Few horsemen in modern history could equal the Confederate cavalry of the American Civil War in dash, gallantry, and the ability to ride fast and hit hard. For the first two years of the conflict, Rebel troopers outsmarted, outmaneuvered, and outfought their blue-clad opponents. Even after Union horsemen established their supremacy in the Eastern Theater during the Gettysburg Campaign, the South's cavaliers remained dangerous foes. The names of the Confederacy's top cavalry commanders - Jeb Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Joseph Wheeler, Wade Hampton, Fitzhugh Lee, Earl Van Dorn, John S. Mosby, John Hunt Morgan, Jo Shelby, John S. Marmaduke, Stand Watie, and Turner Ashby - still rank among those of America's most honored soldiers.

Antebellum Southern culture prized fine horseflesh and skilled horsemanship. Unlike the Union high command, Southern military leaders welcomed the formation of numerous cavalry units and employed them with daring imagination. During the course of the war, the Confederacy fielded 137 regiments, 143 separate battalions, and 101 independent companies of cavalry. Initially, these outfits varied in size and structure. That changed in November 1861, when the Confederate War Department ruled that a cavalry regiment should contain ten companies with sixty enlisted men each. The Confederate Congress boosted a company's official strength to eighty rank and file on October 11, 1862. In actual practice, however, Confederate cavalry regiments averaged 360 to 160 effectives - even at the height of their prowess in the first half of 1863.

Rebel cavaliers rode to war carrying a bewildering array of weapons - shotguns, hunting rifles, horse pistols, and crude sabers brought from home, obsolete flintlock muskets stored in Federal arsenals, rifle muskets designed for infantry use, and foreign carbines and revolvers smuggled through the Union naval blockade. Their most reliable source of modern firearms and other equipment came from the Yankee troopers that they thrashed with such regularity in 1861 and 1862. As one Virginia trooper put it, "Everything but ourselves was branded U.S."

The Confederate War Department authorized a handsome dress uniform for its mounted arm. Aside from some officers, however, few Southern horsemen possessed the means to observe these regulations. Some mounted units turned out in all sorts of gaudy, privately designed uniforms early in the war, but these styles soon gave way to floppy slouch hats, simple gray or butternut jackets, and military or civilian trousers of every imaginable hue.

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