The 19th Century for American cavalry cannot be neatly confined to the hundred years between 1800 and 1900. It is instead a very long century that begins with the formation of the United States.

The young Congress authorized the formation of its first two squadrons of dragoons in response to frontier threats from France, Britain, and Spain. The first was activated in 1792, the second in 1796. A full regiment followed in 1798. Tensions had been mounting between the United States and France, and Congress rapidly increased the size of the military in response. Three additional regiments of dragoons were also authorized but never recruited.

America’s first dragoons saw limited combat, and were mainly employed to protect settlers from Native Americans. The size of America’s military, its cavalry included, ebbed and flowed with political power and the perception of external threats. In 1800, with tension with France easing, the cavalry was reduced to two troops of light dragoons. The early American cavalry continued to see only very limited use during the War of 1812. Horse soldiers worked primarily as couriers and aides; the British had not fielded cavalry on American soil during the war.

The War of 1812 was itself the impetus behind the cavalry’s complete dissolution in 1816. The nation was war-weary, the economy was in shambles, and the fighting ended in a stalemate. The two dragoon regiments had not been fully staffed since the start of the war. In 1814 Congress merged the two together and cut the size of the new regiment down to eight troops of soldiers. Two years later, the American cavalry would be abolished.

The American military was without a mounted arm for 16 years. However, the lack of control on the frontier of America’s newly acquired territory forced Congress to hesitantly reactivate the cavalry. 600 mounted rangers organized in a single battalion, and supplying their own horses, arms, and equipment, were raised on June 15, 1832. The men who made up this battalion were deliberately picked for their expert backwoodsman skills and were given neither rank nor uniforms. Their term of enlistment was a single year, and once that year was up the United States government begrudgingly recognized the importance of a regular mounted fighting force that could be rapidly deployed across the frontier. A new regiment of dragoons was authorized in 1833, becoming the first permanent unit of cavalry in the history of the United States.

The American horse soldier would continue to be designated as a dragoon until the Civil War began in 1861, at which point the mounted arm officially became the Cavalry. The United States Cavalry throughout the first half of the 1800s, and well into the Civil War, would struggle greatly with the existential problem that every cavalry faced: supplying the troops with a constant and sufficient stream of quality warhorses. The U.S. Army lacked a formal remount program and outsourced acquisitions first to politically appointed purchasing boards. Frequently, buyers did not have the experience necessary to properly judge an equine. Neither were there clear requirements about the type of animal fit for service. Many of the animals delivered to the Army were of dubious quality. Purchasing of remounts would not be placed under the direct control of the Office of the Quartermaster General until April of 1863, two years after the war had begun.

The equine cost of the Civil War sent shockwaves through the population of bloodstock in the United States. At the start of the war, the Union Army purchased 110,000 horses and 84,000 mules. In 1862 McClellan’s army had 46,000 horses for 112,000 men. In 1863 the Quartermaster Department sourced 35,000 horses between April and October. A fifth of those animals alone were replacements for equine casualties at the Battle of Gettysburg. The Army of the Potomac went through two horses for every man in the first eight months of 1864. During the summer of that same year, General Sheridan received 200 new horses a day. Such was the devastation that America had fewer horses in 1870 than in 1860, and fewer horses per capita than in 1850.

The Civil War was the first, and perhaps the last, real deployment of American cavalry before World War One that was on a scale that rivaled European warhorse usage. The Cavalry would see smaller deployments in colonial wars and in the administration of insular territories. 16,483 horses were issued for military use during the Spanish-American War, and 6,275 horses were deployed to the Philippines between between 1898 and 1900. American Cavalry mounts were even sent to Tianjin, China, to assist in quelling the Boxer Rebellion.

The American Cavalry had been deliberately structured as a force of exclusively light troops, and cavalrymen had long recognized that mounted service in the United States could not be directly compared to mounted service abroad. In his 1862 book Regulations and Instructions for the Field Service of the U.S. Cavalry in Time of War, General George McClellan plainly states:

The nature of cavalry service in the United States being quite different from that performed by any in Europe, we ought not to follow blindly any one system, but should endeavor to select the good features, and engraft them upon a system of our own.

The proper organization of our cavalry must depend upon the consideration of three things: 1st, the nature of its service against the Indians; 2nd, its employment against a civilized enemy invading our territory; 3d, its service in an offensive war, carried on against our neighbors.

The Indians, against whom our cavalry are brought to bear, are generally irregular light horsemen…

Any army invading our territory must necessarily be deficient in cavalry; in addition, the nature of the parts of our frontiers most liable to attack is not suited to the action of large bodies of cavalry, while in partial operations, light cavalry, well handled, ought always to be superior to heavy cavalry.

Canada, Central Mexico, and the West Indies, are also unsuited to the operations of masses of cavalry, and in none of them are we likely to encounter heavy cavalry…

It would, therefore, seem that heavy cavalry would be worse than useless for our purposes, and that we need only light cavalry, in the true and strictest sense of the term

McClellan’s opening sentence hints at further differences between the experience of cavalry in Europe and the experience of cavalry in the United States. Sympathetic horsemanship had begun to be developed in Italy in the 17th Century, and those philosophies were improved upon by French horsemen into the 18th Century. The ideals of biomechanically correct equitation were exported to England, where they quickly became fashionable among the elite. The development of educated manège riding coincided with the widespread adoption of firearms in combat. Full plate armor fell out of favor. The pommels and cantles of saddles began to be cut down to reflect the needs of a rider that no longer needed to be rigidly held in the saddle. Cavalries across Europe pragmatically integrated the most relevant exercises from the highly collected manège schools into their own training regimes.

The earliest horse soldiers in the United States were no less affected by these structural changes. Saddles were patterned after those used by British and Continental hussars. Dragoons and cavalrymen continued to use the hussar pattern saddle, with some updates to modernize it and make it more comfortable for horse and rider, until the McClellan saddle was adopted in 1859. While other saddles that deviated from the hussar pattern had been tested prior to 1859, the McClellan saddle was the first that broke away from the hussar model to gain widespread use. The saddle integrated the best parts of older saddles with the redeeming features of those that failed field trials, and would continue to be used in mounted combat -- with modifications -- into the 20th Century.

(Continued below)