Cavalry Corps (Union Army) - Western Cavalry Corps

Western Cavalry Corps

As in the East, the various Union commanders in the West generally used cavalry poorly during the first two years of the war; cavalry was again parcelled out to be attached to infantry corps as "shock troops" and scouts. Unlike in the East, where the cavalry proved itself the equal of its foes by the summer of 1863, the Union cavalry in the West struggled to identify an equal to Nathan B. Forrest, and were defeated in most of their major engagements. Benjamin Grierson's famous raid during the Vicksburg Campaign was an aberration and far from the norm.

The first attempt at a unified cavalry command occurred in late 1862/63, when William S. Rosecrans, commanding the Army of the Cumberland, organized all of his cavalry into a single division, acting as a separate command from the infantry, under the command of David S. Stanley. This new division fought respectably, if unremarkably, at Stones River. During the Tullahoma Campaign this cavalry division was expanded to corps size. Stanley commanded the corps with Robert B. Mitchell and John B. Turchin commanding the 1st and 2nd Divisions respectively. Mitchell commanded the corps at Chickamauga while Edward M. McCook and George Crook commanded the divisions.

During the Atlanta Campaign, General William T. Sherman reorganized the cavalry of the armies of the Cumberland and Tennessee into four "columns", with no overall commander. (These individual columns were commanded by Stoneman, Kilpatrick, Edward McCook, and Israel Garrard.) The cavalry continued to perform in a mediocre-at-best fashion, failing an abortive raid to free Andersonville prison camp and being repeatedly defeated by Joseph Wheeler's Confederate cavalry in a series of fights in central Georgia. During Sherman's March to the Sea, Kilpatrick's division remained with the army, serving again with a lack of real distinction, while the rest of the cavalry went north with George Thomas to repel John B. Hood's invasion of Tennessee, taking part in the actions at Spring Hill and Murfreesboro.

In December 1864, just before the Battle of Nashville, a formal cavalry corps was finally organized, under Brevet Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson. It performed decently at Nashville, but, as before, failed to distinguish itself to any real degree. Wilson led the corps in one of the final battles of the war April 16, 1865, at the Battle of Columbus, where, fighting dismounted against Forrest's troopers, they were able to defeat their enemy–the only time Federal cavalry defeated General Forrest.

The rest of the Union armies typically had no unified cavalry commands as such, other than a corps-sized command, under Pleasonton, that was briefly organized by the Department of Missouri to defend that state against Sterling Price's expedition in 1864.