GRANT'S CAVALRYMAN - The Life and Wars of General James H. Wilson by Longacre, Edward G

Mechaniocsburg 1996, Stackpole, US first edition, hard bound in dust jacket, ( reprint of 1972 edition under old title " From Union Stars to Top Hat ".) 6x9, FINE / FINE CONDITION, 320 pages, illus, maps, bibliog, index. -------------------------------------------------------------When the American Civil War commenced, the cavalry of the Union army seemed habitually to lag behind its Confederate opponents. Engagement after engagement, raid after raid, found the Southern horsemen emerging preeminent. It was not for want of brave men or good animals. The fault, rather, laid in the least glorious aspect of this most romantic of all military branches -organization and administration. Once Union authorities applied some system to their cavalry service, telling results rewarded their efforts. More than anyone else, the man responsible for that success was Grant's Cavalryman, General James H. Wilson.Like so many of the outstanding commanders of the North, he started the war a very junior officer. But he had the good fortune to serve under and with Grant, even as Grant was learning the art and honing the skills that would make him rise to general-in-chief. As Grant rose, so did men like William T. Sherman, Philip H. Sheridan and James H. Wilson, men he knew and trusted and who had grown with him. In the end, they dominated the Civil War in the East and West in its final year.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Edward G. Longacre's Grant's Cavalryman is the only modern biography of the man who revolutionized the Union cavalry. Wilson was no mere desk-bound administrator. He commanded ably under Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, and then in the final months of the war, he conducted the largest and most devastating cavalry raid of the war, defeating even the indomitable Nathan Bedford Forrest. Researched in a host of sources unused by previous historians, and marked by a dramatic narrative appropriate to the life of this dashing "boy general," Grant's Cavalryman is the definitive biography of one of the most influential officers in blue during the Civil War.