New Hampshire, was also suspected of
pro-Southern views.
Opposition to Davis’s request crumbled
in the wake of the shocking August 1854
massacre by Sioux warriors of 2nd Lt. John
L. Grattan and 29 men under his command
at Fort Laramie, Wyoming. Grattan, a
recent graduate of West Point, had impetu-
ously led his men into a Sioux village to
demand restitution for the tribe’s alleged
butchering of a straw milk cow. The Sioux
chief, Conquering Bear, asked Grattan to
give him time to make restitution, but the
hotheaded young officer, convinced that he
could defeat the Indians with a single how-itzer and a handful of men, refused. In the
ensuing attack the howitzer misfired, and
Grattan and his men fled in panic. The
enraged Sioux followed and chopped them
down. Although Grattan had been the
obvious instigator of the fight, Davis char-
acterized the fray as “a deliberately forced
plan” by the Indians to raid government
stores. He renewed his demand for addi-
tional troops to police the frontier.
In the end, Davis got what he wanted.
On March 3, 1855, Congress passed a bill
mandating four new Army regiments, two
infantry and two cavalry. Davis set to work
immediately to fill the officer vacancies in
the cavalry regiments, his particular pride
and joy. Command of the 1st Cavalry went
to Colonel Edwin Vose Sumner, better
known to his men as “Old Bull of theWoods” for his thundering voice and hard
head (an enemy bullet had literally bounced
off his skull during the Mexican War, to no
observable ill effect). Selected to lead the
2nd Cavalry was Colonel Albert Sidney
Johnston, a longtime Davis friend and a
veteran Indian fighter in Florida and Texas.
Understudying them were Lt. Cols. Joseph
E. Johnston (1st Cavalry) and Robert E.
Lee (2nd Cavalry).
Lee, then serving as superintendent at
West Point, his alma mater, was not par-
ticularly thrilled by the new assignment,
which would mean a forced separation
from his beloved family and friends. But ifLee was not overly excited by his new post,
most of the others were. Appointments to
the new regiments were widely sought after
by ambitious young officers. Captain
Edmund Kirby Smith, who got a 2nd Cav-
alry posting, exulted in a letter home that
he would be serving in “the regiment of the
Army.” Stuart noted that “expectation is
on tiptoe to see the correct list.” He
received a 1st Cavalry post and gleefully
boasted, “No regiment was ever marshaled
into the field with such brilliant luminaries
at its head.” He was more insightful than
he knew.
Not everyone was thrilled. Critics in both
Congress and the military took note of the
apparently inordinate number of native
Southerners appointed to the two crack
regiments. Of the 25 officers chosen for the2nd Cavalry, 17 of them were Southern
born. After the Civil War, backward-look-
ing critics would charge that Davis had
deliberately stocked the regiments with fel-
low Southerners to give them valuable
experience for the upcoming war. Future
Union Brig. Gen. Richard W. Johnson, who
also served in the 2nd Cavalry, disagreed,
noting sensibly, “This was six years before
the war, and a little too early for one to pre-
dict with any degree of certainty the
supreme folly of a war between the sec-
tions.” Such criticism also failed to note
that the commanding officer of the 1st Reg-
iment was a Northerner, as were twomajors, several captains, and a number of
lieutenants in the two units.
After the officers were chosen, regimen-
tal recruiters began to fill the company
rolls, tacking up posters in cities and towns
across the country announcing the search
for “able-bodied unmarried men between
the ages of 18 and 45 for active service
against Indians on the frontier.” Monthly
pay was set at $22 for first sergeants, $17
for duty sergeants, $14 for corporals, and
$12 for privates. Separate companies were
recruited in Mobile, Baltimore, Memphis,
St. Louis, Cincinnati, Evansville, Indiana,
Logansport, Indiana, Rock Island, Illinois,
and western Pennsylvania.
Recruits were not hard to come by, and
eager applicants soon flocked to Jefferson
Barracks outside St. Louis for training andLeft to right are Confederate Generals Albert Sidney Johnston, Robert E. Lee, Earl Van Dorn, and Edmund Kirby Smith. All served in the 1st or 2nd U.S. Cavalry
before the war.Q-Spr16 1 and 2 Cavalry_Layout 1 1/14/16 12:17 PM Page 37