Daniel P. Black

Among the flood of recruits offering their services to the United States Army upon the outbreak of the Civil War were a host of mounted companies. However, citing a lack of proper cavalry equipment as well as the expense of maintaining mounted units in addition to those already in existence, the War Department was loathe to the idea of creating volunteer cavalry regiments for use in putting down the Rebellion. Carl Schurz argued first to General Winfield Scott to create a volunteer cavalry unit – commanded of course by Schurz – but when Scott rebuffed him, Schurz took his case to President Lincoln and Secretary of War Simon Cameron who over-rode Scott’s decision and on May 1, 1861, authorized Schurz to raise a volunteer cavalry regiment. The men Schurz was able to recruit were a motley bunch: about one-third were European immigrants: Germans, Hungarians and Poles; and despite the unit’s designation as being from New York, in order to meet its mustering quota it included one company from Philadelphia and one company from Michigan. Relations were anything but cordial between the “German” faction of the regiment and the “American” portion. Mexican War veteran Andrew McReynolds was chosen to be colonel when Schurz was named U.S. Minister to Spain.
By late summer of 1861 the “Lincoln Cavalry” (many of the men preferred that name to the unit’s official designation as the First New York Cavalry) had reached Washington, DC, and the front. The regiment would spend the rest of 1861 and first part of 1862 in Northern Virginia before participating in the Peninsula Campaign in the spring and summer of 1862. In the latter half of 1862 the 1st New York shifted to the Shenandoah Valley where it would spend nearly all of the remainder of the war, participating in the 1864 Valley Campaign, and losing a number of its men as prisoners at New Market Gap in a skirmish with John Imboden’s brigade on May 13, 1864.
The official regimental history of the First New York “Lincoln” Cavalry was published in 1902 by the former regimental adjutant Lt. William Beach. This work, coupled with Capt. William Stevenson’s Boots and Saddles have long been the main sources for the Lincoln Cavalry. An excellent new source of previously unknown primary material on the Lincoln Cavalry has emerged with the publication of A Lincoln Cavalryman: The Civil War Letters of Henry Suydam. Edited by Daniel Black and published by Old Line Publishing, the book is a collection of Sgt. Suydam’s letters to his family and includes several written following his capture at New Market Gap in May 1864. There is little in the way of a narrative to weave together the letters in regard to the combat chronicle of the Lincoln Cavalry, although numerous endnotes explain people and events referenced by Suydam.
Suydam would serve for much of the war as Commissary Sergeant (he would ultimately decline a commission) and his writings offer a great insight into the both the politics of the regiment as well as life in camp and on campaign. The hostility toward the “German” portion of the regiment is very apparent in his letters, as are his feelings toward several of the senior officers. His account of Second Winchester covers several pages and is a very valuable account of both the fight and the confusion after the defeat. There is little material from the New Market campaign, and for Suydam that is where his active campaigning ended, but included as an appendix is a list of the casualties sustained by the regiment at New Market Gap.
A Lincoln Cavalryman is an excellent source of new primary material for the First New York “Lincoln” Cavalry and complements well Beach’s regimental history. Any cavalry buff or Valley historian should have this on their shelves.… (mehr)