Captain Charles Fessenden Morse: April 6, 1863

Headquarters Twelfth Army Corps,

April 6, 1863.

I wish you could have seen the great military display there was near here yesterday. You probably have seen by the papers that President Abe is paying a visit to the army; he came down in the great snow-storm Saturday night. Well, yesterday was appointed for a grand review of all the cavalry and horse artillery in the army. All the Major-Generals and many of the Brigadiers with their staffs were invited to be present. Our cortege left these headquarters about half-past ten. We made a pretty good show by ourselves; there were five general officers, namely; Major-General Slocum, Brigadier-Generals Williams, Ruger, Knipe and Jackson, with their staffs and escorts, all in full fig. We rode about seven miles to the reviewing ground and got there just as the President, General Hooker and their large retinue arrived; the artillery fired the salute and the review commenced.

In the centre opposite the troops, looking sick and worn out, dressed in a plain black suit with the tallest of stove-pipe hats, was the President, seated on a fine horse with rich trimmings. On his right and left were Generals Hooker and Stoneman, and clustering around on all sides were Major and Brigadier-Generals too numerous to mention.

You know the story of a man who threw a bootjack out of a hotel window in Washington, last winter, and hit six brigadiers and a dog, and said, “It wasn't a good night for brigadiers, either.” Yesterday was a good day for them. Who would have thought, five years ago, that such a sight as this would ever be possible in democratic, republican America. I doubt if any country has ever seen so large a collection of officers of high rank; there could not have been less than a thousand officers of all grades in the cavalcade, and now-a-days most every one dresses well; so you can imagine that such a crowd, well mounted on handsome horses with rich housings, was a gallant and gay sight. The cavalry was in two lines, each about two miles long; there were nearly ten thousand of them. I never have seen anything like such a number of horsemen together before. Generally they looked very well; the best regiments in appearance were the First and Second United States and the First Massachusetts and the First Rhode Island. There were four batteries of horse artillery, and the last one went by "flying." You know the term, “horse artillery,” is given to those batteries where all the gunners are mounted; this enables them to keep up with the cavalry.

SOURCE: Charles Fessenden Morse, Letters Written During the Civil War, 1861-1865, p. 124-5