Eric J. Wittenberg. _Rush’s Lancers: The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War_. Yardley: Westholme Publishing, 2007. xi + 316 pp. Maps, photographs, bibliography, index. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 1594160325.

Reviewed for H-CivWar by A. James Fuller, Department of History, University of Indianapolis

A Cavalry Regiment’s Ride through the Civil War

Regimental histories afford the historian the opportunity to bring the past to life through the shared experience of men in military service. Using the intimate lens of the individual like a biographer while tracing the collective story of the unit and connecting it to context offers new
insights and perspectives on the issues and questions raised in works of broader scope. In _Rush’s Lancers: The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War_, attorney Eric J. Wittenberg argues that the regiment overcame initial obstacles and obsolete weaponry with superb training and brave fighting that earned it the reputation as one of the finest cavalry units of the war.

Wittenberg is the author of many other books about the Civil War cavalry, including several studies of the role of horse soldiers in the Gettysburg campaign _Protecting the Flanks: The Battles for Brinkerhoff’s Ridge and East Cavalry Field, Battle of Gettysburg, July 2-3, 1863 (2002), _Gettysburg’s Forgotten Cavalry Actions (1998), and a biography of Philip Sheridan _Little Phil: A Reassessment of the Civil War Leadership of Gen. Philip H. Sheridan_ (2005). In researching battles and campaigns, he repeatedly came back to the Sixth Pennsylvania and this added to an interest that had been kindled when he was a boy growing up in a town from which one of the regiment’s companies had come. His passion for the subject and his expertise on cavalry make Wittenberg the ideal writer for a regimental history.

The regiment initially organized as Lancers when they mustered in fall 1861, and the men trained hard in learning to use the long spears that had proven so formidable in past conflicts. Considered obsolete by the 1860s, the lance still enjoyed many supporters, including George B. McClellan, who had studied the weapon’s use in Europe and urged Colonel Richard Henry Rush to
adopt it for his new unit. The regiment’s limited use of the lance, complete with red pennons to flutter in the breeze, soon gave way to the carbine. Despite losing the distinctive arms that had given them their identity, the unit kept its name.

That name came to mean something in the Union Army. By the end of the war, the Sixth Pennsylvania had earned respect and become a tough, hard-fighting regiment. But it was not an easy road. Most of the officers hailed from the elite families of Philadelphia, the unit was commanded by the grandson of Dr. Benjamin Rush, while others pointed to famous ancestors who had led or fought in the American Revolution. At the same time, the rank and file of the regiment was made up of young men from the lower ranks of society, including many from Philadelphia’s working class. Class tensions threatened to cause real problems early on, but when Philadelphia newspapers published accounts about the few officers whose aristocratic ways grated on the enlisted men, the tensions eased. Nationalism combined with training and
the personality of fine officers to overcome the dangers of class conflict in the regiment.

The real test came, of course, on the battlefield. Time after time, the Lancers rode into combat. From minor skirmishes and reconnaissance missions to raids and actions on the flanks of major battles, even full-scale cavalry clashes, the Sixth Pennsylvania found itself in action. In between came the tedious monotony of camp life and the inevitable hardships caused by the
weather, the supply situation, and separation from home and family. Sometimes the enemy proved less dangerous than epidemics. As the months rolled into years, the Lancers developed into veterans and became a reliable unit upon whom the generals could count.

Wittenberg rightly places the regiment’s history within the story of the brigade and always reminds his readers of the broader context of the war. Mistakes in decision making at the highest rank are brought to awful reality at the company, squad, and even individual levels. Familiar battles like Gettysburg are seen from the perspective of the cavalry, a view that sheds
new light on the whole campaign. Instead of the usual recounting of the battle, the reader is taken to places on the flanks and rides along with the Sixth Pennsylvania as the Confederates retreat. The great cavalry battle at Brandy Station receives a well-deserved chapter as does Sheridan’s 1864 Shenandoah Valley campaign. Success followed failure, disappointment followed victory. The regiment’s participation in the successful Stoneman Raid was part of the campaign that led to General Joseph Hooker’s defeat at Chancellorsville. Gettysburg was followed by disappointing results during Robert E. Lee’s retreat. Embarrassments gave way to proud victories as the Union cavalry learned to hold its own against its counterpart, and then
began to defeat the Southern cavaliers.

Throughout the book, the reader becomes familiar with the individuals whose writings make up the author’s main sources. Some of the men died, others were transferred, others were promoted, many reenlisted, and other new faces joined up. Officers and enlisted men, surgeons and chaplains are all given a voice. Some of them had the famous names of elite families, some were related to famous commanders (George Meade Jr. is the obvious example), some were wealthy lawyers, some were poor farmers, and some came from the wrong side of town. But they served together and Wittenberg allows a broad cross section of them to speak about their experiences. They served under famous generals: McClellan, Meade, John Buford, Alfred Pleasanton, George Custer, Sheridan, and Ulysses Grant. They fought against famous generals: Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and Thomas Jackson, to name three. Wittenberg’s final chapter, “Requiem,” provides the stories of what happened to many of the familiar faces and brings them together in reunion celebrations.

Reviewer: Chuck Romig
Chuck Romig graduated from Penn State University with a B.S. in secondary education and teaches history at Penns Valley High School in Spring Mills, Pa. He continues to read and research Civil War history.

Review:
Eric J. Wittenberg has produced a gem of a regimental in Rush’s Lancers: The Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry in the Civil War. Probably every Civil War buff can name one or two favorite John Wayne films and I’d be willing to bet that in at least one of those films the Duke was in the cavalry.

Wittenberg, in this work, expertly reveals not only untold morsels about one of the Civil War’s famed cavalry units, but also the experience of a horse soldier in the war.

He begins the story with the formation of the regiment in Philadelphia, Pa., spearheaded by one Richard H. Rush, a descendant of Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia renown. Rush was a member of the West Point class of 1846 but failed to live up to the reputation for which that class was known.

After a hiatus from the military Rush had problems gaining a commission in 1861. He used his family’s name to eventually gain rank.

The 6th Pennsylvania initially mustered at Camp Meigs in the City of Brotherly Love where they actually trained with lances, a fad that Gen. George McClellan had advocated since his Crimean trip.

After the endless drilling common to any volunteer regiment of the Civil War, the 6th Pennsylvania was ordered to join the Army of the Potomac at Manassas. On their way to the Peninsula to take part in that debacle, they sat as peaceful spectators and viewed the battle of Hampton Roads where the U.S.S. Monitor and the C.S.S. Virginia dueled to a draw in mid-March 1862.

Wittenberg uses his subjects to tell their story with deftness and accuracy. Pulling from a slew of privates, officers and a chaplain, he allows the men of the 6th Pennsylvania and those who interacted with them to tell their tale posthumously.

This style picks up once the men are on the Peninsula and continues through the Maryland Campaign of 1862, Fredericksburg, Stoneman’s Raid and Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, Gettysburg, the transition of Grant to the East, and the 1864 Valley Campaign.

Wittenberg’s work is filled with points of human interest, as well as strategic and tactical analysis, which make this regimental a more exciting read than many others. But it is not just the human interest and military analysis that make this book a keeper. It’s the group of troopers that Wittenberg chose as subjects.

I’m sure that stories as good as the 6th Pennsylvania’s exist, but there are none better. Taste these tidbits to understand what I mean. Why was Stonewall Jackson late in arriving on the Peninsula from the Valley? The 6th Pennsylvania.

Which was the only unit to get a shot off at Stuart’s troopers in their first ride around the Army of the Potomac? The 6th Pennsylvania. Who led brave charges into the teeth of hell at Brandy Station and South Cavalry Field at Gettysburg? The 6th Pennsylvania.

Theirs is a story that needed to be told. Frankly, I’m shocked it took this long with all the Civil War literature published these days.

The research libraries, including a large consortium in the Boston area, are instead signing on with the Open Content Alliance, a nonprofit effort aimed at making their materials broadly available.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

Google pays to scan the books and does not directly profit from the resulting Web pages, although the books make its search engine more useful and more valuable. The libraries can have their books scanned again by another company or organization for dissemination more broadly.

It costs the Open Content Alliance as much as $30 to scan each book, a cost shared by the group’s members and benefactors, so there are obvious financial benefits to libraries of Google’s wide-ranging offer, started in 2004.

Many prominent libraries have accepted Google’s offer — including the New York Public Library and libraries at the University of Michigan, Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. Google expects to scan 15 million books from those collections over the next decade.

But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions.

Even though Google’s program could make millions of books available to hundreds of millions of Internet users for the first time, some libraries and researchers worry that if any one company comes to dominate the digital conversion of these works, it could exploit that dominance for commercial gain.

“There are two opposed pathways being mapped out,” said Paul Duguid, an adjunct professor at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. “One is shaped by commercial concerns, the other by a commitment to openness, and which one will win is not clear.”

Last month, the Boston Library Consortium of 19 research and academic libraries in New England that includes the University of Connecticut and the University of Massachusetts, said it would work with the Open Content Alliance to begin digitizing the books among the libraries’ 34 million volumes whose copyright had expired.

“We understand the commercial value of what Google is doing, but we want to be able to distribute materials in a way where everyone benefits from it,” said Bernard A. Margolis, president of the Boston Public Library, which has in its collection roughly 3,700 volumes from the personal library of John Adams.

Mr. Margolis said his library had spoken with both Google and Microsoft, and had not shut the door entirely on the idea of working with them. And several libraries are working with both Google and the Open Content Alliance.

Adam Smith, project management director of Google Book Search, noted that the company’s deals with libraries were not exclusive. “We’re excited that the O.C.A. has signed more libraries, and we hope they sign many more,” Mr. Smith said.

“The powerful motivation is that we’re bringing more offline information online,” he said. “As a commercial company, we have the resources to do this, and we’re doing it in a way that benefits users, publishers, authors and libraries. And it benefits us because we provide an improved user experience, which then means users will come back to Google.”

The Library of Congress has a pilot program with Google to digitize some books. But in January, it announced a project with a more inclusive approach. With $2 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the library’s first mass digitization effort will make 136,000 books accessible to any search engine through the Open Content Alliance. The library declined to comment on its future digitization plans.

The Open Content Alliance is the brainchild of Brewster Kahle, the founder and director of the Internet Archive, which was created in 1996 with the aim of preserving copies of Web sites and other material. The group includes more than 80 libraries and research institutions, including the Smithsonian Institution.

Although Google is making public-domain books readily available to individuals who wish to download them, Mr. Kahle and others worry about the possible implications of having one company store and distribute so much public-domain content.

“Scanning the great libraries is a wonderful idea, but if only one corporation controls access to this digital collection, we’ll have handed too much control to a private entity,” Mr. Kahle said.

The Open Content Alliance, he said, “is fundamentally different, coming from a community project to build joint collections that can be used by everyone in different ways.”

Mr. Kahle’s group focuses on out-of-copyright books, mostly those published in 1922 or earlier. Google scans copyrighted works as well, but it does not allow users to read the full text of those books online, and it allows publishers to opt out of the program.

Microsoft joined the Open Content Alliance at its start in 2005, as did Yahoo, which also has a book search project. Google also spoke with Mr. Kahle about joining the group, but they did not reach an agreement.

A year after joining, Microsoft added a restriction that prohibits a book it has digitized from being included in commercial search engines other than Microsoft’s.

“Unlike Google, there are no restrictions on the distribution of these copies for academic purposes across institutions,” said Jay Girotto, group program manager for Live Book Search from Microsoft. Institutions working with Microsoft, he said, include the University of California and the New York Public Library.

Some in the research field view the issue as a matter of principle.

Doron Weber, a program director at the Sloan Foundation, which has made several grants to libraries for digital conversion of books, said that several institutions approached by Google have spoken to his organization about their reservations. “Many are hedging their bets,” he said, “taking Google money for now while realizing this is, at best, a short-term bridge to a truly open universal library of the future.”

The University of Michigan, a Google partner since 2004, does not seem to share this view. “We have not felt particularly restricted by our agreement with Google,” said Jack Bernard, a lawyer at the university.

The University of California, which started scanning books with the Open Content Alliance, Microsoft and Yahoo in 2005, has added Google. Robin Chandler, director of data acquisitions at the University of California’s digital library project, said working with everyone helps increase the volume of the scanning.

Some have found Google to be inflexible in its terms. Tom Garnett, director of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a group of 10 prominent natural history and botanical libraries that have agreed to digitize their collections, said he had had discussions with various people at both Google and Microsoft.

“Google had a very restrictive agreement, and in all our discussions they were unwilling to yield,” he said. Among the terms was a requirement that libraries put their own technology in place to block commercial search services other than Google, he said.

Libraries that sign with the Open Content Alliance are obligated to pay the cost of scanning the books. Several have received grants from organizations like the Sloan Foundation.

The Boston Library Consortium’s project is self-funded, with $845,000 for the next two years. The consortium pays 10 cents a page to the Internet Archive, which has installed 10 scanners at the Boston Public Library. Other members include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Brown University.

The scans are stored at the Internet Archive in San Francisco and are available through its Web site. Search companies including Google are free to point users to the material.