In the spring of 1864, three sergeants of the First Delaware Cavalry, Harrison Vandegrift, Spencer Hitch, and William Townsend Downes, opened pocket diaries and began recording the war as they lived it. Across the months that followed, through saddle-sore marches, picket duty in the rain, hard fighting in Virginia, and the long siege lines outside Petersburg, they wrote down what they saw. Their entries are blunt, weary, occasionally funny, and shot through with the small humanity of men trying to survive a war that had already lasted three years too long.
Those diaries sat largely unread for more than a century and a half. Delaware's Forgotten Cavalry: A Failure of Command brings them out of the archives and places them at the heart of a story that has never been properly told.
It is also the story of the man who failed them.
Colonel Napoleon Bonaparte Knight was a political appointee, a Delawarean whose commission owed more to influence than to fitness for command. From the regiment's earliest days through its hardest fighting, Knight's drinking, absenteeism, and outright cowardice repeatedly endangered his troopers and denied them the recognition their service deserved. When the war ended, he and his patrons did something arguably worse: they shaped the story that was left behind. Court-martial papers were sidelined. Newspaper accounts were softened. The history of Delaware's cavalry was quietly rewritten to suit Knight's version of it, and that was the version that endured.
This book sets the record straight.
Drawing on the three sergeants' diaries, the wartime letters of Captain Charles Corbit, regimental records, Knight's court-martial papers, contemporary newspaper coverage, genealogical research, and a wide net of published sources, Delaware's Forgotten Cavalry reconstructs the regiment's 1864 service with both granular detail and narrative drive. Readers ride with the First Delaware through Virginia mud and the smoke of contested crossroads, into skirmishes most histories never mention, and across battlefields, Cold Harbor and the Petersburg lines among them, where larger reputations have crowded the smaller units off the page.
The result is a Civil War book that reads like a lived experience. The diary voices carry the daily texture of cavalry service: the boredom, the foraging, the lice, the camp humor, the sudden shock of combat. Around them, the larger narrative places the regiment in strategic context and carries the reader from the regiment's first days through to a reckoning long overdue.
Written for general readers rather than specialists, the book assumes no prior expertise in Civil War operations or Delaware history. Original maps drawn for this volume orient the reader through each major movement. Footnotes are full but unobtrusive, there for those who want to follow the trail back to the sources.
For anyone drawn to the Civil War, to the underexplored corners of American military history, or to stories of ordinary soldiers failed by the men who were supposed to lead them, this is a book that finally gives the First Delaware Cavalry, and its three diarist-sergeants, the hearing they were denied for one hundred and sixty years.
A regiment rewritten out of its own war. The diaries that bring the truth back.
