If you want details of Union General James Harrison Wilson's cavalry invasion into Alabama in the closing weeks of the Civil War, the logical place to look would be at the end of Stephen Z. Starr's three-volume The Union Cavalry in the Civil War (LSU Press, 2007 paperback of the 1979-85 work) in The War in the West, 1861-65. The description there, however, is very short, because Starr had told the Wilson campaign story in detail in the very first chapter of the very first volume, From Fort Sumter to Gettysburg, 1861-1863.

Starr believed, as did General Wilson at the time, that this war's-end campaign epitomized the coming of age of the Union cavalry after its very slow evolution from being the most ineffective arm of the Union forces. The Selma campaign in March and April 1865 was a crowning achievement against which the many inadequacies of the federal mounted military branch from 1861 to 1865 could be measured and chronicled. Union sympathizers among Civil War readers will be depressed by Starr's long narrative of failures, but can cheer in the end as the cavalry at long-last reaches an elusive zenith of excellence.

In June 1950, at 14 and having graduated from junior high school, my parents and their close friends, the Snows (Ted had played semipro baseball with my dad on the old Apex Oil team), loaded my brother, Ronnie, and me, in a two-door Ford. We headed east, all the way across the elongated state of Tennessee, rode a ferry across the Cumberland River, toured the Great Smokey Mountains, crossed into western North Carolina and into western Virginia, and then came home, again crossing Tennessee but on a southern route.

As our trip drew towards its close, we visited an antique shop in Middle Tennessee in or near Pulaski, Tenn. Pulaski was famous for being where the young rebel spy, Sam Davis, was hanged and martyred, but also where the Ku Klux Klan had its birth.

In the shop, I discovered and became enamored with two rusted sabers. The clerk or owner offered me the better of the two for $11, but my funds being depleted, I had no money. Mr. Snow offered to lend me the money, and I bought the sword and held it between my legs the rest of the way home. (I repaid the loan over the course of the summer, from tips earned as a carhop at the Triangle Cafe in my hometown of Paris, Tenn.) Both the metal scabbard and the sword were very rusty, and I spent that summer removing the rust with fine-grain steel wool and shining the handle with brass polish. The saber has remained with me ever since (57 years now).

The seller assured me that it was an authentic Civil War saber and that it had been found while plowing a field near Pulaski. Markings on the blade below the handle indicated it was of U.S. origin and made in 1865.

As the years passed, I pieced together a "likely story" about the sword. At first, I thought it was left behind when Union General Schofield's army retreated as CSA General Hood advanced toward Nashville in 1864. There was indeed a preliminary battle at Pulaski, prior to the decimation of Hood's army at Franklin a short while later. But the dates of that skirmish and the sword didn't gibe.

As Stephen Starr's history of the federal cavalry shows, in early 1865, Generals Sherman and Thomas and others, persuaded by General Wilson, decided to launch a huge cavalry invasion into Alabama (and Georgia and Mississippi), to rid the war of the irrepressible and troublesome Nathan Bedford Forrest, to seize Selma (with its huge Confederate arms industries) and Montgomery (the first capital of the Confederacy) and to divert the rebels from going to the relief of Mobile as Union forces attacked it. Union General James Harrison Wilson commanded a force of 14,000 cavalrymen, and managed to get 12,500 of them mounted for the expedition, armed with Spenser seven-shot carbines and some artillery. Wilson's division and brigade officers included Generals Emory Upton, Eli Long, J.T. Croxton (who burned the University of Alabama on April 5, four days before Lee's surrender), E.M. McCook (one of eight brothers in the Union army, four of them generals), and E.F. Winslow, and Colonels R.H.G. Minty and O.H. LaGrange. McCook's First Division, Long's Second and Upton's Fourth made up the 14,000 men.

Wilson's horsemen were camped south of Nashville and north of the Tennessee River during heavy rains from March 4 to March 11. They began crossing the Tennessee River March 11, 1865, and were all across by March 18 and began their trek south from there on March 21. My hypothesis is that during that waiting period, they were on farms and roads near Pulaski, just north of the Alabama state line and not far from the Tennessee River and from Huntsville, Ala. The sword could easily have been left behind during their long wait or their subsequent departure.

Civil War troopers were small in comparison to their descendants today, more likely averaging 5'-6" than today's 5'-11", and more likely averaging 130 pounds than today's 190. Removed from its scabbard and swung around, it is very heavy and very cumbersome, and one wonders what possible use it could have been (unless used point-foremost like a bayonet instead of being used for slashing).

The saber is also too heavy to have been worn as part of a uniform. It was obviously fastened to a saddle, using its two metal scabbard loops.

Like the saber wielded by ailing Melanie Wilkes when Tara was visited by a dissolute Yankee scavenger, my saber is more ornamental than useful. Perhaps that is why cavalry often fought dismounted with carbines as primary weapons, or charged with six-shooters blazing instead of with swords swinging.

Taken from a plowed field, my sword has never been beaten back into a plowshare. It has been displayed on a wall, ready to be drawn only if necessity or duty should ever call. It has begun to gather rust and tarnish all over again. This Christmas it goes to a former student young enough to keep it polished for another 57 years. At eleven dollars, it was a fine investment in history for me.

Larry McGehee, professor-emeritus at Wofford College, may be reached by e-mail at mcgeheelt@wofford.edu.

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