Delaware's Forgotten Cavalry: A Failure of Command

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 ...