It must be remembered that Morgan very rarely fought with the army; he had to make his command a self-sustaining one. If repulsed, he could not fall back and reform behind the infantry. He had to fight infantry, cavalry, artillery; take towns when every house was a garrison, and attack fortifications with nothing to depend on but his own immediate command. He was obliged, therefore, to adopt a method which enabled him to do a great deal in a short time, and to keep his men always in hand, whether successful or repulsed. With his support from forty to five hundred miles distant, an officer had better learn to rely on himself.
If General Morgan had ever been enabled to develope his plan of organization as he wished, he would have made his division of mounted riflemen a miniature army. With his regiments armed as he wished them--a battalion of two or three hundred men, appropriately armed, and attached to each brigade, to be used only as cavalry, and with his battery of three-inch Parrots, and train of mountain howitzers, he could have met any contingency. The ease and rapidity with which this simple drill was learned, and the expedition with which it enabled all movements to be accomplished, chiefly recommended it to Morgan, I have seen his division, when numbering over three thousand men, and stretched out in column, put into line of battle in thirty minutes. Regular cavalry can no doubt form with much more dispatch, but this was quicker than it is often done in this country.
The weapon which was always preferred by the officers and men of the command, was the rifle known as the "medium Enfield." The short Enfield was very convenient to carry, but was deficient both in length of range and accuracy. The long Enfield, without any exception the best of all rifles, was unwieldy either to carry or to use, as sometimes became necessary, on horseback. The Springfield rifle, nearly equal to the long Enfield, was liable to the same objections, although in a less degree. Now that the military world has finally decided in favor of breech-loading guns, it may seem presumptuous to condemn them; but, so far as my own experience goes, they are decidedly inferior. When I say inferior, I mean not so much that they will not carry far, nor accurately, although a fair trial of every sort I could lay my hands upon with the Enfield and Springfield, convinced me of the superiority, in these respects, of the two latter; but that for other reasons they are not so effective as the muzzle-loading guns. Of the two best patterns, the Sharp and the Spencer--for the Maynard is a pop-gun, and the others are so contrived that, generally, after one shot, the shell of the cartridge sticks in the chamber--of these two, I have seen the Sharp do the most execution. It has been the verdict of every officer of the Western Confederate cavalry with whom I have talked upon the subject, and it certainly has been my experience, that those Federal cavalry regiments which were armed with breech-loading guns did least execution. The difference in the rapidity with which men dropped when exposed to the fire of an infantry regiment, and the loss from that of a cavalry regiment of equal strength, even when the latter fought well, ought of itself to go far to settle the question, for the federal infantry were all armed with muzzle-loading guns.