Cavalry Tactics, or, Regulations for the Instruction, Formations, and Movements of the Cavalry of the Army and Volunteers of the United States

 

Brigadier General Philip St. George Cooke authored the two-volume manual Cavalry Tactics, or, Regulations for the Instruction, Formations, and Movements of the Cavalry of the Army and Volunteers of the United States. It was revised several times during the 1860s.

The manual’s precise instructions for “all things cavalry” — including but not limited to care and treatment of the horse and equipment, drilling, skirmishing, handling the sabre — are enhanced by diagrams of troop formation and illustrations of soldiers on horseback and on foot.

This illustration accompanies “Position of the Trooper Mounted”:

“The seat natural, without drawing back the thigh; the legs hang vertically from the knees, and close the sides of the horse; the balls of the foot supported in the stirrup; the heels about an inch lower than the toes; these to the front; the stirrups supporting the weight of the legs in a natural position.
“The head erect and square to the front; the shoulders square; the carriage of the body erect, but free and unconstrained.”

This image from Cavalry Tactics, Volume 1, p. 76 [frame 115/276] was published in the 1862 edition at HathiTrust. 
A handy table of contents for Volume 1 (with links) is available at The Wayback Machine.