“North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance grew so exasperated with the indiscipline of Confederate cavalry wandering through the state that he cried out in 1863:
” ‘If God Almighty had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case the Pharoah still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry.’ ”
— From “Fateful Lightning: A New History of the the Civil War and Reconstruction” by Allen C. Guelzo (2012)