Minié ball. During the Battle of Valverde, The 5th Texas Cavalry performed the only major lancer charge of the war, and was slaughtered, abandoning the lance after the battle. The 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry discontinued usage of the lance in May of 1863. Confederate cavalry A Southerner was, on average, considered a superior horseman to his Northern counterpart, especially early in the war. The common explanations for this stereotype were the poor road conditions in the rural South, requiring a greater reliance on horses for individual transportation, combined with a pervasive cavalier culture within the Southern aristocracy which emphasized equestrianism. Historian Gregory J. W. Urwin has referred to such a broad generalization as a part of a "tired, overly-familiar myth" which explains away the South's defeat due to the North's industrial might. Paddy Griffith also argues that, with each trooper having to supply their own horse, "[o]ne does not need to invoke any theory of 'Southern Cavaliers' or 'innate equestrian skills' to see that a soldier will do better if he rides his own cherished four-legged friend than if he is astride an anonymous item of government property." Furthermore, both note these same factors made Southern troopers notoriously insubordinate: soldiers often refused to follow orders or went home whenever they felt like, and some officers refused to serve under commanders with whom they had petty grievances. In one remarkable case a Tennessee cavalry regiment unliterally decided to disband itself. Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina went so far as to compare Confederate cavalry operating within his state to the Plagues of Egypt. Confederate soldiers owned their horses and were compensated on a monthly basis. If a soldier's horse was sick, injured, or killed, the soldier was responsible for returning home and replacing the horse at his own expense. The general rule was that the soldier had 60 days to return with a new horse or he was forced to become an infantryman, which was considered to be an ignominious fate. The first prominent Confederate cavalry leader was J. E. B. Stuart, who achieved success in the First Battle of Bull Run against infantry. He was a flamboyant dresser and an audacious commander, wildly popular with the Southern public for his escapades in twice encircling the Army of the Potomac. These long-range reconnaissance missions accomplished little of military value but boosted Southern morale. After Stuart's death in 1864, he was replaced by