"As distasteful as the image noted is, and outside the scope of the Civil War focus here, I did find an interesting note claiming that soldiers were actually ordered not to sharpen thier sabres during the Indian wars as they would become lodged in the victim."
hmm , weird and interesting,,, i would suspect this is just a more recent myth.. or the soliders commanders were hopped up on opium or something or had little or no understand on how a sword works.. :O
but..... this all comes back to the point of your question about the american use of the sword..
first one must look at the combatants,,
before the war the u.s. military had been very small and was not an old force with any great deal of combat expereince.. much was before the 1820s almost run as private militias... working as strongmen to preserve the interests for varous regional bigwigs..
so when the war came the mjijority of men had never been in any for of military environment and proably never seen a sword in their lives or had a very good concept of its use...the had never tained in fencing or in cavilrey tactics..
by the end of the war the cavalrey forces of both sides were greater than the whole u.s. army before the war.. so you have many many men with many swords and very little or no training,,
so these men used the techniques they were familiar with , even if issued with equiptment they may not have been,
this also shows with the reluctance of both nothen and southern soliders to close in hand to hand and byonet fighting in decicive situations where such an action would have setled the confrontation and the ranges were enought that it woudl have been effective, but the soliders stuck to shooting it out,, as to someone who may have used a gun before for hunting but had only been recently trained in military tactics of the day,, it would seem totaly mad to charge when you could still shoot,,
i think most mounted troops prefered to use their guns from a distance even if the swords would have been far more effective on a freeing enemy.
as had been show well into the modern era, in the ww1 and even later...
a quick hore charge on a surprised enemy with swords is much more effective that riding up on a horse and shooting from a distance.. .. in some situations..
but i think the whole problem with the use of swords is much older than the maerican civil war... and can be seen recorded in the time of nepoleon.... where the french commanders complained the french cavalrey didnt have sharp swords or sufficient skill to use the effectivly against the russian and cossak troops they encountered,,
this gos back to two things, one point was the decline of sword use by the general population and so the sword becomes more and more a military item, and the second thing related to this is then the decline in effective technique,,
but even bugger was the decline in sharpening technique over europen in the 18th and 19th centuary..
with mechanical devices and machines peopl began to lose their ability to understand how sharpening work and how to sharpen and what is sharpened how, the average solider in england, prussia , france or the u.s. in the 1800s didnt know these things at all,, and the average armorer knew little more......
making a dangerous combination for all those edged tools livelyhoods
ive never seen one european mass produced millitary sword that was sharpened properly,
the only swords from around this time ive seen with any sharpness are some hunting hangers, and sword from the east,, turkish , russia and such.....
i remember seeing s european saber that had been modified to the form of a shashka in a museum in dagestan ,the guard was removed and a new sheath made.. the blade had so much metal removed that it was almost another blade.... showing even the inherent flaws in the blunt poorly ground european sabers.. having an angle to think for any sword,, and not even having the blade take to an edge in the factory..........