Jeff --

This is an interesting command, possibly the only one in Confederate service to lose its colonel and major due to a dispute over a card game. I have a four-page organization table for this regiment, covering service record data for all field and staff officers, as well as company captains. I also wrote a paper concerning retired Lt. Col. John P. West. He left the regiment to protect his family in Shelby County from what today's newswriters would style 'insurgents'.

We really don't know how many officers and men were with the command at the end because the regiments of Ferguson's brigade disbanded rather than formally surrender. There are few very paroles on record for this regiment; none for those actually with the command when it disbanded. SInce the brigade was part of Jefferson's Davis' escort from Charlotte NC to Georgia, you may be interested in reading William C. Davis' recent book, A Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government.

To pick up as much as possible on the operations and activities of this regiment, you'll need to look for O. R. references to Brig. Gen. Samuel Wragg Ferguson and his cavalry command. In late 1864 brigade organization was reported as follows:

2^nd Alabama, Col. John N. Carpenter.
56^th Alabama, Col. William Boyles.
9^th Mississippi Cavalry, Col. Horace H. Miller.
11^th Mississippi Cavalry, Col. Robert O. Perrin.
12^th Mississippi Battalion, Capt. George F. Peek.
9^th Mississippi Cavalry, Company--(scout company), Capt. Thomas C. Flournoy.

http://www.generalsandbrevets.com/sgf/ferguson.htm

I'm sure you are aware of the published letters of Sgt. Maj. Harden Perkins Cochrane in Alabama Review. If I'm not mistaken, ADAH has a company book kept while the regiment was stationed near Pollard, Ala. You'll also be interested in inspection reports of the brigade and regiment available on microfilm. ADAH also has records from the 1907 census of Confederate veterans sorted by unit, so you could use the file for the 2nd Alabama Cavalry.

Since few direct references to this regiment exist, it will help to review all sources available on each of Ferguson's regiments, as well as the brigade in general. Here's a colorful example and an image found in John McElroy's Andersonville, an account by a Federal soldier captured by Ferguson's men:

We laid around Atlanta a good while, and things quieted down so that it seemed almost like peace, after the four months of continual fighting we had gone through. We had been under a strain so long that now we boys went in the other direction, and became too careless, and that's how we got picked up. We went out about five miles one night after a lot of nice smoked hams that a nigger told us were stored in an old cotton press, and which we knew would be enough sight better eating for Company C, than the commissary pork we had lived on so long. We found the cotton press, and the hams, just as the nigger told us, and we hitched up a team to take them into camp. As we hadn't seen any Johnny signs anywhere, we set our guns down to help load the meat, and just as we all came stringing out to the wagon with as much meat as we could carry, a company of Ferguson's Cavalry popped out of the woods about one hundred yards in front of us and were on top of us before we could say I scat. You see they'd heard of the meat, too.

http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/3/0/7/3072/3072-h/3072-h.htm#p445

For what it's worth, Ferguson's cavalry was the last organized Confederate command to leave Atlanta.