After suitable prayers and speeches, four men dressed in Confederate uniforms lowered the walnut box into a prepared plot on the VMI parade ground directly in front of a life-size statue of Stonewall Jackson himself. As the remains entered the earth, reenactors fired three volleys over the horse’s grave. Added to the dirt placed on top were handfuls of soil from each of the battlefields where Little Sorrel carried Stonewall Jackson, usually to victory.
George Moor, a Jackson reenactor and head of the cavalry unit that accompanied the walnut box, dismounted to say a prayer over the still-open grave. He carefully placed two horseshoes inside and was asked the meaning of his token.
“So he may be shod wherever he goes,” Moor told the crowd.
Little Sorrel’s gravestone in Lexington, Virginia.
Keith Gibson, VMI Museum, Lexington, VA.
James Robertson, author of the definitive biography of Stonewall Jackson, ended the ceremony with a wish for Little Sorrel. “May you continue to have good grazing in the boundless pastures of heaven,” he said to the remains of the unlikely hero.
No, it wasn’t a funeral, because you don’t have funerals for horses. But it probably was the last original burial of a Civil War veteran, and an appropriate tribute to a horse who had become a unique symbol of a vanished country.
Chapter 1
Warriors under Saddle
During the first week of May 1861, the major in command of Virginia volunteers at Harpers Ferry had horses on his mind. Thomas J. Jackson, a West Pointer, Mexican War combat veteran, and longtime instructor at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, knew all about the value of horses in wartime. He also knew that he was exceedingly short of them.
Virginia was a relative latecomer to rebellion. The state’s secession convention was able to produce enough votes only after South Carolina’s troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor on April 13, leading President Abraham Lincoln to call for volunteers to put down the rebellion. Although most Virginians weren’t secessionists, they wanted no part of fighting fellow southerners and joined the other states of the new Confederacy on April 17. The complexion of the rebellion changed immediately.
Virginia was the biggest, the richest, and the closest to Washington of any state in the new Confederacy. It was also, of all the southern states, home to the largest number of West Point–educated current and former officers of the U.S. Army. Like Jackson, most of them would follow their state into rebellion.
Nearly all the West Pointers were offered significant assignments from Virginia’s new governor, John Letcher, who would control his state’s military manpower until the Confederacy organized its own army. Major Jackson received one of the most important posts when he was sent to command the thousands of volunteers and militia members pouring into Harpers Ferry, site of one of the two major Federal arsenals in the country. The amateur soldiers took control of the town and the arsenal the day after the secession vote, but the military minds in Richmond, including a recently resigned U.S. Army colonel named Robert E. Lee, knew the Federal army would soon want the town back.
On April 27, Jackson received his orders to Harpers Ferry, arriving there two days later. He had left the U.S. Army a decade earlier, taking a job as a professor at VMI, where he taught natural philosophy, the nineteenth-century version of physics. But he also taught artillery tactics, and so he knew immediately upon arrival that horses, lots of them, would be needed in Harpers Ferry if the town were to be saved for the Confederacy.
Harpers Ferry wasn’t a particularly congenial spot for an army of rebellion. It was snugly situated across the Potomac River from the still-loyal Maryland, a slave-holding state destined to stay with the Union thanks to an early order from President Lincoln calling for Maryland to be occupied by Federal troops and several of its civil liberties to be suspended.
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson in 1863.
Library of Congress
On the other side of Harpers Ferry lay the mountainous western part of Virginia, where a majority of citizens resisted secession. Many had no use for the institution of slavery that helped instigate the breakup of the Union in the first place. Others may not have minded slavery but owned no slaves themselves and resented the political power of wealthy eastern Virginians who did hold slaves.
But Harpers Ferry was geographically significant in another way, situated as it was at a key stop on both the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. Both systems linked east and west for the Union and might do the same for the Confederacy. The town, important beyond its size, also stood as a gateway to the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, the rich and fertile land between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains. The valley was a vital corridor to anybody traveling north and south in the western half of Virginia. It was also a breadbasket of great importance to anyone trying to feed an army.
Major Jackson’s orders were to guard this crucial spot, a town that stood at the foot of three elevations, two of them towering over the town. He had seen the topography and sensed its military implications eighteen months earlier, when he, two undersized cannons, and twenty-one VMI cadets trained in artillery were sent to Harpers Ferry to protect against an uprising of slaves or abolitionists (both equally feared) as raider John Brown awaited execution in nearby Charles Town.
Brown’s initial attack on the Federal arsenal in October 1859 had failed since few slaves joined in. There had been no evidence that further trouble was coming, but Virginia was taking no chances. Jackson and the cadets stayed a few days, witnessed Brown’s execution, and returned to Lexington.
The artillery professor learned a couple of things from his stay. First, Harpers Ferry would be exceptionally difficult to defend without placing troops and artillery on the heights overlooking the town. Second, undersized cannons, small enough to be hauled by cadets, wouldn’t do the job if real shooting started.
Harpers Ferry during the Civil War.
National Archives
So Jackson wrote to Richmond for cannons, ammunition, caissons, wagons, and anything else he could get, and he began to look around for horses to haul all that equipment. He also looked around for somebody to help him procure those horses, and his attention fell on a man he knew well, at least by reputation.
John Alexander Harman of Staunton was a member of the family that operated Harman Brothers Stage, a coach line that carried mail and passengers between valley towns poorly served by rail. Jackson himself had traveled on a four-horse Harman coach between Lexington and Staunton on the first leg of his journey to Richmond on April 21, his usual practice when he left Lexington during the decade he spent there.
Harman was a man who all his life had been eager to get on with challenges and new experiences, no matter what the potential danger. He had arrived in Harpers Ferry a week and a half ahead of Jackson, the day after the passage of Virginia’s secession ordinance. He wasn’t sure he wanted to remain. Harman was a busy man and expected to become busier with the outbreak of war. But he was head of a volunteer militia unit in Staunton and felt obligated to make the trip.
In addition to the stagecoach business, Harman procured and butchered meat for a wholesale grocery business, edited a local newspaper, and ran a substantial farm two miles east of Staunton. In his early twenties, before business interests burdened him, Harman had gone off to Texas in search of adventure. His experiences there became the stuff of legend in Staunton, Lexington, and the other Shenandoah Valley towns.
A first wave of Americans, mostly southerners, had arrived in Texas in the mid-1830s to answer settlers’ call for help in executing a revolution against Mexican control of the land north of the Rio Grande. Among those who responded was Ben McCulloch of Tennessee, whose fortuitous case of measles prevented him from being present at the Alamo when it fell to Mexican troops in March 1836.
Unlike the defenders of the Texas
shrine, McCulloch survived to prosper during the years of Texas independence. In 1845, Texas was annexed by the United States and admitted to the Union with a boundary chosen by President James K. Polk, over the bitter objections of Mexico. War broke out the following year and McCulloch raised a company of volunteer rangers to defend Texas from Mexico.
A young John Harman made his way to Texas, joined up with McCulloch, and rode along as McCulloch’s Rangers performed as regular cavalry, dismounted cavalry, guerrilla cavalry, scouts, and spies. The rangers also procured horses for the U.S. commanding general Zachary Taylor and protected Taylor’s long and vulnerable supply lines.
After the war, Harman returned to Virginia and a more conventional life. Thomas Jackson may or may not have known about Harman’s Texas adventures, but in Harpers Ferry he learned quickly that the businessman from Staunton was just the man to find him some horses.
Jackson asked Harman to ride out into the Virginia countryside east of Harpers Ferry to acquire horses suitable to pull artillery pieces, supply wagons, and ambulances. He would ask for donations, which neither man expected, or offer to buy the animals, which they equally doubted would work. They could give only IOUs drawn on the Commonwealth of Virginia in payment, a proposal that would be unpopular under any circumstances, but even more so in Loudon County.
It wasn’t just proximity that made Loudon a likely target of forced Confederate horse procurement. The county was famous throughout Virginia for the quality of its livestock. Its pastures were superb, thanks to the careful management and crop rotation practiced by its small farmers, mostly Quakers and Germans whose ancestors had traveled south from Pennsylvania a century earlier.
The new Confederacy had another reason to look first to the Quaker and German farmers for horses. No farmer would like to be given an IOU for a good horse, and Jackson, a man of great common sense, was reluctant to offend men he hoped would join or send their sons to his rapidly organizing companies and regiments. But enlistment of the Germans was unlikely and that of Quakers essentially impossible.
Deep within Quaker doctrine was the belief that slavery was an absolute evil. Virginia Quakers who lived in Loudon County tended to be quiet about their beliefs, unlike their cousins over the Mason-Dixon Line in Pennsylvania. But the fact that they could run such admirable small farms without slave labor often rankled some of the larger plantation owners of Loudon and other northern Virginia counties.
For several decades there had also been rumors about Quaker farmhouses in Loudon County sheltering runaway slaves, but that would have been so dangerous to slave and protector alike that there were probably few actual occurrences. However, the farmers would certainly have looked the other way as runaways dashed north to freedom.
All in all, John Harman was inclined to look first on the Quaker and German farms of Loudon. He quickly hit equine pay dirt, seizing dozens of horses and leaving pieces of paper behind. He also left simmering resentment. A month after Harman completed his search, the Quaker and German districts of Loudon County would vote overwhelmingly no in the referendum that finalized Virginia’s secession, while most of the rest of the county and state voted to leave the Union.
Quakers and the few other Unionists in Loudon suffered so much from loss of livestock and crops to the Virginia and then the Confederate armies that some were driven to violate another profound Quaker doctrine: that of nonviolence. In the spring of 1862 Quaker farmers and businessmen organized the Loudon Rangers, a partisan cavalry unit later absorbed into the U.S. Army. Although Union regiments did come out of Virginia’s forty-one western counties, they represented West Virginia, which separated from the Confederacy and became the state of West Virginia in 1862. Only the Loudon Rangers came out of Virginia itself to fight for the Union.
The Rangers fought for most of the war with prices on their heads, knowing that capture meant hanging as traitors to Virginia. As Quakers, they were not particularly effective soldiers, but they persevered to the end of the war, perhaps remembering all those fine horses lost to Harman and Jackson.
Harman’s success in rounding up good horses prompted Jackson to ask him for additional help. Although he had ridden out of Lexington on his own horse, Jackson had sent that animal home to continue his journey by stage and train, first to Richmond and then to Harpers Ferry. It’s not clear why Jackson didn’t keep the horse with him or have him sent along later, since he knew that officers were expected to provide their own mounts. Regardless of the reason, Jackson asked Harman to be on the lookout for a suitable horse, one that might stand the stress of battle, should it come.
The search began just as the relationship between the two sides of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was beginning to change. For the first two weeks of Southern control of Harpers Ferry, each side permitted trains to pass, even if they appeared to be carrying supplies that might be used for military purposes. That changed after the first week in May.
On May 9, a westbound train headed to Harpers Ferry was captured by Federal troops in Maryland. Aboard were inventor Charles Dickinson and his new steam-operated artillery piece intended for the Confederacy. The peculiar gun was confiscated, Dickinson arrested and sent to Annapolis, and a round of train seizures and counterseizures was under way.
The day after the steam gun seizure, on Friday, May 10, 1861, a five-car livestock train headed to Baltimore from southern Ohio was stopped at the Harpers Ferry station. Four of the cars were filled with beef cattle, a hundred of them, and they were enthusiastically confiscated for use by the troops, who had been stretching the limited food supplies of the town.
The fifth car contained ten horses, good enough horses that John Harman was called in to take a look. The exact makeup of the horse consignment is lost, and it is now unknown if Harman found some draft animals to add to his supply. But an army needs horses that can be ridden as well as driven. Harman, having learned recently that Major Jackson was in need of a mount or two, checked the consignment carefully, found a few prospects, and sent for his commander.
Jackson liked a handsome horse as well as the next man, and he had owned a few in his time. He had bragged in Mexico about a particularly beautiful and expensive horse acquired for a hefty price, but that animal had been used only during peaceful months of occupation and had never seen action. The carload of Ohio horses may have included one or two handsome ones, but the two that caught his eye were more ordinary.
One was a big sorrel horse, a little angular but clearly strong enough to carry a man of almost six feet. The second, another sorrel, was attractive but not nearly big enough, standing less than fifteen hands (five feet) at the withers. Jackson told Harman that he would take both sorrels, the big one for himself and the little one for his wife, who might need private transportation during the months of upheaval that likely lay ahead. He paid $150 in U.S. money for the two red horses.
The accepted story has been that the money went to the Confederate government, to which Jackson had consigned the confiscated horses. But newspaper articles a couple of weeks later reported that the original consigner, described as an Ohio drover, was “satisfied” with his payment for his load of livestock.
The seizure that provided Jackson with his horses contributed to a situation that infuriated Virginians and harmed the Confederate effort in the state. General Benjamin Butler, in command of Union forces in Maryland in early May, was greatly annoyed by the confiscation of the livestock train. A few days after the incident, Butler was sent to take command of Fort Monroe on the southeastern Virginia coast, still held by Federal forces. Soon after Butler’s arrival, escaped slaves began appearing inside the lines, asking for freedom and protection.
Federal officials were not yet ready to turn the new war into a conflict over slavery. Washington’s position was that secession was illegal and Virginia remained part of the Union. So Butler was told that the escaped slaves were still governed by the laws of the United States and should be sent back to t
heir owners. Butler, a longtime opponent of slavery, believed otherwise. He retained the escapes slaves, calling them contraband of war who should be put into service working for the U.S. Army.
Thousands of escapees arrived and were put to work on construction projects and other duties around Fort Monroe. They, like Thomas Jackson’s two new sorrels, never went back to their former owners.
The escaped slaves had a modest expectation of freedom after the fighting was over, but the horses, had they been aware of the history of their species in times of human war, would have been somewhat less hopeful. In May 1861, it was too soon to know just how hard the Civil War was going to be on horses, but the precedent was not particularly promising. On May 10, 1861, the two sorrels became part of a long and brutal history.
Human beings began to appreciate the value of horses in war not long after they realized that horses were good for something other than food. Although the final word is not yet in on the precise dates of horse domestication and the first use of the animals in warfare, we do know about the earliest surviving evidence of each step.
Horses and humans first encountered each other at least fifty thousand years ago. The acquaintance was neither close nor friendly, with horses providing meat and skins to Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon hunters.
Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel Page 2