All we know for sure about where Little Sorrel came from before he was captured by the Confederates at Harpers Ferry in 1861 was that he had been loaded onto the Baltimore and Ohio livestock car in southern Ohio. William O. Collins was in southern Ohio then, having settled in Hillsboro in Highland County, Ohio, to practice law. He later became a railroad executive but remained in touch with his family’s farming roots, becoming president of the Highland County Agricultural Fair. After the attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861, William Collins raised a company of cavalry and rode off to war at the head of the Eleventh Ohio Cavalry.
The Eleventh Ohio never saw action against Stonewall Jackson, and Collins never laid eyes on the horse the Confederate general was riding. But his friend William H. Trimble, also an attorney in Hillsboro, active in the Highland County Fair, fellow board member of Hillsboro’s St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, and Collins’s occasional business partner, probably did.
William H. Trimble may have carried the identity of Little Sorrel back to Ohio.
A Biographical Cyclopedia and Portrait Gallery, Vol. 4, 1887
Trimble, who judged pacing horse competitions at the county fair in Hillsboro before the war, was colonel of the Sixtieth Ohio Infantry. His regiment saw action during Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign in the spring of 1862. He may or may not have seen Jackson on Little Sorrel in the valley campaign—most likely not. But the Sixtieth Ohio was present at the Battle of Harpers Ferry on September 15, 1862, when the regiment got a close enough look at Jackson to describe his attire and his horse. Trimble got an extra close look.
The Battle of Harpers Ferry was disastrous for the Federal garrison occupying the vulnerable little town where the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers come together. After great success in northern Virginia in the summer of 1862, Robert E. Lee led his Army of Northern Virginia on an invasion into Maryland at the beginning of September. He sent Stonewall Jackson, commanding the army’s Second Corps, to capture Harpers Ferry and Jackson succeeded beyond all expectations. The capture of the garrison included the surrender of nearly twelve thousand five hundred Union troops, the largest haul of enemy soldiers and equipment of the war.
Among the captured regiments was the Sixtieth Ohio, whose soldiers watched Jackson ride into Harpers Ferry after the surrender. They were unimpressed.
“The head officer Jackson was riding a light colored dun,” wrote Lewis Byrum Hull of the Sixtieth. He was, Hull wrote, “dressed very common.” The horse was most likely Little Sorrel, who, as previously noted, was often called dun.
The New York Times correspondent who also observed the arrival of Jackson echoed Hull’s opinion of Jackson’s dress: “He was dressed in the coarsest kind of homespun, seedy and dirty at that; wore an old hat which any Northern beggar would consider an insult to have offered him.” He didn’t mention the horse.
When Colonel Trimble saw Jackson riding into Harper Ferry with his staff, he approached the Confederate general to ask that free black men from Ohio who had come with the regiment as servants be protected from seizure as slaves. After a brief discussion, Jackson agreed. That was apparently the extent of Trimble’s relationship with Jackson, but if it was indeed Little Sorrel that Jackson rode that day, Trimble got a good look at him and may have recognized him as a horse that had belonged to his friend William O. Collins. There’s no written evidence of Trimble saying anything to Collins, although the two men maintained their prewar friendship after the war.
Men from Hillsboro got an even closer look at Little Sorrel two and a half years later, after Stonewall Jackson’s death. In April 1865 Union cavalry from General William T. Sherman’s Division of the Mississippi swept through North Carolina to help apply pressure against civilians and seize livestock as part of the final push to end the war.
Among the horses confiscated was Little Sorrel, who, after a day in Union hands, was returned to Stonewall Jackson’s widow. At least thirty men from Hillsboro were among the regiment that was involved in the raids near Mrs. Jackson’s home. None can be identified as closely involved with William O. Collins in Hillsboro, but most probably got a good look at Little Sorrel and might have recognized him.
If indeed the story of Little Sorrel being foaled at Noah Collins’s farm in Somers is true, this is the most likely scenario. Noah’s brother, William Collins, received the horse sometime before the outbreak of war, possibly for racing use. Racing at the pacing gait was less common than at the trot, but sportsmen in southern Ohio were particularly determined to keep the sport alive. The first of the great pacing racehorses whose place and date of birth is known was Pocahontas, a chestnut mare foaled in 1847 in Butler County, Ohio.
Appreciation for fast pacers in Hillsboro was so great that in 1858 the local newspaper printed an extensive article on how to teach your trotter to pace “at a lively gait.” The county fair, in which Collins and Trimble were active, featured annual awards for the “best pacer” and the “fastest pacer.” If a little red pacing horse had been acquired by William Collins from his brother, Noah, in Somers, Connecticut, and had turned out to be not quite fast enough, he might well have been sold to a broker to be shipped east for possible war use. It’s speculation, but it fits with the Somers story.
Unless some scrap of written information shows up, speculation is all we have. We may always have to wonder about where Little Sorrel came from before he stepped onto a railroad car in southern Ohio. Whatever his origin, he stepped off into the control of a Confederate quartermaster and his commanding officer in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on his way to becoming a legend.
Chapter 4
Little Sorrel Goes to War
There was immediate work for Jackson’s new horse in Harpers Ferry during the first weeks of May 1861. The major—soon to be colonel—proved to be a skillful organizer of fighting units and a capable supervisor of training. He wasn’t necessarily popular with the troops since he was stricter than most of them felt he needed to be. He was also inclined to show up unexpectedly, riding up on his odd sorrel horses, the tall skinny one and, more often, the little rounded one.
The troops, all volunteers, had arrived in Harpers Ferry with their local militia units, for the most part commanded by brilliantly uniformed officers mounted on fine Virginia Thoroughbreds. Orders from Richmond had removed the high-ranking militia officers from their commands and nearly all had gone home in a huff, taking their extravagant uniforms and fine horses with them. Left in command had been Jackson, with his old military school uniform and his plain little horse.
Once Virginia’s secession was completed, the new Confederate government took control of the Virginia troops, removing Jackson from command of the Harpers Ferry garrison and replacing him with the distinguished General Joseph E. Johnston. Johnston had been a brigadier general in the U.S. Army and was the highest-ranking officer to resign his commission to join the Confederate cause.
Johnston reorganized the units that Jackson had established, giving the former commander the First Brigade of what eventually became the Army of the Shenandoah. Jackson, freed from the paperwork of overall command, found himself even more active and more often on horseback as he trained the regiments under his immediate control. He also found himself more and more often using Little Sorrel, not caring what his troops thought about his appearance or that of his mount.
George Baylor was a member of the Second Virginia Infantry, one of the original units assigned to the First Brigade. He was unimpressed with his initial look at Jackson and Little Sorrel at Harpers Ferry. “He had rather a sleepy look and was a very unimposing figure on horseback,” Baylor wrote of Jackson. Baylor later served under Jackson in his celebrated Shenandoah Valley campaign and developed a much more positive opinion of man and horse.
On June 16, Jackson rode out of Harpers Ferry at the head of his brigade. Johnston had decided that Harpers Ferry, surrounded as it was by elevations on all sides, was indefensible. He asked for and re
ceived permission to withdraw west, away from the Potomac River. Jackson, who would have preferred a more aggressive move, left Harpers Ferry with a growing reputation as a leader, at least at the brigade level. Little Sorrel had no reputation at all, except perhaps as the unfathomable choice of a mount of the brigade commander. Nobody recorded which horse Jackson chose to lead his troops out of Harpers Ferry. In the future, writers of diaries and memoirs would remember seeing Jackson aboard Little Sorrel and writing about it, but on June 16, 1861, they didn’t know yet that they were looking at something special.
Johnston moved his army southwest to a spot near Winchester, forty miles from a possible Federal crossing of the Potomac. At Winchester a troop of young college men from Lexington joined Jackson’s brigade. They called themselves the “Liberty Hall Volunteers,” after the original name of Washington College, the alma mater of most of the seventy or so young recruits. Many of them had seen Jackson at the Presbyterian Church and public events in Lexington during his tenure at the nearby Virginia Military Institute, but they had never seen him as a commander of troops. They were puzzled by what they saw and surprised by his choice of a mount.
“A stranger would not have picked out the man in the faded blue uniform with no insignia of rank and riding around on a poor plug as the commander of the host,” wrote Lt. John Newton Lyle. Nor would someone have predicted, Lyle added, that Jackson would become the greatest general since Napoleon. It goes without saying that neither Lyle nor anyone else predicted anything for Jackson’s unimposing little horse either.
On June 19, Johnston sent Jackson’s brigade twenty-five miles north to Martinsburg to destroy railroad equipment. Jackson, with the help of a cavalry contingent under J. E. B. Stuart, was also to watch for a possible advance of troops under Union General Robert Patterson. Jackson had about two thousand soldiers and was told to fall back if he found that Patterson, with his fourteen thousand or more troops, had arrived in force.
It’s unclear if Jackson rode Little Sorrel the first time he faced enemy guns during the Civil War. That happened on July 2, when Stuart sent word that his cavalry had spotted Union soldiers crossing the Potomac River, heading south toward Martinsburg.
Jackson moved forward with one regiment, about four hundred men, and a single cannon under William Nelson Pendleton, a fifty-one-year-old clergyman from Lexington who had enlisted as an artillery captain. As unlikely as the choice of Pendleton seemed to be, he was a West Point graduate who had served briefly as an artillery officer in the prewar U.S. Army. Pendleton’s full artillery component included two small cannons donated by VMI, guns that had been used for cadet training under Jackson, as well as two other heavier guns. Under orders to do no more than test the strength and the intentions of any Federal advance, Jackson thought his limited force was adequate for his purposes.
But the Federal advance force included between two thousand and three thousand five hundred men, and Jackson was barely able to do what he was ordered. He made a brief resistance and then withdrew. The action occurred near a tiny village with a waterfall and a church, a spot with the serene name of Falling Waters. As the site was also near a stream called Hoke’s Run, the battle is known by both names.
Jackson told Pendleton to delay the Federal advance as long as possible with his one cannon. Pendleton found his long-ago artillery training useful. He ordered his single cannon to aim at the legs of the approaching cavalry horses and the small six-pounder did its job.
“The effect was obvious and decided,” wrote Pendleton to his wife four days later. “Not man or horse remained standing in the road, nor did we see them again.” It would not be the first time in Jackson’s Civil War that horses were the intended targets for artillery. Jackson’s brigade withdrew safely to the protection of Johnston’s full force in Winchester.
Johnston referred to the event in the road at Falling Waters as an “affair,” while Jackson called it a “skirmish.” Whatever the name, it ended with minimal casualties. Union General Patterson was sure he had won, with Jackson withdrawing in the face of his advance. But the Confederate side was pleased too, since Jackson had done precisely what was necessary. He had discovered the size of the Union force and determined it would be unwise to bring on a battle. Johnston was even more pleased when Patterson, convinced he had defeated a large force with an even larger one in the wings, not only didn’t advance, he eventually retreated across the Potomac.
More is known about Jackson’s choice of mount at the First Battle of Manassas, which took place three weeks after Falling Waters. That battle, also known as the First Battle of Bull Run, saw the first major combat of the Civil War. Jackson didn’t use either of his sorrel horses, and there is no record of why not. Jackson did have a potentially serious incident on horseback in the weeks between Falling Waters and Manassas that may have affected his decision on what horse to ride, but it seems unlikely that the horse involved was Little Sorrel.
John Lyle claimed that he saw Jackson, while reviewing his troops, come galloping down the line “at top speed as if he were riding a race. His horse, we learned later, was running away with him.” No harm was done. Lyle said Jackson “stuck to that horse like a tick.”
The horse involved was probably not Little Sorrel. Lyle didn’t know Little Sorrel by name or reputation in July 1861, but he certainly did later in the war. He first published his memoirs nearly forty years after the incident and surely would have named Little Sorrel in the account if the little horse were indeed the runaway. Besides, Little Sorrel may have been the least likely horse in the Confederate army to run away with anybody during a review of troops. If the horse that bolted was the big sorrel, that would explain why Jackson chose not to use him in battle. But it doesn’t explain why he didn’t use his calm little one.
According to early Jackson biographer John Esten Cooke, James Thomson, an eighteen-year-old volunteer aide and former cadet at VMI, loaned Jackson the horse he rode at Manassas on July 21. Thomson had just arrived to join the Confederate army and was an outstanding rider, owning excellent horses. Still, it was surprising that Jackson would choose an unknown horse if one of his own had been ready for action.
Jackson had been promoted to brigadier general after the action at Falling Waters and there is a faint possibility that he thought that neither of his sorrels looked imposing enough for a general to ride into battle. But since he hadn’t bothered to replace his well-worn and slightly shabby blue VMI uniform with something more elegant, he wasn’t likely to worry about conformation flaws of an otherwise capable horse.
It’s more likely that Jackson’s own horses hadn’t kept up with him. He and his brigade began their trip from the Winchester area on July 18 when they received word that the Confederate forces at Manassas, twenty-five miles deep into Virginia from Washington, D.C., needed reinforcement in the face of a Union advance.
It was a challenging trip of nearly fifty miles to reach the front. The troops marched over mountains and then climbed aboard railroad cars to head to Manassas Junction, six miles from where the Union and Confederate troops had already begun shooting at each other. The railroad journey for Joseph Johnston’s entire army had to be accomplished in waves because of undersized cars and an underpowered locomotive.
Jackson and most of his brigade arrived at the Manassas depot on the first train late in the afternoon of July 19. The rest of the soldiers pulled in on July 20. The cavalry and artillery traveled over land and Little Sorrel may have been among the late arriving horses. Soldiers by necessity took up the rail car space, and it’s probable that Jackson’s horses were either unavailable to him or unfit at three o’clock in the morning of July 21 when his day got under way, so he borrowed the Thomson horse. Jackson and the rest of what was now called the Confederate Army of the Potomac knew that battle was likely that day, although most thought it would begin with their own attack on the left section of the Federal line, the right of the Confederate line. Jackson’s brigade was
ready for action at five o’clock.
But the first shots came from the Union side, and when it happened Thomas Jackson was on a horse that he didn’t know. The horse performed well throughout the day, first accomplishing a quick move under fire from the right, where Jackson had thought the action would be, to the left, where the Union attack had begun. The borrowed horse happened to be the one carrying him when he received his legendary nickname.
It was shortly after 11:30 AM that Jackson’s brigade stood in wait just over a hill on the farm of the Henry family to be ordered forward. Jackson and the borrowed horse stood in front as a brigade of South Carolinians struggled beneath them to stop a Union advance. Brigadier General Barnard Bee spotted Jackson and his brigade of Virginians on the hill above.
“There is Jackson standing like a stone wall,” Bee said, or something to that effect, as he urged his weakening line to stand strong. There’s a school of thought that Bee meant his statement as criticism rather than praise, accusing Jackson of standing still while his troops were devastated by Union fire. But most people took it to mean that Bee intended that his men steady themselves and reach deep to hold back the Union forces. Bee suffered a mortal wound moments later, so nobody was able to ask him what he meant.
Bee may have been speaking of Jackson himself, or he may have been speaking of the First Virginia Brigade, but the description was soon applied to both. The First Virginia became the Stonewall Brigade and Thomas Jackson became Stonewall Jackson. Both performed magnificently during the remaining four hours of battle, holding fast against the Union troops, then rallying to drive them back toward Washington, D.C., in disarray. Jackson suffered a wound to a finger and James Thomson’s horse was wounded slightly in the leg.
Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel Page 7