Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel

by Sharon B. Smith

  The next day, hearing news of the disaster at Front Royal, Banks started his troops northward to his base of supplies at Winchester, more easily defended than Strasburg. He wasn’t surprised that Jackson had attacked, but he was stunned that the Valley Army had gotten so far north undetected. At first, the Union troops moved out slowly, assuming again that Jackson couldn’t move quickly enough to reach them before they got to Winchester.

  It was true that the Confederates were farther away from Winchester than Banks was. Jackson began a march on May 24 that he kept up day and night, hoping to prevent Banks from reaching his supply base.

  Jackson was determined that nobody stop to rest as they headed north. Henry Kyd Douglas observed the general moving around on Little Sorrel to make himself more comfortable. The trustworthy little animal marched onward, protecting his rider from a fall in spite of the dark and the sleepiness that everyone, man and horse, was experiencing.

  After failing on the field at Kernstown and being less than fully engaged at McDowell, Jackson was determined now to be at the front for all of the action. He was in front at Front Royal and he remained in front through that night on the road to Winchester, even as his column approached the Union-held town they had abandoned two months earlier. There were sporadic brushes with Federal troops along the route, including occasional musket fire coming at them from the darkness.

  “I quite remember thinking at the time that Jackson was invulnerable, and that persons near him shared that quality,” Richard Taylor wrote later. He might well have added “horses” near Jackson to his observation about invulnerability. Little Sorrel was also untouched that tense night.

  Elements of the Valley Army did manage to smash into the tail of Banks’s long column, hitting primarily supply wagons and ambulances. The Federals abandoned the vehicles and hurried on to Winchester, assuming correctly that the underequipped and underfed Confederates would stop their march to loot.

  As dawn broke on May 25 Ewell’s portion of the army was less than two miles from Winchester, having taken a more direct route than Jackson himself. Most of Banks’s six thousand five hundred troops had beaten the Confederates, and they prepared for attack. Banks was grateful that most of his command had reached safety and believed he had hours or days before Jackson could possibly be there. He was wrong on both counts. He wasn’t safe, and Jackson was there.

  Jackson directed a two-pronged attack, with Ewell from the southeast and Jackson himself from the southwest. Early in the battle, Jackson rode Little Sorrel, accompanied by several officers, to the top of a small hill where he could get a firsthand look at the Union deployment against them.

  “They were hit by a hail of grape and musket balls,” wrote John Worsham of the Twenty-First Virginia Infantry. One of the officers was wounded and another saw a musket ball penetrate his sleeve.

  “General Jackson sat there, the enemy continuing to fire grape and musketry at him,” Worsham said. Jackson remained on that hill on a motionless Little Sorrel until he had assessed the situation and issued his orders. After a quick trip back to see that his orders were being followed, he returned to the hill to watch the effects of the advance by Richard Taylor’s brigade. Jackson’s invulnerability, and that of his horse, continued.

  The Confederate attack smashed through Banks’s army. After a briefly strong resistance, the lines crumpled and broke. Union casualties were more than two thousand men dead, wounded, or captured, while Jackson’s losses amounted to only four hundred. As usual, equine casualties weren’t carefully counted. One estimate had the Union forces losing five hundred horses and mules, some to capture but most to death. Even the coldly practical Jackson expressed regret later at the destruction of artillery and wagon horses during cannon attacks on the rear of Banks’s column as it approached Winchester.

  What was left of the Federal army dashed through the town and headed north to safety. Motivation gave the Federal troops speed, while exhaustion slowed down pursuing Confederates, so Banks had what was left of his troops crossing the Potomac River that night and early the next day. Jackson called his troops back from their pursuit.

  Union General Nathaniel P. Banks was a victim of Jackson’s lightning attacks.

  Library of Congress

  Stonewall Jackson and Little Sorrel strode into the center of Winchester to wild cheering. Jackson was their savior, the residents believed, and Little Sorrel deserved adulation by association. It was in Winchester that the little horse first began to lose hairs from his tail, snatched from him as cherished souvenirs. Even today, museums and archives across the south list such entries as “tail hairs from Stonewall Jackson’s horse” in their databases.

  Winchester didn’t remain in Confederate hands for long. In addition to capturing thousands of dollars’ worth of Federal food, equipment, weapons, and medical supplies, Jackson’s army drew a massive response from Washington. The Confederates got exactly what they wanted. Washington canceled plans to reinforce the Union armies threatening Richmond. Federal officials feared that the natural extension of Jackson’s expulsion of Banks from the Shenandoah Valley would be a march on Washington itself. Banks was still estimating Jackson’s army at twice the size it actually was, so the fear seemed reasonable. Jackson was willing for Washington to be afraid, and he moved most of his troops north to the Potomac River to reinforce the perception that he might cross. The sides traded occasional artillery fire, but no serious fighting occurred and Jackson enjoyed the few days near Harpers Ferry.

  Mid-afternoon on May 30, Jackson spent a few minutes observing an artillery duel between opposing batteries. Then, according to occasional staff member and full-time politician Alexander Boteler, “he dismounted from the old sorrel—his favorite war horse—and seating himself on the ground at the foot of a large tree, immediately in the rear of the battery, he presently resumed a more recumbent attitude and went to sleep.” Boteler didn’t mention whether Little Sorrel also lay down to sleep, but he often did, stretched out next to his master.

  Abraham Lincoln himself made the next move. He ordered the reluctant John Frémont, recovered from his army’s retreat at McDowell, to head east into the valley. The only slightly less reluctant Nathaniel Banks was told to head south again, and the highly annoyed Irvin McDowell was ordered to detach twenty thousand troops from his corps near Richmond and send them west. Jackson, Lincoln believed, would be tightly caught in a three-sided vise.

  Jackson, while neither reluctant nor fearful, was sensible and made plans to withdraw from the banks of the Potomac River and head south, back into the heart of the Shenandoah Valley. Little Sorrel got a break. Jackson and some staff took the train as far as Winchester, leaving their horses behind. Jackson arrived late on the same day as the famous nap. By then, the Union troops from the east were almost at Front Royal and the chase was on.

  Jackson called all his troops and horses back, climbed back aboard Little Sorrel, and hurried his army south, up the valley, toward safety. Frémont and McDowell, inexplicably, felt less urgency.

  Perhaps it was the weather. The army was plagued by thunder, hail, and flooding rains during the trip up the valley. Unlike humans, horses usually don’t mind rain, but most of them loathe slippery footing, whether from ice or mud. Little Sorrel was apparently not one of the mud-averse herd, and he carried Jackson steadily south without any problems. By now grass in the valley was fully in, so the horses had good grazing at the campsites chosen for the limited rest times. The soldiers may have been uncomfortable, tense, and often hungry, but Little Sorrel gained weight on the march.

  Jackson decided to make his stand in the village of Port Republic, where two rivers join to create the South Fork of the Shenandoah River. His sixteen thousand troops began arriving in the area on June 6, just as the Union vise began to come together. He left six thousand men of Ewell’s division near the Cross Keys tavern and moved a few miles southeast to the village of Port Republic to estab
lish his headquarters.

  His flamboyant cavalry commander Turner Ashby, whose exploits had alternately exasperated and delighted Jackson during the months they had been together, acted as the Valley Army’s rear guard during the retreat from Winchester. His unit came under fire near the village of Harrisonburg late in the day of June 6 as Jackson and Ewell were establishing their campsites. After successfully fighting off a Union cavalry challenge, Ashby and his troopers faced a small Union infantry force trying to get between the cavalry and Jackson’s infantry. Ashby’s horse was shot and killed in the skirmish. Ashby continued leading his charge on foot, but a bullet pierced his heart almost immediately and he died instantly. It’s not known if he was killed by the Union infantry or friendly fire.

  Jackson had a connection to Turner Ashby’s death that he might not have realized at the time. Ashby was not riding either of his famous stallions when horse and rider were killed at Harrisonburg. His most famous and best horse, the magnificent white Tom Telegraph, had been shot to death seven weeks earlier in the first days of the valley campaign. On June 6, Ashby had borrowed a horse from James Thomson, now an officer in his horse artillery. These batteries were designed for speed, using faster and better horses than the regular artillery batteries. Thomson liked horses and owned several good ones.

  A year earlier, as a volunteer aide to Stonewall Jackson, Thomson had lent Jackson the very same horse to ride at the First Battle of Manassas. Both Jackson and the horse were wounded there, but each recovered quickly. The horse was not so lucky the second time.

  Grieving troopers carried Ashby’s body into Port Republic, where Jackson and his staff mourned his loss. On June 7, Jackson rode the handful of miles northwest to Cross Keys to maneuver troops, hoping to provoke action from Frémont’s nearby force. Nothing happened and in the evening he returned to Madison Hall, the home of Dr. George Kemper, on the southern edge of Port Republic. The estate, standing on a hill overlooking the town, offered enough space for him and his staff and a large grassy paddock for their horses. Little Sorrel must have approved of the choice of headquarters.

  Even though Jackson knew that two separate Union divisions totaling at least fifteen thousand men were close, with thousands more troops possibly moving south to join them, he felt safe at Madison Hall. The estate stood at the end of the town, which itself lay on a peninsula connected by only one bridge to the mainland. The bulk of the Valley Army remained on the mainland side in good, high position. But Jackson, his staff, and their horses were in great danger of being trapped.

  Jackson either didn’t realize the peril or underestimated the inclinations of the Union commanders. He was correct about John Frémont, who would have had to go through Richard Ewell’s six thousand soldiers to get to Port Republic. But he was wrong about James Shields, the Union general whose troops had defeated Jackson at Kernstown, the first battle in the Shenandoah Valley, back in March.

  Several days earlier Shields had sent out a squad of fast-moving cavalry and a handful of artillery pieces to capture Port Republic, which they thought would be only lightly occupied by Confederates. They were right about that, but the few Confederates there included Stonewall Jackson.

  On Sunday, June 8, Jackson and staff members were enjoying a quiet morning on a warm, dry day, standing on the porch at Madison Hall watching their horses graze in the adjoining paddock. At 9:00 AM a panicked Confederate cavalryman dashed up to report that Union cavalry was approaching Port Republic. Presumably Jackson realized at this point just how vulnerable he had made himself.

  Little Sorrel was grazing obliviously in a far corner of the paddock, so Jackson set out on foot toward the main street of Port Republic, leaving servant Jim Lewis to catch and saddle his horse. Aide Henry Kyd Douglas claimed that Jackson briefly borrowed his horse, then thought twice about it. Within minutes, Jackson was mounted on Little Sorrel, rushing to get across the only bridge that would prevent him from being trapped on the peninsula.

  Little Sorrel came through as usual, carrying Jackson on a dash through the town and onto the bridge. Halfway across the river, a Union shell struck the covered bridge just above their heads, but the two made it through the onslaught of musket and artillery fire unscathed. They also survived an artillery barrage aimed at them on the other side of the river. Jackson’s army managed to fight off the invaders and save both their general and their supply wagons, although it was a near miss. The raiding party retreated.

  One of the Union raiders later became famous in his own right, and part of his fame was due to another horse with a remarkable survival instinct. Irish immigrant Myles Keogh had joined General James Shields’s staff as a captain in April 1862, and the fighting around Port Republic was the first action he saw during the Civil War.

  At the end of the war Keogh remained in the regular army, saw duty in the west, and became one of the 268 soldiers killed with George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn River in Montana on June 25, 1876. Keogh’s horse, Comanche, whom he had acquired in 1868, is celebrated as the only U.S. Army survivor of Custer’s immediate command. There were other horses that survived the battle, but they were euthanized during the cleanup, taken by the Indians, or simply forgotten. Comanche alone lived on. He survived until 1891, when he was believed to be about thirty years old. He was honored in retirement and mounted by a taxidermist after his death.

  At nearly the same time that the Federal raiders arrived in Port Republic, the western part of the Union vise closed on Ewell’s division four miles away in Cross Keys. Frémont, with nearly twelve thousand men, launched a half-hearted attack on the Confederate force of about six thousand, using only a fraction of his available troops. The Union attack was repulsed and defeated in a counterattack. The overmatched Frémont ordered a withdrawal from the battlefield, and Ewell was told to be ready to come to Jackson’s support the following day rather than finish Frémont off.

  That night, Ewell’s aide Campbell Brown, who had suffered a shoulder wound during the battle, rode to Port Republic to carry a message to Jackson. Brown discovered just how useful an easy-gaited pacer could be in wartime. Brown’s own horse was a trotter, whose gait he found unbearable as he rode alongside Jackson on Little Sorrel.

  Brown thought he might faint from the pain and was forced to tell Jackson of his discomfort. He remembered for years the sight of Jackson riding comfortably along at the pace, while his shoulder was jarred by every step taken by his trotting horse. Jackson didn’t offer to trade horses with the young officer, but Brown did write that Jackson looked “very compassionately” at him.

  The advance regiments of Shields’s army were now just to the north of Port Republic, and on the following day, June 9, Jackson and his army were on the move well before dawn. A day of attack, counterattack, and a second attack with Ewell’s troops arriving from Cross Keys resulted in a lopsided Confederate victory.

  Union forces lost nearly a third of their soldiers as killed, wounded, and captured, while Jackson’s losses totaled 816 with an unusually high number killed. This was the largest single loss of troops during the valley campaign, but it did little to take away from the importance of Jackson’s victory. After the battle, all Union forces withdrew and scattered, leaving Stonewall Jackson in control of the central and southern part of the Shenandoah Valley. Jackson was also left with a glowing reputation, North and South. Even his little red horse had become known beyond his own army. But most important, the two victories permitted Robert E. Lee, after giving brief thought to permitting Jackson to pursue the Union forces north into Maryland and Pennsylvania, to call the Valley Army east to help defend Richmond.

  Chapter 7

  River of Death

  Port Republic turned out to be Stonewall Jackson’s final battle in the Shenandoah Valley. The end of the campaign brought with it a few days of rest for the soldiers and horses. With Union forces scurrying north and west, some of the pressure fell away from the transportation routes for supp
lies. Soldiers ate better, but surprisingly, the horses began to experience shortages more typical of winter.

  In a normal year, farmers would be cutting their first hay of the season at about the time the campaign ended. But hayfields in the Shenandoah Valley had been devastated by excessive grazing, early cutting, and damage done by marching and bivouacking armies. Little newly cut hay was to be had. Quartermasters found forage to haul in, mostly from Staunton to the southwest, but not as much or as often as Jim Lewis would have wanted for Little Sorrel and the other horses.

  Little Sorrel had managed to keep on weight during a campaign that Jackson’s chief of staff estimated to include four hundred miles of marching in addition to six battles. But he became thinner during the two weeks following Port Republic. When Jackson chose to take a long, difficult trip on horseback, he left Little Sorrel behind. Taking his own horse would have presented a logistical challenge, but Jackson may also have been concerned for the first time about the little horse’s condition after nearly six months of near-constant travel.

  Robert E. Lee, who took over command of the Army of Northern Virginia in early June, called on Jackson to hasten to a meeting with him and other generals at his headquarters near Richmond. The Federal Army of the Potomac had marched up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers and was now just a few miles from Richmond. Lee was always as much of an aggressor as Jackson, and he was making plans for a forceful response.