Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel

by Sharon B. Smith

  Jackson got his army in motion with a combination of railroad transport and marching, but he had to get himself to Richmond more quickly. He and a few staff members rode a postal car on the Virginia Central Railroad as far as Fredericks Hall, a small community that grew up around its railroad depot. Although the rail line continued to Richmond, Jackson chose to finish his trip on horseback, riding another fifty-two miles.

  Jackson and his staff borrowed, commandeered, or purchased horses, depending on whose word you take, and rode them hard, changing mounts when needed. After fourteen difficult hours, the party arrived at a house less than two miles northeast of Richmond that served as Lee’s headquarters. A four-hour conference followed, in which Lee outlined to his highest-ranking subordinates his plans to deal with the Union army under George McClellan that threatened the Confederate capital. Its exact size wasn’t known, but Lee estimated that McClellan had between 100,000 and 150,000 soldiers. Lee’s plan was bold and aggressive, but it was a highly complicated one that the exhausted Jackson may not have entirely grasped.

  The conference ended as night fell on June 23, but instead of getting at least a modest night’s sleep, Jackson climbed aboard his borrowed horse and headed back to his troops. The army had been in motion eastward, so this leg of the trip was shorter. But Jackson was still forced to ride forty miles to reach the leading elements of his column, arriving at 10:00 AM on June 24. He had been ordered to be ready to attack the right wing of the Union army in less than two days, with the front of his badly strung-out column still a two full days’ march away. It was a nearly impossible task, but Jackson seemed unconcerned.

  The army made steady progress toward Richmond, Jackson again riding Little Sorrel, but progress was slower than it should have been. By nightfall on June 25, the day before Lee’s planned assault, the vanguard of the Valley Army was still six miles short of where the entire column should have been to join the attack on schedule. Jackson remained sleepless and listless, although he probably managed a few brief naps aboard his steady little horse during the march.

  By this point on June 25, George McClellan knew that Jackson was coming and he decided to strike first. The inconclusive Battle of Oak Grove involved only limited troops and did nothing to change Lee’s mind about attacking McClellan, but it was the first of what became known as the Seven Days Battles, a series of encounters that were neither inconclusive nor limited. Jackson’s army wasn’t involved at Oak Grove, nor was he expected to be.

  Very early on June 26 Jackson mounted Little Sorrel to lead his troops to what would become the second battle of the Seven Days. He soon met up with J. E. B. Stuart, whose cavalry had been assigned by Lee to protect Jackson’s marching column. The meeting between the two major generals gives us a picture of what both Jackson and Little Sorrel looked like that day as they approached battle.

  Lt. William W. Blackford of Fredericksburg, Virginia, had recently joined Stuart as an engineer and aide and had been looking forward to his first glimpse of the now-famous Stonewall Jackson. He was disappointed. Jackson wore, Blackford said, a “threadbare, faded, semi-military suit,” in pitiful contrast to the splendid appearance of Stuart. Blackford saved some of his criticism for Little Sorrel. Jackson’s horse was a “dun cob of rather sorry appearance,” although Blackford admitted that the little horse was well built. The word “cob” is still used to describe a horse taller than a pony but shorter than a full-sized horse, usually fourteen to fourteen and a half hands and stocky. Blackford’s depiction was accurate.

  Blackford’s description of Little Sorrel as “dun” does suggest to some that Jackson rode a different horse that day, but others who knew Little Sorrel well said he was indeed Jackson’s mount, with one witness describing him as a “chestnut sorrel.”

  It was slow going for Jackson’s men as they approached McClellan’s line. The Army of the Potomac lay just a few miles east of Richmond along the sluggish Chickahominy River, a tributary of the James. It was swampy, muddy, mosquito-infested country that was terribly hard on man and horse. The Union army had suffered thousands of cases of what they called Chickahominy Fever, a disease that combined the worst symptoms of malaria and typhoid. One surgeon referred to the Chickahominy as “the river of death” for the epidemic of fevers among the Union soldiers.

  The Confederates who had been waiting in the area for McClellan to act seemed a little less affected by fever, but hundreds of them became debilitated too. Most modern medical historians believe that Chickahominy Fever, which isn’t recognized today as a specific illness, was a variant of typhoid, although a few hold out for simultaneous infection with malaria and typhoid. But identification doesn’t matter. The bottom line was that the swamps of the Chickahominy lowlands were deadly, quite apart from the effects of musket balls and artillery shells.

  The Chicahominy River swampland brought misery to soldier and horse alike.

  Johnson and Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. 2

  Horses don’t get either malaria or typhoid, but they do get other quite similar mosquito- and water-borne diseases and, more important in the short run, their hoofs suffer badly from the kind of deep, sucking mud that covered the bottoms of the wetlands that made up the Chickahominy swamp. Horses often became stuck and the movement of artillery and supply wagons was agonizingly slow. If the horses were forced to spend more than a short time in the thick mud, they could suffer the rotting and subsequent breakdown of the hoof wall, making them lame and useless.

  In the case of Jackson’s Valley Army, the change from the cool mountain weather of the late spring left them unprepared for what they found in the swamps. A long march following three months of fighting up and down the Shenandoah Valley made their condition even worse as they approached a rendezvous with Lee’s army.

  Jackson himself was unwell and unready for battle, for reasons that people still debate. The consensus is that he suffered from exhaustion and sleep deprivation growing out of the valley campaign. His smooth-gaited little pacing horse did allow him the occasional catnap on the march, but catnaps don’t compare with deep sleep. Besides, nearly one hundred miles of Jackson’s travel had been on borrowed trotting horses, most likely not nearly as comfortable as Little Sorrel.

  He was also ill. According to his wife Anna, he wrote her later that he had been suffering from intermittent debilitating fever during the week of the Seven Days Battles. Jackson had never spent much time in the Chickahominy region, but he had contracted malaria as a child on an Ohio River adventure. He was also stationed in Florida a decade earlier and was almost certainly exposed to malaria then. Many regular army soldiers who were stationed in the South before, during, and after the war suffered malaria attacks off and on for the rest of their lives.

  Whether it was exhaustion or illness, Jackson’s performance in command on June 26 was not what it had been in the Shenandoah Valley. He was hampered by a lack of maps and poor directions from guides, unclear orders from Lee, and difficult travel conditions. A good horse could do only so much to help. Even Jackson admirers find it hard to explain his actions on that day.

  The fast-moving, always-aggressive Jackson was slow and curiously passive. His troops were six hours behind Lee’s schedule, which had called for them to strike McClellan’s right wing early in the day. The delay prompted General A. P. Hill, who had been waiting impatiently for word from Jackson that his army was ready, to launch a premature attack in mid-afternoon. The resulting Battle of Mechanicsville (Beaver Dam Creek to the Union side) resulted in disastrous losses for the Army of Northern Virginia. Jackson failed to come to Hill’s support even though he could hear the sounds of battle from the spot where he stopped his troops.

  Oddly, Jackson did succeed in spite of his failure to act. McClellan knew the Valley Army was on the scene and Stonewall Jackson’s fearsome reputation prompted McClellan to begin an immediate withdrawal of an army that had now swelled to 150,000. McClellan moved so
uth, calling it a “change of base” rather than a retreat. But his southward move showed that he had lost confidence in his plans to take Richmond. McClellan never again regained the offensive.

  On June 27, Lee’s army, with Jackson now in place but still sluggish, began a slow pursuit of the huge Union force. Jackson was most likely aboard Little Sorrel, although aide Henry Kyd Douglas, who was often mistaken, said Jackson rode the other horse he had acquired at Harpers Ferry, the animal alternately known as Young Sorrel, Gaunt Sorrel, or Big Sorrel.

  Other people on the march that day disagreed. John William Jones of the Thirteenth Virginia Infantry, who later became a prolific writer on his experiences in Jackson’s army, knew Little Sorrel well. Jackson wore his “dingy uniform . . . his faded cadet cap tilting on his nose, mounted on his old sorrel.” Jones and others noted the contrast when Jackson and Lee met in the late morning at Walnut Grove Church as the Confederates converged on the departing Union column. Lee, that “king of men” as Jones described him, rode his handsome gray charger with grace and calm, while Jackson, he thought, seemed “to be in a very bad humor” as he rode his unimpressive little horse away from the meeting.

  Lee planned for a multipronged attack concentrating on the Union corps that had been left behind to protect the larger army as it withdrew. He expected Jackson to strike the Federal right and rear as the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia advanced on the Union front. If the plans worked, Lee would attack with 57,000 men, the largest force he would ever put together in the war. This was to be the Battle of Gaines’s Mill, named for a local landmark, or the First Battle of Cold Harbor, named for a nearby crossroads, or the Battle of the Chickahominy, named for the slow, dark river that meandered through the area. The Gaines’s Mill name is most commonly used.

  Lee’s attack began shortly after noon without Jackson. Lacking the services of Jedediah Hotchkiss, who had been left behind in the Shenandoah Valley to draw maps, Jackson had been led down an incorrect road and had been in no hurry to fix the problem. After the Valley Army’s delayed arrival, Lee’s coordinated assault didn’t get under way until late in the afternoon. It was a disjointed attack, but the Confederates broke the Union lines and earned a hard-fought and expensive victory. More than 15,000 men on both sides were killed, wounded, or captured, and well over half the casualties were Confederates.

  Gaines’s Mill was a Confederate success and recognized as such. McClellan hurried his retreat and the Confederates were eager to claim their victory, although most of them realized they had lost, at least temporarily, a chance to destroy an important segment of the Union army by their late advance. Jackson got little credit for the victory even though his men had been involved in the final assault.

  On June 28, action continued to the south, but it was a day of reorganization for Jackson and his troops. It wasn’t a day of rest for Little Sorrel, though. Jackson still hadn’t had much sleep, but he moved around the Confederate camps anyway. John Hinsdale, a young Lieutenant from North Carolina, was supervising a burial detail when he noticed the cheers of his men. Jackson hurried by on his “ugly horse,” acknowledging the ovation by raising his cap. “He was evidently in a hurry,” Hinsdale wrote in his diary. What Jackson was in a hurry doing is unknown, since memoirists and letter writers were understandably more interested in the battles of the Seven Days than the days of inactivity. Lee spent June 28 developing an elaborate plan to pursue the still-retreating Army of the Potomac.

  McClellan had concentrated his army at Savage’s Station on the Richmond and York River Railroad, which consisted of a house and outbuildings that had already been turned into a supply depot and military hospital complex for the Union army. On June 29, Jackson’s army, after rebuilding a key bridge, was to march south and link up with another segment of the Army of Northern Virginia to strike a massive blow against Federal forces at Savage’s Station. Lee hoped for a chance to decimate the entire Army of the Potomac at a site that appeared ideal. But a combination of slow bridge building, confusing orders, and possible lethargy meant that Jackson never arrived at the chosen battlefield before the fighting ended.

  Only a portion of Lee’s army went into battle at Savage’s Station, greatly outnumbered by Federal defenders, but they did manage a stalemate on the field. They were unable to stop the continued retreat of McClellan’s forces, but each day saw the Federals leave Richmond farther behind. Lee was ready to pursue the next day and hoped to bring on a major engagement at a position of his own choosing.

  On the morning of June 30, Jackson and Lee met at dawn. Robert Stiles, a young artilleryman who had been waiting for a good look at Stonewall Jackson, spotted a lone horseman riding well in advance of half a dozen other mounted men. It was Jackson, having this time arrived early for a meeting with Lee. Stiles was unimpressed. “Jackson and the little sorrel stopped in the middle of the road,” Stiles wrote. “Horse and rider appeared worn down to the lowest level of flesh consistent with effective service.”

  A few seconds later, Stiles saw Lee and his “magnificent staff” appear. Now Stiles was full of admiration. Jackson and Little Sorrel were thin and dirty, he noted, while Lee and Traveller were flawless. “That morning every detail of the dress and equipment of himself and horse was absolute perfection,” Stiles said of Lee. The difference between Lee and Jackson, he thought, could not have been more striking.

  Some of Stiles’s description of the meeting between the two generals was probably misremembered or fabricated. The artilleryman described Jackson as drawing a triangle with his toe in the dust in front of Lee and the commanding general studying the primitive map. No triangular movement was planned or happened that day, and enough dust to draw upon would have been hard to find after a night of heavy rain. But the description of Little Sorrel’s condition sounds accurate.

  The horse went into the Seven Days plump and sturdy but probably got little to eat and much work over the first five days. More than 200,000 troops, plus thousands of horses and their wheeled vehicles, were squeezed into an area of less than a hundred square miles. Good grazing was now limited and the almost constant fighting, skirmishing, and marching had ensured that little cut forage had been shipped in. A horse can lose condition dramatically in a week with too little food and too much movement, which is most likely what happened to Little Sorrel.

  Lee’s plan for the day was to trap McClellan’s army at Glendale, where a crossroads formed a bottleneck to the Federal army as it hurried south to the safety of the James River. Lee hoped either to cut the Union army in two or destroy a big part of it.

  The Confederates did catch up with the rear of the Union column, but the Federals had time to set a strong defensive line near Glendale. Only part of the advancing Confederates arrived, not including Jackson, and the resulting battle was at best a draw. Both sides suffered heavy casualties at the Battle of Glendale, the fifth or sixth battle of the Seven Days, depending on how you count, but the Army of the Potomac was able to save most of the column and continue its retreat south. Just three miles away was a location they believed would be provide a perfect position to stand and fight.

  The next morning the Confederates discovered that McClellan’s army, but not McClellan himself, who was safely aboard a gunship on the James, had securely settled itself on Malvern Hill, a fifty-foot plateau ideally suited for artillery placement. July 1 saw a battle that one eyewitness called “closer to murder than war” and Little Sorrel was right in the middle of it.

  Malvern Hill is shown on the left of this contemporary drawing.

  Johnson and Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. 2

  Two miles to the south side of the plateau, the James River allowed Union gunboats to hide, ready to move into position to fire on any Confederates who broke through. Steep slopes on the east and west made assault unlikely there. Lee believed that the defenders could be broken with massed Confederate artillery from the north, and then exploited with infantr
y. But he underestimated the dominance of the Union position and was unable to mass his own artillery to overcome it.

  As Jackson led his infantry column toward Malvern Hill, they came under heavy artillery fire. After a quick deployment of his infantry, Jackson began directing the placement of artillery pieces. But Union shells blasted individual Confederate guns and gunners before they got their second shots off.

  Jackson and Little Sorrel survived several near misses at Malvern Hill, most of them leaving them typically unruffled. Early in the battle, as Jackson conferred with General Richard Ewell, an artillery shell whistled by, missing Little Sorrel’s head by inches. Jackson took no notice and the horse “kept on with its shambling gait,” according to Ewell’s aide Campbell Brown. Ewell noticed the close call, though, stopping his horse before they headed farther into artillery range. Jackson, Little Sorrel, and the others were covered with dust from the explosion of the shell on the ground in front of them.

  Shortly afterward John Gittings, a distant relative of Jackson’s from West Virginia, marched by with his unit. He watched Jackson direct the placement of an artillery battery that had already come under heavy fire. “He sat on his horse under this hurricane of canister and grape,” Gittings remembered years later. He described how the men of his column would keep looking back at the general and his horse, “as if for the last time.” But neither Stonewall Jackson nor his horse were finished quite yet.

  A few hours later Little Sorrel realized even before Jackson did that some chances may not be worth taking. At another meeting with Ewell, the two generals dismounted. While they conferred in the company of several aides, a fragment of a Union shell blew a hole in the head of a courier’s horse right next to them. The surviving horses shrieked and bolted, Little Sorrel for once joining in the equine alarm. Jackson held tightly to the reins, controlled the little horse, and calmly remounted. He directed the now perfectly composed Little Sorrel to a location farther to the rear.