Colonel Bentley took Paul and Abram to the corral where the day’s horse haul was being held. Paul spotted Little Sorrel immediately and, with a Union bridle provided by the colonel, brought him out of the corral. Abram claimed a large white mule named Old Kit, and, with the amused permission of Col. Bentley, chose a few more that may or may not have been the Cottage Home mules. The colonel sent a note of apology to Anna with Paul, who rode Little Sorrel home, followed by Abram and the mules. Bentley assigned three troopers to protect Cottage Home, and, the next day, returned Superior to Anna with further apologies.
Anna Jackson’s nephew Paul Barringer, who helped rescue Little Sorrel.
Tyler, Men of Mark in Virginia, 1906
This was not the only instance of the First Brigade returning the property of prominent civilians. In Lincolnton, Col. Palmer returned a trunk filled with valuables to Harriet Vance, wife of the governor of North Carolina. But the widow of Confederate general Leonidas Polk, killed the previous summer in the defense of Atlanta, was unfortunate enough to be caught up in a raid by Stoneman’s Second Brigade. A major from the Eleventh Kentucky Cavalry took the dead general’s dress sword and refused to return it to the widow.
The Morrison plantation survived the weeks of Stoneman’s Raid better than many other North Carolina farms, but the end of the raid and the end of the war ushered in a period of great hardship. Finances became increasingly strained in the years after the war, as they were at most plantations in the former Confederate states. The Morrison family found it impossible to farm the acreage themselves, so they offered much of it in sharecropping arrangements with former slaves, including at least one of their own, a man named Jake Morrison.
“We must try to live on what we get,” wrote the elderly Dr. Morrison to his sister Sarah three years after the war. The family, once enjoying the services of as many as sixty-six enslaved workers, was down to two paid servants, a woman and her young son.
In the summer of 1867, Anna moved to sell off some of the items she had inherited to raise much-needed cash. One of the things she decided she could part with was the bay stallion Superior. Little Sorrel’s sale was never considered, for both emotional and practical reasons.
“A charming little horse,” one visitor called him. Not only was he Jackson’s favorite, he was a favorite around the farm for his usefulness and personality. His habit of undoing the latches of his own and other horses’ stall doors provided entertainment, as did his ability to topple the top rail of a fence to make the barrier low enough to jump. The freed horses could always be found in the nearest well-grown pasture, so the humans were able to laugh at Little Sorrel’s antics.
Anna originally planned to send Superior to Jackson supporters in Baltimore. The city’s postwar economy was thriving and she was told that they would get a good price for him there. In June, a Jackson admirer in Macon, Georgia, made a generous offer and Little Sorrel’s partner of four and a half years was gone. But the mules and possibly a pony or two remained and his human companions were always ready to pay him attention.
He became a regular mount for Anna’s brother Robert H. Morrison Jr., a physician who needed comfortable and trustworthy transportation for trips to see patients. On the rare occasions that the elder Robert Morrison left the property, Little Sorrel transported him, either under saddle or harness. He became a familiar and well-loved figure in Lincoln County.
An elderly Little Sorrel enjoyed a place of honor in Anna Jackson’s biography of her husband.
Arnold, Early Life and Letters of Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, “Stonewall” Jackson
A story made the rounds that the Morrisons had once sent a servant on an errand to the Brevard railroad station aboard Little Sorrel. The trouble began when the chore was completed. “The old horse started home at a leisurely pace,” one newspaper article reported. Then, according to the article, the servant “began beating him unmercifully.” This was not going to happen to the dearly loved horse of a revered Confederate general. A posse of citizens pursued the offender. “If they had succeeded in overtaking him,” the article continued, “his life would probably have paid the forfeit.” The story is suspect, since Brevard is at least one hundred miles from Cottage Home, a long way to send a servant on an elderly horse, but the sentiment was true. Little Sorrel was a hero of the Confederacy and he was going to be treated as such.
Anna Jackson’s family tried several times to raise money by selling pictures of the famous old horse.
“Old Fancy” Civil War Collection, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University
The Morrisons tried to raise money for the upkeep of the farm by selling souvenir photographs of Little Sorrel, but Anna was unable to afford to keep him. In 1883 she made a difficult decision. Little Sorrel was now thirty-three-years-old, a very advanced age for a horse in the late nineteenth century. He was still healthy and alert, but he had trouble keeping on weight and was stiff in the joints. He was no longer capable of carrying Dr. Morrison on long trips, and Anna felt she couldn’t afford to keep a horse if he had no other use. She decided to offer him to the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia, which had the stabling, grazing, and human help required to assure him comfort in his final few years.
On August 21 the little red horse was taken to Charlotte, where John E. Brown, a veteran of the Fiftieth North Carolina infantry, prepared him for shipment. Col. Brown, who operated a large stable in Charlotte, had been on the field with Jackson at Malvern Hill.
The next day Little Sorrel was led aboard a special car of the Richmond and Danville Railroad. He traveled as far as Lynchburg by train, then was transported to Lexington, where a hero’s welcome awaited him. Only about two thousand eight hundred people lived in Lexington the year of Little Sorrel’s arrival, but it was a place of pilgrimage. Not only was Jackson buried there, so were Robert E. Lee and his famous gray horse Traveller. Visitors from North and South alike came to see the graves and were soon surprised and pleased to discover that a living relic of the war also resided in Lexington.
In 1884 Little Sorrel was back in Virginia for the first time in nineteen years to take up residence at Virginia Military Institute.
1884 Postcard
Little Sorrel had been losing hairs from his mane and tail since he became famous in 1862, but the pillaging escalated during his time at VMI. Although cadets were detailed to protect him, distinguished visitors managed to purloin sizeable sections of hair. A few weeks after Little Sorrel’s arrival at VMI, Charles Thurman, son of a prominent Lynchburg family, arrived from Nashville with an appointment in hand as inspector-general of Tennessee and a state commission as a brigadier general.
General Thurman returned to Nashville with “a large band of hair cut from the mane of the old sorrel horse which General Stonewall Jackson rode during the war,” according to a Nashville newspaper. He presented the mane hair to the Tennessee Historical Society, undoubtedly pleased to know that most Little Sorrel hair exhibits included a much smaller supply of rusty red tail hairs.
In late October, just three months after his arrival, Little Sorrel was taken to the Shenandoah Valley Agricultural Fair in Winchester, where he had seen so much action during the war. A proud corps of cadets accompanied him. The horse lost more hair during this expedition, in spite of strenuous efforts to protect him. But fairgoers were pleased to see him look so well. “Although thin,” the Winchester News reported, “he is looking quite well.” Another newspaper described him as “a handsome sorrel of good form.”
Little Sorrel found that there was pleasure to be had in a life full of new people, new activities, and—above all—new sounds. He was put out to graze on the parade ground and soon discovered that its appeal lay in more than its fine grass.
“When the cadets, in practice, began firing rifle or cannon,” post surgeon R. B. James told Confederate Veteran maga
zine, “Old Sorrel would come running onto the parade ground, sniffing the air and snorting loudly, with head and tail up.”
His health was so good that fourteen months after his arrival at VMI he was strong enough to take a trip by railroad into Maryland, following nearly the same route that he had twenty-two years earlier when the Army of Northern Virginia had invaded the North for the first time. In 1862 Little Sorrel trailed somewhere behind the marching column. In 1884 he enjoyed a special railroad car and a greeting befitting a returning hero.
He was the guest of honor at one of the most important agricultural events in the country, the Great Hagerstown Fair. He traveled at the request of Hagerstown resident Henry Kyd Douglas, who had retained the great fondness for the horse that he had developed when he served as an aide to Stonewall Jackson.
The fair was enormously popular in Maryland, southern Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia, and four different rail lines brought thousands of visitors for the two-week event. Horses were particularly popular—rivaled only by the thousands of poultry shown—and the fair featured in-hand showings of draft horses, riding horses, and breeding stock. The harness races were especially well attended, and after the final race of the day on October 20, Little Sorrel’s appearance was announced.
The huge crowd roared as the old horse, led by ten-year-old Johnny Beckenbaugh on a Shetland pony, paced his way past the grandstand. By this point in his life he was well used to crowds of admirers, but he seemed particularly alert this day. The trotting races may have awakened some distant memory, a recollection even older than combat. But when the band struck up “Dixie,” there was no doubt what he was remembering. “The old sorrel threw his venerable head in the air,” the Hagerstown News reported, “and pranced over the track with much of his old time fire.” The reporter was unaware that there was little fire, even in the old times. What the fairgoers saw that day was an animal that enjoyed his life but still remembered his past.
Life became a little more difficult over the next few months. The visit to Hagerstown was so successful that the Institute’s leadership decided to ship the horse to New Orleans to have him appear in a paid exhibit at the 1885 New Orleans World’s Fair, officially named the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition.
What followed was an unseemly squabble between VMI and Anna Jackson over who would have the honor of exhibiting the old horse and who would profit from the tickets. In the end, Mrs. Jackson won, and her choice for traveling companion was Major Andrew R. Venable, who had seen action as an artillery officer in several of Jackson’s battles but was better known as an aide to J. E. B. Stuart.
Venable and Little Sorrel were in place in New Orleans by late February 1885 after a tour that stopped at several Southern cities. Although the tour was criticized as being too stressful for a thirty-five-year-old horse, he arrived in New Orleans without incident. “He is in good condition,” the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported on February 25. “He has eyes as bright as a 3-year-old’s although he doesn’t appear to have ever been a stylish animal.”
He looked so well and alert that Major Venable was forced to tell the newspaper a few weeks later that this was truly Stonewall Jackson’s horse and he really was thirty-five years old. Doubters had appeared, questioning that a horse of that age could have survived a trip of hundreds of miles and the attentions of thousands of spectators.
He was a popular exhibit, especially after the beginning of April when he began to shed. Many visitors were treated to a lock of his hair to keep as a souvenir, some of which survive in public and private collections. While he was in New Orleans, possession of the famous old horse changed. According to Anna’s wishes, the profits from the twenty-five-cent fee to look at him were to go to a new rest home for poor and disabled Confederate veterans that was recently opened in Richmond.
Little Sorrel left New Orleans on May 1 and began another tour of Southern cities on his way to his new home. He was hauled through the South in a special four-compartment car, with two sections for two human companions, one for hay, feed, and water, and one special padded compartment for the old horse himself.
“Old men fell upon its neck and wept like children,” reported the Cincinnati Enquirer of his stop in Knoxville, Tennessee. Other cities saw similar displays as Little Sorrel took part in what amounted to a railroad procession to his new destination. Once there, he was welcomed by men who had seen him at war and others who had only heard about him.
The twenty years after the war had been difficult for most residents of the old Confederacy, but they were particularly hard on the older and disabled veterans of the war. By the early 1880s, destitute soldiers numbered many thousands around the South and probably a thousand or more in Virginia, whose economy had finally begun to improve.
In 1884 better-off former Confederates raised $14,000 to buy a thirty-six-acre tract of lightly wooded land and an old house in the western part of Richmond. More money poured in to build cottages for Confederate veterans with no way to support themselves, as well as a chapel, a hospital, and other outbuildings. The Robert E. Lee Camp of the Confederate Soldiers’ Home was occupied over its more than half-century life by hundreds of elderly and disabled veterans and, for seven months, by one old horse.
The home opened its doors to its first veterans in January 1885, and Little Sorrel—usually called Old Sorrel at this point—arrived from New Orleans in August. At thirty-five he was, in terms of relative age, by far the oldest resident. The life expectancy of a full-sized horse today is twenty-five to thirty years, several years more than it was in the nineteenth century, when twenty was a good long life. Even today, a thirty-five-year-old horse is the equivalent of a nearly hundred-year-old human. In 1885 Little Sorrel was a centenarian by anybody’s standards. Hardly anybody at the soldiers’ home had seen or even heard talk of a horse so old.
There were plenty of eager hands to groom him, feed him, caress him, and talk to him about the war that had ended more than twenty years earlier. Some of the veterans had actually seen him in wartime, not in his youth exactly because he was no longer young when John Harman took him off the livestock car in Harpers Ferry. They happily told the others about their memories of Little Sorrel and his master.
The trip to New Orleans may have been harder on the old horse than anyone thought, or perhaps the years were finally too many. Little Sorrel began his final decline a few months after his arrival at the soldiers’ home. When word spread around the country that he was nearing his end, a young woman from Hillsboro, North Carolina, sent him a gift for the holidays. “This apple is for Old Sorrel,” Anna Cameron wrote on a card attached to an enormous apple that arrived by express shipment in late December. Others used stronger language.
“Take off your hats, boys. Bow your heads. Old Sorrel is dying,” said the Times-Picayne (New Orleans). “He is only a brute, true, but he is a marked figure in a grand historical pageant. The Great Commander is fast closing up the column, and ere long even the rear guard will have passed over the river to rest under the shade of the trees.” The writer used the reputed last words of Stonewall Jackson, who died never dreaming that his little red horse would outlive him by a full twenty-three years.
By the first weeks of 1886, just after the old soldiers helped him celebrate his thirty-sixth birthday, Little Sorrel reached the point where he could no longer get up on his own. He could lie down, as most horses like to do for an hour or two a day, but his front legs were too weak for him to rise independently.
The soldiers fashioned a block-and-tackle system with bands around his belly to help hoist him up, but the contraption broke, severely injuring the old horse. During the second week in March, Virginia governor Fitzhugh Lee, who had played a role in the success of the flank march at Chancellorsville, paid a visit to the dying horse. Lee caressed his mane and tail, acquiring a few hairs as so many others had done. On March 16, 1886, at six o’clock in the morning, Little Sorrel died at the
Confederate Soldiers’ Home. The flag outside the home was immediately lowered to half-staff.
Plans had been made even before the old horse left North Carolina in 1883 for his hide to be mounted and displayed to maintain the thread that connected Americans—Southerners mostly but Northerners too—to one of the Civil War’s greatest heroes. There was no delay in making arrangements for his body.
The famous taxidermist Frederic Webster had been notified as soon as Little Sorrel was injured, and immediately had the horse’s remains transported to his studio in Washington, D.C. Upon completion, the mount, with head up as if he were focusing on the sight of troops marching and the sound of cannons, was returned to the soldiers’ home, where it remained for more than fifty years.
When the last resident died in 1941, the property was taken over by the State of Virginia and Little Sorrel took a final trip, back to VMI. He remains on display today in the museum in Jackson Hall, named, appropriately, for the man he carried to glory, a glory that was shared by both of them.
Two and a half years earlier, Dr. R. B. James had marveled at how much life remained in Little Sorrel so many years after the vast majority of horses that participated in the war were gone. “Game to the end,” said Dr. James of the little red horse. His other description of Little Sorrel was most accurate. “A glorious warrior,” Dr. James said.
Chapter 13
The Legend
Little Sorrel began to find his place in history within minutes of his death, as Stonewall Jackson himself had done nearly a quarter century before. But Jackson died early, at only thirty-nine, so he was to remain forever young in memory. Little Sorrel lived to an extraordinary age, and all but one of the known photographs of him were taken when he was elderly. That, combined with the inevitably aged-looking mount created by Frederic Webster, ensured that stories of a homely little warhorse would be given credence forever.
Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel Page 21