Lucy's Bones, Sacred Stones, & Einstein's Brain

by Harvey Rachlin

  Having been Stonewall’s mount in his numerous campaigns, Little Sorrel was certainly no novice on the battlefield. But the shooting so disoriented him that he ran, driving Stonewall straight into a branch. Blood poured down Jackson’s head, and although he was weak, he managed to hold on to Little Sorrel.

  Captain R. E. Wilbourne, a signal officer on Jackson’s staff who was riding in with him, grabbed hold of the reins, stopped Little Sorrel, and took the general down. Soon a group of soldiers came to the scene and examined Jackson’s wounds. The general had taken one bullet in the right hand and one each in the left wrist and shoulder. With a penknife a soldier cut open Jackson’s black, bone-buttoned, India-rubber raincoat and uniform, and then the men took him away.

  Surgeon Hunter McGuire amputated Jackson’s left arm, which soldiers buried at the Chancellorsville battlefield (the spot was later marked), but little else could be done to save the war hero. On May 10, eight days after he was shot, the thirty-nine-year-old Confederate general died of respiratory complications, having contracted pneumonia. Jackson’s death came to be regarded by some as a turning point of the war, what with the Union and Confederate armies fighting the crucial battle at Gettysburg just two months later. Some historians believe that if the Confederacy had the superb military leadership of Jackson at Gettysburg, it might have fared better and the war might have turned out differently.

  After Stonewall was taken down from his mount, Little Sorrel ran off and happened into a Union camp. Jackson’s charger was widely recognizable, but luckily for him, no one in this particular camp recognized him. He was later recaptured by Confederate cavalry general Jeb Stuart.

  After Jackson’s death, his thirty-two-year-old widow, Anna, took Little Sorrel to North Carolina, where she went back to live with her father, a minister. Anna later displayed the horse around the country. But by the 1880s this venture no longer produced enough income to feed and maintain the horse, and she gave him to the Virginia Military Institute, where Stonewall had taught before the war. A short time later a dispute developed between Anna Jackson and VMI over the distribution of revenue from exhibiting Little Sorrel at the 1885 New Orleans World’s Fair—the school wanted to use it to erect a Jackson monument, and she wanted it to go to a veterans’ group and others she selected. The Confederate veterans entered into the dispute by not allowing Little Sorrel to be advertised in any of their publications, feeling that it was inappropriate to use the old charger to raise funds for any cause. As a result the widow directed the horse to be sent to the new Confederate Soldiers’ Home near Richmond.

  Little Sorrel was a popular attraction at the home—children especially loved to come see him—and he was devotedly cared for by Civil War veterans who marched alongside him, for by this time he was old and feeble. The veterans looked upon Little Sorrel with great affection, considering the charger upon whom Stonewall Jackson rode in many battles a war veteran just like themselves. Many visitors came in his last days, when he couldn’t rise without the veterans using a hoist and girdle to lift him onto his legs, but the end was surely imminent when one day the girdle slipped forward and Little Sorrel’s vertebral column was broken. The veterans, particularly Tom O’Connell, stayed close by Jackson’s old charger in his last days to help comfort him.

  At 6:00 A.M. on March 16, 1886, Little Sorrel died at the Confederate Soldiers’ Home. There was some discrepancy as to his age; many put it at thirty-six, but according to a Huntington, West Virginia, newspaper obituary, he was thirty-two. His date of birth was not known, and his age was estimated based on the length and wear of his teeth.

  Little Sorrel, one of many horses seized by Stonewall Jackson's troops when they raided a railway train carrying provisions for Union cavalry soldiers, was presented to the general by his chief of transportation, Major John Harmon. Jackson came to favor the horse for its easygoing temperament and made it his charger of choice in battle.

  Arrangements had been made for Little Sorrel to be mounted after his death. It was prestigious for taxidermists to prepare and mount the skins of famous animals, and in a letter dated July 15, 1939, Frederick S. Webster wrote about how he came to be the horse’s immortalizer:

  It was by the sweat of my brow—literally—and the kindly commission from a well known southern gentleman, Colonel E. V. Randolph of Richmond, Va. He came to my studio on Pennsylvania Ave., Washington, D.C., when the horse was still living and made all arrangements for me to go to Richmond when the horse should surrender. A telegram was to advise me of the event. There were no telephones at that time—in 1886, if memory serves me correctly. Shortly thereafter, the expected event happened, and I arrived in Richmond the night before the thirty-six year old champion of years, died.

  Frederick Webster was a prominent taxidermist of the time. In the 1870s he had worked for Professor Henry A. Ward’s Natural Science Establishment, a museum supply and services outfit based in Rochester, New York. (The skull and leg bones of the famous horses of Robert E. Lee and General Philip Henry Sheridan, Traveller and Winchester, were mounted there.) One of Ward’s staff, Carl Ethan Akeley, had recently developed a taxidermic procedure that gave a more lifelike appearance to mounted animals.

  Akeley’s procedure involved taking precise measurements of the specimen and then using them to make a meticulous clay model of the animal. This model was then used to make a plaster of Paris mold over which the animal’s tanned skin would be fitted. With this technique not only was a realistic appearance achieved, but the mount had a long life. Previously, horsehides were mounted on wood, which swelled and shrank and tore the hide.

  By May 1886, two months after Little Sorrel died, Webster had the animal’s skin immersed in a tanning bath. During this time, he made the mannequin. After the hide was properly conditioned, he cut excess skin from the underside of it to a precise thinness that increased its pliability, then wrapped it around the framework. Because souvenir hunters had removed virtually all of Little Sorrel’s tail, Webster had to graft other horses’ hairs onto the tail.

  As partial payment for his taxidermy work, Webster was given the bones of Little Sorrel. Later he expressed resentment at those who criticized him for not placing the bones in the mounted skin, saying that although it was the practice of taxidermists at the time to use the bones with the ligament when mounting a large animal, such use caused the skin to deteriorate. He noted that it took a great deal of time to mount the horse as he did—it was the first time it was done—but he did this because of the horse’s historical importance. “I resent with much feeling,” Webster wrote, “the lack of appreciation of my efforts to preserve as much of Old Sorrel as was possible, for posterity to see the faithful animal of Civil War days, and the laudable desire to do so without any reward but that of decent respect for unsolicited effort to perpetuate as long as possible, what might prove to tell a dramatic story of a conflict between brother and brother.”

  Webster finished his taxidermy in time for him to display the hide in his Washington studio during a Grand Army Veterans’ convention. Many veterans stopped by his studio and recounted, as Webster noted, “many soul-stirring incidents of their fighting days, facing Old Sorrel.”

  After it was mounted, the hide of Little Sorrel was sent to the Confederate Soldiers’ Home, also called the Robert E. Lee Camp, where it was exhibited until after World War II, when the home shut down. For much of the time that Little Sorrel’s hide was on display in Richmond, his articulated skeleton was exhibited in Pittsburgh at the Carnegie Museum. Webster, a member of Carnegie’s staff, donated it to the museum in 1903.

  In April 1949 Little Sorrel’s hide went to another of the horse’s old real-life homes, the Virginia Military Institute. Here it was reunited four months later, in August, with Little Sorrel’s bones, which the Carnegie Museum loaned to VMI. Carnegie later presented the bones to VMI as a gift.

  Little Sorrel’s articulated bones were put on display in the biology building at VMI, while his hide was on exhibit in the school museum. When the
biology department moved to a new building in 1989 and it wasn’t feasible to display the skeleton in the new location, school officials decided to retire the bones. (Officials are waiting for the proper occasion to bury the bones on the parade ground of the campus.)

  Little Sorrel is a source of pride and inspiration to the students and faculty of VMI. Because he was both a witness to the Civil War and a participant in it, his remains are a dramatic and touching reminder of the school and region’s heritage, of a most crucial conflict in U.S. history. All on campus know Little Sorrel was the steed of one of the school’s most famous, if not most militarily gifted, professors. Each year some fifty thousand visitors from around the world come to see the hide of the fighting horse that Stonewall Jackson rode the fateful night he was shot. Little Sorrel stands in a full-scale diorama of a battlefield setting.

  There’s an interesting story about the India-rubber raincoat Stonewall was wearing the night he was shot. The raincoat was left behind, and a vagrant picked it up and exchanged it for a meal with the foreman of an estate on the battlefield. The foreman didn’t believe the vagrant’s claim that it could be the general’s raincoat, but perhaps took pity on him by agreeing to the exchange.

  The raincoat was all cut up and had a bullet hole in it, but the foreman’s wife mended it, and he occasionally wore it around the farm. A young ranger later saw the raincoat and noticed Jackson’s name written in ink on the inside of the yoke, just below the neck. He offered a handsome sum for the raincoat, and the foreman, figuring he could buy a whole team of horses for what he’d get, agreed to let him have it.

  At the end of 1867 the ranger’s father sent the coat to Robert E. Lee, who then shipped it to Mrs. Jackson. It upset her to see the raincoat and remember how her husband died, so when a Scotsman came along and begged her to let him show off the coat in an American Civil War museum he’d created in Scotland, she gave it to him. Later she changed her mind and wanted the raincoat back. The Scot sympathized with Mrs. Jackson’s wish for this last battlefield relic of the general and sent it off to her from Scotland.

  The raincoat passed to Anna Jackson’s grandchild, who later gave it to the same institution where the hide of Little Sorrel resides today.

  LOCATION: Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia.

  ROBERT BROWNING’S

  RELIQUARY

  DATE: Circa 1889.

  WHAT IT IS: A container that had once belonged to the English poet Robert Browning, containing strands of hair of John Milton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE: The reliquary is scallop shaped and made of silver. Between the covers is a movable panel separating the two locks of hair. The inside covers bear engraved inscriptions, and the reliquary is hinged on its left side. On one side of the panel are a few strands of Milton’s light brown hair, held by a knotted black cord. On the other panel is Browning’s lock, which is more plentiful and dark brown. Attached to the handle of the reliquary is a silk embroidered ribbon.

  For many years my offerings must be hush’d;

  When I do speak, I’ll think upon this hour,

  Because I feel my forehead hot and flush’d,

  Even at the simplest vassal of thy power,—

  A lock of thy bright hair,—

  Sudden it came,

  And I was startled, when I caught thy name

  Coupled so unaware;

  Yet, at the moment, temperate was my blood.

  I thought I had beheld it from the flood.

  —John Keats, “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair’

  It would seem that the writer of Paradise Lost and other great poems left a legacy to civilization other than his literature: his hair. His locks served as inspiration for later poets of England, those of the age of romanticism, whose ranks included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Charles Lamb. Milton’s hair, in fact, was immortalized by the romantic poets. On January 21, 1818, Keats wrote the poem “On Seeing a Lock of Milton’s Hair,” and Leigh Hunt, another British poet of the romantic period, composed three sonnets after seeing it.

  Milton’s hair itself has a long and distinguished list of owners. Its proprietors included poet and essayist Joseph Addison (1672-1719), lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), John Hoole (1727-1803, who translated Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and other acclaimed Renaissance poems), and James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859).

  That Milton’s hair has endured for posterity is not unusual. The practice of cutting off locks of one’s hair and giving them to others was common in centuries past. In fact, before the age of photography, it was the customary way for people to have a remembrance of friends or loved ones during separations. Many people could not afford to have their portrait painted even in miniature to pass around to their friends or lovers; a lock of hair was not only intimate but readily available and free.

  The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton.

  The use of hair was largely replaced in the nineteenth century by autographs. There would be albums in people’s homes for visitors to sign. If the visitors happened to be from literary circles, they might write little poems. A number of these manuscript albums exist today with lines by great poets such as Wordsworth, as well as unknown people of the past. Those who didn’t have literary friends would often want a piece of writing in the hand of these people. Individuals would send letters to famous writers asking for a signature or were even cunning and brazen enough to ask some inane question to get a full, handwritten response. (In earlier days it was considered socially improper to write a stranger or for one to acknowledge a letter from a stranger.) This practice was parodied in Muriel Spark’s novel The Girls of Slender Means. One of the characters writes fawning letters to famous authors so she may sell the autographed letters sent in response.

  Making life and death masks to have some keepsake of a person (or for study or some other purpose) was another common practice of the nineteenth century and earlier. Plaster casts of the faces of many famous people exist today, including those of Keats, Washington, Lincoln, and Napoleon. Indeed, there are several death masks of Napoleon in private collections and museums, the casts having been made at Saint Helena and afterward in Europe.

  Locks of hair were cut off not only during a person’s lifetime but also at death. There was even a fad in the past for people to make wreaths of hair of the deceased. Although these wreaths were actually quite awful looking, they were cherished by their owners. Napoleon himself requested that on his death his hair be preserved and made into bracelets for his wife, mother, son, and relatives.

  Hair collecting by men of the past sometimes went beyond the bounds of decency. For example, a watch fob owned by Charles II, the king of England from 1660 to 1685, was reputedly made out of the pubic hairs of his mistresses.

  The cutting off and giving away of hair was popular in the United States as well as in Europe. At the Library Company of Philadelphia, for instance, is a lock of George Washington’s hair cut off by his barber, Martin Pierie, in 1781. It was presented to the library in 1829 by a descendant of Pierie, in a frame made from a piece of Washington’s house at Mount Vernon, a piece of the chestnut tree that Washington planted at Mount Vernon, part of a tree that Lafayette planted, a piece of Independence Hall, a piece of Carpenter’s Hall, part of General Anthony Wayne’s house, parts of the frigates Constitution and Alliance, and part of the pew where Washington worshiped at Christ’s Church.

  The silver, shell-shaped reliquary that contains Milton’s and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s hair also has an interesting provenance, having once been owned by Pope Pius V, the sixteenth-century pontiff who alienated much of Europe. It was given to Robert Browning by Katharine de Kay Bronson, a wealthy American who had moved to Italy. Exactly when Bronson gave the reliquary to Browning is not known, but it likely would have been sometime during the period of their friendship, which began in 1881 and ended when the poet died eight years later. Robert pro
bably could not have imagined that one day the reliquary would be a shrine of sorts to his great love, Elizabeth Barrett Moulton-Barrett.

  It was through their poetry that Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, two well-known poets in England at the time, met. A correspondence commenced in early 1845 after Robert read Elizabeth’s flattering admiration for him in “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” one of the poems in her fifth book, Poems, published the previous autumn. Reading the poem, Robert found himself among the modern poets Geraldine’s lover read to her:

  . . . at times a modern volume,—Wordsworth’s solemn-thoughted idyl, Howitt’s ballad-dew, or Tennyson’s enchanted reverie,—Or from Browning some “Pomegrant,” which, if cut deep down the middle, Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity!—

  Robert wrote to Elizabeth, proclaiming a love for her verses—and for her as well. Elizabeth responded immediately—her letter is dated January 11, the day after Robert’s letter was postmarked—and in gratitude to Browning for his gushing praise of her poetry, wrote, “Such a letter from such a hand! Sympathy is dear—very dear to me; but the sympathy of a poet, and of such a poet, is the quintessence of sympathy to me!” They met several months later, and in November a correspondence began in which Robert beseeched Elizabeth for a lock of her hair. “I will live and die with it,” Robert wrote in a letter postmarked the 23rd, “and with the memory of you. If you give me what I beg . . . say next Tuesday . . . when I leave you, I will not speak a word: . . . If you do not, I will not think you unjust.”

  The next day Elizabeth wrote back, “I never gave away what you ask me to give you, to a human being, except my nearest relatives & once or twice or thrice to female friends . . .”

  On November 25, Robert met Elizabeth at her family residence at 50 Wimpole Street, where she lived. It was their thirty-first meeting and Elizabeth apparently said something that made Robert think she wanted a lock of his hair, for three days later, on November 28, he sent her one, writing “Take it, dearest,—what I am forced to think you mean—and take no more with it—for I gave all to give long ago. I am all yours—and now, mine,—give me mine to be happy with.”