Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel

by Sharon B. Smith

  Other horses had worse luck. John Casler of the Thirty-Third Virginia Infantry was among the soldiers assigned to the wagons and caissons to help them around turns and keep them from going off the road. He was also involved in a mostly losing effort to keep the horses and vehicles upright. “The horses were smooth shod,” Casler wrote in his memoirs, “and in going up a little hill I have seen one horse in each team down nearly all the time. As soon as one would get up, another would be down, and sometimes all four at once.”

  Eventually the teamsters figured that unshod horses would fare better than smooth-shod ones. So soldiers and farriers pulled shoes from many of them, preventing most of the little snowballs and allowing for some suction with each footfall. The one hundred sixty supply wagons that had survived now did a little better at keeping up with the soldiers. After a cold and wet rest along the road south to Winchester, the column turned west toward Romney.

  The weather had warmed a little and the thick layer of ice changed to deep slush. The horses and soldiers found the traveling less slippery but only marginally more comfortable. By the time Jackson reached Romney on January 14, he discovered that the Federal garrison had escaped, providing the Confederate troops with a bloodless capture of the town. Bloodless didn’t mean absence of injury and death, though. Dozens of men had lost fingers and toes to frostbite and many more had fallen ill.

  The Federal troops had left so quickly that the Confederates were able to supply themselves with tents and food stores, so the soldiers weren’t quite as cold and hungry during the time they spent in the tiny town. But conditions didn’t improve much for the horses. Artillery officer William Pogue wrote in his memoirs of the wretched time spent in Romney. It was, he said, a period of particular misery for horses. “Horses tied to the hitching rope had to eat what little feed they got in the mud,” Pogue wrote. “No boxes or nosebags were to be had.” The horses, Pogue added, stood in mud so deep that they found it difficult to change their positions to make themselves comfortable.

  As the commanding general’s horse, Little Sorrel lived a little more comfortably than the others. Jim Lewis began to make his reputation as an outstanding forager for humans and horses during this expedition. Little Sorrel also began to make his reputation as a horse who could survive equally well on “a ton of hay or live on cobs,” as Jackson aide Henry Kyd Douglas said. Little Sorrel, according to Douglas, always looked the same, regardless of condition. In truth, Little Sorrel did lose weight at several points during the war, but he continued on with good appetite and good energy in spite of the shortages, never more severe than in the Romney expedition.

  Jackson was convinced that chasing the Federal occupying force out of Romney constituted a fine victory and briefly thought of continuing the expedition to push Federal forces farther away from the Shenandoah Valley. But the illness of so many soldiers and the loss of so many horses from the artillery and wagon trains made that a questionable move. Instead, he chose to leave his newly acquired troops in Romney and head back to Winchester with his own Stonewall Brigade.

  The new troops were dismayed at the prospect of being left behind in what they considered a dangerously exposed pigpen. Snow had turned back to rain shortly after the column’s arrival and the mud was like nothing the soldiers had ever seen. What’s more, Federal troops in considerable numbers were only about twenty miles away. But Jackson’s brigade was overjoyed as it marched out of Romney on January 23. The soldiers and officers left in Romney seethed with anger.

  William Pogue was thrilled to be leaving with Jackson for the forty-five-mile trip across the mountains to Winchester, which now seemed like a sophisticated metropolis rather than the town of less than five thousand residents that it was. Even a night spent in the open under a heavy snowfall failed to dim the excitement of being on the road back. The air was fresh and the surroundings clean, Pogue reported, and “the horses also ate and rested in some comfort.”

  Jackson himself decided to make the trip in one day. Although most of them rode big Thoroughbred-type horses, staff members struggled to keep up with the rapid pacing gait of Little Sorrel. Anna Jackson hadn’t expected to see her husband quite so soon, having heard stories of the troubles the column had faced on the expedition. After their early reunion, the couple settled comfortably into what turned out to be a quiet six weeks of winter quarters. Anna heard much of what had happened during the expedition from her husband. Among the topics was the performance of Little Sorrel.

  “In making the trip from Romney, he was more than ever charmed with Little Sorrel, whose powers of endurance proved quite remarkable,” Anna wrote years later. “After bearing him along with so much fleetness and comfort, he said the horse seemed almost as fresh and unwearied at the end of the journey as at the beginning.”

  She probably knew by this point that Jackson had intended Little Sorrel to be a gift for her. If she hadn’t figured it out before, she also now knew that she wasn’t going to get her gift, at least as long as her husband was at war. But troubles over the Romney expedition arose quickly and it appeared for a while that Jackson’s war might end before either of them expected, turning Little Sorrel into a lady’s mount after all.

  Some of the problems emerged among the soldiers of his own brigade, the lucky men who had set up winter quarters just outside Winchester. Jackson approved almost no furloughs, even though much of the brigade came from the Shenandoah Valley. The grumbling arising from the no-furlough rule plus complaints from sick soldiers who were told to return to the ranks as soon as they were mobile contributed to tension in the town. If it bothered Jackson, he said nothing.

  But the complaints coming from Romney could be heard throughout Virginia and even Jackson couldn’t miss them. By the end of January, the situation in the little town had deteriorated well beyond the terrible conditions of mid-month. Streets were now filthy as well as muddy. The captured Federal food supplies had rotted and rats had converged on the storage sites. Union troops remained within a short march, although they had shown no signs of trying to retake the town.

  On January 31, Jackson received a telegram from Secretary of War Judah Benjamin in Richmond ordering him to recall the Romney troops to Winchester. Jackson was stunned by the order, which he knew must have come from Confederate President Jefferson Davis. What he didn’t know yet was that officers and even some enlisted men in Romney had been bombarding Richmond with letters complaining that they had been arbitrarily assigned to a place that was unhealthy and impossible to defend.

  Jackson was convinced it was neither. If Romney remained unhealthy, he believed, it was the result of the officers there failing to enforce sanitary standards. Defense, he thought, was no more difficult than at any other place in western Virginia where loyalties were decidedly mixed.

  The fact that officers under his command had gone around him to government leaders was the most infuriating aspect of the whole incident. Jackson immediately sent word to Benjamin that he had sent the recall notice to Romney as ordered and that he would now resign his commission and return to teaching at the Virginia Military Institute. But Jackson had friends in high places as well, and Little Sorrel was saved from a career as a lady’s horse, at least for a while.

  Two friends, Virginia governor John Letcher and former U.S. congressman and newly elected Confederate congressman Alexander Boteler, swung into action immediately. They confronted both Judah Benjamin and Jefferson Davis and stirred up public opinion against Jackson’s departure from command. Jackson was persuaded to withdraw the resignation and Little Sorrel remained a commanding general’s favorite mount.

  Wartime Virginia governor John Letcher was an important ally for Jackson.

  Library of Congress

  But the Confederates left Romney anyway, giving up the fruits of the miserable winter campaign, and Federal forces soon retook the town. Union General Nathaniel Banks gained further ground. By the end of February, his troops were withi
n twenty miles of Winchester. The Romney brigades had been dispersed rather than returned to Jackson’s control, and the Valley Army had been so weakened that army engineers told him he might not be able to hold Winchester either. He asked Richmond for more troops but was refused.

  On March 7, Banks and his soldiers had reached a point just five miles from Winchester. The Union general was convinced that Jackson had many more men than he actually did, a common failing in the Union high command during the early years of the war, and was slow to advance farther. But even the aggressive Stonewall Jackson had to face reality. Winchester, the first city of his Shenandoah Valley campaign, would have to be abandoned.

  Chapter 6

  Into the Valley

  Stonewall Jackson left Winchester shrouded by a cloud of bitterness. He’d thought about taking the war to Banks in a bold night attack, but the reality of weather, timing, and the size of his little army thwarted him. To protect his army he opted instead for retreat. It was a painful decision.

  Jackson chose Little Sorrel on the night of March 11, 1862, since the little red horse had become his clear preference during the difficult winter. Jedediah Hotchkiss, mapmaker and important chronicler of Jackson, wasn’t present on March 11, but he thought it was important enough to mention the horse as Jackson’s mount that night in his chapter in Confederate Military History, published nearly forty years later.

  It made perfect sense for Stonewall Jackson to ride his best horse on what he felt was the worst day of his war. He assumed that he faced many days on the road, possibly including one or more battles against an enemy with far superior numbers. There was no question that Little Sorrel was ideally suited for long miles under saddle and Jackson suspected by now that he was equally ideally suited for battle.

  What’s more, his quiet good nature provided an antidote to a sour mood and his easy, rocking chair gait didn’t get in the way of a rider’s complex thinking. In the best of times, Stonewall Jackson kept his own counsel. Now, after an atypical backward step in the face of terrible odds, an easy amble was the perfect companion for serious thought.

  The first leg of the trip was brief. A few miles out of town Jackson found a suitable fence corner, dismounted, and went to sleep on the ground for a couple of hours with his favorite horse stretched out right next to him. He was more cheerful in the morning as he followed and then led his marching army southwest, deep into the Shenandoah Valley. By local tradition, Jackson’s forces were moving up the Shenandoah Valley as they headed southwest, since the elevation of the landscape increases north to south.

  Much of the time he walked as his soldiers did, leading Little Sorrel by the reins. Nobody is quite sure why he completed some of the dozen miles of that first full day’s journey on foot. His horse hadn’t been heavily used for a few months, so there was no need to rest him. As usual, Jackson felt no need to explain his actions.

  The pace was slow but steady. Jackson was determined to think of his movement south not as a retreat but rather as a tactical repositioning. By the evening of March 13, he and his army of forty-five hundred had reached Strasburg, where they stayed two days. Union troops were following at an even slower rate, eventually stopping in Strasburg themselves on their slow-speed chase. But by then Jackson was long gone.

  He had led his troops farther south to Woodstock and finally stopped them in the Mount Jackson area, more than forty miles from Winchester. Little Sorrel probably carried Jackson for most, if not all, of these miles.

  The time was tense for Jackson but easy for his horse. The weather remained cold and damp with occasional snow showers, so spring grass wasn’t yet up and the occasional grazing the horses managed provided little nutrition. But Mount Jackson was a reasonable distance by good road from a Confederate supply base at Staunton, especially convenient since Staunton was Quartermaster John Harman’s hometown. The agricultural bounty of the rich Shenandoah Valley provided food for soldiers and sufficient cut hay and grain for horses.

  But Little Sorrel wasn’t idle. He carried Jackson on daily inspections into Camp Buchanan, as the troops named their campsite. He used the time to check on their training and organization and, particularly, to see how newly arrived militia members were settling into their regiments. Governor John Letcher had called up these militiamen just before the Confederates abandoned Winchester, and they now joined in the defense of the Shenandoah Valley.

  One of those militia members was Jedediah Hotchkiss, the former schoolmaster and self-taught topographer whom Jackson immediately seized upon as a valuable addition to his engineering staff. Today, more than a century and a half later, the maps Hotchkiss drew at Jackson’s request remain works of art and history, and they would form a vital link in the coming Confederate campaign in the Shenandoah Valley. But the personal journals Hotchkiss kept during his time with Jackson, as well as his assiduous research after the war, are even more important for historians as they try to understand Stonewall Jackson and figure out what happened to his favorite horse.

  Some militia members, although not Hotchkiss, saw almost immediate action. On March 21, Jackson learned that Union General James Shields, commander of the six-thousand-man detachment that had remained in Strasburg, was preparing to leave and rejoin Banks near Winchester. Since Jackson’s standing order was to force as many Union troops as possible to remain in the valley, he became convinced that Banks had been ordered east to join in a possible Union assault on the Confederate capital of Richmond.

  That meant immediate action for Jackson and his troops. He intended to turn around and reach Shields quickly, before the Union general had a chance to join Banks and the rest of the Union soldiers. The next two days saw the first forced march of Jackson’s little army in the Shenandoah Valley, the lightning-fast movement that got the Confederate troops to places nobody, especially the Union commanders, believed they could possibly be.

  On March 22, Jackson, riding Little Sorrel as always, led his forty-five hundred soldiers twenty-five miles down the valley, adding another sixteen miles by mid-day on March 23. This was an improbably quick pace, one that left fifteen hundred men straggling behind along the way. There were perhaps three thousand soldiers available when the column reached Kernstown, just a few miles short of Winchester. In the meantime, Jackson’s cavalry commander Turner Ashby had fought a minor skirmish against a handful of Shields’s troops. Ashby then assumed that only a small number of Shields’s division was there and the rest of Banks’s corps was gone. Ashby passed that word on to Jackson.

  That assumption was matched by an assumption by the Union commander. Nathaniel Banks was convinced that Jackson was either forty miles south or somewhere along the way, and he personally took off from Winchester just about the time the Confederate troops arrived south of the town. Banks figured that Shields’s division, commanded by Nathan Kimball because of an injury to Shields, was present in full and could handle anything that might come along.

  Still aboard Little Sorrel, Jackson acted on his misinformation and ordered an attack. But Shields and Kimball had been wiser than Banks and had hidden most of their troops between Kernstown and Winchester. Jackson realized quickly that there were many more than a thousand or so rear guard Union soldiers.

  The three thousand Confederates had challenged as many as ten thousand Union troops. Short of ammunition and badly outnumbered, Jackson’s men fought hard but were forced to withdraw from the field. It was a first-ever battlefield defeat for Stonewall Jackson.

  Jackson was unprepared for the number of Union defenders at Kernstown.

  Harper’s Weekly, April 12, 1862

  William E. Caffey, an English-born Confederate artillerist who wrote under the pseudonym “An English Combatant,” took his first note of Stonewall Jackson at about this time. He noticed Little Sorrel as well. “As for uniform, he has none—his wardrobe isn’t worth a dollar,” Caffey said of Jackson. “His horse is quite in keeping, being a poor lean a
nimal of little spirit or activity.”

  But Jackson realized that Little Sorrel performed just fine in what may have been his first experience under musket and artillery fire. Jackson was displeased with his army’s performance at Kernstown, but he was highly pleased with Little Sorrel. He rode the horse in all of his remaining battles.

  William Caffey had second thoughts about Little Sorrel as well. Later in his Battle-fields of the South from Bull Run to Fredericksburg, he gives a different picture of the horse. “The old sorrel war-horse is well known throughout the army,” he wrote. “With head down, it seldom attempts more than a trot, but stands fire well, and that may be the reason why the General prefers and always rides him.”

  As it turned out, the excellent performance of Little Sorrel wasn’t the only good thing to come out of the Kernstown defeat. Generals Shields and Kimball told everyone for years that they were the only generals to defeat Stonewall Jackson in battle, but officials in Washington, including Abraham Lincoln, were disturbed by the fact that Jackson had appeared at Kernstown quickly and unnoticed. They now wondered if he might suddenly show up at the outskirts of Washington itself.

  Lincoln and the War Department persuaded themselves that Jackson had many more soldiers than he did. Banks was told to return with his full corps and officials began concentrating Federal forces in the Shenandoah Valley. As Jackson and the Confederate government had hoped, troops were taken away from the planned Federal assault on Richmond.

  This was, by any standards, a victory, though the defeat on the battlefield at Kernstown remained an embarrassment to Stonewall Jackson for the rest of his life. The fact that he had relied on someone else for observation and assessment of the enemy led him in the future to conduct his own reconnaissance. Little Sorrel would almost always be his companion in this risky business.