Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel

by Sharon B. Smith

  Jackson’s troops headed back up the valley to regroup and train. For Jackson, a man who liked to attack, it would be a time to figure out how to fulfill his mission to occupy as many Federal troops as possible, by attacking, defending, or just biding his time.

  He began planning immediately, as soon as he set his troops in motion. The day after the battle, observers noticed him riding at the front of his column, lost in thought, reins dangling. He trusted Little Sorrel to find his own way and get him to where he needed to be. Little Sorrel did just what he hoped.

  It was a leisurely withdrawal up the valley, made possible by a Union pursuit that was again even more leisurely. A cautious Shields couldn’t believe that Jackson would have attacked as he did without considerable support behind him, so he was reluctant to provoke a new battle. But there was regular skirmishing between Union and Confederate cavalry as the infantries marched. At one point Jackson found good ground to defend, halted his troops, and had them prepare for battle, should General Shields want it. He didn’t, and the retreat continued.

  “It was the boldest retreat I ever saw,” wrote John Worsham of the Twenty-First Virginia Infantry years after the war. “If the enemy did not hunt for us, General Jackson would hunt for them.”

  The lethargy of the retreat perplexed the soldiers, but it was much easier on men and horses than the trip down the valley had been. Worsham noted that it had taken them only two days to march nearly fifty miles before Kernstown and eighteen days to march one hundred miles after the battle.

  On one level it was an awkward time for both Jackson and Little Sorrel. Shortly after the firing stopped at Kernstown, Jackson relieved Brigadier General Richard Garnett from his command for telling his brigade to retreat when it ran out of ammunition. It was the Stonewall Brigade, Jackson’s old command, that made their withdrawal even more painful to contemplate. Jackson thought the soldiers could have succeeded with bayonets alone.

  The soldiers involved believed that they might have all died if Garnett hadn’t pulled them back. For weeks the brigade stood silent when Jackson rode among them on inspection, as he tried to do with every section of his army daily. Little Sorrel had already become accustomed to cheers from the troops on these inspection rides and he would habitually raise his head, increase his speed, and look altogether livelier as soon as heard the ovation. He must have been puzzled by the silence now.

  But Jackson had more to worry about than the lack of applause. He now realized that he was going to have to know a great deal more about the valley than his opponents did if he was to have any chance of success against staggering odds. He knew within a couple of days of the battle that Union strength was mounting rapidly. It was what he wanted, to be sure, but his troops were already greatly outnumbered and the disparity was growing. He called for Jedediah Hotchkiss.

  “I want you to make me a map of the valley,” he told his new cartographer. He wanted every hollow, every mountain, every pass, and every road within the valley’s full one hundred forty miles accounted for, and he got exactly that. Hotchkiss became close to Jackson and was trusted with duties well beyond mapmaking. He acted as a courier, scout, bridge-destroyer, and sounding board.

  But for the next month and a half it was the mapmaking that was most important. With the help of Hotchkiss, Jackson moved his army around like the pieces on a chessboard, using Ashby’s cavalry to screen its movement. Nathaniel Banks was alternately convinced that Jackson was running away, hiding in place, and leaving the valley to join the Confederate forces protecting Richmond.

  By late April, Jackson’s army was at Swift Run Gap—strictly speaking, outside the Shenandoah Valley—waiting for promised reinforcements. Banks knew in general where he was but couldn’t see him and figured the little Valley Army was finally off to Richmond. That was a mistake.

  Because of the report that Jackson had left, Shields’s division was sent out of the valley too, off to Fredericksburg to be in position to either defend Washington or attack Richmond, leaving Banks in place to defend against any new Confederate troops that might appear.

  What concerned Jackson more in his role as defender of the Shenandoah Valley was the movement of another Federal army. Two brigades of General John C. Frémont’s Mountain Department had crossed the Allegheny Mountains on the western border of the valley. The controversial but widely celebrated Frémont, still known as the “Pathfinder” for his expeditions in the west, rose to command less than two months earlier. He was not one to stand still, so he sent six thousand men under General Robert Milroy east across the Allegheny Mountains to see what could be done about the Confederates in the valley. Jackson and Richmond officials assumed that Frémont planned to unite with Banks, creating a huge army that even Stonewall Jackson couldn’t handle.

  The move wasn’t unexpected, and there were some Confederate troops already in place. The small Confederate Army of the Northwest was commanded by a man as colorful as Frémont but much less self-important. General Edward “Allegheny Ed” Johnson, a former frontiersman and Indian fighter, was waiting with nearly three thousand men near Staunton in the far south of the valley. Jackson, fifty miles to the east, saw the Frémont-Milroy move as an opportunity to take care of the smallest of the Union armies threatening him. He figured Banks and his nineteen thousand men weren’t going anywhere for now, and that army could wait for later. Besides, Jackson hoped to pull off a march that would have befuddled the best of military minds, which Banks did not possess.

  So Jackson, Little Sorrel, and the rest of the Valley Army headed due south on April 30. The column moved out first, getting under way in a pouring rain that, after weeks of showery weather, immediately turned their line of march into a morass of mud. Jackson and his staff, including careful observer Jedediah Hotchkiss, hurried past the marching soldiers to reach the front of the column.

  Hotchkiss later described Jackson riding Little Sorrel at full gallop through the mud around the column, pursued by staff members on fancier horses struggling to keep up. He doesn’t say who won what he called a “ludicrous” race, but he did note that the soldiers cheered their general as he galloped past. They had forgotten their anger over the dismissal of the admired General Garnett. It was now adulation as usual for Jackson and Little Sorrel.

  The twelve-mile march south took two and a half days, thanks to roads that were soon like quicksand. Wagons and artillery became bogged down beyond the ability of their horses to pull them out. Soldiers were forced to stop marching to help pull, and at one point on May 1, Jackson himself jumped off Little Sorrel to help extricate a cannon from the mud.

  Once the army reached the little town of Port Republic, Jackson ordered it to head due east, and his own army now also assumed they were going to Richmond. But at Mechum’s River Station, on the other side of the Blue Ridge Mountains and out of the valley, the men climbed aboard rail cars that were actually headed west. They were soon back in the valley, and by May 5, Jackson’s army was at Staunton, six miles from Allegheny Ed. Jackson, still on Little Sorrel, made the trip on horseback with his staff and a few troops over a treacherous mountain pass.

  Jackson was pleased with the efficiency of the leg of the journey from Mechum’s River Station, and the men were pleased that the heavy rains of the last several weeks had finally let up. Thanks in part to the relentless rain, the shabby blue uniform coat from VMI that Jackson had worn for the entire first year of the war had finally reached the end of its road. He replaced it with a simple homespun gray wool jacket, and now, his staff officers thought, he looked somewhat spiffier. If they thought he should replace Little Sorrel with a more elegant mount, they kept that thought to themselves.

  The respite in Staunton didn’t last long. Milroy had been confused about the direction of Jackson’s move until May 7, but he now realized the Confederates’ intentions and saw that they were uncomfortably close. Although he didn’t believe the two Confederate armies had yet combined, Milroy soon unders
tood that the armies of Johnson and Jackson would total nearly nine thousand men and greatly outnumber his brigade when they did unite. He withdrew back toward the Allegheny Mountains, calling on his commander, General Frémont, to send help in the form of a brigade headed by General Robert Schenck.

  The chase was on. Jackson, still aboard the tireless Little Sorrel, placed his army in line behind Allegheny Ed’s troops as all nine thousand headed west to confront Milroy and, with any luck, more of Frémont’s army. Before Jackson took his place at the front of his column, he tried to deceive any Union loyalists who might be watching. He and a few of his staff officers headed south on the Lexington road, thereby starting the rumor that the army was actually headed south. According to Hotchkiss, Jackson turned after a few miles onto a connecting road to catch up with his westbound army.

  Late arriving staff members, having heard the rumors, rode much too far south and went twenty-five miles out of their way before they caught up with Jackson. As usual, only the humans complained.

  A surprise assault by Union artillery on Jackson’s column was handled, but it left the leading regiments of his column a full five miles behind the end of Johnson’s. Early on May 8, his forward-most regiments came under fire from skirmishers as they approached the little village of McDowell. Jackson hurried to the front of the column, accompanied by only Jedediah Hotchkiss, to see for himself what his troops faced. Captain Edward Alfriend of the Forty-Fourth Virginia Infantry was shocked by Jackson’s willingness to expose himself to enemy fire. He urged the general to move out of range.

  “I wish to look forward here,” Jackson told Alfriend curtly and that was that. He looked while Alfriend’s company did their best to protect him. Jackson and Little Sorrel survived uninjured.

  A few minutes later Jackson caught up with Allegheny Ed Johnson. The two generals, accompanied by Jedediah Hotchkiss and other staff members, rode to the top of a rocky ridge where they could get a good view of Milroy’s troops arrayed before them in the town of McDowell. The Union soldiers got a good view of them too and began firing. In spite of the firing, Jackson concluded that Milroy wasn’t going to attack that day and sent most of his staff down the other side of the ridge to rest in preparation for possible action the next day. He and Little Sorrel remained, having survived another close call.

  For the rest of his war Jackson would continue to take terrible chances with his own and his horse’s safety. It was mostly the lesson learned from his defeat at Kernstown that led him to a behavior that, while brave, was risky to all, including the survival of the Confederacy. He didn’t trust other people’s observations and wanted to make his own whenever possible.

  Jackson’s Calvinist beliefs almost certainly played a part. Like most fundamentalist southern Presbyterians of the time, Jackson believed John Calvin’s teachings from three centuries earlier: nothing happens except what God has decreed, and “fortune and chance” play no role in what occurs. He may have felt he was taking no chance at all by exposing himself to fire. What was decreed would happen. Of course, Calvin was talking about human beings and Little Sorrel hadn’t been consulted.

  Although Jackson had convinced himself that there would be no Union attack, Milroy, believing that the action on the ridge was part of a Confederate effort to post dangerous artillery on high ground, did launch an attack a couple of hours later. That began the short, bloody, and indecisive Battle of McDowell. General Johnson’s troops, first in line, did most of the fighting, with Allegheny Ed directing the action until he suffered a severe leg wound. When darkness fell a couple of hours later the firing stopped and the Battle of McDowell was over. The Confederates suffered two-thirds more casualties than the well-directed Union force, leading Milroy to claim a victory.

  But by morning Milroy was gone, headed back to the safety of Frémont’s army. Again, Jackson had managed to fashion an important strategic win out of less-than-ideal material and most historians consider McDowell to be the first of the string of successes in Stonewall Jackson’s Shenandoah Valley campaign.

  Jackson ordered a pursuit of the retreating Federal brigades, stopping only when Milroy made a stand at a narrow and easily protected mountain pass a few days later. By then it was obvious that Milroy posed no immediate threat and Jackson turned his army around to head back to the Shenandoah Valley. He wasn’t convinced that Frémont wouldn’t make an effort to unite with Banks again soon, so he ordered Hotchkiss to locate and construct barriers in the mountain passes that might allow the Federals to sneak back into the valley under the cover of the mountains.

  Jackson turned his attention back to Banks and the troops under Confederate general Richard Ewell, who had been sent by Richmond to reinforce the Valley Army. Ewell had been waiting impatiently in the camp vacated by Jackson’s army when it took off on its western adventure. Ewell wrote of Jackson as an “enthusiastic fanatic” who kept his long-term intentions to himself. In the meantime, Ewell’s job was what Jackson’s had been, to resist any movement within the valley by Banks and prevent Banks from moving out to join in the threat on Richmond. That movement began to happen in mid-May.

  Banks seemed to be moving north, possibly detaching some of his troops, but Ewell had received orders from the east that contradicted Jackson’s to stay put. Joseph Johnston, commander of the forces protecting Richmond, told Ewell that every man was needed there. Waiting for word from Jackson caused Ewell to explode in anger at his commander. “I tell you, sir,” he raged at a subordinate, “he is as crazy as a March hare!” Later, after repeated successes under Jackson, Ewell changed his mind, noting that the secretive Jackson “just knows how to keep his own counsel.” He became Jackson’s most trusted subordinate general until his severe wounding at Chantilly four months later.

  Jackson, having taken care of Frémont at least temporarily, had big plans for his enlarged Valley Army. As his troops marched back into the valley he met with Ewell on May 18, revealing some, but not all, of his strategy to his second-in-command.

  On May 20, Jackson was joined by part of Ewell’s nine thousand men. Soldiers in Ewell’s division were eager to see Stonewall Jackson, who had become increasingly celebrated in the army, thanks to the victory at McDowell. General Richard Taylor, who commanded a Louisiana brigade assigned to Ewell, was among the curious soldiers who linked up with Jackson.

  General Richard Taylor of Louisiana was critical of Little Sorrel’s appearance.

  Library of Congress

  Taylor was a celebrity himself. He was the only son of Zachary Taylor, Mexican War hero and twelfth president of the United States. Richard Taylor had also been briefly the brother-in-law of Jefferson Davis, whose first wife was Richard Taylor’s second-oldest sister. That sister had died of yellow fever in 1835 after only three months of marriage to Davis, making the relationship distant, as was Zachary Taylor’s presidency. But Richard Taylor still mentioned family whenever it might be helpful.

  More than a trace of snobbery is apparent in Taylor’s war memoirs, published in 1879. His descriptions of Jackson and Little Sorrel date from the day his brigade of Ewell’s division joined Jackson’s army and Taylor first laid eyes on Stonewall Jackson. Jackson wore, he said, “a pair of cavalry boots covering feet of gigantic size, a mangy cap with visor drawn low, a heavy dark beard, and weary eyes.”

  As for Jackson’s transportation, the general was “mounted on a sorry chestnut with a shambling gait.” Perhaps he had never seen a pacer before. He got a better look later when he rode alongside Jackson as commander of the lead brigade of the Valley Army, at sixteen thousand men finally large enough to do honor to the name. Although he remained full of opinionated observation, Richard Taylor was never critical of Little Sorrel again.

  On May 22, the army began a northward march in search of Nathaniel Banks or any of the elements of his command that he had foolishly scattered around the valley. The tedium of the march was broken when Jackson passed the column to reach t
he front. J. William Jones was marching with the Thirteenth Virginia Infantry.

  “Hearing loud cheering in the rear, which came nearer and nearer,” he wrote years later, “we soon saw it was Stonewall himself, mounted on that old sorrel we afterwards came to know so well.” Jones said his regiment “gave a hearty greeting to the great captain who had come to lead us on to victory.”

  Victory came quickly to the three-thousand-man segment of the army that reached the outskirts of Front Royal on the afternoon of May 23. The troops were mostly from Ewell’s division, but Jackson and Little Sorrel led them in person. The Union garrison at Front Royal was small, only about one thousand men, with the rest of Banks’s troops to the northwest in Strasburg.

  Front Royal itself was both important and not. It stands at the northern entrance of the Luray Valley, a smaller valley that parallels the larger Shenandoah Valley. Just north of town the two branches of the Shenandoah River come together. In 1862, the town provided twenty-five miles of good train and road access to Winchester, the town that commanded the northern approach to both valleys. However, Front Royal was almost impossible to defend since high peaks surrounded it. But the railroad trestle and the bridge on the Winchester road were vital, and Jackson had to act quickly to prevent the Union troops from burning them. He was so impatient that at least once he rode Little Sorrel in front of his own troops, risking himself and his horse to bullets from both Confederates and Federals.

  The Union contingent in Front Royal was overwhelmed. The hour-long battle turned 90 percent of the Federal soldiers into casualties, including nearly seven hundred captured. But they won the footrace to the bridges, placing hay on the ties and setting it on fire by shooting into the hay. The hay burned, but the rain-soaked wood of the bridges didn’t, and the Confederates had time to pitch the burning hay into the water. Jackson and Little Sorrel, along with four cavalry companies, chased the Union soldiers down. By late afternoon, Jackson’s army was in full possession of Front Royal. Winchester stood twenty-five miles away to the north. Just nineteen miles away to the northwest of Front Royal, Nathaniel Banks and his six thousand soldiers in Strasburg had no clue what had just happened.