Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel

by Sharon B. Smith

  After hours of lopsided artillery dueling, Lee ordered infantry to advance, but that movement led to even greater loss of life. By nightfall, the assault was over. More than five thousand Confederate soldiers were killed or wounded. Union losses, while substantial, were much less. There was no count of horses killed, but the figure rose well into the hundreds. Even though an effort was made to remove the artillery horses to the rear once the guns were placed, Union shells found many horses anyway.

  The Battle of Malvern Hill was a resounding and devastating defeat for the Army of Northern Virginia, but it was hard to convince the soldiers of either side of that fact. McClellan abandoned the hill in the night, hurrying his army to his new and safer base at Harrison’s Landing on the James. His campaign to capture Richmond by marching up the peninsula between the York and James Rivers was officially over.

  In spite of the terrible loss at Malvern Hill and a couple of the lesser engagements of the Seven Days, Lee’s army had succeeded in its primary goal. The Confederate capital was safe and, while Lee lost several chances to destroy McClellan’s army, soldiers and civilians alike saw the week of battles as a great victory.

  Lee was now a hero of the Confederacy and Jackson had lost none of his luster, even though his performance was less than stellar. Little Sorrel was also expanding his reputation. The word among the soldiers was that Stonewall’s little horse might not be a beauty, but he was brave and tough and steady, everything you could possibly want in a warhorse.

  Jackson gave the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia a good look at his horse during a march toward Harrison’s Landing in pursuit of McClellan three days after Malvern Hill. Artillery officer William Pogue enjoyed the sight and sound of Jackson “bareheaded on Little Sorrel at his best speed” sweeping by the marching column, drawing cheers so loud that they echoed long after the two were out of sight.

  A few days later, Lee, fully convinced that McClellan presented no immediate threat to Richmond, withdrew most of his troops, including Jackson’s army, to the west. He had already proved that he believed in the adage that the best defense is a good offense, and his instinct to attack moved to the forefront. In this, Stonewall Jackson agreed completely.

  Chapter 8

  Risk and Redemption

  Stonewall Jackson left the Chickahominy swamp as he had arrived, riding his easygoing little pacing horse. After Malvern Hill, Jackson was ill, exhausted, and not particularly pleased about what had happened. The summer of 1862 wasn’t yet at its halfway mark and the soaring temperatures had already taken their toll on man and horse alike. The swampy ground on either side of the Chickahominy had contributed to the misery.

  But the still unwell Jackson now faced many more miles in the saddle. The prospect of hours aboard the rough-gaited Big Sorrel was unappealing, so Jackson again chose Little Sorrel, even though the horse had been heavily used for weeks. Jackson and his staff left their camp twenty-five miles from Richmond just after nine o’clock on the night of July 8. Most of his fourteen thousand men were already well under way. Henry Kyd Douglas was one of the sleepy staff members who rode along with Jackson, noticing the general nodding off and trusting Little Sorrel not to let him fall.

  Jackson was known throughout the war for his naps aboard the sure-footed Little Sorrel.

  Randolph, The Life of Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, 1876

  After two days of marching, Jackson’s troops arrived at the farm of Hugh Augustus Watt, a cousin of the Hugh Watt on whose farm the Battle of Gaines’s Mill had taken place. This Hugh was most likely unhappy to see an army arrive, even though he was quickly assured that no battle was in the offing. Jackson set up his headquarters tent in the Watt front yard and Little Sorrel enjoyed his first good grazing in two weeks. The weather remained hot and humid, but it was delightful by comparison to the dismal swamps of the Chickahominy River bottom.

  Hugh Watt was the uncle of Hugh A. White, a young officer of the Stonewall Brigade, who was permitted to enjoy meals in his uncle’s farmhouse. It was a welcome quiet time for Little Sorrel. The Watt farm was less than three miles from Richmond, but Jackson spent most of his time in camp. He called on the services of Little Sorrel only once during the long weekend near Richmond.

  Jackson and Little Sorrel traveled the three miles to the capital on Sunday, July 13, on what Douglas called “official business.” The business was momentous. The day before Lee had received word that John Pope, commander of a newly reorganized unit of the Federal army now known as the Army of Virginia, had begun moving some of his troops south. Lee responded with a reorganization of his own, giving Jackson the left wing of the Army of Northern Virginia. Jackson was told to head north and west to try to intercept the leading Union forces, while Lee retained the larger part of his army near Richmond.

  After a stop in the city for church services, Jackson remounted Little Sorrel and took off at a gallop, according to Charles Blackford, a cavalry officer borrowed from J. E. B. Stuart for courier and scouting duty. The road back to camp was clogged with wagons. Jackson, becoming impatient to get back to his troops, led his staff on a shortcut across a farmer’s field of ripe oats.

  The hoofs of the hurrying Little Sorrel and the other horses cut up the crop. The infuriated farmer, already on hand to keep a wary eye on the military wagons passing his property, swore loudly at the group of riders, Sunday or not. “I intend to have every damned one of you arrested!” the farmer shouted, according to Blackford. The oaths stopped when Jackson revealed his identity. The farmer immediately gave the horses permission to travel wherever they wanted to in his oat field. Little Sorrel would have certainly preferred to sample a little of the crop rather than gallop across it.

  But orders were out and a more pressing duty was at hand. The left wing was to move toward Gordonsville, a vital road and rail crossroads in Orange County north of Richmond. Later that day, Stonewall Jackson’s wing of the Army of Northern Virginia, with Jackson and Little Sorrel in front, marched out of the camp at the Watt farm and into an immediate future that all knew would include battle. The goal was the new Union army that Lee believed was consolidating in central Virginia. Jackson was to prevent them from moving against Richmond at the least and, at the best, drive them back to Washington.

  The trip began in chaos. Jackson had planned to transport his troops to Gordonsville by train, but a break in the line sent some of the regiments to Richmond to take a different line and others on a march to a point on the rail line beyond the break. Some made the sixty-mile trip on foot, with regiments arriving in Gordonsville over the course of several days.

  Jackson himself appeared on July 19 and remained in the area for three weeks, first in Gordonsville itself and then south of the town. He needed the respite after his illness and exhaustion.

  Mapmaker Jedediah Hotchkiss, who had spent the weeks of the Seven Days battles in the Shenandoah Valley, observed that Jackson looked poorly after his time on the Chickahominy. Hotchkiss doesn’t mention Little Sorrel, who presumably looked pretty much like he always did.

  But he and the other horses enjoyed their three weeks in Orange and Louisa Counties, where they found plenty of grass and recently cut hay. Little Sorrel soon became his usual rotund self, and memoirs that cover this period never refer to him as “gaunt.”

  The change of calendar from July to August brought more of the same in terms of weather. Temperatures in the upper eighties and into the nineties every day of the first week of the month caused suffering to man and horse alike. Even Hotchkiss, who was inclined to refer to every clear summer day as fine, began to describe a “warm fine day” and finally “a very warm day” on August 5. Two days later, Jackson moved his headquarters to the north and east. As usual, only Jackson knew exactly where they were headed, but most assumed it was to meet at least part of John Pope’s army.

  Now they faced dust as well as heat as they marched to battle. What Jackson had hoped to be a lig
htning march in the manner of the Shenandoah campaign turned into nearly two days of dust-clogged misery and painfully slow progress. Jackson had himself as well as the weather to blame. He failed to inform the commander of his largest division, a late coming addition to the Confederate left wing, of a change in plans for the order of the march.

  That was Major General A. P. Hill’s huge six-brigade Light Division, almost the size of an army corps, which made no progress at all on August 8. The two smaller divisions, slowed by their own supply trains, traveled only a few miles themselves. Jackson was still uncharacteristically lethargic himself. But he knew his only hope of success was to attack a small advance portion of John Pope’s massive Army of Virginia before Pope was able to get his much larger segment up to join the leading brigades.

  The Union vanguard was held by an eight-thousand-man corps headed by Nathaniel Banks, the still-angry target of Jackson’s accomplishments earlier in the year in the Shenandoah Valley. Because of the slow forward progress of the Confederate troops, the Union cavalry quickly and easily spotted the movement. Banks, who had moved south in person, was well aware that Stonewall Jackson was on the way.

  Fortunately for Jackson, he remained aboard the quick Little Sorrel and was able to maintain some contact with his strung-out column. After a long and frustrating day, the least successful march he had ever led, Jackson and his staff spent the night of August 8 at a farmhouse owned by James Garnett, a spot near the center of his scattered brigades.

  “The grass in the yard was very long and nice,” noted Jedediah Hotchkiss, who was referring to its suitability for comfortable camping. Jackson himself didn’t sample the comforts of the grass, opting instead to spend the night on the front porch of the house. He maintained his reluctance to stay inside civilian homes while on the march, but the lawn apparently didn’t appeal to him. Little Sorrel and the other staff horses enjoyed the untrimmed grass for other reasons.

  The leading regiments moved out after dawn. Jackson mounted Little Sorrel and headed to the front of a wing that now totaled twenty-two thousand men. He was preceded by only a modest cavalry unit—not including Stuart—and hoped they would give him plenty of advance notice when they ran into Nathaniel Banks’s division. He was unhappy with the cavalry commander and had already asked Stuart to join him from his assignment with Lee around Richmond.

  The temperature had reached well into the eighties when Jackson stopped Little Sorrel at a farmhouse to wait for word from the cavalry and pull nonessential wheeled vehicles out of the line of march. The marching column continued on a northeast course toward Culpeper, still nearly eight miles away. Jackson remained convinced that Culpeper was the place where Union General John Pope planned to concentrate his Army of Virginia.

  While waiting at the farmhouse, Jackson and Little Sorrel took a detour to lead the staff on a trip up a hill half a mile to the east. Jackson hoped to get a better idea of what was happening ahead, realizing that much activity would be hidden in the undulating hills in this section of the piedmont of Virginia. In spite of the hazy heat and the dust kicked up by his own column, he saw Union cavalry, which he had expected, and he believed he saw evidence of enemy infantry and artillery, which he did not expect, at least not yet.

  By now, at mid-day, Jackson already suspected that the vanguard of Pope’s army was already somewhere south of Culpeper. He had heard sporadic firing from cavalry skirmishers since early morning and some soldiers thought they had heard artillery. At nearly the exact moment that Jackson began to believe that a division of the Union army was here and not at Culpeper, artillery fire broke out, and suspicion suddenly became certainty. The staff urged Jackson to withdraw from his hill.

  “[S]everal shots were fired at the General before he got back to the Culpeper Road,” wrote Charles Blackford in a letter to his wife a few days later. It was the first of many times that day that Jackson and, by association, Little Sorrel escaped death.

  The battle variously known as Cedar Mountain, Cedar Run, Slaughter Mountain, and Major’s Gate was under way. The highest point on what was to become the battlefield was known locally as both Cedar Mountain, for its vegetation, and Slaughter Mountain, for the family that lived on the slope. Cedar Run was a shallow, marshy stream that meandered over the territory, and Major’s Gate was an entrance to a lane that at first appeared to Confederate officers be an important landmark but proved not to be as the battle unfolded. Historians have mostly settled on Cedar Mountain to identify the battle, although many of the participants thought that Slaughter Mountain better described what happened there.

  Cedar Mountain, shown in 1865, provided both a good view and dangerous exposure.

  Andrew J. Russell Photograph, Library of Congress

  The duel between the artillery of Stonewall Jackson’s wing of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and that of Nathaniel Banks’s corps of the Union Army of Virginia raged for more than two hours, and Jackson spent most of that time in motion on the back of his indefatigable little horse. He arranged his infantry into a position to advance once the artillery had done its work. He sent messages, the most important to the still-trailing Light Division of A. P. Hill. He rechecked the disposition of the regiments at the front. He again searched for high ground to take a look at the lay of the land and the location of the Union forces.

  Although any man or horse on the battlefield was in danger from flying shells, Jackson put himself and Little Sorrel in extra jeopardy halfway through the artillery duel. John Blue, a cavalry lieutenant from western Virginia, had been assigned to Jackson as a courier and was amazed at what he saw of the famous general’s actions. Lt. Blue was among the officers Jackson led up the northern slope of Cedar Mountain, barely within the lines of the Confederate right.

  Blue noted that Jackson sat there on Little Sorrel, “immobile as a statue,” as he watched the artillery battle through his binoculars. Shells exploded around the group, killing one horse and severely wounding two others. Jackson seemed not to notice, and Little Sorrel remained stationary as well.

  Jackson eventually agreed to a timid suggestion from a staff member that he leave such an exposed position, leading the group a short distance down the hill. He stopped, then sent the others on their way.

  “They will hardly fire at a single horseman,” Jackson said as he calmly continued his study of the Union forces within their full view and cannon range. Little Sorrel seemed not to mind that the other horses were permitted to seek cover while he was not.

  John Blue developed an admiration for Little Sorrel as well as for Stonewall Jackson that afternoon. Jackson sat alone on the slope of Cedar Mountain for just a few minutes after the other riders left. When he finally came down to his waiting staff he received word that Brigadier General Charles Sidney Winder had been incapacitated by what proved to be a fatal wound. Winder, commander of Jackson’s old Stonewall Brigade, had just been promoted to division command and was a vital link in the line of battle. He was an old Lexington friend of Jackson’s and that, as well as the fact that his division was assigned to the very front of the Confederate infantry line, shook Jackson.

  Jackson and Little Sorrel raced half a mile north to the scene of Winder’s wounding, the staff struggling to keep up with the pair. Blue observed that Jackson and his little horse jumped two fences to reach the forward-most infantry, now trying to adjust to a sudden change in leadership. He noticed nothing wrong with Jackson’s form at the jump, although fellow West Point cadets had years before loudly criticized the young Jackson. Blue mentioned neither too-short stirrups nor a seat too far forward.

  Blue was apparently impressed enough with the jumping prowess displayed by Little Sorrel to mention it in his memoirs, printed in a West Virginia newspaper near the end of the century. But he would have been even more impressed if he had known that pacing horses, especially those with the sloping croup and high withers of Little Sorrel, rarely have the strength in the hindquarte
rs to jump really well.

  Jackson spent only a few minutes at the far left before returning to a more central position. He seemed not to have noticed mistakes in the disposition of his line of battle, although he couldn’t have missed the confusion that resulted from Winder’s wounding. He presumably didn’t realize that he had misread the position and intentions of the Union troops.

  The result was near disaster. Just as Jackson attempted to deal with the flaws in the Confederate line, Union infantry struck a stunning and unexpected blow. A full brigade hit the side and back of the Confederate left, staggering the Stonewall Brigade, which was thrown first into disarray and then into terror. The famous unit staggered and partially broke, hundreds of soldiers rushing to the rear.

  Then came one of the iconic moments of Stonewall Jackson’s military career, and he was—appropriately—with Little Sorrel when it happened. Seeing the disintegration of the Stonewall Brigade and the catastrophe it might mean, Jackson dashed to the site of the break and drew his sword. Or, to be accurate, he tried to draw his sword but found it impossible to remove from its scabbard. The blade may have rusted or it may have caught on something in the leather, but Jackson was unable to get it out. So he unbuckled the scabbard and raised the sword over his head, scabbard and all. For emphasis, he grabbed a Confederate battle flag from a startled color bearer.

  “Rally, men,” he shouted. “Where’s my Stonewall Brigade? Forward!” There are different versions of Jackson’s exhortation, but the stories all show the same effect.