Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel

by Sharon B. Smith

  “As he dashed to the front,” wrote Charles Blackford to his wife two days later, “our men followed with a yell and drove everything before them.” He added that Jackson was usually “an indifferent and slouchy looking man,” but now “his whole person was changed.”

  Blackford claimed the men would have followed Jackson into the jaws of death itself, which seemed not out of the question here in the shadow of Cedar Mountain. And Blackford gave some of the credit to Little Sorrel. “Even the old sorrel horse seemed endowed with the style and form of an Arabian,” he told his wife.

  The Confederate line regained its composure, reformed, and drove Banks’s corps back from whence it came. How much was due to Jackson’s inspiration and how much to the fortuitous arrival of A. P. Hill’s massive Light Division could be debated.

  Exchanges of artillery fire continued. But except for a foolish and futile charge by a Pennsylvania cavalry battalion that killed a few dozen troopers and even more horses, the Battle of Cedar Mountain was over. Pope liked to think he had a victory, since Jackson’s march north was stopped, at least temporarily. But Jackson was left in control of the field, and that was the ruling definition of victory at the time. Admirers of Stonewall Jackson were convinced that the dominant Stonewall of the valley had reemerged, overlooking mistakes that so nearly led to disaster.

  The first public look at equine carnage in the Civil War came from Cedar Mountain.

  Timothy O’Sullivan Photograph, Library of Congress

  If it had been possible to ask the surviving horses of Cedar Mountain battle, they might have singled out Little Sorrel as the hero. As he often did, he performed well beyond what anybody might expect of a little pacing horse, facing without flinching what even a horse should realize was mortal danger. Again he was tireless, covering a dozen or more miles under fire over the course of a very long day. Jackson and Little Sorrel slept well that night, lying down with the rest of the staff and their horses on long grass just beyond the battlefield.

  Jackson had ordered the troops to camp in place, not knowing whether Banks had been reinforced enough to renew the battle on August 10 or if he himself would be in a position to pursue the Union army. But J. E. B. Stuart arrived in the night, did a proper reconnaissance, and told Jackson that Banks was being heavily reinforced. Jackson received information from another source, a captured Union sergeant with good sources, that Pope was likely to withdraw north.

  Charles Blackford, who had captured the talkative sergeant, brought his prisoner to Jackson’s headquarters, where staff members stood waiting with their horses outside the headquarters tent. As Little Sorrel waited in front for Jackson to emerge, Blackford noticed the sergeant caressing the horse’s rump and running his left hand through his tail.

  Little Sorrel, as usual, didn’t mind the attention, but Blackford soon noticed that each of the prisoner’s left-handed strokes took away a handful of the horse’s tail hairs. Jackson emerged and looked at the scene with surprise. “Why are you tearing the hair out of my horse’s tail?” Blackford quoted Jackson as asking. The sergeant told Jackson that each of Little Sorrel’s hairs would bring a dollar in New York. Blackford reports Jackson as being both amused and pleased.

  Henry Kyd Douglas told an almost identical anecdote about a prisoner and Little Sorrel that supposedly took place a month later, but Blackford’s was the first and almost certainly the most accurate, since it was included in a letter written just eight days after Cedar Mountain, not in memoirs completed decades later. It’s possible that both stories are true, but tail hairs of Little Sorrel are commonly found in museums today, so somebody pulled plenty of hairs out of his tail at various points during his long life. The Union sergeant was sent off to prison still in possession of his valuable red hairs.

  By that night, Jackson realized that John Pope’s Army of Virginia would number more than fifty thousand when consolidated. He began to withdraw the Confederate troops from the Cedar Mountain area, returning to his previous campsites near Gordonsville, where there was better access to provisions for men and grazing for horses. The next move would be up to Robert E. Lee.

  Over the next ten days, Lee put together as much of his army as he dared give up and sent it to Jackson’s wing. Lee was convinced that the recalcitrant and exceptionally slow George McClellan would eventually be prodded out of his comfort zone and move to join John Pope, creating a Federal force of well over one hundred fifty thousand, a figure that Lee couldn’t begin to match.

  A quick move was vital, but various problems with logistics made that impossible. A restless Jackson slept poorly and did some personal scouting. All evidence suggests that he continued to ride Little Sorrel during this period even though the horse certainly deserved a rest. Jackson may have had no other horse of his own available.

  Aide Henry Kyd Douglas, in memoirs written years later, described an incident that took place during Cedar Mountain that would have affected Jackson. Anna Jackson’s younger brother, Joseph Morrison, had joined Jackson’s staff shortly before the battle. During the fighting young Morrison, according to Douglas, had joined his brother-in-law in an attempt to rally the troops. According to Douglas, Morrison, riding one of the general’s horses, was sprinkled with blood from a wound in the jaw suffered by the horse.

  The horse may have been Big Sorrel, the only other horse Jackson was known to own at this point. If so, the horse survived the wound, which must have been minor. A serious injury in the mouth or jaw would have made it impossible for the horse to eat for weeks, and we know Big Sorrel survived the war.

  There are other possibilities. The wounded horse may have been an animal purchased by or given to Jackson but not noted in letters or memoirs. The wound, or even the horse itself, if not Big Sorrel, may not have existed at all. Douglas was a colorful and engaging writer, but he exaggerated, embroidered, and occasionally invented incidents. No other memoir writer mentions the wounded horse, nor does Jackson’s widow, who would certainly have known about her brother being aboard a wounded horse owned by her husband.

  Whether Big Sorrel was injured or not, Jackson chose the trustworthy and unflagging Little Sorrel for transportation as the Army of Northern Virginia prepared to attack John Pope’s army again. Sometimes Little Sorrel proved more tireless than his rider.

  On the night of August 19 Jackson decided to conduct a cavalry scout himself. He led a party of two dozen men on horseback along dark narrow roads and by-paths, looking for something that nobody but Jackson had any idea about. “It was one of those freaks which sometimes seize him,” noted Captain Blackford, “and which make many people think he is somewhat deranged.”

  It was fortunate that night that Jackson was on Little Sorrel’s back, since once again he fell asleep in the saddle and safely emerged from the scout anyway. The party found nothing along the hidden by-ways, but at daybreak they reached the top of a mountain and were treated to a view of John Pope’s entire army camped for several miles in each direction around Culpeper.

  The view was useful, but the route Jackson took was not. A marching army couldn’t use the narrow paths taken by the small party on horseback. Blackford concluded that Jackson was “wandering in another world.” It was fortunate that he was aboard Little Sorrel as he wandered.

  Jackson’s wing began a steady move north the next day as Pope and his army continued their own march. During the following days, the two bodies sent out cavalry to scout and skirmish and occasionally trade fire. On August 22 Jackson’s wing approached the Rappahannock River and came under artillery fire from the other side. A cannonball struck and killed a horse whose nose was alongside Little Sorrel’s rump. Both Jackson and Little Sorrel saw the other horse fall dead but paid no attention.

  Charles Blackford commented on both Jackson and Little Sorrel in a letter home. He told his wife that it would take half a dozen bombshells to wake them up, but “when once roused there is no stopping either one of them
until the enemy has retreated.”

  Jackson and his wing completed their fifty-five-mile march on July 26 when they pulled into Bristoe Station on the critical Orange and Alexandria Railroad. As far as anyone reported, Little Sorrel carried Jackson the entire distance. After damaging trains and tracks, Jackson sent two infantry regiments and Stuart’s cavalry on to Manassas Junction, four miles away, which had become the main supply depot for John Pope’s army. They were followed by more troops.

  The hungry and poorly clothed Confederates gorged on Union supplies at the lightly defended depot. Union headquarters, receiving word that the Manassas station had been attacked, sent four New Jersey regiments by train to take care of what they thought was a small raiding party. They were shocked to find the terrifying Stonewall Jackson there with a huge force.

  It was a rout, but one that turned into another near miss for Jackson and Little Sorrel. Jackson, who rarely felt sorry for anybody, must have experienced some remorse for what was happening to the New Jersey soldiers and pulled out a pocket handkerchief. He rode forward on Little Sorrel and waved the white cloth, calling for the Union soldiers to surrender. They refused and Jackson and Little Sorrel were fired upon. “I heard the minie [ball] as it whistled by him,” wrote nineteen-year-old cannoneer Edward A. Moore from Jackson’s own Lexington, Virginia.

  Jackson called for his troops to resume full artillery attack, devastating the four Union regiments, killing their general, and forcing the surviving soldiers to retreat. But it became obvious that the railroad depots couldn’t be protected for long from a Union force that already could include seventy-five thousand men even without the addition of McClellan, if he ever got there. Jackson ordered his men to pack what they could and set fire to the rest of the supplies.

  He led his men on a perilous night march north, moving to a position from which he could both monitor Federal army movement and escape, should something go terribly wrong. If he was fortunate, he might also draw John Pope into battle on a favorable ground. Jackson’s wing marched right out of the view of even the best scouts from Pope’s army. Pope convinced himself that Jackson had disappeared because he was retreating to the Shenandoah Valley.

  Jackson settled his men on a hidden ridge along an unfinished railroad embankment just northwest of the field of the First Battle of Manassas. There they stayed, near a little crossroads named Groveton on a farm owned by the Brawner family, until the afternoon of August 28. At mid-afternoon Jackson received word that a Union column was marching east below his hidden troops. He decided to take a look himself and, to the horror of watching staff members, rode Little Sorrel onto a rise within plain view and easy musket range of the passing Union regiments. It was one of several times he had exposed himself and his horse to great danger and again successfully challenged fate.

  Abner Doubleday, leading a brigade of New Yorkers in the Union column, claimed later that he suspected the shabby rider on the odd little horse was a Rebel officer, but he was overruled by other officers in the column, who thought it was just a poor farmer. Doubleday said they later learned from Confederate prisoners that it wasn’t just an officer but “Stonewall Jackson reconnoitering our movements.”

  Jackson exposed himself and Little Sorrel to Abner Doubleday’s troops on the ridge in the rear of the drawing of Groveton Crossroads.

  Johnson and Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Vol. 2

  Jackson and Little Sorrel turned suddenly and returned to the safety of a stand of trees, where he ordered his men to attack the passing column. It turned into a strange and brutal battle in which both sides suffered terrible losses and neither could press an advantage. Jackson rode near the front lines for most of the two and a half hours of the battle, but he and Little Sorrel again emerged uninjured.

  Jackson’s most important division commander, Richard Ewell, wasn’t so lucky. He suffered an injury that led to the amputation of a leg and his absence from the army for nearly a year.

  Little was gained and much lost in this brief battle known alternately as Groveton and Brawner’s Farm, but one thing did result. The Second Battle of Bull Run was under way, a battle that would become one of the great accomplishments of the Civil War careers of both Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

  Jackson’s troops remained in place the night of August 28, and on August 29, Pope began repeated assaults on the Confederates. Each was stopped, with heavy losses on both sides. Pope apparently failed to notice when James Longstreet’s right wing came up later in the day. When Pope renewed his attack on August 30, his troops were first struck by a massive show of artillery force. Then, Jackson and Longstreet began a counterattack that drove Pope’s troops east, across the old battlefield, and all the way across Bull Run. Only a better-organized Union army prevented a repeat of the disaster of the First Battle of Manassas.

  Jackson apparently rode Little Sorrel on August 29, but it’s unclear what happened after that. The horse disappears from the record sometime after August 29 and stays gone for a little more than a week. Some of the memoirists who were most closely associated with Jackson were away themselves during this period and not in a position to report on their general’s horse. Charles Blackford went home with a fever. Jedediah Hotchkiss was on duty but spent little time with Jackson on the second and third days of the battle. Henry Kyd Douglas was there and is the only source for the idea that Little Sorrel was not used the final day.

  Douglas wrote after the war that on August 30 he was asked by Jackson to exchange horses with him as the battle raged. Jackson, he said, was riding a small bay horse captured the previous day from the Union army, a horse who refused to go forward and was otherwise misbehaving. Douglas, who had been ordered to carry a message to Longstreet asking for help, made the change and then had trouble himself with the bay. He doesn’t say why Jackson was riding a captured horse or what happened to Little Sorrel.

  But there is some evidence that Jackson used Little Sorrel for at least some of August 30 after the incident described by Douglas. Infantryman Gus McClendon of the Fifteenth Alabama claimed in his memoirs to have seen Jackson riding his famous horse that day as Jackson and Longstreet began their counterattack against Pope. “He came on top of the railroad embankment, mounted on Old Sorrel at a slow gallop followed by one courier,” McClendon wrote. He went on to describe in great detail Jackson’s “dusty, dingy, faded gray uniform” and the “legs of the pants stuffed into the legs of an old pair of boots.” Both writers offer convincing detail, so it’s possible that both were right and Jackson switched horses during the battle. But one of the two may have been wrong. McClendon didn’t really know Jackson but had seen him many times. Douglas knew him much better, but his memoirs include plenty of embroidery and some apparent falsehoods.

  In later writings Douglas says that Little Sorrel was temporarily lost or stolen at about this time, a situation he claimed lasted more than two weeks. Other observers reported Jackson aboard his favorite horse much sooner than two weeks after Second Manassas. Douglas wrote often about and was fond of Little Sorrel, so his word has to be taken seriously. Other writers who were involved with Jackson at the time did note the horse’s absence at various points, but none of them refer to Little Sorrel being lost or stolen, including Anna Jackson, who would probably have been told the truth by her husband. Many later writers have taken Douglas at his word and repeated the “lost or stolen” story.

  John Newton Lyle of Lexington, who had served under Jackson since the previous summer, wrote in his memoirs that “there was rejoicing in the heart of the General’s military family when Old Sorrel was stolen.” But Lyle released his memoirs in 1903, well after the Douglas story appeared in print. It’s unclear whether he remembered it independently or was repeating Douglas’s version.

  There are several possibilities for Little Sorrel’s absence from August 30 (or August 29, if McClendon was wrong) to the first or second week in September. Being stolen is the
least likely. There were more impressive and less identifiable horses to be had, including dozens of captured Union mounts.

  There is a slight chance that Little Sorrel was wounded on August 30, leading to the switch to the recalcitrant bay. Survivors of the Black Horse Troop, a cavalry company assigned to provide couriers for Jackson during the battle, remembered that one of their troop, Private Erasmus Helm Junior, suffered a mortal wound while holding Stonewall Jackson’s horse during the fighting on August 30. It’s possible that the horse was hit as well. Nobody mentions a wound to Little Sorrel, and that would surely have been worth noting unless it was extremely minor. But a wound doesn’t explain why Gus McClendon saw Jackson on Little Sorrel after Douglas claimed he had switched horses with the general.

  Little Sorrel’s absence probably happened because somebody, possibly not Jackson, believed that Little Sorrel had finally had enough. He had been in almost constant use for months, carried Jackson in a dozen battles, and been fed irregularly.

  The most likely scenario is this: someone either convinced Jackson to give the horse a break or independently arranged for him to be misplaced to the rear. The culprit may have been Jim Lewis, who was known to be solicitous of the little horse, but that would have been an extreme step for a slave to take, even one as well treated as Lewis was. A staff officer would have been a more likely perpetrator of the disappearance if it were a deliberate act.

  Why he stayed missing so long is harder to figure out. Little Sorrel may have become mixed up in the baggage trains after being sent to the rear during the day or at the close of action on August 30. Although the major fighting ended at sundown and the battle turned out to be over, it was hardly a time of calm. Heavy rain began to fall, adding to the inevitable confusion brought by darkness.

  The Confederate commanders thought that Pope might regroup and attack the next day. If not, they intended to pursue the Union army to try to block it from reaching the protection of Washington, D.C. There was unavoidable disorder in the rear and no time for Jackson to order someone to find his horse or go looking himself.