Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel

by Sharon B. Smith

  Superior, Big Sorrel, and the bay mare wouldn’t have been immediately available if something happened to Little Sorrel. By normal practice on a day of potential battle, Jim Lewis would have traveled toward the back of the column with the extra horses, probably riding Superior. Jackson could have taken the horse of a subordinate or sent a courier to fetch Superior if necessary.

  During the five-and-a-half-hour march, Jackson followed his usual habit and rode up and down the column. Jackson urged the troops to remain close to each other to maximize the impact once contact was made with the Union forces. Jackson made himself visible for an additional reason. At this point in the war, he knew that the sight of him was enough to motivate his soldiers.

  Never mind the dusty uniform, the worn-out cap, and the odd little pacing horse, he was still Stonewall Jackson and an object of inspiration wherever he appeared. The magnificent new uniform he wore that day may have puzzled a few of them, but the little horse was the same, and they thought all must certainly be well with the army.

  Jackson arrived at the front line at about 8:30 AM, three hours after sunrise, taking field command of the two divisions of soldiers already there. In an instant, those divisions changed their role. They were no longer to form a defensive roadblock to Union troops heading east toward Fredericksburg. They were now to be, as Jackson told their commanders, the vanguard of an attacking Confederate force, the bulk of which was still several hours east. The order to advance came a couple of hours later, when the first regiments of Jackson’s own divisions were close.

  The first shots of the Battle of Chancellorsville were fired shortly before eleven o’clock on the morning of May 1, when skirmishers of the two armies met up about three miles east of the crossroads. Fighting began in earnest half an hour later.

  The oblivious General Joseph Hooker had ordered a slow advance of Federal troops on the turnpike that headed east from Chancellorsville to Fredericksburg, expecting resistance, but not too much. He was still under the delusion that most of Jackson’s corps remained along the Rappahannock south of Fredericksburg. Hooker himself was comfortably settled in a strong defensive position around the Chancellorsville crossroads, ready to repulse any Confederates that got through. He was also in position to follow in support of Union troops headed to Fredericksburg.

  His lead regiments got the resistance they expected, but they were confused by it. Hooker’s carefully thought-out and, so far, well-executed plan depended on the relatively weak Confederate left wing falling back to Fredericksburg under the Union onslaught and making their defensive stand in the city, where they would be overwhelmed by a Federal force twice their size.

  But these Confederate troops seemed for all the world like they were advancing, not falling back. In the decades since Chancellorsville, Hooker has been both attacked and defended for his actions in the first week of May 1863, but neither supporters nor detractors can understand why he would base his entire plan on the twin assumptions that Stonewall Jackson could not get his corps up quickly and that, once there, he and Robert E. Lee would choose to fight a defensive battle.

  Jackson, still riding his brave Little Sorrel, was so determined to know the strength and intentions of the Federal forces that he rode for a time in front of his advancing troops, a position far too reckless for a man so important to his army. What he saw was a Union force not eager to advance but ready to fight through the resistance that the Confederates presented. The Union troops surprised him when they began withdrawing. It was an orderly withdrawal, to be sure, but they were making no effort to continue forward. The Union soldiers fired, pulled back, fired again, and pulled back again.

  These actions mystified Jackson, who knew that Hooker was aggressive by nature. The Union artillery had found itself an effective position on high ground south of the crossroads, so the Confederate advance was slow and difficult in spite of the Federal infantry withdrawal.

  Late in the afternoon, Jackson and Little Sorrel, accompanied by one aide, hurried to a spot farther south where he could examine the Federal defensive position. Joined by Stuart and a handful of the cavalry chief’s aides, he dismounted, leaving the perfectly behaved Little Sorrel in the company of the other horses, and climbed up a small knoll. It was a terribly exposed position, with artillery shells exploding all around the group.

  “General Jackson, we must move from here,” Stuart announced. Jackson agreed.

  They walked down the knoll and remounted, but not before two things happened. First, a shell fragment struck Stuart’s adjutant Channing Price, who had been standing just a few feet from Jackson. The wound, although it appeared not to be serious, severed an artery and ultimately killed the young aide. Second, Jackson got a good view of the dense, tangled stand of trees and brush that stood between him and the Union position near the Chancellorsville crossroads. The vegetation was thick and tall enough to mask a marching column of soldiers, should a general want to send one south and west. Jackson rode Little Sorrel back to the front.

  Shortly before sunset, Lee and Jackson met less than a mile from the Chancellorsville crossroads. The Union troops appeared to have retreated into their strong defenses. Dismounting and leaving Little Sorrel and Lee’s mount to be held by aides, the two generals sat on fallen logs and talked about the surprising Union retreat. Jackson thought it might mean Hooker was ready to pull out of his strong defensive position in Chancellorsville. Lee disagreed.

  They did agree to send out a pair of trusted aides to scout the Federal positions. The scouts found the front extremely well defended. A direct assault on the crossroads would be difficult and bloody. But the Union right flank beyond the crossroads was weak and poorly laid out.

  Lee’s question: could Jackson’s troops somehow get around seventy-two thousand Union soldiers and hundreds of pieces of artillery to smash into the vulnerable Union right flank? It was a rhetorical question since Lee had already decided the flank attack was the only option. Most of those seventy-two thousand would be in the center and could not be struck head on. How to do it was something for Jackson to sleep on. Little Sorrel was long since dozing when his owner lay down himself.

  A couple of hours later Jackson was wide awake, sitting on a discarded Union hardtack crate, examining maps, and thinking about that dense growth he had seen from his risky hill climb the previous afternoon. Scouts and local guides told him there were routes well south, out of sight of even the sharpest-eyed Federal observers, and that he could lead his troops south and then north to hit the only part of the Union line where a column of twenty-eight thousand men could have an impact on a line of seventy-two thousand.

  The march got under way at 7:00 AM, later than Jackson’s predawn preference. But he was confident that he could keep his soldiers mostly hidden, and Lee knew everything that Hooker had done the day before spoke to the Union commander’s determination to fight a defensive battle.

  Jackson joined the march after one of his fifteen regiments of infantry got under way. For the fourth straight day, he rode Little Sorrel. He might have liked to rest the little horse, but he knew today would be pivotal, for himself, for the army, for the entire Confederacy. Lee had ordered and planned a long and risky march to attack a wing of an enormous Union army. Failure would have meant disaster, and Jackson chose again to ride his most trusted horse.

  There was an added advantage. The march would be at least a dozen miles, and he and his horse would add a few more than that, riding up and down the column to see and be seen. The comfortable pacing gait, the first thing Jackson had noticed about the little horse two years earlier, would be a blessing.

  Lee waited near the previous night’s meeting place to have a few final words with Jackson, a moment noted by biographers and painted by artists. The conversation was brief and nobody knows what was said. Lee never wrote about it afterward, and if he told anyone else, they kept his confidence. The two generals parted, and Jackson returned to his audacious march around
Hooker’s army. Lee returned to his duty: commanding the two divisions left to him, no more than fourteen thousand men, trying to persuade Hooker that forty thousand soldiers remained in front of him.

  Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson meet for the last time on May 1, 1863.

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

  Not long after the march began the column passed through a small clearing, suddenly becoming visible to Federal observers posted a mile and a quarter away in tall pine trees. A few hours later shells began crashing into the clearing, most of them falling short, as the last of the infantry marched through. The shelling did little damage, and the remaining soldiers were hurried through the clearing. The trailing supply wagons were directed on a longer, more southerly route, well out of sight and range of Union weapons.

  News of the Confederate movement had clearly gotten to General Hooker from the tree-top observers, as did a handful of other reports from scouts, but he managed to convince himself that the troop movement meant that Lee was retreating. It was what he expected, what he wanted, and therefore it must have been what was happening.

  A Georgia regiment trailing and protecting the column was attacked and badly damaged in late morning, but the attack was eventually fought off by reserves. Otherwise, the march moved forward through the hot, dry, and narrow footpaths that wound through the tangled desolation known as the Wilderness. The tireless Little Sorrel was in constant motion, carrying Jackson forward and backward around marching soldiers, urging them to keep up with the men in front of them.

  Just after two o’clock in the afternoon, General Fitzhugh Lee of Stuart’s cavalry division intercepted Jackson. Lee and his cavalry had been acting as a screening force for the march and located the far right wing of Hooker’s army.

  “Bring only one courier,” Fitzhugh Lee told Jackson, “as you will be in view.” Jackson, his courier, Lee, and possibly cavalry Colonel Thomas Munford rode to the top of a wooded hill. Jackson and Little Sorrel stood for several minutes, in plain view and within sharpshooter range of the Eleventh Corps of Hooker’s army. The soldiers had stacked arms and were completely at ease, cooking, smoking, and otherwise enjoying a warm, sunny afternoon. If they had looked up from their pleasures, everybody’s day might have ended differently.

  Jackson told the courier to hurry to the front of the marching column and tell the commanding general to wait for him. The courier dashed away.

  “One more look upon the Federal lines,” Fitzhugh Lee wrote later of Jackson, “and then he rode rapidly down the hill, his arms flapping to the motion of his horse, over whose head it seemed, good rider as he was, he would certainly go.”

  When he reached his column, Jackson changed his plans and orders. He told the officers to continue farther north than originally intended, so that the attack would come, not just on the flank of the right wing of Hooker’s army, but at the back, a far greater challenge to an army that had already been caught napping.

  It took nearly two hours for enough of the trailing division to reach Jackson’s chosen point of assault and be directed to their positions, mostly in the dense thickets of the Wilderness. Although racing sundown, Jackson was composed, almost serene, as he waited with line officers to pass on the word to attack. Little Sorrel, whose efforts during the march would have tested any horse, matched his owner in unruffled serenity.

  “Upon his stout-built, long-paced little sorrel,” said his aide James Power Smith, “General Jackson sat, with visor low over his eyes and lips compressed, and with his watch in his hand.”

  Lt. Octavius Wiggins of the Twenty-Seventh North Carolina Infantry also watched Jackson prepare to order the assault. He was more poetic in his description of Jackson and his horse. “There sat General Jackson on the little sorrel,” Wiggins wrote later, “as calm as if sitting upon the seashore a thousand miles away from a battlefield.” Stonewall Jackson undoubtedly had worries and doubts during this day of his most difficult and daring march, but the choice of a horse to carry him was not among them.

  With the words “You can go forward” from Jackson, twenty-one thousand men burst out of the thickets with the unearthly Rebel yell and muskets crashing onto the unsuspecting Eleventh Corps of Joseph Hooker’s Army of the Potomac. It was a rout.

  Some Union soldiers tried to stand their ground and fight; some arranged themselves into an organized retreat, returning fire when possible; and some simply ran, a few as far as the Rappahannock River. By the time the sun went down the Confederates had advanced nearly a mile and a half, to within sight of the Chancellorsville crossroads. Artillery support from the Union Twelfth Corps, plus disorganization within the front ranks of Jackson’s corps, had brought the attack to a standstill.

  But the attack had been an improbable and breathtaking success and Jackson, in whom elation and aggression fused during battle, was determined to regroup and carry on. Night assaults were rare and dangerous, but the moon was nearly full. A campaign that began under the shroud of white fog would not be stopped by a curtain of darkness.

  At just after 9:00 PM, Jackson decided to see for himself what was happening in front. Aboard Little Sorrel, as he had been for fourteen hours, he gathered around him his staff, a few couriers, and a young local man from Stuart’s cavalry division to act as a guide. There were ten men in all.

  It was now two hours past sunset with no trace of daylight remaining, but the full moon offered some visibility. Jackson’s party could see the soldiers forming the front line but generally could not see precisely who these soldiers were. If it had been possible to ask Little Sorrel and the other horses, they could have told their riders who was there. The night vision of horses is much superior to that of humans.

  At 9:00 PM on May 2 Jackson and Little Sorrel head out from this spot to scout the Union line.

  Library of Congress

  Shortly after starting the ride to the front, Jackson’s group met up with General A. P. Hill, commander of the division that held the front line. Jackson told Hill about his planned scout and Hill felt obligated to join the ride forward. Eight other men were with Hill. An additional man was added when Jackson gave Hill the use of his own engineer, Captain James Keith Boswell, as a guide. Jackson’s group moved forward first.

  They heard noise from Federal soldiers in the dark ahead as well as random firing from skirmishers on both sides. The nineteen riders found themselves between the front lines of the Confederate and Union forces, and Jackson, who did not consider himself reckless, realized the danger was too great. He ordered his men to turn around.

  Peril came from all directions. The Union troops appeared to be forming for the expected Confederate advance just ahead, so turning back made sense. But Confederates were also firing at a Pennsylvania regiment just to the south, the crash of musketry clearly audible to both Hill and Jackson and the North Carolina troops in front of them.

  Hill, who had been following, was now leading the two groups and, just sixty yards from the safety of the Confederate line, he heard the shout, “Yankee cavalry!” followed by a volley of musket fire. A horse might have known that the nineteen silhouetted riders wore Confederate uniforms, but the soldiers of the Eighteenth North Carolina infantry did not.

  The volley struck the A. P. Hill party first and hardest. Jackson and his followers had veered off into heavy woods and were screened somewhat by trees and distance, but the gunfire devastated both groups. In Hill’s group, the general and his mount were the only pair in which one or both were not killed, wounded, or captured. Jackson’s engineer, James Keith Boswell, riding next to Hill, died instantly from two bullets to the heart.

  In terms of numbers, Jackson’s party suffered less from the catastrophic friendly fire. One courier and two horses died immediately. Several horses were wounded, possibly including Little Sorrel, and two men were struck as well. But fewer casualties did not mean less consequence.

 
Stonewall Jackson was struck three times, once by a smoothbore ball that broke two bones in his right hand. The other wounds were more serious. Two bullets tore through his left arm, one through outside of the forearm and a second smashing through bone a few inches below the shoulder. The first of these bullets, which left an exit wound on the inside of Jackson’s left wrist, may have struck Little Sorrel, who was described by one of the party as suffering from a neck wound.

  A nineteenth-century woodcut shows Jackson’s wounding and a startled Little Sorrel moving in something like a pacing gait.

  Casler, Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade, 1906

  Whether it was pain, fear, or a response to the distress of his trusted rider, Little Sorrel wheeled and dashed away from the gunfire, crashing through thick woods toward the Union line, causing Jackson’s face to be gashed by low tree limbs. Jackson’s bridle hand, the left, was useless, but he managed to control his horse with his less-injured right hand and direct him back to the Confederate line.

  Two aides who had escaped injury dashed up to horse and rider, stopped Little Sorrel, and eased Jackson from the saddle to begin care of his wounds. It would be the last time Stonewall Jackson and Little Sorrel saw each other.

  Chapter 12

  Afterward

  The catastrophe of Stonewall Jackson’s wounding drew dozens of men desperate to help, in spite of the danger from enemy and friendly fire. Little Sorrel, not as important to the army, was almost ignored. He stood quietly in place as Jackson was helped from the saddle, remaining stationary as work began to stop the general’s bleeding. This was the behavior so familiar to the men who knew Little Sorrel.