Captain William F. Randolph, chief of the couriers riding with the group, had been behind Jackson when the bullets struck. He was uninjured, although his horse suffered several minor wounds. After regaining control of his terrified horse, Randolph moved him ahead to where Jackson had been placed.
“I saw the general’s horse, which I recognized at once,” Randolph wrote years later. Little Sorrel, he said, “was standing close to the edge of the road with his head bent low and a stream of blood running from a wound in his neck.”
The wound to Little Sorrel is left out of other accounts. Understandably, most witnesses paid almost all their attention to Jackson, not his horse. Moreover, the rest of Randolph’s account is highly suspect. He describes dismounting, rushing to the supine Jackson’s side, and lifting the general’s head and shoulders up.
“Not a living soul was in sight then,” continued Randolph, “but in few moments A. P. Hill rode up, and then Lieutenant Smith, one of his aides.” All that was true, but it was Jackson’s chief signal officer Richard Wilbourn, one of the men who helped Jackson down from Little Sorrel, who had given the first assistance, not Randolph.
So Randolph’s account has been mostly ignored, even though some of the descriptions of the events are compelling and believable. The account of Little Sorrel’s wound may well be one aspect of the narrative that was true.
The brave little horse had showed utter calm under fire all day. Bullets had zoomed by his head and shells had crashed at his feet. The headlong dash toward enemy lines was atypical for Little Sorrel and most likely would not have happened unless pain was added to the noise and confusion.
To be fair, a good horse is always sensitive to his rider and Little Sorrel would have felt Jackson’s shock and been aware of his pain. But bolting was not in this horse’s repertoire. A wound, perhaps not as severe as Randolph described, may well have been the cause. The two bullets that struck Jackson’s left arm were never found, and later trajectory analysis suggests that the horse’s neck might have been in line with the lower of the wounds, especially given Jackson’s crouching posture on horseback.
Randolph said he was sent off, first in search of a horse-drawn ambulance and then to inform General Stuart, second only to Jackson and A. P. Hill in terms of rank. The man who took charge of Little Sorrel after the incident was Private John Webb of Moorman’s Battery of J. E. B. Stuart’s Horse Artillery.
The battery would normally have been with Stuart, several miles away at this point. But Jackson had ordered a gun from Moorman’s Battery and two others to participate in the late afternoon assault. Three pieces were still in place at the time of the barrage of bullets, just a few yards from the point where Jackson was removed from Little Sorrel. The commander of one of the pieces, Major Marcellus N. Moorman, had been a student of Jackson’s at the Virginia Military Institute.
Webb held on to Little Sorrel in spite of the confusion and the sporadic firing, also catching the horses of two other wounded officers. Members of Moorman’s Battery said later that they were unsure of the identity of Little Sorrel and that he and the other riderless horses were used for a few days after the wounding. Eventually Little Sorrel was recognized and turned over to Moorman. Moorman was both fond of horses and ambitious, and he was careful with Stonewall Jackson’s horse. Little Sorrel joined the other horses of the battery.
One account from 1866 written by Jackson’s brother-in-law General D. H. Hill, who wasn’t present, claimed that Little Sorrel disappeared after the wounding and then improbably wandered into J. E. B Stuart’s camp thirty miles away a week later. But the early biographers of Jackson acknowledged Moorman’s version, although they all left out Moorman’s name. During the 1880s and 1890s Moorman became active in speaking and writing about his experiences at Chancellorsville, particularly his role at the time of Stonewall Jackson’s wounding. Critics were quick to jump on inconsistencies and exaggerations in other aspects of his narrative, so he failed to become part of the ongoing historical record.
At the same time that Moorman began speaking out about his experiences after the wounding, a few newspaper reporters began making the existing story more interesting by claiming that Union soldiers had captured Little Sorrel. Perhaps the symmetry of a horse repatriating himself appealed to them. But the truth of what happened to Little Sorrel was lost.
Eventually the idea that Little Sorrel had completed his bolt toward the Union lines and had been captured by Federal forces reached writers of Jackson biographies. Since it was well known what happened to the horse later in his life, the biographers assumed that the Federals must have either given him back or lost him in a subsequent recapture. Even the finest of the Jackson biographies, with a very few exceptions, include some version of this story.
The time frame for his period in Federal hands ranged from a few hours to a few months, depending on the writer. The final issue of Confederate Veteran magazine, published in December 1932, had a compromise story, with Little Sorrel disappearing briefly, then being recovered by Stuart’s troops early the next morning.
A few former Union soldiers helped the Union capture story along. Among the best known was Charles H. Lewis of the Twenty-Second New York Cavalry. He claimed to have captured Stonewall Jackson’s sorrel horse during fighting in the Wilderness. “It was the greatest horse I ever rode,” Lewis told family members, who passed the story on to reporters. Lewis, of Cherry Valley in Otsego County, described how the horse was taken away from him a few days later when he was captured himself by the Confederates and sent off to the Andersonville prison in Georgia.
Lewis, like so many others, got his action confused. The Twenty-Second New York Cavalry was not engaged at Chancellorsville but was involved in the Battle of the Wilderness over the same ground a year later. He spent the summer and fall of 1864, not 1863, at Andersonville. Lewis may well have taken a fine sorrel horse from the Confederate army, but it was not Little Sorrel. Jackson’s little red horse was almost certainly never out of the control of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Meanwhile, the battle continued on the morning of May 3 with the most intense fighting of the campaign. With masterful management and the help of Stuart substituting for the wounded Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee managed to reunite the two parts of his army while fighting off an attack from the rear by the Federal corps that had finally left Fredericksburg. Hooker’s army was driven back to the fords of the Rappahannock they had been so proud to cross the week before. The Army of the Potomac escaped across the river on May 6.
Jackson and Little Sorrel were sent in different directions, Jackson south and east to Guiney Station, deeper in Confederate territory for better protection as he recuperated, and Little Sorrel north and west with Stuart’s cavalry. The horse artillery saw little action during the final days of the battle, but it was kept in constant motion. Little Sorrel traveled with Moorman’s men until they reached Raccoon Ford on the Rapidan River on May 7. Men and horses were exhausted, probably including Little Sorrel, but the spring grass gave the horses plenty to eat. Little Sorrel was lovingly cared for by John Webb, who had found him, and another artillery private, Thomas R. Yeatman.
On May 9, Stuart’s division arrived at Orange Court House in Orange County, setting up camp at a site just south of the village. It was an area known as Scott’s Hill. “Our headquarters were established on one of the hills forming a semicircle round one side of the beautiful little valley in which the pleasant village of Orange Court-house is situated,” wrote Heros von Borcke in his Memoirs of the Confederate War. “We overlooked the town, as well as a great part of the rich country around it.”
Von Borcke, the volunteer aide to Stuart, had always found Jackson and his little horse amusing. It’s not known if he realized that Jackson’s horse was part of Stuart’s contingent on Scott’s Hill.
On May 10, eight days after the wounding, Moorman sent a letter to Jackson, assuming that the general had continued the rec
overy that he and the rest of the army had heard about. He told Jackson that he had possession of his little sorrel horse and asked what the general wanted done with him. Jackson died at 3:15 that afternoon of pneumonia, which had set in a few days earlier.
The letter most likely did not arrive before Jackson’s death. If it did, Jackson was in no condition to understand its contents. Although it would be good to think that he knew before his death that his beloved little horse was safe, that was unlikely. Jim Lewis probably did know, and the news was most likely a small comfort to him.
Little Sorrel is shown in an 1872 lithograph, but he was not actually present on May 10, 1963, when Stonewall Jackson died.
Currier and Ives, Library of Congress
News of Stonewall Jackson’s death raced through the Army of Northern Virginia. Moorman may have known by the night of May 10. He certainly was aware by the next day and immediately asked Stuart what should be done with Little Sorrel. Stuart made the arrangements to send the horse to Richmond. According to Moorman, John Webb kept the yellow noseband as a souvenir.
Little Sorrel was taken to the stables at the Governor’s Mansion, where Governor John Letcher took charge of the favorite horse of his neighbor and friend. The horse did not march in Stonewall Jackson’s funeral procession. Many people then and since have assumed that he was indeed the riderless horse that followed the hearse as the funeral procession traveled the half mile between the Governor’s Mansion to the state capitol building on May 12.
There are no surviving photographs, so modern historians may be forgiven for assuming the place of honor went to Little Sorrel. Contemporary observers should have noticed that Little Sorrel had become dark bay and must have grown five or six inches. The horse in the procession was Superior.
Jackson’s newer horse may have been chosen for the honor because he was considered more handsome, or maybe Little Sorrel’s neck wound was thought to be unsightly. Most likely, the horse hadn’t reached Richmond in time for the procession and he simply wasn’t available. When he did arrive, he stayed in the Letcher stables for two weeks, possibly to recover fully from his wound, and then was put on a train to North Carolina, to Anna Jackson’s family home near Charlotte.
In June, Jackson’s estate was probated. He left no will, but Anna was sole heir and the valuation and distribution were completed without controversy. The family home in Lexington, Virginia, was valued at $8,548 and converted to rental property. Four slaves were valued at a total of $5,700 and soon emancipated. Assorted stocks and investments were sold to pay debts. Anna kept the two horses owned by Stonewall Jackson at the time of his death.
“A sorrel horse, not present” and a “bay mare” were listed in the appraisal of Jackson’s estate and valued at $400 to $450 each. The sorrel horse was obvious. That was Little Sorrel, already sent to Anna Jackson in North Carolina. The bay mare is more difficult to figure out. The mare was presumably the horse given by citizens of Staunton on December 30, 1862. There is no record of Jackson using her, but she may still have been in his possession.
He certainly owned the bay stallion Superior at the time of his death. Superior did eventually end up in Anna Jackson’s possession, but he was emphatically not a mare. There is no record of when Superior was shipped to North Carolina, but he was there by early 1865. So Jackson’s second horse was either the mare given by the gentlemen from Staunton in December or a misidentified Superior. The mare, later named Molly Jackson, was never sent to North Carolina and was owned after the war by Fielding Templeton of Staunton and later by Templeton’s nephew McDowell Adair.
Little Sorrel lived in peace for nearly two years at Cottage Home, the Morrison plantation in Lincoln County, North Carolina. The plantation house was hardly a cottage. Anna’s father, Robert Hall Morrison, had transferred the name from the family’s smaller original home when they inherited a much larger property from his wife’s parents.
Cottage Home, North Carolina, where Little Sorrel was sent after Jackson’s death.
Arnold, Early Life and Letters of Gen. Thomas J. Jackson, “Stonewall” Jackson
Robert Morrison was a Presbyterian minister and a former college president in nearby Charlotte, but his marriage had placed him securely within the plantation aristocracy of North Carolina. So Little Sorrel now enjoyed the most luxurious circumstances he had ever known, not that a horse in the habit of lying down in an army bivouac for a quick nap would have much cared.
The plantation house itself was a three-story, twelve-room country mansion, but to the horses, the important structures were huge barns. Even more important were the extensive pastures. There was plenty of room at Cottage Home for two extra horses. The farm was now mostly in food production. By mid-1863 the Union navy’s blockade made it difficult to ship cotton overseas, and the Northern markets for cotton were gone. Food, on the other hand, found a ready market for the Confederate army and the civilian population in Virginia, whose farms had suffered terribly from foraging armies of both sides.
Little Sorrel, called Fancy around the farm, became a favorite for transporting family and workers around the eight-hundred-acre Cottage Home plantation. He was also a favorite mount of Anna’s young nephew Paul Barringer, son of her late sister Eugenia. Paul’s father, Rufus Barringer, served in Stuart’s cavalry division, eventually rising to brigadier general.
Paul Barringer, born in 1857, spent much of the war at Cottage Home. It’s through his memoirs, written in the 1880s but not published until 1949, that the story of Little Sorrel in North Carolina survives. Because of his youth, some historians doubt that Barringer’s memories are entirely accurate, but what he writes in his memoir corresponds with other sources. The most important of his recollections involves the day war came calling again on Little Sorrel.
By the last week in March 1865, the Confederacy was held together by a quickly diminishing thread. The country’s government knew it would have to evacuate the capital of Richmond within days—it happened on April 2—and Lee was unable to feed his shrinking army. After a week of trying desperately to find a way south to unite his army with that of Joseph Johnston’s in North Carolina, Lee surrendered on April 9 at Appomattox Court House. The end had been in sight for months.
Even though Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant knew better than anyone else that the Confederacy could not long survive, the Union commander-in-chief was determined to end the war once and for all. His method was to be a final attack on the war-making ability of the South. He would take care of the Confederate army. Cavalry general George Stoneman would take care of the capacity to feed that army.
George Stoneman.
Library of Congress
Stoneman would operate in eastern Tennessee and North Carolina, which had been so far mostly untouched by war. Stoneman, who had been a roommate of Stonewall Jackson’s at West Point in the 1840s, would make war on the economic lives of the people.
Stoneman’s Raid—the word has been capitalized ever since—got under way on March 23 in Knoxville, Tennessee. The cavalry division plundered its way out of Tennessee and across North Carolina, reaching Virginia on April 2. The raid continued in southern Virginia as Lee and Grant played their endgame to the north and on April 9, the day of the surrender, they moved back into North Carolina. Even though Johnston’s army was still in the field, it seemed to the people whose property was taken or destroyed that it was all overkill. Whom, they asked, could their farm support at this point except for their own children?
Stoneman’s raiding party was made up of three brigades of three regiments each, and the people of Lincolnton, North Carolina, were fortunate that it was Stoneman’s First Brigade that rode into town on April 17. The First was under the command of Col. William J. Palmer, a Quaker abolitionist from Delaware.
As a Quaker, Palmer opposed war, but as an abolitionist, he fought for the end of slavery. He managed to remain honorable through four y
ears of war. The looting and physical violence against civilians suffered by other towns in North Carolina were minimal in those raided by Palmer’s brigade. But he was assiduous in one of the primary goals of the raid. Stoneman had ordered his troopers to take any useable horse or mule they could find, both for service of the Union army and to deny them to the Confederates.
On the morning of April 18, Palmer divided two regiments of his brigade, the Tenth Michigan and the Twelfth Ohio, into raiding parties and sent them out in search of horses. Young Paul Barringer had spent the day of April 18 with his aunt Anna and the rest of the family at Cottage Home. “That evening a full regiment of Yankee cavalry passed by,” Barringer wrote later, “stopping long enough to take all the horses and mules on the place, including Fancy and General Jackson’s other horse, a stallion named Superior.”
Anna Jackson, aware that her husband and Stoneman had known each other at West Point, wrote a note to the general, asking him to return the two horses. Young Paul and “old Abram”—presumably a slave—took the note to the raiders’ camp, a mile away near the millpond of Dr. C. L. Hunter, a friend and colleague of Robert Hall Morrison. This was the camp of the Twelfth Ohio Cavalry and, upon arrival, Paul was sent to the commanding colonel. Paul, only eight at the time, was unable to recall the colonel’s name years later, but he was almost certainly Robert H. Bentley, the acting commander of the Twelfth Ohio. More than thirty men of that regiment, including the adjutant William Heddleston, were from Hillsboro, Ohio, the town Little Sorrel may have left to go to war four years earlier.
Stonewall Jackson's Little Sorrel Page 20
