by Jane Kendall
The colonel smiled. “It does.”
Levi turned and hugged my neck, hard, and I felt his tears.
“We did it, Rosie, we did it. We’re free. And we’re together.”
Going Home
Belle Rivière seems a lifetime ago. It was a dream, a dream that comes back to me with the sharp, clean smell of river water, the sweet scent of honeysuckle, or the call of a mockingbird. I often wonder if frail Miss Martha-Anne is well and if Lafayette was of any use to her. I would guess not. I can only hope that Charger and my dear sisters and my old friends in the stable are fed and groomed and cared for as we all once were. But I have a sad feeling that Charger is gone, and my dear sisters and the rest were taken by the Commissary Department after all. We hear stories of cotton fields lying fallow, of horses and children starving and women in rags. I fear for them. It takes money to run a war, says Colonel Buxton, and the Confederates never had anything but pride and courage and cotton.
Three years have passed since Captain Randall died at Manassas, which our new friends call Bull Run after the little creek where the fighting was so intense. Levi and I are in South Carolina now. We fight for the Union and we have survived. He is a sergeant in one of the Union’s all-black regiments, and is more proud of his brass-buttoned uniform than he ever was of his livery. Colonel Buxton is our commanding officer, and is as fine a human as I can imagine. He rides me to survey the troops and call out orders. But he understands what Levi and I mean to each other, and on quiet days he lets Levi take me on long rides through the woods. Sometimes we find an empty stretch of road where I can do my running walk and Levi and I fly along, as free as birds. The colonel has promised that when the war ends I will belong to Levi, and he is a man of his word. He also talks of taking him to Boston to be educated, but that’s not what Levi wants.
“I want to go back to Alabama, Rosie,” Levi says as he gently draws the currycomb across my flanks. “Nowhere near Demopolis, though,” he adds with a grin. I’m glad he doesn’t want to return to Belle Rivière. I want to remember it as it was, when I was young.
“Get me a sweet little farm,” he says, “like that nice Mr. Elisha. Nothin’ fancy, just a few acres to farm and maybe a creek where I can fish. A little cabin for me and a barn for you.”
We dream of peace, and we dream of home. It is the best dream of all.
APPENDIX
MORE ABOUT THE
TENNESSEE WALKING HORSE
Two Centuries of History
The Tennessee Walking Horse is perhaps the most American of horses, for it is like a melting pot of many breeds and strains. The Walking Horse was developed in the late 1700s and early 1800s by the farmers of middle Tennessee, who needed a sturdy mount that could work the fields, provide a comfortable seat, and handle the hilly terrain. From the Thoroughbred the Tennessee Walking Horse took its aristocratic appearance, from the Morgan its strength and endurance, and from the American Standardbred (a harness racing trotter) and Narragansett and Canadian Pacers its swiftness. The combination of these various breeds’ qualities produced a handsome horse celebrated for intelligence, an even temperament, and remarkable stamina.
The Walking Horse came into its own on the vast cotton plantations of the pre–Civil War South as a superb and easily trained saddle horse that could travel many miles a day without tiring. There were many ways to breed a Walking Horse. For example, Traveller, General Robert E. Lee’s legendary gray gelding, was a Walking Horse of Thoroughbred, Narragansett, and Morgan blood. The breed went by many names—Southern Plantation Walking Horse, Tennessee Pacer, Tennessee Walker, Southern Pacer, Walking Saddle Horse, Plantation Horse—but all were Walking Horses descended from Tennessee stock.
The Walker generally stands between fifteen and seventeen hands, and its colors can include bay, black, chestnut, and sorrel, though dark bay is the most common. Walking Horses have long, straight necks, sloping shoulders, and delicately modeled heads with small, forward-pricking ears. Their manes and tails are long, silky, and unusually wavy.
In 1837, a Tennessee piebald named Bald Stockings became known for a fast, smooth fifth gait, the running walk, for which the breed would be named. When using this unique gait, a Walker can cover ground at six to twelve miles per hour! The Walker seems to delight in its famed fifth gait, sometimes flicking its ears and clicking its teeth in rhythm as it skims along. The running walk may very well be an instinct as old as time. Fossil footprints of Hipparion horses from 3.5 million years ago suggest that Hipparions also traveled in a fast walk of up to eight miles per hour.
In 1886, a black stallion with a white blaze named Black Allan was born in Lexington, Kentucky. His sire was Allendorf, a Hambletonian Pacer, his dam a Morgan called Maggie Marshall. The breeder was clever enough to call Black Allan a Tennessee Walking Horse, and the label stuck. Was this truly a new breed, or a variation on an old theme? The Hambletonian Pacer was a combination of the American Standardbred, the Narragansett Pacer, and the Canadian Pacer—three strains that had been part of the Tennessee Walker’s genealogy from the earliest days, along with the Morgan. Black Allan was eventually selected by the Tennessee Walking Horse Breeders’ Association as the foundation of a new breed, and designated Allan F-1. Some people, however, refer to Black Allan as the first modern Tennessee Walking Horse to distinguish him from the old plantation-style Tennessee Walking Horses.
After the Civil War, the Tennessee Walker became known as a plow horse that farmers also used for match races, and as a pleasure and show horse. The official registry, which recognized the Tennessee Walking Horse as a breed, was not founded until 1935. The studbook was closed in 1947. Since then, for a Tennessee Walking Horse to be registered, both parents must have been registered. The Tennessee Walking Horse is the official horse of Tennessee. The town of Shelbyville calls itself the Walking Horse Capital of the World, and every year holds an eleven-day Tennessee Walking Horse National Celebration.
Today the Tennessee Walking Horse is highly desired as a show horse, a Western pleasure horse, and a Western trail horse. The Tennessee Walker’s graceful “rocking chair” gait is said to benefit riders with back problems, and this, combined with its pleasant personality, makes it an excellent therapy horse for the disabled. The Walking Horse is popular, beautiful, and extremely photogenic. After the original Trigger died, cowboy star Roy Rogers chose a Tennessee Walker to be Trigger, Jr., and Silver, the Lone Ranger’s horse, was often played by a Tennessee Walker.
Training the Walker
Tennessee Walking Horses mature early, so their training starts soon after birth. It’s slow and steady, to reinforce their calm and docile nature. Most Walkers are broken to a halter by the time they are weaned. By the end of their first year, they will learn to be handled, to stand patiently while being groomed and shod and examined by a veterinarian, and to back up.
In their second year, Walkers are trained to the longe, or long rein, to start the process of learning their gaits. (Some may even be hitched to small, lightweight carriages or trotting sulkies to learn how to be driven.) This is in preparation for being saddled. By the time they are ready to be ridden, Walkers are accustomed to tack and are relaxed and friendly around people. After they are completely broken to the saddle, the next step is to train them to the distinctive running walk. Since the beginning of the breed, the method has remained simple and unchanged: ride the horse in a flat walk down the same stretch of road over and over again until the equivalent of at least a hundred miles has been reached. The Walker doesn’t expect to be going anywhere special—just back and forth on a familiar road—so it soon settles into an easygoing rhythm. Only then will the trainer gradually increase the speed until the running walk is achieved.
After the flat walk and the running walk are firmly established and become second nature to the horse, the Walker is gently brought to a canter in a gait that is comfortable for both horse and rider. Although a Tennessee Walking Horse can be urged into a gallop, with a Walker it’s never about a mad dash for s
peed, but about reaching the destination with style and elegance.
Slavery and the Civil War:
A House Divided
The Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, holds the unhappy record as the deadliest war in American history. The war was fought over the issue of slavery, which had been legal in America for more than two hundred years. (The first ship carrying African slaves arrived at the Virginia colony in 1619.) Slaves were bought and sold as property, with no rights and no payment other than basic housing and food.
Slave labor was the backbone of the Southern economy, which depended on a single crop: cotton. Eli Whitney’s invention in 1793 of the modern cotton gin—a machine that separated fiber from seeds, a time-consuming task formerly done by hand—had raised cotton production to unprecedented levels. As production increased, from 750,000 bales a year in 1830 to nearly three million bales in 1850, so did the demand for slaves to work the fields. In 1860, the South was shipping 80 percent of the cotton fiber used by the fabric mills of Great Britain, and providing two-thirds of the world’s cotton supply. That year the Census Bureau reported some four million slaves in the fifteen slave states. It is estimated that one in every three Southerners was a slave.
The presidential election was held on November 6, 1860. Abraham Lincoln, the Republican Party candidate, was a single-term congressman who had lost the Illinois Senate race in 1858. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he said that year in a memorable speech. “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Lincoln campaigned passionately against the expansion of slavery into nonslave states. Slavery, he said, must be restricted to the states where it already existed and must eventually be abolished. This angered the South so much that in many places Lincoln’s name was not on the ballot.
How they hated Abraham Lincoln in the South! They hated him because he had come from humble beginnings, which meant he wasn’t a proper gentleman. They hated him because his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was a Kentuckian and should have sided with her kinfolk. But he was mainly hated for his abolitionist platform, which they believed was a matter of states’ rights: individual states should be free to control their own affairs and not be dictated to by the federal government.
Lincoln was elected with only 40 percent of the popular vote but 59 percent of the Electoral College votes. As they had threatened, the Southern states began to leave the Union, starting with South Carolina in December. Ten more Southern states would secede by June 1861 and form the Confederate States of America. They chose Richmond, Virginia, only one hundred miles from Washington, D.C., as their capital and Jefferson Davis as their president. Both the outgoing and incoming administrations in Washington, however, thought the secession an illegal rebellion, and no country in the world recognized the new country as legitimate.
The federal government also demanded that the Confederacy return all Union military property within their borders. The turning point came on April 12, 1861, when the Confederates attacked Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and reduced it to a smoking pile of rubble. Lincoln’s response was to call for a volunteer army to recapture all federal property. The Confederacy’s response was to send all available troops to northern Virginia, less than fifty miles from Washington.
In July the Union Army entered Virginia and began to move south. The two armies met on July 21, 1861, near the town of Manassas. It was the first battle of the war, and no one expected the outcome. At first the Confederates, who were outnumbered, were pushed back. But then they rallied with a furious counterattack. The Union Army fled in panic, unnerved by the ferocity of the Rebs and the unearthly shrieks of the Rebel Yell. Said one Union veteran, “If you claim you heard it and weren’t scared, that means you never heard it.” (Although you will find no Captain Jefferson Randall on its rolls, the Fourth Alabama Infantry Regiment did fight at Manassas and suffered heavy casualties.)
The war raged on for years. Although the Confederates would see victories, General Robert E. Lee’s 1863 advance into Pennsylvania ended in disaster at the Battle of Gettysburg. Atlanta and its all-important railroads fell in 1864 to Union general William Tecumseh Sherman, whose infamous March to the Sea cut a wide swath of destruction through the South. Union forces continued to successfully blockade the Southern ports so that the Confederates could not ship their cotton to sell it abroad. It takes money to run a war, and by the end, CSA greenbacks weren’t worth the paper they were printed on.
On April 9, 1865—almost four years after Fort Sumter—a weary General Lee surrendered at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. Much of the South lay in ruins. At a terrible cost to the nation, the days of King Cotton and slavery were finally over.
COMING SOON!
Ireland, 1917
Darcy is a light gray Connemara pony with silver dapples. She’s fast and tough, whether she’s pulling a load of peat from the bog or riding around the rugged countryside with Shannon McKenna, her human family’s eldest daughter. But when Mrs. McKenna needs a doctor, Darcy discovers a skill that will change her and her family’s life forever. Here is Darcy’s story … in her own words.
About the Author
Jane Kendall is the author of the critically acclaimed historical novels Miranda and the Movies (which was a Junior Library Guild Selection for Advanced Readers) and Miranda Goes to Hollywood and the serialized time-travel adventure All in Good Time. She has also illustrated more than two dozen children’s books, including The Nutcracker: A Ballet Cut-out Book, Laurie Lawlor’s Heartland series, and the Frances Hodgson Burnett classic A Little Princess.
Jane lives in Greenwich, Connecticut, and has been a senior writer for Greenwich magazine since 1992. She has written for the New York Times on film history and teaches a college-level writing course for the Institute of Children’s Literature. She was an enthusiastic rider growing up, and on one memorable occasion went Christmas caroling on horseback.
Her maternal great-grandfather served in the Forty-Ninth Alabama Volunteer Infantry, which fought at Shiloh, at the siege of Vicksburg, and under General Joe Johnston in the Battle of Atlanta; her great-great-grandfather served in the Twenty-Eighth Georgia Infantry, which was at Gettysburg and at the Appomattox Courthouse when General Robert E. Lee surrendered. “Writing Tennessee Rose,” Jane says, “has renewed my interest in my ancestors—none of whom, I am pleased to say, ever owned slaves.”
About the Illustrators
When Astrid Sheckels was growing up, she was never happier than when she had a paintbrush or pencil in her hand, a good book to read, and a furry animal nearby. Her favorite things to draw were animals, both real and imaginary.
Astrid is a fine artist and the illustrator of a number of picture books and novels, including the award-winning The Scallop Christmas and The Fish House Door. She still likes to sneak animals into her illustrations! She lives and maintains her studio in the rolling hills of Western Massachusetts.
To learn more about Astrid and her work, visit astridsheckels.com.
Ruth Sanderson grew up with a love for horses. She has illustrated and retold many fairy tales and likes to feature horses in them whenever possible. Her book about a magical horse, The Golden Mare, the Firebird, and the Magic Ring, won the Texas Bluebonnet Award.
Ruth and her daughter have two horses, an Appaloosa named Thor and a quarter horse named Gabriel. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.
To find out more about her adventures with horses and the research she does to create Horse Diaries illustrations, visit her website, ruthsanderson.com.
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