The Horses
T
By C. Kay Larson, www.opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com
he Civil War is not
normally called a horse’s
war, but it most certainly
was: cavalry and artillery
horses, draft and pack horses
and mules, approximately
one million on the Union
side alone. The seat of war
was also the lap of America’s
horse culture – or, rather,
cultures, north and south.
As the historian David Hackett Fischer
points out, the First Families of Virginia,
the fountain of Southern culture, were
descendants of aristocracy and gentry —
Armisteads, Lees, Randolphs, Washingtons
— who largely emigrated from southwest
England. This rural, manorial region
supported King Charles I during the
English Civil War, and owned slaves until
the early Middle Ages. At least among
the officers and Southern gentry, horses
were signs of elite power, a symbolism that
translated onto the American battlefield
and, after the war, the statuary pedestals of
countless Southern town squares.
In contrast, the “First Families of the North”
— Winthrops, Saltonstalls and Welleses —
were most associated with Suffolk, Essex
and Cambridge, a Puritan region of yeoman
farmers and artisans. Horses were more
utilitarian, bred to work, not to race or ride
to oversee the plantation.
Nineteenth-century romanticism
enhanced the “chivalry” image. Sir Walter
Scott’s novel “Ivanhoe,” set in the age of
crusading knights, was a blockbuster hit in
the American South. Through it, Southern
planters idealized themselves as models
of medieval honor, manhood, classical
learning – and equestrian skills.
When hostilities began, the Confederate
military was led by this dashing upper
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class, foremost among them Robert E.
Lee. Son of the Revolutionary War general
“Light Horse Harry” Lee, Robert married
Mary Custis, a great-granddaughter of
Martha Washington. He graduated second
in his class at West Point and excelled in
horsemanship.
Indeed, the cavalry was a sure path to
glory in the Confederate Army. J. E. B.
Stuart and Jubal Early were the two most
famous Confederate cavalry officers,
though others gained solid reputations.
The legendary mounted raiders Nathan
Bedford Forrest and John Hunt Morgan
disrupted drives across Tennessee by the
Union generals Don Carlos Buell and
William S. Rosecrans.
Steeds were more than status symbols,
though: when fighting was fierce or
retreats had turned into routs, generals
might personally rally their troops.
The visual symbolism and bravery of
mounted officers created an aura of élan
and command on the battlefield. During
the 1864 campaigns in Virginia, General
Lee rode along along the breastworks
encouraging the men, turned retreating
troops and chased down stragglers. Once,
when Lee was exposed to cannon fire, an
artilleryman remembered that “Old Mas’
Bob rode out of the smoke on Traveller,
amid the loud shouts of A. P. Hill’s Corps.”
The Southern cavalry was a rich man’s
undertaking: members had to provide
their own horses. This resulted constant
shortages of both trained horses and
men to ride them. During Lee’s advance
to Gettysburg in the summer of 1863,
his forces confiscated horses from
Pennsylvania farmers. However, mounts
must be trained for combat, to not react
to guns and cannon, so likely they proved
ineffective at first.
Despite an initial supply problem and lack
of leadership and mission focus, by mid1863 the Union cavalry was coming into
its own. Union quartermasters smartly
purchased many Morgans, a uniquely
American breed known for endurance,
versatility, heart and courage. The largest
cavalry battle of the war, involving 17,000
horsemen, occurred on June 9, 1863, at
Brandy Station, Va. Stuart’s forces were
preparing to advance in order to screen
Lee’s march north toward Gettysburg.
Begun by a Union surprise attack, the
Confederates finally fended off the
enemy. Yet the Union soldiers’ strong
stand resulted from the fact that for the
first time, they had trained and been
commanded as a coherent corps. After
the Battle of Gettysburg, Union cavalry
fought 15 battles in 16 days and captured
or destroyed half of Stuart’s cavalry, as well
as 4,000 or so horses and mules and 1,000
loaded wagons. The South’s food crisis also
gave Union cavalry operations an edge;
by early 1865 well-fed Northern cavalry
mounts were able to beat malnourished
Confederate horses to their own supply
trains and depots in Virginia.
Union cavalry proved itself in the Western
Theater, too. In General Rosecrans’s
Middle Tennessee campaign that year,
cavalry under David Stanley made
daring attacks on rifle pits and cannons
north of Shelbyville. Perhaps the most
successful raiding operation of the war
was conducted by a former music teacher,
Benjamin Grierson, who during the
1863 Vicksburg campaign cut a 600-mile
swath of destruction through Mississippi
to disrupt Confederate Gen. John
Pemberton’s supply lines.
But the real heroes were the horses
themselves. Cavalrymen and scouts
understood what their horses could do for
them. Horses could sense enemy forces
before they reached a rider’s earshot. Take
Nellie, a 6-year-old Union horse who was
first ridden in service by a soldier pursuing
the Confederate general Morgan during
his three-state Ohio River Valley raid in
1862 and ’63. During the Knoxville, Tenn.