Day 53. April 22, 1862.
53
to burn the barn with horses inside….
Tuesday 22
Quite a cool morning. The wind was blowing some and still raising quite stormy all day. The mud is drying up some and nothing new that is of any importance. I hope that we will have pleasant weather. I was over at Masons* House today. Things look as if there was soldiers about that did not care much**
*Mason’s House:
Journal of the Shenandoah Valley During the Civil War Era: A Publication of Shenandoah University’s McCormick Civil War Institute Volume IV 2021 Jonathan Noyalas Footnote 23 in piece by Cheyenne Nimes titled “May Peace Soon be Restored: The 1862 Diary of Ephraim Burket, 110th Pennsylvania” P. 49
“Burket is referencing Selma, the home of Senator James Mason in Winchester. Mason’s home was located at 514 Amherst Street. Selma, because Mason was the author of the controversial 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, was one of the earliest structures targeted by Union soldiers. Union troops began pulling the structure apart in the spring of 1862 and in late January 1863 Union general Robert H. Milroy, among the first to enforce President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, razed what remained of the structure and utilized the material in the construction of fortifications north of Winchester.”
**Ephraim is referring to Union soldiers looting.
Civil War Weather in Virginia Robert K. Krick P. 54
“7a.m. 48; 2p.m. 58; 9p.m. 48.”
Note: 1865:
The Civil War The Final Year Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean
P. 712-713
“WHAT WERE WE FIGHTING FOR”:
NORTH CAROLINA, APRIL-MAY 1865
The Civil War The Final Year: Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Aaron Sheehan-Dean P. 712-713 Diary of Samuel T. Foster, of the 34th Texas Cavalry had joined the Army of Tennessee, and wrote this entry near Greensboro, North Carolina.
(1865)
April 22
“Rumor says (this morning) that we will start for home in course of the next 10 days, and the rumor comes or purports to come from those that ought to know.
Later in the day the report is that we got to fighting again, that Genl Johnson can’t make any terms but submission reunion free negroes &c, and we have been fighting too long for that.
I have not seen a man today but says fight on rather than submit.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 105
“The numbers and condition of the wounded shattered the composure of civilians who previously had no conceivable idea of the potential magnitude of carnage. Sally Putnam wrote vividly of Richmond becoming a universe of suffering during the 1862 Peninsula fighting: “We lived in one immense hospital, and breathed the vapors of the charnel house…. Every family received the bodies of the wounded or dead of their friends, and every house was a house of mourning or a private hospital…. Sickening odors filled the atmosphere and soldiers’ funerals were passing at every moment….” A veritable abbattoir engulfed everyone caught in the aftermath of combat. Fannie Beers, setting off to tend soldiers wounded close by in the 1864 Georgia campaign, came first upon a vast number of mangled, living beasts. “The plaintive cries and awful struggles of the horses first impressed me. They were shot in every conceivable manner, showing shattered heads, broken and bleeding limbs, and protruding entrails.” Many “struggled half-way to their feet, uttering cries of pain, while their distorted eyes seemed to reveal their suffering and implore relief.’”
“Shelby Foote Indepth 3 hour Interview” video on YouTube (minute 2:34.00)
“Horses are a tremendous problem feeding them. Feed a man you’ve got to have two or three pounds of food a day, feed a horse you’ve have to have something like fifteen pounds of food a day, so that getting that food up to the line is quite a job. The horse situation in the South for the last year of the war was crucial to their cavalry being able to function. The North was superbly right mounted at that time. But the South was miserable; the horses were so weak-kneed they couldn’t get up to a gallop. There wasn’t any bark left on any of the trees in northern Virginia because the horses were eating it because they had nothing else to eat. It was a real crippling thing that deserves more study than it’s had.”
A Yankee Spy in Richmond Elizabeth Van Lew P. 49
“Upon two occasions we were obliged to put in a substitute for our horse. This little business of substitution cost us much, and after the last time the Government refused to give us protection papers for him. There was no safety “for man or beast” in our “dear young Government.”
During raids or panics, I have known them to take the horses on the street from a bread cart, from country carts coming to market, though they publicly advertised that this would not be done. Frequently not a horse was to be seen on the streets, except those in Government employ.
Horses found strange hiding places. We hid ours for several days sniffing the smokehouse air, but they traced him, so we spirited him into the dwelling house, spread straw upon the study floor, and he accepted at once his position and behaved as though he thoroughly understood matters, never stamping loud enough to be heard, no neighing. This was his hiding place several times, sometimes for a week together. A good loyal horse, and the Yankee advent found him in his Sanctum [when they arrived April 3, 1865].”
This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War Bruce Catton P. 287-288
Note: Writing of 1863:
“From half rations the army came down to quarter rations. When a commissary wagon jolted by, soldiers would follow, hoping that something edible might fall out so that they could pick it up and eat it. Horses and mules—those that still survived: more than ten thousand of them had died**—were allowed three ears of corn each day, and hungry soldiers robbed them so regularly that it was necessary to put armed guards around when the livestock was fed. The horses and mules were so desperate that they gnawed down saplings and hitching posts, and a number of wagons were ruined because the beasts had tried to eat them. After the animals had been fed their inadequate meals, soldiers would search the mud looking for stray grains. Other soldiers risked shots from Rebel pickets to go ranging out through the country between Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge to collect acorns.
Yet there was no serious grumbling. The men were depressed because they had lost a battle, but they seem to have accepted the scarcity of food without complaint, confident that sooner or later somebody would do something about it. The Confederates made no hostile moves’ felt, apparently, that none was called for, since these Yankees would inevitably be starved into submission before much longer. At night the view was spectacular. An enormous semicircle of twinkling lights, running from the crest of Lookout all the way across the southern horizon to the northern end of Missionary Ridge, marked the Confederate campfires; down below, paralleling this crescent but several hundred feet under it, ran the line of Union fires. The lights lit the sky and almost seemed to dim the stars, and a veteran later remembered the sight as “grand beyond description.” Union campfires were rather skimpy most of the time. The only firewood was on the north side of the Tennessee, and the starving horses were too weak to haul it into camp.”
Note: Nathan Bedford Forrest’s horse Roderick, in March 1863, Battle of Thompson’s Station, 3/5/63: the horse returns to him after Forrest led him back to safety. Roderick was shot 3 times but he jumps 3 fences to return to Nathan. Gets shot a 4th time. The Tennessee town celebrated the 145th anniversary of the battle, & the statue of Roderick is on the spot where he died. While still being debated (& lawsuited) in 2020, Nathan Bedford Forrest & his wife themselves wander off to relocate alongside their contentious statues. By summer, 2021, the SCV agreed to move his remains to their National Confederate Museum 200 miles off, pending lawmaker’s ruling. The chain link fence surrounding the stone signifying their presence is constantly littered with stars & bars, flags that townspeople still pull down, all within shouting distance of MLK’s motel assassination site. And you know it’s only a matter of centuries before they raise him out of that ground to look at his bones. Then where will they put him? The case of the levitating bones.
FYI: Thompson’s Station was a Confederate victory, 1,906 lost on the Union side with a mere 300 Rebels gone.
Shelby Foote, on Forrest in a 1999 interview from his house in Memphis, when asked about Forrest’s picture on the wall: “He’s an enormously attractive, outgoing man once you get to know him and once you get to know more facts. For instance, he was probably Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, but he dissolved that Klan in 1869; said that it’s getting ugly, it’s getting rough, and he did away with it. The Klan you’re talking about rose again in this century and was particularly powerful during the 1920s. Forrest would have had no sympathy with that later Klan. Last thing in the world was was he anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic, which is what that Klan was mainly in the twenties. I have a hard time defending the Klan and I don’t really intend to defend it; I would never have joined it myself, even back in its early days.”
Also: “You could add that in hand-to-hand combat he killed thirty-one men, mostly in saber duels or pistol shootings, and he had thirty horses shot from under him. Forrest is one of the most attractive men who ever walked through the pages of history; he surmounted all kinds of things and you better read back again on the Fort Pillow massacre instead of some piece of propaganda about it. Fort Pillow was a beautiful operation, tactically speaking. Forrest did everything he could to stop the killing of those people who were in the act of surrendering and did stop it.”
Last: “When word of the massacre at Fort Pillow got up to Washington, Lincoln wrote to Grant and said, This is intolerable, I want whoever was responsible for it punished. Grant passed the word along to Sherman. If you know anything about Sherman, you know he would have jumped on Forrest like a tiger if he’d been guilty. Sherman never recommended anything along those lines. They sent a committee of Congress down to investigate Fort Pillow and they took testimony from people who were obviously lying their heads off, talking about people being buried alive, women and children shot while pleading for their lives. If you read a biography of Bedford Forrest, you’ll get some notion of what a fine man he was.”
No, Really Last: Shelby Foote: “I told some interviewer I knew a hell of a lot more about negroes than Baldwin even began to know.” YIKES.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes at the end of the Foote interview as it appears in The Atlantic (6/13/11), titled “The Convenient Suspension of Disbelief”:
“And yet here is the bit of sadness: He gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.”
Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War Michael C.C. Adams P. 48-49
“To be coated with dirt and insects degraded soldiers’ spirits, inducing low morale and despondency that, if unchecked, could disempower the victims and even end in death. Private Watkins, recalling the Army of Tennessee’s 1864 occupation of Lookout Mountain, wrote, “Never in all my whole life do I remember of ever experiencing so much oppression and humiliation. The soldiers were starved and almost naked, and covered all over with lice and camp itch and filth and dirt. The men looked sick, hollow-eyed, and heart-broken, living principally upon parched corn, which had been picked out of the mud and dirt under the feet of officer’s horses.’”
Note: Body lice, 2.3 to 3.6mm, lay eggs on clothing, stay there ’till they move to feed… on the body. And bugs they called gallinippers were black flies & mosquitoes. Imagine fighting off malaria in this pestilential existence, the bugs you couldn’t spot on your dust-covered or rain-soaked clothes; 47: number of teeth a mosquito has:
“There were blood-sucking buffalo gnats that dived into ears and nose, blowflies, chiggers, fleas, and worst of all, lice (“gray backs”) that roamed freely over the body….” Rebel Yell: The Violence, Passion and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson S.C. Gwynne P. 178
www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.13702900 (Library of Congress) “The Army Grayback” Toledo Ohio 1867 by General Isaac R. Sherwood: (Except)
“While all the North was booming us with praise; when Sherman issued orders for a rest, That every soldier in new blue be dressed; When blouses torn and pants without a seat; And shirts with sixty graybacks in each pleat, Where made into a bon-fire, far from sweet, it took just four days of that Georgia sun To hatch a new crop fiercer than the old one.
And now I lie beneath the August night, While dying embers glow of camp-fire light, I see the shiny stars in silvery bars Wink calmly o’er the sleeping field of Mars. There is no cover save the sombre sky. There is no music but the night hawk’s cry; Yet as I gaze into the mellow moon I feel the Grayback in my pantaloon! I feel him in my shirt, upon my neck, His griping grip upon my starboard deck. I cannot sleep, I cannot rest at all, For his omniverous bite and omnipresent crawl.”
Note: Is that… something crawling on you?
Note: Biting flies! Yes, they buzz! And buzz! “Crazed sound track.”
Note: About what has been termed the “Pickett’s Charge of the West,” the Battle of Franklin in Tennessee, which pitted 27k Union against 27k Confederate, Catton writes,
This Hallowed Ground: The Story of the Union Side of the Civil War Bruce Catton P. 448
Note: Regarding the November 30, 1864 Franklin Fire:
“‘You could see a Rebel’s head falling off his horse on one side and his body on the other, and the horse running and nickering and looking for its rider. Others you could see fall off with their feet caught in the stirrup, and the horse dragging and trampling them, dead or alive. Others, the horse would get shot and the rider tumble head over heels, or maybe get caught by his horse falling on him.’”
It was November 30, a pleasant Indian-summer day with a broad open field rolling gently up to the Union trenches. General Schofield, who was on the far side of the river seeing to the bridge-building job, looked across and saw one of the great, tragic sights of the war. Here were eighteen thousand Confederate infantrymen, more men than had charged with Pickett at Gettysburg, coming forward in perfect order, battle flags flying, sunlight glinting on polished rifle barrels. On came the moving ranks, looking irresistible, battalions perfectly aligned; then the Federal infantry and artillery opened, a dense cloud of smoke tumbled down the slope, and the moment of pageantry was over.
No fight in all the war was more desperate than this one at Franklin. Hood’s men charged with a stubborn fury that should have proved to the angry general once and for all that they were not in the least afraid to fight out in the open. They came to close quarters and – incredibly, for the charge was just about as hopeless as Burnside’s** assaults on the stone wall at Fredericksburg had been – cracked the center of the Union line and went pouring through, raising the Rebel yell. But the break was quickly mended. Ohio and Wisconsin and Kentucky troops came in with a prompt counterattack. There was terrible hand-to-hand fighting in a farmyard and around a cotton gin; a gunner in one Union battery brained an assailant with an ax, and young Colonel MacArthur of the 24th Wisconsin was crying to his men: “Give ’em hell, boys, give ’em hell, 24th!” The Confederates who had broken the line were killed or driven out, and all along the front the firing reached a fearful intensity; some of the Confederates, utterly beaten out, facing this fire at the closest range, were heard calling: “Don’t shoot, Yanks – for God Almighty’s sake, don’t shoot!”
The autumn day ended at last, and the battle ended with it, the shattered Confederate brigades drawing back in defeat. Their losses had been six thousand men killed or wounded, five general officers killed – among them the Pat Cleburne who had mentioned the unmentionable in that officer’s meeting the previous winter – and six more generals wounded, one mortally. Nothing whatever had been gained.’”
Note: As McPherson quotes Lee saying to Longstreet watching the battle at Fredericksburg: “It is well that war is so terrible– we should grow too fond of it.” But, really? Really?
The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America Edward L. Ayers P. 240
“One farm family put all their horses in a barn and secured it with a large iron lock whose key had been “lost.” The cavalrymen could hear the horses inside, neighing to their own, and could not bring themselves to burn the barn with horses inside. Another woman, using a butcher knife, slit the reins by which a prize mare was being led away by cavalrymen; impressed by her “spunk,” the Federal officer laughed and told his men to let the mare run. On another farm, a Union officer ordered a fine mare bridled and led away. When the mare’s colt followed its mother, the farm woman begged them not to take an animal so young that it could be of no use to an army. The officer agreed the animal was useless and simply commanded one of his men to shoot the colt. The woman wept over its body. People remembered these stories for generations.”
Note: At minimum, twice as many horses & mules (1.2-1.5 million) as men died in the war. They took bullets for the men who ducked their heads into horse’s haunches, behind torsos, any part of a horse they could get to die instead of them. Imagine these men’s sorrow (on top of everything else) if they cared about their horses at all, whatsoever.
United States Congressional Serial Set Vol. 2961 P. 171:
“7k horses were killed in Stoneman’s Raid, an 1865 month-long campaign through southern states. Major Pleasonton in letter to Major Humphreys “….while the loss to the Government was over 7,000 horses, besides the equipments and men left on the road. Had this force been retained for the Gettysburg campaign the results would have been more decisive.’”
Note: Note that this passage describes treatment of animals in 1920s sharecropping Alabama, so imagine the conditions under actual slavery: A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America Jacqueline Jones P. 249-250
“In the fields, hands would purposely overwork mules, or even “kill out” the animals, to win a respite, “a chance to rest and play around until they [the owners] brought out new mules” from the plantation’s stock.”
**Low-balled is the most graceful way of putting it. The number is obscenely low.
Lens Of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War Edited by J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher P. 198-201
Note: This is the story of the famous white horse you may have seen in Civil War books with photographs:
“Henry Strong was killed in one of the first exchanges of gunfire. His horse, mortally wounded by the same blast, sank to the ground on all fours and turned his head as if falling asleep. The Confederates were forced back. A Louisiana comrade who sought to recover valuables from Strong’s body was hit four times by bullets. Federals stripped* the dying horse of its saddle and tack. The animal was ignored as battle raged until sundown brought an end to the slaughter.
For at least two days the horse lay in a lifelike pose of helplessness. The unusual sight attracted attention. Union brigadier general Alpheus S. Williams wrote his daughters: “One beautiful milk-white animal had died in so graceful a position that I wished for its photograph. His legs were doubled under and its arched neck gracefully turned to one side, as if looking back to the ballhole on its side.”
Lieutenant Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a future Supreme Court justice, was among others struck by the sight of the dead animal. On September 19, Alexander Gardner rode into the area. A Scottish immigrant, Gardner was then an assistant to pioneering photographer Mathew Brady. The energetic Gardner took some seventy pictures at Antietam. Most of them were of the battleground in the Dunker Church sector. One of the images was of the now-purging horse. Gardner likely made the photograph because of its unique nature. If so, such was a major misconception.
Without horses, no major battle could have occurred in the Civil War. That fact, overlooked by most historians, is incontestable. Horses and mules provided the bulk of transportation in the nineteenth century. Symbolically, the first casualty of the Civil War was a horse killed during the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Four-legged beasts pulled and carried armies that otherwise would have been stationary.
Naturally, cavalry would be nonexistent because of the absence of mounts. Each rider in the war needed three remounts yearly. Hence, demand was constant. A single six-gun artillery battery required seventy-two horses for full efficiency. Infantry was the main component of an army, yet it was inoperable without wagon trains. The Napoleonic standard at the time called for twelve wagons per one thousand men. Four horses lugged a wagon containing about 2,800 pounds of supplies. (A six-mule team was able to haul 4,000 pounds on good roads – but roads were seldom good.) At the time of Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac was utilizing 4,000 wagons and 1,100 ambulances. Quartermaster Rufus Ingalls had the dauntless responsibility of obtaining and maintaining more than twenty thousand draft animals for that most famous campaign of the war.
How far an army traveled, and what it accomplished on a march or in a battle, was contingent upon the presence and the quality of horses. Major General William T. Sherman was aware of that logistic. “Every opportunity at a halt during a march,” he directed, “should be taken advantage of to cut grass, wheat, or oats and extraordinary care be taken of the horses upon which everything depends.”
In 1861 the North had 3.4 million horses; in the Confederacy were 1.7 million steeds. This inventory was surely sufficient for the short contest everyone expected. Yet what followed were four years of marches, battles, deaths, sufferings, trials, and tribulations never envisioned. The most imaginable hardships fell upon army horses and mules.
Most soldiers knew little about caring for mounts and draft animals. So they used them with pitiless disregard. They treated the animals as if they were at least indefatigable and at most indestructible. Long distance movements in all kinds of weather wore down thousands of animals. In the Western Theater, horses traveled over nine states. One of Brigadier General John Hunt’s cavalry raids involved horses pushed to cover 1,100 miles in less than a month. While cavalrymen could sleep in the saddle, their mounts were in constant motion.
An estimated 2.3 million horseshoes were annual necessities for every sixty thousand animals. Yet neither shoes nor farriers were always where they were needed. Lameness was epidemic.
Sheer exhaustion overcame horses on prolonged movements. Brigadier General James H. Wilson recalled of the Union pursuit of John Bell Hood’s Confederate army in December 1864: “It was cold and freezing during the nights, and followed by days of rain, snow, and thaw. The country… had been absolutely stripped of forage and provisions by the march of contending armies…. The poor cavalry horses faced still worse than their riders. Scarcely a withered corn blade could be found for them, and thousands, exhausted by overwork, famished with hunger, or crippled so that death was a mercy, with hoofs dropping off from frost and mud, fell by the roadside never to rise again.”
Worn-down animals in some cases were shot rather than allowed to recover and fall into enemy hands. Major General Philip H. Sheridan admitted after a retreat that he slaughtered five hundred of his mounts. The commander of the Confederate pursuit put the number at two thousand animals.
The most constant problem faced by wartime horses was lack of water and food. Dehydration, malnutrition, and starvation were the most prevalent equine killers. Army regulations stipulated that each horse daily was to receive three pounds of oats and fourteen pounds of hay. Such standards were seldom met. One brigadier must have provoked laughter when he routinely asked for eight hundred thousand pounds of grain and hay per day for the horses in his command. Short rations were worse for the animals than for the soldiers. Indeed, in the later stages of the war, hungry men at the corn allotted for starving horses. Finding sufficient forage was an almost hour-by-hour problem. Gathering food for man and beast was certainly a factor in Lee’s 1863 decision to invade the North.
It was a crippled army that stopped the Confederate advance at Gettysburg. Federal horses had been without forage for three days. Several thousand of them collapsed and died in the Gettysburg-Frederick, Maryland, segment of Meade’s postbattle movements. Ironically, the forage those animals so badly needed comprised a large percentage of the fifty-seven wagonloads of supplies that Lee took back to Virginia.
Insufficient attention was also paid to the content and quality of rations given the horses. When hay was not available, the horses would be fed only grain. Because horses are grazing animals, they require a considerable amount of roughage in their diet. Lack of hay could lead to either of two deadly diseases: colic, a gastrointestinal infection usually fatal, and laminitis, an inflammatory foot condition that can be permanently crippling. Pasturage was a poor substitute for army rations. It has only a third of the nutritional value of oats and hay.
Photographs of long wagon trains belie their contents. Many vehicles were carrying bales of hay and sacks of grain. As official campaign dispatches repeatedly made clear, never enough feed existed for dwindling numbers of animals still struggling to keep pace.
On July 2, 1863, at the climactic moments of both Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the Confederate Quartermaster Department announced that the sources for acquiring horses were “well-nigh exhausted.” A serious question now existed on “how the animals necessary for the future equipment of our armies in the field are to be obtained.” Within a year, Lee was eliminating artillery batteries because horses could not be found to pull the cannon and caissons. The retreat to Appomattox was a death march for both soldiers and animals. “The poor horses,” a Richmond artillerist observed, “were giving out, and by the time Amelia Court House was reached, the teams were so broken down by hard marching and want of rest… that the caissons were abandoned and destroyed.” Lee thus was without artillery for the last five days of his army’s existence.
The number of horses killed in combat will never be known. Commanding officers, even cavalry leaders, rarely mentioned equine casualties in their communiques. However, some statistics emerged in official reports of Gettysburg. Losses in Colonel Henry Cabell’s artillery batallion were 26 men, plus 67 horses killed and 13 disabled. At least 881 artillery horses in the Army of the Potomac were slain in the three days of fighting. The day after Gettysburg concluded, Quartermaster Ingalls wrote Meade: “The loss of horses in these several battles has been great in killed, wounded and worn down by excessive march…. I think I shall require 2,000 cavalry and 1,500 artillery horses as soon as possible to recruit the army.” Ingalls revised his figures the next day to 5,000 horses.
A major factor in Meade’s slow pursuit of Lee after the battle was the poor condition of cavalry and draft animals. Too few were present and asked to do too much. The army stalled as a result.
Mahatma Gandhi once declared: “You can judge a people by the way they treat their animals.” Throughout my career, in reading thousands of soldiers’ letters, diaries, and reminiscences, I have always been on the alert for their comments about army horses and mules. Horses were wherever any component of an army was, so every soldier saw them at various times. Nevertheless, they received little attention from Johnny Reb and Billy Yanks. Those men who did mention the animals generally were expressing revulsion or pity at what they beheld. In mid-April 1862, a Maine adjutant stationed at Harpers Ferry classified teamsters “as a class the most depraved of any in the army. They have no mercy for their beasts, are the very personification of selfishness and malevolence, stupidity physical and moral…. They know less than the beasts they drive. Today I heard an unusual hub-bub and looking out saw a wretched abortion of humanity, pounding the noses of two mules and trying to make them back up against the railroad tracks.” George Hitchcock of the Twenty-First Massachusetts Infantry stared out at the Fredericksburg battlefield two days after the fighting. The saddest sight, he wrote, “was that of a wounded horse fastened to an artillery wagon, which had been shot somewhere in the hindquarters. From time to time it would raise itself up on its forward feet, look toward us in a most imploring way, appealing for help with a groan like a human being– most heart-rending, then falling back in exhaustion, slowly dying by pain, starvation and thirst.
That lone statue, as well as the Antietam photograph, are inadequate tributes. More than 1.5 million horses and mules did not live to enjoy the national pasture that cam ein 1865, with peace. Not one received a decent burial. Another million horses hobbled home permanently impaired. History remembers them all only as necessary costs in a great nation-molding conflict. They deserve a better title: “The Unsung Heroes of the Civil War.”
In the lawn of the Virginia Historical Society is a bronze sculpture from 1997: as Gary Gallagher puts it (P. 201)
“The metal figure depicts a broken-down, skeletal horse, head bent low as if in the final seconds of life. It is not part of a proud army passing in review or a dramatic participant in a battle scene. The bronze horse instead is the silent embodiment of the phrase “faithful unto death.’”
Note: The inscription in the granite reads: “In memory of the one half million horses and mules of the Confederate and Union armies who were killed, were wounded or died from disease in the Civil War.” The horse is emaciated, with ribs sticking out, thin chicken legs, and the horse’s head is tilted down, eyes looking at the ground. However, other estimates (Miller, below) have the loss at 20% of America’s 7.4 million horses and mules killed. It’s also said the South lost an entire half of the 2.5 million animals that lived at war’s beginning. The animal suffering was atrocious. See “Southern Horse” by Keith Miller at historynet.com/southern-horse
John Trotwood Moore: “Wherever man has left his footprint in the long ascent from barbarism to civilization, we find the hoofprint of a horse beside it.”
Note: A horse is so sensitive, it can feel when a fly lands on him, the little fly legs. These incredibly sensitive animals carried this entire war on their backs. For more on horses, see 3/23, 3/28, 4/14, 4/22, 4/25, 5/2, 5/5, esp. 5/28, 6/3, 6/8, 6/12, 6/19, July 2, 3, etc.
From the Sullivan County Record, August 21, 1896: New York, Aug. 18.— “During the nine days preceding last Saturday White & Sons, contractors for the removal of dead animals, removed from the city’s streets the bodies of 1,258 dead horses. The highest death rate was among the street-car horses.”
See: The Horse at Gettysburg: Prepared for the Day of Battle, by Chris Bagley (2021)
Note: Soldiers, townsfolk came through like locusts, stripping off every button, pocketwatch, shoe. The men like locusts descending, all one color, tearing everything in sight apart with their little teeth. A helpless animal was no obstacle. Because hit men would also undress to find the where the wound was so they’d know whether or not it would kill them, it looked as if someone playing dress-up killed them all, as photographed later. Head, chest, abdomen were the fatal areas. Abdomen meant a slow death.
Note: Like a calling card wedged in a front door, McClellan had in advance Lee’s battle plan for Antietam & still couldn’t get it right= 23K casualties & bloodiest single day of whole war. And that’s not counting those who died of wounds after. Casualty count was far higher. Lee, with his Ron Jeremy blue eyes, the always-on-the-make Lee, he didn’t know all this, only that it must be outrun, these “Yankee children of light.” Also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg (commenced at dawn 9/17/62), the first large battle to take place on Yankee soil, with 22,717 dead, wounded, or missing, so bloody that by Antietam they dispensed with the pomp & circumstance, the brass band, held their prayers to themselves, & simply shoved the dead face down into mass graves in the Earth that starts to fall inward on itself while they swig whiskey & tell jokes.
soldiers about that did not care much….
She screamed in his blood a hollow formed by an animal hoofprint. Foaming horses running then collapsing. Wary broken pieces of buried animals.
Blood feuds still sticking to the skin of the South resume their shadows, residual haunt. The dead animal’s hoof is held to the flame while the stories are told over & over again. Count on it. Any wild animal’s instinct is to bite very hard to make you let go. They want blood for blood. The people who live here. They still speak the old stories. In other words, we live here by the stories they tell themselves.
Were it not for the horses. There would have been. No Civil War. Were it not for all the hoofbeats, the neighing, tails swishing, their big brown eyes imploring you, their long eyelashes.
In another century they wear fabric tails, the whinnying children crawling across the field, playing with the little period horses who pretend to eat nonexistent straw just like before.
But there are still people around telling it.
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