Gervase Phillips. History Today. Volume 55, Issue 12, December 2005.
Historians have often stressed the modernity of America’s Civil War. The rifled-musket, the iron-clad warship, telegraphs and railroads have been heralded as revolutionary developments in its conduct. Yet Gervase Phillips argues that the dependence on often weary, sickly horses on both sides in the war, and the failure to manage their use and welfare had a significant impact on the development, and final outcome of, the struggle between North and South.
On September 17th, 1862, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, under General Robert E. Lee, was fought to a bloody standstill by the Federal Army of the Potomac, at Antietam, Maryland. Over 20,000 men, more than a quarter of those engaged, fell, killed or wounded, on that fatal field. In the aftermath, Lee withdrew back into Virginia, his hopes of rallying Maryland to the South’s cause frustrated. Yet he escaped pursuit. The Federal commander, George B. McClellan, allowed his enemy to slip away. President Lincoln chided and cajoled his reluctant general to action, but ‘Little Mac’ would not be hurried. Indeed, a month after the battle, he claimed he still could not move. His army’s horses were too exhausted. Notwithstanding McClellan’s reputation for over-caution, this was not an empty excuse. For, although largely unheralded in conventional accounts of the struggle, the conduct of the war was shaped at every level, tactical, operational and strategic, by the capabilities of the American warhorse.
That the significance of the horse to victory (and defeat) has not been fully recognized should come as no surprise. Even at the time the absolute centrality of the horse to warfare was not always appreciated by those outside the military profession. In response to McClellan’s despatch, outlining the state of his ‘broken down’ horses, Lincoln sarcastically responded, ‘Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?’ This was characteristic of Lincoln’s sharp wit, but also of his ignorance of military matters. Cavalry was not simply a battlefield arm. Whilst scouting, it was the very eyes of a commander; in the protective role it was the screen behind which his forces concentrated, manoeuvred and camped securely. It never rested.
After Antietam, six Federal cavalry regiments made an extended reconnaissance of over 200 miles. One unit covered seventy-eight miles in just twenty-four hours, pursuing a Confederate raid into Pennsylvania. All the while, the cavalry’s pickets were responsible for over 150 miles of front along the Potomac. Scattered patrols skirmished with their Southern counterparts. As ‘Little Mac’ responded:
If any instance can be found where overworked Cavalry has performed more labor than mine … I am not conscious of it.
Just as the majority of the Union’s soldiery was drawn from civilian volunteers more enthusiastic than skilful, so the horses came from the comparatively gentle pace of farm work. Many should never have been taken from their stables. The ignorance of unqualified inspectors led to the purchase of great numbers of sickly and worn-out horses for the army. Young horses under three, and old ones, well into their twenties, were stamped US and passed for service. Jaws swollen with distemper and spavined limbs were considered no obstacle to military utility. The problem was evident from the earliest days of the conflict, but the insatiable demand for remounts stymied efforts to find a solution. As late as mid-1863, the Union Quarter Master, General Montgomery Meigs, was still receiving alarming reports. One described a shipment of a hundred horses from New York. Just forty-eight of these were fit for service, the rest were diseased, too young, too old or simply ‘quite used up’. Even animals that were healthy when purchased were soon reduced to a pitiful condition by the low standards of care they received once in service. A French observer, the Comte de Paris, was struck by the sufferings of Federal al remounts:
Immense corrals were established among the vacant lots in the neighbourhood of Washington and the Western cities to receive droves of animals emaciated by long journeys which the horse-contractors brought from Vermont and Kentucky. Taken a few days previously from the farm upon which they were grazing at liberty, never having been broken, these horses were crowded in a narrow space, carelessly picketed, badly fed, seldom groomed and without any shelter.
In 1863, General Wesley Merritt noted ‘the frightful loss among horses’ to ‘hoof rot’, the result of standing in mud and filth; ‘the disease seems to have been contracted in the quarter-master’s corrals in Washington.’
The situation was little better once remounts reached their regiments. Battle proved less costly in the lives of horses than exhaustion, disease and poor horse-mastery by inexperienced soldiers. Excessive weight on the horses’ backs was one problem. Green troopers, yet to learn the distinction between the essential tools of war and useless impedimenta, were the worst offenders. When the 10th New York Cavalry first took the field, one officer noted that
… some of the boys had a pile [of equipment] in front on their saddle, and one in the rear, so high and heavy it took two men to saddle one horse and two men to help the fellow into his place.’
On occasion, horses carried in excess of twenty stone on campaign. Such a burden was little short of a death sentence. Henry Pyne recalled the condition of the 1st New Jersey Cavalry’s mounts after a week of forced marching in the Shenandoah Valley, May 1862;
… with increasing frequency men would be seen to dismount and attempt to lead forward their enfeebled animals, which with drooping heads, lacklustre eyes, and trembling knees could scarcely support the weight of the saddles and equipments.
Exposure to the elements could prove equally lethal. Pyne recalled that
no covering could be procured for [the horses], through the wind, the rain and the snow they had to remain exposed to the weather. To save the cost of a few tarpaulins the lives of many horses, worth thousands of dollars, were sacrificed …’
In the field, soldiers were in the habit of simply requesting more horses to replace those that died rather than perfecting the skills necessary to maintain their mounted arm on campaign. In response to demands for yet more remounts from General William S. Rosecrans in early 1863, Meigs caustically retorted that ‘We have over 126 regiments of cavalry, and they have killed ten times as many horses for us as for the rebs.’
In January 1864, The Times in London, reported General Henry Halleck’s fury at the wastage of horses that was hampering his army’s ability to conduct operations:
… probably the principal fault is in the treatment of their horses by the cavalry soldiers. Authority should therefore be given to dismount and transfer to the infantry service every man whose horse is through his own neglect or fault rendered unfit for service …
By Halleck’s own calculations, Federal cavalry units had been supplied with 284,000 horses during the first two years of the war, although there had never been more than 60,000 mounted troopers in the field at any one time. In the final year or so of the war, he estimated a further 180,000 horses had been expended.
Initially, the Confederate army fared better. Rather than relying on government purchase, each volunteer for cavalry regiments was required to supply his own horse, for which he was to receive 40 cents a day for upkeep and compensation should the horse be killed. Fit horses were thus made available cheaply and were well-cared for by their owners, when in service. The Confederate government restricted its own purchases to horses and mules for gun teams and transport. Remounts for Southern units were thus plentiful in 1861. The fortunes of war soon transformed that situation, however. The great horse breeding regions were in the upper South. By mid 1862, Federal forces occupied Missouri, Kentucky, much of Tennessee and trans-Allegheny Virginia, thus denying the South a great reserve of quality horses. Wartime inflation made it impossible for many Southern troopers to afford new horses. The reliance on individuals to secure their own remounts inevitably came to promote straggling and horse stealing on the grand scale. According to Major E.H. Ewing, Inspector of Field Transport for the Army of Tennessee,
… the policy adopted at the beginning of the war by the Government of making cavalrymen mount themselves has done more to demoralise the troops of this branch of the service than any other cause.
In spite of these radically different approaches to the supplying of horses, neither side was well-mounted then. But what has seldom been recognized is the profound effect this had on the way the war was waged.
Both Federal and Confederate armies attempted to raise cavalry forces that could fight from the saddle with sabre or revolver, rather than mounted infantry units which utilized the horse’s mobility but only fought on foot. As a result both rejected smaller horses as unsuitable.
In the North, the notices in local papers called for horses
… to be not less than fifteen hands high, between five and nine years of age, of dark colors, well broken to the saddle, compactly built, and free from all defects. No mares will be received.
In the South, despite the difficulties in procuring remounts, the large numbers of mustangs (a small but hardy and intelligent breed that would have been an excellent mount for mounted infantry) available in Texas were thought ill-adapted for cavalry duties. The unwillingness to use smaller horses demonstrated a strong commitment to mounted combat. And yet, in so many instances, Civil War cavalry played little or no part in major engagements.
It has been suggested that shock action was rare on Civil War battlefields because infantrymen now carried rifled-muskets, with a range of 600 yards, compared to the 100 yards of the Napoleonic smooth-bore. A galloping horse presented a more demanding target than the firing range and, in combat, fear, exhaustion and surprise had as much influence on accuracy as rifling. But the rarity of shock action during the conflict is also partly down to horses and horsemanship. In particular, the condition of the horses was crucial. Regiments were often too exhausted to undertake shock action, which demanded speed and stamina.
Furthermore, farm horses ridden by farm boys were not ready for combat. In regular armies of the time it was accepted that it took three years to train trooper and horse to be truly effective as battlefield cavalry. In 1861, untutored horses found the succession of unfamiliar experiences on campaign terrifying. Stephen Start cited this example of the Seventh Indiana Cavalry, early in the war, responding to the command ‘Draw Sabres!’:
The sabers being drawn made a great rattling and clatter, and waved over the horses’ heads, the sight and sound of which greatly frightened them. This was more than they could bear. Some of them reared and plunged, depositing their riders on the ground; others darted over the commons, their riders hatless, holding on with both hands … In a twinkling the entire regiment was dispersed over the surrounding country.
Some regiments would never have enough horses suitable for the charge. As late as August 1864, in Georgia, a quarter of the 5th Iowa Cavalry’s mounts were, out of necessity, mules. These lived up to their proverbial reputation for obstinacy and any order for swift manoeuvre was met ‘with some confusion’. Nor were the riders themselves much better prepared. C.E. Lewis, of the 1st Dragoons, ‘dreaded a mounted scrimmage’ because ‘I knew enough about the men’s riding to know that in a charge, with their horses on the jump, they would be unable to use their weapons efficiently, if at all.’
The inability, in the early years of the war, of either side to amass a sizable body of trained cavalry prevented armies from exploiting battlefield successes and, therefore, from winning outright victories. The inconclusive outcome of Antietam was characteristic of much of the conflict. In a treatise on tactics published in 1866, Colonel Francis Lippitt wrote that
… the battles of the late War of the Rebellion, the earlier ones at least, were mostly indecisive. One chief cause of this was that neither side had a sufficient force of true cavalry to enable it to complete a victory, to turn defeat into a rout, and drive the enemy effectually from the field.
At the operational level, (that sphere of military activity that links individual battles into campaigns leading to the achievement of greater strategic goals), therefore, the horse question was instrumental in prolonging the conflict.
Many commanders instead deployed their cavalry away from the battlefield on raids on the enemy’s lines of communication. Perhaps the most famous of these was J.E.B. Stuart’s audacious ride around the Union army during the Peninsula campaign of June 12th-15th, 1862. However, it was in the west, where Federal forces hoped to cut the Confederacy in two by seizing control of the Mississippi, that the raid proved the most profitable exploitation of the horse’s mobility. In the summer of 1862 three Confederate raids led by John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest halted the Union drive on Chattanooga as troops were diverted hither and thither to defend territory they had already occupied. Later that year raids led by Forrest and Earl Van Dorn forced U.S. Grant to abandon temporarily his siege of Vicksburg. Ultimately Northerners would learn to use the raid as a devastating weapon against the South, destroying resources and undermining the morale of civilians. The most destructive was General James Wilson’s raid through Georgia and Alabama in March-April 1865. Fourteen-thousand horsemen rode nearly 600 miles, seizing three large cities, Selma, Tuscaloosa and Montgomery, and destroying railways, armouries and factories as they went.
What was striking about these raids was the appalling physical demands they made on the horses. Ideally good cavalry could cover from twenty-five to thirty miles a day at a normal pace, alternately walking and trotting the horses and taking a ten minute rest every hour. When pressed by some urgent necessity, cavalry might march fifty miles in a day. The raids pushed horses to the limits of endurance, however. In April 1863, Northern General B.H. Grierson, led 2,000 horsemen through Mississippi, marching 600 miles in less than sixteen days. The last 76 miles was covered in just twenty-eight hours.
It was not simply a question of stamina; it was impossible to feed the horses properly as the regiments moved and fought. Federal horses recuperating from marches were supposed to receive 10 lbs of hay and 14 lbs of grain a day. This ideal was rarely achieved on active service when cavalry was often expected to live off the land. Yet even in the verdant Shendandoah Valley in spring 1862, Henry Pyne thought the pasture insufficient: ‘the horses munching eagerly the rich clover of the meadow lands gained from it little strength for the toils of the future.’ Attempts to carry extra fodder on the horses added to their burden. Major William Jennings, 7th Pennsylvania Cavalry, noted that forage ‘packed upon the withers of the horses’ did more harm than good, causing sore backs. Between April 30th and September 13th, 1864, this regiment lost 401 of 961 horses; ‘the majority that died [or] were abandoned were literally starved’.
Yet, in the end, Federal forces could cope even with this grim rate of attrition. The creation of the Cavalry Bureau in 1863, improved both the quality of remounts and the care of injured and broken-down horses from the field. Six principal horse depots were established, the largest at Giesboro D.C. Clean, spacious and well-organized with specialist ‘hospital’ accommodation, these depots had an enormous success in returning recuperated horses to active service. In the east the cavalry in the field was reorganized with the creation of a Cavalry Corps for the Army of the Potomac, concentrating regiments en masse. Northern commanders now had a substantial body of mounted men available for ‘independent’ duties such as pursuit of a defeated army. Furthermore, the hard school of war had turned farm boys and farm horses into cavalry troopers and chargers. On August 19th, 1864, Colonel E.H. Murray led Federal cavalry into action at Jones-borough, Georgia, ‘the most terrific, yet magnificent, charge ever witnessed was made. The saber and the horses’ hooves were about our only weapons’.
For the Confederates, in contrast, the provision of remounts and the supply of fodder had become dire. As a result, the tactical balance between the rival cavalries shifted against them. Confederate cavalry degenerated into mere mounted infantry, unable to fight from the saddle. Heros von Borcke, a Prussian adventurer who served with the rebel cavalier J.E.B. Stuart, explained to the British General Keith Fraser that the quality of horses had so declined that ‘one was obliged by this fact to have greater bodies of cavalrymen used as dismounted sharpshooters’. Philip Sheridan’s campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, from August to October 1864, pitted Southern mounted infantry against Federal troopers who could both fight dismounted and charge. Something of the advantage this capacity gave to Northern units was captured in this letter home from Sergeant F. Thibeaudeau of the 1st New Jersey Cavalry:
… the enemy were flying before us up the road, so with cheers we dashed forward on the run, leaping our horses over the open spaces, and as we flew by the dismounted men they gave us cheer after cheer, shouting ‘go in Jersey,’ which we were doing, for every man was trying to outrun his neighbor and overtake the fleeing foe, who, as they went, cut loose blankets, feed, haversacks, and everything else that would help lighten their horses, so that they would take them out of reach of Yankee sabres …
From the beginning of the war Confederate cavalrymen had been called upon to make the most strenuous exertions, in the most unfavourable of circumstances. Colonel T.T. Munford recalled his experiences in the Shenandoah Valley, May-June, 1862:
The roads macadamized and the cavalry unprovided with horseshoes, and being compelled to subsist mostly on young grass without salt, I found my command in a most deplorable condition.
Lack of horseshoes would be the bane of Southern cavalry, crippling in more ways than one. During the Gettysburg campaign of July 1863, when reconnaissance was vital, Robert E. Lee noted that ‘for want of [horseshoes] nearly half our cavalry is unserviceable’.
Had it not been for Lee, it is unlikely that there would have been a viable Confederate cavalry arm in the east at all by mid-1863. Writing in 1930, Charles Ramsdell noted that ‘attentive care’ towards his army’s horses was an inherent characteristic of Lee’s generalship. The securing of the Virginian grain crop for fodder was a vital objective of operations in the summer of 1862. Indeed, time and again, it was the condition of his horses that dictated Lee’s strategy. When, in early 1863, the Federals had begun preparing an offensive into Virginia, Lee was initially forced to remain immobile to preserve his horses and fodder supplies. Those who considered the horse question most closely were filled with forebodings. The Virginian politician Edmund Ruffin confided to his diary in April 1863:
It seems to me that our country & cause are now, for the first time during the war, in great peril of defeat—& not from the enemy’s arms, but from the scarcity & high prices of provisions, & the impossibility of the government feeding the horses of the army.
It was not just the cavalry horses that were suffering. The condition of both draft animals and gun teams were a constant cause of concern to Lee, and, once more, dictated his actions. Retreating into Virginia in August 1863, he wished to turn on the pursuing Federals but could not do so. As he explained to the Confederate President, Jefferson Davis, ‘nothing prevents my advancing now but the fear of killing our artillery horses. They are much reduced and the hot weather and scarce forage keeps them so’. At that time, the horses were receiving pitiful rations, 5 lbs of corn per day at most. Only when a fresh crop had been harvested in the autumn could Lee move against Union forces.
Initially, sick and infirm horses had been put to pasture and left to recover or die with little attention from veterinarians. Late in 1863 a number of ‘horse infirmaries’ were established in the South to provide more systematic care for horses and mules which might be returned to service. Yet most of the horses which arrived at these institutions were too exhausted to recover fully, or were found to be suffering from infectious diseases and had to be destroyed. The supply of fresh horses was now also close to exhaustion. The Confederacy had been loath to impress too many farm horses, knowing how dependent the war effort was on agriculture. Federal raiders had no such scruples. By June 1864, in excess of 20,000 Southern horses had been captured, enough to have resupplied the Army of Northern Virginia’s artillery and transport teams for fifteen months. As he contemplated the Federal offensive of summer 1864, Lee told Davis that ‘upon obtaining an increase of our supply of horses depends the issue of the campaign …’
Schemes to get mules from Mexico and horses from Texas (across the Federal-controlled Mississippi) and the occupied areas of west Virginia came to naught. The fighting of summer and early autumn 1864 left Virginia devastated. Whatever was not consumed by the rival armies was simply destroyed, Sheridan’s cavalry burning crops in the fields. Lacking cavalry to protect his flanks, Lee manoeuvred at peril and short of gun-teams to move batteries, much of his artillery was rendered immobile. So his soldiers ‘dug-in’. Inevitably, the entrenched Confederate forces defending Richmond and Petersburg were besieged. By March 1865, unable to feed men or animals, Lee acknowledged that ‘our present lines must be abandoned’. Lee had no equivalent mounted force to counter the combination of mobility and fighting power of Sheridan’s Cavalry Corps, which pursued him. This would prove decisive. As he retreated westwards his route was blocked again and again by Sheridan’s troopers. Lee was finally cornered and forced to capitulate at Appomattox Court House on April 9th, 1865.
For the horses, the war was an ordeal to the end. It is impossible to say for certain how many perished during the course of the war. Taking Halleck’s calculations as a starting point it is not implausible to suggest that equine deaths exceeded the human toll of 620,000.
The weary survivors mostly returned to farm work. A few, the chargers who had gained a sort of celebrity status by carrying famous men into battle, enjoyed gentler retirements. Robert E. Lee’s grey ‘Traveler’ became ‘the pet of the countryside’ around Lexington, Virginia, and received gifts from as far afield as England. Ulysses Grant’s three mounts lived out their lives in his possession. ‘Egypt’ and ‘Cincinnati’ were fine, well-bred horses, gifts from admirers in Illinois and Missouri. Grant’s third mount was a little black pony, looted from a plantation belonging to the brother of the Confederate president and cheekily renamed ‘Jeff Davis’. His easy-going gait made him a favourite of Grant for patrolling, although he forbore to ride the pony in battle. Most remarkable of the survivors, perhaps, was General George Meade’s battle-scarred bay ‘Baldy’. Twice wounded at 1st Bull Run, left for dead at Antietam and wounded again at Gettysburg, Baldy outlived his master and followed the hearse at Meade’s funeral in 1872.
The conduct of war had long depended on, at best, indifference to the well-being of horses, at worst, systematic cruelty as they were overloaded, overworked, under-fed and exposed to the hazards of battle and the extremes of climate. In the name of military necessity, horses were expendable. In that regard there was nothing modern about America’s Civil War.