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The Overlooked

www.earthintransition.org

Originally aired on January 03, 1997 - In part 123 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson discusses the unfortunate plight of horses and mules during the conflict. They were, he says, the first target in battle and they always had high combat losses. 

#123 – Unsung Heroes

Many centuries ago, a philosopher observed that a horse was “the noblest conquest man has ever made”. From the beginning of recorded time, horses have been an indispensable part of life in Europe and Asia. The first horses arrived in Virginia in 1610, and the growth of tobacco-farming thereafter led to a high demand for horse flesh.

A major evolutionary development occurred in the 1700s. The king of Spain presented a jackass to George Washington, who crossbred it with some mares. The result was the first American mule.

With the coming of civil war in 1861, the need for horses and mules became acute. Tens of thousands of animals went into military service – which brings us to a misconception that Hollywood has perpetuated for decades. Movies always show mounted warriors staging an attack; the defenders open fir; riders topple to the ground while horses gallop away unhurt.

In reality, the opposite was the case. Horses were the first target in battle. Kill the animals, the riders become dismounted, and the fighting continues with both sides on the same level. In similar fashion, shoot or bayonet the artillery horses and the other side’s cannon become immobilized.

Such acts were violent and unfeeling, but no one has ever said that war was nice.

The sheer agony of horses in the Civil War is seldom mentioned because it was so commonplace. In January, 1862, General “Stonewall” Jackson embarked on a campaign west of Winchester. The march was through snow, sleet, and ice. A Lexington gunner observed one morning: “Many of us will never forget the sad plight of our horses…They had fallen during the night march so often, and had been shoved by the carriages so, that…blood had frozen over their wounds. One poor horse had both knees cut, and icicles of blood extended…to the ground.”

In late winter, 1863, another Virginia cannoneer wrote from near Fredericksburg: “To feed our horses here is the chief difficulty; they are in a bad way;…dying in numbers.”

Military operations resumed in the spring. A captured Union officer described one of Lee’s supply trains this way: “Their artillery horses are poor, starved frames of beasts (and) look like a congregation of all the crippled California emigrant trains that ever escaped…rampaging Comanche Indians.”

The battle of Gettysburg took a heavy toll on army animals. An artillery commander in A. P. Hill’s Third Corps reported that “the horses of the command suffered severely for the want of shoes”. Four months after that engagement, when Mr. Lincoln came to Gettysburg to help dedicate a soldier-cemetery, hundreds of dead horses still lay unburied on the battlefield.

Combat losses among horses were always high. A New York battery of six guns had 31 horses killed at the battle of Seven Pines. Later that year at Fredericksburg, the same unit lost 30 horses in the action.

The situation never got better. On Lee’s retreat to Appomattox in April, 1865, a Richmond gunner noted: “The poor horses, in bad condition, were giving out.” Soon, “the teams were so broken down by hard marching and want of rest” that they and much of the equipment were abandoned.

Some 700,000 men lost their lives in the Civil War. More than 1 ½ million horses and mules died from wounds, sickness, and exhaustion. It can honestly be said that not one animal emerged from the war in better condition than when it entered the conflict. Horses served, and they suffered, in silence; but they were not always forgotten. That explains why a soldier once declared: “God forbid that I should go to any heaven in which three are no horses.”