The Battle of Gettysburg was among the bloodiest battles of the Civil War, with about 23,000 Federal soldiers and 28,000 Confederate soldiers dying there.
But soldiers were not the only casualties. Some historians believe as many as 3,000 horses also were killed.
Superior Southern Cavalrymen
During the 19th century, United States cavalry troops usually took their own horses to war. Historians note that if superior numbers of horses had been enough to win the war, the Federal states would have won easily and early. When the war began, Federal states held about 3.4 million horses. The Confederacy held only 1.7 million.
However, Southern riders and horses were thought to be superior. Young Southerners rode more miles and more often than urban northerners. Horse racing was more popular in the South, leading to better breeding. Wealthy Southerners had more pleasure horses, free to go to war.
Seizing the Horses of War
In the North, few wanted to take their plow horses to war, and volunteered for the infantry instead. It is not surprising, then, that the Federal states had only six cavalry regiments at the start of the war. By the end of 1861, the Federal states had 82 volunteer cavalry regiments, but Federal horses were still thought to be inferior to Southern mounts. However, in both armies, if a cavalryman’s horse was injured or killed, he would be sent to seize one from a nearby farm. Because the early fighting was in the South, Federal troops seized horses as remounts from the Confederacy quite often, partly alleviating lack of mounts, if not alleviating the distress of those mounts.
Charles Francis Adams, a Federal horsemaster, noted that the regular pace of the cavalry riding to battle was four miles an hour, a pace that was “ ‘killing to horses’.” Covering only forty miles was nearly a fifteen hours’ march. On these marches, the cavalry soldiers fared quite well. After all, they were riding, not walking.
The Sad Plight of the Cavalry Horse
Horses, on the other hand, suffered terribly. Adams’ wrote to his mother:
Imagine a horse with his withers swollen to three times the natural size, and with a volcanic, running sore pouring matter down each side, and you have a case with which every cavalry officer is daily called upon to deal, and you imagine a horse which has still to be ridden until he lays down in sheer suffering under the saddle.
The horses got no hay on their forced marches, ate only about eight pounds of grain when a normal ration would be ten pounds, and drank from streams muddied by their very passage, and often bloody. Adams was not surprised at the result. Virginia, he wrote, was burdened with “the stench of dead horses, federal and confederate.”
The Worst Battle for Horses
The stench was not so bad north of the Mason-Dixon line. Even during his invasion of Pennsylvania in 1863, Gen. Robert E. Lee’s troops had little chance to seize horses. The march to battle at Gettysburg was not long enough, and the farms not rich enough, to provide very many new mounts. Horse-rich plantations did not exist in central Maryland or Southern Pennsylvania. Still, with 3,000 horses killed in that single battle, the vision of dead horses must have contributed greatly to the horror that was Gettysburg, a horror today commemorated by a fascinating re-enactor HD program, The Horses of Gettysburg, recently shown on Detroit Public Television.
Sources
About the Cavalry Horse. Excerpt of a letter from Charles Francis Adams to his mother, written May 12, 1863, and maintained by the 17th PA Volunteer Cavalry Co.
Grace, Deborah. (2000) The Horse in the Civil War. Reilly's Battery Website
Detroit Public TV History page. Horses of Gettysburg.
