STONEWALL JACKSON’S HORSE.

[Retrieved and transcribed by Nanci Headley Kotowski

from the January 4, 1893, issue of Parkersburg Daily State Journal, Parkersburg, WV]

Among the stores captured at Harper’s Ferry, writes Mrs. Jackson in her “Life of Stonewall Jackson,” not the least valuable was a train of cars on the Baltimore and Ohio railroad, bound for Washington, and loaded with horses for the government. This was a lawful prize and was at once turned over to the Confederate army, with the exception of two horses which General Jackson purchased. Thinking that hostilities would soon be over, he selected the smaller of the two—a pretty sorrel—as a present for his wife.

General Jackson had several other horses, but preferred the little sorrel to them all, finding his gait, as he expressed it, “as easy as the rocking of a cradle.” He rode this horse in nearly every battle in which he was engaged.

Fancy, as the sorrel was named, seemed almost indefatigable. One reason perhaps was that he always lay down when the command halted for a rest. His master made a pet of him, and often fed him with apples from his own hand.

After being lost for a time upon the fall of General Jackson at Chancellorsville, the horse was found by a Confederate soldier and kindly sent to the Jackson family in North Carolina. He lived many years in Lincoln county, on the farm of Dr. Morrison, father-in-law of the general.

One of the young Morrisons used to say that Old Fancy, as he was always called on the farm, “had more sense than any horse he ever saw.”

He could make as good use of his mouth in lifting latches and letting down bars as a man could with his hands. One of his habits was to let himself out of his stable, and then go deliberately to the doors of all the other horses and mules, liberate each in turn, and then march off to the grain fields with them all behind him—like a soldier leading his command.

But he was such a pet that his misdemeanors passed for cleverness. He was often taken to county fairs, where he was an object of as much interest as one of the old heroes of the war.

He was more than thirty years of age when he died, in 1886, at the Soldiers’ home in Richmond. A stuffed effigy of this old warhorse may still be seen in a glass case in the library of the home.