The Cavalry Horse

The death of Barbaro yesterday reminded me yesterday of just how fragile horses are. For all of their size and strength, horses are delicate, fragile beasts. The truth is that they were never intended to tolerate the abuse that we humans so often subject them to. And unless properly fed, watered, and cared for, they will break down.

Capt. Charles Francis Adams served in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry. The grandson of one U. S. President, and the great-grandson of another, Adams possessed the family’s gift for the written word. The winter of 1863 was an especially harsh one. Adams had a chance to observe the torment of his unit’s mounts as they suffered alongside their masters:

My tent is logged up, I have a good fire-place, a pretty complete outfit and am as comfortable as I have any wish to be; but I feel for my men and dare not go and look at my horses. I know just how they look, as they huddle together at the picket-ropes and turn their shivering croups to this pelting north-easter. There they stand without shelter, fetlock deep in slush and mud, without a blanket among them, and there they must stand–poor beasts–and all I can do for them is to give them all the food I can, and that little enough. Of oats there is a sufficiency and the horses have twelve quarts a day; but hay is scant, and it is only by luck that we have a few bales just now when most we need them. I have them fed four times a day–at morning, noon, night and midnight–and if they have enough to eat, they do wonderfully well, but it comes hard on them to have to sustain hunger, as well as cold and wet. It is all over, however, with any horse that begins to fail, for after a few days he either dies at the rope, or else glanders set in and he is led out and shot. I lose in this way two or three horses per week.

Charles Francis Adams to his father, January 28, 1863. Some 1.5 million horses are estimated to have died in the American Civil War.

The Battle of Monroe’s Crossroads was fought near Fayetteville, North Carolina on March 10, 1865. Pvt. William F. Sewell of the 5th Georgia Cavalry received a mortal wound in that harsh fighting. While the Battle of Bentonville raged on March 19, local blacks ventured out onto the Monroe’s Crossroads battlefield. They found Sewell’s unburied body lying on the bank of a creek where he fell and died on March 10. His large black horse, still saddled and and still carrying all of its accouterments, grazed nearby, faithfully waiting for his master to awaken and for them to get back to work. That black horse loyally stood by its dead master for nine long days.

The National Sporting Library in Middleburg, Virginia–the heart of modern Virginia horse country–commissioned a monument to the Civil War cavalry horse. Rather than portray a hale and hearty horse, the monument shows an exhausted, malnourished cavalry horse, still faithful and still serving, even though it was clearly near the end of its rope. The scabbard to his master’s saber is empty; we don’t know what happened to his master. The monument accurately depicts the condition of Civil War cavalry horses, and shows the frightful toll that endless hours of marching and picketing took on those proud beasts.

Although Barbaro was a pampered and beloved thoroughbred, he demonstrated the same fighting spirit as those faithful cavalry horses, and I admire him. He proved that the mark of a champion is not necessarily won-lost record, but rather heart and courage. In demonstrating the heart and courage of a champion, he proved himself a worthy heir to the cavalry horses who sacrificed so much in the Civil War.