The Civil War is not normally called a horse's war, but it most certainly was: cavalry and artillery horses, draft and pack horses and mules, approximately one million on the Union side alone. The seat of war was also the lap of America's horse culture – or, rather, cultures, north and south.
As the historian David Hackett Fischer points out, the First Families of Virginia, the fountain of Southern culture, were descendants of aristocracy and gentry â?? Armisteads, Lees, Randolphs, Washingtons â?? who largely emigrated from southwest England. This rural, manorial region supported King Charles I during the English Civil War, and owned slaves until the early Middle Ages. At least among the officers and Southern gentry, horses were signs of elite power, a symbolism that translated onto the American battlefield and, after the war, the statuary pedestals of countless Southern town squares.
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