"ACW General's Horses Colors Reference" Topic

Well, I tried looking them up a couple ways. Has anybody already correlated to tons of research it would take to get this info?

Not that I've seen. But it's usually not too bad if you look for a particular general, and he had a favorite horse. Traveler or Little Sorrel, for instance.

Not always the case. When Longstreet's Corps went west, they brought NO horses with them. Even the division commanders were on foot for Chickamauga, and Longstreet took what they could scrounge up. Hard to believe they couldn't have brought a dozen animals with them if Longstreet had insisted. And evidently Grant's primary concern was that it be a big horse, Grant himself being somewhat vertically challenged.

The big ACW commanders usually had a personal uniform style, but I wouldn't bet on them always riding the same horse. The harder it is to find a reference to a particular horse, the more likely it is there wasn't one.

Finding names of the more prominent Officer's mounts is pretty easy. Lee also had Lucy Long and a mount simply known as The Roan. Grant has Cincinnati and Jeff Davis as well as Fox and Kangaroo. Meade rode Old Baldy until 1864. Sherman rode Jack, Sheridan Rienzi, renamed Winchester after Cedar Creek. Hancock's mount was a deep black horse, Chamberlain's mount was named Charlemagne. Longstreet's horse was Hero, after The Wilderness Lee gave him a horse named Fly by Night. Richard Gannett's horse, Redeye, was reputed to be the most expensive horse in the First Corps. J.E.B. Stuart rode a mount named Virginia during Gettysburg.

Finding the names of horses is easy, physical descriptions though can be harder.

Don Troiani has been making notes of this topic for years in his reading on the Civil War. If a general you are interested in has been included in a painting Don did, you can probably rely on it being accurate, or unknown.

But as noted above, most general officers had more than one horse at a time.

Tom

If you are going to represent Little Sorrel, I suggest that you get a horse from a scale smaller than the rider (eg 15mm rider on 10mm horse). I discovered when I went to the VMI museum that they weren't overjoyed at me referring to it as a moth-eaten pygmy nag.