In May 1863, the Federal brigade of Colonel John T. Wilder swept the country east and north of Murfreesboro, Tenn. Northern troops had been in the area for months, yet in five days the brigade took another 196 horses from the people of the region, despite attempts to hide the horses in woods, ravines and caves. One horse was found tied to a bedpost in a lady’s back parlor.

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Proper and adequate care of artillery horses was essential. If they were weakened by neglect, they could not long survive the rigors of active campaigning. Good commanders were aware of this and issued orders aimed at improving the animals’ care.

On October 1, 1862, shortly after the Antietam campaign, Robert E. Lee issued Order No. 115, addressing the care to be given to all horses of the army and fixing responsibility upon specific officers for the care of the horses in the artillery reserve. Those guilty of neglect of battery horses were to be punished. No artillery horses were to be ridden except by designated artillerymen. The chief of artillery was empowered to arrest and bring to trial any man using a horse other than in battery service.

Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman, while still a divisional commander, issued a similar order to the artillery officers attached to his division. After outlining the many tasks to be performed when a battery came to a halt during a march, Sherman directed that “every opportunity at a halt during a march should be taken advantage of to cut grass, wheat, or oats and extraordinary care be taken of the horses upon which everything depends.”

Feeding, of course, was a critical part of the horses’ care. The daily ration prescribed for an artillery horse was 14 pounds of hay and 12 pounds of grain, usually oats, corn or barley. The amount of grain and hay needed by any particular battery depended on the number of horses that battery had at the time. It varied almost from day to day, but it was always enormous. The horses of the battery had to be fed each day, whether the battery moved or not. During the Civil War, an artillery battery might sit in the same place for weeks at a time, and yet consume thousands of pounds of hay and grain each day.

Artillery horses represented only a small number of the animals that had to be fed by the military. Besides the horses with the artillery, horses used by the cavalry, and horses and mules used to pull supply wagons and ambulances, there were also thousands of saddle horses carrying officers and couriers. Brigadier General Stewart Van Vliet, chief quartermaster of the Army of the Potomac during its campaign on the Virginia Peninsula in 1862, reported that 800,000 pounds of forage and grain were needed daily to feed the horses and mules. Since a wagon ordinarily carried 1 ton, the animals’ daily food allowance required 400 wagonloads each day.

The prescribed rations were not always available. Sometimes, especially as the war went on and areas were picked clean by the opposing armies, severe shortages of grain and hay developed. At other times, there was available grain and hay but they could not be delivered to the batteries needing them. The artillery horses of the Union V Corps subsisted on a daily ration of five pounds of grain as Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant pushed south in May 1864. The meager rations were the result of a shortage of wagons, not a lack of grain. After the artillery wagons had delivered hay and grain to the batteries, infantry units seized them and used them as makeshift ambulances to carry the thousands of wounded back from the Wilderness and Spotsylvania.

Pasturage was sometimes available, but green grass and field plants were not efficient foods. Eighty pounds of pasturage was needed to match the nutritional value of 26 pounds of dry hay and grain, the prescribed daily ration. In addition, green pasturage increased the likelihood that a horse might founder. Nevertheless, pasturage was used, either as a supplement to the regular ration or as the primary source of nutrition for short periods, if hay and grain were not available.

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