Revisited Myth # 44: The position of a horse’s legs on an equestrian statue tells the fate of the rider.

This persistent myth claims that there is a code in the positioning of the horses legs in equestrian statues telling the fate of the rider. Supposedly, if one hoof is raised, the rider was wounded in battle. It two hooves are raised, he died in battle. If all four hooves are on the ground, he survived the battle/war. It isn’t true, but what makes it so amusing is that the myth persists, even though anyone can look around at the statues and see that there is no relationship to the “code.” Snopes has the best lengthy rebuttal at http://www.snopes.com/military/statue.asp, but I’ll summarize here.

In Washington, D.C., the American city with more statues than any other, one third of the equestrian statues follow the code. Seeing as how there are three possibilities, it seems that chance is hard at work. In Gettysburg, another location full of statues, most of the horses actually do follow the code, but not all. (General Longstreet wasn’t wounded in that battle but his horse has one leg raised.)

General Andrew Jackson, who did not die at the Battle of New Orleans but lived to become president.

How did this myth get started? My opinion is that it started at Gettysburg where most of the statues actually do conform, if coincidentally, to the “code.” If you were to look at three or four statues and find the pattern held true, you might conclude all the rest did too. And we are all suckers for any sort of “secret code,” so that naturally sticks in our minds.

The myth lives on in another format in Richmond, Virginia, along Monument Avenue where Confederate heroes are said to face north if they died in the war and south if they lived through it. Generals Lee and Jackson do fit the formula, but the others (Stuart, Davis, and Maury) face east, which means . . . exactly what? (Actually, if you confined the statement to Confederate generals, leaving out Davis and Maury, and used the direction that their horses faced rather than their riders, the myth would hold true for those three instances, but that’s getting a bit elaborate.)

The equestrian statues code seems to be an American manifestation of the English effigies-of-knights code, which is at least as old as the nineteenth century. Supposedly, the position of the legs of the knights on their tombs indicates whether or not they went on Crusade. An English historian of the 1920s tried to debunk this by pointing out many examples where this was clearly wrong. We can all feel his pain as he wrote in 1923, “Surely it is time that the imaginary connection between cross-legged effigies and the Crusades should be exploded, and yet how rampant is that fiction in certain places, and how constantly it has to be contradicted!” No rest for the weary historian . . .