How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall
could afford to spend whatever he wished to acquire any horse he wanted, but in this case he did not have to spend a fortune. He just spent more than most men could afford.
Some New Yorkers had amassed fabulous fortunes: the retailer Alexander T. Stewart had made more than $1 million during the year 1863. Seventy-nine residents of New York earned more than $100,000 that same year. Two years previously, when the Civil War had begun, the estimated number of millionaires residing in New York was 115. The rich were growing richer, with a growing number of them turning to horse racing for sport.43
Kentucky’s owners, like other New Yorkers entering Thoroughbred racing, found themselves in good company with Belmont in the sport. Belmont was a smoothly polished urbane sort who exemplified elite society, showing the way to others in his class with the fascination he had developed for fast horses. Paradoxically, he was a self-made man. He began his working years sweeping floors in Germany for the moneylending Rothschilds financial empire and had advanced to a position as its American representative. He also owned his own bank. As a society leader, he had no peer. New Yorkers regarded him as the symbolic ruler of Fifth Avenue, and rightly so. He had shown so many of them how to live and enjoy the good life.
Thoroughbred racing at Jerome Park, which opened in 1866, drew New York society leaders as well as Bluegrass horsemen, who brought their stables to the Northeast. Jerome Park, with August Belmont serving as its first president, almost overnight became the leading racecourse in the United States. This new racecourse assumed the preeminent position in the sport, which Southern racecourses, in particular the Metairie track in New Orleans, had held before the Civil War. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library.)
Leonard Jerome, a lawyer like Travers and also a financial wizard on Wall Street, was soon to become the founder of several racetracks in the Northeast. To his dismay, he had missed the inaugural meet of Saratoga racing in 1863 because he was otherwise occupied, manning a Gatling gun from a window of the building housing the New York Times. He was a major stockholder in the newspaper and was intent on protecting his investment. To that end, he had aimed his gun on the masses, many of them Irish, who were rampaging through the streets in riots that broke out in 1863 over the army draft. Jerome made up for lost time, however, and was in attendance at Saratoga in 1864 and 1865.
In 1865, Jerome changed American racing forever. That year he founded the American Jockey Club, and, by 1866, the club opened the most modern, lavish, and elite racetrack yet seen in North America. The track was situated northeast of the city in Westchester County on the old Bathgate estate. The American Jockey Club members, quite an exclusive set, named their racecourse Jerome Park. Belmont served as the initial president. Jerome, like the others, grew only wealthier. He invested in railway companies and enjoyed yachting with William K. Vanderbilt. He also partnered with Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt in railroad deals. Much later, following his death in 1891, he gained additional status as the grandfather of Sir Winston Churchill.44
Jerome’s friend Cornelius Vanderbilt did not participate in Thoroughbred racing, favoring instead the trotting matches that also were popular at this time. This had not stopped the commodore from throwing his considerable support behind Travers and others in founding the Saratoga Racing Association. He patronized racing and the other gambling activities of the Saratoga summerfest, as did multimillionaires like William B. Astor, said to be the richest man in the world with his fortune of $61 million. With Astor, the commodore, and Jerome joining Travers, Hunter, and Osgood at Saratoga Springs during summer, the season must have been awe inspiring, one multimillionaire after another strolling down the village avenues.45
Alexander, the owner of Asteroid, also owned a sizable fortune. Contemporary accounts identified him as the second-wealthiest man in Kentucky, behind his close friend and fellow horse breeder Alexander Keene Richards of Georgetown in Scott County, Kentucky. But that was before the war; Alexander might have surpassed him. The friendship between these two men was such that they oversaw the care of each other’s slaves and horses when necessity arose. Unlike Kentucky’s owners, Alexander had passed nearly all his life in rural regions. Yet he was anything but a country rube.
He had graduated from Trinity College at Cambridge University in England after spending much of his youth on his uncle’s Airdrie estate in Scotland. In fact, Alexander was quite the man of the world. He had inherited his uncle’s title and wealth, which included a highly productive mining and refining operation in Scotland called the Airdrie Iron Works. Alexander returned to the United States to live in 1849, bringing with him expansive ideas gleaned from his travels in Europe: visions of the way an ideal livestock breeding operation should be designed, grounded in the notion that ideas promulgated in England or on the European continent were the goals that Americans should strive for. He bought up portions of the family’s Woodburn Farm that had been divided among his siblings on their father’s death. He set about planning and designing the layout of a farm that his contemporaries began to view not only as mammoth but also as a model that they would be wise to copy. “The breeding establishment at Woodburn is modeled on the most approved English plan,” the Kentucky Gazette noted in 1866 with an approving nod. The stables for horses and cattle were vast and made of cut stone; the dairy houses, also built of cut stone, were managed by Scottish dairymaids.46
Robert Aitcheson Alexander, the owner of Woodburn Farm in Woodford County, Kentucky, was a sportsman, an agriculturist, and a visionary who stood the famed sire Lexington at stud. He also was recognized for the premier trotting horses he bred and stood at stud. His contributions to the progress of the sport were immeasurable. (Courtesy of Woodburn Farm.)
New Yorkers sometimes mistook Alexander for an Englishman, an understandable error since Kentuckians frequently called him Lord Alexander; it is even possible that he spoke with a slight British accent after spending his youth in Scotland and England. New Yorkers clearly saw him as set apart from the average person traveling up from Kentucky, for Kentuckians still bore somewhat of a frontier appearance in the minds of Easterners. Illustrative of this was one story told from the racecourse after reporters observed Alexander kneeling so that women standing behind him could have a better view of the track. One reporter remarked how this expression of good manners surely must be English. Another corrected him, writing: “[Alexander] was born in Woodford County, Kentucky, and lives on the home place of his father.” Yet he did seem more English and less like a Kentuckian, the latter a type that Harper’s magazine had characterized as a knife-wielding frontiersman.47
In manners, wealth, and social customs, Alexander assuredly came from the upper class. His father, Robert Alexander, was a native of Scotland who had received his education in France and become acquainted with Benjamin Franklin, at that time serving as the U.S. ambassador to France. The senior Alexander followed Franklin to the United States, later moved to Kentucky, acquired the property he named Woodburn, and became president of the Bank of Kentucky in Frankfort. He built a log cabin on Woodburn but never lived on the farm. The son who took up residency at Woodburn was Lord Robert Aitcheson Alexander, following his college years spent in the British Isles. He moved into the log house his father had built, expanding it to a sizable residence while maintaining the log porch exterior at one end.48
While some thought him English in his manners, Alexander also evoked popular notions of the archetypal plantation owner. His vast Woodburn Farm was sufficiently large, between three and four thousand acres, to pose the picture of a small plantation to those Northern writers who visited before and after the Civil War. Taking full advantage of the slave labor available in Kentucky, the younger Alexander developed his vast livestock cattle and horse-breeding operation into a model farming enterprise renowned throughout the United States prior to the Civil War. He owned several excellent trotting and Thoroughbred stallions, including Lexington, sire