How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall
that this group ever inaugurated its well-intentioned program.11
The association’s charter clearly noted that the war had made necessary the formation of this group, stating: “The injurious effects of the late war have been most seriously felt by those who have been engaged in the breeding and raising of horse stock.” Alexander’s Woodburn had not been the only farm raided. General Abe Buford, Alexander’s neighbor, had been another breeder hard-hit with impressments by the armies and theft by outlaws. “Most of the blood stock belonging to General Buford were [sic] lost and sacrificed in ‘63 and ‘64,” reads one report.12
In addition to the raids on Woodburn Farm and the Buford place, the stables of Alexander Keene Richards, Willa Viley, John Clay, Major Barak Thomas, and many others suffered devastation. Likewise, so did two large stables owned by a Union sympathizer, James A. Grinstead, that were located at the Kentucky Association track. The Confederate raider John Hunt Morgan and his men set fire to those stables. Not far from the racecourse, at Ashland, the late Henry Clay’s estate where his son, John Clay, had raised the horse Kentucky, Morgan and his men took Thoroughbreds valued at an estimated $25,000. Among these was the highly prized mare named Skedaddle. If Clay had not chosen to take Kentucky northeast to sell in 1863, he might have lost this colt as well. John Hervey, in his history of racing, wrote: “The idea that Kentucky did not suffer more than negligible damage to her thoroughbred interests by the war is … wholly erroneous. Its ravages, of which those committed by [General John Hunt] Morgan were the most terrible, affected her best blood and finest individuals.”13
As Kentucky’s horse breeders began to regroup and rebuild, they faced problems different from those experienced farther south in Tennessee. In Tennessee, the gentry class of landowners relied on its own resources to become a self-sufficient breeding business once more. Kentuckians, on the other hand, were intent on attracting outside capital investment to their business of breeding and raising horses. The Kentucky idea held considerable potential for expansion but, from the start, proved difficult to carry out. Northern capitalists viewed investment in Kentucky after the war as highly problematic. Kentucky’s expanding reputation for violence and lawlessness led to the fear that bloodstock, farm property, and, most of all, people were unsafe in central Kentucky. Southern states on the whole had quickly acquired a notorious reputation for lawlessness after the war, but newspapers in the Northeast frequently singled out Kentucky. One Northerner stated that in no way could New Yorkers “live and safely conduct business in any section of the South.”14
The other problem was the farm labor pool, which evaporated in the months following the war’s end. Without a labor pool, the farms could not function. The farm labor pool before the war had consisted largely of slaves. Even before the war had ended, slaves had begun to enlist in the U.S. Army or flee to army camps, hoping to receive protection. After the war, freedmen fled in great numbers to Lexington and Louisville, seeking employment as well as safety from the violence they soon began to realize would be their likely fate in the rural areas. The Ku Klux Klan or vigilantes assuming the name of the Klan were terrorizing and killing black folk throughout the Bluegrass countryside. This environment could hardly have appealed to any capitalists from outside the state who might have considered locating a breeding farm in central Kentucky or, at the very least, boarding their bloodstock there.
Adding to the labor problem was the confusion over slavery and freedom: where did one end in Kentucky and the other start? The status of slaves as freedmen remained uncertain in this border state because Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had freed only those slaves in rebel states. Slaveholding Kentucky had not gone through the war as a rebel state. Kentucky had remained loyal to the United States after a brief period of neutrality, sending 50,000 Kentuckians into the Union army. Another 25,000 Kentuckians had chosen to enlist in the Confederate army, leading to some confusion about which side Kentucky actually supported. The real story about the war from the perspective of Kentuckians, however, was the number of men who did not enlist in either army. A total of 187,000 Kentuckians chose to stay out of the war, as John Clay had. They simply stayed at home. As William W. Freehling suggests, those numbers told much about the way Kentuckians essentially regarded the war. “Those figures placed Kentucky last among southern states in percentage of whites who fought for the Confederacy and first in percentage of whites who fought for no one,” Freehling writes. Small wonder, then, that many remained confused about the status of slavery during and after the fighting since government policy concerning slaves was turning out to be different in Kentucky than in the South.15
To complicate matters, some 23,000 black Kentuckians had joined the Union army late in the war, on a promise from the U.S. government that they would be granted freedom for themselves and their families. But slavery itself was not outlawed in Kentucky with the close of the war. That would not occur until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865—an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that Kentucky’s legislature actually refused to ratify. Many Kentuckians who had owned slaves gave them up only reluctantly and with a great amount of resentment toward the federal government. Numbers of slave owners also refused to honor the federal law that granted freedom to black soldiers who had enlisted with the Union army. “Whatever their status, Kentucky’s black population received contradictory advice,” writes Marion B. Lucas. “Federal officials proclaimed their freedom; slaveholders considered them fugitives.” The way slavery finally ended in Kentucky was with the Thirteenth Amendment becoming law and federal troops making sure the law was enforced. As a result, whites took out their anger on blacks, many of whom fled for the cities or the North. The turmoil resulting from this situation left the farms without much of a labor force to work the fields or tend to bloodstock and livestock.16
With the status of former slaves in flux, the labor pool largely vanished on the farms and at the racecourse. A new racing periodical, Turf, Field and Farm, published in New York, recognized this problem during its first month of publication in August 1865, noting: “We fear the unsettled condition of labor in that state will interfere to a great extent with trainers in getting the right kind of hands for stable purposes.” The import of this statement, coming from a periodical published by two Kentuckians named Sanders and Benjamin Bruce, whose financial backing came from Woodburn Farm, cannot be underestimated. It appeared as though Kentuckians were sending up a white flag on the labor crisis. “Prewar production capacity was only slowly reestablished,” according to Peter Smith and Karl Raitz.17
White landowners throughout the South exacerbated the labor crisis by harassing freedmen; border-state Kentucky also experienced this trend. “Whites were obsessed with subordinating the newly freed blacks, and looming racial turmoil would make southern labor unproductive and unreliable,” Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace write in their history of New York.18
Two months after its inaugural issue, in what was undoubtedly a public relations ploy, Turf, Field and Farm attempted to paint the labor situation in a more positive light. It reprinted an article published in the Louisville Journal that attempted to point out Kentucky’s “many advantages to the Northerner proposing to settle in the South.” The article extolled “the celebrated ‘blue-grass region’” of the state and its agricultural advantages for beef cattle, sheep, and horses, noting that “the flesh of the beef cattle and the sheep of that region possess an exquisite flavor and tenderness unknown to the leathery meats of other States.” As mentioned, the Journal agreed with the well-received belief concerning the superiority of Bluegrass soil, ascribing its advantages to the “blue limestone” underlying the region.19
The article also argued against the possibility of a protracted labor problem by predicting a bright future for free labor somewhere in Kentucky’s future, anticipating “those 100,000 slaves who yet remain in bondage, liberated, and the trained labor and skill