How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall
this iconography helps draw tourism and other business. The physical landscape that marks central Kentucky as horse country includes the multitude of manicured farms, such as Calumet, that exist close to the city and can be seen without having to travel too far from downtown Lexington. The regional iconography extends to the miles of board fences signifying horses, the architecturally astounding horse barns, and the emerald-green pastures populated with bloodstock that is valued in the multimillions of dollars. As for the economic impact, earnings from horse farms ripple through the regional and state economy in numerous directions, ranging from veterinary services and hay and feed suppliers to grocery stores, office supply companies, automobile dealerships, insurance companies, and shopping malls, bringing a better lifestyle to residents regardless of whether they are directly involved in the horse economy. If the story behind the making of Kentucky’s horse business provides a usable past, it is the cautionary tale of how integral this business remains to the state’s economy—and how, without protection, it could easily be snatched away by other states eager to grab the wealth.
The overarching theme behind this struggle to build a Kentucky horse industry was the realization among the region’s horsemen that they could not begin to do so without luring the big money from outside capitalists into central Kentucky. And it is my contention in this book that the money began to flow into Bluegrass Kentucky only after both locals and outsiders embraced a popular plantation myth that gave the region a neo-Southern identity. Ironically, this occurred some thirty-five to forty years after the end of the Civil War and the disappearance of the Old South. Bluegrass Kentucky’s new identity had fortunate economic consequences, as it negated the region’s notorious reputation for violence and lawlessness, thus bringing business to horse country. But, at the same time, this altered identity excluded African Americans from participation in the new horse industry. The new identity also rewrote the region’s history, for it ignored the role the commonwealth had played as a loyal part of the United States during the Civil War. A mistaken notion grew that Kentucky had remained neutral throughout the war.
The neo-Southern image was a cleverly crafted picture, situating the Bluegrass within an Eden of smoothly operating plantations where the horses ran fast, the living seemed ideal, and all African Americans occupied servile positions of offering juleps to the colonels as the white folk relaxed in the shade of columned mansions. This picture grew in direct contrast to the highly visible sphere that blacks had occupied as star athletes of the sport, some, like the jockey Isaac Murphy, becoming wealthy in the generation following freedom.
“Citizens of the United States according to Popular Impressions.” Although highly offensive to modern sensibilities, this illustration depicts stereotypes associated in 1867 with a variety of Americans. The popular image of Kentuckians retained the old notions of the Western frontier: a wild, uncivilized character in coonskin cap with a hunting knife in one hand and a recently taken scalp in the other. Bluegrass Kentucky would not begin to acquire its civilized and highly polished Southern identity until decades later. (Harper’s Weekly, January 12, 1867, 29.)
Today, some persons might argue that, as a slaveholding state, Kentucky shared a common ideology and common characteristics with the seceded South even if it had remained loyal to the United States. Commonly shared interests did exist; however, Americans of that era did not readily view Kentucky as Southern. Neither did all Kentuckians, who were notoriously divided on who and what they were. Kentucky was a state of multiple regions, each with its own identity. The state’s overall identity was imprecise and vague.
We’ve all heard the story that Kentucky did not secede from the Union—until after the war was over. Arguably, the state’s central region, the Bluegrass horse country, did not begin to associate with a Confederate identity until sometime after the Civil War. The historian Anne Marshall has pointed out that this turn appeared quite strange indeed, given that it brought Kentuckians to embrace the war’s losing side when in reality Kentucky had fought on the winning side. Historians are beginning to show how and why this notion expanded within the regional consciousness.3
Generations of Kentuckians once explained away this change of mind as pure resentment over atrocities that the U.S. Army committed while stationed in the commonwealth. E. Merton Coulter had promulgated this theory in his history of Kentucky after the Civil War. As a Southern man of his times—the 1920s and 1930s—he had viewed the Kentucky conundrum through a racist and neo-Confederate prism. According to his analysis, Kentuckians turned their backs on the federal government and wished, in retrospect, that they had fought on the side of the Confederate states. They made their feelings clear when they assimilated a Confederate identity after the war was over. Revisionists have effectively argued against Coulter’s thesis. But, until recently, little work had been done to explain whether and why, if Coulter’s theory no longer held up, Kentucky had actually gone over to the side that had lost.4
More recent historians of Kentucky generally have agreed that, following the war, those Kentuckians living at least in the central portion of the state—the Bluegrass—increasingly identified with the Southern states. However, they do not agree specifically on when, how, or why this turn occurred. For example, Marshall has argued that white Kentuckians came to imagine their state as Confederate by embracing racial violence, Democratic rallies, and the myth of the Lost Cause, all of which suggested a Southern and Confederate identity. Luke Edward Harlow has connected a proslavery theology in the politics of Kentuckians—following the demise of slavery—as a link to a Confederate identity. In his argument, Kentuckians reconfigured white religious understandings of slavery from before the war into a justification for Jim Crow practices long after the war.5
I argue in this study that Bluegrass horsemen joined with outsiders in assigning a Southern identity to their region early in the twentieth century, when doing so suited the nostalgic needs of white Americans generally and the economic needs of Bluegrass horsemen specifically.
Americans at the turn of the twentieth century felt beleaguered. They longed for a more wholesome and orderly lifestyle that they believed might have existed in the past. A postwar, industrialized age that people had hoped would create an easier lifestyle for all was accomplishing the opposite: creating angst because machines replaced traditional craftsmen, because large corporations devoured family businesses, and because industrialists, capitalists, and the financial speculators on Wall Street had cornered the majority of American wealth. These wealthy folk might have seemed to inhabit an ideal sphere, given their magnificent mansions, their elegant parties, and their showy stables of racehorses. But not even the very rich could escape the rising angst of the times. They lived in a world fraught with violent labor strikes directed against their industries, with race riots in their city streets, and with servant problems in the private sphere of their homes.
Small wonder, then, that the upper class as well as the middle class found an escape in novels and nonfiction idealizing the past. This past came popularly to life as an imagined antebellum Southern lifestyle. As depicted on the printed page, this antebellum world appeared as quite the opposite of the impersonal world that Americans knew at the turn of the twentieth century. The Southern cavalier ruled his plantation with a fatherly kindness that benefited both his family and his servants. The only turmoil to be found in this imagined world might have been a daughter’s love affair with a Yankee, a love affair that crossed taboo geographic lines. As it happened, the Bluegrass region of Kentucky became associated with this cavalier South thanks to a group of esteemed and highly popular writers whose work pictured central Kentucky in these terms. Outsiders and regional inhabitants alike began to picture horse country in a new and different way that brought a great economic boom to the region’s equine business. This boom turned the Bluegrass into the horse capital of the world.
Bluegrass horse and business interests had been trying since the Civil War to attract outside capital to the region. But they never were successful, largely owing to the violence and lawlessness that kept this capital away. Not until Bluegrass Kentucky evolved as Southern in the popular imagination did those outsiders with big money change their minds about buying into the region’s