How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall
Kentucky was the cradle of the American racehorse and always has been, and always will be, central to the horse racing industry. Not told was the power struggle over where the locus of horse breeding was to be in the postbellum world that engaged Kentucky with the Northeast. Resentments and rivalries spilled over from Civil War battlefields onto the racecourse in the postwar turf. The economic future of the Bluegrass lay at risk.
Kentucky’s horsemen spent a generation attempting to swing the business back their way. When they stumbled on the winning formula, they unexpectedly found willing partners among those outside capitalists who had ignored them in the past. A nationwide need among white Americans for nostalgia, working in tandem with a rising racism throughout the United States, solidified into plantation imagery as the balm to soothe the nation’s soul. The imagery settled on Bluegrass Kentucky, and only then did the horse business in the commonwealth begin to attract the big money needed to grow and support the infrastructure for an equine and tourism industry.
The Kentucky colonel, the columned mansion, and the imagined construct of Bluegrass horse country as representing the Old South cannot be underestimated in securing the Thoroughbred industry its locus in the commonwealth. What follows is the story of how the Bluegrass became Southern.
chapter ONE
The Fast Track into the Future
July 1865 found some of New York’s wealthiest citizens joining an eclectic collection of gamblers, horsemen, and social hangers-on in the daily rounds of mineral baths and Thoroughbred racing at Saratoga Springs, New York. The Civil War had ended only three months previously, and most of those visiting this Adirondack resort sought to put all lingering thoughts of the war behind them. If they had entertained any thoughts at all of this late war, they had viewed it as an opportunity to make vast sums of money or, at worst, as a period of unpleasant news reports. Saratoga visitors quickly turned their thoughts to much more pleasant prospects lying ahead. What lay most immediately ahead was a showdown between two outstanding Thoroughbreds, one called Kentucky and the other Asteroid.
Kentucky’s color was a rich and lustrous bay. His mahogany-hued body shone with a dark glean, in striking contrast to the white hair extending upward from his hoof halfway to the knee on his right front leg. A white stripe ran the length of his face, narrowing toward his nose. His tail had been cropped straight across in the English fashion, about four inches above the hock. He had two white marks on his back caused by wear from the saddle. Kentucky stood not hugely tall at only fifteen and a half hands—a little more than five feet at the withers where his shoulder blades came together. But people weren’t looking at his height when they studied the fire in his eye and the strength in his limbs.1
A son of the prolific Lexington, a breeding stallion who reigned as the most successful sire of American Thoroughbreds, Kentucky had come into the hands of a triumvirate of wealthy men in the Northeast soon after his Bluegrass breeder, John Clay, took the colt to the track at Paterson, New Jersey, to sell in 1863. The track at Paterson had opened its gates for the first time that year and stood at the forefront of a revival of racing in the North, a revival that undoubtedly delighted wealthy sportsmen of New York. Interest among them in Thoroughbred horse racing had reignited with a spark that by the end of the war would erupt into a roaring flame. This represented a huge change in the future course of racing in the North. For close to twenty years, the Northeast had existed without any Thoroughbred racing, at least without any racing of consequence organized by jockey clubs. Melvin Adelman has written in a history of New York sports: “By 1845 horse racing in New York was in a state of virtual collapse…. For the next twenty years the sport floundered.” Men whose fortunes had expanded exponentially during the war were among those eager to take up the sport, in a desire to show off their new wealth.2
Kentucky was of a rich bay color, one in a triumvirate of talented sons of Lexington, all foaled in 1861 in the Bluegrass. Kentucky’s dam was Magnolia, a daughter of the imported sire Glencoe. John Clay, a son of Henry Clay, bred Kentucky. Magnolia was among the highly prized Thoroughbreds that once belonged to Henry Clay. (W. S. Vosburgh, Racing in America, 1866–1921 [New York: Scribner Press, 1922], facing 70.)
Clay, taking racehorses with him to Paterson to sell in 1863, was among a vast number of Kentuckians who had chosen not to fight in the war. Throughout the war, he lent his energies to his business, which was the breeding, raising, racing, and selling of Thoroughbreds. Choosing not to enlist did not mean that he remained unaffected by wartime strife, however. On account of the war, the amount of horse racing declined throughout the South and in the border state of Kentucky, and, thus, Clay would have faced a greatly diminished market for the sale of his racing stock. He had three options. The first was to stay home and race the colt called Kentucky in Lexington, where the sport managed to stumble along throughout the war. The only occasion when the club in Lexington did not hold a race meet was during the spring of 1861, when racing shut down after the first day owing to military maneuvers held close by. The second option was to take his horses to New Orleans to race, if he thought the journey safe, which it probably was not. The final option was the choice a number of Kentuckians had made: take their stables to race in the North, where they would, it was presumed, be safer from wartime hostilities.3
The Kentuckians Zeb Ward, Clay, Captain T. G. Moore, and Dr. J. W. Weldon campaigned their racing stables in Pennsylvania and on Long Island at New York’s old Union Course in 1862. They also raced in Boston. Back in the Bluegrass, Kentuckians who had not shipped their horses to the Northeast were beginning to see them impressed for army duty or stolen by guerrillas and outlaws. Bluegrass breeders lost untold numbers of bloodstock this way, for this war that began in an effort to save the Union and wound up as a war to end slavery “did much to interfere both with breeding and racing in Kentucky,” as the Kentucky Farmer and Breeder observed. Edward Hotaling likewise has observed: “Kentucky [horsemen] had to look northward for buyers, tracks, and safe havens for their stables. The scene was bleak.”4
However bleak the racing outlook might have appeared throughout the South and in Kentucky, interest in sports was on the rise in New Jersey and New York. Northern racing experienced a rebirth during these war years, just as other modern sports also began to attract urban crowds. In fact, it was not unusual for New Yorkers to attend athletic events as spectators despite the war, even when the war entered their midst. This happened around the time of the draft riots in Manhattan in 1863. Some 105 persons, many of them Irish, rioted over four days in mid-July of that year because they resented the fact that they could not buy their way out of military service as the wealthy could. However, some five thousand New Yorkers had forgotten the riots by July 22. They boarded ferries to attend a championship baseball game at Elysian Fields at Hoboken in New Jersey. New York lost the game to Brooklyn, 10–9.5
John Clay, a Bluegrass horse trainer and breeder, was a son of Henry Clay, whose exemplary career in politics earned him the nickname the Great Compromiser. John Clay inherited his father’s Thoroughbred breeding operations and continued them on a portion of Ashland, the family estate in Lexington. (Turf, Field and Farm 66, no. 11 [March 18, 1898]: 345.)
During that same summer, from July 1 through July 3, the Battle of Gettysburg took place in the nearby state of Pennsylvania. Some forty-six to fifty-one thousand Americans died over three days of fighting in and surrounding this small town, ending the South’s second invasion of the North under General Robert E. Lee. Gettysburg, in fact, acquired notoriety as the battle having the greatest number of Civil War casualties. Four and a half months later, in November, President Abraham Lincoln redefined the purpose of the war with his Gettysburg Address, shaping its new framework into a mission to end slavery. Despite the battles, despite the redefined purpose of the war, nothing was stopping