How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall
in demographics because the major portion of wealth no longer lay in the South or in agricultural pursuits, including the breeding and raising of racehorses.
But, for this particular moment during the summer of 1865 at Saratoga Springs, the question of shifting economics and power narrowed down to which group was to control the breeding and racing of fast horses. Was the future to lie with the old guard in Kentucky (and also in Tennessee, where a class of gentry landowners pursued horse breeding on a smaller but highly successful scale) or with the new moguls of industry and finance in the Northeast? The power struggle to ensue would cut across a wide swath of American demographics, from wealthy New York capitalists to Bluegrass landowners, while also touching peripherally on the mountain folk of eastern Kentucky, who would constitute a convenient contrast to these other groups. The power struggle also would involve Kentucky’s African American community: the once dominant numbers of black jockeys and trainers who rode and trained many of these fast horses in Kentucky and also in New York.
This was a critical time for the future of Thoroughbred racing. The shift of power in the sport represented no small achievement to those New Yorkers who had lent their support to Thoroughbred racing, for the breeding industry had collapsed in that state following the economic Panic of 1837. New York’s breeding and racing activities had not recovered prior to the Civil War. The sport had been virtually dead in New York, stomped into oblivion first by the financial crisis and then by public sentiment opposed to gambling and racing. The Union Course on Long Island, once the site of well-attended races that brought together horses from the North and the South, had fallen into a disreputable state in which mule racing coexisted with what little Thoroughbred sport remained. One Thanksgiving Day, mules raced for a $50 purse that saw “eight of the obstinate brutes … brought to the starting point, … only four [of which] could be induced … to go anyhow.” Without a horse-breeding industry, racing in New York could not exist. The new, Northeastern turf moguls relied on Southerners to supply their sport with horses during the middle years of the Civil War until the resurgence of the sport in New York. New York sportsmen even had problems persuading the most reputable of their society to join in supporting the return of Thoroughbred racing, for the sport remained tainted with the unpopular specter of gambling.20
For at least ten years before the war, men of solid reputation in the Northeast had severed any connection they once might have had with the turf, owing to the sport’s disreputable notoriety. During this decade, individuals deemed unworthy by the elite class operated the tracks located in and around New York. Rather than see their names connected with these questionable entrepreneurs, wealthy sportsmen spurned racehorses and took up yachting.
Following the Panic of 1837, a second economic disaster occurred in 1857; this one affected not only the general welfare of Americans but also the health of the turf. The 1857 Panic exacerbated the decline of the turf because numbers of men who could afford to own racing stables experienced financial ruin. A nineteenth-century author, Lyman Weeks, observed that, on the eve of the Civil War, racing flourished only in Kentucky. Everywhere else, he wrote, the situation was grim: “Public interest in the turf had become reduced to a low point and the final clash of arms gave the sport what was feared at the time would be its death blow.”21
Thus, a handful of wealthy New Yorkers accomplished the near impossible when, partway through the war, they initiated a revival of Northern racing on bringing their good names and social reputations to the sport. Joining Travers, Hunter, Osgood, Jerome, and a few others in this effort was August Belmont, a titan of Fifth Avenue society and the founder of a bank in New York. Belmont was wealthy beyond the imaginings of the average Bluegrass horseman. He represented the archetypal capitalist of the Northeast—writ large. He took control of New York racing and soon become the virtual dictator of the American turf. His close friend Leonard Jerome, who made his money selling short in the stock market during the 1857 Panic, was already planning his elaborate racecourse, Jerome Park, on 250 acres known as the Bathgate estate that he had purchased in 1865 for $250,000 at Fordham, north of Manhattan. Belmont agreed to serve as the first president of the track.22
Powerful Northern men like these took Thoroughbred racing from regional popularity in the South to prominence as a national and commercialized sport. They made many changes, with the most radical being the way they converted a diversion of the Southern rural gentry into a major urban sport. They also changed the manner in which races were run. They followed the more recent English custom, replacing the old-style multiple heat racing with “dash” races in which a single trip around the track (or, perhaps, only a portion of the track) was all it took to determine the outcome of a race.
Heat racing, in which the horses returned to the track perhaps three more times following their first run to determine the outcome of an event, took all day to determine a winner. As Americans became more hurried in their lives, this change proved highly popular and helped boost the sport’s popularity in this country. No one, especially the new moguls of the business world, had time to while away an entire day waiting for horses to race one another into the ground over multiple heats to decide a race. That languid side of life had slipped away with the antebellum South.
Men like Belmont and Jerome were in a hurry, no different than other Americans. They were building fortunes and dynasties in their private lives. On the public front, they founded and ruled over lavish racecourses meant to complement the opulent breeding farms they were building in New York. These men determined the locations of the new racecourses, choosing places conveniently close to the city of New York, where they lived and worked. With lifestyles that differed so remarkably from the slower tempo of those of the antebellum planters of the South, these men were reshaping the sport to move to an upbeat pace.
These men might never have had the opportunity to seize this power had not the wartime interruption of racing and breeding in the slaveholding states forced the latter to surrender control of Thoroughbred racing and breeding. Control of the sport had swung back and forth between North and South in a cyclic pattern almost from the time racing began in the seventeenth century in the New World. However, the outcome of the Civil War left no doubt that the Northeast had regained the control that it had lost during the 1840s. This situation coincided with the rapidly rising popularity of this sport among men of means in New York: men like Travers and his group, which owned the racehorse Kentucky.
This showdown at Saratoga, then, really constituted more than a race between two horses. The cry that went up to see the horses race against each other appeared more like powerful New Yorkers stepping up to dictate where and how the sport should operate in this new world that emerged after the war. The race was looking more like an occasion for these new men in racing to show Bluegrass horsemen a thing or two about the sport that the Bluegrass and the South had so recently controlled. The rivalry between Asteroid and Kentucky fueled this power struggle and contributed directly to the revival of the sport in the North. “The fever spread, and the glory of the turf was revived in the North,” as one early history of Thoroughbred racing puts it.23
Before the war, Kentucky-bred horses had ruled the turf, sent via steamboats down the Ohio River to the Metairie course at New Orleans, where the greatest of them all, the horse named Lexington, had settled a regional rivalry on the racetrack. He had defeated his Mississippi rival, Lecomte, in a sectional contest on a par with any of the famous North-South contests held before the war in New York and the southern Atlantic states. Lexington retired from the track to a new career as a breeding stallion and, during the mid-1850s, came into the hands of the wealthiest breeder in Kentucky, Alexander, the squire of Woodburn Farm.
Here was a man who, despite living a solitary life in the country, never would have been mistaken for an individual of unsophisticated ways or means. A lifelong bachelor, Alexander was Kentucky born but a Cambridge-educated member of the British aristocracy who chose to return home to the Bluegrass. He also was the owner of Asteroid. Alexander had raised Asteroid on his grand estate in Kentucky’s Woodford County. As an agriculturist, he lived for the thrill and pride of breeding racehorses of Asteroid’s caliber. He could afford to pay a then-record $15,000 for Lexington to stand at stud at Woodburn