Читать книгу How Kentucky Became Southern - Maryjean Wall - Страница 9

Some 460 million years before horses like Kentucky and Asteroid appeared on American racetracks, central Kentucky and Middle Tennessee formed their destiny as horse country. This occurred during the Ordovician Period, a time of major plate collision of the earth’s crust, along with volcanism on what would become North America. Continents moved, mountains formed, and vast seas opened into a shallow marine shelf that was to form the central portions of the east-central United States. Surging seas swept over this shallow shelf, bringing with them the millions of invertebrates that left behind a precious natural gift, their fossilized shells, which gave rise through the millennia to a particular form of limestone rock, the building block that horsemen have long believed is critical to raising a strong-boned racehorse.

The structure of this rock includes the calcium carbonate that composes most limestones. However, and more importantly to horse breeders, the composition of this particular limestone includes a heavy concentration of phosphate, an occurrence that Professor Frank Ettensohn, a geologist at the University of Kentucky, has stated is relatively uncommon and occurs in few other places outside the Bluegrass. Ettensohn has theorized that the phosphate plays a greater role in growing a strong horse than does calcium carbonate by itself. During the early nineteenth century, Bluegrass horsemen appeared unaware of the contribution the phosphate made to the rock; they believed that the limestone itself was responsible for the exquisite flavor found in beef and sheep raised on this land. They believed that the limestone made the same contribution to those strong-boned horses raised in the Bluegrass, horses they described as “hickory-boned.” These nineteenth-century Americans might not have realized fully the composition of the limestone, yet they still seemed aware that the soil drew its strength from it. In 1865, the Louisville Journal attributed the quality of Bluegrass livestock to “the stratum of blue limestone which underlies the whole country at the distance of from ten to twelve feet from the surface, and perhaps has some effect on the grass.”¹

The soil, the limestone, and the Kentucky bluegrass that grew on this gently rolling land continued to fascinate observers who wrote about this verdant section of the United States. In 1876, the Harvard professor Nathan Southgate Shaler, a geologist and paleontologist, wrote that Bluegrass land was “surpassed by no other soils in any country for fertility and endurance.” Around the same time, an article in the London Daily Telegraph cited the mineral benefits that horses in the Bluegrass received from the soil. In 1980, the University of Kentucky professor Karl B. Raitz succinctly described the Bluegrass region as “a broad limestone plain which has been etched on a structural arch of Ordovician limestones and shales.” Noting the phosphatic content in combination with calcium, he wrote: “The gently rolling terrain is underlain by phosphatic Lexington and Cynthiana limestones which decompose into exceptionally fertile silt loam soils.²

Early in the nineteenth century, central Kentucky and Middle Tennessee both became known as “the Bluegrass,” the name taken from the Kentucky bluegrass that flourished in their fields. No one has ever produced definitive answers on whether the legume that made the reputation for these regions actually possesses a blue hue and whether it is native to these states or originated someplace else, perhaps in Europe. “Whether the grass of the Blue Grass region be indigenous, or transplanted here at an early day by artificial means we have not room to discuss,” observed the Lexington Transcript in 1889, adding: “Anyhow, it lies at the foundation of our immense stock business…. It makes fine whisky, cattle, trotters and runners, and gives strength to our men and symmetry and beauty to our women.” Thus, even though no one knew the origin of the grass, folktales abound about Poa pratensis, more commonly known as Kentucky bluegrass.³

Some say that, if you observe the grass in this region just at dawn, when the dew lies heavily on it, you will see a hint of blue. The folklorist R. Gerald Alvey has related still another way in which people have attempted to explain the presence of this supposedly blue-tinted grass. He told how people observed a bluish vein running through the limestone and believed that the constantly decomposing blue limestone was responsible for the blue grass. Most importantly, people believed even decades before the Civil War that livestock in this region absorbed through the grass the important minerals that the limestone rock gave up into the rich soil. Equally as important in their eyes were the natural springs that spilled water infused with the same minerals into farm ponds and streams where livestock drank.⁴

Bluegrass breeders learned early on how to exploit this natural agricultural gift of the soil and turn it into a rich resource, combining the nutrition that it provided to grazing animals with their own ever-widening knowledge of equine pedigrees. Long before the mid-nineteenth century, Americans recognized that the strongest, fastest racehorses came from the Bluegrass region. This had occurred not by accident, but thanks to the gift of the land and the breeders’ continuous attempts to upgrade the quality of their stock.

After the Civil War, the unexpected rise in the number of fabulous horse farms under construction in the Northeast represented a new direction for the sport, one that challenged popular notions about the unique value of Bluegrass soil and grasslands. In fact, the owners of these new estates appeared to have ignored altogether the benefits that Bluegrass horse country offered, with its mineral-rich land and the superior equine bloodlines. The trend was becoming obvious to all: Belmont, the society leader and banker; Travers, the financier and president of the Saratoga Race Course; Milton Sanford, the textiles mogul; and the Lorillard brothers, Pierre and George, heirs of the vast tobacco fortune, were building their own horse farms to complement the growing number of racetracks in the Northeast. Just as men like these already had shifted the center of racing away from the South and the border states, now they appeared to be starting a new trend by developing their own breeding farms in New Jersey and New York. Bluegrass breeders undoubtedly would have viewed this as problematic to their interests, for it hinted at the possibility of horse country becoming obsolete or at least diminished in relevance. Either way, the problem threatened to hit directly at the pocketbooks of Kentuckians. Just as breeders were regrouping after the war, trying to replenish their stock or rebuild their farms so that they could begin earning an income again, extremely wealthy men in other states were seizing those financial opportunities out from under their grasp.

This increasingly popular trend reached a critical point when the racing career of that highly accomplished racehorse Kentucky came to a close in 1866. As we have seen, Travers and his group sold the horse for a record $40,000 to Leonard Jerome on the horse’s retirement to the stud. Instead of returning to the state of his birth, however, Kentucky stayed in New York, moving to new quarters close to Jerome Park to begin his breeding career, stinted to mares whose owners had no intention of sending them to breed to stallions in the Bluegrass. Two years later, in 1868, Belmont purchased Kentucky from Jerome for the purpose of installing the horse at his Nursery Stud on Long Island. In fact, Kentucky never returned to stand at stud in the state for which John Clay had named him. No one in the Bluegrass took this lightly.

Breeders in Tennessee also made an effort to get back in the business of breeding and raising racehorses; this, too, would provide more competition for Kentuckians. In Tennessee’s historic horse country near Nashville, where Andrew Jackson had founded a racecourse before becoming president of the United States in 1829, breeders took the lead in restarting their programs from the premier plantation of that state, Belle Meade. This particular horse-breeding operation had been recognized for its quality and the quality of horses it produced since long before the war. Within two years after the war, it took a significant step toward regaining some of its renown by holding its first yearling auction. Neighbors of Belle Meade, many of them breeders of Thoroughbreds, depended on this plantation for guidance and organization at a time when they were attempting to find a niche in the new marketplace.⁵

“With the probable exception of Woodburn Farm” in Kentucky, writes Ridley W. Wills II, this queen of Tennessee plantations, Belle Meade, “was considered America’s greatest breeding establishment.” During the 1870s and 1880s, the estate’s renewed success would see it achieve nationwide recognition once again, largely through annual yearling sales held at the plantation and also, for a time, in New York. The farm also gained renown for the valuable stallions it stood at stud, among them Bonnie Scotland, Enquirer, Vandal, John Morgan, Iroquois, and Luke Blackburn. General William Giles Harding, the master of the plantation for forty-four years, was recognized after his death at age seventy-eight in 1886 as a man who “had done as much for the breeding interests of Tennessee, and perhaps for all America, as any man in the nineteenth century,” according to Wills. As Wills also points out, Harding’s generalship of Belle Meade attained such renewed standing for the plantation after the war that it “was one of the few places where the Old South was brought over into the new.”⁶

The great mansion, paddocks, and pastures stocked with fine horses led Northern horsemen who visited during yearling auctions to believe that this was what the Old South had looked like during the antebellum period. Six columns, each twenty-two feet in height, composed the portico of the residence. The columns, each cut in two sections of limestone taken from quarries on the plantation, represented the craftsmanship of Belle Meade slaves. The appearance of this house undoubtedly figured into notions that Americans constructed decades later, after the demise of Belle Meade, when Kentucky’s Bluegrass horse country assumed the mantle as representative of the Old South. The portico of Belle Meade was well recognized throughout the United States, for writers had been describing the columns since before the Civil War. “It is true that the massive towering stone pillars that are seen in front, impress one more with the idea of extravagance than utility,” wrote a newspaper correspondent for the Nashville Union and American in 1854, “yet they so agree in architectural beauty with the whole, that economy would even not seem to require their removal.”⁷

Despite the devastation that its herds and physical structures suffered, Belle Meade was able to recover fairly quickly from the ravages of the war. Unlike other plantations in that part of Tennessee, it had not lost all its stock to armies or raiders, partly a result of the family having ingratiated itself with the Union army officers who made Belle Meade their headquarters. “The horses taken did not include any of Harding’s valuable brood mares,” Wills writes. “In his report, the officer said the mares were exempted from impressments until the ‘will of government’ was known.” Breeding operations resumed rather quickly after the war. General William Jackson began to assist his father-in-law, General Harding, in operating the plantation and, most especially, the horse-breeding endeavors.⁸

Belle Meade plantation, near Nashville, rivaled Woodburn in the production of Thoroughbred racehorses. It resumed its horse-breeding operation soon after the Civil War. The main residence was the iconic Southern horse farm. (Photograph by the author, 2008.)

In central Kentucky, the war had greatly compromised livestock breeding operations. Robert Aitcheson Alexander wrote from Woodburn to his brother, Alexander John Alexander, in 1864:

The sale was almost a failure from the fact that the Covington [KY] Railroad was not repaired so as to allow trains to run through (a bridge having been destroyed by [John Hunt] Morgan) and the fear of the men from the more Northern States that a raid would cut them off or they might not be able to get their stock away. There were only 3 or 4 men here from across the [Ohio] river and only one purchase.

The sheep brought more money than anything else…. I sold no trotting stock. Twelve head of thoroughbred later brought 3180 or 265 a head and 11 head of mares and fillies (Thoroughbred) brought 2270 or 206 each. I sold a Lexington mare out of Kitty Clark for $1000….

I am by no means satisfied with the condition of things here but cant [sic] do anything to change my stock from Ky till I go to Chicago.

In another letter to his brother, Alexander wrote in 1865: “I have got my colt brother to Norfolk back from the guerillas, but man owning him having been captured. I had to pay the captor $500 but as the horse seemed little the worse for the long sojourn amongst the rascals except in condition I am well satisfied to get him at that rate.”⁹

As in Tennessee, central Kentucky breeders restarted their bloodstock operations as well as they could, under the circumstances, in an attempt to join the new market. Quite quickly, they realized that they might be able to expedite the process if they received state aid. Governor Thomas E. Bramlette readily supported the growing horse industry and chartered a cooperative association that organizers named the Kentucky Stud Farm Association. Alexander and others leading this initiative included William S. Buford, F. P. Kinkead, and Abraham Buford of Woodford County, and Benjamin Bruce, John Viley, and James A. Grinstead of Fayette County. All were among the leading livestock breeders in central Kentucky. They intended for the association to develop its own breeding farm along the lines of the national stud in England. The English stud operated on an egalitarian principle, providing equal access to stallion service for all owners of mares.¹⁰

Organizers in Kentucky intended the association to provide members with the means to recommence their livestock breeding, no small matter considering that many had ended the war facing the loss of breeding stock, farms, and their labor pool, which, in most cases, had been their slaves. The group planned to purchase a farm, although there is no evidence that the plan ever got this far. The intention was to fit out the farm with paddocks and stables for horses, making it suitable for the raising of Thoroughbreds. The group also intended to purchase broodmares and at least one stallion, with the intention of auctioning the offspring when they reached the yearling stage. The Kentucky General Assembly and the Kentucky Senate chartered the new organization on January 26, 1866, and waived the customary incorporation fee of $100. Apparently, the state legislature perceived the need to support and accelerate the start of this group’s work. The Kentucky Stud Farm Association must have seen the need to help all breeders by providing easy access to a stallion and mares. Unfortunately, there is no evidence 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 bestowed upon the fair fields.” The author of this article did see Kentucky’s future grounded in agriculture and not in industry, however, writing: “As a manufacturing State, probably Kentucky will not, for some time at least, attract much attention.” But, in a direct appeal to capitalists who might be enticed to purchase farmland or horses within the state, he pointed out that two wealthy Kentuckians—Robert Aitcheson Alexander and Brutus J. Clay, the latter the owner of a vast cattle farm called Auvergne in Bourbon County—were men of cultivated manners who had spent great sums of money on their livestock. The problem was that the Northeastern capitalists were not inclined to wait for this ethereal future to take shape. Thus, they began building their own horse farms in New York and New Jersey. Meanwhile, Kentucky horse breeders “were faced with the problems of rebuilding the productivity of their land and of maintaining a genteel way of life without a reliable source of labor,” as Smith and Raitz have written. Thomas Clark also noted: “The shortage of labor on the postbellum estates was so critical that at one point a widespread campaign was launched to encourage foreign laborers, including Chinese coolies, to settle in Central Kentucky.”²⁰

Bluegrass landowners then hit on an idea to encourage former slaves to return to agricultural work. They made small plots of rural land available, either without charge or at greatly discounted prices. They customarily sectioned off these portions of land at the rear of their estates away from public view, thus completely changing the landscape from its appearance under antebellum practices, which saw slaves occupying cabins within sight of the main residence. But much had changed with freedom, even the landscape. The point was that the landowners were offering laborers an opportunity to live on land that they could call their own. The labor problem did, in fact, sort itself out somewhat as a result of these rural hamlets. Smith and Raitz have suggested that the central Kentucky horse-farm landscape might never have evolved as it did into a collection of park-like estates had not the landowners provided laborers with access to land of their own and, thus, a place to live near the farms where they worked. Still, even after landowners initiated this practice, the farm labor problem did not immediately resolve itself. Two years later, Turf, Field and Farm continued to report on the labor problem, noting that hemp and tobacco production had fallen off “owing to the derangement in our labor system.”²¹

By 1867, labor problems continued to plague the farmlands of central Kentucky. Offering a suggestion, Turf, Field and Farm reprinted an article from a Northern newspaper, the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, extolling the appeal of Asian workers. This article cited physical and social characteristics of Asians, in particular Chinese immigrants, that landowners perhaps would find more appealing than those ascribed to ex-slaves: “The Coolies are interesting to a foreign observer who remembers that they have come from the land of Vishnu and Brahma, the ancient seat of wonderful civilizations, where the Ganges is a god…. The men are mostly very handsome and graceful, well formed and supple, with olive skins, straight features, white teeth, long, silky black hair, and lustrous dark eyes, full of passion.”²²

Turf, Field and Farm reflected the popular thinking of these times—and the labor concerns of farm owners—in citing racial characteristics and superimposing stereotypes on a hierarchy of labor. In an article titled “The Five Races of Man” published in 1867, it intoned: “Race is established by climate and mode of living … with differences so strongly determined that they are perpetuated hereditarily…. The very characteristics which form the Caucasian variety and which separate it from the varieties give it intellectual prominence … [and] make it the superior of all others.” This argument neatly ordained that blacks belonged in the fields and the stables and not in mainstream society living as the equals of whites. It mirrored the arguments that Southerners had put forth before the Civil War when they had justified slavery with patriarchal notions. Antebellum Southerners convinced themselves, and tried to convince outsiders, that they stood as the heads of their plantations and gave orders for the good of their slaves, much as a father stood as the leader of his wife and children.²³

The depleted labor pool continued to pose problems for Kentucky farms, despite the effort to develop rural hamlets. By 1871, some counties, including Fayette, in the heart of the Bluegrass region, attempted to interest white labor in farmwork. At the same time, some people felt that Kentucky would be better served by the voluntary emigration of blacks to Africa—a timeworn argument seen as the clear way to remove blacks from American society. Henry Clay, an antebellum patron of Thoroughbred racing and breeding in Kentucky, had patronized this movement decades before the Civil War. Six years after the war, Kentuckians continued to debate the colonization movement. A letter published in the Frankfort Tri-Weekly Yeoman in 1871 extolled the appeals of Liberia, describing that African country as possessing “every luxury.”²⁴

No one appeared to have found the solution for launching a Kentucky horse industry with the scope and scale that would make it competitive with the racing and breeding operations of the wealthy men who were embracing the Northeastern turf. The depleted labor pool, the depleted numbers of bloodstock, and the simple lack of wealth needed if Bluegrass Kentuckians were to compete with the industrial and Wall Street wealth of New Yorkers made the prospect appear grim. Those bookend regions of the Bluegrass, Kentucky and Tennessee, both bore the burden of these postwar encumbrances.

Kentucky and Tennessee consequently entered the new world of postwar racing and breeding at a disadvantage. Nonetheless, some differences in the way in which breeders in these two states sought to regain their niche as horse country became apparent almost from the start. Almost immediately, Kentuckians sought outside capital investment. Tennessee breeders seemed content to work with what they had. These different approaches would determine the individual futures for these Northern and Southern sections of the Bluegrass, for, by the early twentieth century, central Kentucky alone would become known as the Bluegrass. By that time, Kentucky had secured outside capital, had developed a professional class to manage the horse industry, and had avoided the antiracing laws that shut down the sport forever in Tennessee. The Southern portion of the Bluegrass posed a cautionary tale: the death of racing led to the end of the breeding farms in Tennessee. The result was that Americans soon forgot that Middle Tennessee at one time had shared the Bluegrass region with central Kentucky.

Kentuckians continued their struggle with the new world they faced after the war when Bluegrass horse country took another blow. This was the death of Robert Aitcheson Alexander in 1867 at the age of forty-eight. He died at Woodburn on December 1, following some years of poor health. He had long been known to be “feeble.” Three weeks before his death, he fell ill, then rallied briefly before relapsing. Turf, Field and Farm