The Prince of Jockeys

by Pellom McDaniels III

  One of the most prominent slaveholders in Kentucky, Senator Henry Clay, argued before the American Colonization Society on January 20, 1827, that the “object of the Society was the colonization of the free coloured people, not the slaves, of the country.”38 His position was based on his own interest in maintaining the institution of slavery and the growing popularity of programs and organizations promoting the immediate emancipation of slaves. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan cofounded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1839 along with fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who spoke publicly and wrote frequently about the evils of slavery. In the Liberator, Garrison called for the immediate emancipation of slaves in the United States and challenged slaveholders to see that their degradation of human beings was damaging their own souls. In Garrisonian terms, slavery was a sin that guaranteed the highest retribution from God: death of the soul. What is more, Garrison recognized the inevitability of violent rebellion by those who were denied their humanity and saw their freedom as a God-given right.

  Free blacks, not to be forgotten, struggled against the colonizationists’ push to remove them from the United States. America was as much their country as it was their white counterparts’, they argued. Furthermore, free blacks vocalized their resistance to any plan to deny them citizenship in the country of their birth, where their ancestors’ spilled blood guaranteed their right to freedom. In 1829 freeborn African American writer David Walker recognized the importance of the moment at hand and published a manifesto, appealing to the black masses to rise up and shape their destiny. Walker writes:

  Do the colonizationists think to send us off without first being reconciled to us? Do they think to bundle us up like brutes and send us off, as they did our brethren of the State of Ohio? Have they not to be reconciled to us, or reconcile us to them, for the cruelties with which they have afflicted our fathers and us? Methinks colonizationists think they have a set of brutes to deal with, sure enough. Do they think to drive us from our country and homes, after having enriched it with our blood and tears, and keep millions of our dear brethren, sunk in the most barbarous wretchedness, to dig up gold and silver for them and their children? Surely, the Americans must think that we are brutes, as some of them have represented us to be. They think that we do not feel for our brethren, whom they are murdering by the inches, but they are dreadfully deceived.39

  Walker's words resonated with free and enslaved blacks in his home state of North Carolina and other states in the Southeast, as well as in the Northeast, where Garrison and his antislavery associates launched their campaign to abolish slavery.

  On August 21, 1831, in Southampton County, Virginia, itinerant slave preacher Nat Turner led a group of armed, self-emancipated black men in an attempt to liberate their fellow bondsmen. Turner's revolt was quickly crushed, but not before he and his men had tortured and killed every white man, woman, and child they encountered.40 After restoring order, fearful slave owners sold those slaves known to be troublemakers to slave traders, who transported them to the Deep South. Others instituted programs of physical abuse intended to intimidate the slaves and keep them from rebelling. In the end, Garrison's prophetic vision for the future of America and the American South, where enslaved blacks would rise up and claim their humanity through rebellion, violence, and the taking of white lives, was realized.

  In the state of Kentucky, free African Americans represented less than 1 percent of the population in 1830: a total of only 4,917 individuals.41 Although small, this population challenged the institution of slavery as an indelible fact of life for people of African descent as the nation expanded west. The presence of these quasi-free individuals constantly reminded the enslaved of their unnatural state while simultaneously undermining slaveholders’ power over their human chattel, especially in urban locations such as Louisville and Lexington. Free African Americans established a sense of citizenship and identity by relying on one another and by working to contribute to the stability of their small communities. Nevertheless, the status of free blacks was a constant debate among the Kentucky legislators of the day.

  Slavery is, by design, patriarchal, and in nineteenth-century America it could be useful only within a large agricultural economy. As the needs of Kentucky farmers and manufacturers began to change, slaveholders found themselves with a surplus of workers who still required food, clothing, and shelter. To mitigate the costs of keeping their human chattel, slaveholders hired out or sold off numerous slaves. The slave traders who bought these slaves took them to the Deep South to fill the increasing demand for labor there. As one historian describes the industry, “Negro trading in Kentucky was a constantly growing evil, which had begun with the comparatively innocent buying and selling of slaves by the individual owners to satisfy their own desires.”42

  By the mid-1830s, the practice was more widespread than historians are willing to admit. Gentlemen farmers became slave breeders, buying and participating in the reproduction of human chattel to exploit for the financial rewards.43 Kentucky slaveholders advertised their “good breeding stock”—girls as young thirteen who were purchased and immediately began having their masters’ children. These unions were reminiscent of the raping of African girls and women bound and chained on ships destined for the Caribbean and North and South America during the Middle Passage. Children born from these violent episodes were sold if they survived the voyage. Likewise, the mulatto children born on their master-fathers’ farms were kept as additional labor; sold to the highest bidders at slave markets such as Cheapside in Lexington, to be used as domestic help; hired out as factory labor; or sold downriver to Natchez, Mississippi, or New Orleans, Louisiana. In the New Orleans market, wealthy planters, gamblers, and politicians paid high prices for mulatto girls and women, turning them into concubines and courtesans for their own decadent pleasures. With the expansion of “King Cotton” and the need for more slave labor to realize a profit, slave traders also frequented the Bluegrass region in search of new stock, which they found.

  In addition to their slaves, the landed gentry were concerned about the breeding of livestock. Short-horn sheep, purebred cattle, and horses could be found on the numerous working farms within the 2,500 square miles surrounding Lexington in Fayette County. Since before the Revolutionary War, the sportsmen of colonial America had shown great interest in horse racing as a form of entertainment and a mass spectator sport. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth century, as the population of colonial America grew and the various towns and cities began to identify as communities, the need for diversions increased. Naturally, the colonists turned to the entertainments they had known in their respective countries of origin: footraces, boxing, cockfighting, bullbaiting, and horse racing. Of these various forms of entertainment, the colonists were especially connected to horse racing as a public contest of skill and bravery, and numerous owners and breeders developed grounds to demonstrate their superior breeding and jockeying know-how.44 Similar to the turf in England, spectators came from adjoining communities to participate in the public spectacle. Indeed, both gentry and commoner attended the races, where the best horses and jockeys galloped to victory amid the cheering and cursing of a drunken proletariat and a thoroughly entertained planter class.

  Similar to the English gentry, Americans, especially those with large farms and plantations in the southern colonies and Kentucky, were determined to improve the horse breeds found in North America.45 As early as 1787, residents of Lexington were entertained by racing down Main Street, which featured some of the fastest horses bred in Virginia. However, the finest of Thoroughbreds came from the farms of horsemen such as John Breckinridge, William Buford, Henry Clay, Willa Viley, Robert Atchison Alexander, John Wesley Hunt, and Elisha Warfield. Their early Bluegrass breeders, brought from Virginia, set the standard for Kentucky horses and horse racing, rivaling all comers from the Eastern Seaboard and the Deep South. The elite used bloodstock breeding to both improve the quality of animals in North America and create wealth from the sale of
stock with strong bloodlines. The Thoroughbred would influence the wealthy to procure the finest horseflesh available, establish jockey clubs, and build grand horse parks to demonstrate their standing.

  Moreover, American gentlemen used contests between their horses as public demonstrations of their individual and collective wealth. And similar to their English cousins, the “habit of racing, to test the value of horses by their gaits and speed,” became an important aspect of the everyday lives of those who maintained stables and farms dedicated to the turf.46 Indeed, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, numerous merchants, politicians, and other landholding elites expressed renewed interest in the extravagance of well-bred horses and horse racing. With the nation's expansion west of the Allegheny Mountains, a new generation of bloodstock breeders began to develop animals to compete with their predecessors in the East. One of the most successful was Robert Atchison Alexander.

  Alexander was born in 1819 in Woodford County, Kentucky, but was sent to England at age thirteen to attend Trinity College at Cambridge.47 In 1850, after the death of his father, young Alexander returned to America to claim his inheritance, consisting of land in the Bluegrass region just northwest of Lexington. Using his substantial wealth, most of which was derived from his holdings in Scotland, Alexander quickly acquired more land and began to develop a 3,000-acre farm dedicated to the improvement of native animals.48 Visitors to his property were awed by the order and economy of the grounds, tended to by a workforce of more than 150 leased African American slaves. The well-manicured, park-like lawns surrounding the main tract of land were divided by rail fences and stone walls constructed by slaves and recently arrived European immigrants. Within the confines of the Alexander home, African Americans worked as servants and cooks, and in the stables they were employed as grooms, trainers, exercise boys, and jockeys. Alexander raised animals of various breeds using stock imported from England, and he sold some of his finest cows, colts, and sheep to farms across the country. For his horses, however, he provided only the best. He built three private one-mile oval tracks: one for Thoroughbreds, one for trotters, and one for hurdle jumpers. To train and groom his beautiful beasts, Alexander employed the finest horsemen available in the Bluegrass: African American men and boys. These enslaved individuals would be vital to the development of horse racing as a national pastime—one that transcended class, ethnicity, race, and religion. Unfortunately, they too were commodities to be bought and sold at the discretion of their owners.

  2

  America Bourne

  On January 6, 1861, near the town of Winchester in Clark County, Kentucky, on the Pleasant Green farm owned by David Tanner, America Murphy gave birth to a baby boy she named Isaac.1 Or at least this is what we can glean from the little hard evidence that exists. How America came to be on the farm, where exactly she gave birth to her son, who attended her, and whether the boy's father, Jerry Skillman, was present will never be known. What we do know is that because of her status as an enslaved black woman, the particulars related to her bringing a child into the world were deemed too unimportant to record—birth certificates were not issued for children born to slaves. Still, when the right questions are asked, the gaps in our knowledge about Isaac Murphy's beginnings become less daunting, and his life unfolds before our eyes.2

  The lone thread that connects the facts and fictions of Murphy's life is the location of his birth. Kentucky birth records reveal that on January 6, 1861, a nameless black male child was born to a nameless black slave woman who lived on the Tanner farm.3 Although there is no conclusive evidence that this was baby Isaac and his mother America, it is the only birth listed for the Tanner farm in the years 1860–1861. Thus, the corroborating evidence is strong. In addition, Murphy's 1896 obituary, written by close friend and turf man Llewellyn P. Tarleton, confirms the time and place of the famous jockey's birth. More important, this key shred of evidence provides a window into the past, suggesting the type of environment America Murphy was forced to negotiate daily in an effort to protect her child and herself from the abuses and degradations of slavery, while simultaneously keeping an eye toward the future.

  Even 150 years after Isaac Murphy's birth, there is still a veil of curiosity surrounding the early life of one of the most unlikely heroes of the mid- to late nineteenth century. Scholars of African American history, sports, and Southern history share an interest in Murphy, based on his larger-than-life accomplishments on the turf despite the alleged inferiority of people of African descent. Conventional wisdom aside, the institution of slavery was predicated on the ability of the powerful white elite to control an American landscape fat with resources and untapped potential. To do so, the white elite also had to control the lives of blacks, who provided the labor needed to grow America's wealth. Thus, the white majority worked systematically to regulate and manage the narratives associated with people of African descent and their individual and collective histories, especially those that demonstrated blacks’ ability to rise above their circumstances. To be born disconnected from one's history—past and present—is one sure way to confuse and alienate an individual's sense of destiny and purpose.

  A month after Abraham Lincoln's election as president of the United States and South Carolina's secession from the Union, America Murphy, nearing the end of her pregnancy, may have chanced to think about her fate in the soon to be divided country of strangers. The institution of slavery was a firmly embedded and socially acceptable reality in the Bluegrass region, and black labor had been key to the success of white farmers and manufacturers there. Yet Kentucky would become a major factor in the conflict between the Federal government and the slave states over the states’ right to chose their own future with regard to the slavery question: allow slavery to expand into the western territories, or limit it to the states that currently supported the institution. While politicians argued and fought over America's destiny, America Murphy prepared to give birth.

  Whether she wanted to bring a new life into the world is not known; whether she saw the world as a sinking ship of despair and degradation or recognized Lincoln's election as the beginning of a wave of change is not detailed in any journal, memoir, or letter. Chances are that she was hopeful, like most in her situation, that she would someday be free and that her child would have a better, freer, more just life. For America Murphy, January 6, 1861, was a day of great hope for herself and for her son's future. Sometime during that day, the dark mulatto woman gave birth to a baby boy in the slave cabin on the Tanner farm, enduring the pain to get what was wanted: a healthy child.

  No one can really know, but baby Isaac may have suffered from bouts of pneumonia and other ailments, a consequence of being born during the harsh Kentucky winter. But like his mother, he would have been tough. Like most slave children, baby Isaac would learn to survive from the example set by his mother. America had grown to womanhood within the bowels of slavery. She knew every nasty detail about the institution and its shameless purveyors of unimaginable suffering. She learned about the savagery of whites whose assumed superiority was challenged by willful slaves who audaciously claimed their humanity without fear of death. She saw the anxiety whites felt about blacks’ hatred of them and the nightmares they kept to themselves—visions of death at the hands of rebellious slaves determined to right the wrongs of the past. Vulnerable but not helpless, America knew about the debauched decadence of white men's and women's semiprivate lives, as they sought to take whatever they wanted from the weakest among them: the Negro. She knew black people had no rights—this was obvious. And it is possible she was aware of the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's proclamation to the country's black population—free and enslaved—that they were not entitled to be recognized as citizens under the Constitution of the United States.4 More than likely, America understood the challenges of free blacks in and around the Bluegrass region as they tried to establish some sense of stability for themselves and their families. Clearly, the pervasive
institutional racism woven into the fabric of society prevented any full expression of independence.

  But America was smart. She no doubt knew about local abolitionists, the Underground Railroad, and plots among her neighbors to run off into the night with the hope of reaching the Ohio River and the freedom that lay beyond it. Even though they lived on the margins of white society, members of the black community of the Bluegrass region were connected and maintained a connectedness that was unique in every way. Indeed, these invisible people had power, though not in the same sense as white slaveholders or whites in general, who levied life-and-death sentences against human chattel with impunity. The power of those held in bondage was based on an understanding of the nature of white people and their fragile identities built on the myth of white supremacy. Although they were physically limited in their ability to move freely, this invisible community managed to escape the brutality of their lives by using their minds, their individual and collective knowledge, to achieve a specific end. Enslaved African Americans learned to live outside their physical reality through their imaginations, promoting a sense of freedom and a lack of fear of white reprisal or even death. Who can say whether America Murphy plotted to escape and disappear into the wind one day when the Tanners least expected it. She may have been an agent for abolitionists, undetected by her masters, whose naiveté and sense of entitlement left them vulnerable.