The Prince of Jockeys
Page 29
Hoping to prove himself in the East, Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin (1828–1909) hired Murphy, who was touted as a big stakes winner. Baldwin's willingness to offer Murphy a $10,000 contract would set a standard and eventually change the opportunities for African American jockeys. (Courtesy of the Arcadia Public Library Image Archive)
The Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company produced these cards to advertise its products. Isaac Murphy appeared on three Kinney cards, astride horses owned by E. J. Baldwin: Volante, Los Angeles, and Emperor of Norfolk. (Courtesy of the author)
Advertisements such as this savaged the contributions of jockeys like William Walker, Isaac Murphy, Anthony Hamilton, and Pike Barnes. It reads, in part, “Hi! Dat hoss can jist fly now. I only ’plied jist six bottles of Kendall's Spavin Cure, and it hab taken off all dem four ringbones, two spavins, one curb, two splints, one capped hock and a shoe bile.” (Courtesy of the author)
Tobacco card from Gold Coin Chewing Tobacco (Julius Bien and Co., Lith, NY, 1887)
Tobacco card from W. S. Kimball and Company's Cigarettes. (Courtesy of the author)
This is one of seven tobacco cards produced with Isaac Murphy's likeness between 1887 and 1890. (Courtesy of the author)
Tobacco card from Old Judge and Gypsy Queen Cigarettes. (Courtesy of the author)
In the article accompanying this image in the New York Sportsman, Murphy comments on riding Salvator: “I'll try hard to win, sir, and my mount is a great young horse, one of the finest I have ever seen. But it's company he'll go against, you know.” (New York Sportsman, June 21, 1890, 576)
Matt Byrnes (1853–1933), on the left, was a highly sought-after trainer in the 1880s and 1890s. (Courtesy of the Keeneland Association)
Murphy's June 25 win on Salvator over Garrison riding Tenny. John C. Hemment's photograph as the horses crossed the finish line is recognized by sports historians as the first of its kind. (Courtesy of the Keeneland Association)
Murphy celebrated his victory on Salvator at the home of trainer Matt Byrnes near Eatontown, New Jersey. (Courtesy of the Keeneland Association)
Jockeys at Morris Park, 1891. Murphy is in the middle row, kneeling behind Anthony Hamilton. Next to Murphy is Willie Simms, who would win the Kentucky Derby in 1896 and 1898. (Courtesy of the Keeneland Association)
In the 1880s and 1890s, at the peak of their success, black jockeys were caricatured as coons in the popular press. Images such as this one humiliated these men and erased any sense of achievement and manhood. (Courtesy of the author)
Image depicting the great 1890 match race between Salvator and Tenny. (Courtesy of the author)
This lithograph of Henry Stull's painting of the match between Salvator and Tenny was a popular depiction of the dramatic race. Note Murphy's posture in the saddle. Stull was probably not at the race but based his painting on the widely circulated accounts of it. (Courtesy of the author)
Isaac Murphy posed for this picture at Morris Park in 1891. (Courtesy of the Keeneland Association)
Ed Garrison (1868–1930) was one of Isaac Murphy's greatest rivals. Their June 25, 1890, match race at the Coney Island Jockey Club is recognized as one of the most exciting in American sports history. (The American Turf: An Historical Account of Racing in the United States [New York: Historical Society, 1898], 376)
Anthony Hamilton (1866–1904) was one of Isaac's closest friends. He left the United States in 1901 to race in Europe. (The American Turf: An Historical Account of Racing in the United States [New York: Historical Society, 1898], 395)
In 1895, Willie Simms (1870–1927) became the first American jockey to win a race in England on an American Thoroughbred. (Courtesy of the Keeneland Association)
This image of Murphy was supposedly taken near the fence separating his property from the Lexington racetrack. (Photograph by Harrison Foster)
The announcement for Isaac Murphy's funeral, held at his home on February 13, 1896. (Courtesy of the Keeneland Association)
Llewellyn P. Tarleton (1846–1916), who wrote Murphy's obituary, remembered the boy who had become an honorable man. “Honor and shame from no condition rise; Act well your part, there all the honor lies.” (William E. Bidwell and Ella Hutchinson Ellwanger, Legislative History and Capitol Souvenir of Kentucky [Frankfort: Frankfort Printing Company, 1910], 247)
Although this account seems incomplete and sterile in terms of Williamson's personal history, the fact is that no one really knew who Ansel Williamson was. Due to nineteenth-century ideas about race and American ideas about destiny, this information was not deemed important.
As American slavery scholar Annette Gordon Reed notes, the “ease and swiftness with which blacks were written out of the social compact indicates that notions of essential differences and inferiority took hold very early on in” the new nation's development.30 The founding fathers' ideas about commerce and national identity allowed people of African descent to be sacrificed for the good of democracy. The complexities of slavery and the individual experiences of black men and women were rarely shared publicly, for fear of white rebuke and retaliation for contradicting the country's manifest destiny. In the end, only the fortunate few who knew the magnificent trainer and groomer of jockeys would mourn the passing of Williamson the man.31
Black children were taught to depend on their elders for advice and guidance, so chances are good that Isaac had looked up to the extraordinary trainer and thus felt a great loss at Williamson's passing. From what we know about Isaac, we can assume that he was respectful and paid tribute to Williamson, someone who was a consummate example of perseverance, industry, and temperance.
From June through October 1881, Isaac lived out of a suitcase, staying at various boardinghouses during the eastern racing season. He may have traveled alone, or he may have traveled with a companion, perhaps a fellow jockey from Kentucky. In between racing at Coney Island, Monmouth Park, and Saratoga Springs, Isaac would have discovered Manhattan, where the cosmopolitan nightlife dazzled the senses of unattached young men with small-town upbringings and big-city dreams. Situated between Twenty-Fourth and Forty-Second Streets, Manhattan's black community was known as the Tenderloin district, and its churches, overpriced tenements, brothels, saloons, and restaurants catered to the distinct tastes and needs of blacks from the South and curious white voyeurs from the North. Historian Marcy Sacks suggests that districts such as the Tenderloin, “among the most congested of any in New York City,” increased in population and popularity for a number of reasons. First, these urban spaces were designated for blacks, and the growing number of immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and other European countries drove black Southern migrants away from the more appealing areas of the city. Second, the mainly Irish American police force maintained this color line, so the limited housing and employment opportunities elsewhere in the city led to a “rapid influx of black migrants into” neighborhoods where they felt comfortable among their own.32
In Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson recalls the New York City of his childhood and the neighborhoods where blacks congregated:
In the earliest days the Negro population of New York lived, naturally, in and about the city at the tip of Manhattan Island. In the middle of the last [nineteenth] century they lived mainly in the vicinity of Lispenard, Broome, and Spring Streets. When Washington Square was the centre of fashionable life, large numbers of Negroes engaged in domestic service in the homes of the rich lived in a fringe of nests to the west and south of the square. As late as 1880 the major portion of the Negro population of the city lived in Sullivan, Bleecker, Thompson, Carmine, and Grove Streets, Minetta Lane, and adjacent Streets.33
According to Johnson, black Manhattan developed into a black bohemia constituted in part by the Tenderloin district, with its professional clubs and venues where musicians and writers of the era experimented with their art. The red-light district also “nourished a number of ever present vices; chief among them, gambling and prostitution.”34 Black Manhattan was at the forefront in extending the bounda
ries of the Negro's previous so-called place in the American imagination. In Manhattan, the “Negro jockey constituted the very first ranks of the profession.”35
While in New York, twenty-year-old Isaac might have wandered the streets of black Manhattan in search of adventure or just to satisfy his curiosity. He might have visited one of the clubs, honkytonks, or other entertainments available. On Sunday, he would have attended services at one of the churches in the Tenderloin district, such as Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Sullivan Street or St. Phillips Episcopal Church on Twenty-Fifth Street.36 He might have walked down the Great White Way, a portion of Broadway between Fourteenth and Thirty-Fourth Streets, to see the new electric lights being installed under the supervision of black inventor Lewis Howard Latimer. Latimer's patented carbon filament lightbulb and other innovations and patents related to electricity earned him a place alongside Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, both of whom Latimer worked for as a draftsman and electrician. There is no way to know whether Isaac ever ventured into the Tenderloin district or gazed down the Great White Way, but his time in New York coincided with the changing milieu associated with the burgeoning “diversities of individuality” being cultivated by African Americans in the Northeast, especially in black Manhattan.37
While in New York, Isaac would hear of the July 2 shooting of President James A. Garfield at the Washington, D.C., train station by Charles Guiteau, a disgruntled paranoid schizophrenic who had been denied a political appointment at the U.S. consulate in Paris, France. The shot was not immediately fatal, but after suffering for two months from a systemic infection resulting from the wound, Garfield died on September 19 at the age of forty-nine. The following morning Vice President Chester A. Arthur was sworn in at his home in New York by Justice John R. Brady of the New York Supreme Court. Two days later he took the oath of office in Washington before Chief Justice Morrison Waite. Arthur “read a short inaugural address, and issued a proclamation setting apart the funeral day, September 26, as one of national fasting and prayer.”38 As for Guiteau, his three-month trial ended with a guilty verdict, and he was hung on June 30, 1882.
Although President Arthur was a Republican and his policies reflected that affiliation, he was also an advocate for the New South, which meant less governmental oversight of local affairs—specifically, protection of African Americans' citizenship rights under the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Since the Civil War, African Americans had turned to their Republican friends for protection, but the Arthur presidency would prove problematic to those who believed they had a friend in the White House. Ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments had opened the door to freedom, citizenship, and the franchise, but with Arthur's presidency, the government seemed to be taking a step backward. Black leaders and some congressmen looked for help in overturning the concessions being made, while Southern politicians and businessmen were poised to reclaim their former power over African American labor by returning black people to slavery for the good of national pride and productivity.
A sign of the times, the Kentucky Live Stock Record, a newspaper usually dedicated to topics related to farming and horse racing, published an article about the “exodus of the negroes from the State,” which some Kentuckians lamented as a loss of labor. “Instead of expressing regret,” the writer opined, “it is a matter of congratulation, and we should like to see the day when there is not a colored individual in the borders of Kentucky.” What is even more striking is the article's advocacy for white labor, “men of brains and muscle” who possess “energy, industry and frugality, backed by intelligence and education.”39 Ironically, these are not the qualities Kentuckians had previously sought in their workers. If they had, black schools would not have been burned down, black men living off their land would not have had their possessions confiscated or destroyed, and black men and women demanding employment contracts and full pay would not have been threatened with death. What Kentucky capitalists really wanted was a new slave—an ignorant shell of a man too fearful to fight for his rights and too hungry to demand what was rightfully his.
White immigrants who saw themselves as equals based on race, if not opportunity, refused to subject themselves to the abuses indicative of slavery. Immigrants wanted to become landowners themselves, not work for other white men looking to squeeze as much cheap labor out of them as possible. Those blacks criticized as “able bodied colored men loafing on the street corners” and indignant Negro women unwilling “to go to the country to work for any kind of wages offered” were actually intelligent and educated about the ways of white folks. These men and women refused to subject themselves to the abuses of sadistic farmers, mistresses, and employers who enjoyed doling out punishments to vulnerable blacks denied the safety of their own communities. Free blacks who knew they had options refused to be reduced to human chattel and chose to migrate to the West.
Within the context of this white derision for blacks, Isaac's success inspired other black people who saw themselves in the jockey. Isaac was a rising star of considerable talent and ability whose achievements posed the question, “If a nigger is not a nigger, then what is a white man?” During his stay in New York, Isaac won fourteen of thirty-four races, placed second in eight others, and came in third in four races. Most of his victories were on Williams's Checkmate and W. C. McGavock's Boulevard. By the end of the 1881 campaign, Isaac had won twenty-two of fifty-two races and enjoyed some popularity among the high-stakes owners and gamblers, including brothers Michael and Philip Dwyer of Brooklyn, “Big” Ed Corrigan of Kansas City and Chicago, New York financier Leonard Jerome (the grandfather of Winston Churchill), and eccentric mining king Elias Jackson “Lucky” Baldwin of Santa Anita Farms of California. These men were capable of accelerating the Kentucky native's career beyond anything he could imagine. Isaac used his reputation as an honest and winning jockey to negotiate terms with these wealthy owners for mounts in stakes races.
These relationships would help Isaac achieve significant milestones during the 1882 season: out of eighty-eight races, he won thirty-three, placed second in twenty, and placed third in ten. Overall, Isaac won an incredible $33,490 for his employers. Isaac's arrival as a professional was reflected not only in the number of mounts he received but also in the quality of the horses he rode. At the Coney Island Jockey Club meeting in September 1882, Isaac, wearing the green jacket and white sash of Ed Corrigan's stable, rode the Kentucky-bred Pearl Jennings in the three-year-old filly stakes race. He won the $600 race by a head in front of Pierre Lorillard's Pinafore and beat two of his rivals in the process—William Donohue and Jimmy McLaughlin, whose home courses were in the Northeast. Most important, this was Isaac's first time riding for Big Ed, who was known as an “arrogant, self-willed despot, a good friend, but a hard hitting enemy.”40 Isaac was well aware of the politics of the turf and the power wielded by people like Corrigan, but Big Ed treated Isaac with respect. It was a mutually beneficial relationship: Corrigan wanted to dominate the racetracks in the Northeast, Midwest, and Far West, and Isaac wanted to ride for an owner willing to pay a premium to the jockey who could help him achieve that goal.
Between the spring and fall seasons in the West and Northeast, Isaac continued to win in the dramatic fashion he was known for. His numerous victories no doubt increased his income for the year and gave a considerable boost to his savings. Although we do not know the specific financial arrangements between Isaac and the owners he rode for, it is estimated that, taking into account fees and bonuses (likely based on a percentage of the winnings), his earnings for 1882 were between $2,000 and $4,000 (or about $50,000 to $97,000 in 2013 dollars).41 Most important, Isaac was his own man and was able to set his own fees and be paid what he was worth. Eventually, Isaac would even hire his own private valet, a young white boy, to assist him.
At the end of the 1882 season Isaac returned home to Frankfort to recover from the long season of traveling and riding on the national circuit. His success had made him somet
hing of a local celebrity, but his achievements would be acknowledged in the national media on the occasion of his twenty-second birthday. On the front page of the January 20, 1883, issue of the New York Sportsman, editor C. J. Foster notes Isaac's accomplishments:
Murphy is one of the best jockeys in America, being especially strong in knowledge of pace, coolness, and good generalship. He will soon be too heavy to ride, we fear, in which case Uncle Eli ought to and doubtless will take him in and teach him all he knows about training.
Mrs. M[eta] W. Reynolds writes as follows concerning him: “Of course I need not tell you of Isaac's honest and trustworthy nature, for the whole of the American turf must be cognizant of that fact; but no one knows it better than I do.”42
While Foster acknowledges Isaac's superior ability, he also recognizes that his future as a jockey is limited. Still, Foster believes Isaac can have a successful career in horse racing, similar to that of Eli Jordan and the great Ansel Williamson. And Meta Hunt-Reynolds's willingness to express in a national newspaper her personal feelings about the colored jockey indicates Isaac's importance to her and her family.
On the Path to Happiness and Prosperity
On January 24, 1883, Isaac Burns Murphy married Lucy Carr in a ceremony at St. John's African Methodist Church on the corner of Clinton and Lewis Streets in north Frankfort. The Frankfort Roundabout published the following account of the wedding: “Isaac Murphy, the noted colored jockey of Fleetwood Farm, and Miss Lucy Carr of this city, were married Wednesday evening. Quite a number of the young friends of the groom from other places were in attendance, as well as a large company from the city. The ceremony was performed by Rev. D. S. Bentley.”43