The Prince of Jockeys
Page 49
48. Mangum, Kingdom for a Horse, 11.
2. America Bourne
1. Historians have cited various dates as Isaac Murphy's birthday, including January 1, April 16, and November 10, 1861, but they agree that he was born on David Tanner's farm in Clark County, Kentucky. A majority have quoted directly from Murphy's 1896 obituary written by Llewellyn P. Tarleton, “Isaac Murphy: A Memorial,” Thoroughbred Record, March 21, 1896, 136 (also published in the Lexington Herald). Tarleton mistakenly states that Tanner's farm was located in Fayette County.
The 1850 U.S. census shows Tanner's limited ownership of slave labor. The itemized listing includes three black female slaves (one mulatto), ranging in age from ten to nineteen; a twenty-one-year-old male; and two adults—a male aged fifty and a female aged forty-two. The same census lists the slaves belonging to David's brother, Branch Tanner: three female slaves (two mulattos), ranging in age from twenty-seven to ninety; a thirteen-year-old mulatto male; and a six-year-old black male. I believe that the nineteen-year-old female was America Murphy, Isaac's mother. In examining the document that recorded America's death from rectal cancer, it is clear that she was mulatto and that, based on her age at death, she was born sometime between 1830 and 1835. See Ed Hotaling, The Great Black Jockeys: The Lives and Times of the Men Who Dominated America's First National Sport (Rocklin, CA: Forum Prima Publishing, 1999), 239; David Wiggins, Glory Bound: Black Athlete in a White America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 22; Anne S. Butler, “Racing's Buried History: Too Little Known about the Real Lives of 19th Century's Black Jockeys,” Lexington Herald Leader, April 9, 2001, H1, 4.
2. Due to the nature of slavery, the children born to enslaved black women were considered no more valuable than prized farm animals, with the exception of Kentucky Thoroughbreds, which were actually more valuable owing to their pedigrees and their symbolic representation of mastery over nature. What mattered most to the slave owner was that the offspring was born alive and the mother survived the birthing process, as both represented financial investments. What little knowledge we have about the births of these children comes from former slaves’ oral histories, slave owners’ records, and the official records of births kept by state and local governments. Although historians and scholars of African American history and life often use oral histories to establish some semblance of a foundation, the experiences of black women throughout the antebellum period have been overgeneralized. What historians and biographers must both explore and incorporate into their work are the gaps in knowledge that cannot be fully accounted for through traditional methods of inquiry. There is more than one way to get to the roots of the questions that perplex and dumbfound us with regard to black life in America prior to the Civil War. We need to be radical, yet responsible. The records in the archives and repositories throughout the state of Kentucky, as well as those hidden in plain sight in local libraries and historical societies, are the best places to uncover the various factors that influenced the life of a boy named Isaac Murphy.
3. Kentucky Birth, Marriage, and Death Records—microfilm (1852–1910), microfilm rolls 994027–994058, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, KY.
4. Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Dred Scott's Revenge: A Legal History of Race and Freedom in America (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009), 60–61.
5. For a description of one of the most horrendous examples of brutality in Kentucky, perpetrated by Lilburn and Isham Lewis, nephews of Thomas Jefferson, see Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 2003), 47–48.
6. Frederick Douglass, “Captain John Brown Not Insane,” Douglass
Monthly, November 1859, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 375–76.
7. For an examination of how slave societies organized themselves, see Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown [1851], ed. John Ernest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); William Still, Still's Underground Rail Road Records: With a Life of the Author (Philadelphia: William Still Publishing, 1886); Wilbur Henry Siebert, The Underground Railroad from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Macmillan, 1898); Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003).
8. See Annette Gordon Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello (New York: Norton, 2008), 106–7.
9. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), 45, argues:
Slavery as a mode of production creates a market for labor, much as capitalism creates a market for labor power. Both encourage commercial development, which is by no means to be equaled with capitalist development (understood as a system of social relations within which labor-power has become a commodity)…. Although ancient slavery did not create a market for labor-power, it did, by creating a market for human beings and economic products induce a high level of commercialization that, together with the successful consolidation of a centralized state, combined to bequeath a system of law upon which modern bourgeois society could build.
10. During the middle of the nineteenth century, the infant mortality rate among enslaved African Americans was more than double that among whites. See Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante Bellum South (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), 314–21.
11. The Supreme Court's 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case made it clear that enslaved and free African Americans could not expect white men to grant them the privileges of full citizenship.
12. I believe that Green Murphy was actually Jeremiah Murphy, a tavern keeper who ran an inn out of his home in Lexington. See J. Winston Coleman, Stage Coach Days in the Bluegrass (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1955), 55.
13. See John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 314–15; Randolph Hollingsworth, Lexington: Queen of the Bluegrass (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004), 21, 41; John Wilson Townsend, Lore of the Meadowland: Short Studies in Kentuckiana (Lexington: Press of J. L. Richardson, 1911), 28–34; Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, 122–23.
14. “Ike Murphy's Real Name,” Daily Inter Ocean, July 28, 1891, 3.
15. Lexington 1859–60 City Directory (Lexington: Hitchcock and Searles, 1859), 86.
16. George Washington Ranck, Boonesborough: Its Founding, Pioneer Struggles, Indian Experiences, Transylvania Days, and Revolutionary Annals (Louisville: John P. Morton, 1901), 130.
17. See the following for in-depth discussions of interracial sex, power, and African American identity construction: Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the 19th Century South (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 96; Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black & White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 180–82; Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 413–31; Winthrop Jordan, White over Black (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 167–78.
18. Francis Fredric, Slave Life in Virginia: A Narrative by Francis Fredric, Escaped Slave (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2010), 27–33.
19. Lewis Clarke, Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis Clarke (Boston: David H. Ela, 1845), 9.
20. Kentucky Birth Records, 1852–1910, Ancestry.com; original data from Kentucky Birth, Marriage, and Death Records—microfilm (1852–1910), microfilm rolls 994027–994058, Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives, Frankfort, KY.
21. Albert Bushnell Hart, The American Nation: A History, vol. 16, Slavery and Abolition, 1831–1841 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906), 122.
22. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 506–8.
23. See ibid., 496–97, for the different ways slave mothers tried to protect their children from lives of servitude.
24. James F. Hopkins, A History of the Hemp Industry in Kentucky (Lexington: University Pre
ss of Kentucky, 1951), 24. See also Eric Thompson et al., Economic Impact of Industrial Hemp in Kentucky (Lexington: Center for Business and Economic Research, University of Kentucky, July 1998); Lowell H. Harrison and James C. Klotter, New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 292–93.
25. 1850 U.S. census data and listing of free inhabitants in Bourbon County.
26. In chapter 5 of Narrative of William Wells Brown: A Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), Brown describes being hired out as a slave in various capacities and occupations. While working with Mr. Walker, a St. Louis slave trader, Brown was exposed to the additional cruelties of Southern slavery. In The Autobiography of the Reverend Josiah Henson (Reading, PA: Addison-Wesley, 1969), 17, Henson discusses the breakup of his family after his owner died:
The doctor's death was a great calamity to us, for the estate and the slaves were to be sold and the proceeds divided among the heirs. The first sad announcement that the sale was to be; the knowledge that all ties of the past were to be sundered; the frantic terror at the idea of being sent “down south”; the almost certainty that one member of a family will be torn from another; the anxious scanning of the purchasers’ faces; the agony at parting, often of ever, with husband, wife, child—these must be seen and felt to be fully understood.
27. Marriages between slaves from different farms happened frequently, although slave masters tried to discourage the practice. Sudie Duncan Sides argues: “When planters would not sell slaves who wished to be married, the marriages took the form of…the slaves living separately and visiting one another on the weekend. In marriages such as these, there was no legal binding contract provided or licenses granted that would obligate the slave owners to provide a guarantee to not sell the children born during the enslavement of the female. In some cases, the slave owner took the liberty to maintain sexual access to the body of his legal property.” Philip A. Bruce's revisionist historical examination reluctantly admits that the system of slavery “debased both man and woman by making true marriage impossible.” Furthermore, no matter how “faithfully both members of the couple might observe the marital obligations, their union could amount only to a passing arrangement as long as their owner had the power to sell either at any moment that his interests moved him to do so. The possibility of such rupture, followed by a final separation, was enough in itself to weaken, or at least to embitter, the relation, however firmly cemented apparently by affection and the birth of children.” Sudie Duncan Sides, “Slave Weddings and Religion: Plantation Life in the Southern States before the American Civil War,” History Today 24, no. 2 (1974): 87; Philip A. Bruce, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: Observations in His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889), 16. See also John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 172–73.
28. See Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 569–70, n. 4.
29. Ibid.
30. In this ritual, one of the best known among slaves, the couple simply stepped over a new broom in the presence of family and community members. These traditions were useful for the preservation of mores and values, but their strength depended on their inheritance (how they were acquired) and their diffusion (how they were carried from one place to another) among those seeking to maintain a sense of communal continuity and social understanding within the context of slavery. Carl Wilhelm von Sydow, “On the Spread of Tradition,” in Selected Papers on Folklore (Copenhagen: Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1948), 11; Lucas, History of Blacks in Kentucky, 18–19.
31. See John Komlos, “Shrinking in a Growing Economy? Mystery of Physical Stature during the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 58, no. 3 (September 1998): 779–802; Michael R. Haines, “Growing Incomes, Shrinking People—Can Economic Development Be Hazardous to Your Health? Historical Evidence for the United States, England, and the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century,” Social Science History 28, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 249–70.
32. John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 95–97.
33. Several slave narratives illuminate the practice of selling children away from their mothers or selling mothers without their newborns, who were placed in the care of other female slaves. See Charles Elliott, The Sinfulness of American Slavery (Cincinnati: L. Swornstedt and J. H. Power, 1850); J. Winston Coleman, Slavery Time in Kentucky (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1940), 119–25; James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember: An Oral History (New York: Avon Books, 1988), 28–29; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 32–40; Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 148–55.
34. William E. Cain, ed., William Lloyd Garrison and the Fight against Slavery: Selections from the Liberator “Disunion,” June 15, 1855 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 1995), 141–44.
35. Lewis Collins and Richard Henry Collins, Collins’ Historical Sketches of Kentucky, vol. 1 (Covington, KY: Collins and Company, 1878), 102.
36. Elizabeth Hyde Botume, First Days amongst the Contrabands (New York: Arno Press, 1968).
37. Frederick Douglass, “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, Delivered at the Unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 619–20.
3. Seizing Freedom
1. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the populations in those two territories to choose whether to support the expansion of slavery within their borders, nullified the Missouri Compromise, which had prevented slavery from expanding beyond the 36°30' line.
2. “Forcing Down the Free Colored People,” Weekly Anglo African, September 3, 1859, Black Abolitionist Archive, University of Detroit Mercy Libraries, http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital/baa/item.php?record_id=1612&collectionCode=baa.
3. See John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 266; Frederick Douglass, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decision,” in Negro Social and Political Thought: 1850–1920, ed. Howard Brotz (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 249. The Compromise of 1850 provided that: (1) California would enter the Union as a free state, (2) the other territories would be organized without slavery as part of the discussion, (3) Texas would cede certain lands to New Mexico with compensation, (4) slaveholders would be guaranteed protection with a firm fugitive slave law, and (5) the District of Columbia would be free from the slave trade.
4. Historians believe the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 accelerated the rate by which free and enslaved African Americans sought refuge in the North, taking advantage of the Underground Railroad and its network. It has also been acknowledged that the law increased the number of antislavery advocates in the North because it forced whites to become involved in the lives of Southerners. See Wilbert Siebert, Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom (New York: Arno Press, 1968), 209–14; Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, as Narrated by Himself (London: Charles Gilpin, Bishopgate Without, 1851), 17; Marion Gleason McDougall, Fugitive Slaves, 1619–1865 (Boston: Ginn, 1891), 43.
5. See Robert Clemens Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties (Lancaster, PA: John A. Hiestand, 1883), 107–30.
6. Frederick Douglass, “No Struggle, No Progress,” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory 1787–1900, ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 310–11.
7. Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 250.
8. Quoted in Douglass, “Speech on the Dred Scott Decisi
on,” 247–62.
9. Quoted in Frederick Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision,” May 14, 1857, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 347. See also The Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States and the Opinions of the Judges Thereof in the Case of Dred Scott versus John F. A. Sandford (Washington, DC: Cornelius Wendall Printer, 1857), 9.
10. Political Debates between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas (Columbus: Follett, Foster, 1860), 232.
11. The fallout over the Kansas-Nebraska Act created the momentum that helped form the Republican Party.
12. Following the firing on Fort Sumter in April, Arkansas and North Carolina seceded in May, and Tennessee followed in June.
13. Douglass Monthly 3 (May 1861): 451–52.
14. Editorial, “What of the Night?” Weekly Anglo African, April 20, 1861, http://research.udmercy.edu/find/special_collections/digital/baa/item.php?record_id=918&collectionCode=baa.
15. Alfred M. Green, “Let Us Take up the Sword,” in Foner and Branham, Lift Every Voice, 357–59.
16. Quoted in Richard Leeman, African American Orators: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 308.
17. See Kenneth Stamp, ed., The Causes of the Civil War (New York: Touchstone Books, 1991); Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Lincoln on Race and Slavery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Political Debates between Lincoln and Douglas.
18. Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Cooper Institute,” February 27, 1860, in Abraham Lincoln, Slavery and the Civil War (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001), 83.
19. Peter H. Clark, The Black Brigade of Cincinnati (Cincinnati: Jos. B. Boyd, 1864), 4–5.
20. See Christian G. Samito, Becoming American under Fire: Irish Americans, African Americans, and the Politics of Citizenship during the Civil War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).