27. Application No. 174.318 and Certificate No. 137.891, issued as confirmation of a valid claim to the pension of Jerry Burns, Civil War Pension Index: General Index to Pension Files, 1861–1934, Ancestry.com; original data from General Index to Pension Files, 1861–1934, T288, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
28. Patricia Hill Collins, Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 5.
29. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 671.
30. DuBois's chapter “Back towards Slavery” in Black Reconstruction in America is an excellent study of how whites in the South responded to Reconstruction and the advancement of blacks as socially, economically, and politically viable individuals. For specific accounts of violence in Kentucky during Reconstruction, see George C. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 1865–1940: Lynchings, Mob Rule and “Legal Lynchings” (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1990).
31. John Hope Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 150–69.
32. Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky, 39.
33. “The Ku Klux: Greeley's Men at Work in Kentucky—They Hang a Man, His Wife and His Daughter to a Tree,” New York Times, November 5, 1870, 1.
34. See Wright's account of this lynching in Racial Violence in Kentucky, 51.
35. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 76.
36. Spencer Talbott, Freedman's Bank Records, 1865–1871, Ancestry.com; original data from Registers of Signatures of Depositors in Branches of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, 1865–1874, micropublication M816, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.
37. “Bank Book and Circulars,” in Documentary History of Reconstruction: Political, Military, Social, Religious, Educational & Industrial 1865 to the Present Time (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark, 1906), 384.
38. “Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company,” House of Representatives, Report No. 58, 43rd Congress, 2nd session, January 25, 1875, 5.
39. America Burns is listed as owning “one city lot” worth $400 in the Fayette County tax records.
40. “Freedmen's Bank,” House of Representatives, Report No. 502, 44rd Congress, 1st session, May 19, 1876, 3.
41. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 599; Carl Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud (Urbana: University of Chicago, 1976), 1.
42. See Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud, 1–20; DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 599–600; John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 314–15; Eric Foner, Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (New York: Vintage Books, 2006), 193–94; Franklin, Reconstruction after the Civil War, 181–82.
43. Advertisement for the Lexington branch of the National Savings Bank and Trust Company, Kentucky Statesman, November 8, 1870, 3.
44. DuBois would argue that the Freedmen's Bank was a failure largely because of the lack of Federal regulation of the bank's controllers. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 599–600.
45. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud, 52.
46. Ibid., 50.
47. Advertisement for the Lexington branch of the National Savings Bank and Trust Company,” Kentucky Statesman, November 8, 1870, 3.
48. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 599–600; America Burns, Record No. 1479, Freemen's Bank Ledger.
49. According to Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud, 100–101, the actual “amount due to whites was quite substantial at New Orleans and New York, and perhaps great at Beaufort and Jacksonville,” where whites had invested heavily in the bank to take advantage of the interests rates. This was problematic, as the Freedmen's Bank was intended to be a savings bank for blacks only.
50. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 599.
51. “Freeland's Famous Jockey: Joe Cotton's Owner Tells How He First Taught the Boy to Ride,” New York Times, August 20, 1885, 3.
52. Historians have suggested that Green Murphy may have been involved in the decision to apprentice his grandson to the Williams and Owings stable, but I have been unable to locate Green Murphy in any of the 1870–1890 census data for Lexington. In fact, as noted previously, neither of the males listed as living in America and Isaac's First Ward home was Green Murphy. David Wiggins, Glory Bound: Black Athletes in a White America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1997), 22; 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.
53. Theodore Ayrault Dodge, Riders of Many Lands (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894), 171–75.
54. Ranck, History of Lexington, 136.
55. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 2002), 144–45.
56. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 61.
57. Frank Talamadge Phelps, “The Nearest Perfect Jockey,” Thoroughbred Record, May 13, 1967, 1247.
58. Herbert Gutman suggests that both during and after slavery, African Americans maintained a sense of community through the use of “fictive, or quasi” kinship names such as “uncle” and “aunt.” We also know from history that whites utilized the prefix of uncle and aunt to mark older African American men and women as subordinate. This naming would evolve into the twentieth century phenomenon of white men calling black men George, and black men responding antagonistically to the label calling white men Mr. Charley. Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 220–22.
59. “Freeland's Famous Jockey,” 3.
60. “Isaac Murphy Was One of the Greatest Men that Ever Rode,” transcript of a telephone interview conducted with Nate Cantrell by Pamela Douglas, March 15, 1976, Betty Borries Collection, Keeneland Research Library, Lexington, KY.
61. Ibid.
62. In his short story “The Man Who Was a Horse,” African American folklorist Julius Lester gives us a glimpse of what Murphy would eventually feel while riding one of his mounts:
The longer he was with the herd, the less he thought. His mind slowly emptied itself of anything relating to his other life and refilled with sky, plain, grass, water and shrubs. At these times he was more aware of the full-bodied animal beneath him. His own body seemed to take on a new life and he was aware of the wind against his chest, of the taut muscles in his arms, which felt to him like the forelegs of his horses. The only thing he didn't feel he had was tail to float in the wind behind him.
Julius Lester, Long Journey Home: Stories from Black History (New York: Dell, 1972), 88.
63. John H. Davis calls Isaac Murphy “one of the best judges of pace on the American turf.” According to Davis, Murphy “could tell to almost the fraction of a second just how fast a horse under him was going.” John H. Davis, The American Turf: History of the Thoroughbred, Together with Personal Reminiscences by the Author, Who, in Turn, Has Been Jockey, Trainer and Owner (New York: John Polhemus, 1907), 88.
6. Learning to Ride and Taking Flight
1. “King of the Pigskin Artists: The Successful Career of Isaac Murphy, the Colored Archer of America,” New York Herald, March 17, 1889, 24.
2. Lewellyn P. Tarleton, “Isaac Murphy: A Memorial,” Thoroughbred Record, March 21, 1896, 136.
3. American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839), 186–87.
4. American Racing Colors: Colors of the Owners of Racing Horses as Worn by Their Jockeys at the Meetings of the American Jockey Club (New York: Thomas K. Miller, 1884).
5. “Freeland's Famous Jockey,” New York Times, August 20, 1885, 3.
6. There is a wonderful section on the tradition
al purpose of apprenticeships for stable boys who wanted to become jockeys in C. R. Acton, Silk and Spur (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), 58–70.
7. Will Ogilvie, “Aintree Calls,” Bailey's Magazine of Sports and Pastimes 101, no. 650 (April 1914): 199.
8. “The Spring Campaign,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 1, no. 3 (February 19, 1875): 38.
9. “Stock Gossip,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 1, no. 4 (February 26, 1875): 54.
10. “King of the Pigskin Artists,” 24; Betty Borries, Isaac Murphy: Kentucky's Record Jockey (Berea: Kentucke Imprints, 1988), 23.
11. According to Thomas Clark, “Crab Orchard was selected for the meeting place because it was at the forks of the Louisville and Lexington branches of the Wilderness Road.” Thomas D. Clark, A History of Kentucky (Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation, 1988), 77. Being that this was the location of Isaac Murphy's first professional race, it is appropriate that was at a kind of crossroads between old and new, past and present. See also Lincoln County Historical Society, Lincoln County, Kentucky (Stanford, KY: Turner Publishing, 2002), 34.
12. “King of the Pigskin Artists,” 24; Borries, Isaac Murphy, 23.
13. “King of the Pigskin Artists,” 24.
14. Borries, Isaac Murphy, 54.
15. “King of the Pigskin Artists”; R. Gerald Alvey, Kentucky Bluegrass Country (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992), 135–36.
16. John E. Kleber, ed., The Kentucky Encyclopedia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 496–97; Alvey, Kentucky Bluegrass Country, 188–89; Matt Winn, Down the Stretch: The Story of Colonel Matt J. Winn as Told to Frank G. Menke (New York: Smith and Durrell, 1945), 3; Lynn S. Renau, Racing around Kentucky (Louisville: Lynn S. Renau Antiques Consultant, 1995), 43–57.
17. Acton, Silk and Spur, 11.
18. Henry Custance, Riding Recollections and Turf Stories (London: Edward Arnold, 1894), 13–17; “Mr. Richard Ten Broeck,” Bailey's Monthly Sporting Magazine of Sports and Pastimes 8, no. 51 (1864): 55–57.
19. Robert Black, The Jockey Club and Its Founders in Three Periods (London: Smith, Elder, 1891), 332.
20. Jim Bolus, Run for the Roses: 100 Years at the Kentucky Derby (New York: Hawthorne Books, 1974), 7; Winn, Down the Stretch, 26–27.
21. Bolus, Run for the Roses, 9.
22. Winn, Down the Stretch, 3.
23. Bolus, Run for the Roses, 11.
24. Renau, Racing around Kentucky, 47.
25. Bureau of the Census, “1870: Population,” in Ninth Census of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), 1:150.
26. Kentucky Live Stock Record 1, no. 16 (May 14, 1875): 231.
27. “A Riverside Farmer at Lexington,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, May 22, 1877, 2.
28. Bolus, Run for the Roses, 10; “The Inaugural of the Louisville Jockey Club,” Kentucky Live Stock Record, reprinted in Hoofprints of the Century (Lexington: Thoroughbred Record, 1975), 16.
29. Bolus, Run for the Roses, 11.
30. In New History of Kentucky (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997), 136, Lowell Harrison and James Klotter identify Robert Scott as a farmer and breeder of blood animals. Whether Williams and Owings trained and raced Lady Greenfield for Scott is unclear. However, other than 1875, she does not show up as a racehorse of any significance.
31. “Racing Record for 1875,” in Spirit of the Times (New York: Spirit of the Times, 1876), 31.
32. Philip St. Laurent, “The Negro in World History,” Tuesday Magazine 3, no. 11 (July 1968): 16.
33. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 249.
34. Philip A. Bruce, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: Observation on His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889), 243–44.
35. George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Racial Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 245.
36. Tarleton, “Isaac Murphy: A Memorial,” 136.
37. Kentucky Live Stock Record 3, no. 21 (May 22, 1876): 330.
38. “The Turf,” New Orleans Times, December 28, 1875, 3.
39. “Cincinnati Railroad,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, October 26, 1875, 4; “Railway Matters,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, January 1, 1878, 7; “Chester Park,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, July 3, 1878, 8.
40. “Queen City Jockey Club,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, January 23, 1878, 8.
41. He finished fourth on T. J. Megibben's Eaglet on the third day in the first race and again on Eaglet on the fourth day in the third race. “The Turf,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 3, no. 23 (June 3, 1875): 360–61.
42. “The Kentucky Association,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 4, no. 13 (September 23, 1876): 196.
43. “The Turf: Louisville Jockey Club: Second Day—Springbranch, Whisper, Redding and Eva Shirley the Winners,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 4, no. 14 (September 30, 1876): 210.
44. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1992), 691–92.
45. Cincinnati Daily Gazette, October 30, 1876.
46. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, 694.
47. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 56.
48. Frederick Douglass, “Convict Lease System,” 1895, 36, Frederick Douglass Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
49. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, 53.
50. “Stock Gossip: Messrs. Williams & Owings’ Stable,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 5, no. 15 (April 14, 1877): 228.
51. “The Turf,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 5, no. 19 (May 12, 1877): 291.
52. “The Louisville Spring Meeting,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 5, no. 20 (May 19, 1877): 312.
53. “Louisville Jockey Club, Tuesday, May 22d—the Derby Day,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 5, no. 21 (May 26, 1877): 323.
54. Ibid.
55. “Sixth Day,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 5, no. 22 (June 2, 1877): 340.
56. “King of the Pigskin Artists,” 24.
57. “Louisville Races,” Wheeling Register, May 25, 1877, 1; “Sixth Day,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 5, no. 22 (June 2, 1877): 340.
58. “Ten Broeck's Great Race,” Wheeling Register, May 30, 1877, 1; “Ten Broeck Cuts Down the Fastest Two Mile Record Three Seconds,” New Orleans Times, May 30, 1877, 1; “A Glorious Event,” Plain Dealer, May 26, 1877, 1.
59. For compelling examinations of the genesis of horse racing in the East, see Steven Reiss, The Sport of Kings and the Kings of Crime: Horse Racing, Politics and Organized Crime in New York, 1865–1913 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011); Kimberly Gatto, Saratoga Race Course: The August Place to Be (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011); Ed Hotaling, They're Off! Horse Racing at Saratoga (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995).
60. Reiss, Sport of Kings, 17.
61. Hotaling, They're Off! 88.
62. Reiss, Sport of Kings, 21.
63. “Saratoga: A Festival Week, a Genteel Affair, Hotel Life, the Weather, an Interesting Scene, a Splendid Picture,” New York Times, July 19, 1865, 2.
64. Myra B. Young Armstead, Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August: African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 39.
65. Hotaling, They're Off! 72; Reiss, Sport of Kings, 22.
66. “Saratoga: A Festival Week,” 2. This was most likely the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church discussed by Armstead in Lord, Please Don't Take Me, 115; Mount Olivet Baptist Church was not built until after 1870.
67. In a letter to his mother, Walt Whitman described the chaos in New York after the conscription law was passed:
So the mob has risen at last in New York—I have been expecting it, but as the day for the draft had arrived & every thing was s
o quiet, I supposed all might go on smoothly—but it seems the passions of the people were only sleeping, & have burst forth with terrible fury, & they have destroyed life & property, the enrolment buildings &c as we hear—the accounts we get are a good deal in a muddle, but it seems bad enough—the feeling here is savage & hot as fire against New York, (the mob—“copperhead mob” the papers here call it,) & I hear nothing in all directions but threats of ordering up the gunboats, cannonading the city, shooting down the mob, hanging them in a body, &c &c—meantime I remain silent, partly amused, partly scornful, or occasionally put a dry remark, which only adds fuel to the flame—I do not feel it in my heart to abuse the poor people, or call for rope or bullets for them, but that is all the talk here, even in the hospitals.
“Correspondence,” July 19, 1863, Walt Whitman Archive, Charles E. Feinberg Collection of Walt Whitman, 1839–1919, Library of Congress, http://whitmanarchive.org/biography/correspondence/cw/tei/loc.00777.html.
68. Theodore Corbett, The Making of American Resorts: Saratoga Springs, Ballston Spa, Lake George (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 155.
69. John Morris [pseud.], Wanderings of a Vagabond: An Autobiography (New York: John O'Connor, 1873), 197–261.
70. “Saratoga Association,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 5, no. 24 (June 16, 1877): 376.
71. See Hotaling, They're Off! 118; Reiss, Sport of Kings, 34–35.
72. “The Season at Saratoga: All the Hotels Are Ready,” New York Times, June 17, 1878, 1; Hotaling, They're Off! 117–18.
73. “The Turf: Saratoga Races,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 6, no. 6 (August 4, 1877): 82.
74. Ibid., 83.
75. “Third Day of Second Meeting—A Dead Heat for the Grinstead Stakes between Duke of Magenta and Spartan,” Kentucky Live Stock Record 6, no. 8 (August 25, 1877): 115.
76. Rev. C. H. Parrish, ed., Golden Jubilee of the General Association of Colored Baptists in Kentucky (Louisville: Mayes Printing Company, 1915), 249–52; Marion B. Lucas, A History of Blacks in Kentucky: From Slavery to Segregation, 1760–1891 (Frankfort: Kentucky Historical Society, 2003), 239.
The Prince of Jockeys Page 52
