By Allen Guttmann

In the 19th-century American South, thoroughbred racing intersected with slavery in important and surprising ways. [History] Race Horse Men has a straightforward and entirely persuasive thesis. The wealthy white Southerners who owned stables of thoroughbred horses—and who owned the slaves who tended and rode the horses—perceived the racetrack as a microcosm of the ideal society. It was “in miniature the hierarchical world they wanted.”

To these antebellum “Cotton Whigs,” black jockeys riding horses bred and cared for by black trainers were “living proof that men of authority and vision could create a dynamic, harmonious community in which everyone flourished.”

There was a caveat. Everyone had to know his or her proper place. “Thoroughbreds,” Katherine Mooney writes, “taught and represented important lessons about the hierarchy permissible within American democracy.” The artist of choice for “turfmen”—horse-racing devotees—was Edward Troye, whose portraits of horses and handlers depicted slavery “as planters wished to see it.”

Katherine C. Mooney ’04
This vision of the racetrack-as-community survived the Civil War and was important in the postwar restoration of cordial relationships between turfmen North and South. They understood and respected one another. The ideal world enacted at the Gilded Age racetrack differed from the plantation vision in that white workers took their proper place in the social hierarchy, a place that was, in fact, below that of highly respected black trainers such as Hark and Ansel Williamson and famously successful black jockeys such as Isaac Murphy and Jimmy Winkfield.

Mooney brightly illuminates important cultural connections left in the dark by more conventional social histories.

Mooney demonstrates the privileged status of African-Americans with equestrian skills. The breeding shed, she writes, was a rare place in the South “where slave expertise dictated the flow of events.” Little wonder that the virtue most praised by white turfmen was fidelity. They trusted black trainers to take thoroughbreds on long journeys into states where slavery was illegal and flight would have been easy. That this fidelity was less total than assumed became clear during the Civil War, when many (but not all) privileged black horsemen fled to Union lines, where some joined the North’s black regiments. Empirical reality, the brute fact that many black “race horse men” preferred freedom to the easy life, made little impression on those who remained enchanted by the “mystical bond of unbreakable fidelity.”

But the best part of Race Horse Men is not the thesis but its beautifully painted portraits of great black trainers and jockeys, too many to name, and its stride-by-stride accounts of the great intersectional races that seemed to have the entire nation holding its breath. Mooney’s narrative of the famous 1822 contest between Eclipse (North) and Sir Charles (South) is especially notable.

One of the small pleasures of this social history is the appearance of famous men (and, occasionally, women) in unexpected roles. Historians know that Andrew Jackson was a “race horse man,” but how many knew that his opponent in the struggle over the Bank of the United States, Nicholas Biddle, was also a turfman? We knew about Henry Clay, but what about the notoriously thuggish, Irish-born Tammany Hall politician John Morrissey and that ill-fated cavalry officer George Armstrong Custer?

Race Horse Men brightly illuminates important cultural connections left in the dark by more conventional social histories. I’ve written about antebellum horse races. Why didn’t I recognize the significance of all those black trainers and jockeys?

Guttmann is the Emily C. Jordan Folger Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus, at Amherst.
Christopher T. Martin photo