The Prince of Jockeys Read online

  THE PRINCE OF JOCKEYS

  The Life of

  ISAAC BURNS MURPHY

  PELLOM MCDANIELS III

  Copyright © 2013 by The University Press of Kentucky

  Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

  serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.

  All rights reserved.

  Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

  663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

  www.kentuckypress.com

  17 16 15 14 13 5 4 3 2 1

  Frontispiece: Depiction of the great 1890 match race between Salvator and Tenny (Courtesy of Pellom McDaniels III)

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McDaniels, Pellom, III.

  The prince of jockeys : the life of Isaac Burns Murphy / Pellom McDaniels III.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8131-4271-5 (hardcover : alk. pbk.) —

  ISBN 978-0-8131-4384-2 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4385-9 (pdf)

  1. Murphy, Isaac Burns, 1861-1896. 2. Murphy, Isaac Burns, 1861-1896—Influence. 3. African American jockeys—Biography. 4. Jockeys—United States—Biography. 5. Jockeys—Kentucky—Biography. 6. Kentucky Derby—History. 7. Kentucky—Race relations—History—19th century. I. Title.

  SF336.M784M35 2013

  798.40092’9—dc23

  [B] 2013019414

  This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

  Manufactured in the United States of America.

  Member of the Association of

  American University Presses

  A special thank you to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which generously assisted with publication costs.

  The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency created in 1965. It is one of the largest funders of humanities programs in the United States. Because democracy demands wisdom, NEH serves and strengthens our republic by promoting excellence in the humanities and conveying the lessons of history to all Americans.

  For Rudolph P. Byrd,

  An Elegant Specimen of Manhood

  They'll see how beautiful I am

  And be ashamed—

  I, too, am America.

  — Langston Hughes

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part 1: Roots

  1. Into the Bluegrass

  2. America Bourne

  Part 2: Rise

  3. Seizing Freedom

  4. From the Silence and the Darkness, 1865–1869

  5. The New Order of Things, 1870–1874

  Part 3: Revelations

  6. Learning to Ride and Taking Flight, 1875–1880

  7. An Elegant Specimen of Manhood, 1881–1889

  8. In This Peculiar Country, 1890–1895

  9. A Pageantry of Woe, 1896

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Chronology

  Notes

  Index

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  Isaac Burns Murphy was born in the midst of dramatic changes taking place in mid-nineteenth-century America. He lived through the “second American Revolution,” which gave people of African descent recognition as citizens, and he died at the end of the same century, when those hard-fought gains were shattered by the adoption of government-sanctioned Jim Crow policies of exclusion. Murphy, one of the most dynamic jockeys of his era, was a casualty of his own success. He lived at a time when former slave turned fiery abolitionist Frederick Douglass and bold yet wise President Abraham Lincoln publicly reproached advocates of the institution of slavery as perpetuators of a “system of brute force that shields itself behind might, rather than right.”1 Their vision for a unified nation divorced from the “peculiar institution” encountered resistance from both Northern and Southern whites and European immigrants, whose identities were tied to the notion of a fixed racial hierarchy in which blacks occupied the lowest position.

  To most Americans, athleticism is an inherent feature of blackness, directly linked to the mythology of race promoted by the founding fathers in the U.S. Constitution. To say that Murphy was a natural athlete diminishes his life experiences and his decisions, as well as the choices of those individuals who survived through social adaptation and economic opportunism. In his youth, Murphy gained freedom, citizenship, and eventually the right to vote through amendments to the Constitution—a document originally designed to exclude rather than include 4 million people of African descent. He was symbolic of the progress made by African Americans within a generation of the Emancipation Proclamation, the end of the Civil War, and Reconstruction (which, though important, fell short of its promise to fully include African Americans as U.S. citizens). What is more, Murphy represented the potential for blacks to grow into a tremendously powerful body politic, capable of challenging traditional beliefs and Darwinian theories about race and changing the fortunes of those who had previously resided at the bottom of society and whose humanity had been thought nonexistent. For most white men, especially in the South, their imagined position in American society eroded morally, socially, and economically each time an individual of African descent achieved anything that resembled public or private success. This view of race is so entrenched in the white American imagination that it is visible even in the twenty-first century, as evidenced by the public reaction of some government officials to the election of the nation's first African American president, Barack Hussein Obama.

  When average Americans think of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, they are not necessarily considering the intersecting contexts within which these documents were written. Nor have they thoroughly examined the lives of the men who met and debated the validity of their argument for independence and whose signatures appear on these documents. Yet doing so would reveal important clues about the framers' ideological and personal reasons for endorsing a particular direction for the new nation. Indeed, these paragons of American masculine virtue recognized that the institution of slavery was not sustainable when freedom was the basis of the Revolutionary cause. Still, these men deliberately laid a cornerstone for an American style of democracy that would be hard to extract once the Republic was fully realized. Clearly, the intent was to acquire and defend freedom for some while denying it to others. To most Americans, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Samuel Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin are vaunted heroes from the age of tyranny and oppression.2 And their collective vision for the nation, written on parchment, is considered not only infallible but also, to those blinded by nationalism and patriotism, divine in both origin and decree.

  By design, the Declaration of Independence spoke to the desires and needs of a particular segment of the colonial population, attempting to defend their self-appointed right to exploit their current and future interests in the resource-rich territory of North America.3 These powerful white men with land, property, and wealth needed protection from King George III and the British government, so they created a social movement to inspire middling and disenfranchised whites, women, Africans, and people of African descent to fight for the primary gain outlined in the Declaration: freedom from oppression and the right to pursue individual happiness
. Equally, the U.S. Constitution protected the interests of the same white elite and planter classes who had the most to lose.4 As examples of American success, prosperity, and manhood, these men represented an American aristocracy, and they were elevated as models of powerful white masculinity. The Constitution simultaneously fixed the status of Africans and their descendants, whose assigned role in American society was based on their blackness and their assumed racial, religious, and cultural inferiority. From these documents evolved the core principle of a uniquely American identity, whereby whiteness would dominate blackness in perpetuity, regardless of the wholesale debunking of quasi-scientific theories related to race.

  The tacit use of recognized racial difference was a central feature of the distinctive American credo built on the existential promises of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, because race was both a social and a cultural construction used to maintain order in the emerging nation, it would become the bedrock for a privileged white class whose identity was built around fantastical ideas about blackness made popular by fictional accounts of the continent of Africa, religious leaders, and the politically powerful. This race-based orientation had real consequences related to the designation of human beings as human capital, the narrow definition of citizenship, and the challenges of racial assimilation as European immigrants poured into the country during the first half of the nineteenth century. Racialized “others,” especially African Americans, were relegated to the margins of society. Over time, the specific cultural and religious differences among people of European descent were erased, as Europeans were amalgamated into an easily accepted whiteness in defense of black competition and empowerment. Debased and abused, African Americans were used both literally and figuratively by the majority of whites as an indicator of the latter's fixed social standing and believed racial superiority. This imagined position, in turn, influenced political decision making designed to reinscribe white male power and white privilege. Still, despite its entrenched position and institutional support, slavery was always a contested terrain that challenged American interpretations of morality, manly virtue, justice, and the political destiny of the new nation.

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, antislavery advocates, emancipationists, and abolitionists in the commonwealth of Kentucky began organizing against the perpetuation of slavery. Emboldened by their religious convictions, like-minded Kentuckians formed the Kentucky Abolition Society in 1808, the same year the United States banned the importation of African slaves. Led by Baptist preacher David Barrow, members of the society argued that the system of slavery was “pregnant with moral, national and domestic evils, ruinous to national tranquility, honor and enjoyment, and [something] which every good man wishes to be abolished.”5 Various members of Kentucky's growing population, including clergymen, politicians, and commoners seeking opportunities to own land and prosper away from the institution of slavery, joined reform-minded organizations with the concrete objective of dismantling the peculiar institution. Their passionate pleas for moral decency and courageous intervention were acknowledged by many who disapproved of the use of human chattel as the primary labor force for the developing nation. However, to a majority of slave owners, the simplistic solution of emancipating and educating blacks, with the intent of creating new citizens who could contribute to the development of the Republic, was asking too much. To the planter class and the wealthy elite, the entrenched American tradition of slavery, which they believed was the most effective method of securing the wealth and power they desired, was irreversible because it was “nature's design.” To proponents of slavery, slaves were private property, similar to a horse or a carriage; any infringement on a private citizen's ability to pursue life, liberty, and happiness (the American dream), even if it was related to the ownership of human chattel, was considered unconstitutional. Slaveholders and their supporters were powerful enough to challenge all efforts to deny them their right to dispossess individuals of African descent of their human rights. And they did.

  One of the most prominent slaveholders in Kentucky was Senator Henry Clay, a leading politician and advocate for the colonization of Africa with free blacks from the United States. Clay would become known as the “Great Compromiser” after he negotiated the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state in 1821 but prohibited the institution of slavery in the territories north of 36°30' latitude. In an 1827 address to the American Colonization Society, Clay argued that the organization could not “touch the subject of slavery” but could promote the establishment of a colony in Africa for free blacks.6 Like a majority of slaveholders, he believed the presence of free blacks corrupted the system of slavery by inspiring dissent among those held as human chattel who hoped to claim freedom for themselves. Most of the wealth of the Kentucky elite had been generated by their African American slaves, who provided the muscle needed for gentlemen farmers, merchants, and lawyers to obtain their bounty of good fortune. Besides their slaves, white male Kentuckians prided themselves on their other possessions: land, brick homes, Thoroughbred horses, cattle, and acres of corn, hemp, and tobacco. Still, rallying around calls for Christian decency, the antislavery movement exposed the great hypocrisy at the foundation of the “Great Republic”: it prided itself on being a nation of civilized people who valued freedom, yet it maintained the repugnant tradition of owning human beings as property.

  Not to be denied their voice, African Americans, both the quasi-freeborn and the self-emancipated, spoke out against the institution of slavery in terms that were easily understood. Gifted writers such as David Walker defined the lives of those held in bondage as a frustrating existence of “wretchedness and endless misery.”7 Enslaved poet George Moses Horton waxed expressively about the “sad disgrace” of slave life and the broken promises of liberty, no doubt referring to those promises found in the Declaration of Independence.8 Harvard-trained physician Martin Delany argued that his fellow blacks held in bondage were Americans whose “birthright to citizenship” can never “be annulled.” What is more, he urged the more powerful members of the race—specifically, urban leaders in Philadelphia and New York—to use their political maturity and assume a stronger position in the growing national debate regarding the “Negro question.”9 By the middle of the nineteenth century, the primary voices opposing the institution of slavery were those of former slaves, who used their publications and public lectures to articulate in detail their experiences as the focus of production and debauchery and to express what it meant to be socially dead in a country where freedom is claimed to be a God-given right.10 The most compelling narratives came from fugitive slaves such as William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and Solomon Northrup, whose collective experiences excited and accelerated the abolitionist movement that had already been established. Their first-person narratives spoke to the godlessness of the institution and brought attention to the enterprise of human suffering that was supported by the church, the Federal government, and the determined merchants who were benefiting from trade with the South—deemed by many to be the devil's playground, with slave owners as his unholy minions.

  In Isaac Murphy's Kentucky, slavery was imagined to be a more benign, less destructive version of what took place down in the Deep South. In reality, the practice was just as brutal and the source of great pain and sorrow for African Americans. Kentucky masters sadistically beat and maimed individuals for the smallest of infractions, and on occasion, a rebellious slave would be murdered to serve as an example to others who might be unwilling to submit to their condition. Although it was not a widespread practice, some Kentucky farmers and planters bred slaves for interstate commerce, selling them to traders transporting new “inventory” to the cotton and sugar plantations in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. Kentucky boasted slave markets fat with merchandise, where the finest slaves could be purchased for a fair price. At auctions, it was common for families to be broken apart and sold for profit,
to pay off debts, or just to reduce the amount of “stock” on a farm. Kentucky slave owners even sold their own mixed-race children, born as a result of the sexual abuse and rape of female slaves in their possession. This type of abuse damaged not only the women whose lives and bodies were claimed as commodities to be used and discarded. These reprehensible acts of violence shaped the social and familial relations between African American men and women, which historians, sociologists, and anthropologists believe are still being affected today.11 White women also participated in abusing the human chattel they depended on for the comforts of modern living. The occasional maiming of a mulatto slave child by his or her mistress was seen as retaliation against a husband's infidelity and revenge against the black Jezebel who had enticed a weak man in his time of need: hegemony at work.

  More than anything, Kentucky's future prosperity depended on African American muscle to establish the region's agricultural and commercial wealth. Working as skilled laborers, field hands, animal trainers, and grooms, black men were an invaluable source of productivity on the farms of the Bluegrass State's elite. Numerous gentlemen farmers invested in stock farms dedicated to the development of sheep, cattle, and horses for the expanding marketplace. As horse racing became exceedingly important to the landed gentry, grooms, trainers, and jockeys rose in prestige on Kentucky farms. This allowed enslaved black men to elevate not only their owners' status but also their own value on the farm and in slave society. In generating revenue for their masters, these men created value for themselves and increased their reputations as quality slaves. This odd juxtaposition of self-assertion and self-deprecation carried with it a sense of individual, familial, and community pride.12 Recognizing their value, these African American men took advantage of every opportunity to shine, thus ensuring that their future needs would be met. Indeed, they could almost guarantee themselves and their families a degree of comfort, based on their ability to succeed on the oval racetrack. Ironically, like the horses they rode to victory, even the most successful jockeys of the antebellum period were merely commodities to be bought and sold.