Race’s Tracks

In August 2014, The Economist published a review of Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism that charged him with “advocacy” because of his “grim” portrayal of slavery based on slave testimony. The Economist soon apologized and retracted the review online, but it expressed a point of view favored by those whose idea of antebellum slavery comes from the movie Gone with the Wind. Many Americans might prefer to view slavery as an entity pried off the nation’s side by the Civil War and discarded, and to view the slaveholding of many of the Founding Fathers as an unfortunate trait but not relevant to who they were and to what kind of nation they institutionalized in the Constitution. In the spring of 2015, events in Missouri, Florida, New York, South Carolina, and Maryland are reminders of how race structures U.S. society.

Katherine C. Mooney’s Race Horse Men: How Slavery and Freedom Were Made at the Track and Pellom McDaniels III’s The Prince of Jockeys: The Life of Isaac Burns Murphy make it impossible to view American history as separate from questions of slavery and race. Mooney and McDaniels look behind the image of racing as a pastime of the few, the wealthy, and the white to show that the business of thoroughbred horse racing was, from the beginning, a matter of race. The history of thoroughbred racing is interwoven with history of African Americans from slavery onward. Elite whites may have owned the horses, but blacks owned the knowledge, experience, and skill. Thoroughbred racing might seem a narrow topic in which to explore these issues, but both authors show that the major themes of nineteenth-century history intersect in racing’s microcosm.

Mooney argues that because thoroughbred racing was first centered in the antebellum South, it acquired a racial form that would persist beyond abolition. Racing revealed the tangled complexities and perplexities of slavery. Thoroughbred racehorses were lucrative property made so because of the skills, work, and knowledge of other lucrative property: black horsemen. Though skilled black horsemen could carve out spaces of autonomy and respect within the confines of slavery, white turf-men nonetheless felt completely entitled to their work. “From the beginning of American racing, some of the nation’s most prominent turf-men were Southerners, and at the track they practiced sophisticated and complex forms of human bondage and believed that they demonstrated how integral slavery was to building a powerful and prosperous United States, how richly they deserved Northern deference to their economic imperatives and social customs” (p. 6). In slavery and freedom, racing was a concrete, not just symbolic, demonstration of power and racial hierarchy that created solidarity among elites. For example, Henry Clay’s prominence in politics and horse-breeding—his Ashland Farms was instrumental in developing the American thoroughbred—demonstrates how closely these circles were intertwined.

Thoroughbred racing gained national popularity in the antebellum period, but by the 1850s began to reflect sectional and political divides. The Civil War disrupted both racing and breeding. Despite Confederate belief that “the Southerner’s skill with horses would inevitably defeat any enemy” (p. 127), fine thoroughbreds proved as vulnerable to the carnage of the battlefield as any horse. The war shifted control of racing to the North as a new industrial elite, flush with wartime profits, established breeding operations and racetracks; but the track remained a site of class consolidation. If Southern elites feared black emancipation and resented Reconstruction policy, Northern elites feared labor unrest and resented government interference in business. At the racetrack they “created in miniature . . . the political and economic structures they favored, and they strengthened the bonds of camaraderie and common interest that could give their models formative power on a national scale” (p. 159). Yet for three...