How Kentucky Became Southern. Maryjean Wall

within the state, he pointed out that two wealthy Kentuckians—Robert Aitcheson Alexander and Brutus J. Clay, the latter the owner of a vast cattle farm called Auvergne in Bourbon County—were men of cultivated manners who had spent great sums of money on their livestock. The problem was that the Northeastern capitalists were not inclined to wait for this ethereal future to take shape. Thus, they began building their own horse farms in New York and New Jersey. Meanwhile, Kentucky horse breeders “were faced with the problems of rebuilding the productivity of their land and of maintaining a genteel way of life without a reliable source of labor,” as Smith and Raitz have written. Thomas Clark also noted: “The shortage of labor on the postbellum estates was so critical that at one point a widespread campaign was launched to encourage foreign laborers, including Chinese coolies, to settle in Central Kentucky.”²⁰

      Bluegrass landowners then hit on an idea to encourage former slaves to return to agricultural work. They made small plots of rural land available, either without charge or at greatly discounted prices. They customarily sectioned off these portions of land at the rear of their estates away from public view, thus completely changing the landscape from its appearance under antebellum practices, which saw slaves occupying cabins within sight of the main residence. But much had changed with freedom, even the landscape. The point was that the landowners were offering laborers an opportunity to live on land that they could call their own. The labor problem did, in fact, sort itself out somewhat as a result of these rural hamlets. Smith and Raitz have suggested that the central Kentucky horse-farm landscape might never have evolved as it did into a collection of park-like estates had not the landowners provided laborers with access to land of their own and, thus, a place to live near the farms where they worked. Still, even after landowners initiated this practice, the farm labor problem did not immediately resolve itself. Two years later, Turf, Field and Farm continued to report on the labor problem, noting that hemp and tobacco production had fallen off “owing to the derangement in our labor system.”²¹

      By 1867, labor problems continued to plague the farmlands of central Kentucky. Offering a suggestion, Turf, Field and Farm reprinted an article from a Northern newspaper, the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, extolling the appeal of Asian workers. This article cited physical and social characteristics of Asians, in particular Chinese immigrants, that landowners perhaps would find more appealing than those ascribed to ex-slaves: “The Coolies are interesting to a foreign observer who remembers that they have come from the land of Vishnu and Brahma, the ancient seat of wonderful civilizations, where the Ganges is a god…. The men are mostly very handsome and graceful, well formed and supple, with olive skins, straight features, white teeth, long, silky black hair, and lustrous dark eyes, full of passion.”²²

      Turf, Field and Farm reflected the popular thinking of these times—and the labor concerns of farm owners—in citing racial characteristics and superimposing stereotypes on a hierarchy of labor. In an article titled “The Five Races of Man” published in 1867, it intoned: “Race is established by climate and mode of living … with differences so strongly determined that they are perpetuated hereditarily…. The very characteristics which form the Caucasian variety and which separate it from the varieties give it intellectual prominence … [and] make it the superior of all others.” This argument neatly ordained that blacks belonged in the fields and the stables and not in mainstream society living as the equals of whites. It mirrored the arguments that Southerners had put forth before the Civil War when they had justified slavery with patriarchal notions. Antebellum Southerners convinced themselves, and tried to convince outsiders, that they stood as the heads of their plantations and gave orders for the good of their slaves, much as a father stood as the leader of his wife and children.²³

      The depleted labor pool continued to pose problems for Kentucky farms, despite the effort to develop rural hamlets. By 1871, some counties, including Fayette, in the heart of the Bluegrass region, attempted to interest white labor in farmwork. At the same time, some people felt that Kentucky would be better served by the voluntary emigration of blacks to Africa—a timeworn argument seen as the clear way to remove blacks from American society. Henry Clay, an antebellum patron of Thoroughbred racing and breeding in Kentucky, had patronized this movement decades before the Civil War. Six years after the war, Kentuckians continued to debate the colonization movement. A letter published in the Frankfort Tri-Weekly Yeoman in 1871 extolled the appeals of Liberia, describing that African country as possessing “every luxury.”²⁴

      No one appeared to have found the solution for launching a Kentucky horse industry with the scope and scale that would make it competitive with the racing and breeding operations of the wealthy men who were embracing the Northeastern turf. The depleted labor pool, the depleted numbers of bloodstock, and the simple lack of wealth needed if Bluegrass Kentuckians were to compete with the industrial and Wall Street wealth of New Yorkers made the prospect appear grim. Those bookend regions of the Bluegrass, Kentucky and Tennessee, both bore the burden of these postwar encumbrances.

      Kentucky and Tennessee consequently entered the new world of postwar racing and breeding at a disadvantage. Nonetheless, some differences in the way in which breeders in these two states sought to regain their niche as horse country became apparent almost from the start. Almost immediately, Kentuckians sought outside capital investment. Tennessee breeders seemed content to work with what they had. These different approaches would determine the individual futures for these Northern and Southern sections of the Bluegrass, for, by the early twentieth century, central Kentucky alone would become known as the Bluegrass. By that time, Kentucky had secured outside capital, had developed a professional class to manage the horse industry, and had avoided the antiracing laws that shut down the sport forever in Tennessee. The Southern portion of the Bluegrass posed a cautionary tale: the death of racing led to the end of the breeding farms in Tennessee. The result was that Americans soon forgot that Middle Tennessee at one time had shared the Bluegrass region with central Kentucky.

      Kentuckians continued their struggle with the new world they faced after the war when Bluegrass horse country took another blow. This was the death of Robert Aitcheson Alexander in 1867 at the age of forty-eight. He died at Woodburn on December 1, following some years of poor health. He had long been known to be “feeble.” Three weeks before his death, he fell ill, then rallied briefly before relapsing. Turf, Field and Farm