By the time of the inaugural race meet at Saratoga Springs, Clay had raced and won with his colt Kentucky at the Paterson track in New Jersey. This caught the attention of the well-regarded sportsman John F. Purdy. Purdy was a wine dealer, a “gentleman” jockey (which meant that he did not pursue a living riding racehorses), and a man whose advice people in racing held in high regard. He promptly bought the colt for $6,000, taking him in a package deal with a filly named Arcola. Clay had insisted that Purdy purchase Arcola as part of the sale, but Purdy’s interest had been entirely in Kentucky.7
Purdy pronounced Kentucky the most magnificent two-year-old colt he had ever seen. As well, he announced that he was buying Kentucky, not for himself, but for all New York, a development that indicated the rising interest in horse racing in that state. What Purdy really might have meant to say was that he was acting as a sales agent for wealthy buyers. The next time Kentucky appeared on the racecourse, which was the following spring (1864), when he was three years old, he raced under the colors of an elite group that included William R. Travers, John Hunter, and George Osgood. This group brought much attention to itself that same year for being among the founders of a new racecourse at Saratoga Springs. The group had assumed control of racing at Saratoga in 1863 and opened a new grandstand and racecourse across the road from the primitive racing grounds where the inaugural 1863 meet had raced. Purdy served as the new Saratoga track’s vice president and Travers as its president.8
Travers and Hunter were well known beyond the racecourse at Saratoga Springs. In fact, they were better known as Wall Street speculators who had realized remarkable success with buying and selling equities. Under the firm name of Travers and Jerome, Travers and his Wall Street partner, Leonard Jerome (the latter destined to be Winston Churchill’s grandfather), had notoriously run up a $50,000 capital investment in 1856 to a sum larger than $1 million three years later. This seems even more remarkable for the clear profit it produced, as the partners had pulled off their financial coup during an era when personal income tax did not exist. By 1864, Travers and Jerome had expanded their involvement in horse racing into building racecourses, beginning in 1864 with Saratoga Springs. Jerome would open a course in 1867 with much more lavish facilities in Westchester County, closer to the city of New York. He called his swank new track Jerome Park.9
William R. Travers served as the first president of the new Saratoga Race Course, opened in 1864. He also was a partner in the ownership of the horse Kentucky, purchased from John Clay of Lexington. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library.)
Two years later, by the summer of 1865, when the war was over, Kentucky had run up a remarkable record. Although he had suffered his only career loss in 1864 in the Jersey Derby at Paterson (where he ran third—fourth according to some reports—behind another son of Lexington called Norfolk), Kentucky had strung together a winning streak that included the Jersey St. Leger Stakes, the Sequel Stakes, and a match race—a one-on-one contest against one other horse. All that remained for him to do if he were to secure a place as champion over all other American racehorses was to race against the third member of Lexington’s great sons who were all born in 1861. This was the colt named Asteroid, who, like Kentucky and Norfolk, was bred in the Bluegrass.
Asteroid was also bay. He and Kentucky both were four years old, born the year the Civil War broke out. Asteroid, unlike Kentucky, had never known defeat on the racecourse. This might have seemed to make him the champion of American racehorses, for Kentucky, his only equal, had lost one race. Later, at the close of his career, Kentucky would also lose a race against the clock when he attempted to beat the timed record of his sire, Lexington. But Asteroid had accumulated an unblemished record, even if he had raced entirely in Ohio and the border states of Kentucky and Missouri, a geographic happenstance that New Yorkers imperiously viewed as parochial.
Asteroid had also proved his speed and endurance in quite another way. He had survived a devil of a gallop at the hands of outlaws disguised as Union soldiers who had taken him during a raid on Woodburn Farm, in the heart of horse country. “Mr. Alexander and his family were just sitting down to dinner … when an old negro woman came running in with the news that there was a great commotion at the stables, a party of men being engaged in seizing and carrying off the horses,” read one account. The theft had occurred quite brazenly, in the middle of the day.10
The theft took place during the autumn of 1864, six months before the war ended. The outlaw riding Asteroid had forced him to swim across the Kentucky River under a hail of bullets fired their way. Asteroid wound up ransomed for Woodburn Farm and was back at the races in the spring of 1865, with people in the Northeast calling for him to race against Kentucky. This challenge certainly was taking everyone’s mind off the late war, as the prospect of a widely anticipated race between the two posed all kinds of intriguing possibilities.
Asteroid, another of Lexington’s famous offspring (his dam was Nebula, a daughter of the imported Glencoe), raced for his owner, Robert Aitcheson Alexander, of Woodburn Farm in Woodford County, Kentucky. Outlaws stole the horse during the Civil War. Alexander’s friends ransomed him and returned him to Alexander. Asteroid then resumed his racing career. He was undefeated on the racetrack, winning twelve races and a total of $12,800. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library.)
With Asteroid having defeated all his competition west of the Allegheny Mountains, it seemed a shame to many patrons of the sport that he had never gone east to race against Kentucky. As people in the Northeast saw it, a showdown of this sort would settle the matter of which colt was the better of the two and, therefore, the fastest racehorse in the United States. But people also looked for something more than a horse race in this challenge issued to Asteroid. Sectional rivalries lingered after the war, and these two horses had acquired the status of sectional rivals. General Ulysses Grant and his Confederate counterpart, General Robert E. Lee, had barely signed the terms of peace in April 1865 at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia when New York’s wealthy sportsmen had begun to anticipate still another sectional confrontation, this one to occur on the racecourse. There seemed no better way to reassert the North’s victory in the war.
None could hide their feelings about this event: the rivalry between these two horses stirred up “a little unpleasant feeling between men of different sections,” according to the recollections of the era’s turf authority, Hamilton Busbey. This highly anticipated showdown was “marked with much feeling, and the names of the two horses were daily in the mouths of thousands,” Busbey wrote. Ironically, although these horses represented sectional rivalries, their coming together on the racecourse was also expected to signal sectional healing. Busbey suggested that the sport of horse racing had already demonstrated healing qualities because “men who, a few months before, had faced each other on the battle-field, stood side by side on the race-course, enthusiastically applauding the silken-coated thoroughbreds.”11
Sportsmen sensed another irony in the challenge. They might have seen this confrontation not so much as between North and South, as the war had been fought, as between West and East, the latter being where the locus of power in horse racing had shifted immediately after the Civil War. The West, during this era, meant Kentucky—and every other place on the map to the left of the Allegheny Mountains. While the power in racing had, indeed, shifted east, Kentucky no more than Virginia or Pennsylvania actually occupied a geographic position that could be described as in the West. This geographic designation,