Across the Atlantic: The American Thoroughbred
Race horses first came to this country with the aristocratic settlers of the southern colonies. These wealthy colonists, many of them refugees from the English Revolution, were accustomed to the pastime of racing and to the prestige of owning winning horses, and brought their best racers with them to the New World. As southern fortunes grew throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these colonists were able to begin importing examples of the new English breed, the Thoroughbred. The first Thoroughbred to reach this country was Bulle Rock, imported in 1730. From that point on, Americans set about creating their own version of the Thoroughbred, blending imported stock with their own native horses and adding strains of the short, tough, and fast American Indian ponies. Although interrupted by the American Revolution, Thoroughbred breeding in the South flourished. By 1798, the year the mighty Diomed was imported to Virginia, America had laid unshakable foundations for a strong line of Thoroughbreds that would eventually rival the best in the world.



Diomed poster
This advertisement, placed in a Virginia paper, announced the arrival of Diomed, and his availability for breeding.


Diomed was a racing legend in England, having won the inaugural English Derby in 1780, but the gallant horse proved himself useless in the stud barn. When he was sold to a Virginia breeder in 1798 at age 21, it was assumed that his best days were behind him. But once Diomed found himself on American soil, his problems disappeared, and over the next ten years he sired enough successful progeny to immortalize him as the father of the American Thoroughbred.

With Diomed, Virginia quickly established itself as the center of breeding in the new country. But while Southerners held impromptu races on any available strip of land, including village streets, American racing was born elsewhere. The first official race track in the colonies was opened by the royal governor of New York in 1665, on a clear stretch of pasture on Long Island. It was not until the 1690s that southern colonies were able to open tracks, as every available piece of cleared woodland went to the production of tobacco. As the over-planted land grew fallow, however, and became useless for the cash crop, the flat space was snatched up, and race tracks opened all over. Williamsburg became the center of southern racing, attracting the elite colonists from miles around to bring their horses together in grueling match races similar to those in England and New York.

The unique, developing culture of the post-revolution United States at the end of the eighteenth century affected racing as it did most American pastimes and habits. Northern puritans felt racing was immoral, and effectively choked its growth in New England. In the South, too, problems were brewing. The dominant Church of England, officially tolerant of racing, was no longer in power. Questions arose about the importance of a gentry sport in a newly egalitarian society. But with breeders importing new stallions to replenish stock lost in the war, and southern horse owners wealthier than ever since the 1792 appearance of Eli Whitney's cotton gin, racing, and the Thoroughbred, survived the storm.



Breeding Farm
This farm is one of many that dot the landscape in Kentucky, the center of Thoroughbred breeding in the United States since the end of the Civil War.


After the temporary setbacks of the final years of the eighteenth century, the racing scene of the nineteenth century was marked by almost constant expansion. As settlers moved farther west, they took racing with them, and by 1840, Illinois, Missouri, Texas, and Louisiana all hosted racing events. The bluegrass of Kentucky and Tennessee welcomed horse breeders as they, too, moved westward. Hopeful diggers in the 1848 Gold Rush carried the Thoroughbred as far west as he would ever go in this country: to California. Racetracks in the east, meanwhile, were slowly gaining favor and were hosting more and more people from all classes, and were building grandstands and setting up rails unlike anything seen on the informal, village tracks of the west. One of the eastern tracks, Union Race Course, opened on Long Island in 1821 with a "skinned" (dirt) track. Unlike the traditional grass of English tracks, this dirt was fast, and Union became the model for future American tracks. Union Race Course was influential for another reason as well. Two years after it opened, it hosted the first of the great match races between north and south that came to characterize racing in the United States before the Civil War. Horse owners from each of the increasingly disparate sections of the country put up open challenges, offering purses to prove their horse better than any other. American Eclipse met Sir Henry that day in 1823 at the Union Race Course, and the northern-bred Eclipse won in three four-mile heats. Black Maria and Trifle went head to head in 1832, and Fashion and Boston met twice in the 1840s. The victor in those matches, northern Fashion, went on to meet Tennessee's Peytona in two matches in 1845.



Fashion vs. Peytona
After being beaten in their first match-up, Fashion edged by Peytona to win the second.


While these North versus South horse races were run at least partly in fun, and attracted more crowds than any other event in American history to that point, the real match-up between North and South, in the Civil War, brought racing to its knees. The traditional breeding centers of Virginia and the Carolinas were devastated: pasture was torn up, and horses stolen or killed in the wake of advancing armies desperate for both mounts and food. In the north, Thoroughbreds were conscripted for military duty, and tracks were closed or used as army training camps. After the war, areas of the country not as deeply marked with battle scars were the first to regroup. California racing flourished toward the end of the nineteenth century, while Kentucky and Tennessee emerged, relatively unscathed, as the new centers of American breeding. The north was able to reopen tracks in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but the center of racing after 1865 rested squarely in New York State.



Saratoga Track
A view of the historic track started in the resort community during the civil war.




United States Hotel


Saratoga Springs, whose spas and resort hotels entertained thousands of the country's elite, was an ideal location for a racetrack

New York, undaunted by the horrors of Gettysburg, opened a new track in the summer of 1863 in Saratoga Springs 3. The success of this picturesque track encouraged a number of courses in the state after the war's conclusion. Jerome Park, opened in 1866 in New York City, became the control center of New York racing when the American Jockey Club set up headquarters there and declared their goal to "promote the improvement of horses. . . and to become an authority on racing matters." (Longrigg, 223) The famous match races were replaced by shorter dashes with large fields of horses on racing cards at Jerome Park, as everywhere in post-Civil War United States. England had switched to these short races by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and new horses imported to the United States both right before and after the Civil War were bred for this short, fast race, no longer exhibiting the traits of endurance and stoutness necessary for long matches. Just as England had done in the opening years of the century, the United States racing community founded Classic races that became the proving grounds of the truly great horses. The Kentucky Derby, the most famous of these Classics, was started in 1875; the Belmont Stakes and the Preakness Stakes had started several years before.



Iroquois
By winning the English Derby, he set the stage for the success of American Thoroughbreds in the racing world of the twentieth century.


As the nineteenth century closed, racing in the United States was preparing for huge changes to racing and to the Thoroughbred market, changes they could only guess at. Racing was becoming more corrupt every year, and by the dawn of the twentieth century was considered too dangerous for honest fans and owners. This corruption paved the way for the shut-down and reform of racing in the early years of the new century. The international racing world of the twentieth century was foreshadowed by the victory of Iroquois in the 1881 English Derby; as the first American-bred to win that august race, he signaled the importance of America in the racing world of the coming years.


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