The Horse of America in His Derivation, History, and Development

by John Hankins Wallace

I am clearly of the opinion that Justin Morgan was an honest man and that he would not tell a lie, even if he knew it might accrue to his present and personal advantage. He was poor, feeble in health, and had hard scuffling to get along. As a means of livelihood, in part at least, it seems to have been his business for a good many years to keep stallions on shares for different owners. As late as 1795 he had a horse from Hartford, Connecticut, called Figure, to which we will refer later on. In 1788 he sold his little place in West Springfield, Massachusetts, and removed to Randolph, Vermont, where he died in March, 1798 In the autumn of 1795 he visited West Springfield again, for the purpose of collecting some money that was still due him there, probably some deferred payments of his former home, and as he was not able to get the money he took two horses in lieu thereof. One was a three-year-old gelding, and the other was a two-year-old bay colt, entire. He led the gelding beside the horse he was riding and the colt followed all the way. The evidence that fixes the date of this trip in the autumn of 1795 and the age of the colt that followed seems to me to be completely bomb-proof. This evidence not only embraces the recollections of Justin Morgan’s neighbors, but when he died the colt, in 1798, was sold by his administrators as a five-year-old. In all the changes of ownership that took place through his life and at his death, in 1821, he was represented as foaled in 1793. He died from the effects of a kick that was neglected, and not from old age.

The only serious attempt that has been made to controvert the date of 1793 was that made in the name of John Morgan, of Lima, New York, in 1842, he being then eighty years old, in the Albany Cultivator. Unfortunately the editor fails to publish the letter he professes to have received from John Morgan and only gives his construction of it, which any child knows is no evidence at all. The editor represents him to say “that the two-year-old stud which he (Justin) took with him to Vermont was sired by a horse owned by Selah Norton, of East Hartford, Connecticut, called True Briton or Beautiful Bay.” Justin Morgan removed to Randolph, Vermont, in the spring of 1788, and this John Morgan removed to Lima, New York, about February, 1790. They were not brothers, but distant relatives. If John means to say that Justin “took with him” when he removed to Vermont a two-year-old son of Beautiful Bay, that colt must have been foaled in 1786, which would make him twelve years old instead of five when he was sold upon the death of his owner, and thirty-six years old instead of twenty-nine when he died from a kick. Now, if we concede that Justin did take with him a two-year-old son of Beautiful Bay, the dates render it impossible that he should have been the founder of the Morgan horse family and we have no trace of him whatever.

Another authority has very recently come to the front, and in order to avoid the difficulty of dates and still retain the possibility of the horse being by Beautiful Bay, insists that he was foaled 1789 and bred by Justin Morgan himself. Under this new light he was foaled in Vermont and didn’t have to travel there at all. He insists further that he named the horse Figure and kept him in the stud till his death in March, 1798, when the horse was sold and his name changed to Justin Morgan. It is true that Justin Morgan, still seeking to make a living, kept a stallion two or three years owned in Hartford, Connecticut, and advertised him as “the famous horse Figure, from Hartford.” Now, if this horse was foaled the property of Justin Morgan and owned by him as long as he lived, why should he advertise him as “from Hartford?” All these efforts to fix dates by shifting about so as to make it possible for the bogus stolen horse to come in as a sire, have already received more attention than their importance demands and I will therefore call this the close of the third chapter.

There are several incidents connected with the life of the colt of 1793 that fixed his identity and age upon the recollections of the neighbors and friends of Justin Morgan. Solomon Steele, Evans, Rice and others who knew the colt well, all agree that the colt followed his companion and playmate from West Springfield to Randolph in the autumn of 1795 and that he was not then halter broken. They all agree that Evans hired him for fifteen dollars a year to draw logs in his clearing, in the place of a yoke of oxen. They all agree that Justin Morgan died in March, 1798, and that the colt was then sold as a five-year-old. The death was an immovable date fixer around which everything in connection with these events must be determined. And when the horse died in 1821 nobody had ever doubted that he was foaled 1793.

Justin Morgan, Jr., was in his tenth year when the colt was brought home, and he was twelve years old when his father died. In 1842 Justin Morgan, Jr., in a communication to the Albany Cultivator, says: “One was a three-year-old gelding colt, which he led; and the other a two-year-old stud colt, which followed all the way from Springfield. The said two-year-old colt was the same that has since been known all over New England by the name of the Morgan Horse. I know that my father always, while he lived, called him a Dutch horse. I have a perfect recollection of the horse when my father owned him and afterward, and well remember that my father always spoke of him as of the best blood.”

When he made these clean-cut and emphatic declarations Justin Morgan, Jr., was fifty-six years old, and it has been suggested that he was too young, at the time, to have remembered about the colt. This is a grave mistake, for farmer’s boys remember a thousand things better then than they ever do afterward. I don’t think that my own memory is remarkable, but today, at over three score and ten, I can, with the utmost distinctness, recall the names, color, markings, size, peculiarities and, in some cases, the history of most of the horses that were on the farm when I was eight years old. I can, therefore, have no hesitation in accepting Justin Morgan’s evidence on account of his youthfulness, at the time of which he speaks.

Did Justin Morgan know what he was saying when he “always, while he lived, called his horse a Dutch horse?” And did he understand the historical meaning of his words when “he always spoke of him as of the best blood?” To answer these questions we must make some reference to history. The Dutch horses were a breed wholly distinct from the horses of the other colonies. The colony of New Netherlands (New York) received its supply from Utrecht, in Holland, commencing in 1624 and a few years following. In forty years they had so increased that the colony was well supplied. These horses were about fourteen hands and one inch high, which was about one hand higher than the horses supplied to the English colonies. They were not only higher, but they had more bone and muscle, and, I think, more shapely necks. In every respect they were better, except that they were not so good for the saddle, for the reason, as I think, that they were not pacers. The standard that determined their superiority was the higher prices at which they were bought and sold, over the New England horses, as shown by the official reports of the colony. When the colony passed under British rule, the first governor immediately established a race course on Hempstead Plains, Long Island, and there in 1665 the first organized race in this country took place. This was long before the English race horse had reached the character of a breed, and a round hundred years before the first representative of that breed reached New York. The horses that ran at Hempstead Plains were undoubtedly Dutch horses, for the inhabitants of New York and Long Island attended these annual meetings in great numbers, and as they were nearly all Dutch they would not have gone a stone’s throw to see an English horse run. These annual race meetings were kept up a great many years by the successive governors.

In 1635 two shiploads of Dutch horses, from the same quarter, chiefly mares, reached Salem, Massachusetts, and were sold at prices enormously high as compared with the prices of those sent from England to the same colony. These two shiploads added materially to the average size of the horses of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, as shown by statistics, as well as the other colonies getting their foundation stock from that source. We may safely conclude, I think, that some of the descendants of these shiploads were taken to the valley of the Connecticut when Hartford was planted, for we not infrequently meet with the term “Dutch horse” in the old prints of that valley. Besides this source the valley of the Hudson was full of them. They retained their distinctive appellation till about the beginning of this century.

Mr. O. W. Cook, of Springfield, Massachusetts, did a great deal of fundamental investigation on the origin of this family, away back in 1878-9, etc., and I am under special obligations to him for being the first man to open my eyes to the great confidence game that has been played for a hundred years, and all originating in the fabulous story of “one Smith.” Among other important things he unearths an advertisement of Young Bulrock that was advertised to stand at Springfield, 1792, as follows: “Young Bulrock is a horse of the Dutch breed, of a large size, and a bright bay color, etc.” In speaking of his pedigree, Mr. Cook most pithily remarks: “In view of the three-fold concurrence of time and place and breed, it fits into the vacuum in the Morgan’s lineage as a fragment of pottery fits into its complement.” There was another horse advertised in Springfield that year, but he had neither name nor breed and in color he was gray. The advertisement of Young Bulrock fits in time, fits in color and fits in breed; and thus removes all reasonable doubt that he was the sire of the original Morgan horse. This is the reason why Justin Morgan “always, while he lived, called him a Dutch horse;” and the little scrap of history given above will show why he always spoke of him as “of the best blood.” He was right in the former and he was right in the latter declaration. It is not possible, at this day, to prove, technically, these matters of a hundred years ago, but after considering all the facts in the case, we must conclude that they are satisfying to the human understanding, and that Justin Morgan told the truth.

For the past fifty or sixty years the breeding of the original Morgan horse has been a subject of apparently unending controversy. The real facts concerning his origin, however, have never been brought to light and fully developed until within the last few years, and it is probable that nothing of material value will ever be added to the foregoing tracing. We have found from contemporaneous history that Lieutenant Wright Carpenter stole a horse from Colonel James De Lancey and was successful in carrying him into the camp of the patriots at Fishkill, and that is all we know about that particular horse. After the war was over it is stated that “one Smith” sold a horse to Mr. Ward, of Hartford, and represented that he had stolen the horse from Colonel De Lancey, and Mr. Ward sold that horse to Selah Norton, who seems to have owned him as long as he lived. It must be accepted as true that Lieutenant Carpenter captured a horse from Colonel De Lancey, but we cannot accept it as true that this was the same horse owned by Norton. We must first know how and where “one Smith” got him. Norton had this horse and advertised him in different parts of the country for public service seven or eight years before the romance of his history and pedigree was given to the world. As this romance would have been a grand feature in an advertisement of a stallion, Mr. Norton was too slow in evolving it, and when he did bring it out nobody believed it. At that period many portions of New England abounded in stallions with bogus pedigrees and histories, and if we judge Norton by his acts in giving his horse three different names at different times and places, we must conclude he was ready to conceal or invent anything that would add to his horse’s popularity and patronage.