The Ultimate Insult

D.C. Linsley took his defense of the Morgan breed very seriously. In response to one anonymous criticism of the breed, written by a self-described Vermonter and excellent judge of horsemen, he goes line by line through the criticism and "proves" how false it is. It's an emotional and highly charged defense during which he honestly offers no real facts; it's one man's opinion against another. Halfway through the rant, Linsley delivers the ultimate insult, which had me giggling in what was supposed to be a quiet research space:

Not a word of proof is offered, and the assertion leads one to think that the writer is neither a horseman nor a Vermonter, and that he has only borrowed the name of our little State, to have a good place to write from about Morgan horses.

OH SNAP.

(Linsley, p. 76)

Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses

I have, to be honest, not a lot to report right now on my research. I'm in a reading-and-thinking stage, in which I'm taking in large quantities of information and and taking lots of notes - mostly about other things to find, or look at.

I've gotten about 100 pages into Daniel Chipman Linsley's Morgan Horses, which was the first concerted effort to document and catalogue the history of the original Morgan, Figure, and to properly establish the Morgan horse as a breed.



It's an interesting thing: Linsley spends almost a hundred pages setting up his book, by way of a world tour through different breeds of horses, then an American tour of the types of horses that are used in various regions of the country. He spends a long time describing the type of work a horse in American ought to be able to do, and then he spends pages and pages detailing what he thinks is an objectively perfect conformation for that work. In utterly exhausting detail.

At the end of that - after he has defined what makes a breed and then described his ideal horse - he concludes that Morgans fit all these characteristics. Then he spends a dozen pages or so utterly trashing one or two people who happen to have evaluated Morgans and not been wild about them.

Only then is he ready to begin to discuss the origins of the breed, which he does in his trademark exhausting manner. On that, more later.

Linsley's book is like so many others about the Morgan breed. It has a thesis. He sets out to prove that Morgan horses are a distinct, valued breed, and that they are moreover the best possible American breed. He fuses the work he is doing in trying to establish Morgans as a respected breed with a sense of regional (Vermont) and national (American) identity.

He is not the first, nor will he be the last, writer to do so. In fact, it's entirely possible that he set up a storyline for writing about the Morgan that is still very much in play today, both in fiction and nonfiction writing about the Morgan horse.

Justin Morgan Had a Horse (1972)

On its way to me now!

Check out the epic 70s hair on Don Murray as Justin Morgan. The movie appears to have completely cut out Joel Goss's role as narrator of the book, and added in a love story subplot.

Expect a review when it arrives.

James Monroe and Figure - More Sources

So when I left off on this piece of research, one of the main sources I'd found detailing James Monroe's visit to Vermont in 1817 had no mention at all of Figure - or indeed any special horse at all.

It was clearly time for a new research angle. I headed to the research library of the Vermont Historical Society*, thinking I would see if they had any letters, diaries, or other primary source accounts by those who were there that day and saw James Monroe's visit.

At first glance, this was going to be a trickier proposition than I thought. None of the manuscript collections that had been indexed and described in finding aids mentioned James Monroe, or at least not his visit to Montpelier. There was one very interesting document in which members of the militia artillery company that saluted Monroe (per the description I quoted in the previous entry) signed an agreement to share the costs of powder and shot for that salute. The absence of easily indexed finding aids made the next option a general survey of all manuscripts dating from that period and tied to Montpelier - which I held off on, pondering my next move.

There were a few files on general Morgan horse history, so while I was waiting for those to be pulled, I went into the stacks in search of secondary sources.

There have been innumerable books and articles published on Morgan horse history, and the stacks at the Vermont Historical Society's library provided an excellent overview of secondary sources.

The first two sources I went to were the two earliest and most comprehensive. Daniel Chipman Linsley's
Morgan horses: a premium essay on the origin, history, and characteristics of this remarkable American breed of horses, published in 1857. He did the first detective work to find out where Figure came from, and collected the first 240 stallions for the general Morgan pedigree. I'll have a lot to write about Linsley in the future, as it's a fascinating book on many levels, but today I was primarily interested in seeing what he had to say about Monroe's visit.

Here was my first surprise of the evening: nothing. He had nothing whatsoever to say about Figure being used as a parade mount for James Monroe, though he had plenty to say about everything else connected to Figure.

Next source: Joseph Battell's Morgan Horse Register, published in 1894, which was the next major historical treatment of Figure. Same thing: no mention at all. Zip. Zero.

Now I was starting to get worried, and I double-checked my original sources for the claim that Figure was Monroe's parade mount. The statement appears, among other places, on the website of the National Museum of the Morgan Horse, so I didn't make it up entirely!

I started reading secondary sources in earnest, skimming hard and trying to track the earliest iteration of this story. It started cropping up again in the 20th century - victory! So sometime after 1894 but before 1942, when Marguerite Henry included a fictionalized version of it in Justin Morgan Had a Horse (though she places the parade in Burlington, not Montpelier).

Where did I find it?

Eleanor Waring Burnham's Justin Morgan, Founder of His Race: The Romantic History of a Horse. Here it is on Google Books. I have a whole series of posts planned on Burnham's book, which is amazing on many levels, but the long and short? It's a children's book. YA, maybe. It is highly, highly fictionalized, in the best tradition of Black Beauty.

Here's the passage as it appears at the very end of Burnham's book; she also places the parade in question in Burlington:

Suddenly over the face of President James Monroe there passed a look of keen interest, followed by one of intense admiration.

He had caught sight of Morgan, and his eye, unerring in its judgment of horseflesh, was arrested at once by his vigorous and fearless style. He turned to a group of officials. 

"I see, gentlemen," he said in a tone of genuine appreciation "that Vermont can produce a horse worthy of her heroes!"  

A moment later he had thrown his leg over the back of the proudest horse in America!

And then the book ends.

Is this really the source of the story? Had Burnham done some actual research that led her to include the story? Did she think it was just another colorful addition to the legend? If we're meant to take everything in the book as historical fact then there are some real doozies in there

More digging is necessary!

*In the interests of full disclosure, I work for the Vermont Historical Society, though not in the research library.