The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

Many of the South’s leading lights were away, plotting rebellion. But the planters who did attend brought with them wives and eligible sons and daughters. They brought retinues of Black servants and between races sold or acquired others. The jockeys were enslaved; the trainers were enslaved. White planters relied on slaves to maximize the value of their horses and in the process burnish their own social cachet. In this milieu a horse was much more than just a horse. As the South Carolina Jockey Club’s biographer put it in 1857, horses were “the impersonation of Carolina chivalry—the embodied spirit of Carolina blood and Carolina honor.” The planters were knights engaged in chivalric contests. Winning mattered. Observing the effect of a loss on the backers of one racehorse, a Carolina writer noted in 1859 how it made these “manly men” feel restless and dissatisfied. “Their cavalier blood is stirred—they cannot brook such defeat—they cannot go home thus shorn, stripped of their trophies, bankrupt of applause—not a green leaf of all their laurels, now only a crown of thorns.”