William Douglas-Hamilton fixed his chesterfield collar to a gruff March wind, sidled through a restive crowd and approached a line of bookmakers before the stands at Aintree. He knew well the horse he sought to back in the 1867 Grand National near Liverpool, knew better the bookmakers hungry for his action.
Bookies instinctively hunted the rich and reckless punter and took aim as the 12th Duke of Hamilton approached.
A nobleman by title only, young Hamilton astounded Britons as a brawling, boozing, free-wheeling playboy keen to scandal. In barely four years, he'd all but squandered the enormous fortune he'd inherited at 18. Now he stood before the bookies' chalkboards a fading lord, 351⁄2 furlongs and 30 fences from financial ruin.
He cloaked desperation with swagger as well-wishers engaged him. Among 23 Grand National entries, Hamilton's seasoned steeplechaser, Cortolvin, loomed a sturdy prospect for his second the year before. The Duke accepted 16-1 odds, wagered £1,000 -- today's equivalent of $185,000, akin to the winning purse -- and left his fate to Cortolvin and 22-year-old jockey Johnny Page.
The flag fell at 3:23 p.m. Tumbling clouds met brilliant sunshine, making Aintree's triangular field a kaleidoscope of bright and sullen greens and browns. Hamilton found his gray and magenta colors near the lead, the foreword to a long-drawn chapter depicting tall hedges, open ditches, brooks, slopes and water jumps. (A stone wall, the course's signature prop from its 1836 unveiling, had become a less dastardly brush hurdle.)
Deemed a test of courage, agility and stamina for horse and rider, the Grand National defined a crucible too for the Duke of Hamilton. Across two circuits and nearly 41⁄2 punishing miles under handicap conditions, Cortolvin carried 11 stone 13 pounds (167 pounds) and, with Hamilton's added burden, a royal legacy that had outlived famine, wars and tumult through the centuries.
The labored minutes married thrill and mishap. Horses leapt, splashed, balked and tumbled, Cortolvin among the leaders and free of hardship. Well through the first circuit, front-running King Arthur refused a fence, and Cortolvin took over at Becher's Brook. Rhythmic and responsive, the bangtail bay led most of the second lap and into the fence-less homestretch, more than 10 minutes in, when the mare Fan came to call. Cortolvin soon ended the engagement and left her to win by 5 lengths, as one British scribe wrote, "in a canter."
Raucous celebration aside, Cortolvin's performance begat two notable developments. It restored the wealth and dignity, for a time anyway, of the 12th Duke of Hamilton. And it ensured an early death for a horse named Preakness.
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They dined on beefsteak and mutton chops, broiled salt mackerel and sugar-cured herring, and spoke of a delicacy yet untasted. Lawyer and textile magnate Milton Sanford had invited prominent Eastern sportsmen to a Saturday dinner at the Union Hall Hotel in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., to discuss plans for a novel horserace. By the time waitstaff had served brandies and lit cigars that August evening, 1868, much of the menu had been conceived.
Sanford brought a knack for commoditizing ideas. The Thoroughbred horseman owned wool and cotton mills and got rich making blankets for the Union army during the Civil War ended three years earlier. Sanford meant to broaden horse racing's refashioned tapestry and found his guests eager to provide the thread.
As talk turned to yearlings, bravado peppered the air and steered the plan. The distinguished horsemen agreed to back their boasts by creating a winner-take-all sweepstakes two years hence, $1,000 entry, $500 forfeit, a "dash" of 2 miles for 3-year-old colts and fillies. They would call it the Dinner Party Stakes.
Representatives of Jerome Park, the New York City track opened a year earlier, offered an additional $5,000 to host it, an appealing prospect until Oden Bowie took the floor. Bowie drew acclaim as Maryland governor, Mexican War army lieutenant, railroad builder, farmer, horseman and, as diners discovered, persuasive salesman.
With a receding hairline, small and deep-set eyes and a runaway mustache, Bowie lacked a thespian's face but exuded his stage presence. Maryland had originated racing in the colonies 125 years earlier, he proffered, held the land's first sanctioned races in Annapolis in 1745 and counted among its enthusiastic patrons one George Washington. The state's sophisticated racing audience, he assured, would guarantee a large and loud reception.
The motion carried, leaving Bowie only one need. A racetrack.
A pristine new venue, the governor had promised, would provide racegoers an urgent curiosity to match the exhilarating feature and supporting races. Privately, he thought it would rededicate Maryland as a plum of the American turf whose once-lavish courses had turned weedy bygones, added casualties of the Civil War.
The sale made, Bowie and a team scouted the countryside and chose a 70-acre tableland overlooking Jones Falls, a northwest Baltimore tract the state fair had used. Critics who deemed the high plateau a waiting victim of chill winds and foul weather for an October race meeting proved nearly prescient.
Some 20 years earlier on those very heights, a certain Englishman had plowed a sketchy oval into good soil, declared it a racetrack and christened it Pimlico after his hometown London neighborhood. Bowie's track-to-be, not far from the crude original, thus had a name but little backing, financial or otherwise.
He’d pronounced himself a handicap horse of national rank, and Pimlico effectively
laid claim to his growing fame and popularity. In 1873, the year Preakness turned 6,
the track established a 11⁄2-mile springtime stakes for 3-year-olds in his name.
Convincing and resourceful, the governor raised $55,000 in private contributions and finessed another $60,000 in state and city pledges to fund his cause. Architect John Elliott's ensuing lavender-and-white grandstand spanned 280 feet, seated nearly 4,000 and featured a stately lower ballroom.
Rain drenched the virgin ground for days and turned the dirt track to pudding, but Pimlico's debut met welcome sunshine, warm breezes and, as Bowie had foretold, a lively turnout.
The four-day race meeting that began Oct. 25, 1870, a Tuesday, stoked Maryland's first sanctioned races since 1859, and thirsty racegoers traveled by buggy, hansom and cabriolet, train and omnibus to sample the revival. The Baltimore Sun reported that patrons arrived en masse at 10:30 a.m. for the 1 p.m. races and estimated a crowd beyond 12,000. The skeptics turned mum.
"Baltimore had not seen such a gay throng since the days before the Civil War," Joseph J. Challmes wrote in his 1975 book The Preakness: A History. Ladies toting wicker baskets served picnic lunches in the grandstand, Challmes wrote. Others contented with Pimlico's offerings: "sandwiches, cucumber pickles, peppermint water and water flavored with wintergreen."
Third on a four-race showcase, the $18,500 Dinner Party Stakes became the second-richest Thoroughbred race in United States history; Nashville's Bailie Peyton Stakes had offered a spectacular $35,000 in 1843 (about $1.5 million today).
Foster, the copper-toned Dinner Party favorite, and Sanford's Preakness, both by the extraordinary Lexington, stood the only colts in a field of seven. Sanford relished colts sired by Lexington who, nearly blind and missing a shoe, had set a 4-mile world record at Metairie Race Course near New Orleans. A son of Boston, Lexington fashioned so great a legacy as racehorse and 16-time leading stallion that the Smithsonian Institution would display his skeleton (now at the International Museum of the Horse in Kentucky).
For love of Lexington, Sanford plucked the eighth foal from the British-bred *Yorkshire mare Bay Leaf at a yearling auction of Robert Alexander's famed Woodburn stud in Kentucky. The National Racing Museum and Hall of Fame and other sources assert that Sanford paid $2,000 for Preakness, but the 1877 anthology Famous American Horses put the purchase at $4,100. The discrepancy reveals certain recordkeeping inconsistencies of the day and helps inform the remarkably sketchy reportage surrounding the eventual demise of Preakness.
Sanford had left his native Massachusetts for Wayne Township in northern New Jersey, established a secluded horse farm behind dense timberland and named it Preakness, the Native American term for quail woods. He'd give his Lexington yearling the same name.
Preakness thus arrived at Pimlico an unraced mystery, dark brown, big and burly. His appearance for the third race drew snickers, ridicule and, in bookmakers' ledgers or private wagers, scant backing. How sporting, folks told Sanford, that he should try the mighty Foster with a cart horse. Others spoke less subtly, calling Preakness "half-trained," "big as a bull," "fat as an ox." Sanford offered little in the way of counterpoint, fretting that summer lameness might have undermined the colt's fitness. He wagered nothing.
The mount belonged to Billy Hayward, a skilled horseman who'd accepted Sanford's offer to leave England to train and ride Preakness and stablemates. Consistent with the times, an African-American rode every other Dinner Party runner.
The initial standing start judged poor, the horses regained line and broke at a drumbeat, jockeys riding straight-legged in English style. Horses sloughed audibly through the muck toward the clubhouse turn, Gov. Bowie's My Maryland leading most of the first lap before Preakness took over. When Finesse, then Ecliptic, passed the short-lived leader, doubts about Preakness' bloom and stamina turned audible.
Preakness managing the kick-back, Hayward contented to track the dueling front-runners the second time through the far turn. There, jockey's hope fused runner's means: Preakness angled out for a homestretch rally and, with sudden brio, managed a mostly bewildering 2-length score.
Keeping with tradition, Hayward directed Preakness back to the frontstretch and, still in the irons, reached toward a finish pole to untether the winner's get, a silk purse dense with gold coins.
Pimlico would prove a launching pad. Trained by Charles Littlefield his 4-year-old season, Preakness resumed racing under Hayward in the spring of 1871 and dominated handicap stars Glenelg and Helmbold in the 21⁄4-mile Westchester Cup. That fall, he took another Jerome Park headliner, the Maturity, and finished the season with a heralded return to Baltimore in a Pimlico Stakes walkover that drew wild cheers nonetheless.
He'd pronounced himself a handicap horse of national rank, and Pimlico effectively laid claim to his growing fame and popularity. In 1873, the year Preakness turned 6, the track established a 11⁄2-mile springtime stakes for 3-year-olds in his name.
The Baltimore Sun distilled Survivor's victory in that first Preakness Stakes as one star in a constellation. "Those who had seen Pimlico only in the red and yellow tints of autumn, or remembered its clinging mud and biting winds were surprised to see it in the bright verdure of May," the story read.
"Spring zephyrs and a clear atmosphere and bright warm sunshine and bodily comfort were things never before associated with its elevated and exposed situation. The general verdict was therefore more than favorable."
Preakness the racehorse substantiated the homage by winning major stakes the next three seasons, often under exacting weight. At age 8 in 1875, Preakness carried 131 pounds to a Baltimore Cup victory and finished third in the Fordham Handicap, conceding the winner 27 pounds.
Summer enlivened him even more. He shadowed the celebrated Springbok through the Saratoga Cup in July, relentlessly dogging the race favorite and 1873 Belmont winner across 21⁄4 miles to a first-place dead heat in track-record time that endured 23 years.
In the book Racing in America, 1866-1921, commissioned by The Jockey Club, W.S. Vosburgh deemed the Saratoga Cup field "perhaps the highest in point of quality that ever started for that historic event." In The American Thoroughbred, author Charles E. Trevathan called it "a smashing good contest."
Preakness left Saratoga with a record of 39-18-12-2, racegoers having seen the best of him that summer of '75. Then they saw him no more.
A month after the Saratoga Cup, The Daily Graphic, a New York tabloid featuring the nation's first newspaper illustrations, reported that the 62-year-old Sanford intended to race less and breed more. By November, Preakness and seven stablemates had arrived in England.
Preakness carried Sanford's blue silks and flashes of brilliance through a few British races in 1876. The Daily News of London reported that his third in the Goodwood Cup frightened off all challengers for the Brighton Cup, effectuating a walkover. The Leicester Mercury hailed him "a rare glutton for distance."
An ocean from home, Preakness maintained his robust appearance at age 9. One turf chronicler wrote: "He is a dark bay in color, stands fully sixteen hands in height, with capital back and loins, strong, powerful quarters, clean head, well set on a thick, muscular neck, and legs like iron and clean as a foal's."
Before the year ended, Sanford had sold Preakness to a ruddy, spirited, 31-year-old British nobleman formally known as the 12th Duke of Hamilton. A rewarding afternoon involving the steeplechaser Cortolvin nearly a decade earlier at Aintree had made the purchase possible.
Four years wed to Lady Marie Montagu, daughter of the Seventh Duke of Manchester, Hamilton maintained regard as rapscallion. Vanity Fair, a society page that typically dignified celebrity weddings of the day, wrote that the Duke "paints a picture of idleness and dissipation. . . Public affairs . . . appear to be the special object of his aversion . . . learning nothing, hunting five days a week . . . his betting book is usually a sorry sight on settling day."
Hamilton had commissioned two large passenger steamers and two luxury yachts by way of Cortolvin's 1867 Grand National score, the very season of Preakness' birth, and refurbished stables at the smaller of his estates (nearly 5,000 acres), Easton Park in Suffolk. There Preakness took residence.
William Alexander Louis Stephen Douglas-Hamilton fancied Preakness a stallion whose classic American bloodlines would offer the British Thoroughbred bone and substance. Fiddler, a first-crop colt born 1878, won Hamilton three stakes and regard as the best offspring from Preakness' five years at stud.
Outside moderate breeding engagements, Preakness won first prize at horse show competitions in London, Essex and Bristol, feats at times overshadowed by his owner's capers. On Sept. 25, 1879, the Truth, an upstart British publication, contained this item:
"The Duke must have been the hero of a good many escapades of the Prince Hal kind. At a restaurant in Paris he was so unfortunate as to be compelled to knock a policeman down, whereupon brother guardians of the peace were under the painful necessity of taking his Grace and a friend to the lockup. I believe they were unaware of his rank and position, and looked more ashamed than the Duke when they learned their mistake. The thing got into the papers, and . . . Felix Whitehurst, Esq., was instructed to state that there was no truth whatever in the report."
At 34, Willam Douglas-Hamilton still fretted little over unflattering notices. Born in Scotland, 1845, he'd attended boarding school at Eton, west of London. He was a senior when his father tumbled a flight of stairs at a Paris restaurant and died of a brain injury a week later. As first-born son, William received wealth and title.
Like father and grandfather, he attended the University of Oxford's Christ Church College. Unlike them, he earned expulsion for unruly behavior and a budding reputation as an ennobled ruffian. In an exhaustive volume on British aristocracy titled The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct or Dormant, author and genealogist G.E. Cokayne wrote of Hamilton, "At [Christ Church], he went in for boxing, as he went in later for horse-racing, yachting and other amusements . . . He was full bodied, of a rudely ruddy complexion, had a powerful neck, and seemed strong enough to fell an ox with his fist. "
And wild enough to kill his horse with a gun? The Thoroughbred-racing world has long accepted that the hot-headed Hamilton shot Preakness dead following an altercation. What exactly happened? Had Preakness truly turned roguish under Hamilton's care? Did the Duke pull the trigger or order it done? Where did this take place, and when? Extensive research involving prominent library archivists left these questions unanswered.
~~~~~
The industrial revolution in Great Britain and the U.S. effected a 19th-century communications boom with the creation of the electric telegraph, steam-powered printing press and machine-made paper. Newspapers produced with newfound speed both informed and entertained growing readerships. But the beat reporter -- one covering a specific subject or entity -- hadn't been established in the U.K. when Preakness arrived there. In sum, newspapers largely relied on wire dispatches and one another for content.
An archival search of scores of newspapers throughout Great Britain and America's 38 states failed to produce a single descriptive, contemporaneous account of the events surrounding Preakness' end. However it happened, he apparently died at 14 in 1881, probably early autumn. The primary-source evidence:
Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1881: "Preakness is rapidly winning his way in England as a successful sire."
On October 8, the Graphic of London also cited Preakness in the present tense.
Newspapers of the day hadn't introduced the banner headline; they often featured a single, one-column headline for an entire page of copy. The death of Preakness merited not even that: The first observed report appeared buried in the pink pages of a weekly broadsheet. A single sentence innocuously embedded in a page-seven racing column, Saturday, October 15, 1881, in Bell's Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, read: "... Preakness, who I should have fancied to stud success in this country if his temper had been sweeter, but I hear has been lately destroyed."
Britain's Sheffield Independent briefly printed the news two days later.
Two New York publications reported it Nov. 5 as essay fodder. Spirit of the Times wrote: "Preakness, it is said, was destroyed because of his temper, which became so violent as to render him unmanageable. We think the action hasty. He was just the horse whose blood might have done much to improve the bone and muscle which much of the English stock are wanting, owing to their being bred on small and overcrowded public farms . . ."
The Turf, Field and Farm wrote, "The stallion must have been badly handled by the servants of his last owner in order to develop an ugly temper. It is easy to sour the disposition of a spirited horse."
The [Louisville] Courier-Journal of November 14 further muddied the assailant's identity: "It was the savageness of Preakness that caused the Duke of Hamilton to have him shot."
Major newspapers of the day failed to report the incident in timely fashion, nor did they investigate it later. Nor did these accounts support the accepted notion that the death of Preakness directly strengthened England's animal cruelty laws.
In light of the times, the British press might have found Preakness' death less consequential given his regard as a largely American phenomenon; at that point, the Pimlico race in his name had managed only nine runnings. Maybe editors deemed the incident less newsworthy as another tired example of Hamilton's excitable ways. Maybe the Duke conspired with farmhands or the press to quiet or delay its reporting.
“The Duke of Hamilton succeeded to the title . . . and
at once proceeded to dissipate one of the most enormous
fortunes that ever fell into the hands of a minor.”
– From a Washington Post article in 1882
After Daily Racing Form columnist Charles Hatton conceived the notion of a Triple Crown in the 1930s and the Preakness Stakes grew as an American classic, interest in Preakness the horse was revived and the brief tale of his abrupt end recited. On the cusp of the 150th running (financial troubles scotched the race from 1891 through 1893), the particulars surrounding the death of Preakness remained unsubstantiated.
In spring 1882, creditors' squeeze forced the Duke to liquidate treasures from Hamilton Palace, the family castle in southern Scotland. (Hamilton rarely lodged there, and not at all post-divestiture.) According to The New York Times, the dispersal included "his magnificent library and soon thereafter his paintings by Reubens, Titian and Albrecht Durer, statues and furniture."
The 17-day public auction at Christie's in London raised nearly £400,000, almost $80 million today, but only lowered Hamilton's flagging public image.
"The Duke of Hamilton succeeded to the title . . . and at once proceeded to dissipate one of the most enormous fortunes that ever fell into the hands of a minor," The Washington Post wrote in 1882. "His experience did not appear to teach this tilted gambler that the mode of life he so persistently clings to can only end in debt and dishonor."
His only child, Lady Mary Louise Douglas-Hamilton, turned 11 the year the Duke became seriously ill. Diagnosed with dropsy (fluid retention), gout and kidney disease in 1895, he was advised to travel for his health. He boarded one of his yachts, The Thistle, and sailed the Mediterranean to North Africa. He died in Algiers on May 16, 1895, at age 50.
In its obituary two days later, The Times of London made no reference to Preakness.
Because Hamilton's only brother had died in 1886 and the Duke had no male heirs, his peerage descended to a fourth cousin, Alfred Douglas Douglas-Hamilton. The 13th Duke of Hamilton's inheritance included Hamilton Palace, a hunting lodge on a Scottish moor and a debt of £1 million.
