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By Root 1274 0

the battles, and pull the heavy loads of the great industrial cities. But the horse remained anonymous, invisible, and routinely subject to overwork and abuse. When English author Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty, in the late nineteenth century, she said that her aim was to “induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses.” Though now considered a children’s classic, the book was originally intended for an adult audience. Narrated from the horse’s point of view, the novel describes Black Beauty’s life, from his earliest memory, of “a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it” to his wretched existence pulling a heavy load for a cruel peddler. The sentimental and emotionally wrenching book was wildly popular, quickly becoming a bestseller first in England and then in the United States, where it became a favorite of the progressive movement. Sewell’s book was the first to popularize interest in the plight of the horse and to generate widespread concern about the beast of burden’s treatment.

This point of view dovetailed nicely with the views of the urban reformers of the late nineteenth century. By this period, the conditions in large cities were cause for dismay: urban environments, crowded with tenements built to accommodate waves of new immigrants, were considered filthy and dangerous and, from the nineteenth-century point of view, centers of moral decay. Progressives wanted to clean up cities by promoting a cleaner and more orderly environment, and horses were at the center of their reform projects. The new steam, electric, and internal combustion engines were seen as the wave of the future, while horses were considered dirty and prone to accidents, and their manure was a major contributor to urban filth and an important cause of disease. In addition, the culture of the teamsters, the men who drove the horses, and the livery stables they frequented were seen as centers of immoral behavior—teamsters, in the popular mind, were associated with public drunkenness and foul language. The sight of teamsters beating their horses in public was a frequent urban spectacle.

The original mission of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, founded in April 1866 by Henry Bergh, was to enforce anti-cruelty regulations for horses. Born in 1811, Bergh was the son of a prominent New York shipbuilding family. He attended Columbia College in New York but dropped out in order to travel around Europe; later in life, he was appointed by Abraham Lincoln to the American legation in the court of the czar of Russia. During his travels in Europe, he became sensitized to the poor treatment of animals. Bergh believed that “mercy to animals meant mercy to all mankind.” In nineteenth-century America, horses were the most visible symbol of animal abuse, their presence in the city streets an inescapable fact of life. The ASPCA adopted as its mission the enforcement of anti-cruelty regulations designed to protect urban workhorses, noting, “Among the punishable offenses: overuse of the whip, driving a lame horse, furious driving (until a horse was foaming at the mouth), knowingly selling a diseased animal, or killing a horse without a license.” In other words, only the most blatantly cruel practices were targeted—those that would be readily noticeable to the untrained eye. Even these modest reforms were considered difficult to enforce. There was nothing to stop a teamster from pushing his horse to just short of these limits.

Another early humane society crusader, George Angell of Massachusetts, was inspired to act when, in March 1868, two horses, each carrying its rider over forty miles of rough roads, were raced until they both dropped dead. Angell wrote a letter that appeared in the Boston Daily Advertiser, where it caught the attention of Emily Appleton, a prominent Bostonian who was interested in animal welfare. Within weeks, the pair had managed to produce the state’s first anti-cruelty laws and founded the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The MSPCA passed out copies