Justin Morgan, founder of his race — Context and Discussion

Episodic Structure and the Chapter as Scene

The table of contents lists twenty-one chapters with titles that read like captions: “True Is Broken to Harness,” “True Meets His Father,” “True Goes to Found His Race.” Each chapter appears to isolate a single event or relationship, a method that allows Burnham to shift the horse’s circumstances without building sustained dramatic tension. The excerpt from Chapter XIII, “The Morgan Goes to Montpelier to Live,” exemplifies this: it opens with a change of ownership (from the smithy to James Hawkins’s farm) and then immediately moves to a new episode with David Wing Jr. The chapter functions as a self-contained sketch of Morgan’s life with the Wings, complete with its own setting, minor characters, and closing reflection on a horse’s uncertainty about owners. This episodic quality suggests the book may be read as a series of tableaux rather than a novelistic arc.

Recurring Sensory Motifs: Forge, River, and Touch

Burnham anchors Morgan’s experience in a few repeated physical details. The forge appears early: Morgan “liked the musical ring of the hammer on the anvil and the glare of the forge as the handle of the bellows was raised and lowered.” Later, the Winooski River is described with a similar sensory richness—“sweep of eddies and currents, its foaming rapids and singing falls.” These passages give the horse a subjective, almost romantic interiority. Touch is another motif: David Wing rides with “a loose rein” and “the firm touch on the bridle was as light as a woman’s,” while Mistress Hannah Wing brings “dew-wet clover or grass” and carrots. The frontispiece caption—“… THE FEEL OF HER CHEEK AGAINST HIS!”—underscores this emphasis on tactile connection, though the excerpt does not reveal the context of that image.

Shifting Perspectives: Horse and Human

Burnham alternates between Morgan’s point of view and a human narrator’s observations. The horse “hoped David might buy him from Hawkins” and “called to her … with his affectionate little neigh.” Yet the same passage includes a detailed aside about Vermont children carrying shoes to school, a social-historical note that belongs to the human world. This shift is not jarring; Burnham treats the horse’s mind as continuous with the human environment. The foreword’s claim that she aimed to “bring out all those noble characteristics for which the Founder of His Race was famous” suggests that the horse’s perspective is a device for moral portraiture. The excerpt does not reveal whether this dual focus is sustained throughout the book, but it establishes a pattern of intimate animal subjectivity embedded in regional description.

Movement Between Domestic and Wild Spaces

The excerpt traces Morgan’s movement from the smithy (a human workspace) to the farm on Dog River, then to journeys with David Wing through “fertile valleys and across densely wooded hills; along frequented highways or vague trails through the forests.” This oscillation between settled and wild landscapes is a structural principle: the horse is equally at home in the barn, where Hannah feeds him carrots, and in the river, where he is “always ready to swim.” The chapter titles reinforce this pattern—from “Early Influences” to “In the Flood of 1811” to “The Naval Battle”—suggesting that Morgan’s life is a series of transitions between the ordinary and the extraordinary. Burnham uses these shifts to create a sense of adventure without a single overarching plot, relying on the horse’s adaptability to unify the scenes.

Readers approaching Justin Morgan, Founder of His Race should expect a work that prioritizes atmosphere and anecdote over strict chronology. The foreword’s admission of selective history invites a reading that attends to Burnham’s choices—what she emphasizes (sensory detail, horse’s affections) and what she omits. The episodic structure rewards attention to recurring images rather than plot progression. This edition preserves the original 1911 text, including the frontispiece by Roger Noble Burnham and the introduction by Henry Kirke Bush-Brown.

Years among the stacks taught me how a forge’s heat lingers in Burnham’s horse, that persistent touch of creation. Bee-Keeping — Background and Themes hums with a similar quiet patience—the hive’s patient industry, a different rhythm of tending and return. Both books whisper of devotion to small, living things, and I find that kinship restful.