Thomas J. Scott

Quick Facts

• Role: Itinerant animal painter and turf journalist from Pennsylvania; the novel’s diarist and on-the-ground chronicler of Kentucky racing and slavery
• First appearance: Introduced through diary entries when he arrives to paint bloodstock in Kentucky
• Key relationships: Jarret Lewis (mentee and collaborator), Dr. Elisha Warfield (patron), Richard Ten Broeck (turf contact and intermediary)
• Defining identifiers: Left medical school for lack of funds; studies equine anatomy; Unionist “free labor man” with growing moral clarity
• Look: A young, lanky man with fair, well-barbered hair; worn boots and frayed cuffs betray his precarious finances

Who They Are

Bold, observant, and hungry to make his name, Thomas J. Scott is both artist and witness. His diary entries keep a cool, analytic distance even as he’s drawn into the brutal intimacy of plantation life and the spectacle of the turf. As a Northerner working in the South, he stands at a moral and social crossroads—critical of slavery yet financially reliant on those who uphold it. Through his paintings and notebooks, he preserves lives that might otherwise vanish, embodying the novel’s meditation on Art, History, and Memory. His canvases later become the breadcrumb trail that lets the modern researchers Theo and Jess recover lost stories, underscoring the theme of Hidden Histories and Erased Narratives. His most transformative bond is with Jarret Lewis, whose horsemanship and insight expand Scott’s understanding of both horses and human bondage.

Personality & Traits

Scott’s sensibility braids craft, curiosity, and compromise. He aspires to scientific precision in his art—measuring fetlocks and scapulae, studying bone and sinew—yet he’s also a deft social operator who knows a commission depends on flattering powerful men. Early missteps reveal a northern naïveté about slavery; experience, friendship, and war sharpen him into a clearer-eyed, more ethically awake observer.

• Ambitious and pragmatic: Leaves medical school for lack of funds and pivots to painting and turf journalism, knowing he must “smother [patrons] in honey like a fresh-baked biscuit” to secure work.
• Forensic observer: Trains in a knackery to learn “the nature of every bone and sinew,” and his diary dissects both equine anatomy and the Warfield household’s dynamics.
• A mentor with blind spots: He treats Jarret’s knowledge as expert—asking about a horse’s “soul”—yet initially suggests Jarret might “mount up and ride off,” exposing how poorly he grasps the realities of enslavement and kinship.
• Principled yet complicit: A “free labor man” who courts slaveholding patrons; he chastens himself—“I must guard against the rank seductions of this place”—for how easily power can corrupt sympathy.
• Outward signs of precarity: Lanky, with fair, barbered hair, but with “worn” boots and “frayed cuffs,” a body that carries both aspiration and debt.
• Resilient, altered by war: Service as a hospital steward strips away any romance of conflict; the man who once anatomized horses now cannot stomach human carnage.

Character Journey

Scott arrives in Kentucky as a gifted striver, eager to turn facility into reputation. His first encounters at the Meadows are awkward—he misreads the social terrain—even as he intuits Jarret’s authority with horses and begins to learn from him. Their collaboration deepens with each Lexington portrait: promises kept, measurements taken, and, crucially, an image made for Jarret himself. The diary entry about dining with Cassius Clay captures Scott’s role as a barometer of a fractured region—he records tensions others try to paper over. As the nation ruptures, he lays down brushes for bandages, serving as a hospital steward; exposure to torn bodies clarifies his convictions and sours any notion of heroic war. During the Woodburn raid, capture flips his relationship with Jarret into stark relief when Jarret becomes his rescuer, sealing mutual trust. Scott returns to painting altered—more sober about power, more reverent about memory—culminating in his masterpiece of the blind Lexington with Jarret: a portrait that honors not just a legendary horse, but the hands and knowledge that made him.

Key Relationships

• Jarret Lewis: Scott is one of the first white men to invite Jarret’s expert opinion—asking what a horse “feels about the world”—and to shape his art around Jarret’s insight. He teaches composition and color while Jarret teaches him how to see; their mutual tutelage yields truer portraits and a risky, loyal act when Scott places a bet on Lexington for Jarret.
• Dr. Elisha Warfield: Warfield is Scott’s gatekeeper to the elite turf world. Scott flatters him in public to earn commissions yet dissects the household’s moral contradictions in private. The patron–artist dynamic exposes Scott’s dependence on a system he disdains.
• Richard Ten Broeck: As a journalist, Scott moves in Ten Broeck’s turf circles and leverages that access to serve Jarret’s interests. By acting as intermediary for the wager, Scott uses his social capital to pry open a narrow path toward Jarret’s hoped-for freedom.

Defining Moments

Scott’s life tilts on a handful of encounters where art, ethics, and risk converge.

• First conversation with Jarret about Glacier’s “soul”: Signals Scott’s respect for Jarret’s horsemanship and sets the tone for collaboration built on asking, not assuming.
• Painting Lexington across time: From the early colt promised “for Jarret” to the final portrait of blind Lexington with Jarret beside him, Scott turns images into a ledger of loyalty and loss—art as testimony.
• Dinner with Cassius Clay: A diarist’s high-wire act, capturing the volatility of Kentucky’s politics and the hypocrisy of genteel conversation around abolition.
• The wager on Lexington for Jarret: Scott stakes his reputation and funds to channel Jarret’s expertise into tangible leverage, converting admiration into action.
• The Woodburn raid and rescue: Capture by Quantrill’s men reverses roles; Jarret’s intervention shows how cross-racial bonds can become life-and-death commitments within a violent order.
• War service and renunciation of the saw: Hospital duty makes him “sick and tired of carnage,” pushing him back to painting with a chastened sense of what images must hold.

Essential Quotes

I want to know how he feels about the world . . . what kind of soul he’s got. Scott reframes animal portraiture as an ethical inquiry. By asking Jarret to articulate a horse’s interiority, he validates Jarret’s expertise and reorients his own art toward feeling rather than mere likeness.

Here’s the ground of it, as I see it: a racehorse is a mirror, and a man sees his own reflection there... A gentleman likes to have a horse that gives the right answers to those questions, then he can believe that he will give the right answers too. To do my part, I have to give a man a likeness that shows not just how beautiful the horse looks, but how beautiful it feels to him. This credo reveals Scott’s double vision: he understands both equine beauty and the self-fashioning of elites. His portraits sell an illusion—wealthy men seeing themselves reflected—yet his insight also lets him smuggle truth into the image.

You must like the work here a great deal. Otherwise, with all these fast horses, you and your pa could just mount up and ride off. The river’s not that far away, after all. The line exposes Scott’s early blindness to the realities of bondage—family ties, surveillance, terror, and law. It becomes a moral checkpoint in his development: a moment he must outgrow through listening and witness.

If I were in purse to buy Warfield’s Jarret, I believe I would do it. And so we who think we are above enslaving our fellow man are corrupted. Only show us absolute agency over the apt and the willing, and suddenly we find the planters’ obduracy that much less odious. I must guard against the rank seductions of this place. Scott indicts himself, not just the slaveholders. The passage captures how proximity to power tempts even the “principled,” and how self-suspicion becomes his ethical discipline.

Julien, I am sick and tired of carnage. I must set down my surgeon’s saw and pick up, once again, my painter’s brushes. War strips Scott of any romance about conflict. Returning to art is not retreat but a reassertion of purpose: to remember and repair, to depict with the gravity that blood—and history—demand.