The Seminoles, the "bloodhound war," and abolitionism, 1796-1865.

ABOLITIONIST GEORGE W. CARLETON OBSERVED IN 1857 THAT IN SLAVE-holding areas of the South, the bloodhound had become "a household word--a 'domestic institution.'" To support this criticism of slavery, he reprinted newspaper advertisements from several southern states featuring these dogs or their services for sale. Other abolitionists also mentioned this animal; the antebellum historical record abounds with antislavery references to vicious bloodhounds used by slave owners to guard, chase, and assault slaves who had escaped. For example, Frederick Douglass' Paper, an abolitionist weekly published in Rochester, New York, referred to bloodhounds over a hundred times between 1851 and 1855. Senator Charles Sumner, who mentioned the image numerous times during the 1850s, spoke derisively of "a whole kennel of Carolina bloodhounds" in the speech that elicited his caning by Representative Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina. Former slave Harriet Jacobs invoked these dogs frequently in her autobiography, with one especially vivid quotation from her uncle Benjamin, who said that when a runaway "is hunted like a wild beast he forgets.... every thing," even God, "in his struggle to get beyond the reach of the bloodhounds." (1) Abolitionists used arresting images--the rape of black women, the whipping and killing of slaves, and the separation of black family members, for example--to graphically convey abuse within slavery, but the bloodhound image was unusually powerful because it simultaneously highlighted both violence within slavery and slaves' desire to be free.

Despite historians' rich studies of the antislavery movement, little attention has been paid to the bloodhound image as an abolitionist device for condemning bondage. Scholars Elizabeth Clark and Marcus Wood observe that the bloodhound was one of the many images used by abolitionists to convey slavery's dehumanization, yet their works treat bloodhounds and other slave-catching dogs interchangeably, limiting their insights. In discussing an etching entitled "The Bloodhound Business," Wood refers to the bloodhounds in the drawing as "hounds" and "dogs." (2) By subsuming bloodhounds under the broader, more convenient categories of dog and hound, Wood is assuming more than he should: that antebellum Americans, especially those involved in the politics of slavery, viewed these various terms for dogs as interchangeable and equally provocative rhetorical devices. To the contrary, bloodhound should be differentiated from dog, and the terms and images should be placed in historical context, thereby allowing a full understanding of the role, meanings, and significance of the bloodhound in abolitionist discourse.

One major reason for the bloodhound's rhetorical richness among abolitionists is the double life it led as an image that also conveyed and condemned the exploitation of Native Americans. As W. C. L. Martin noted in his 1845 volume, History of the Dog, Euro-Americans used "Cuban Blood hounds" in "hunting down the defenceless Indian or ... runaway slave." (3) In response, abolitionists deployed the bloodhound image when attacking the ill-treatment of both Indians and African slaves. Indeed, the bloodhound's association with Indians--within the context of the United States--was so pronounced that it preceded and then paved the way for its eventually more pervasive association with southern slavery. But even when the bloodhound became increasingly an antislavery image in the hands of abolitionists in the 1840s and beyond, it continued to evoke the mistreatment of native peoples. As a result, study of the Indian dimension of the bloodhound image not only illuminates abolitionists' views on race and racial domination but also expands our understanding of their critique of American society. Just as they attacked slavery, intemperance, warmongering, and prevailing gender norms, so too did many criticize the subjugation of Native Americans. (4)

Abolitionists deployed the bloodhound image to condemn the subjugation of Indians because many activists felt a fundamental sympathy for Native Americans. However, abolitionists' use of the image to convey their concern assumed three political guises that varied in prominence over time. First, abolitionists emphasized the bloodhound to galvanize support for Indians, most notably in late 1839 and early 1840 when they criticized the American military's use of these dogs against the Seminoles in the Second Seminole War, also known to contemporaries as the Bloodhound War. (5) Second, as part of the abolitionists' attack on slavery in the 1840s, they pointed to the military's deployment of these dogs to substantiate their claim that the so-called Slave Power was using its extensive influence within the federal government to advance the cause of slavery. Third, during the 1850s they used the employment of bloodhounds against the Seminoles primarily as a symbol of white Americans' subjugation of non-white peoples. The image was so effective at highlighting this domination that even after the Civil War critics deployed it to convey their anger at America's continuing racial injustices. In 1868, for example, Frederick Douglass, as part of his indictment of the Democratic Party and its "strong against the weak" policies, cited not only African Americans' experiences but also those of "the humane Seminoles" whom Democrats and others had "hunted down ... with bloodhounds" because they had sheltered runaway slaves in the years before the Seminole War. (6)

Centuries before American abolitionists seized on the bloodhound as an image that decried the ill-treatment of Native Americans and African Americans, some Europeans were already using canine symbols to indict the brutal treatment of these non-European peoples in the New World by other Europeans. The Spanish conquistadors enlisted what the Aztec people of central Mexico recalled a few decades after Hernando Cortes's conquest of Tenochtitlan as "enormous," "tireless," "powerful," and "ferocious" war dogs that attacked and "are [native] people." (7) Early critics of the Spanish conquest, most notably Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, used such evidence of canine assaults to help convey the immoral treatment of the Indian peoples of the New World. In one of his many references to these animals, Las Casas, in his 1552 La Destruccion de las Indias, wrote, "Ya esta dicho que tienen los espanoles de las Indias ensenados y amaestrados perros bravisimos y ferocisimos para matar y despedazar los indios." Such depictions of "fierce dogs" that "attack[ed]" and then "t[ore] to pieces" the Indians constituted key evidence from which Las Casas spawned the condemnatory "Black Legend" interpretation of the conquest that has persisted to the present. (8)

English-language accounts of the conquest essentially built on the Las Casas paradigm of emphasizing Spanish brutality; they described without hesitation those fierce dogs-of-war used by the Spanish for defeating the natives. One such history, published in 1762, explained that the Spanish were able to "hunt ... these unhappy people with dogs" only because these animals were "trained up for th[is] purpose." As early as March 1495, recounted the early English histories, Columbus and his men reaped the military benefits of such training when they deployed "twenty large dogs" in their campaign against the Indians of Hispaniola, who, claimed historian William Robertson, threw down their weapons and fled, in part because "the fierce onset of the dogs was so great." (9) Another historian, Antonio de Herrera, claimed that since the conquerors had "taught the Dogs to bite, ... one single Spaniard went about as safe with a Dog as if he had been guarded by an hundred Men." (10)

Yet only in 1796 did the English-speaking world begin to refer to these Spanish dogs as "bloodhounds." In the second half of 1795 the English colonists of Jamaica faced an uprising of Maroons, runaway slaves and their descendants who had carved out their own autonomous communities on the island. Hoping to defeat the Maroons quickly, the Earl of Balcarres, lieutenant-governor and commander-in-chief of Jamaica, "procure[d]" from Cuba "100 ... Large Dogs of the Bloodhound Breed which are used to hunt down runaway Negroes on that Island." Their "ferocity" was so great, claimed Balcarres, that not only would the dogs help track down the Maroons but also the Africans would be so frightened by the prospect of being mauled that they would promptly give up their rebellion. Surrender was imminent, boasted Balcarres, as "the Negroes ... have been struck with horror at hearing of this measure ... [T]he Savages have the utmost dread of a Large Dog." The governor was so confident that he thought the dogs would be able to perform "the same ... service" against the "Brigand[s] in St. Domingo [Haiti]." (11)

Rather than sharing Balcarres's optimism about the dogs' utility in fighting rebellious Africans in the Caribbean, much of British officialdom expressed anger and disbelief at the canine importation. Members of the House of Commons as well as King George III decried, as General Norman Macleod, a member of Parliament, put it, these "improper weapons," the use of which violated the "principle[s] ... of nations" and, argued Richard Sheridan, also a member of Parliament, stained the "honour of the British character." (12) In their efforts "to put an end to this atrocious mode of warfare," critics charged that Britain was imitating Spain; drawing on the work of Las Casas and Robertson, they claimed that the use of "100 blood-hounds ... for the purpose of extirpating the Maroons" echoed the canine "barbarities exercised by the Spaniards." Such a military measure "reduced [us] to be humble copiers of the cruelties of the Spaniards, whose inhumanity we" have "always condemned," asserted John Courtenay, a member of Parliament. (13)

Critics went even further in deriding the British government's apparent imitation of the Spanish. They ignored the language of their own authorities, Las Casas and Robertson, and renamed the conquest's war dogs bloodhounds. In doing so, they made these dangerous dogs appear even more vicious in the minds of late-eighteenth-century English folk since the term bloodhound was far more suggestive of bloody assaults than the more benign-sounding dog. No less important, this terminological change also made the imported Cuban dogs appear more violent. By now sharing the name of their Spanish counterparts, the imported dogs became the apparent descendants of the earlier dogs and therefore inherited the traits of martial violence vividly associated with those earlier creatures. In explaining these canine connections to Parliament, Macleod seamlessly merged these two bloodhound-denominated dog types into a single kind of dog that traversed the centuries, observing that "these blood-hounds that were imported [into Jamaica] ... were dogs which the Spaniards had found of great use upon their discovery of Mexico for the purpose of extermination." (14)

This renaming of the earlier Spanish dogs and the increased violence consequently associated with the Cuban/Jamaican dogs of the 1790s did not go unchallenged. Balcarres's allies downplayed their viciousness and instead emphasized their role in tracking. Joseph Foster Barham, a member of Parliament, reminded his colleagues that in England a "gentleman who had ... [a deer]park" would use bloodhounds to "protect [his] venison" by "hunt[ing] deer-stealers." In this perspective, blood in bloodhound did not refer to any supposed propensity to assault humans, be they Old World deer-stealers or New World Indians or Africans, but rather to their more benign but still useful ability to scent the blood of wounded but pilfered deer so as to track down these animals and their thieves. From this perspective, the ability to trail blacks in New World societies was the preeminent trait of these and other well-trained tracking dogs. (15)

Balcarres pursued a different tack. He sharply disputed the supposed connection between the Spanish animals and the Cuban/Jamaican ones, claiming publicly in May 1796 that the former were used "for attack and robbery, against the peaceful," innocent Indians, whereas Anglo-Jamaicans imported the latter for the evidently less violent purpose of helping them to provide for their "own defence, and for their own protection." Yet in order to strengthen his defense, Balcarres, recognizing the substantive implications of various canine terms, now claimed that the animals he borrowed from Cuba were the generic "dogs (not Blood-hounds)," thereby contradicting his letter of late 1795 in an effort to use a term that sounded less threatening. However, in his eagerness to defang the Cuban animals and his critics, he ceded an important terminological and substantive point to his opponents because he referred to the conquest dogs as "blood-hounds [used by] the Spaniards ... against the Indian[s]...." (16)

Balcarres's semantic parsing and the broader controversy of which it was part wrought important consequences for nineteenth-century Indians, slaves, slaveholders, and abolitionists. The very debate over these dogs heightened people's awareness of the animals and their deployment against Native Americans as well as blacks prior to 1796. By uniting similar but distinct dog types, the renaming offered the impressive image of a single dog breed that rendered centuries-long assistance to their Euro-American masters' subjugation of other peoples. While the dogs' tracking of blacks and Native Americans remained a visibly important role of these animals in the nineteenth century, their association with violence dominated popular conceptions of them. For as the controversy revealed, the violence associated with these animals was based on two aspects of European domination in the New World: using the dogs in state-sponsored military actions and, as is better known, in individual plantation owners' efforts to recapture runaway slaves.

Euro-Americans quickly incorporated the new term bloodhound into their understanding of the Spanish conquest of Native Americans. In May 1796 the Philadelphia Pennsylvania Gazette, reporting that the Jamaican authorities had "imported blood hounds from Cuba," had already internalized the name change as it referred to "the atrocious and cruel barbarities" inflicted by the "blood hounds on the peaceful inhabitants of Mexico and Peru." In an 1805 study of Haiti's black revolution, Marcus Rainsford discussed the bloodhounds imported by the French from Cuba in 1802 as part of their effort to reclaim their colony; as background to this account, Rainsford first described the Spanish "bloodhounds" used against both Native Americans and the Jamaican Maroons. (17) In 1813 the Baltimore Weekly Register discussed how Spain "introduced" the bloodhounds "into St. Domingo," "first to destroy the Indians and afterwards the fugitive negroes" who fled to "the mountains"; by 1836 the paper had enlarged its scope to include Spanish deployment of the "bloodhound" on Cuba, initially against "the wretched natives" and then for "the discovery and seizure of runaway negroes." (18) In his magisterial history of the United States, George Bancroft mentioned the bloodhounds used by the Spaniard Hernando de Soto as "auxiliaries" in his invasion of the present-day Southeast. (19)

Supporters of the Second Seminole War were clearly aware of the dogs' history, for it was during this war, which lasted from 1835 to 1842 and was also known to contemporaries as the Florida War, that the United States used bloodhounds to help fight the Seminoles and their African American allies, many of whom were fugitive slaves living with the Seminoles. (20) Like the English and French before them, Florida officials turned to Cuba for the animals, since bloodhounds were not yet commonly used in the South for pursuing slaves and hence were not readily available for military service. In part because of this requisition and the resulting controversy, the Second Seminole War became a watershed in the history of Native Americans, southern slavery, and American abolition. For in the aftermath of the Bloodhound War, as the Second Seminole War was sometimes called, slaveholders incorporated these and other comparably trained dogs into their apparatus of slave control; in response, abolitionists made these vicious slave-catching dogs a central image in their attack on slavery.

Although the importation did not occur until January 1840, advocates proposed using dogs repeatedly during the previous four years. In May 1836 the Tallahassee Floridian claimed that it was necessary to put "this ferocious animal" into battle to "deter" the "ferocious and blood-thirsty ... enemy," the Seminoles and the "slaves which they have captured." (21) The following year, Thomas S. Jesup, the commanding general in Florida, vowed that he would send "to Cuba for bloodhounds"; in July 1838 Zachary Taylor, Jesup's replacement and a future president, also endorsed the importation of these dogs. In early 1839 Jesup, as quartermaster general of the army and no longer head of the Florida forces, advised Thomas Hart Benton, chairman of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs, that the United States should imitate "the British Government in their war with the Maroons in Jamaica [by] employ[ing] the Blood Hound." (22)

As Jesup's recommendation indicates, bloodhound advocates were well versed in the dogs' New World experiences. In 1837 Henry O'Reilly of Rochester, New York, gently suggested that if the war continued poorly the United States might have no choice but to copy the "Spaniards" who "employ[ed] ... ferocious auxiliaries"--"bloodhounds"--in "subjugating Peru." In contrast, the Tallahassee Floridian condemned the "cruel" and "rapaci[ous]" actions of conquistadors Cortes and Nuno de Guzman against the "unoffending Mexican." At the same time, it claimed that "self-preservation" justified bloodhound use in Florida against "an invisible, treacherous and brutal enemy." Another supporter asserted that Florida should follow the lead of Jamaica, for a "great degree of similarity" existed between the Maroons and the Seminoles; they were "equal ... in activity and endurance.... vision and hearing," and, "in cunning, treachery, cruelty, and the barbarous art of mutilating the dead and torturing their prisoners[,] neither excelled the other." (23)

Less concerned with precedents, other dog proponents simply trumpeted the bloodhound's self-evident value and claimed, as one put it, that while "the Indian can elude any number of troops ... the blood hound ... he cannot elude[:] ... the keen scent of the dog would be his deadly, conquering foe." As a result, "the best plan ... is to overrun the territory with troops" and "well-trained blood-hounds," thereby eliminating what the Floridian referred to as this "mot[le]y mixture of Seminoles, Creeks, [and] fugitive slaves...." (24) Convinced by these claims of the animals' usefulness, Florida territorial officials requisitioned dogs from Cuba in December 1839; in early January 1840 nearly three dozen bloodhounds arrived. (25) Each cost approximately $150.00, and they were placed under the control of the U.S. military. (26) Early dispatches celebrated their supposed successes in the field. (27)

Critics, primarily abolitionists, fiercely attacked first the idea of using the animals and then the animals' deployment in Florida. Their opposition had three sources: familiarity with the bloodhounds; preexisting sympathy for Native Americans; and outrage at southerners using dogs to chase slaves. First, their challenge to this "disgraceful," "revolting[,] and savage" treatment of the Seminoles built on the critics' knowledge of the bloodhounds' roles in the New World. (28) Early antislavery publications had invoked these bloodhounds and the violence they wrought on the Indians of the Caribbean basin. William Lloyd Garrison's Boston Liberator, the most prominent of abolitionist periodicals, discussed the Spaniards' "destruction of the Carribeans." To convey the natives' sorrow, the newspaper offered a portion of James Montgomery's poem titled "The West Indies," first published in 1809, in which he speaks of the "blood-hound's death-step [being] close behind" the fleeing Indians. In 1839 Theodore Dwight Weld, in his Slavery As It Is, saw southerners' use of slave-catching dogs as echoing the cruel Spanish who "hunt[ed] [Native Americans] with bloodhounds" as part of their strategy of conquest. (29)

Abolitionists' knowledge of bloodhound violence also emanated from their awareness of the dogs' equally vicious attacks on people of African descent in the Caribbean and Latin America. In the 1820s the New York Freedom's Journal, an African American antislavery periodical edited by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, fed readers grisly stories about the "bloodhounds introduced from Cuba" by the French into Haiti and how these animals feasted "from time to time on human flesh." In 1833 Lydia Maria Child, an American abolitionist, informed her readers that "[i]n some of the West Indies, blood-hounds are employed to hunt negroes." To support her claim she cited Harriet Martineau's antislavery novel Demerara, situated in the plantation region of Demerara (in present-day Guyana). In describing a hunt, Martineau writes that "a fierce blood-hound ... sprung at [fugitive] Willy's throat and brought him down.... [H]aving tasted blood, the animal was not to be restrained" by humans. Finally, "[w]hen the mangled negro had ceased to struggle ... the hound slunk back into the bushes, licking his chops." Usefully summarizing the use of bloodhounds up to the late 1830s, an antislavery children's magazine titled the Slave's Friend, when informing its readers in 1837 that "the people of Florida" proposed to bring these "ferocious animals" from Cuba and use "them in hunting the poor Indians, and the slaves they have taken away from the planters," first explained that "Spaniards, on the island of Cuba," had once used "the Bloodhounds" to "hunt the wretched natives of that Island" and now used them to "discover and seize runaway slaves" there. (30)

Yet knowledge of the bloodhounds was, by itself, not enough to galvanize the abolitionists into action. In addition, their response rested on their pre-existing willingness to act on behalf of Native Americans. According to historian Linda K. Kerber, there were early-nineteenth-century abolitionists who so questioned the dominant society's treatment of Native Americans that their "concern for the Indian preceded [their] concern for the black." Abolitionists criticized federal Indian policy as being dictated by the needs of slave owners and their allies, to the consequent harm of Native Americans, especially those living in the Southeast, where planters coveted their land. Armed with this critique of federal policy, antislavery activists in the late 1820s and early 1830s sought to protect southeastern Indians by petitioning the government to stop its westward removal policy, which, as women from Hadley, Massachusetts, put it in their petition, was the latest "act ... of injustice toward our Indian tribes." (31)

This anti-removal campaign sharpened abolitionists' assessments of the government's racial policies. On the one hand, argues Mary Hershberger, the effort transformed many of the antislavery advocates, who had formerly embraced proposals to resettle African Americans in Africa, into radical abolitionists who abjured the removal of blacks and called for the immediate ending of slavery. On the other hand, the rejection of removal of blacks to Africa strengthened abolitionist commitment to protect Indians from their own removal and other indignities, such as the war against the Seminoles, and made the abolitionists even more cognizant of how the politics of slavery and the politics of federal Indian policy impinged on each other. As the poem "The Bloodhound War," written in opposition to use of the dogs, put it when describing the origins of the Second Seminole War, "This brutal fray, [was] of Bondage born...." Or as one antislavery society stated in opposition to the war, "The ... object of the South, through the instrumentality of the national government, is doubly atrocious: first, to get forceful possession of [the Indians'] lands" and then "to establish slavery" on "those lands." (32)

Abolitionists' criticism of federal Indian policy and of the Florida War gave them the analytical basis for decrying the importation of dogs, but it was their ongoing outrage at southerners' use of dogs to chase slaves as a regular feature of plantation life that gave the activists the emotional power to organize against the canine military tactic. (33) To be sure, the animals that slave owners used "to pursue and catch runaway[s]" were not bloodhounds but rather, as the former North Carolinian Nehemiah Caulkins recalled in the 1830s, their all-purpose hunting "dogs." (34) Lydia Maria Child made a similar claim, juxtaposing her 1833 assertion about the use of bloodhounds in the West Indies with her observation that a southern-style "negro hunt" consisted of "dogs, guns, and horses," with no mention specifically of bloodhounds. Yet, however unexceptional these southern slave-catching dogs may have been, abolitionists were nonetheless offended at the way slave owners animalized slaves by sending dogs after them as though they were beasts of the forests. In an 1832 description of a slave hunt in South Carolina, the Boston Liberator conveyed this animalization by noting that the "slavite" used "his guns and dogs to destroy" two fugitives as though they were "panthers or bears." (35)

Already sensitized to the dehumanization that southern slaves experienced when hunted like wild animals, abolitionists attacked what they saw as the "barbarous and inhuman measure" of using bloodhounds against the Seminoles. Indeed, the special circumstances of the Seminoles' situation inflamed abolitionist anger all the more. Because the military's tracking down of Indians in Florida would be accompanied presumably by the heightened violence characteristic of bloodhound assaults, the dehumanization of pursuit became even more offensive to the critics, particularly given their view of the Seminoles as free, unbound people whose humanity was as sacrosanct as that of slaves or anyone else. For in claiming in their petitions that this measure was barbaric and "inhuman" and, consequently, violated "every feeling of humanity," abolitionists were offering one definitional aspect of what it meant to be treated as a human being, namely, the right not to be pursued militarily by war dogs. By presenting this conception of human existence, abolitionists, in sharply criticizing the dog tactic, were thus affirming the Seminoles' humanness and, in so doing, including them within the cloak of a shared humanity with themselves and all other inhabitants of the Americas. (36)

Armed with an intellectually and emotionally based opposition to the dogs, abolitionist critics wasted little time remonstrating against the bloodhound tactic. They imitated the anti-removal campaign by gathering and submitting their own petitions to Congress. Eventually, 162 would be sent in, representing seven states and signed by roughly eight thousand citizens. (37) These petitions made three points. First, they defended the Seminoles by condemning this "atrocious Blood Hound business," which they viewed with "deep regret and abhorrence." Second, beyond criticizing "the import[ation]" of "a number of Blood Hounds ... from the Island of Cuba," these "Memorial[s] and Remonstrance[s] ... earnestly beseech[ed] Congress to interpose its authority to arrest this" unfortunate action. Third, they offered two reasons why Congress should stop this initiative: it was immoral--"barbarous and inhuman"--to treat the Seminoles this way, and it was a national embarrassment that, if not terminated, would "inflict" a "deep and lasting disgrace ... upon the national character." While the latter reason appealed less to people's concern for the Seminoles than to their sense of nationalism, both justifications, if they sparked the desired congressional action, served to promote the Seminoles' interests. (38)

Terminating the bloodhound initiative was difficult. (39) While the petitions were correct in assuming that Congress could intervene, since Florida, as a United States territory, was "subject to the control of the General Government," any such intervention required knowing who, if anyone, in the federal government had procured the dogs. Yet since the petitions remained silent on the issue, abolitionists' allies had to seek out the origins of the dog initiative as a prelude to debating its termination. To this end, Whig representative George H. Proffit of Indiana bluntly asked whether "the Secretary at War ... has or has not ordered or authorized the use of bloodhounds in the war with the Indians in Florida"; in response, defenders of the dogs released a satchel of correspondence to and from Secretary of War Joel Poinsett that apparently exonerated the federal government of the charge of importing the dogs. These letters, released by Thomas Hart Benton, chair of the Committee on Military Affairs, as part of the Senate's inquiry into the issue, showed that Zachary Taylor, commander of the U.S. military in Florida, suggested the use of bloodhounds in July 1838, but the missives also revealed that it was actually the civil authorities of Florida who imported the animals in January 1840 and then "offered their services to the United States Army." (40) By absolving the national government of complicity in the importation of the dogs, the letters relieved it of the need to take any action; yet by doing nothing, Congress was essentially placing its stamp of approval on the dog tactic. (41)

Congressional support for the bloodhounds inflamed abolitionist anger all the more. As abolitionists stated repeatedly, the Native Americans were being inhumanly treated by military use of bloodhounds; as part of their campaign to protect the Seminoles from this abuse, the abolitionists emphasized the degradation experienced by the Indians at the hands of the violent dogs. Certainly, this message also promoted abolitionists' antislavery agenda, since it was in their interest to highlight any actions that would embarrass, if not weaken, the forces of slavery. Yet such political criticism could have been made without using--as they did--such inflammatory terms as barbarous and savage when condemning the actions of the federal and territorial officials. The use, therefore, of such charged language suggests that abolitionists' impassioned opposition to the dog tactic not only was an opportunistic use of the Seminoles' predicament to promote the antislavery agenda but, in addition, reflected a sincere concern for the Seminoles as a sovereign people who, like all other peoples, deserved to be treated with at Feast a minimum level of humanity, even in a time of war.

In their pro-Seminole efforts, abolitionists adroitly highlighted the violence associated with the dogs. At times, they did so indirectly by using terms and images that would trigger vivid associations in the minds of Americans. When they referred to hunting--such as saying that the dogs would be used to "hunt down and destroy the Seminole"--many of the petitions offered an image of the Seminoles being pursued like any other wild creature. For a largely rural populace for whom hunting was still a normal part of life, such an image might well have brought to mind the bloodshed that occurred when game was hunted and brought down. (42) While there were many Americans who, in seeing Indians as more like the wolf or the bison, would have seen nothing wrong in hunting these people as though they were animals of the forests, others, the critics hoped, would be offended, as they were, by such blatant dehumanization. (43)

Instead of referring explicitly to the dogs of 1840, other critics invoked the Black Legend of Spain's conquest of the native people so as to convey what the Seminoles might face. In January 1840 the Liberator equated the bloodhound decision unfavorably with the "barbarities practiced by the Spaniards" who used "blood-hounds" when "hunting down the Indians of the new world." Merely mentioning, with minimal details, the Spanish dogs in such a matter-of-fact way implicitly conveyed the grim fate of the Seminoles simply because the Liberator assumed that, in having a working knowledge of the conquest's bloody details, many Americans could extrapolate from the earlier Indians to those in Florida. (44) Given that the Spanish barbarity occurred as part of state-initiated military action, such historic references heightened the sense of violence that was sure to befall the Seminoles as a result of the U.S. military's use of the dogs.

By contrast, other abolitionists mentioned the dogs explicitly and made them sound as fierce as possible. They depicted vicious creatures that were so dangerous that they would "hunt [the Seminoles] down like beasts of prey." Hardly the common cur or even all-purpose hunting hounds, these animals were big and "savage"; with their "large size and elegant proportions," the Cuban bloodhounds were said to be as big as an English sheepdog or St. Bernard, "equal to the mastiff in bulk--to the bull dog in courage--to the bloodhound in scent, and to the grey-hound in agility." (45) Abolitionists heightened the dogs' dangerousness by emphasizing that they were specially trained to chase and to attack their human quarry. One article, entitled "Fiendish Cruelty," explained that the dogs' "antipathy ... to the blacks [in Cuba] is purposely increased" by having "the negroes ... beat them with great severity" while they were tied up, so that when the dogs were let out at night to chase down runaways, "these blood-thirsty brutes" would be especially ferocious toward "their black persecutors." (46) Deliberate training, combined with their intimidating appearance, made the bloodhounds so fierce that they required special handlers known as "Chasseurs del Rey," four of whom accompanied the dogs to Florida to manage them. (47) One political cartoon (see Illustration 1), in attacking the dog tactic, underscored the message of the dogs' being well trained--and, hence, all the more dangerous--by showing them standing perfectly at attention as they receive their orders. (48)

Abolitionists received unexpected help from dog supporters who shamelessly celebrated the dogs' destructive capabilities. One Floridian explained that they were anything but an "ordinary pack barking about a planter's dwelling.... " Instead, they were "an animal of great nerve, strength, and agility"; indeed, for this individual, they were the most "ferocious beasts" he had ever seen. As for the bloodhounds' role in the Seminole War, the Tallahassee Floridian trumpeted their viciousness by criticizing Poinsett's "mistaken" policy. Contrary to his instructions, the dogs were "intended... to 'worry,' to 'hunt,' to 'bite,' to 'tear to pieces,' all the red devils the[y] can catch." (49)

Such provocative claims made it harder for most dog defenders to dispute the critics. The official position of military and political leaders was established in July 1838 when General Taylor explained, as part of his recommendation to use the dogs, that these animals would serve only to "ascertain where the Indians can be found, not to worry them." Later, when Poinsett authorized Taylor to "procure such number of dogs as he may judge necessary," the secretary of war underscored that they should only be used "to track and discover the Indians, not to worry or destroy them." (50) Yet however clearly Taylor and Poinsett emphasized the role of tracking the Indians, such statements could not help but reinforce the vicious image of these dogs; mentioning what they were not to do only served to remind people what the animals were capable of doing. To say, as one defender did, that reining them in would keep them from "mutilat[ing] and devour[ing] ... 'little papooses'" was to all but admit that the dogs were capable of such mutilation if unrestrained; to claim, as another did, that the animals were "so trained as to pursue, but not to injure, the object of their search" was hardly reassuring when this individual added a damning caveat: "unless he attempt[s] to move or resist." (51)

Perhaps a more realistic defense emanated from those Floridians who realized that pronouncements emphasizing the dogs' tracking role could never compete with or undo the countervailing message of violence automatically conveyed in the provocative term bloodhound. "[T]he very name of these Dogs," combined with their historic "stain of Spanish barbarity has rendered them terrific without cause," argued the Tallahassee Floridian. The St. Augustine Florida Herald and Southern Democrat asserted, "A name is every thing. 'Dogs from Cuba' would be as flat as the miserables themselves, but 'bloodhounds' makes a full capital stock in trade." Other newspapers also recognized the need to detoxify the word, and hence the controversy, by using alternative terminology. The St. Joseph Times ridiculed the critics' apparent obsession with the Cuban dogs' appellation by suggesting humorously that supporters replace "the blood-thirsty name of Bloodhounar' with the more harmless-sounding and "loving name of the Black Muzzled Lady's Pet"; no one, it claimed, would object to the idea of a "Lady's Pet following the footsteps of an Indian Gentleman." In no mood for levity, the St. Augustine News "propose[d]" the name of "Peace-Hounds," which it believed "more appropriate to their character and services, than the name of bloodhounds, which has shocked the nerve of so many old ladies of both sexes out of Florida." Moreover, this new label would more accurately reflect their having "give[n] peace to Florida, without shedding much blood." (52)

Despite defenders' best efforts to promote the dogs and their role in tracking--and not attacking--Indians, the dogs' supporters had to concede defeat when the animals were withdrawn from the field of battle by spring 1840. The main reason given for the rapid end to their deployment was that the dogs failed to track their human prey. Floridians complained that these hounds were "trained to hunt negroes," not Indians; because "the scent of an Indian is entirely foreign to their nasal organs," being trained to follow Cuban slaves evidently ill-equipped the dogs to pursue the Indians and their scent. (53)

In spite of these claims about the dogs' ineffective training, abolitionists made critical contributions to derailing the dog tactic and perhaps making it possible for the Seminoles to resist for another two years. Presumably, if the dog initiative had been tried outside the glare of public opinion and opposition, there would have been more time for the handlers to retrain the dogs, to become generally more acclimated to Florida's dense and swampy terrain, and to improve their performance in the field tracking the Native Americans. By creating such a political firestorm, abolitionists and their allies reduced the time available to the army to produce results with the dogs, forcing the government to terminate the dog initiative, perhaps prematurely. That opponents of Martin Van Buren's presidential reelection efforts later in 1840 made the bloodhounds into a partisan issue suggests that political calculation, as well as military considerations, played a role in the abandonment of using the dogs earlier that year. (54)

Of course, not all of the political pressure emanated from abolitionists. Through their initial outcry, abolitionists created a political controversy that in turn generated, as one periodical noted, "considerable discussion in many parts of the country." (55) In addition to the thorough coverage in the Army and Navy Chronicle, the Liberator, Niles' National Register, and various Florida newspapers, numerous other periodicals reported on the controversy. (56) The Congressional Globe, in its capacity as the journal of record for Congress, recorded the debates in the House and Senate about the bloodhounds and duly noted the arrival of petitions on the topic. All of this attention galvanized citizens of various political persuasions to join in opposing the dogs; Samuel Bettle of Philadelphia told his congressional representative, John Sergeant, that it was "gratifying" that the "readiness to sign [a petition] seems generally unaffected by party considerations, [as] men of all parties unite in condemning the measure." (57) Having initiated the controversy, abolitionists could quite rightly take credit for having raised the political awareness of perhaps normally indifferent northerners.

Abolitionists followed up these political successes by continuing to exploit the bloodhound as a political image. Even though the authorities abandoned the dogs, this hardly meant that abolitionists would forget them. Quite to the contrary, appreciating the effectiveness of the bloodhound image at attracting attention, abolitionists marshaled it throughout the 1840s as part of their critique of federal Indian policy. No less important, they also used the controversy to promote the antislavery cause by strengthening their indictment of the Slave Power and by making use of the image of the vicious bloodhound to condemn slavery itself.

The Bloodhound War became an important piece of evidence to support the emerging "Slave Power Conspiracy" thesis offered by abolitionists. Although Poinsett's satchel of letters had seemingly absolved the federal government of responsibility for importing the dogs, the presence in key positions of slaveholders who supported the bloodhound initiative--Benton of Missouri, Jesup of Kentucky, Poinsett of South Carolina, and Taylor of Louisiana--underscored the extent to which the federal government was controlled by influential southerners who, if they did not directly bring in the dogs, still made it possible for them to be used. (58) This level of complicity helped fuel abolitionists' emerging fears about the growing ability of southerners--and their northern allies, such as Van Buren--to use their power to dominate the national government and to dictate developments throughout the country, for example, by waging war on the Seminoles to acquire land and slaves and using bloodhounds as auxiliaries in that effort. Given that the term Slave Power was first being used in the late 1830s and in the spring of 1840 received one of its first airings as a proper, capitalized phrase, the Bloodhound War likely helped abolitionists develop this political term and theory for summarizing their fears of slaveholder domination. Not merely reflecting a pre-existing "slave power" construct, the bloodhound controversy helped give this concept credibility as a discrete political formulation that would remain at the center of antislavery discourse. (59)

The bloodhound controversy also defined and bequeathed to abolitionism one of the movement's central images for attacking slavery in the years after 1839: the vicious slave-chasing bloodhound. When defenders of the dogs tried to minimize their ferocity and emphasize their more benign but still useful tracking role, they unavoidably confirmed abolitionists' long-standing charges that using dogs--if only common ones--to subjugate non-European peoples was customary practice in the South. At the same time, the defenders' claims, however accurate, could offset neither the inherent sense of bloodiness associated with the name and, hence, the dogs nor, for that matter, the sense of violence that clung to them by virtue of their being used in war. Even if they merely tracked the Seminoles and therefore inflicted little bodily harm, the animals' use in war imbued them with war's systematic violence. Just as the bloodhound's association with the martial activities of the Spanish, British, and French shaped, in 1839 and 1840, Americans' understanding of the dog's ferocity, so too did the dogs' involvement in a war against the Seminoles permanently imbue these animals with a heightened, perhaps even exaggerated, sense of violence in the postwar years, when abolitionists customarily used this canine image to convey the horrors of plantation slavery. As abolitionist emblems of southern violence and inhumanity, these dogs would always owe much of their reputation for fierceness to their well-publicized role in the Second Seminole War.

Without delay, abolitionists capitalized on this image in their work against southern slavery. Where before the war they had limited their use of the bloodhound image when condemning bondage, the bloodhound tactic and the entire debate over it gave abolitionists enough evidence to claim thereafter that these animals chased black southerners when they fled slavery. Individuals on both sides of the controversy understood that since blacks lived with the Seminoles, they were presumably chased along with the Native Americans. As a result, abolitionists could move full force to associate slavery with the violence of the bloodhound.

Although the key transition in abolitionists' usage of bloodhound was the controversy of 1839-1840, the aftermath of the initial 1836 bloodhound proposal witnessed occasional use of the bloodhound image. The New York Colored American, an African American periodical edited by Samuel Cornish, mentioned "Christian bloodhounds" and "voracious blood-hounds in the shape of men" in the late 1830s; similarly, the Boston Liberator invoked the term metaphorically when speaking of slave-catchers as "two-legged bloodhounds." (60) Use of the image continued apace during the 1839-1840 dispute; in the fall of 1839, Edwin Fussell described "the yell of the bloodhound" as it sinks its "fangs in ... the ... fugitive"; S. L. L., the author of "A Dream," a poem published in February 1840, also mentioned the "blood-hound's deadly fangs." (61)

Abolitionists' deployment of their newest antislavery device continued even as the bloodhound initiative was terminated in spring 1840. Most prominently, Joshua Giddings, speaking in Congress in February 1841, challenged the oft-stated purpose of the ongoing military conflict in Florida--to remove Indians--and of the bloodhounds--to help track them down--by claiming instead that the dogs, like the war, were intended to procure runaway slaves for southern slave owners. (62) To sustain this view, Giddings presented a letter from Jesup, written in May 1837 to one of his officers, Lieutenant Colonel W. S. Harney: "If you see Powel (Oceola) [a Seminole leader] tell him I shall send out and take all the negroes who belong to the white people; and he must not allow the Indian negroes to mix with them. Tell him I am sending to Cuba for bloodhounds to trail them; and I intend to hang every one of them who does not come in" but who, Jesup implied, would be caught with the dogs' help. (63) By unveiling this seemingly indisputable evidence of what he saw as the underlying purpose of the war and bloodhounds, Giddings not only strengthened the association of these dogs with slave-chasing but, in doing so, also enriched abolitionists' newly emerging ability to condemn southerners for using the animals in this way. While the Seminoles certainly received attention in Giddings's speech, his goal was to emphasize the pursuit of slaves.

However, southern slaveholders, through their own self-interested adoption of the Cuban bloodhounds, ultimately provided abolitionists with the best ongoing evidence for condemning southern slave-chasing in the post-1839 period. The New York Star reported in early 1840 that "[t]he southern planters, it is well known, and the slave States generally, have never adopted this cruel alternative [the use of bloodhounds] towards runaway slaves," unlike "the benighted West India colonies of Spain." As a result of the Bloodhound War and the political dispute surrounding it, though, slaveholders learned the value of bloodhounds and other comparably trained dogs for controlling slaves and sought to incorporate them into their plantation world. (64) Samuel Ringgold Ward, an abolitionist and former slave, described the transformation of slave-catching in the nineteenth century: "in those [earlier] days the track of the fugitive was neither so accurately scented nor so hotly pursued by human[s] ... or ... kindred bloodhounds, as now" in the 1850s, "nor was slave-catching so complete and regular a system as it" had become. (65) Frederick Douglass's abolitionist newspaper, the Rochester North Star, emphasized the introduction of the bloodhounds into the slave South in the aftermath of the Seminole War when it criticized Zachary Taylor for having recommended to the United States Senate during this war that all runaway slaves "should be tracked by bloodhounds." As it turns out, Taylor had not made this recommendation, and the North Star admitted that it had made "a slight mistake" about claiming Taylor had. Still, it held firm to the more general point that "Southern slaveholders simply profited by his recommendation to adopt that [bloodhound] method of hunting the Indians...." (66)

Slaveholders' adoption of the Cuban method of slave-catching--deploying fierce and specially trained dogs--gave abolitionists a deeper and more immediate evidentiary basis for attacking slave-chasing bloodhounds than did the ever-receding Seminole War. This sustained use of bloodhounds or bloodhound-like dogs in the South during the last decades of slavery meant that abolitionists, had they chosen, would no longer have needed to rely on criticizing the bloodhounds of the Florida War when attacking the South. Instead, they could just bring up the bloodhounds of slavery without any reference to the Seminoles or any other Native Americans.

Yet such was not the case. Abolitionists still called to mind the Seminole War when employing the bloodhound image. Despite their frequent allusions to bloodhound use by southern slaveholders, abolitionist critics regularly brought up the image within an explicitly Indian context from the termination of the bloodhound initiative until the death of Zachary Taylor in 1850. (67) The bloodhound tactic, as a subset of the broader Seminole War, represented to them the persistence of a federal Indian policy promoting the interests of the Slave Power; and, in being borrowed from the managerial practices of slave owners themselves, the tactic suggested to abolitionists the extent to which the Slave Power shaped federal policy. Throughout the 1840s, then, their outrage remained unabated and surfaced in periodic expressions of anger at the ill-treatment of Native Americans. While the main purpose of these bloodhound references was to use the Seminoles' experience to highlight slaveholder control of federal policies, the invocations also reflected sincere concern for the Native Americans themselves, as people and not just as pawns in the larger political dramas between North and South.

Some abolitionists suggested that bloodhounds were being used not only against Seminoles but also against other native groups. In late 1840 the Liberator endorsed what it called the "just and true" pro-Indian remarks of Rev. H. Colman, who focused so single-mindedly on the treatment of Native Americans that he ignored the issue of slavery altogether. Colman not only bemoaned the Indians having been "robbed and defrauded" throughout the country but also castigated the various tools used for inflicting such harm, such as "the small pox[,] whiskey.... bayonet.... and... [n]ow ... blood-hounds." By depicting the dog method of "extermination" as just one of many and placing its use in a nationwide context, he was normalizing its usage and leaving open, therefore, the possibility that Euro-Americans might use it again, which was soon the case. (68) In 1841 the Liberator decried "the exterminating system" in Texas--that is, "the hunting [of] Indians [most likely Kiowa and Comanche] with blood-hounds, and shooting them down." (69)

Perhaps more common, other critics conveyed sympathy for the Seminoles while placing the bloodhound episode in the larger context of slavery. This practice occurred within months of the cessation of the dog tactic. During the presidential election of 1840, abolitionists attacked the incumbent, Martin Van Buren, for (among other things) his Seminole War tactics. Included as part of an anti-Van Buren pamphlet, a poem titled "The Blood Hounds Have Come" spoke sarcastically about "The blood hounds hav[ing] come! hurrah! hurrah!," which would allow the United States to "hunt" the brave Indians" "as beasts"; and, the poet continued, "Before their sharp fangs the red warrior shall quail." In July the Pennsylvania Freeman offered as its first reason for rejecting the incumbent that "nothing [was] worse than the present Administration respecting slavery. Nothing [was] worse than" its "importat[ion of] bloodhounds to exterminate the Indians, for affording a sanctuary for fugitive slaves." (70)

Even with the defeat of Van Buren and the termination of the Florida War, abolitionists continued to call attention to the use of bloodhounds against the Seminoles. In December 1843 antislavery southerner Cassius M. Clay tried to explain the mindset of antislavery northerners to his fellow Kentuckians, including the northerners' anger at "the employment of blood-hounds, to drive the unoffending savages from the homes of their fathers, which were their rightful inheritance," simply because southerners wanted to prevent "runaway slaves from fleeing into those impassable swamps." In August 1844 George Bradburn assailed "the Florida war, which, by the help of Cuban bloodhounds ... enable[d] slaveholders to ... kidnap ... free Indians" from their homes. Still angry at the treatment of the Seminoles, Joshua Giddings in 1845 castigated the use of "blood-hounds[,] ... as auxiliaries to our army," for finding "women and children, who ... sought liberty in the deep recesses of the forests," while in the pursuit of "Southern slaves that have fled from their masters." (71)

In the period after the Seminole War, the year 1848 marked the climax of abolitionists' strategy of mentioning bloodhounds as a way to condemn the domination of Indians. In an effort to taint Zachary Taylor's run for the presidency, abolitionists repeatedly pointed out Taylor's association with the bloodhound episode of 1839-1840, deriding him, for example, as being "the bloodhound War Chief." (72) While many anti-Taylor dog epithets explicitly alluded to the Seminoles, others did not, perhaps making, in those moments, the canine image primarily a commentary on Taylor's actions and less a means for decrying ill-treatment of Indians. Yet even then, when the Seminoles were not mentioned, citizens who went further and saw bloodhound as also encompassing the victims of such canine depredations were most apt to understand this term as referring to the Seminoles and not to slaves. For despite the fact that Taylor was a well-to-do slaveholder from Louisiana, there were few instances during the 1848 campaign when anti-Taylor partisans explicitly linked bloodhound exclusively to slaves and slavery but many such references to the Seminoles. (73) Given this rhetorical tendency of the 1848 political season to make direct connections between the dogs and Native Americans, individuals who heard Taylor described as the "Bloodhound Candidate" of the "Bloodhound Party" would probably have seen Indians, and not African Americans, as the implicit victims of the dogs. (74) In short, in the discourse of the 1848 election, bloodhound invariably connoted not slavery and slaves but rather the Seminoles and Euro-American domination of Native Americans.

That critics expressed their anger over the Seminole War's bloodhound episode during this election is hardly surprising. Even before Taylor became a presidential candidate, abolitionists were attacking him for his treatment of Indians. In September 1846, reprinting an article titled "The Cuba Bloodhounds," the Liberator observed sarcastically that it was "'that noble officer'" General Taylor who recommended the use of the dogs "to hunt down the Florida Indians." In October 1846, just a few months into the Mexican conflict, the Liberator tried to counteract Taylor's newly won Mexican War "reputation of being a successful fighter" by reminding readers that he "recommended the introduction of Cuba blood hounds to fight the Indians in the Florida War." In November 1847 the Liberator condemned Taylor by reprinting a Whig newspaper's 1846 article arguing that his recommendation for putting "THE CUBAN BLOOD HOUNDS ... upon the track of the Indians" disqualified him from leading the "Army of Occupation" in Mexico. (75)

Anti-Taylor attacks and sympathy for the Seminoles mushroomed once his candidacy became clear. On March 3, 1848, the Liberator referred to Taylor as "this monster-warrior" and cited as evidence his "employment of bloodhounds in hunting down for slaughter the poor Seminole Indians--mothers, wives, daughters, infants and all." (76) Not to be outdone, the North Star on June 16 smeared Taylor as "the cruel monster" who introduced "blood-hounds ... into Florida to hunt men, women, and children, and tear them in pieces," with the result, the Liberator added in an article on July 7, that the dogs had "jaws dripping with innocent blood." A brief biographical screed, Facts in the Life of General Taylor; the Cuba Blood-Hound Importer, described how Taylor's "hell-hounds.... t[ore] [the Seminoles' bodies] into atoms." (77) Reminding people less ghoulishly of Taylor's past, the North Star and the Liberator reprinted Taylor's letter of July 1838 recommending the use of the dogs against the Seminoles; and working especially hard to rekindle people's outrage, the latter paper reprinted one of the petitions sent in from the Philadelphia region in 1840 opposing the use of bloodhounds. (78)

Also echoing the 1840 controversy, Taylor's opponents used political illustrations, such as "Hunting Indians in Florida with Blood Hounds," to make Taylor's bloodhound-related actions as offensive as possible (see Illustration 2). This 1848 print can be read as trying to foster sympathy for the Seminoles in two ways. First, it reasserts the critics' 1840 claim that these Indians faced dangerous war dogs. The animals' legendary fearsomeness is reflected not only in their grim, lean, and tightly muscular appearance (as conveyed particularly in the drawing of the animal at the lower right) but, in addition, in their ability to obey, soldier-like, Taylor's orders to charge headlong into the Seminole ranks and to bite without hesitating. Second, the print treats the Native Americans respectfully, though stereotypically, within the "Noble Savage" paradigm; in addition to presenting the central Native American man in a heroic, if not statuesque, way, the artist takes the basic humanity of the Indians as a given and asserts that the typical male Indian cared enough about his appearance to possess a bandolier bedecked with an attractive geometric design. However generic and romanticized this Indian depiction is, the print essentially presents the Native Americans in a positive manner and, in doing so, argues that it was a particularly heinous crime of Taylor's to unleash unusually vicious dogs on such a noble group of people as the Seminoles. (79)

The backdrop of the Mexican War also retrospectively invested the Seminole episode with more sympathy. While the violence-saturated context of the recently concluded war against Mexico certainly helped abolitionists stoke Americans' awareness of the army's use of the bloodhounds, anti-Taylor partisans went further and explicitly linked the two wars. In March the North Star challenged Taylor's sterling reputation by urging readers to "remember Florida, and [the Mexican War' s] Monterey, and Buena Vista! the Seminole, hunted and torn with ["Blood-hounds"], and the Mexican murdered at his fireside or altar!" By summer it was commonplace for local antislavery societies to pass resolutions condemning Taylor's supposed actions in Florida and Mexico. In July the Weymouth, Massachusetts, convention deplored Taylor for his "butchery and overthrow of the Seminoles and Mexicans [and for being] the originator of the battalion of West India bloodhounds." At a meeting in late summer, abolitionists in Harwich, Massachusetts, asserted that Taylor's "only recommendation" for the presidency was "his BLOODHOUND butchery of the Seminole Indians, and his successful massacre of the Mexicans, at the command of Slavery." The announcement of an upcoming Liberty Party meeting in Madison County, New York, ridiculed Taylor for "recommending the use of bloodhounds in the war.., against the poor innocent Florida Indians;--for his success in butchering the unoffending Mexicans...." (80) The print "Hunting Indians in Florida with Blood Hounds" also merged the two conflicts, showing Seminole War soldiers taking advantage of the comparatively open terrain of northern Mexico to charge the Native Americans in the classic Napoleonic, close-order, bayonets-at-the-ready formation typical of Mexican War battles but hardly possible in the swampy, densely forested landscape of Florida, the presumed setting of this illustration. (81)

By yoking the Seminoles' experience with the dogs to the bloodiness of the Mexican War, critics invested the use of dogs in the Florida War with new importance. Presented as part of this pattern of butchery in Taylor's war-making career, it could not be minimized as an aberration; his willingness to use bloodhounds had to be seen instead as a normal and therefore even more disturbing manifestation of Slave Power aggression. This event, by being the first of a series of evidently comparable actions, seemed to acquire even greater significance as the precedent for Taylor's later aggression. Equated with the recently concluded butchery in Mexico, the eight-year-old episode in Florida may have taken on added grisliness, becoming more worthy of sympathy in 1848.

Their anger at Taylor and his treatment of the Florida Indians unabated, abolitionists continued to raise the Seminole/bloodhound episode even after he was elected and assumed the presidency. "[T]o whom is [Taylor's victory] glorious" news, asked the North Star. It was not "[t]o the poor Seminoles whom Gen. Taylor hunted with bloodhounds" and, as the Liberator added on the same day, "throttle[d]" and thereby "crushed" "in their hiding-placing in the everglades." Disbelief at the Seminoles' treatment would not die. In August 1849 in an attack on Taylor's "morals," the Liberator condemned his ongoing "protection" of slavery, and, in addition, the journal felt the need to cite his "employ[ment] of bloodhounds to hunt down, maim and capture the poor Seminole Indians, in order that they might be either exterminated or banished from their homes and council fires, solely because they ... shelter[ed] the fugitive slave...." By "building" this "City of Refuge," asserted R. Y. in a letter titled "To the Women of Concord, N.H.," the "poor Seminole died a martyr to his humanity." (82) Even after his death on July 9, 1850, abolitionists would not let go of Taylor, who, "in connection with Cuban bloodhounds, led ... the exterminating war against the Seminole ... solely because they gave refuge to men and women fleeing from the ... horrors of slavery." (83)

The invocation of the Seminole episode throughout the 1840s, culminating in attacks on Taylor's presidency, suggests that abolitionist anger about the use of bloodhounds in the Second Seminole War had always reflected a deep outrage, not just a momentary irritation voiced in hope of achieving short-term gains for the antislavery movement. Yet abolitionists' postwar sympathy, however real and tangible, differed fundamentally from that of 1839-1840 in that it was not linked to specific pro-Indian policies. Whereas the earlier outrage produced a successful anti-dog campaign focusing on the needs of the Seminoles by criticizing the war in Florida and the dog initiative, abolitionists' persistent unhappiness at these Indians' treatment through the 1840s did not focus on any particular proposals. Instead, in their most generous moments, the activists offered pungent and possibly exaggerated sketches about the dogs' effects on the Seminoles so as to gain sympathy for the Native Americans; rather than target any particular government action, these bloodhound-related comments served the simpler but still useful role of telegraphing a general displeasure at the government's poor treatment of Indians. (84)

By contrast, these critics were much more aggressive in using the Seminoles' experience when attacking the Slave Power. Abolitionists' sympathy for Indians thus remained politically significant in the 1840s because it undergirded their outrage at the way the Slave Power harmed and exploited Indians in the service of slavery. Even though abolitionists refrained from directing this passion toward actively promoting the needs of Indians, they nonetheless used it to fuel their anger at the slave-owning imperium within the United States. Indeed, outrage at the Slave Power for deploying the dogs to promote its agenda became in the 1840s another reason for individuals to question the federal government's proslavery policies and to perhaps embrace the antislavery cause. Given the prominence of the Bloodhound War in the 1848 election, this issue assumably shaped the political thinking of some of the roughly 294,000 men who rejected Taylor and the Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, and voted for either Gerrit Smith or Martin Van Buren running, respectively, as nominees of the antislavery National Liberty and Free-Soil Parties.

Through the 1840s, the bloodhound thus lived a double life as an image that reminded Americans of the ill-treatment of both slaves and Native Americans. The linking of slavery and bloodhounds likely received the most attention, yet regular citations to the Seminoles' experience suggest that the bloodhound figure was sufficiently complex to be interpreted in multiple ways, as a referent to the Seminoles if mentioned in an explicitly slavery context and vice versa. The image's multivalency weakened, however, during the last fifteen years of the slavery era as the importance of the bloodhound/Seminole issue within abolitionists' attack on the Slave Power shrank measurably. Two factors account for the narrowing of this weapon's rhetorical richness: passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 and the absence of well-publicized, federally sponsored wars against Indians in the 1850s.

As the most controversial aspect of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act expanded tremendously the attention accorded to and the metaphoric strength of the slave-chasing bloodhound image. Outraged at the way the act favored the rights and needs of slave owners and slave-catchers, northern abolitionists, as is well known, tried to obstruct its enforcement. (85) As part of their campaign against the law, they repeatedly summoned the bloodhound image, referring to the legislation as "the bloodhound fugitive slave bill," Ohio supporters as "Cincinnati bloodhounds," and northern officials responsible for enforcing it as "blood-hound commissioners." (86) The abolitionists used bloodhound-related epithets so often--or as Senator Daniel Webster, a key northern supporter of the act, put it, "not infrequently"--that he denied the charge "that Washington was a miserable bloodhound, set upon the track of the African slave." (87)

This far greater attention in the 1850s was, however, narrowly focused on the issue of slavery and had shifted away from any ongoing references to Indian ill-treatment. While the ultimate victims of the act's measures were obviously the fugitives who might be caught, tried, and returned to slavery, much of the passion engendered by the act among northerners concerned its application in the North and what it required northerners, black and white, to do in helping southerners reclaim fugitive slaves. By making demands on many northerners, the act offered them ominous evidence that the Slave Power was no mere abstraction or clever abolitionist linguistic confection but an active, tangible intrusion into their lives. Their passions stirred by the act's demands, northerners saw themselves and runaway slaves in the North under attack, thereby making the Indians' earlier experiences with dogs seem not only temporally and geographically distant but also substantively irrelevant. For antislavery northerners now living under the shadow of the Fugitive Slave Act, regular resort to the events of the Seminole War became a rhetorical luxury that they could ill afford at a time when they were themselves being harassed by these dogs, symbolic or otherwise. Indeed, in being protectors of runaway slaves, northerners now occupied the earlier position of the Seminoles and also became, as the Homestead (Ohio) Journal stated, prey for "the inhuman bloodhounds of the South." (88)

Whereas the Fugitive Slave Act made Indians' experience with bloodhounds less immediately relevant, the relative absence of high-profile federal wars against Indians in the 1850s created fewer rhetorical opportunities for sustaining the connection betweens Indians and bloodhounds as part of the overall challenge to the imperium of slavery, thus diminishing abolitionists' interest in the ongoing Euro-American domination of Native Americans. While the Rogue River and Plateau Indian wars involved Native Americans fighting settlers in Oregon and Washington, the laws creating these two territories each prohibited slavery, thereby reducing the likelihood that the northwestern territories would receive the national political scrutiny and intervention that befell the Florida Territory from 1835 to 1842. This kind of national politicization was even less likely in regard to the states of Texas and California; while Native Americans and Euro-Americans fought each other in those two locales in the 1850s, the state, rather than the territorial, context of those struggles assured that the conflicts would take place beyond the interfering eye of the federal government. (89)

Perhaps the most significant sign of abolitionists' declining interest in Indian affairs was their indifference to the Third Seminole War of December 1855 to May 1858. Despite repeating the dynamic evident in the Second Seminole War--white people invading Florida Indian land--the new conflict failed to generate much commentary from abolitionists. Some publications did take note. The antislavery National Era reported that Florida's "Gen. Carter ... has brought ... some fine dogs, well practiced in trailing negroes," presumably to help in "finding" the Seminoles, just as the "packs of blood-hounds" imported during the "former campaign against the Seminoles" were expected to do. (90) But, overall, abolitionists took little active interest in this war, much less demonstrating a willingness to yoke it to their embrace of the earlier bloodhound episode so as to indict the nefarious Slave Power. Florida's status as a state, as well as the chaos of Kansas, likely diverted abolitionists' attention away from this Indian conflict.

Yet even with the near disappearance of the Seminole issue from abolitionists' quiver of antislavery weapons in the 1850s, it remained a part of public discourse about racial domination in the United States. Even individuals without an overt political agenda referred to bloodhounds chasing down Indians--whether in Florida or in the West Indies--in their discussions of United States or broader Western hemispheric history. (91) Abolitionist did as well. In May 1851, amid the alarm over the Fugitive Slave Act, long-standing antislavery activist Henry C. Wright decried the "hunt[ing] out and exterminat[ion], with bloodhounds and rifles, [of] the Seminoles, because they gave comfort to fugitive slaves"; similarly the Friend, an antislavery Quaker publication, bemoaned "the exile of Indian tribes, or their extirpation by blood-hounds," as did the three published volumes of Joshua Giddings. (92) Rather than constituting a concerted attack on the Slave Power, these references served for some individuals as an evocative symbol of white America's need for all-encompassing racial control and its willingness to exercise unusual, if not inhumane, means of achieving it.

The Bloodhound War affected abolitionists in two important ways. First, it created the opportunity for abolitionists to expand their rhetorical assault on southern slavery through the widespread exploitation of the bloodhound image. While their knowledge of these dogs prior to the war enabled them to attack the bloodhound decision quickly and effectively, the actual military deployment of these animals enabled abolitionists to deploy the image rhetorically against the South, even following the army's abandonment of the tactic. Where the very sound of the term bloodhound had long fostered a sense of bloody violence being wrought by the dogs, their association with various wars--the Spanish conquest, the Jamaican Maroon rebellion, the Haitian revolution, and now the Seminole War--further imbued the image with a sense of acute violence even before concrete evidence of such vicious dogs attacking slaves in the post-1840 South came to light. Thus, a crucial image that abolitionists would utilize regularly against slavery in the 1840s and 1850s was first associated, in this country, primarily with the subjugation of Indians and conveyed a sense of violence that reflected in large part its linguistic properties and martial application.

Secondly, the war enlarged antislavery activists' sympathies toward Native Americans. Abolitionists were already angry about Indian removal and the onset of the Florida War, and the use of bloodhounds against the Seminoles provoked greater abolitionist sympathy for the Seminoles, motivating the abolitionists to fight this dog tactic and, in so doing, promote the security of the Seminoles. The great irony is that despite the brief, essentially failed application of the bloodhounds in Florida, abolitionists wrote and spoke about this event so forcefully in the following years as to suggest that the dogs had harmed the Seminoles as much as the abolitionists claimed. In the 1840s this continued outrage, while not engendering concrete pro-Indian actions, as had been the case in 1839-1840, nonetheless helped fuel abolitionists' criticism of the Slave Power, making the Florida War episode a central element in their brief against the slaveholder imperium. Indeed, their continuing references to bloodhounds and the Seminoles demonstrate that abolitionists of the 1840s, like those of the 1830s, fashioned a critique of the racial bases of the American sociopolitical order that, in featuring Native Americans so centrally, made their societal criticism even more provocative than scholars have already justifiably claimed.

With the shrinking of the Seminole/bloodhound issue in the 1850s, abolitionism's far-reaching critique of Euro-American racial domination retreated from its radical outcroppings. Yet even then, with explosive issues such as the Fugitive Slave Act and "Bleeding Kansas" clearly overshadowing the Seminoles' bloodhound experience, it is fair to conclude that this episode lived silently on, serving as a key entry point through which many Americans came to understand and ultimately to join the campaign to end slavery.

(1) [George W. Carleton], The Suppressed Book about Slavery! Prepared for Publication in 1857,--Never Published until the Present Time (New York, 1864), 326-27 (Missouri), 330 (Tennessee), 332 (Tennessee), 338-39 (Alabama; first quotation on p. 338), 339 (Alabama, two advertisements), 343-44 (Louisiana), 349 (Texas, two advertisements); George F. Hoar, ed., Charles Sumner: His Complete Works (20 vols.; 1900; reprint, New York, 1969), III, 136, IV, 178, 180, 308, 312, V, 11, 33, 252 (second quotation), 253, VI, 174, 175; Linda Brent [Harriet Jacobs], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861; reprint, New York, 1973), 21 (third and fourth quotations), 27, 35, 41, 44, 46, 49, 118, 187, 195; and issues of the Rochester (N.Y.) Frederick Douglass' Paper (hereinafter cited as Frederick Douglass' Paper) between 1851 and 1855. (The issues of Frederick Douglass' Paper from 1851 to 1855 are available from Accessible Archives in a transcribed online version at www.accessible.com, and the digital version does not indicate the original page numbers.) For a sampling of other bloodhound references, see Charles Elliott, Sinfulness of American Slavery ... (2 vols.; Cincinnati, 1850), I, 268; Theodore Parker, A Discourse Occasioned by the Death of Daniel Webster ... (Boston, 1853), 94; Parker, The New Crime Against Humanity: A Sermon, Preached at the Music Hall, in Boston, on Sunday, June 4, 1854 (Boston, 1854), 63; Freedom's Songs! For the Campaign of 1856! John C. Fremont. An Acrostic (Boston, 1856); Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (New York, 1857), 328; Narrative of the Life of James Watkins ... (Bolton, Eng., 1852), 15, 21; Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave. Narrative of Solomon Northup (1853), in Gilbert Osofsky, ed., Puttin' On Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup (New York, 1969), 296-99; Peter Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life: or, Illustrations of the 'Peculiar Institution' (2nd ed., Boston 1855), 65; Benjamin Drew, [ed.], A North-Side View of Slavery. The Refugee: or The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada ... (1856; reprint, New York, 1968), 261, 263-65, 288; Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft From Slavery (1860), in Arna Bontemps, ed., Great Slave Narratives (Boston, 1969), 285, 331: and John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge, 1977), 451, 247-48, 395, 339. I would like to thank the following individuals for providing either assistance with the research for this essay or commentary on earlier drafts: Colette Hyman, Mary Hershberger, John Stauffer, Mark Smith, Silvia Vasquez-Anderson, Martha Hernandez, and three anonymous Journal of Southern History reviewers; Winona State University librarians Joe Mount, Mark Eriksen, H. Vernon Leighton, Kathryn Sullivan, Joe Jackson, William Palzer, Russell Dennison, and Kendall Larson: Barbara Kolk of the American Kennel Club library; librarians at the National Archives, University of Minnesota (including the James Ford Bell Library), New York City Public Library, Library of Congress, University of Florida, Florida State University, Florida State Archives, and the British Public Record Office; and former Winona State University President Dr. Darrell Krueger for granting me an early sabbatical that allowed me to complete this essay.

(2) Elizabeth B. Clark, "'The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America," Journal of American History. 82 (September 1995), 463-93; Marcus Wood. Blind Memory,: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780-1865 (New York, 2000), 96, 98, 103, 127-29 (quotation on p. 127), plate number 6. In this essay I use the terms "antislavery activists" and "abolitionists" interchangeably.

(3) W. C. L. Martin, The History of the Dog ... (London, 1845), 197-201 (first quotation on p. 197; second quotation on p. 201). Martin's book was reviewed in the Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, 9 (December 1846), 476-84.

(4) On the abolition movement's perspectives on Native Americans and federal Indian policy, see Linda K. Kerber, "The Abolitionist Perception of the Indian," Journal of American History, 62 (September 1975), 271-95; Mary Hershberger, "Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle against Indian Removal in the 1830s," ibid., 86 (June 1999), 15-40; and John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), chap. 6, "Learning from Indians."

(5) E. W. S., "The Bloodhound War," Boston Liberator, January 24, 1840, p. [4]; "The Bloodhound War," ibid., March 20, 1840, p. [3]. (Page numbers in the Boston Liberator run consecutively throughout each volume, but in this article, citations to page numbers will be placed in brackets and refer to the order of the pages within the issue cited.) Many of the petitions sent to Congress criticizing the use of the dogs in the Seminole War were labeled, in an unknown hand, as being about "the Bloodhound War." The original petitions and memorials are found in two locations at the National Archives, Washington, D.C. Those sent to the House are in HR 26A:g11.1-g.11.4 ("Committee on Military Affairs: Employment of Bloodhounds in the Florida War Against the Seminole Indians"), Records of the United States House of Representatives, Record Group 233; hereinafter cited as House Petitions. Those sent to the Senate are in Sen.26A-g11, Box 93 ("26th Congress ... Committee on Military Affairs"), Records of the United States Senate, Record Group 46; hereinafter cited as Senate Petitions.

(6) Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Vol. IV: Reconstruction and After (New York, 1955), 208. Douglass had a long-standing interest in the Seminoles; see "Gen. Taylor a Methodist," Rochester North Star, March 17, 1848; "Anti-Slavery Convention at Harwich," ibid., September 22, 1848; "A Few Words to Our Own People," ibid., January 19, 1849; "What Is To Be Done!" Frederick Douglass' Paper, May 6, 1852: "Recommencement of the Seminole War," ibid., February 4, 1853: "The River Amazon," ibid., March 31, 1854; and "'The Mexican Border Troubles." ibid., November 16, 1855. The Rochester North Star is available in a transcribed online version from Accessible Archives at www.accessible.com, and the digital version does not indicate the original page numbers. For another African American who in the late nineteenth century sympathetically invoked the Seminoles' bloodhound experience, see Albery A. Whitman, Not a Man and Yet a Man (1877; reprint, Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1970), 108, 144, 145, 162, 163, 164, 171, 191: and Whitman, The Rape of Florida (Upper Saddle River, N.J., 1970; reprint of the 1885 revised edition entitled Twasinta's Seminoles; or, Rape of Florida), 55.

(7) Miguel Leon-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston, 1962), 22, 31 (first, second, and third quotations), 41, 46 (fourth and fifth quotations), 143, 144. The Aztec (Nahua) began to provide accounts of the conquest by the mid-1540s. John Grief Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner, Dogs of the Conquest (Norman, Okla., 1983), provides a good discussion of the Spanish dogs' martial contributions to the conquest.

(8) Fray Bartolome de Las Casas, La Destruccion de las Indias (Barcelona, Spain, 2000), 90; see also pp. 18, 25, 28, 34, 45, 49, 50, 53, 54, 81, 86, 87, 91. An English translation is as follows: "As has been said, the Spaniards train their fierce dogs to attack, kill and tear to pieces the Indians." Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, translated by Herma Briffault (1974; new ed., Baltimore, 1992), 127; see also pp. 22, 35, 43, 48, 70, 76, 78, 81, 82, 117, 123, 124.

(9) An Account of the Spanish Settlements in America ... (Edinburgh, 1762), 57 (first two quotations); William Robertson, The History of America (2nd ed., 2 vols.; London, 1778), I, 127 (third and fourth quotations). Also see Robertson, The History of America (5th ed., 3 vols.; London, 1788), I, 181-82.

(10) Antonio de Herrera, The General History of the Vast Continent and Islands of America: Commonly Call'd the West-Indies, From the First Discovery Thereof ..., translated by John Stevens (6 vols.; London, 1725-1726), I, 244. De Herrera's six-volume history abounds with references to the vicious Spanish dogs; see I, 145, 255-56, 281, 313, 339; II, 42, 52-55, 60-62, 66, 95-96; III, 240; IV, 100, 125-26; V, 75, 193, 196; and VI, 10, 11. See also Richard Rolt, A New and Accurate History of South-America (London, 1756), 97-98; and Edmund Burke, An Account of the European Settlements in America ... (4th ed., 2 vols.; Dublin, 1762), I, 28.

(11) Balcarres to Duke of Portland, December 29, 1795, Colonial Office, 137/96, p. 58 (British Public Records Office, Kew: hereinafter cited as PRO: hereinafter records from the Colonial Office will be referred to as CO with the appropriate class, volume, and folio numbers following); Balcarres to Dundas, December 29, 1795, War Office, 1/92, p. 239, PRO. These letters are identical. The Third Duke of Portland (William Henry Cavendish Cavendish-Bentinck) was the Home Secretary of State and thus responsible for the colony of Jamaica; Dundas was in the House of Commons and was also Secretary of State for War. In light of the slave revolution occurring in the 1790s in the Haitian (western) half of the nearby island of Hispaniola, I assume that Balcarres is using "St. Domingo" to refer to Saint Domingue, the French name for the colony that became Haiti, and not to Santo (St.) Domingo, the Spanish name for its colony on the eastern half of Hispaniola. Mavis C. Campbell, The Maroons of Jamaica, 1655-1796: A History of Resistance, Collaboration. and Betrayal (Granby. Mass., 1988), chap. 7, highlights the dogs' contributions in putting down the rebellion. Contemporaries disagreed about the dogs' effect on the Maroons. George Wilson Bridges, The Annals of Jamaica (2 vols.: London, 1827-1828), I, 503-4, emphasizes their impact. R. C. Dallas, The History of the Maroons ... (1803, 2 vols.: reprint, London, 1968), II, 119-71, downplays their role.

(12) Portland to Balcarres, March 3, 1796, CO 138/42, conveying the King's "abhorrence"; "Blood Hounds in Jamaica," London Times, March 22, 1796, p. 2 (first and second quotations); "Debate on General Macleod's Motion respecting the Employment of Bloodhounds in the War against the Maroons," The Parliamentary, History of England.... Vol. XXXII: Comprising the Period from the Twenty-Seventh Day of May 1795, to the Second Day of March 1797 (London, 1818), 928 (third quotation). On the dispute, see also "The blood-hounds made use of lately...." London Times, March 1, 1796, p. 3: and "The Address of the House...." ibid., July 11, 1796, p. 2.

(13) "Debate on General Macleod's Motion," 927 (first quotation), 929 (fourth and fifth quotations), "Maroons in Jamaica," London Times, February 27, 1796, p. 1 (second quotation); "Blood Hounds in Jamaica," ibid., March 22, 1796, p. 2 (third quotation).

(14) "Debate on General Macleod's Motion," 924.

(15) "Debate on General Macleod's Motion," 926. Barham's view reflects one understanding of what the term bloodhound originally referred to among the English; according to Edward C. Ash, citing Bewick of 1790, the animals were used to pursue "'deer that had been previously wounded" and had bled, hence the name; see Ash, Dogs: Their History and Development (2 vols.; London, 1927), II, 487. A second view claims that the term comes "from the expression 'blooded hound," meaning a hound of pure breeding." See Catherine Brey and Lena Reed, The New Complete Bloodhound (New York, 1991), 4. Similarly, Edwin Brough, The Bloodhound and Its Use in Tracking Criminals (London, 1902), says that the term refers to "the hound of pure blood (as we should speak of a blood horse ...)." See pp. 9-10 (quotation on p. 10).

(16) "The Maroon War," London Times, July 8, 1796, p. 3. Balcarres's defense was first published in the supplement to the Kingston (Jamaica) Royal Gazette, April 30-May 7, 1796, p. 11; a copy is available in CO 137/97, pp. 247-48. Any quotations that are in italics in this essay were italicized in the originals.

(17) "Belfast Feb. 29,'" Philadelphia Pennsylvania Gazette, May 4, 1796, p. 2; Marcus Rainsford, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti: Comprehending a View of ... the Revolution of Saint Domingo ([London], 1805), 12, 41, 327, 339, 342, 423-29, index ("Bloodhounds"). For other early uses of the term bloodhound when describing the Spanish dogs of the conquest, see Outalissi, "The Indian's Complaint and Prayer" [poem], American Monthly Magazine and Critical Review, 4 (January 1819), 238; Bridges, Annals of Jamaica, I, 78, 92-93; "Spanish Bloodhound," American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine, 2 (1830), 389; and "Historical Notices of the Dog," ibid., 9 (1838), 459. For other references to the bloodhounds used by the French in Haiti, see William Taplin, The Sportsman's Cabinet ... (London, 1803), 95-96; "Memoranda Respecting Hayti," Christian Observer, 7 (November 1808), 704-6; "Memoirs of Hayti," Port Folio, 3rd ser., 1 (May 1809), 369-73, esp. p. 373; "Memoirs of Hayti," Port Folio, 3rd ser., 3 (January 1810), 38-45, esp. pp. 44-45; "The Gamekeeper's Fireside," Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and American Monthly Review, 5 (August 1839), 63-64; and Jean Fouchard, The Haitian Maroons: Liberty or Death, translated by A. Faulkner Watts (New York, 1981), 176.

(18) "The War of the Allies," Weekly Register, 4 (April 10, 1813), 97-98 (first three quotations); "Note.--Blood Hounds," ibid., 4 (April 10, 1813), 98-99 (fourth quotation); "The Bloodhound," Niles' Weekly Register, 50 (July 2, 1836), 298 (final three quotations). See also Bridges, Annals of Jamaica, I, 78, 92-93.

(19) George Bancroft, History, of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent (1834; rev. ed., 6 vols.; Boston, 1846), I, 44. Although Hernando de Soto used the bloodhounds in his efforts to conquer Indians in lands that would eventually become part of the United States, this anti-Indian usage never became part of the popular understanding of the Spanish conquistadors' use of the dogs in the West Indies and Central and South America.

(20) On this war see John T. Sprague, The Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War (1848; reprint, Gainesville, Fla., 1964): Joshua R. Giddings, The Exiles of Florida; or, The Crimes Committed by Our Government against the Maroons, Who Fled from South Carolina and Other Slave States, Seeking Protection under Spanish Laws (1858; reprint, Baltimore, 1997); John K. Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 1835-1842 (Gainesville, Fla., 1967); Virginia Bergman Peters, The Florida Wars (Hamden, Conn., 1979); James W. Covington, The Seminoles of Florida (Gainesville, Fla., 1993): Kenneth W. Porter, The Black Seminoles: History of a Freedom-Seeking People (Gainesville, Fla., 1996): Larry Eugene Rivers, Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville, Fla., 2000); Bruce Edward Twyman, The Black Seminole Legacy and North American Politics, 1693-1845 (Washington, D.C., 2001); and Joe Knetsch, Florida's Seminole Wars, 1817-1858 (Charleston. S.C., 2003). After this war, approximately six hundred Seminole people remained in Florida.

(21) ["A proposition ..."], Tallahassee Floridian, May 21, 1836. p. [2]. See also "War in Florida," Niles' Weekly Register, 50 (June 11, 1836), 258; "The Bloodhound," ibid., 50 (July 2, 1836), 298; and "Barbarous," Boston Liberator, July 2, 1836, p. [2].

(22) Jesup to Lieutenant Colonel W. S. Harney, May 25, 1837, quoted by Representative Joshua R. Giddings in a speech to the House of Representatives on February 9. 1841, in Giddings, Speeches in Congress (1853; reprint, New York, 1968), 19 (first quotation); Taylor to Adjutant General R. Jones, July 28, 1838 (as passed to Secretary of War Joel Poinsett in August 1838 and provided by him to Congress in February 1840), Congressional Globe, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., 2034 (February 17, 1840); Jesup to Benton, January 19, 1839, as reprinted in Clarence Edwin Carter, ed., The Territorial Palters of the United States. Vol. XXV: The Territory of Florida, 1834-1839 (Washington, 1960), 563-64 (second quotation). Taylor replaced Jesup as commander of the Florida forces in May 1838 and served until April 1840.

(23) Henry O'Reilly, "Notices of the War in Florida: The Maroons--The Seminoles--A Parallel From History," Daily Albany [N.Y.] Argus, February 13, 1837, p. 2, in the Goza and Mickler Newspaper Collections (Department of Special Collections, P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville) (first four quotations): The Scribbler of Leisure Moments, "The Dog," Tallahassee Floridian. April 11, 1840, p. [2] (fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth quotations); K., "The Florida and Maroon Wars," Army and Navy Chronicle, 9 (September 5, 1839), 146-48 (tenth, eleventh, and twelfth quotations). On the Spanish precedent, see also a letter of S. J. M. to the editors entitled "The Bloodhounds," Washington Daily National Intelligencer, March 27, 1840, p. 3, in the Goza and Mickler Newspaper Collections. For other examples of the Jamaican Maroons being used as an instructive precedent, see "Bloodhounds," Army and Navy Chronicle, 9 (September 12, 1839), 173; "The Truth of History," ibid., 10 (February 20, 1840), 116; "Cuba Bloodhounds," ibid., 10 (February 20, 1840), 125; "Bloodhounds," St. Augustine News, August 30, 1839, p. 2; ["When Jamaica ..."], St. Joseph (Fla.) Times. January 1, 1840, p. 2; "The Blood Hounds," Hartford (Conn.) Times, February 22, 1840, p. 1, in the Goza and Mickler Newspaper Collections: and "Seminoles and Maroons," New London (Conn.) Gazette and General Advertiser, June 29, 1836, p. 1, in the Goza and Mickler Newspaper Collections.

(24) Three Summers and Two Winters in Florida, "Florida War," Army and Navy Chronicle, 9 (October 31, 1839), 283-84 (first quotation): Sam Jones, "Florida War," ibid., 9 (October 17, 1839), 253-54 (second quotation): Sam Jones. "Florida War," ibid., 9 (October 31, 1839), 284-85 (third quotation: it is not clear whether the name "Sam Jones" referred to a real supporter of the dogs or, as I suspect, was a sarcastic reference to Sam Jones [Arpeika], an important Seminole leader): A Floridian, "The Florida War," Tallahassee Floridian, December 7, 1839, p. 1 (fourth quotation). See also "Florida War," Niles' National Register, 57 (February 15, 1840), 385.

(25) James W. Covington, "Cuban Bloodhounds and the Seminoles," Florida Historical Quarterly, 33 (October 1954), 111-19; "Bloodhounds in Florida," Niles' National Register, 57 (January 25, 1840), 352 (30 or 40 bloodhounds); "Florida War," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (January 30, 1840), 75 (33 dogs): "The Blood Hounds" (reprinted from the Tallahassee Star), Boston Liberator, January 31, 1840, p. [3] (39 dogs): "Cuba bloodhounds arrived!" Niles' National Register, 57 (February 1, 1840), 368 (33 bloodhounds): Cong. Globe, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., 204 (33 dogs); "Latest News from Florida--First and Successful Operation of the Blood-Hounds," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (February 20, 1840), 117 (30 dogs); "The Bloodhounds," ibid., 10 (February 20, 1840), 124 (34 dogs): Elliott, "Peace and War" (reprinted from the Register and Observer). Boston Liberator, March 20, 1840, p. [4] (about 30 dogs). (26) Covington, "Cuban Bloodhounds," 112 ($151.72 per dog); "Bloodhounds," Boston Liberator, January 24, 1840, p. [4] ($5,000 total): "The Bloodhound Humbug," ibid., July 10, 1840. p. [4] ($5,000 total).

(27) "Bloodhounds--The Florida War," Niles' National Register, 57 (February 22, 1840), 416; "Latest News from Florida--First and Successful Operation of the Blood-Hounds" (dated February 2), Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (February 20, 1840), 117; "Indians" (written March 5), Tallahassee Floridian, March 21. 1840, p. [3]: "Successful Effort of the Bloodhounds" (written March 8), Army and Navy Chronicle, l0 (March 19, 1840), 187-88; "Florida" (written March 17), Niles' National Register. 58 (April 4, 1840), 72.

(28) "Society of Friends of Penn., N. Jersey, and Del. Against the Employment of Bloodhounds in the Florida War, May 18, 1840," House Petitions, [tray:]g11.1-g11.2 (first quotation); "Blood Hounds" (reprinted from Portsmouth Journal), Boston Liberator, February 14, 1840, p. [4] (second quotation).

(29) "The West Indies," in The Poetical Works of James Montgomery: Collected by Himself (4 vols.; London, 1841), I, 141; "Aunt Margery's Talk with the Young Folks: Fifth Evening," Boston Liberator, February 23, 1833, p. [2]; [Theodore Dwight Weld], American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839; reprint, New York, 1968), 8. See also ibid., 9, 156, 160.

(30) "From the Scrap Book of Africanus: Hayti No. IV," New York Freedom's Journal, June 15, 1827 (first quotation); "Extracts from the Baron De Vastey's Work...." ibid., December 12, 1828 (second quotation); [Lydia Maria] Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston, 1833). 24 (third quotation); Harriet Martineau, Demerara: A Tale (London, 1832), 2, 127-28 (fourth and fifth quotations); "Bloodhounds," Shave's Friend, 2 (March 1837), 14-15 (remaining quotations). See also "Anti-Slavery Meetings at Andover," Boston Liberator, August 8, 1835, p. [1] (Haiti); and "Slave Trade in the District," ibid., March 1, 1839, pp. [2-3] (Jamaica). The New York Freedom's Journal is available in a transcribed online version from Accessible Archives at www.accessible.com, and the digital version does not indicate the original page numbers.

(31) Kerber, "Abolitionist Perception," 274-75; Hadley petition, quoted in Alisse Theodore, "'A Right to Speak on the Subject': The U.S. Women's Antiremoval Petition Campaign, 1829-1831," Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 5 (Winter 2002), 610.

(32) Hershberger, "Mobilizing Women," 15-40; E. W. S., "The Bloodhound War," Boston Liberator, January 24, 1840, p. [4] (first quotation); Kerber, "Abolitionist Perception," 278 (second, third, and fourth quotations).

(33) On slave-catching dogs, see John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger, Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (New York, 1999), 160-64; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 651; William Kauffman Scarborough, The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1966), 91-92; and Kenneth M. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York, 1956), 189-90. On slaves' dogs, see John Campbell, "'My Constant Companion': Slaves and Their Dogs in the Antebellum South," in Larry E. Hudson Jr., ed., Working Toward Freedom: Slave Society and Domestic Economy in the American South (Rochester, N.Y., 1994), 53-76. On the barking and aural dimensions of dogs in the antebellum South, see Mark M. Smith, Listening to Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 2001), 76-78, 83, 85-86, 229-30.

(34) Caulkins's story comes from [Weld], American Slavery, 15 (quotations), 21, 48, 97, 108, 144, 148, 155, 159, 160. In editorializing that slave owners used bloodhounds, Weld was clearly jumping the gun and ignoring his own evidence to the contrary since eight of his nine examples (culled from original sources) of dogs being used to chase fugitives spoke of dogs or hounds and only one used the term bloodhound.

(35) Child, Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans, 24; "Slavery Record," Boston Liberator, February 18, 1832, p. [2]. Overall, the Liberator showed restraint in linking the bloodhound to the South; in the first five years of its existence (1831 through 1835) there were 32 references to slave-chasing canines in the South, out of which 60 percent (19) were to dogs or hounds and 40 percent (13) to bloodhounds (5 additional canine references were to the bloodhounds of the West Indies). On the animalization of slaves, see Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men, 205-6; and David Brion Davis, In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (New Haven, 2001), chap. 10. See also "The Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave" (reprint of 1855 edition, which updates the 1824 edition), in Arna Bontemps, ed., Five Black Lives: The Autobiographies of Venture Smith, James Mars, William Grimes, the Rev. G. W. Offley, [and] James L. Smith (Middletown, Conn., 1971), 68; Solomon Bayley, A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents, in the Life of Solomon Bayley ... (London, 1825), 4 (Bayley ran away in 1799): "A Negro Hunt [in 1817-1818]," in [Lydia Maria] Child, ed., The Oasis (Boston, 1834), 265, 275, illustration between pp. 264 and 265; [Lydia Maria] Child. Anti-slavery Catechism (2nd ed., Newburyport, Mass., 1839), 6: and "Narrative of James Curry, a Fugitive Slave," Boston Liberator, January 10, 1840, pp. [1-2] (the narrative of this 1837 runaway effort was recorded in September 1838).

(36) House Petitions and Senate Petitions. The vast majority of petitions, both printed and handwritten, followed a standard statement that included the quoted material. The typical petition went as follows: "To The Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled: The Memorial and Remonstrance of the undersigned Citizens of the United States--respectfully sheweth--That your Memorialists have learned with deep regret and abhorrence, that a number of Blood Hounds have recently been imported from the Island of Cuba, for the purpose of employing them to hunt down and destroy the Seminole Indians [note: some say "employing them against the Seminole Indians"], with whom the Government is now carrying on a war in the Territory of Florida.--Dreadful as are the evils attendant on a state of warfare, even in its most mitigated form--to aggravate them by the introduction of so barbarous and inhuman a measure, we view as an outrage upon every feeling of humanity, against which we are bound solemnly to protest. As a Territory of the United States, Florida is subject to the control of the General Government: and we earnestly beseech Congress to interpose its authority to arrest this attempt, and preserve our country from the deep and lasting disgrace which must be inflicted by so foul a blot upon the national character." All quotations are from the standard language of the petitions.

(37) On the receipt of petitions during the 26th Congress, see Cong. Globe, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., 198, 201, 203, 207, 220, 223, 226, 228, 233, 255, 259, 274, 321, 390, 430 (covering February-June 1840). My totals reflect the number of surviving petitions at the National Archives (155 with names and 7 without names listed).

(38) Samuel Bettle to John Sergeant, February 7, 1840, letter attached to "Memorial [petition re.] Bloodhounds," in House Petitions, [tray:]g11.2-g11.4 (first quotation). All other quotations are from the standard petition reprinted in note 36.

(39) Cong. Globe, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., 131, 183-84, 203-4, 252, 321, 487.

(40) Cong. Globe, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., 131 (second quotation), 203-4: Covington, "Cuban Bloodhounds." 114 (third quotation). The first quotation in this paragraph is from the standard petition reprinted in note 36.

(41) Inexplicably. Congress failed to note or investigate the United States Department of Navy's independent requisition of Cuban bloodhounds in the spring of 1840. Covington, "Cuban Bloodhounds," 116, 119.

(42) "Remonstrance against the Bloodhound War, Signed by 54 Persons," Sen.26A-g11, Box 93, Senate Petitions.

(43) On the various animals to which Euro-Americans loosely compared Indians, see Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn., 1973), 88 (wolves, lions), 386, 388 (gray panther), 154, 170, 244, 358 (beasts/animals); Robert F. Berkhofer Jr., The White Man's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York, 1978), 89 (buffalo), 60, 95 (animal-like); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis, 1980), 463, 502 (wolves), 55 (wild varmints), 138, 339 (beast); Bernard W. Sheehan, Savagism and Civility: Indians and Englishmen in Colonial Virginia (Cambridge, Eng., 1980), 69 (lion, bear, crocodile), 65-88 (beast); Philip Weeks, Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States, 1820-1890 (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1990), 14-15 (buffalo, wolf, panther); Clifford E. Trafzer, As Long as the Grass Shall Grow and Rivers" Flow: A History of Native Americans (Fort Worth, 2000), 108 (buffalo); and Gary B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America (4th ed., Upper Saddle River, N.J., 2000), 50, 52 (beasts, serpent).

(44) "Hounding Floridians" (reprinted from New-Yorker), Boston Liberator, January 24, 1840, p. [4]. See also Rev. John Pierpont, "A Voice From the Pulpit" (reprinted from the Albany Daily Register), Boston Liberator, June 12, 1840, p. [4].

(45) "Society of Friends of Penn., N. Jersey, and Del. Against the Employment of Bloodhounds in the Florida War, May 18, 1840," [tray:]g11.1-g/1.2, House Petitions (first quotation); "Blood Hounds," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (February 20, 1840), 117 (second quotation); "The Bloodhound," Family Magazine, 7 (1840), 449 (third quotation); "Cuba Bloodhounds," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (February 20, 1840), 125 (fourth quotation). On the bloodhounds' physical appearance, see also Cong. Globe, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., 204; "The Truth of History," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (February 20, 1840), 116; and "Communicated," ibid., 10 (March 12, 1840), 173.

(46) "Fiendish Cruelty" (reprinted from Northampton Courier), Boston Liberator, January 3, 1840, p. [4]. For a second description of training, see Elliott, "Peace and War" (reprinted from the Register and Observer), Boston Liberator, March 20, 1840, p. [4], who writes that "[t]he method of training them [in Cuba] is equalled in barbarity only by the purposes for which they are used. The negroes are tied up, and the dogs set on them to tear their an[k]les and legs. The hounds, by this taste of blood, acquire the ferocity which fits them for this duty." For a third training method, see "The Bloodhound," Family Magazine, 7 (1840), 449-50.

(47) On the handlers see Covington, "Cuban Bloodhounds," 112 (4 Cubans); "The Blood Hounds" (reprinted from Tallahassee Star), Boston Liberator, January 31, 1840, p. [3] (6 Spaniards, "trainers and keepers"): Cong. Globe, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., 204 (5 to manage them); "The Bloodhounds," Army and Navy, Chronicle, 10 (February 20, 1840), 124 (4 keepers); "Latest News from Florida--First and Successful Operation of the Blood-Hounds," ibid., 10 (February 20, 1840), 117 (5 Spanish trainers). Chasseurs del Rey is the Spanish term used to describe the men who handled the dogs.

(48) While Bernard F. Reilly Jr., in his American Political Prints', 1766-1876: A Catalog of the Collections in the Librao, of Congress (Boston, 1991), 146, offers the tentative date of 1840 for this print, he associates other "bloodhound" images unambiguously with 1840; see pp. 144-45, 147M8, 167, 177-78, and 188. Using cartoons or illustrations to attack the bloodhound tactic began by March 1840, when articles in the Boston Liberator ("The Bloodhound War," March 20, 1840, p. [3]) and in the New York Colored American ("The Blood Hounds," March 21, 1840) mentioned a "lithographic print" being created attacking the use of the dogs. (The New York Colored American is available in a transcribed online version from Accessible Archives at www.accessible.com, and the digital version does not indicate the original page numbers.) Some of the anti-dog prints created later in 1840 were used to derail Van Buren's reelection efforts. The text of the print titled "The Secretary of War presenting a stand of colours to the 1st Regiment of Republican Bloodhounds" follows, with Secretary of War Poinsett speaking: "Fellow citizens & Soldiers! In presenting this standard to the 1st Regiment of Bloodhounds, I congratulate you on your promotion, from the base & inglorious pursuit of animals, in an uncivilized region like Cuba, to the noble task of hunting men in our Christian country! our administration has been reproached for the expense of the Florida war, so we have determined now to prosecute it, in a way that's dog cheap/Hence in your huge paws! we put the charge of bringing it to a close. Be fleet of foot and keen of nose, or the Indians will escape in spite of your teeth! Dear Blair here, shows you a map of Florida the theatre of your future deeds. Look to him as the trumpeter of your fame, who will emblazon your acts, as far as the 'Globe' extends, He feels great interest in all his Kith & Kin, and will therefore transmit your heroism, in doggrel verse to remotest posterity!" The second speaker, Francis Blair, was the pro-Democratic editor of the Washington Globe: "I take pleasure in pointing out to you, my brethren-in-arms, the seat of a war, the honour of terminating which our master has put in the hands of our race. 1 have no doubt you will all prove like myself--good collar men in the cause." According to Reilly, the phrase "collar men" referred to the old term "collar presses," which were newspapers supportive of Van Buren's Democratic administration. Reilly, American Political Prints, 147.

(49) "The Bloodhounds," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (February 20, 1840), 124 (first, second, and third quotations): ["No one can peruse the Message of Gov. Reid"], Tallahassee Floridian, March 7, 1840, [3] (fourth and fifth quotations).

(50) The Taylor and Poinsett correspondence is part of the documentary material released to Congress by Poinsett: see Senate Document, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., No. 187: Letter from the Secretary of War, to the Chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, in Relation To the employment of Bloodhounds against the hostile Indians in Florida (Serial 357, Washington, D.C., 1840), 1-5 (first quotation on p. 3; second and third quotations on p. 4); Cong. Globe, 26 Cong., 1 Sess., 203-4. The instructions were reprinted in "The Bloodhounds," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (February 20, 1840), 114-16: and "Head-Quarters. Army of the South," ibid., 10 (March 12, 1840), 173-74.

(51) "Communicated," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (March 12, 1840), 173 (first quotation); "The Truth of History: Note," ibid., 10 (February 20, 1840), 116 (second and third quotations). See also "Blood Hounds," ibid., 10 (February 20, 1840), 117-18 ("They seize but do not destroy their prey ..."): and E, "A Word in Season," ibid., 10 (February 20, 1840), 124. There were northerners who also supported the bloodhounds: see "The Blood Hounds!" Hartford Times, February 8, 1840, p. 3: "The Blood Hounds," ibid., February 22, 1840, p. 1, in the Goza and Mickler Newspaper Collections: "Mr. Editor," ibid., February 29, 1840, p. 3; and ["We are requested ..."], Philadelphia Pennsylvanian for the Country, February 6, 1840, p. 4, in the Goza and Mickler Newspaper Collections.

(52) The Scribbler of Leisure Moments, "The Dog," Tallahassee Floridian, April 11, 1840, p. [2] (first and second quotations); "Sympathy," St. Augustine Florida Herald and Southern Democrat, March 26, 1840, p. [2] (third quotation); "The Bloodhounds," St. Joseph Times, February 19, 1840, p. 2 (fourth, fifth, and sixth quotations); "The Peace-Hounds," St. Augustine News, March 13, 1840, p. 2 (seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth quotations). See also ["Nine 'Peace-Hounds' have arrived ..."], ibid., March 20, 1840, p. 2; and ["Seven 'peace-hounds' left ..."], ibid., March 27, 1840, p. 2.

(53) "The Blood Hounds," Tallahassee Floridian, April 25, 1840, [3] (first quotation); "Florida War," Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (April 23, 1840), 267-68 (second quotation). On the importance of training, see also "The Bloodhounds," ibid., 10 (February 20, 1840), 124; "Correspondence of the Army and Navy Chronicle," ibid., 10 (April 2, 1840), 219-20; "Correspondence of the Savannah Georgian," ibid., 10 (April 2, 1840), 221; "Correspondence of the Army and Navy Chronicle," ibid., 10 (April 23, 1840), 265: "Col. Twiggs' Expedition," ibid., 10 (April 23, 1840), 269-70; Sprague, Origin, Progress, and Conclusion of the Florida War, 240; Giddings, Exiles of Florida, 264-66; Charles H. Coe, Red Patriots': The Story of the Seminoles (Cincinnati, 1898), 157; and Mahon, History of the Second Seminole War, 266-67 A second reason cited for the failure of the dog tactic was that the Seminoles "were able to make friends with the dogs and thus prevent any effective pursuit." Covington, "Cuban Bloodhounds," 119n30. On this explanation, see also Edward S. Ellis, Thrilling Adventures among the American Indians (Philadelphia, 1905), 206-7.

(54) George R. Fairbanks, History, of Florida from Its Discovery by Ponce de Leon, in 1512, to the Close of the Florida War, in 1842 (Philadelphia, 1871), 323-24.

(55) "Bloodhounds--The Florida War," Niles' National Register, 57 (February 22, 1840), 416.

(56) Other coverage includes "The Bloodhounds," Advocate of Peace, 3 (April 1840), 143; H. F. F., "Southern Correspondence," Boston Weekly Magazine, 2 (February 8, 1840), 182; A. A. L., "The Seminole's Welcome," Casket, 16 (March 1840), 119: "The Blood Hounds," New York Colored American, March 21, 1840: "There Will Be No Boundary War," ibid., May 9, 1840; "The Blood Hounds," Corsair, 1 (February 22, 1840), 794; "The Bloodhound," Family Magazine, 7 (1840), 449-50; and Chatham, "The Blood-hounds," Friend, 13 (February 8, 1840), 148.

(57) Samuel Bettle to John Sergeant, February 7, 1840, letter attached to "Memorial [petition re.] Bloodhounds, in [tray:]g11.2 g11.4, House Petitions. People's awareness did not dissipate; non-abolitionist periodicals invoked the bloodhounds throughout the 1840s. See "Report," Advocate of Peace, 5 (June 1843), 68; "Sketches of the Florida War," Western Literary Journal and Monthly Review, 1 (February 1845), 213-16, esp. p. 214; and Mary E. Hewitt, "Osceola Signing the Treaty," Broadway Journal, 1 (April 19, 1845), 248.

(58) On their status as slaveholders, see John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (24 vols.; New York, 1999), II, 619 (Benton); XVII, 616 (Poinsett); and XXI, 410 (Taylor). Chester L. Kieffer, in his Maligned General: A Biography of Thomas S. Jesup (San Rafael, Calif., 1979), while not addressing slaveholding per se, provides circumstantial evidence that suggests that Jesup owned slaves: his wife, Ann Croghan, came from a "well-to-do and highly respected" Kentucky family (p. 96); he owned a 2,600-acre farm in Todd County, Kentucky (p. 114); and he considered buying a Mississippi plantation (p. 116).

(59) A keyword search of the online version of the American Periodical Series (APS), the most comprehensive collection of nineteenth-century periodicals, has a congressional speech of Senator Thomas Morris of Ohio in February 1839 as being the first usage in the manner eventually used by the antislavery movement. See "Congress," Boston Liberator, March 8, 1839, p. [1]. The earliest instance of the term being capitalized in the material included in the APS occurred with the Pennsylvania Freeman; see "The Slave Power," reprinted in Boston Liberator, May 22, 1840, p. [1]. Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract." The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), 338-40: and Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination. 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge, 2000), 23, both indicate that the phrase developed in the late 1830s and early 1840s.

(60) "Contentment," New York Colored American, August 17, 1839 (first quotation); "Speech of Mr. Gillette...," ibid., July 7, 1838 (second quotation); "Kidnapping in New-York!!" Boston Liberator, April 21, 1837, p. [2] (third quotation). See also "The Crime of Being a Man, and a Freeman," ibid., April 28, 1837, p. [3]; and "The Bitter Fruits of Slavery," ibid., May 19, 1837, p. [31.

(61) Edwin Fussell, "A Voice from Indiana," Boston Liberator, October 4, 1839, p. [2]; S. L. L., "A Dream," ibid., February 7, 1840, p. [4]. Other examples from the early 1840s include "Georgia and Maine" [poem], ibid., January 17, 1840, p. [4]; "Speech of Rev. Amos G. Beman at the Anniversary of the Vigilance Committee," New York Colored American, May 22, 1841; and "The Slave in the Dismal Swamp" (October 1842), in The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston, 1902), 26. In 1842 Frederick Douglass, in one of his first published writings, criticized "two-legged blood-hounds" hunting fugitives in Boston. See Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. Vol. I: Early Years, 1817-1849 (New York, 1950), 105-9.

(62) In presenting what was essentially an antislavery speech masquerading as an inquiry into the finances of the Florida War, Giddings violated the so-called Gag Rule, which prohibited criticism of slavery in Congress. As a result he was roundly attacked by southerners. See "Washington," Boston Liberator, February 19, 1841, p. [3]; "Speech of Mr. Giddings, of Ohio," ibid., March 19. 1841, p. [2]; "Speech of Mr. Giddings, of Ohio," ibid., March 26, 1841, p. [1]; "Speech of Mr. Giddings, of Ohio," ibid., April 2, 1841, p. [1]; "The Florida Slave-Hunt," ibid., April 9, 1841, p. [2]; "Speech of Mr. Giddings, of Ohio...." New York Colored American, April 3, 1841; "Speech of Mr. Giddings, of Ohio ...," ibid., April 10, 1841; "Speech of Mr. Giddings, of Ohio...." ibid., April 17, 1841; "Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society," Boston Liberator, April 23, 1841, p. [3]; "The Cuba Bloodhounds," Boston Weekly Magazine, 3 (April 24, 1841), 254; George W. Julian, The Life of Joshua R. Giddings (Chicago, 1892), 96-100; and James Brewer Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings and the Tactics of Radical Politics (Cleveland, 1970), 63-67.

(63) Giddings, Speeches in Congress, 19. Giddings found the Jesup letter in House Document, 25 Cong., 3 Sess., No. 225: Letter from the Secretary of War Transmitting the Information ... Respecting the Disposition of Negroes and Other Property Captured from Hostile Indians during the Present War in Florida ... (Serial 348, Washington, D.C., 1839), 16. While lawyer Giddings understandably seized on the Jesup letter to strengthen his interpretation of the war and the bloodhounds' purpose within it, he deliberately minimized the role of the dogs in chasing Indians. In the letter (as printed in House Document 225) Jesup wrote, "[H]e must not allow the Indians or Indian negroes to mix with them." By dropping Jesup's inclusion of "Indians" from his speech, Giddings not only arbitrarily narrowed Jesup's concern to just the "Indian negroes" but, moreover, made it seem that Jesup was clearly referring to these Negroes when he used the word "them" twice in the next sentence. By contrast, it would seem that in saying "Indians or Indian negroes," Jesup was subsuming both groups within the word "them," which he uses when talking about who would be trailed and hung. Interestingly, in Exiles of Florida, Giddings twice quotes the Jesup letter with the full phrase "Indians or Indian Negroes." See pp. 154, 265. Further, as Rivers indicates in Slavery in Florida, 204-7, by late 1839 most of the "Indian negroes" were gone, having left Florida for Arkansas as a result of negotiations with Jesup in 1838. Thus, Giddings's emphasis on blacks would have had more credence earlier in the war when Jesup wrote the 1837 letter that mentioned "Indians" and "Indian negroes"; by the time the bloodhounds arrived, the Seminole force consisted primarily of Indians.

(64) "Blood Hounds" (reprinted from New York Star), Army and Navy Chronicle, 10 (February 20. 1840), 117. As Leon F. Whitney noted in Bloodhounds and How to Train Them (1947; rev. ed., New York, 1955), when talking about the Civil War period, "owners of so-called Bloodhounds appreciated the name and used it to the fullest extent trying to establish a reputation for ferocity in order to strike terror into the Negro population ..." (p. 13). Therefore, what perhaps mattered most for slave owners was having a fierce dog that was trained to pursue slaves and that could be called a "bloodhound," whether or not it was. On the impact of the name, see also Brough, Bloodhound and Its Use, 9.

(65) Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro ... (1855; reprint, New York, 1968), 21.

(66) "A Word to Objectors," Rochester North Star, February 4, 1848 (first quotation); ["In our last number..."], ibid., February 11, 1848 (second and third quotations). John McElroy, a Union veteran of the Civil War, also noting the dogs' legacy, observed that the "bloodhounds" used to chase soldiers fleeing Confederate prisons were "descendants of the strong and fierce hounds imported from Cuba ... for hunting Indians during the Seminole war." John McElroy, Andersonville: A Story of Rebel Military Prisons, abridged by Philip Van Doren (1879; abridged ed., New York, 1962), 73.

(67) For examples of abolitionists" references to the bloodhounds in the mid-1840s, see "Extract from S. S. Foster's Letter." Boston Liberator, September 1, 1843, p. [2]; "Scotland," ibid., September 15, 1843, p. [1]: S. H. Gay, "The Hundred Conventions," ibid., January 26, 1844, p. [3]; "Ralph W. Emerson's Oration," ibid., August 16. 1844, p. [1]; E. J., "Our Glorious Union," ibid., September 20, 1844, p. [3]: "'The Convention at Portland," ibid., October 18, 1844, p. [2]; ["A fugitive from ..."], ibid., June 27, 1845, p. [4]; D. Lewis, "[Letter], Auburn, N.Y.," ibid., April 3, 1846, p. [3]; Thos. Van Rensselaer, "The Late Anniversary in New York," ibid., June 12, 1846, p. [1]; H. W., "Fugitives," ibid., August 27, 1847, p. [3]; Richard Allen, "A Sketch," Liberty Bell. By Friends of Freedom, 4 (1843), 199; J. G. W., "Illinois in 1843 and 1847," Washington National Era, June 3, 1847, p. 2: By a Protestant Episcopalian, "A Letter to the Right Rev. L. Silliman Ives," ibid., July 1, 1847, p. 4: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston, 1845), x, 85: and William Wells Brown, comp., The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs for Anti-Slavery Meetings (1848; reprint, Philadelphia, 1969), 9, 15, 20, 38.

(68) "The Florida War," Boston Liberator, November 20, 1840, p. [4]. An antislavery Quaker periodical, the Friend, also linked the bloodhound to other native groups; see "Third Lecture," Friend, 14 (June 12, 1841), 289; and "Grahame's Colonial History," ibid., 19 (August 8, 1846), 361. Other, less politically motivated writers applied the Seminole/bloodhound experience to other Indians; see G. P. M., "Fragment of an Indian Story" [a poem], New Mirror, 3 (August 3, 1844), 277; "Recent Publications," Literary World, 2 (December 11, 1847), 463; and "The Vow: A Legend of the Iroquois," Yale Literary Magazine, 13 (February 1848), 160. Others just focused on the Seminole experience; see "Lecture II, Dec. 7, 1840," American Repertory of Arts, Sciences, and Manufactures, 3 (April 1841), 174; and "Report," Advocate of' Peace, 5 (June 1843), 68.

(69) "Recognition of Texas by the British Government" (reprinted from the Dublin Freeman's Journal), Boston Liberator, January 29, 1841, p. [1]; see also "Ireland: Recognition of Texas" (reprinted from the Dublin Morning Register), Boston Liberator, March 26, 1841, p. [2]. Minnesota authorities also sought to use bloodhounds to pursue "Sioux Indians" in 1863 following the Dakota War of 1862; see Oscar Malmoros to John B. Sanborn, July 31, 1863, John B. Sanborn Papers (Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul).

(70) "The Blood Hounds" (reprints poem in full), Boston Liberator, September 15, 1848, p. [3]; "Should Abolitionists vote for Harrison?" (reprinted from Pennsylvania Freeman), Boston Liberator, July 17, 1840, p. [2]. A few months later, another article, "A Solemn Appeal," ibid., September 11, 1840, p. [l], invoked generically "[t]he Indians, of this country," who "[i]n all human probability ... will ... be exterminated by the sword [or] the bloodhound," as part of an election plea "to Abolitionists, not to vote for" either William Henry Harrison or Van Buren.

(71) "Speech of Cassius M. Clay," Boston Liberator, February 2, 1844, p. [1]; "Mr. Bradburn's Position Defined," ibid., August 16, 1844, p. [2]; "Mr. Giddings's Statement," ibid., October l0, 1845, p. [2]. For a poetic example, see the antislavery poem entitled "The Trump of Jubilee," written in November 1840 and published in The Liberty Bell (Boston, 1841), 45-57, in which the unnamed author makes the "stricken Indian" (p. 48) of "the dark Floridian woods" (p. 48) and "the bloodhound strife" (p. 49) the backdrop against which the bondman's story is told. See also James McCune Smith, "Haytien Revolutions," New York Colored American, October 16, 1841; Samuel Lewis's statement in December 1842 to the Ohio Liberty Convention, in which he criticized the government for deploying "bloodhounds ... in common pursuit of miserable negroes and savages," reprinted in The Legion of Liberty? And Force of Truth ... (2nd ed., New York, 1843), no pagination; John Quincy Adams and Joshua Giddings, "Massachusetts Revolution," Boston Liberator, May 3, 1844, pp. [1-2]; "An Address," ibid., February 28, 1845, p. [1]; and "Letters from Henry O. [C.] Wright," ibid., July 25, 1845, p. [3].

(72) "General Taylor's Nomination," Boston Liberator, June 23, 1848, p. [3] (quotation); "Gen. Taylor," ibid., July 14, 1848, p. [2] ("bloodhound warrior"). See also "Blood! Blood!" ibid., December 15, 1848, p. [4], which used the phrase "Zach Taylor's Bloodhound War." For other general bloodhound-related references to Taylor, see "Anti-Slavery Celebration," ibid., July 7, 1848, p. [2]; "The New Political Movement," ibid., July 14, 1848, p. [2]; "Sabbatizing," ibid., August 4, 1848, p. [4]; "Salem Convention," ibid., September 1, 1848, p. [2]; "Will they be the Bloodhounds," ibid., October 27, 1848, p. [2]; "The Presidential Elections," Rochester North Star, October 20, 1848: and "The Political Skies," ibid., October 27, 1848.

(73) The following two articles commenting on the campaign make the bloodhound-slave connection: "A Word to Objectors," Rochester North Star, February 4, 1848, and "Is This Infidelity and Atheism?" Boston Liberator, August 11, 1848, p. [3]. Each of the following four writings refers to bloodhounds being used against slaves and Seminoles: ["In our last number ..."], Rochester North Star, February 11, 1848; "The Bloodhound Candidate," Boston Liberator, June 30, 1848, p. [3] ("blood-hound over some 200 slaves"); "Antislavery Harp," ibid., July 7, 1848, p. [2]; and Charles Stearns, Facts in the Life of General Taylor; the Cuba Blood-Hound Importer, the Extensive Slave-Holder, and the Hero of the Mexican War (Boston, 1848), 6, 14-16. See Rochester North Star, August 11, 1848, for an announcement of the book by Stearns.

(74) "The Bloodhound Candidate," Boston Liberator, June 16, 1848, p. [3]; "The Bloodhound Candidate," ibid., June 30, 1848, p. [3]; "The Bloodhound Candidate," ibid., November 3, 1848, p. [4]; "Northern Whigs and Democrats," Rochester North Star, July 4, 1848; "The Northern Churches," ibid., July 21, 1848; "Bloodhound Piety," ibid., August 21, 1848; "Mr. S. R. Ward," ibid., September 1, 1848; and "The Bloodhound Party--The Bloodhound Candidate," Boston Liberator, July 7, 1848, p. [3].

(75) "The Cuba Bloodhounds," Boston Liberator, September 4, 1846, p. [2] (first and second quotations); "Gen. Taylor," ibid., October 9, 1846, p. [4] (third and fourth quotations); "Cuban Blood Hounds," ibid., November 5, 1847, p. [1] (fifth and sixth quotations). See also "Norfolk County A. S. Society," ibid., May 7, 1847, p. [1].

(76) "General Taylor," Boston Liberator, March 3, 1848, p. [2]. See also "Abbott Lawrence," ibid., March 3, 1848, p. [2]; "The Bloodhound Candidate," ibid., June 30, 1848, p. [3]; "Antislavery Harp," ibid., July 7, 1848, p. [2]; "Dear Garrison," ibid., July 14, 1848, p. [1]; and "The Blood Hounds," ibid., September 15, 1848, p. [3].

(77) "The Presidency," Rochester North Star, June 16, 1848 (first and second quotation); "The Bloodhound Party--The Bloodhound Candidate," Boston Liberator, July 7, 1848, p. [3] (third quotation); Stearns, Facts in the Life of General Taylor; the Cuba Blood-Hound Importer, the Extensive Slave-Holder, and the Hero of the Mexican War, 6, 14-16 (fourth quotation on pp. 14-15). See also "A Veteran Whig Father's Answer To His Son," Washington National Era, October 19, 1848, p. 168; "A Word to Objectors," Rochester North Star, February 4, 1848; ["In our last number"], ibid., February 11, 1848: "Selections: Speech of Hon. J. R. Giddings," ibid., July 28, 1848; and "Political Cookery," ibid., October 6, 1848.

(78) "Gen. Taylor and the Bloodhounds," Boston Liberator, March 3, 1848, p. [1]; "Gen. Taylor and the Florida Bloodhounds," Rochester North Star, March 17, 1848 [Both of these reprintings of Taylor's recommendation mistakenly date it as being made in 1839, not 1838.]; "Strange Bedfellows," Boston Liberator, October 27. 1848, p. [3]. See also "The Blood Hounds," ibid., September 15, 1848, p. [3].

(79) Reilly, American Political Prints, 291: see also pp. 289, 301-2, 304-6, 312. In the illustration. Zachary Taylor is horseback, saying: "Hurra! Captain, we've got them at last, the dogs are at them--now forward with the Rifle and Bayonet and 'give them Hell Brave Boys', let not a red nigger escape--, show no mercy ,exterminate them, this day we'll close the Florida War, and write its history in the blood of the Seminole--but remember Captn., as I have written to our Government to say that the dogs are intended to ferret out the Indians, (not to worry them) for the sake of consistency and the appearance of Humanity, you will appear not to notice the devastation they commit."

(80) "Gen. Taylor a Methodist." Rochester North Star, March 17, 1848 (first quotation); "The Presidency," ibid., June 16. 1848: "Anti-Slavery Convention in Weymouth," Boston Liberator, August 11, 1848, p. [1] (second quotation); "Anti-Slavery Convention at Harwich," ibid., September 15, 1848, p. [1] (third and fourth quotations); "To the Liberty Party of the County of Madison," Rochester North Star, September 15, 1848 (fifth quotation). For similar references, see "Reformatory," Boston Liberator, January 28, 1848. p. [4]; "Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Mass. Anti Slavery Society," ibid., February 4, 1848, p. [2]; "Abbott Lawrence," ibid., March 3, 1848, p. [2]; "The Bloodhound Candidate," ibid., June 16, 1848, p. [3]; "Posture of Politics," ibid., September 29, 1848, p. [2]: "Henry C. Wright to James Haughton," ibid., October 13, 1848, p. [1 ]; "Gen. Taylor and the Florida Bloodhounds," Rochester North Star, March 17, 1848; "The Northern Churches," ibid., July 21, 1848; "Bloodhound Piety," ibid., August 21, 1848; "Anti-Slavery Convention at Harwich," ibid., September 22, 1848; "More Annexation," ibid., November 3, 1848; and Stearns, Facts in the Life of General Taylor; the Cuba Blood-Hound Importer, the Extensive Slave-Holder, and the Hero of the Mexican War, 6.

(81) For a provocative examination of military tactics during the Mexican War and eventually the Civil War, see Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (Tuscaloosa, 1982).

(82) "Glorious News!--Taylor Elected!!!" Rochester North Star, November 17, 1848 (first and second quotations); "What Cannot Be Denied," Boston Liberator, November 17, 1848, p. [2] (third, fourth, and fifth quotations); "West India Emancipation--Celebration at Worcester," ibid., August 17, 1849, p. [3] (sixth, seventh, and eighth quotations) [reprinted in Rochester North Star, August 24, 1849]; "To the Women of Concord, N.H," Boston Liberator, February 16, 1849, p. [2] (remaining quotations). See also "The Blood of the Slave on the Skirts of the Northern People," ibid., December 1, 1848, p. [1]: "Blood! Blood!" ibid., December 15, 1848, p. [4]; "Horace Greeley," ibid., January 19, 1849, p. [4]; "'To Gen. Zachary Taylor," ibid., March 9, 1849, p. [1]; "'Trick of the Cloth." ibid., March 23, 1849, p. [2]; "The Cause of Peace," ibid., December 7, 1849, p. [2]; "Legislative," ibid., January 25, 1850, p. [3]; "The Government of the U.S.," ibid., May 31, 1850, p. [4]; "Iowa and its Legislature," Washington National Era, April 26, 1849, p. 66; "The Blood of the Slave on the Shirts of the Northern People," Rochester North Star, November 17, 1848; "Fifth Annual Meeting of the Western N.Y. Anti-Slavery Society," ibid., December 29, 1848: F. D., "The Fair at Williamson," ibid., January 26, 1849: M. R. D., "Pittsburg, Feb. 24, 1849," ibid., March 9, 1849: F. D., "Editorial Correspondence," ibid., March 9, 1849; "A Damper," ibid., April 7, 1849: "Friend Douglass," ibid., May 4, 1849: and "Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society," ibid., June 1, 1849.

(83) Henry C. Wright, "Frederika Bremer, and Zachary Taylor, the Slaveholder," Boston Liberator, September 27, 1850, p. [4]. See also "A.S. Convention at Pawtucket," ibid., July 26, 1850, p. [3]; "President Taylor," ibid., August 30, 1850, p. [4]; "The Taylor Apotheosis," ibid., August 30, 1850, p. [4]; and "A Tribute to the Memory of Gen. Taylor," ibid., September 6, 1850, p. [2].

(84) Not all antislavery activists were sympathetic to Native Americans; Jane Grey Swisshelm was rabidly anti-Indian. See Arthur J. Larsen, ed., Crusader and Feminist: Letters of Jane Grey Swisshelm (St. Paul, 1934), 25-27. In addition, even sympathetic abolitionists recognized the problematic issue of slaveholding among southeastern Native Americans; see "General Jesup and the Seminoles," Boston Liberator, July 31, 1846, p. [2]; and Kerber, "Abolitionist Perception," 282-83.

(85) See Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, 1850-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1970); and Gary Collison, Shadrach Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

(86) "Letter from Henry C. Wright," Boston Liberator, November 22, 1850, p. [4] (first quotation); "The Subjugation of Ohio," ibid., November 27, 1857, p. [1] (second quotation); "The First Victim under the New Fugitive Slave Bill." Rochester North Star, October 3, 1850 (third quotation). See also "Another Slave Case in Boston," Boston Liberator, February 14, 1851, p. [3] ("blood-hound law"); "Judge Jay on the Bloodhound Bill," Rochester North Star, October 31, 1850 ("Bloodhound Bill"); ["The Path-Finder says ..."], ibid., October 31, 1850 ("odious Bloodhound Law"); "The Bloodhound Commissioner," Boston Liberator, April 11, 1851, p. [1]; "First Annual Report of the Old Saratoga District A. S. Society," ibid., April 2, 1852, p. [1] ("bloodhound Commissioner"); "Fugitive Slaves," Rochester North Star, October 3, 1850 ("blood-hound commissioner"); "Gross Hypocrisy Detected," Boston Liberator, February 28, 1851, p. [2] ("Boston bloodhounds"); and "Baltimore Platforms--Slavery Question, &c.," ibid., July 9, 1852, p. [1] ("Boston bloodhounds").

(87) "Speech of Daniel Webster," Boston Liberator, June 13, 1851, p. [1].

(88) "Look Out for Slave-Hunters and the U.S. Marshal!" (reprinted from the Homestead Journal), Boston Liberator, March 7, 1851, p. [3].

(89) President Polk signed the bill organizing the Oregon Territory on August 14, 1848, and it excluded slavery. The Washington Territory was carved out of the Oregon Territory in 1853, and it too prohibited slavery.

(90) "General Summary," Washington National Era, December 17, 1857, p. 203. For other brief notices of the war in the antislavery press, see also "Florida Indians," Friend, 29 (March 29, 18561, 232; "The Florida Indians," ibid., 30 (September 13, 1856); "The Seminole War to be Continued," Washington National Era, June 4, 1857, p. 91; "The Seminole War," Friend, 31 (January 9, 18581, 144; "New Orleans," Washington National Era, May 20, 1858, p. 79; and "The Florida War," Friend, 32 (November 1, 1858), 72.

(91) Among non-abolitionist writers who invoked the connection between the Spanish, Indians, and bloodhounds, see David Turnbull, Travels in the West. Cuba; with Notices of Porto Rico, and the Slave Trade (London. 1840), 330: "The Bloodhound," Family Magazine, 7 (1840), 450; "Letters from Cuba," Knickerbocker. or New-York Monthly Magazine, 25 (February 1845), 145-59, esp. p. 148; Ashabel Davis, History of New Amsterdam; or, New York as it Was.... (New York, 1854), 124-25: John B. Duffley, "Life of Columbus for Godey's Young Readers," Godey's Lady's Book, 49 (October 1854), 343: "Vasco Nunez De Balboa," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 18 (March 1859), 473,475. 478, 480: "Discovery of America," Merry's Museum. Parley's Magazine. Woodworth's Cabinet, and the Schoolfellow. new ser., 10 (July 1, 1860), 106-7: and Charles De Wolf Brownell, The Indian Races of North and South America ... (Hartford, Conn., 1864), 161. On the Seminoles and the bloodhounds, see also "Report," Advocate of Peace, 5 (June 1843) 68: Sprague, Origin, Progress. and Conclusion of the Florida War, 239-43; "Martial Men and Martial Books," New Englander, 6 (October 1848). 482-83: J. Benwell, An Englishman's Travels in America: His Observations of Life, and Manners in the Free and Slave States (London, [1853]), 161: and "The Progress of Our Political Virtues," Putnam's Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science, and Art, 5 (February 1855), 197.

(92) Henry C. Wright, "An Almighty Convenience," Boston Liberator, May 30, 1851, p. [4]: "The Position of Women," Friend, 31 (December 26, 1857), 125-26: Giddings, Speeches in Congress. 10. 19, 60, 246: Giddings, Exiles of Florida, esp. pp. 152-55, 242-43, 264-73, 276-77; and Giddings, History off the Rebellion: Its Authors and Causes (New York, 1864), 135-36, 140, 149-50, 488. For other antislavery references to the Seminole experience, see Elliott, Sinfulness of American Slavery, II, 127; "Cuba and the United States," Frederick Douglass' Paper, September 4. 1851: "Blood Hounds as a Humane Institution," ibid., June 22, 1855: "The Evening Star," Washington National Era, August 30, 1855. p. 138; and "The Poor Indian," Friend, 38 (November 5, 1864), 75. As part of their concern about Indians and bloodhounds, abolitionists still mentioned the early Spanish episodes: see "'Who is my Neighbor.'" Rochester North Star, June 23, 1848: Theodore Parker, The Nebraska Question: Some Thoughts on the New Assault upon Freedom in America ... (Boston, 1854), 48: and "The Barbarism of Slavery" (1860 speech), in Hoar, ed., Charles Sumner, VI, 174-75. Abolitionists also continued to mention the usage of bloodhounds against Africans in the West Indies; see J. G. W., "The West Indies in 1843, 1844, and 1845," Washington National Era, October 14, 1847, p. 1 (Jamaica); "Training of Bloodhounds," Rochester North Star, February 25, 1848 (Haiti): W. O., "From Our London Correspondent." Washington National Era, July 27, 1848, p. 117 (Cuba): "Slavery in Cuba." ibid., June 9, 1859, p. 89; and "Slavery in Cuba," Friend, 32 (September 3, 1859), 411.

MR. CAMPBELL is an associate professor of history at Winona State University.