In the West Indies and the Southern States
Welcome to the New World! So what's changed since we've crossed the Atlantic? Well, hunting animals has kind of gone by the wayside since there are other dogs for that. Plus, these Bloodhounds have such a skill set for tracking down lost peoples (see Josh's page on their use in law enforcement: /usage-in-law-enforcement.html). We're going to be focusing on early revolts, the Antebellum period, and the Civil War Era though, which is pretty neat too! Might as well get to it!
Before we make our way into America, we should probably start with the “West Indies”, for chronological sake. Here, we see that since there were runaway slaves and uprisings at the time, "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" (Campbell). This is where we start with Bloodhounds in the New World. They weren’t used just for wars, it appears that they were used in order to keep together an everyday institution. [We’ll get to the implications of this sort of thing on the next page] How ‘bout the good ol' US of A? Well, the story is kind of the same actually. "Bloodhounds ha[d] been employed to run down a criminal, but in the convict camps of Arkansas and Mississippi and other States also, I believe they [were] kept for that purpose" (About the Bloodhound). Bloodhounds were utilized to maintain Indian prison camps, but matters start to get worse from here, however. Instead of fugitives coming back and going back to business as usual, the tendency was that when prisoners escaped, "the dogs tracked them down and they were brought in and executed" (About the Bloodhound). With this type of atmosphere, eventually "the savage attacks of the dogs terrified the Indians more than the firearms" (About the Bloodhound), which definitely says something about how the Bloodhounds were trained. Up to this point, we have only seen the mistreatment towards Indian convicts, but one can be certain that slaves were part of this story as well. In this hostile environment, the fugitive slaves who “walked and ran toward Pensacola Bay and its tributaries and then boarded canoes and skiffs or simply floated on wooden planks toward Fort Pickens” (Clavin) faced huge dangers. In the same article, it is explained that “Confederate snipers and ‘[h]uge bloodhounds’ employed by slave owners represented the greatest threats" (Clavin). We can begin to understand slavery in a totally new way with the employment of Bloodhounds -- a way I had never thought of before. One might be led to ask how anybody would know this. This type of thing could be an old tale or a string of rumors, but "besides intelligence, contrabands provided Union soldiers with evidence of the horrors of slavery, including open wounds caused by bloodhounds" (Clavin). With this Civil War background in mind, the use of Bloodhounds extended beyond slaves. In fact, Bloodhounds "were used in some of the Southern prisons to run down escaped Union soldiers" (About the Bloodhound). Pretty high stakes if you ask me! And once again, I'll leave you off with a little English literature example. In order to show you how devastating the use of Bloodhounds was during this period, we can see that this canine made it into a popular novel for all to see: "this cruel practice of pursuing fugitive slaves with bloodhounds furnished material for one of the most striking incidents in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'" (About the Bloodhound). |
The Old World & The New World
An awful, but telling depiction of a prison Bloodhound
Bloodhounds used in the Civil War
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