“Open jaws of this monster-tyranny”: abolitionism, resistance, and slave-hunting canines

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the weaponization of canines by enslavers in the antebellum American South and the manner in which abolitionists used reports of canine attacks in their fight against slavery. Using descriptions and images of canine attacks to demonstrate the brutality of the slave system, abolitionists mobilized and swayed public opinion by appealing to audiences' familial empathy, religious ethos, and shared sense of physical pain. Following the slave-hunting canine trope as it evolved to reflect the changing socio-political and cultural developments of the mid-nineteenth century, this article views the Compromise of 1850 as an inflection point, after which enslaved persons were no longer depicted as victims being attacked by dogs, but rather, as empowered survivors defending themselves and their families against the canines.

The third section continues chronologically through the 1840s before transitioning to the Compromise of 1850 and the evolution of the slave-hunting canine trope, which increasingly depicted enslaved persons fighting back and resisting their canine captors. As this abolitionist trope reached its fullest potential, images, illustrations, and stories proliferated, showing enslaved persons not as victims being pinned down or cornered by dogs but rather as empowered survivors defending themselves and battling against the weaponized canines. The article will conclude with an analysis of the slave-hunting canine trope during the Civil War. Emblematic of the arms that people of colour would take up as Union soldiers, as well as the collective freedom they were close to achieving, the continued publication of illustrations and stories of slave resistance to canines echoed the final salvo of American slavery. As the Civil War raged on, Confederates began using dogs to track, fight, and kill white Union soldiers and prisoners of war. Attuned to the symbolism of its usage, abolitionists continued to incorporate the same canine trope that they had employed for the past four decades; the only difference now was the skin colour of the victims. Hunted in the same manner by the same weaponized canines, in this regard, Southerners killed formerly enslaved persons and Union soldiers with equal barbarity.
Fugitivity, weaponized canines, and the shaping of the historical narrative of slavery I would in my will leave my skin as a legacy. 7 (William Grimes) Memories fade, but some become seared in permanence, as when "bones, whitened by the rain, and bleached in the sun," remind all who pass of the violence visited upon a place. Years after his escape from slavery, Charles Ball remembered the graphic details of the first time he saw an enslaved person hunted by dogs. "Hardy," an enslaved person accused of a crime, "had not been seen, since the previous evening," and "messages were despatched (sic) round the county," for planters "to come without delay, and join in the pursuit." A request was also made for "a gentleman" who "owned a blood hound … to come with his dog, in all haste." 8 Hardy put "ten or twelve miles" between himself and the plantation, but the hound "caught him, and would soon have killed him, had he not been compelled to relinquish his prey." Several years later, when Ball penned his narrative, he remembered Hardy, "sitting on the ground, covered with blood, and yet bleeding profusely," the dog having "mangled both his arms, and hands, in a shocking manner." 9 Memories of Hardy's bloodied, mangled body did not deter Ball from attempting to self-emancipate years later. Tracked by dogs, he remembered watching "twenty horsemen; and a number of dogs," run into the woods where he was hiding, knowing that "if they could find" him, he would be, "hunted down like a wild beast." Ball managed to keep "still by the side of the log for a long time after the horses, dogs, and men, had ceased to trouble the woods." Ball eventually made his way to Philadelphia, where he and Isaac Fisher wrote his autobiography, in which he immortalized his experiences in bondage, including his and Hardy's encounters with slave-hunting dogs. 10 Self-emancipated enslaved persons such as Charles Ball brought to the North their experiences escaping bondage, and also the experiences of other enslaved persons whose stories were subsequently catalogued into abolitionist literature. The abolitionist movement did not begin with ink from a pen but rather with the bloodsoaked footsteps of self-emancipating enslaved persons. Before abolitionists such as Theodore Dwight Weld and Harriet Beecher Stowe vividly described slavehunting canines, and before George Cruikshank and Richard Ansdell painted artistic life into pictorial representations of the attacks, thousands of enslaved persons risked their lives to escape to freedom, often facing the snarling, bone-crushing jaws of slave-hunting canines.
When slave narratives were published during the 1820s and 1830s, these firsthand accounts describing the brutality of slavery and the harrowing escapes from bondage helped to usher in the transition of the abolitionist movement to immediatism, while also providing the authentic pain and suffering that reframed the narrative of morality, empathy, and moral-suasion. 11 As self-emancipated enslaved persons such as Ball, William Grimes, Solomon Bayley, and Moses Roper penned their narratives, they captivated their audiences with details of being hunted by canines, thus lighting the fire that heated the steel being cast into the sword of American abolitionism.
The genesis of the racialized weaponization of bloodhounds and other dogs by Southern enslavers has proved elusive, but slave narratives date the practice to before the turn of the nineteenth century. 12 Detailing his escape from slavery in 1799, Solomon Bayley recalled in his 1825 narrative being "chased" and "pursued by dogs," on three occasions. 13 In another narrative published in 1825, William Grimes described escaping bondage in 1814, after being told that if he ran away, he would be caught by "dogs, for they would track (him) anywhere." 14 Challenging the hypocrisy of slavery in the United States while drawing attention to the physical abuses concomitant with the institution, Grimes laid claim to his abused and scarred body, noting that if it were not for the stripes on my back which were made while a slave, I would in my will leave my skin as a legacy to the government, desiring that it might be taken off and made into parchment, and then bind the constitution of glorious, happy, and free America. 15 Bayley's and Grimes's experiences with slave-hunting canines were not unique, as their accounts were corroborated by contemporary newspapers such as the New York Commercial Advertiser, which reported in 1827 that a "negro who had absconded from his master," only "surrendered" after he was "considerably maimed by the dogs." 16 On 8 January 1831 William Lloyd Garrison's influential abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, detailed an incident in which a "black outlaw, Big George," was on the run and "bloodhounds have tracked them." Garrison's emphasis through italics suggests the importance that he gave this event. 17 Ball's narrative achieved great popularity and "was reprinted often," prompting readers to vicariously feel Hardy's pain at the hands of the bloodhounds. 18 When Ball escaped from slavery, readers must have imagined his fear, drawing on the freedom-seeker's memory by proxy, as he walked past the spot where "Hardy had been given alive for food to vultures." Readers must have felt their hearts race with trepidation as Ball, "heard the loud growl" of dogs and hounds as he hid in the "thicket." However, Ball, who would later join the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812, was not a passive victim. Cornered by two hounds as their owners encouraged them to attack, Ball unsheathed his former enslaver's sword, and with a "single cut, laid open the head of the largest and fiercest of the dogs, from his neck to his nose." 19 Published in the same year as Ball's narrative, Moses Roper's account described his being "smelt out" by dogs during his attempted escape from slavery. 20 After reading Roper's narrative and meeting him, a "man of colour" wrote "impromptu" verses dedicated to him, in which he poetically described Roper's escape from slavery: "His tyrant follows with his bloody hounds, The track is lost-he plunges in the wave; And now with the fleetest speed onward he bounds, And from him throws the cursed brand of slave." 21 Slave narratives such as Ball's and Roper's were meant to elicit a "range of powerfully felt emotions," in a construct in which "reader and writer colluded for a straightforward purpose" of exposing "the cruel system of slavery," and bringing about the end of the institution. 22 Ball's narrative offered a brutal and bloody critique of slavery, most notably in its "unadorned detail of acts" such as graphic descriptions of vicious dog and bloodhound attacks. 23 Ball's seminal narrative was "hailed by many in the antislavery movement," and "directly influenced the manner and matter of later fugitive slave narratives." 24 Replete with depictions of enslaved persons who were maimed by bloodhounds, Ball brought attention to the cruelty of enslavers while also establishing "important precedents for the slave narrative tradition." 25 Freedom-seeking enslaved persons would later "vote with their feet," but they put the issue on the ballot with their voices, stories, and experiences. 26 Southern enslavers weaponized dogs as early as 1799, as racialized tools of oppression, violence, and control. And when formerly enslaved persons such as Grimes, Bayley, Roper, and Ball penned their narratives, their stories of slave-hunting canines and gruesome bloodhound attacks "infused a spark of being" into a "monstrous" practice that had heretofore only been imagined, providing abolitionists with what would be one of their most effective and enduring anti-slavery images. 27 Early slave narratives exposed slavery's brutality and Southerners' cruelty, with every bloodstained page helping to transform the abolitionist movement and redefine American republicanism, the scarred skin of former slaves binding "the constitution of glorious, happy, and free America." 28 Terror, empathy, and slave-hunting hounds in American abolitionism These are the lands, where the instinct of the bloodhound is improved by pursuing, overtaking, and reveling in human flesh. 29 (Alvan Stewart) Surrounded by the Mississippi River, the three freedom-seeking enslaved persons might have felt safe at their camp on Cat Island. Each moment of freedom lulled them into a false sense of security before the baying of the bloodhounds cut through the thick Louisiana air -a harbinger of their impending capture. Two of the runaways were arrested, "but the third made flight." After being "shot in the shoulder," the runaway "plunged into the sluice," the blood from his bullet wound turning the muddy water crimson. The enslaver took deadly aim while his bloodhounds pursued the injured man into the water. "With a bullet in his shoulder, and the blood hounds unfleshing his bones, he bore up for a moment with feeble stroke as best he might," but "the dogs succeeded in drowning him." 30 The world would never know his name, but abolitionists such as Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, and the editors of the American Anti-Slavery Almanac made sure that the world knew his story. Months after he was killed by bloodhounds near the Mississippi River, both the Almanac and Weld's American Slavery As It Is brought to the story to life in written and pictorial form. Published within weeks of one another, these two works reveal a robust and dynamic abolitionist network while also demonstrating the rapidity with which incidents in the South became known in the northern states.
Highlighting the horrific details of the same hunt, both works added their original interpretive touch, and in doing so, further demonstrated the vitality of the slave-hunting canine trope, while also portending the numerous ways that abolitionists would use it over the next three decades. The Anti-slavery Almanac and Slavery As It Is demonstrated how the slave-hunting canine trope, conveyed through words and visuals, could appeal to the empathy, common humanity, and religious ethos of Northern audiences.
It is argued that "fugitive slaves wrote themselves into being," and also "into history," through their autobiographical slave narratives. 31 While this interpretation is accurate for many prominent black abolitionists and fugitive slaves, "history" no doubt, has room left in it for those who did not write narratives or deliver speeches but still fought and fled their way "into being" and "into history" through acts of resistance and attempted escapes. 32 It can be assumed that the man who was drowned by bloodhounds near the Mississippi, as well as Aunt Cheyney, Hardy, and thousands of other enslaved persons, may not have added a spoken or written word into the historical record. Nevertheless, their lived experiences were passed on, often orally, eventually making their way into other slave narratives, legal records, abolitionist testimonies, and newspapers. Experiences were then incorporated into the abolitionist corpus through newspapers and works such as Slavery As It is and the Anti-slavery Almanac.
"Facts," Angelina Grimké wrote to her sister, "FACTS, have set in motion all that machinery in England which has at last worked out a peaceful and glorious deliverance for 800,000, slaves in the B[ritish].W[est]. Indies, and so filled England with horror and indignation at the SYSTEM." 33 Inspired by abolitionists across the Atlantic, the Grimké sisters "spent six months, averaging more than six hours a day, in searching through thousands upon thousands of Southern newspapers," as they "gathered the raw material for the manufacture of Slavery As It Is." 34 Theodore Weld estimated that they used "twenty thousand newspapers," to find incidents such as the man who was drowned by bloodhounds on Cat Island, which they found in the St. Francisville (La.) Chronicle. 35 After providing an account of the incident from the Louisianan newspaper, their book offered a poignant commentary on it, hoping to elicit empathy, sympathy, or indignation for the "Poor fellow" who was killed. In graphic detail, the book exposed the cruelty of the incident, taking readers through the man's last moments, during which he "tried hard for his life" with a "bullet in his shoulder, and the blood hounds unfleshing his bones." Adding narrative flair, the authors gave readers a glimpse of hope, as the man, "bore up for a moment with feeble stroke as best he might" before he took his last fear-filled breath, the "blood hounds" and "public opinion," both "succeeding in drowning him." 36 The use of dogs to hunt enslaved persons would not have surprised Weld or the Grimké sisters, as they had read Ball's narrative at least a year before writing Slavery As It Is. In a January 1838 letter to the sisters, Weld noted that "we have half a dozen fugitives from southern slavery now in the city [New York City]. … One a man of thirty whose history is as rife with the highest interest as Charles Ball." 37 Weld's assumption that the Grimkés knew Ball was well-founded, as Angelina's Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States, published shortly before Weld's letter, borrows at least an entire paragraph straight from Ball's narrative. Grimké's vivid description of slave whippings was inspired by Ball's description of a woman named Lydia who was brutally beaten by her enslaver, once more demonstrating the immense impact that this narrative had on other abolitionists. 38 In the months spent reviewing Southern newspapers, Weld and the Grimké sisters became convinced of the pervasiveness of the slave-hunting canines described by Grimes, Bayley, Roper, and Ball. Incidents such as the man who was drowned on Cat Island were corroborated by a "large number of extracts similar" from "Southern newspapers," dating back to at least 1827. 39 While, "slaveholders and their apologists" continued "flooding the world with testimony that their slaves are kindly treated," formerly enslaved persons and those who spoke on their behalf provided the dams and levees that stopped the flooding of misinformation by revealing that enslaved persons were "hunted with blood hounds" and "torn in pieces by dogs." 40 Slavery As It Is claimed to be the "Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses." And for thousands of enslaved persons, their "testimony" was presented through their resistance to slavery and their attempted escapes, while their corroborating evidence was their scarred, bitten, and bloodied bodies. These brutalized bodies spoke the universal language of human suffering, becoming the lingua franca of those who wanted to end slavery. And enslavers, eager to recapture their freedom-seeking enslaved persons, unwittingly helped abolitionists increase the numbers of Northerners who accepted black suffering as a universal language, or at least a regional dialect. Southern newspapers were replete with runaway slave advertisements, as enslavers attempted to reclaim their formerly enslaved persons. Offering identifiable physical features of the enslaved persons they were seeking, enslavers betrayed their pretenses of paternalism by identifying scars of violence, such as wounds, bullet holes, and bite marks. 41 Confessing to a crime that he did not believe existed, the "slaveowner became a witness against himself" in the courtroom of Northern public opinion. 42 Northern audiences read about a runaway "negro boy" from Georgia, who would forever be identified by a "scar on his left cheek from the bite of a dog." One hundred miles north, another child, a "negro boy Ellic," was identified by a "scar on one of his arms from the bite of a dog." Two days before Christmas in 1837, a "Ranaway (sic), Isham," was identified in an Alabama newspaper as having "a scar upon the breast and upon the under lip, from the bite of a dog." And in the case of a runaway named Bill, the scars "from the bite of a dog," only told part of his horrific story; his body was a panoply of horror and torture, with a "scar over one eye" and a "burn on his buttocks, from a piece of hot iron in the shape of a T." 43 Stories of the enslaved were told through their scars, and the amanuensis was the "slaveholders themselves." 44 Selling over an astounding 100,000 copies in its first year of publication, Slavery As It Is and its catalog of canine violence "became the handbook of the antislavery movement from them on." 45 William Lloyd Garrison included a section titled the "Slavery Record" in The Liberator, which contained testimony, evidence, and advertisements from Southern newspapers. Using the power of enslavers' voices against themselves, Garrison filled his newspaper with "self-subverting quotations." 46 The bloodhound was fast becoming a popular image in the minds of abolitionists, as is revealed in an 1839 letter written to Garrison, published in The Liberator. After "imploring our brothers in the name of the bleeding slave," Edwin Fussell, asked, "do we not yet hear the yell of the bloodhound, as he fastens his fangs in the quivering flesh of the terror-stricken fugitive!" 47 The runaway advertisements and stories culled from Southern newspapers by Garrison, Weld, and the Grimké sisters provided readers with an unadulterated look at the horrors of Southern slavery. However, while Angelina Grimké believed that "facts" would set the United States on the path of emancipation à la Great Britain, she was also aware of their limitations. "Until the pictures of the slave's sufferings were drawn and held up to the public gaze," Grimké wrote, "no Northerner had any idea of the cruelty of the system." Without the pictorial representation bringing the horrors of slavery to life, it never entered Northerners' "minds that such abominations could exist in Christian, Republican America." 48 Grimké echoed Garrison's sentiments as well as those of other members of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who believed that images and pictures held a privileged place in their ability to elicit empathy and sympathy. 49 Abolitionists relied on anecdotal evidence to prove the efficacy of visuals, as they hoped that America's changing conception of pain and suffering would help them win the empathy and sympathy of their countrymen. 50 Bringing to life the very moment before death, the Anti-Slavery Almanac provided readers with a visual of the same bloodhound hunt and murder on Cat Island that was vividly described in Slavery As It Is. 51 While the slave-hunting canine motif was growing in popularity, the pictorial representation of the hunt and murder of the Louisiana man demonstrates the impact that abolitionists believed that images of such attacks could have in evoking empathy from audiences. The fugitive's final moments, spent in unimaginable pain and unadulterated horror, revealed the suffering of enslaved persons, the brutality of enslavers, and the violence inherent to the system in which they were both involved.
The inclusion of this image in the Anti-slavery Almanac was an overt appeal to readers' empathy; however, the authors of the Almanac also seem to have included Christian imagery as an appeal to the religious sensibilities of its audience. 52 The enslaved person's outstretched arms and downward, right-facing gaze mirrors famous mediaeval and early modern representations of the crucifixion of Christ. 53 Abolitionists, many of whom were evangelical believers in egalitarian Christianity, continued to use appeals to Christianity as well as Christian imagery when employing the slave-hunting canine device. 54 Published the same year as the Anti-Slavery Almanac and Slavery As It Is, Reverend Abel Brown Jr. of Pennsylvania wrote a letter to the editor of the Christian Reflector describing, "the poor heart-broken slave making his way to a land of freedom … escaping from a (professed Christian's) bloodhound." 55 Three years later, The Liberator published an article labelling both "depriving (slaves) of the Bible" and the "unrestrained use of the scourge, the rifle and the bloodhound," as being "superlative abuses" that were "indispensable requisites to the support of the slave system." 56 Influenced by the Second Great Awakening, and its conversion model of ending sin, Christian abolitionists felt an increased urgency to emphasize the most "superlative abuses" of slavery, as they attempted to convince Americans that it was a sin that must be stopped. 57 When enslaved persons could not pen their narratives or tell their stories, they wrote through their actions and spoke through their scarred bodies. Enslaved resistance, especially the act of escaping, prompted enslavers to "send bloodhounds to pursue" runaways, providing abolitionists with the powerful and poignant slave-hunting canine trope. Considered one of the worst aspects of Southern slavery, abolitionists increasingly relied on the slave-hunting canine trope as one of their most effective weapons against Southern proslavery arguments, revealing the South to be a land "where the instinct of the bloodhound is improved by pursuing, overtaking, and reveling in human flesh." 58 Resistance, the "bloodhound bill," and the coming of the American civil war Starvation, the bloody whip, the chain, the gag, the thumb-screw, cat-hauling, the cat-o'-nine tails, the dungeon, the bloodhound, are all in requisition to keep the slave in his current condition as a slave in the United States. 59 (Frederick Douglass) "Walking amid the hurrying throng" in New York City in 1838, Frederick Douglass gazed "upon the dazzling wonders of Broadway," with the "free earth under" his feet. 60 After meeting William Lloyd Garrison in 1841 at "an antislavery convention in Nantucket," Douglass began lecturing, impressing all who listened with his gift for oratory and his masterful use of language. 61 He delivered the abolitionist message to tens of thousands of listeners during the early 1840s, on lecture tours that brought him from Ohio to Maine. 62 Douglass effectively weaponized spoken and written words in an intellectual, moral, and religious war against slavery. As enslavers deployed dogs to hunt self-emancipating enslaved persons, abolitionists turned alchemists such as Douglass converted this cruel and inhumane action into words, images, and speeches. When he published his narrative in 1845, he wrote about the apprehension and terror he felt when planning his escape, during which he could face a "grim death" by being "overtaken, and torn to pieces by the fangs of the terrible bloodhound." 63 The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was an instant classic, elevating Douglass to a position of fame and prominence in the United States and aboard. However, even though he lived, wrote, and gained fame in the free Northern states, the spectre of the chains of slavery must have felt like a phantom limb, as the fetters very much existed in his mind. In an 1845 speech, he used the bloodhound motif to articulate the paradoxical and ambivalent nature of his newfound freedom and fame, noting that he was "chained in perpetual servitude," and "the bloodhound may chase me down." 64 In August 1845, Douglass travelled far from the long arm of the American law to Great Britain for a 20-month tour to capitalize on his international acclaim. 65 Speaking in the crowded Finsbury Chapel, in London, he expounded on the tortures that American enslaved persons endured, such as "starvation, the bloody whip, the chain, the gag, the thumb-screw, cat-hauling, the cat-o'-nine tails, the dungeon, the bloodhound." 66 Corroborating his own experiences in with advertisements from Southern newspapers published in Slavery As It Is, Douglass told the crowd that he had the "testimony of a thousand witnesses," which he could "give at any length, to prove the truth" of his statements. 67 Causing the crowd "much sensation," Douglass asserted that the bloodhound is regularly trained in the United States, and advertisements are to be found in the southern papers of the Union, from persons advertising themselves as bloodhound trainers, and offering to hunt down slaves at fifteen dollars a piece. However, Douglass drew "loud cheers" from the audience when he enjoined them to tell enslaved persons that, "the whip is burned … the chain is no longer for his limbs" and that "the bloodhound is no longer to be put upon his track." 68 Frederick Douglass's success, coupled with the Mexican-American War and the widening sectional chasm, catalysed the publication of many fugitive slave narratives, including some written by men who had escaped from slavery decades earlier. 69 James W.C. Pennington escaped slavery in 1827 and had "joined together in holy matrimony" Douglass and his wife, Anna Murray. 70 In his 1849 narrative, he reflected on his escape from slavery, during which he was "thrown into a panic by the appearance of a party of gunners, who passed near me with their dogs." 71 Pennington's "feelings" were "always outraged" when he heard others speak of enslavers as "kind masters" rather than "human blood-hounds" who tracked freedom-seeking enslaved persons and subjected them to unthinkable anguish. 72 Facing the "danger of ferocious dogs, and blood thirsty slave hunters, who were so rapidly approaching," Henry Bibb ran with his little daughter in arms but stumbled and fell, scratching the arm of little Frances with a brier, so that it bled very much; but the dear child never cried, for she seemed to know the danger to which we were exposed. 73 With the "dogs soon at" their "heels," Bibb and his family were "compelled to stop, or be torn to pieces." 74 Relying on the power of visuals to evoke empathetic responses from readers, Bibb and his publisher included in his 1849 narrative this harrowing illustration of his family being hunted. 75 In his narrative, Bibb detailed his attempted escapes from slavery and rhetorically asked, "what would induce me to take my family and go into the Red river (sic) swamps of Louisiana among the snakes and alligators" or to be "hunted down with blood hounds"? "Nothing," he answered; "nothing but the strongest love of liberty, humanity, and justice to myself and family." 76 Frederick Douglass, who had started publishing an anti-slavery newspaper called the North Star upon returning from Britain, wrote of the powerful empathetic and emotional response that Bibb's story evoked from its readers. "The horrors of slavery" and the "accumulated outrages inflicted on the slave," such as being hunted by bloodhounds, "must stir the blood of every reader who has the pulsations of a man." Douglass hoped that Bibb's narrative would be "widely circulated through out (sic) the country." 77 This was a country, Bibb contended, in which "almost the whole moral, political, and religious power of the nation are in favor of slavery, and aggression against liberty and justice." 78 Reflecting on the hypocrisy of slavery in the United States, William Wells Brown lamented American democracy and its "democratic whips-its republican chains-its evangelical blood-hounds" in his 1847 narrative. 79 Brown openly discussed the futility of painting a true picture of the horrors of slavery, noting in a speech that "slavery has never been represented; slavery never can be represented." 80 Similar to other formerly enslaved persons and abolitionists who struggled to articulate the boundless cruelties of slavery, he provided readers with a litany of "some of the most revolting and atrocious scenes which can be imagined," such as "slave-prisons, slave-auctions, handcuffs, whips, chains, bloodhounds, and other instruments of cruelty." Brown believed that, if others read about "these implements of torture," it would be "enough to make humanity bleed at every pore." 81 If words could only provide a sketch of the barbarities of slavery, he hoped that illustrations would add colour and detail to the canvas of horror. 82 During an attempted escape during his teenage years, Brown was hunted by bloodhounds which caused him to take "refuge in the top of a tree." 83 Although unsuccessful in his first attempt to run away, he eventually fled enslavement in 1834, later working for Elijah Lovejoy, lecturing for the American Anti-slavery Society, and becoming the first African American novelist. Brown began a lecture tour in Great Britain in 1849, but his stay was prolonged when the United States Congress passed the Compromise of 1850. 84 The Compromise, which strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, requiring northern states to return self-emancipated enslaved persons to their enslavers, served as a defining moment in the abolitionist movement as well as in the lives of formerly enslaved persons, as many, including William Wells Brown and Henry Bibb, were forced to relocate to Canada, the British Isles, and Europe. 85 Termed the "Bloodhound Bill" by abolitionists, the Fugitive Slave Act "turned Antebellum America" upside down, galvanizing abolitionists and demonstrating the willingness of many abolitionists to engage with political issues on the national level. 86 In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act, the usage of weaponized slave-hunting canines by enslavers and their allies increased. All the while, formerly enslaved persons and their abolitionist allies doubled down on their verbal weaponization of the slave-hunting canine motif. Feeling a renewed sense of purpose, abolitionists attacked the Fugitive Slave Act verbally, visually, and poetically. Frederick Douglass, who had drifted away ideologically from Garrison, delivered a speech addressing the "vile, infernal law," in which he animalized slave-catchers by postulating that "the man who takes the office of a bloodhound ought to be treated as a bloodhound." 87 The Fugitive Slave Act also gave rise to a vast array of illustrations and political cartoons, many of which effectively used slave-hunting canines to better emphasize the injustice and inhumanity of the law. In a lithograph published in 1851, Peter Kramer used a familiar, poignant motif, in which a mother is chased by slave-hunters and their dogs. Abolitionists frequently relied on depictions of parents with children being hunted by dogs, hoping that viewers' parental and familial instincts would allow them to empathize with the freedom-seeking enslaved persons. The veracity of these abolitionist accounts was corroborated by formerly enslaved persons such as Bibb, who, in his narrative, described running from bloodhounds with his "little daughter in arms." 88 89 Kramer's politicized rendition shows two dogs accompanying a handcuff-carrying marshal along with Daniel Webster, whose support of the Fugitive Slave Act gained him the ire of abolitionists. 90 In 1852, a similar lithograph was published in which a mother carrying a newborn and holding the hand of another child is escaping pursuing hunters and dogs. Webster, with a copy of the Fugitive Slave Act in hand, again leads the hunt, but this time he is accompanied by Michigan Senator Lewis Cass and Austrian General Baron Haynau. 91 A notable difference in this lithograph is that the dog has become anthropomorphized, as in Frederick Douglass's belief that "the man who takes the office of a bloodhound ought to be treated as a bloodhound." 92 Both images, as well as most other abolitionist texts and visuals published before 1850, depicted the self-emancipating enslaved person being chased, cornered, or caught by dogs. Whereas some historians find images of dogs attacking enslaved persons, who were "universally presented" as "disempowered," proliferating after the Fugitive Slave Act, a closer examination of these images demonstrates that the Fugitive Slave Act was actually a turning point, after which self-emancipating enslaved persons were often depicted as empowered resisters of their canine captors. 93 Published shortly after the Fugitive Slave Act, abolitionist printer William Harned's illustration, "No Higher Law," shows Webster presenting a letter supporting the Fugitive Slave Act to a king, who sits on a throne, resting his arm on human skulls and a copy of the Act. In the background of the illustration, an enslaved mother is once again fleeing with her children. However, right behind the throne, the artist depicts an incredible act of resistance that breaks from abolitionist tradition. Six dogs lead a hunting party attempting to capture a runaway, but the man is not depicted as disempowered or passive. In defiance of the racialized slave-canine power dynamic, he is shown-chest out with a look of resolute strength-kneeling above a slain dog, while pushing down a second dog with his left hand and seizing another by the throat with his right hand. This illustration's depiction of resistance signifies that, around the time of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, some abolitionists began viewing enslaved persons as active resisters to slavery, capable of self-emancipating and effecting change through their actions and words.
The "miserable wicked fugitive slave business" of the Compromise of 1850 prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, one of the most widely read and influential works of the nineteenth century. 95 In authoring the work, Stowe relied on slave narratives, interviews with formerly enslaved persons, Southern newspapers, and Weld's Slavery As It Is, which she kept "in her work basket by day," sleeping "with it under her pillow at night, till its facts crystallized into Uncle Tom." 96 Armed with the testimony of formerly enslaved persons and a compendium of Southern newspapers compiled by Weld and the Grimké sisters, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin to "awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race." 97 Stowe "exploited so brilliantly," a "readership" that had already been carved out by "slave narratives" and then repackaged a romanticized work of fiction that, by her own words, was only "something faintly approaching the worst" of slavery. 98 In one of the most compelling moments in Uncle Tom's Cabin, an enslaver tells his daughter Eva the story of an enslaved person named Scipio, who was mauled by dogs during an attempted escape. With his enslavers and their bloodhounds hunting him, "as men hunt a deer," Scipio found himself cornered in an "impenetrable thicket of cane." But he "fought the dogs right gallantly. He dashed them to right and left, and actually killed three of them with only his naked fists." 99 The "hunt of Scipio" was brought to life in visual form in two of the book's earliest editions, as Stowe and her publishers knew the importance of visuals in bringing to life the scenes to which words often could not do full justice. In the "Illustrated Edition," published in late 1852, Hammatt Billings created an artistic rendition of the hunt. Scipio is shown pinning down a dog with his right arm, while his right leg covers another hound, while a third dog sinks its teeth into Scipio's back. 100 In a "particularly famous" 1853 edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, internationally renowned illustrator George Cruikshank brought events from the novel to life in the vivid style that had gained him acclaim during his years illustrating for Charles Dickens. 101 Though largely ignored by historians, the "hunt of Scipio" was one of only twenty-seven engravings made by Cruikshank, demonstrating the emotional significance of this scene. Cruikshank's rendition, perhaps even more graphic than Billings', shows Scipio holding down a hound with his right arm while two other dogs tear into the runaway's flesh. 102 Readers must have winced in vicarious agony, feeling Scipio's pain and desperation. Stowe validates readers' emotions and channels them through the words of the innocent, almost angelic child, Eva, who, upon hearing the story, burst "into tears, and sobbed convulsively" as she admitted that "these things sink into my heart." 103 Continuing the trend of depicting resistance to slave-hunting canines that began in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, both Stowe and her illustrators also emphasized Scipio's ability to fight back against the canine tools of enslaver power. 104 He is depicted as fighting "the dogs right gallantly," in both illustrations, most notably in that by Cruikshank, which presents Scipio, surrounded by four deceased hounds, with his left arm outstretched in a clenched fist of defiance. 105 Capitalizing on the commercial success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, William Wells Brown wrote Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, in 1853. Brown combined the international acclaim gained from his narrative with the sentimental novelistic milieu to produce a work that cut to the core of the most poignant issues of slavery. Armed with his firsthand experience with bloodhounds as well as the knowledge of the emotional response evoked by his narrative, Brown emphasized the slave-hunting canine trope in Clotel, highlighting violent resistance to canine captors.
In this widely successful work of fiction centreing on one of President Jefferson's enslaved children, Brown designates Georgina, an educated abolitionist, as the book's moral compass. In a scene reminiscent of the retelling of the hunt of Scipio in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Georgina recounts the story of Harry, who had "attempted to escape by swimming across a river," but "the dogs were sent in after him." She emphasizes his brave act of resistance to the dogs, noting that "Harry had great courage and fought the dogs with a big club." Seconds away from subduing the dogs and escaping, Harry was shot, and "the poor fellow was killed." An illustration captures his courageous fight against the dogs the moment before he is shot. 106 107 Though their attempted escapes were unsuccessful, both Harry and Scipio resisted and violently thwarted their canine captors. Only an enslaver's bullet stopped the runaways. Cases of enslaved persons resisting weaponized hounds were documented in slave narratives dating back to that of Charles Ball, but by the early 1850s, images of empowered runaways vanquishing their canine foes had truly entered the abolitionist canon. Disrupting the racialized slave-canine power dynamic, canine weapons of white enslaver power, which for the last several years had been shown in abolitionist literature chasing enslaved persons, were now being resisted, stymied, and killed.
Illustrations became the most common medium to depict this transformation of the empowered slave resisting canines. In 1853, Richard Hildreth's fictional slave narrative, The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive, was updated and resold in an illustrated edition. In this new edition, Hildreth added a dramatic scene in which the narrator's friend, "Wild Tom," was pursued by a "hunting party." Animalized in much the same way as Scipio, Hildreth described Tom as bounding "through the piny (sic) woods like a deer" before "a rifle shot grazed his side." The overseer, who was "leading in the chase" for Tom, "sprang from his horse, and attempted to seize" Tom, but was overpowered by the wounded fugitive. 108 109 Hildreth paints artistic life into this climactic act of resistance in an illustration in which Tom chokes the overseer with one arm while attempting to stab a dog with the other. This scene and its accompanying illustration, added over fifteen years after the narrative's original publication, demonstrates the acceptability in abolitionist circles of violent black resistance to slave-hunting canines and the open defiance of the slave-canine power dynamic imposed on enslaved persons by Southern enslaver culture.
Twelve years before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and fifteen years before the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Charles Ball wrote about bloodhounds who "mangled" an enslaved person "in a shocking manner." 110 However, it was Ball's act of violent defiance against the bloodhounds that helped situate the republication of his narrative within the context of slave resistance that was becoming increasingly popular by midcentury. His work was reprinted in three editions in 1853 and 1854, allowing a new audience to read about his act of resistance against slave-hunting bloodhounds, in which he used his former enslaver's sword to cut "open the head of the largest and fiercest of the dogs." 111 No longer viewed as an early aberration of black resistance, Ball's fight against his potential canine captors now fits into a pattern of an increasing celebration of black resistance.
The slave narratives of the 1840s depicted the experiences of formerly enslaved persons who were hunted by dogs, helping to appeal to readers' empathy while further popularizing the slave-hunting canine abolitionist trope. Ushering in a transitional period shortly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, freedom-seeking enslaved persons were increasingly portrayed as empowered resisters of the dogs. Depictions of violent resistance to slave-hunting canines represented an immediate challenge and a serious disruption to the long-existing power structure in the slaveholding South. These popular images of resistance also helped reinforce the perception of formerly enslaved persons' strength and masculinity while also demonstrating their willingness to fight against their former enslavers.

Conclusion
Is that as bad as running white men down with blood hounds? 112 (James McElroy, Union Prisoner of war at Andersonville) The increased frequency of images of resistance to slave-hunting canines reflected the "revolutionary character" to which abolitionism had transitioned during the 1850s. 113 By the time that Ball's narrative was commercially reprinted for the final time in 1858, the United States was on the precipice of war. In November 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected President, and over the next six months, several Southern states seceded from the Union, P.G.T. Beauregard fired on Fort Sumter, and the nation entered into civil war. The ink on Lincoln's call for 75,000 volunteers had barely dried before free men of colour began offering their services to the Union. Not even a week had passed since Fort Sumter when black abolitionist Alfred Green delivered a speech urging African Americans to "take up the sword" and gain "recognition as citizens" by fighting against the secessionist South. 114 That same day, a letter to the editor of Frederick Douglass's Douglass' Monthly asserted that the "descendants of Africans should take a prominent part in a war." Douglass gave this letter his "entire approval," believing that it encapsulated what was "passing in the minds of all thoughtful colored men of the North." 115 Demonstrating the eagerness of many African Americans to fight for freedom, images of violent resistance to slave-hunting canines continued to proliferate during the Civil War. 116 Painted during the first year of the conflict, Richard Ansdell's The Hunted Slaves showed a self-emancipating enslaved person-his newfound freedom symbolized by the broken shackles attached to his left hand-fighting three dogs. This man, who is fighting for his life, represents the strength and resolve of enslaved resistance as well as the defence of a fragile freedom, embodied by his wife in the painting. One of the dogs has already been destroyed, showing the vulnerability of the enslaver system in the face of black resistance. However, the fight is ongoing as two of the dogs remain poised to attack. Freedom has not yet been won, but the man, standing in for countless other formerly enslaved persons, is ready and willing to fight and die for the cause.
By the summer of 1861, Frederick Douglass had grown frustrated with the government, as he clamoured for "an open recognition of the Negro's manhood, his rights as such to have a country, to bear arms, and to defend that country." As many black leaders turned their efforts to persuading "Northerners to grant African Americans the respect they deserved," the popularization of images, narratives, and stories depicting masculine resistance to slave-hunting canines may have helped shape the image of an empowered black soldier in the minds of some Northerners. 117 As the war progressed, self-emancipated enslaved persons continued to take "their freedom into their own hands," crossing into Union lines, and eventually helping to prompt the passage of the Second Confiscation and Militia Act in July 1862. 118 Those who crossed into Union lines provided Northerners with "evidence of the horrors of slavery, including open wounds caused by blood-hounds." 119 Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation to the public after the Battle of Antietam in September of that year. Passed into law on 1 January 1863, the Proclamation promulgated the reception of African Americans "into the armed service of the United States," prompting Douglass to offer his services by recruiting volunteers to wear "the brass letters, U.S." 120 Images of self-emancipated enslaved persons resisting canine captors continued to be published as African Americans began serving in the Union Army. 121 Published during an election year, the etching titled "The Bloodhound Business," which showed a freedom-seeking enslaved person defending his wife and daughter from dogs, served as a reminder of the barbarity of the enslaver system, as well as the ability of formerly enslaved persons to fight bravely in the face of danger.
Weaponized as tools of control and extensions of their power, enslavers employed slave-hunting canines as instruments of violent terror during the half-century leading up to the Civil War. Self-emancipated enslaved persons carried stories of the dogs to the North, many of whom also bore the scars of their encounters. One of the most widely used and highly effective abolitionist tropes of the antebellum period, the slavehunting canine evoked empathy, compassion, and indignation from Northerners. After taking on a tone of resistance around the time of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, the years leading up to the Civil War saw self-emancipating enslaved persons frequently depicted as violently resisting the dogs. Far from being a "historically conditioned … postfacto justification of Union policy," the images published during the Civil War represented the continuation of a decade-long tradition of depicting freedom-seeking enslaved persons asserting their strength while defending themselves and their loved ones from slave-hunting canines. 122 In the latter years of the Civil War, a complete subversion of the antebellum Southern enslaver power dynamic was underway, evidenced most powerfully in a Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper drawing titled "Terrible Fight with Bloodhounds." 123 The illustration, which likely depicts a "dog company," was a stark reminder of Southern brutality but also of the dignity and bravery of black soldiers, who were no longer depicted as enslaved persons, but rather as free men wearing Union blues to signify their potential citizenship. 124 The same canine foes who had for years been depicted chasing, hunting, and terrorizing self-emancipating enslaved persons were now being bloodied, impaled, and defeated on the battlefield. 125 The reversed dynamic was not lost on the black soldiers who encountered "dog companies," as the men of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, which was composed of numerous self-emancipated enslaved persons and "contained scarcely a freeman," killed "their old tormentors with great relish." 126 Readers opening their Harper's Weekly on 21 November 1863, would have encountered a familiar illustration of men being hunted and attacked by dogs. However, on this date, two days after Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" reminded Americans that their nation was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal," readers would have noticed a stunning and profound change in the hunting canine trope. 127 For the first time, the men being hunted were white.
"Created equal," the white soldiers fled with the same feeling of terror and grimaced with the same pain felt by the scores of self-emancipating enslaved persons who had for years suffered the same fate.
As reports circulated of Confederates using bloodhounds and other dogs to hunt white Union soldiers and prisoners of war, illustrators and publishers used similar imagery from decades of slave hunts to show readers the brutality of the Confederates. In 1864, The Liberator noted that "there is no room for doubt that the rebels employ bloodhounds to track and catch Union men." 129 Later that year, a book written by a former prisoner of war named John James Geer informed readers that "the thought of being pursued by bloodhounds was horrifying in the extreme" and that he had seen "two large packs at different times upon our track." 130 While Captain Geer escaped from Macon Prison, some of the most horrific reports of Confederates using bloodhounds and other dogs to hunt Union soldiers came from the notorious Andersonville Prison. Testimonies abounded of attempted escapees who were torn "in pieces," and "torn by them shockingly," often returning to the prison with "marks of the teeth of the dogs." 131 Confederates weaponized dogs in military prisons against white Union soldiers in much the same manner that they employed them against enslaved persons during the antebellum period: with the expressed purpose of hunting human beings and striking fear into the hearts of those who threatened to upend the power dynamic through resistance and escape. The Northern press knew the emotional weight that stories and images of dogs hunting humans carried. While reading abolitionist texts and viewing illustrations, white Northerners vicariously experienced the feelings of being hunted. However, during the Civil War, white Union soldiers experienced these emotions firsthand.
Serving proudly for the Union, many black soldiers found themselves targeted in the same way and with the same types of dogs as the enslaved persons who had attempted to self-emancipate before the Civil War. However, white soldiers and prisoners of war were also indiscriminately hunted and terrorized by Southerners' weaponized canines. The racial implications and the profound significance of these developments were not lost on soldiers on either side of the conflict. When Southerners repeatedly asked, "'Why are you-uns puttin' n-s in the field to fight we-uns for?' The questioner was always silenced by the return interrogation from Northerners: 'Is that as bad as running white men down with blood hounds?'" 132 Remembered in the postbellum years as "bloodthirsty and cruel," and feared by formerly enslaved persons "more than the lash or musket," Cuban and Siberian bloodhounds were killed, bred out of existence, and banned by some states during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. 133 However, slave-hunting canines never left the minds of many formerly enslaved persons. The WPA Slave Narratives contain numerous stories such as Aunt Cheyney's that reveal the horrors inflicted upon enslaved persons by dogs. Robert St. Ann recalled the story of "a youngster run away," who was caught by bloodhounds and subsequently buried alive, while Annie Grove Scott remembered her Uncle Bill, who was caught by bloodhounds and "tore to pieces" until "dere (sic) wasn't nothing left to bury." 134 However, many formerly enslaved persons also remembered incredible acts of resistance, during which "the slave would kill the bloodhound." 135 Will Glass told interviewers about his Uncle Anderson, who once "bit a dog's foot off" during an attempted escape. When asked "why he did that," he replied, "the dog bit him and he bit him back." 136 Bred out of existence while the Lost Cause purposely obscured its gory history, slave-hunting canines were kept alive in the memories of formerly enslaved persons and in the preservation of the legacy of nineteenth-century abolitionists.