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ABOLITIONIST GEORGE W. CARLETON OBSERVED IN 1857 THAT IN SLAVEholding 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...