University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Faculty Scholarship 2-2020 Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas Tyler D. Parry University of Nevada, Las Vegas Charlton W. Yingling University of Louisville,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty Part of the History Commons Original Publication Information Parry, Tyler D. and Charlton W. Yingling. "Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas." 2020 Past & Present 246: 69-108. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtz020 ThinkIR Citation Parry, Tyler D. and Yingling, Charlton W., "Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas" (2020). Faculty Scholarship. 441. https://ir.library.louisville.edu/faculty/441 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/past/article-abstract/246/1/69/5722095 by University of Louisville user on 19 March 2020 SLAVE HOUNDS AND ABOLITION IN THE AMERICAS* I INTRODUCTION In 1824 an anonymous Scotsman travelled through Jamaica to survey the island’s sugar plantations and social conditions. Notably, his journal describes an encounter with a formidable dog and its astonishing interaction with the enslaved. The traveller’s host, a Mr McJames, made ‘him a present of a fine bloodhound’ descended from a breed used for ‘hunting Maroons’ during Jamaica’s Second Maroon War almost three decades earlier.1 The maroons had surrendered to the British partly out of terror of these dogs, a Cuban breed that officials were promoting for use in Jamaica on account of their effectiveness in quelling black resistance.2 Unfamiliar with the breed, the traveller observed its ‘astounding ...aversion ...to the slaves’.