By 1865, Union soldiers perceived the bloodhound as a weapon by which the planter class oppressed not only slaves, but white unionists and captured Union soldiers. The savagery of the bloodhounds illustrated what Northerners considered to be the true brutality of the culture of the “Southern chivalry.”
In the war’s second year, newspapers in Iowa began to discuss the new use of bloodhounds in the Southern states as literal instruments of control over Southern Unionists. The Confederate government deployed “negro dogs” against army deserters and those men who resisted the conscription. To the author of one article in the Burlington Hawk-Eye in the spring of 1862, the use of “the blood-hounds of rebellion” against Southern Unionists epitomized …show more content…
These men, long deemed targets for bloodhounds, now fought in the same uniforms and under the same banner as the sons, husbands, and fathers who had enlisted from Iowa’s farms and towns, yet in their deployment of bloodhounds the Confederate army refused to acknowledge the change. Colonel Thomas Wentsworth Higginson, the white commander of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, United States army’s first black regiment, wrote in his memoirs that near Pocataligo, a “a ‘dog company,’ consisting of mounted rifleman with a half dozen trained bloodhounds” attacked a detachment of his regiment. The black soldiers “met these dogs with their bayonets” and “killed four or five of their tormentors with great relish.” They brought the carcass of one of the animals back to camp. Colonel Higginson dispatched its skin north to be “stuffed and mounted” for display at a Sanitary Commission fair in Boston. The killing of the bloodhounds by black men in United States Army uniforms was a propaganda victory for northern abolitionists. A dramatized illustration of the 1st South Carolina’s fight against the bloodhounds misaffiliated with a battle fought several months before the regiment’s muster featured in The Black Phalanx, a postwar history of the service of black …show more content…
The armies of the “Southern chivalry” had been defeated in the field, but the weapon, which epitomized their brutality and power, was not. To kill Butler’s bloodhounds stripped him of his power, deprived him of an instrument by which he asserted the domination of the slaveholding class. The bayoneting of the bloodhounds served as the emasculation of the man: an emasculation necessary to allow the Reconstruction of a South which mirrored the free labor system of the
In the war’s second year, newspapers in Iowa began to discuss the new use of bloodhounds in the Southern states as literal instruments of control over Southern Unionists. The Confederate government deployed “negro dogs” against army deserters and those men who resisted the conscription. To the author of one article in the Burlington Hawk-Eye in the spring of 1862, the use of “the blood-hounds of rebellion” against Southern Unionists epitomized …show more content…
These men, long deemed targets for bloodhounds, now fought in the same uniforms and under the same banner as the sons, husbands, and fathers who had enlisted from Iowa’s farms and towns, yet in their deployment of bloodhounds the Confederate army refused to acknowledge the change. Colonel Thomas Wentsworth Higginson, the white commander of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, United States army’s first black regiment, wrote in his memoirs that near Pocataligo, a “a ‘dog company,’ consisting of mounted rifleman with a half dozen trained bloodhounds” attacked a detachment of his regiment. The black soldiers “met these dogs with their bayonets” and “killed four or five of their tormentors with great relish.” They brought the carcass of one of the animals back to camp. Colonel Higginson dispatched its skin north to be “stuffed and mounted” for display at a Sanitary Commission fair in Boston. The killing of the bloodhounds by black men in United States Army uniforms was a propaganda victory for northern abolitionists. A dramatized illustration of the 1st South Carolina’s fight against the bloodhounds misaffiliated with a battle fought several months before the regiment’s muster featured in The Black Phalanx, a postwar history of the service of black …show more content…
The armies of the “Southern chivalry” had been defeated in the field, but the weapon, which epitomized their brutality and power, was not. To kill Butler’s bloodhounds stripped him of his power, deprived him of an instrument by which he asserted the domination of the slaveholding class. The bayoneting of the bloodhounds served as the emasculation of the man: an emasculation necessary to allow the Reconstruction of a South which mirrored the free labor system of the