In 1836, Sardis and Sophia decided to send Rutherford to a preparatory school in Norwalk, Ohio -- a Methodist seminary. It must have given Sardis confidence to send his nephew to the same school as his friend Ebenezer Lane’s boy, William. His bond with Lane was exhibited further by his again choosing to send Rutherford with William to a school in Middletown, Connecticut. Upon informing Rutherford of Sardis’s decision to send Rutherford east, Rud informed his mother, “I will not say I wont (sic) go – but I dont (sic) wish to go.” To which Sophia responded that William would also be attending. He replied that “he would go for he liked Wm Lane better than any boy in Norwalk.”[1]
This friendship grew over the years, and even spilled, briefly, into Hayes’s time at Harvard; Lane enrolled during Hayes’s last semester.
This childhood friendship continued through Hayes’s time in Lower Sandusky. For us, who are interested in learning about Hayes’s life, this friendship is fortuitous if for no other reason than it produces a wonderful piece of correspondence. In an October 10, 1846, letter the young lawyer divulged much to his friend about politics and the important question of slavery. You can read the entirety of this letter here. The following run of entries for this series will draw its inspiration from this exchange.
For this entry, I want to analyze one line in particular:
Hayes wrote, “The ‘blackguard Mexican War’ as Root calls it is but one or two pegs higher in [p]opular estimation than Mr Van Buren’s blood hound war.”
In this quote, he references Joseph Root who was a congressional representative from Ohio. He’s an important figure. He was a leading voice against President James Polk’s move to annex large portions of Mexico, claiming that Polk instigated a war with that nation for that unjust purpose. Former President John Quincy Adams, whom Hayes spoke very discouragingly about, also sided with Root against the war. In fact, once he became a congressional representative in 1847, Abraham Lincoln made a famous “spot” declaration arguing Polk overstepped his authority. The importance of this war with Mexico and the annexation of Texas is essential knowledge for understanding how volatile the slavery question became to American politics in the mid-19th century. Image: President Martin Van Buren
For this entry, I simply want to consider Hayes’s candid use of the phrase “blood hound war.” By using this specific wording, Hayes drew upon (purposely or inadvertently) abolitionist characterizations of the violent abuses of the slave system.
The war that Hayes was referencing here was the Second Seminole War which lasted from 1835 to 1842. This war, which was a response to Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, resulted from U.S. attempts to forcibly move the Seminoles from Florida to west of the Mississippi. In the midst of this conflict, the U.S. army employed the use of bloodhounds to seek out Seminoles and their black allies (fugitive slaves who escaped into Florida). This tactic, even if meant to track the Natives rather than to attack them, was denounced by abolitionists who connected the barbaric use of these dogs by the Spanish “who used ‘blood-hounds’ when ‘hunting down the Indians of the new world.’”[2]
What’s more important, for the purposes of our study, is that by the time Hayes wrote this line the use of bloodhound imagery attacking Seminoles and the freedom seeking enslaved had become popular in abolitionist circles. A number of abolitionist journals, such as the Colored American, the Boston Liberator, and Frederick Douglass’s Rochester North Star, referenced bloodhounds. Joshua Giddings referenced bloodhounds on multiple occasions on the floor of Congress. Hayes was tapping into this rhetorical device.[3]
It’s hard to determine how much Hayes was making a statement about slavery, though. As we’ve learned in previous entries, Hayes had shown himself to be a true Whig partisan. Abolitionists were effective at using the tactic for anti-slavery reasoning, but it also became a cry for those who campaigned against a second Martin Van Buren term, the Democratic incumbent. This partisan devotion might be the true reason for his usage of this phrase. Hayes was so elated by the Whig William Henry Harrison’s triumph over Van Buren that he wrote in his diary, “The ‘whirlwind’ has swept over the land and General Harrison is undoubtedly elected president. I never was more elated by anything in my life…Glorious!” Later, Zachary Taylor, who was wrongly deemed responsible for the use of bloodhounds in the Second Seminole War, also received attacks from abolitionists during his presidential run in 1848. As a Whig candidate, Hayes would be reluctant to attack Taylor. In fact, he wrote in his journal during Taylor’s candidacy, “Work like a trooper for "Old Zack" and enjoy the victory.[4]
Despite this phrase's connection to abolitionist rhetoric, it's most likely Hayes was speaking as a Whig partisan. This leads me to believe that this statement provides another indication of how his political leanings dictated his response to slavery and the larger questions of his day. Hayes's evolution of thought more followed the trajectory of the political trends in the North. As his political allies pushed toward an anti-slavery stance, so did he.
[1] SBH to SB, August 1837, HPLM.
[2] John Campbell, “The Seminoles, the ‘Bloodhound War,’ and Abolitionism, 1796-1865,” in The Journal of Southern History, May 2006, Vol. 72, No. 2, pg. 277.
[3] Ibid., 285-287.
[4] Ibid., RBH Diary, November 5, 1840, and undated entry (Volume I, pg. 234 of published diary).