An Englishman's Travels In America: His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States - 1857 - By J. Benwell.
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These Dogs Were Very Ferocious,
And, On Approaching The Leashmen, Who Had Them In Charge, They Opened In
Full Yell, And Attempted To Break Loose.
The dogs had just arrived from
Cuba with their keepers, their importation having been caused by the
supposition, that, like the Maroons in Jamaica, who, for nearly thirty
years, defied the colonists there, the Indians would be terrified into
submission.
This, however, turned out to be erroneous; for, on their
first trial, the Indians killed several, and the scheme was very
properly abandoned a short time after.
Such barbarous means were very unjustifiable, although many (to use the
language of the Earl of Chatham, when deprecating a similar course in
the English House of Lords) considered that every means that God and
nature had placed in their hands, were allowable in the endeavour to
bring to a close a war that had cost the Federal Government an immense
amount of blood and treasure. I am of opinion, however, from what I
afterwards heard, that the step was not an altogether popular one in the
eastern and northern states, although it certainly was so in the
southern; it being argued in the public prints there, that as dogs had
been used in hunting down fugitive negroes from time immemorial, the
mere fact of bloodhounds being used instead of mastiffs was a peccadillo
unworthy of name.
The tobacco plant, though growing in many parts of Florida
spontaneously, like the broad-leafed dock in England, is often
cultivated in garden-ground for domestic use, some of the finer kinds
being as aromatic as those of Cuba.
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