The lash and shackles remain the major symbols of physical degradation fixed in historical memory on slavery. Yet, as recounted by witnesses, including slaves themselves, the dog was perhaps a more effective tool for managing labour or even inflicting horrific pain or death on those who defied their masters’ commands. Central to this Atlantic tragedy were black victims who insisted upon their own humanity by innovatively resisting canine attacks that animalized them as prey. Attack dogs thus formed a touchstone for black cultures. Despite learning from mostly local experiences with slave hounds, black resisters widely exhibited uncanny similarities in evading the dogs by using scents to misdirect them, wading in water, hiding from them and, as a last resort, fighting them. The hounds pursued them, extending white power into mountains, swamps and forests with their acute extra-human abilities to scent, hear, outrun, signal, attack, and sometimes execute, black bodies. The ingenuity and perseverance of slaves in fleeing dogs to terrain beyond the plantocracy’s domain later enlivened the abolitionist cause by manifesting the peculiar depravity of slavery.
Socially conditioned, culturally weighted interspecies violence permeated the management of slave societies in the Americas. Slaveholders, slaves and abolitionists all conferred meaning upon, and inferred meaning from, pursuit and punishment by dogs. This pattern formed three mutually defined, entangled cultural circuits. The plantocracy wielded the ‘natural’ antipathy of dogs towards blacks for their own power and prestige, slaves learned how best to survive, and abolitionists described this barbaric contest in emotive appeals for emancipation. As many observers noted, domesticated attack dogs not only hunted those who defied the profitable Caribbean sugar regimes and North America’s later Cotton Kingdom, they dominated black space as terrifying enforcers of labour exploitation. Dogs enforced plantation regimens through quotidian intimidation and closed off fugitive landscapes with acute adaptability to the varied Caribbean and North American terrains of sugar, cotton, coffee or tobacco plantations that they patrolled.
Dogs embodied a crude form of ‘biopower’ for slave societies across the Americas. They optimized the extraction of labour from black bodies by using threats that encouraged compliance, and coercion that enforced biological controls. Dogs secured both the foundations of capitalism, and the white bodies that might enjoy it. The canis familiaris, willingly or not, was an interspecies shaper of racial hierarchy and slavery. Slave dogs subdued human property, enforced legal categories of subjugation, and built efficient economic regimes. The common refrain among slaves of being treated ‘worse than a dog’ was no hyperbole, as many blacks were made subservient by a ‘lesser’ species that was well maintained by the white power it fortified. Training dogs to attack only blacks instantiated racism, as planters interpreted this as confirmation that even dogs ‘knew’ the supposed immutable inferiority of blackness.
As a form of biopower in the slave societies of the Americas, hounds used violence to ‘naturalize’ blackness and whiteness for the sake of the planters’ profits, defined an existential struggle for black humanity, and proved the evils of slavery for abolitionists. This melding crucible has yet to be analysed across the rise and fall of slavery in the Americas. It suggests that, among burgeoning transnational and comparative studies on ethnicities, labour, commodities and social life, histories of slavery could gain from increased attention to interspecies interactions. By examining how the use of dogs proliferated in Atlantic slave societies, spurred transatlantic abolitionist campaigns, and forced enslaved people to use their environments creatively to resist their bondage, this article demonstrates that dogs were major mediators of slavery, race and abolition for over three centuries in the Caribbean and North America.