Symbolism In 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' By Harriet Beecher Stowe

The image of the bloodhound first rose to prominence in the latter years of the wight, when it was utilized as the critic’s term for the dogs imported to British Jamaica from Cuba for the purpose of putting down a rebellion of runaway slaves and their descendants by means of the animals’ prowess as a means of both pursuit and intimidation. The use of these animals was condemned by parliament and King George III as an un-English adoption of a barbarous Spanish policy dating to the days of Cortez. The American press soon began to adopt the term in their descriptions of Spanish colonial conquests to describe ferocious animals unleashed upon the native people. In January of 1840, the United States government began its own importation of Cuban

Simon Legree, the novel’s epitome of the cruel slaveowner, owns several of the animals. In one scene, Legree tells Tom, while “caressing the dogs with grim satisfaction” at the animals ability to incite fear, "Ye see what ye 'd get, if ye try to run off. These yer dogs has been raised to track niggers; and they 'd jest as soon chaw one on ye up as eat their supper.” This scene is echoed later in the novel when the character of Cassy tells Tom that even “down in the darkest swamps, their dogs will hunt us out, and find us. Everybody and everything is against us; even the very beasts side against us--and where shall we go?" The dogs serve to convey the barbarity of Legree and illustrate the all-encompassing corrupting power of the

Perhaps, no Southerner articulated the argument for the superiority of slave system so prominently in the years immediately preceding than the Edgefield’s District’s own James Henry Hammond. His 1857 defense of slavery on the Senate floor inflamed Northern public opinion and thrust a powerful new term into the American political vocabulary. Hammond justified slavery by arguing that all societies required an underclass to perform menial duties to allow their superiors to advance mankind. He referred to this underclass as “mud-sills.” By formally stratifying society with the slaveowner in a paternal role, Hammond argued, the Southern treatment of its mud-sills was compassionate. This humane treatment, he proclaimed in his most incendiary statement of the speech, could be directly contrasted with Northern society’s treatment of “manual laborers and operatives” who he insisted were on a practical level no different than