On September 8, 1850, as part of a broader set of compromises intended to stave off sectional division over the future of slavery in the United States, a new Fugitive Slave Act passed into law. This act meant that people who escaped slavery could be pursued into free states and captured, re-enslaved, and returned to their enslavers. Under this law, citizens of the North had to cooperate with slave catchers. In this article Aisha Djelid examines the sexual violence inflicted by catchers.

Antebellum Dogs, Catchers, and State-Sanctioned Sexual Assault

In an interview conducted in the 1930s, a formerly enslaved woman named Annie Young vividly recalled how her aunt fled her plantation in the 1850s to escape the sexual clutches of her unnamed enslaver. In order to avoid the impending sexual abuse after her enslaver ‘tried to have her’, Young’s Aunt ran ‘off in de woods.’ In response, he ‘put those blood hounds…on her trail’ and when he finally caught up to her, ‘hit her in de head wid something like de stick de police carry.’  With a cracked skull, bleeding ‘like a hog’, he raped her.

White enslavers and those that worked for them created slave patrols to police and control the movements of enslaved people outside the boundaries of the plantation, and dogs were often their weapon of choice. Those that ran away, such as Annie Young’s aunt, fled slavery out of sheer desperation, and risked coming into contact with blood-thirsty hounds to reach the relative safety of a Northern free state. Unfortunately for Young’s aunt, the dogs captured her, and she did not escape the sexual assault of her enslaver. Instead, white utilisation of dogs as a mechanism of torture, combined with a stick ‘like the police carry’, further enabled her capture and punitive rape.

Many enslaved women fled the boundaries of the plantation for respite from sexual assault, both temporarily and permanently. Mary Reynolds, a formerly enslaved woman interviewed in the 1930s by the Works Progress Administration’s Slave Narrative Project, recalled that her aunt, Cheyney, ran away because her enslaver, Solomon, frequently sexually assaulted her. Reynolds reported that ‘Cheyney was jus’ out of bed with a sucklin’ baby one time, and she run away.’ This baby was likely the result of rape and sexual exploitation at the hands of Solomon. A few hours passed before Cheyney’s enslavers noticed she had not ‘come to the house to nurse her baby’, and then they set the ‘hounds [on her] [which] takes her trail.’ Cheyney’s story ends much in the same way as Young’s, as Reynold’s recalled how the dogs eventually caught up to her and ‘tore her nak[ed] and et the breasts plumb off her body.’ Cheyney survived the ordeal, yet due to the substantial wounds inflicted upon her by the dogs, was significantly disfigured and could no longer breastfeed her baby. Not only did her enslaver consistently rape and enforce motherhood upon her, but he also took away her ability to nourish her child.

Not all patrol encounters were as sexually violent as the cases presented in Young and Reynolds’s testimony, nevertheless many of these interactions still held a sinister and sexualised undertone. For example, Priscilla Gibson recalled that in Texas, her neighbour, Sylvia, ran away to the woods. Her enslaver chased her through the woods with his dogs, who he subsequently ‘let…bite her and tear her clothes.’ These women who ran from the plantation to escape sexual assault found that patrollers policed these liminal spaces beyond the plantation boundaries by following them and perpetuating gendered violence: on one end of the spectrum, they used dogs to strip them, exposing their nakedness and sexualising their bodies, and on the other end of the spectrum they raped and sexually abused them (or sent them back to their enslavers who did so). [3]

[1]    Larry H. Spruill, 'Slave Patrols, “Packs of Negro Dogs” and Policing Black Communities', Phylon, 53 (2016), 42.

[2]    Spruill, ‘Slave Patrols’, 42.

[3]   For work on plantation space and geographical boundaries, see Stephanie M.H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), particularly Chapter 1.

Aisha Djelid recently completed her PhD at the University of Reading. Her research focuses on sexual exploitation and forced reproduction in the antebellum US South.