“The Zest of Sport”

This chapter argues that our rhetorical framework for understanding slave hunting as sport comes from the abolitionist trope of the courageous runaway pursued by the bloodhound, but is reinforced by memories of slave hunting in the oral histories collected by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. It examines a rare recorded example of a case where slave hunting for retrieval of property evolved into a sadistic game in the Motley and Blackledge trial in South Carolina. A rare exception was planter Oshinsky David Barrow, who lived at the very rich plantation, Afton Villa in Louisiana, and described organized “drives” to find runaways which were undertaken with “the zest of sport”. The use of dogs in the hunting of human beings allowed observers to draw connections between slave hunting and more permissible blood sports. Sporting chance also played a part in the narrative around convict tracking.