Perhaps no vice is more general among mankind than a desire to represent ourselves, and our country and government, to mankind and to posterity as just and wise, whatever real truth may dictate. Surely, if General Jessup's official reports be regarded as correct, the people of Florida should have been the last of all who were concerned in that war, to claim the virtue of magnanimity or forbearance, or to charge the Seminoles or Exiles with ferocity or bad faith. The expression that "_it is high time that sickly sentimentality should cease_," manifests the ideas which he entertained of strict, equal and impartial justice to all men. This message was an appropriate introduction to the legislative action which immediately succeeded its publication. It was that legislative body which first gave official sanction to the policy of obtaining blood-hounds from Cuba to aid our troops in the prosecution of this war. Of this atrocious and barbarous policy much has been said and written, and its authorship charged upon various men and officers of Government. At the time of the transaction, it was represented that the blood-hounds were obtained for the purpose of trailing the Indians, and historians have so stated;[123] but for various reasons, we are constrained to believe they were obtained for the purpose of trailing _negroes_. It was well known that these animals were trained to pursue _negroes_, and _only_ negroes. They would no more follow the track of a white man than they would that of a horse or an ox. It was the peculiar scent of the negro that they had been trained and accustomed to follow. No man concerned in obtaining these animals, could have been ignorant that they had, in all probability, never seen an Indian, or smelt the track of any son of the forest.