Every slaveholder well understood the habits of those ferocious dogs, and the manner of training them, and could not have supposed them capable of being rendered useful in capturing Indians. The people of Florida appear to have been stimulated in the commencement and continuance of this war solely by a desire to _obtain slaves_, rather than to _fight Indians_; and while acting as militia or as individuals, they were far more efficient in capturing negroes and claiming those captured by other troops than in facing them on the field of battle. Nor can we resist the conviction, that catching _negroes_ constituted, in the mind of General Jessup, the object for which those animals were to be obtained. Such was evidently his purpose when he wrote Colonel Harney, as quoted in a former chapter, "If you see Powell (Osceola), tell him that I intend to send exploring and surveying parties into every part of the country during the summer; and that I shall send out and take _all the negroes who belong to white people, and he must_ not allow the Indians or Indian negroes to mix with them. Tell him I am sending to Cuba for blood-hounds to trail them, and I intend to hang every one of them who does not come in." We cannot close our eyes to the fact, that General Jessup intended the blood-hounds to be used in catching "the negroes belonging to the white people," as he said. Those white people were mostly slaveholders of Florida; those who proposed in the legislative assembly of that territory the obtaining of the animals, and adopted a resolution authorizing their purchase. They did not wait for the President to act, nor for the "Secretary of War," whom the Governor of Florida characterized as "that distinguished _Carolinian_" on whose judgment and patriotism the people of Florida so much relied.[124] By resolution, Colonel Fitzpatrick was "authorized to proceed to Havana, and procure a kennel of blood-hounds, noted for tracking and pursuing negroes." He was fortunate in his mission. He not only obtained the animals, but he accomplished the journey, and reached St. Augustine as early as the sixth of January, 1840, with a reinforcement for the army of the United States of thirty-three blood-hounds well trained to the work of catching negroes. They cost precisely one hundred and fifty-one dollars seventy-two cents, each, when landed in Florida. He also procured five Spaniards who were accustomed to using the animals in capturing negroes; and as the dogs had been trained to the Spanish language, they would have been useless under the control of persons who could only speak the dialect of our own country.