HAMMOND, James Henry

HAMMOND, James Henry (b. 15 November 1807; d. 13 November 1864), planter, politician.

Born into a middle-class family in the South Carolina upcountry, James Henry Hammond fulfilled many of the expectations of his demanding, financially unsuccessful father. The eldest of eight children, Hammond in 1823 entered South Carolina College in Columbia, a training ground for the state's elite political leadership. He perfected his debating skills as a member of the college's Euphradian Society, serving as valedictory orator for his graduation in 1825. In addition to his scholarly achievements as a young man, Hammond may have had a very active sex life. In an 1826 letter to Hammond, classmate Thomas Jefferson Withers reminisced about feeling the "exquisite touches" of Hammond's "long fleshen pole," and he celebrated Hammond's "furious lunges" at bedfellows. In another 1826 letter, Withers portrayed Hammond "braying, like an ass, at every she-male you can discover" (Duberman, pp. 87–88). Though inconclusive as to whether Hammond had homosexual encounters with Withers or other men, the playful tone of the letters suggests that Withers, Hammond, and their larger social circle had carefree attitudes about male same-sex desire.

In 1828 Hammond opened a law practice in Columbia, and he soon became an articulate spokesman for South Carolina's states' rights, antifederal tariff nullification movement. From 1830 to 1831 he also edited the Southern Times , a nullification newspaper. The political establishment in South Carolina in the late 1820s and early 1830s favored a one-party system dominated by wealthy elites, limited suffrage, a hierarchical social order, and a plantation economy that distinguished it from the democratic, urban, industrial North. By his mid-twenties Hammond was known as an effective advocate for the political establishment, warning of the excesses of Jacksonian democracy. He joined the ranks of the South Carolina aristocracy with his marriage to Catherine Fitzsimons in 1831, acquiring an estate with nearly eleven thousand acres and 147 slaves.

At Silver Bluff, a small South Carolina community across the Savannah River from Augusta, Georgia, Hammond tried to dominate his newly acquired slaves by regulating their religion, marriages, child rearing, and work routines. He aimed to be the quintessential patriarch, controlling the lives of his wife, children, siblings, slaves, and overseers. His notoriety as a nullifier and defender of the status quo helped him win a U.S. congressional seat in 1834. Though he only served one term, he gained national fame by moving that the U.S. House of Representatives refuse any acknowledgment of petitions regarding slavery. Insisting that Congress lacked constitutional authority to act on slavery, Hammond solidified his reputation as a strict constructionist of the U.S. Constitution. He also served as South Carolina's governor from 1842 to 1844, using his tenure to promote his proslavery views.

According to Hammond, slavery served as the foundation for republican societies. He argued that black slaves in the South labored under more favorable conditions than did free laborers in Europe or the North. His belief in black inferiority did not prevent him from having sexual liaisons with two slave women: Sally Johnson and her daughter Louisa Johnson. He apparently fathered a child with both Sally and Louisa, adding two illegitimate children to the eight legitimate children he fathered with his wife, Catherine.

Though Hammond also served as a U.S. senator from 1857 to 1860, rumors of sexual improprieties with a teenage niece may have hampered his two previous attempts at winning a Senate seat. In the fall of 1843, the nineteen-year-old daughter of Hammond's brother-inlaw, Wade Hampton II, told her father that Hammond had attempted to seduce her the previous spring. Hampton used this information to blackmail Hammond, contributing to his Senate defeats in 1846 and 1850. Rumors about the Hampton affair dogged Hammond throughout the 1840s and early 1850s and led to the Hammonds' social ostracism among many elite South Carolinians.

However, Hammond revived his political career in the early 1850s. In the summer of 1850, he served as one of four South Carolina delegates at the first Nashville Convention, a pan-southern convention organized to discuss southern positions on Henry Clay's compromise bill on territorial questions. By the time of his 1857 election to replace A. P. Butler in the U.S. Senate, Hammond had gained a reputation as a cautious statesman. He continued to defend the South's slave system and to deny that the U.S. Congress had any power to regulate slavery, but he also believed that the South had a stronger position inside the Union than outside of it. Consequently, his moderation in the 1850s reduced his later influence in Confederate South Carolina. From the beginning of the American Civil War in April 1861 until his death in the fall of 1864, Hammond criticized Confederate policies that allowed officials to confiscate his food supplies and impress his slaves into labor. Hammond died at Redcliffe, the neoclassical mansion he built in 1858.

Bibliography

Duberman, Martin. " 'Writhing Bedfellows' in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence." Journal of Homosexuality 6, nos. 1–2 (Fall–Winter 1980–1981): 85–101.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

Hammond, James Henry. Gov. Hammond's Letters on Southern Slavery: Addressed to Thomas Clarkson, the English Abolitionist. Charleston, S.C.: Walker and Burke, 1845.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619–1877. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.

Will C. Holmes

see alsopolitical scandals.