James Henry Hammond was a despicable man. In 1829, with little wealth but much ambition, the twenty-one-year-old South Carolinian pursued Catherine Fitzsimmons—a plain, socially awkward, and fatherless heiress—against her family’s wishes. He wed her two years later, but he did not love her, openly expressing his philosophy of marriage: “Women were made to breed—men to do the work of this world. As a toy for recreation, and one soon tires of any given one for this, or as bringing wealth and position, men are tempted to marry them and the world is kept peopled.” Upon taking control of Catherine’s dowry, he came to own hundreds of slaves, allowing nearly eighty to die over the next decade through either mistreatment or neglect. He sexually abused several female slaves, including Sally Johnson, whom he purchased (along with her infant daughter, Louisa) specifically to be his mistress. He fathered several children with Sally before replacing her with Louisa when the girl turned twelve years old.1
Hammond also sexually molested four nieces, the daughters—ages twelve to nineteen—of his wife’s sister and her husband. As he justified in his diary, “all of them rushing on every occasion to my arms and covering me with kisses, lolling on my lap, pressing their bodies almost into mine, wreathing their limbs with mine, encountering warmly every portion of my frame, and permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them and to rest without the slightest shrinking of it, in the most secret and sacred regions.”2 When his improprieties became known, his brother-in-law worked tirelessly to undermine Hammond’s political career. None of the girls ever married, their reputations and psyches warped by the incidents. Hammond expected Catherine to remain faithful throughout, and she overlooked the episodes with the nieces and with Sally Johnson, even bearing him another child. Not until Hammond refused to forego Louisa’s bed did his wife leave, although she eventually returned.
For over a century, Hammond has featured frequently in Southern histories. In book after book, he shows up as an agricultural reformer, politician, and always very vocal proponent of slavery and the Southern way of life. Moreover, historians use Hammond as a symbol of antebellum Southern manhood, finding in his interactions with women and men, black and white, a series of symbols and performances that enjoin multiple traditions of patriarchy, honor, and mastery. Yet, when historians have examined Hammond’s psychopathology—specifically, the sexual and gendered ways through which he constructed his masculine Self—they have concluded, as did Carol Blesser, that “in almost every respect James Henry Hammond seems to have resembled nothing less than a monster.” On the face of it, Hammond was a monster, a product of a premodern ideal of the white, colonizing, “predatory male” who believed he had full liberty to act on his hormonal impulses, even to the point of rape and molestation.3
Why are historians so taken with Hammond? Clearly, we have fallen into a trap that Daniel Boorstin once labeled “the Law of the Survival of the Self-Serving”: “are we victims, willingly or not, of a Casanova syndrome that puts us at the mercy of the most articulate boasters of the past?” After all, when Hammond confessed in his diary about his intimacy with his nieces—concluding with his plea, “Am I not after all entitled to some, the smallest portion of, credit for not going further?”—to whom was he appealing if not us, his voyeurs and judges? Every time Hammond wrote in his diary, penned a letter, and recorded plantation transactions in his business ledgers, he constructed his patriarchal Self with an audience in mind. Have we too readily accepted his voice as representative of antebellum white Southern manhood? I submit that, when it comes to issues of manhood and the sexual Self, the answer is yes.4
What is at stake here is not the psychopathology of one individual but rather the character of white, patriarchal masculinity in the Old South, of which Hammond was both typical and atypical. He was uncommonly intense in his passion for the elite South and the mythmaking required to sustain it, including his 1858 “Mudsill” Speech in which, upon proclaiming “Cotton is King,” he justified slavery by arguing that white and black lower classes worked as menial laborers so that the upper class could be freed to advance the Southern way of life. Simultaneously, he was recognized by thousands among the white laboring classes almost as one of their own—”the people’s candidate,” as the Charleston Evening News proclaimed, who became governor of South Carolina, and a U.S. congressman and senator. Neither were Hammond’s physical and sexual indulgences atypical, though his eagerness to commit them to the written record certainly was. Most Southern white men expected similar sexual license, but few matched Hammond’s braggadocio.5
Thirty years ago, consideration of the Southern patriarchal Self was unimagined. The poststructuralist work of Michel Foucault was just emerging onto the academic scene, and Southern masculinity studies were unknown. Historians studied what men did, not how they understood themselves. When, in 1982, Bertram Wyatt-Brown published Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, he established honor as the primary formative force in Southern white manhood. Wyatt-Brown uncovered honor as a series of symbols, rules, and expectations drawn from Protestant and classical influences, a code increasingly outdated in early national America, clashing with the rationalism, restraint, and respectability sought by a commercializing middle-class culture. Emotion rather than reason drove Southern manhood: Southern men immortalized valor through vengeance, exalted individual will, and defended reputations through duels and vigilantism. For Wyatt-Brown, fighting, hospitality, and gambling evinced a specific, honor-driven mentality of Southern manhood. By considering how Southern men thought of themselves and why they did so, Southern Honor dramatically altered the historiographic landscape of Southern gender history.6
Conceptually, however, the honor paradigm relied on an essentialist notion of gender differences that would come under attack. For example, Wyatt-Brown characterized male lust as “simply a recognized fact of life. To repress natural impulse was to defy nature itself, leading to prissiness and effeminacy. Outright libertinism also suggested unmanly self-indulgence and inner weaknesses. But a healthy sex life without regard to marriage was quite in order.” Essentialism employs biological impulses and functions to define manhood and womanhood. Male lust? Why it’s merely what men’s biology drives them to do. When James Henry Hammond proclaimed that “women were made to breed,” his was an essentialist definition of gender; and so too was the vigorous, “natural,” male (hetero)sexuality in Wyatt-Brown’s honor-laden South.7
Essentialism was the predominant way of thinking about gender until the rise of women’s history in the 1970s and 1980s. Concerned about essential-ism’s consequences for women’s equality, many women’s historians argued that gender is culturally constructed rather than biologically grounded. Joan Scott complained about the scholarship of the day: “whether domination comes in the form of the male appropriation of the female’s reproductive labor or in the sexual objectification of women by men, the analysis rests on physical difference,” an approach that “assumes a consistent or inherent meaning for the human body—outside social or cultural construction—and thus the ahistoricity of gender itself.” In other words, by limiting understanding of gender to men’s biological ability to physically dominate and to women’s reproductive capabilities (and by judging all gendered relations along that continuum), scholars contributed to continued repression of women.8
Catherine Clinton’s The Plantation Mistress (1983) exemplified this push away from essentialist definitions of gender and toward cultural construction. “White men in the Old South were compulsively preoccupied with deference and authority,” explained Clinton: “Their egos were poised on a precarious pinnacle of honor. Sex in this context, much as in Victorian England, had melodramatic elements; force, potential if not explicit, took center stage. . . . As a result, ante-bellum patriarchs simultaneously emasculated male slaves, dehumanized female slaves, and desexualized their own wives.” Instead of acting out of biological impulses and functions, Clinton’s white Southern men sought to dominate sexual and reproductive systems on their plantations out of deep-seated fears about losing their own authority and virility, fears created and perpetuated by the cultural constructions of slavery and patriarchy.9
Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, historians moved in new historio-graphic directions, including new postmodern methodologies that broke free from essentialism and joined with women’s history to inspire the new field of gender history. Over two decades of women’s history had created a rich and deep historiography of how Southern black, white, and Indian women acted upon ideas of womanhood, but the student of history would have thought these different women lived in different Souths. As Clinton lamented in 1994, “How can we accomplish anything by depicting unintegrated parallel lives?” The same may have been asked of gender history: how could gender scholars integrate their subjects’ lives into a more complete picture of Southern gender if, beyond Wyatt-Brown’s Southern Honor, there was no historiography for Southern manhood to match the abundance of work on Southern womanhood? A true gender history required greater understanding of men and masculinity, a historio-graphic limitation keenly understood by the earliest masculinity scholars. In her analysis of American masculinity, Gail Bederman challenged scholars “to study the historical ways different ideologies about manhood develop, change, are combined, amended, contested—and gain the status of truth.” She encouraged a more discursive construction of masculinity in which manhood is multivalent, regularly reenacted, and unsettled. “I don’t see manhood as either an intrinsic essence [essentialism] or a collection of traits, attributes, or sex roles [cultural construction],” Bederman explained, “Manhood . . . is a continual, dynamic process.”10
There is no reason to imagine that Old South manhood, too, was not continually dynamic, even among elite white men who peopled the planter class. We have had a very static notion of those patriarchs because patriarchy itself is often portrayed as unchanging and constant. In this regard, Clinton’s interpretation was as problematic as Wyatt-Brown’s in that Clinton’s descriptors for patriarchy—”old,” “entrenched,” and “bedrock”—reiterated an unchanging nature of Southern patriarchy, as did Wyatt-Brown’s characterization of Southern honor as “ancient,” “primal,” and “prehistoric.” As exciting as their works were, these historians persisted in portraying manhood, in Scott’s words, as “epiphenomenal, providing endless variations on the unchanging theme of a fixed gender inequality.”11
Consider the historical narrative with which we currently work: Shaped by Old World feudalism and monarchy, patriarchy became the primary form of manhood in colonial America, pervading law, religion, family, and politics. The democratic impulses of the American Revolution collided with patriarchy, as Michael Kimmel explained, because “it freed the sons from the tyranny of the despotic father.” Even as new models of manhood—like the self-made man—appeared in the industrializing North, in the agrarian South, aristocratic conceptions of manhood persisted primarily because of slavery. Southern patriarchs became “anxious” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and willingly compromised privilege to retain hegemony. “In the age of ‘sensibility’ patriarchy was being sentimentalized into paternalism,” concluded Rhys Isaac. But paternalism was just a kinder and more insidious form of patriarchal power, as Eugene Genovese exposed in his analysis of the expectations and obligations between planters and their dependents. This narrative portrays Southern patriarchy as abnormally stable, static, and reactionary over two and a half centuries, notably evolving only once and not very dramatically into paternalism. If we accept, however, that masculinity is always developing and changing, being contested by, amended by, and combining with other ideas of manhood, then we can begin to imagine the dynamism of elite Southern white manhood in the Old South. When we look at any given Southern patriarch, even Hammond, we do not see manhood realized but rather a man becoming.12
Southern patriarchy was performative, meaning that the ideal did not just set standards for masculinity but participated in constructing that reality. As historian Steven Stowe explained, elite actions like dueling or epistolary courtship were affairs “of theater and ideology; it happened and it explained what happened.” Advice literature like Lord Chesterfield’s Advice to His Son provided the theatrical scripts on becoming such a man, and one cannot overstate the Southern upper class’s obsession with Chesterfield. “There are so many polite reflections and useful lessons that no man can be well accomplished either in mind or body but with their perusal,” proclaimed John Ramsey of North Carolina. But as historian Michael Curtin has elaborated, Chesterfield believed it “the duty of the rich and the enlightened to support the myths by which public order was maintained”—recall Hammond’s Mudsill Speech—and his letters “appeared to represent manners at their most cynical, expedient, and immoral light.” Chesterfieldian manhood encouraged the individual to use institutions and people for his own ends: “There is hardly anybody good for every thing, and there is scarcely anybody who is absolutely good for nothing.” Historians have demonstrated time and again how Hammond and other Southern patriarchs exploited slavery, marriage, academies and universities, the market, the law, and everyone around them for their own manly advancements.13
Yet, since they were humans and not just actors, Southern patriarchs struggled with Chesterfield’s advice. What Laura Edwards has argued for Southern law—that it “continually asserted the power of white manhood” precisely because “that power was neither complete nor stable in practice”—was true for all structures in which patriarchs and patriarchs-in-training operated. From the law to slavery, families to churches, courtship to marriage, duels to politics, becoming occurred within rigid and very public institutional venues that created tension between personal satisfaction and public expectations—between what one was and what one thought the performative script dictated he be. Consider, for example, Cyrus Stuart. The orphaned son of a blacksmith, Stuart attended a South Carolina academy, read Chesterfield, and aspired to become a Southern patriarch. He understood the ideal before him, but he failed in the testing. He experienced conflict in the academy, was rebuffed in courtship, stumbled in oration, was unable to overcome self-doubt, and failed to separate illusion from reality. He pursued a planter’s daughter, hoping courtship and marriage would elevate him to patriarchal manhood (as it had for Hammond), but alas: “I thought I could insinuate myself into her favour, this I only hoped, for none ever had a better nack of hoping than I have.” One need only peruse Stuart’s and other aspiring patriarchs’ diaries and letters to find the repressed emotions, compulsive insistence on manliness, and obsession with self-control. More established men like Hammond confessed in their later years that they found the ideal hollow and unfulfilling: “My life is a blank, all daily sorrows aggravated by my follies.” Even younger men, however, sensed the lie: “I seem happy & cheerful & hopeful,” reflected North Carolinian Henry Craft, “What a liar the seeming is.” Seeming is not becoming: seeming is performance, and in many ways the patriarchal Self was always performing the scripts.14
So when a wave of modernizing forces—democracy, individualism, industrialization, consumerism, evangelicalism, romanticism, sentimentalism—crashed against the South in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Southern patriarchal performance responded in order to sustain the sense of entitlement and self-aggrandizement that characterized their eighteenth-century aristocratic script. Over the past fifteen years, a flurry of historical scholarship has drawn attention to these forces, the most powerful of which was the market economy. For example, Diane Barnes explored how industrialization facilitated social ambition and mobility among Petersburg, Virginia, artisans and laborers. Such self-made men, striving to achieve the type of respectability promoted by the patriarchal ideal, ideologically (and awkwardly) blended their commitment to free labor with a commitment to slavery. Other historians have found comparable scenarios among the Creeks, Choctaws, and other Native Southern peoples. As an expanding market economy offered refinement to those beyond the upper classes, planter-class hegemony faced gradual diffusion, requiring responses from the patriarchy. John Mayfield demonstrated how the consequential strain on Southern patriarchal manhood became a central theme of regional literature in which writers like William Gilmore Simms and Johnson Jones Hooper mocked self-made aspirations. Beyond literature, patriarchs developed a rhetoric of mastery that appealed to yeoman farmers who controlled small worlds, binding the two classes in common political interest. White Southern patriarchs reacted, as Ted Ownby noted, by “self-consciously” constructing masculinity to resist “interference from outside the region.” The educational process became a way to “manufacture” men. In her study of military academies, Jennifer Green concluded that military education dictated the rules of Southern patriarchy to an emerging middle class; likewise, Lorri Glover has shown how education and refinement pushed elite white boys into reactionary civic roles and racial stances.15
Sentimentalism and an accompanying emphasis on affectation also swept into the Old South. Patriarchy faced a modernizing childhood in which preteen whites were freed from labor, educated, increasingly viewed as innocents, and pampered with love. Correspondingly, women had to become more affectively and physically available to meet the emotional and material demands of childrearing. Family sizes grew smaller; sibling relationships grew more intense; children became more distinct from adults in appearances and activities. More affectionate and intimate families strengthened the nuclear family at the expense of extended kinship. New expectations of mutual love and companionship eroded more traditional concerns over lineage, property, and control. Anya Jabour’s work on William and Elizabeth Wirt’s companionate marriage, for example, demonstrates how emotional fulfillment and romantic love offered alternative models of marriage to those based on male domination and female submission. And as evangelicalism put new expectations on masculinity, including an attack on those “licit vices” so commonly associated with Southern patriarchy, men faced greater moral pressures from churchgoing wives.16
Despite the Chesterfieldian script, these modernizing forces required every Southern patriarch to negotiate his becoming against his seeming, pitting his Self against his performance. Southern patriarchs’ diaries regularly reflect this contest: a dispassionate persona simply records thoughts on the weather, local politics, a recently read book, or business transactions without any hint of personal investment, because the scripts of manhood required him to think of those things; an emotional persona wrestles with love, lust, family, courtship, paternal responsibilities, and other demands of manhood. Consequently, in comparison to the dispassionate voice, the emotional investment in manhood always comes off as overly dramatic. “I think that I am too ambitious,” opined Cyrus Stuart, “ever to be successful in my under takings, yet I will endeavour to acquire that equinimity of temper which is absolutely necessary to make a great man.” Mississippian Henry Hughes pleaded with God: “Please help me. Push me on. I am half frightened. I am not. It is true. I must be the Greatest mortal man that can be; I must be the best mortal man that can be. I am God’s Favorite.”17
The most intimate realm in which negotiation between Self and performance took place was sexuality. Just as they were to be physically aggressive and emotionally restrained in the public sphere, men were to exhibit similar qualities sexually. Failure to meet one of these qualities required exaggeration of the other. In the public realm, for example, when emotions could not be controlled, physicality and aggression were often amplified—duels, slave whippings, crimes of passion. In the household, uncontrolled emotions often resulted in physical abuse and forced sex with wives and slaves. Consider, for example, William Byrd II’s employment of sexual power to assert his masculine authority in a moment of emotional discordance: “In the afternoon my wife and I had a little quarrel which I reconciled with a flourish. Then she read a sermon in Dr. Tillotson to me. It is to be observed that the flourish was performed on the billiard table.” Although Byrd lived in the early eighteenth century, he subscribed to the same type of advice literature as antebellum planters would, with the same emphasis on performance as a gentleman. And so, on the billiard table—a very male space—he won the quarrel and reestablished husband over wife by “flourishing” her, a refined term that relates more about his satisfaction in his gentlemanly performance than the act itself.18
At its core, Chesterfieldian advice was misogynistic, casting women as persons to be used rather than as people to love: “Every man and his wife hate each other cordially, whatever they may pretend, in public, to the contrary. The husband wishes his wife at the devil, and the wife certainly cuckolds her husband.” Still, marriage was key to both seeming and becoming a man. In an 1826 letter, Jeff Withers mocked James Henry Hammond’s eagerness to find a wife: “And you’ll ‘be damn-d if you don’t marry’?” Hammond did find that wife, and Catherine Fitzsimmons provided him the things he needed to become a Southern patriarch—a plantation from which he could perform patriarchal manhood and a wife through which he could perform patriarchal sex. “To get children, it is true, fulfills a department of social & natural duty,” he responded to Withers, but if Catherine meant anything more to Hammond emotionally, it is difficult to discern. As Steven Stowe recognized, Hammond was “cruelly incisive about the dynamics of romantic wishfulness: at its core was an awkward dichotomy of woman as transcendent lover and honest helper, an uneasy union of passion and utility.”19
Patriarchs-in-training were early introduced to sex as performance; and because in many cases the act was with female slaves, they quickly learned the relationship of power to sex. “The men of the South especially are more indelicate in their thoughts and tastes than any European people,” noted one British commentator in 1842, “and exhibit a disgusting mixture of prudery and licentiousness combined, which may be regarded as one of the effects of the system of slavery, and the early familiarity with vicious intercourse to which it invariably leads.” That “early familiarity” was what nearly every planter’s son experienced in the slave quarters when he “became a man.” That “early familiarity” licensed Robert Newsom of Missouri, after his wife’s death, to purchase Celia to serve as his mistress. For five years, with the silent acquiescence of his daughters who dared not challenge their father’s actions, Newsom repeatedly raped Celia by whom he fathered two children. One night, Celia, wearied and angered by that “early familiarly,” bludgeoned Newsom to death before burning his body in the fireplace. That “early familiarity” led another slave woman, suspecting that her master intended to rape her, to flee into the woods pursued by bloodhounds. “He catched her and hit her in de head wid something like de stick de police carry, she bleed like a hog and he made her have him,” remembered the woman’s niece. That “early familiarity” underlay Anna Matilda King’s demands of her planter husband upon a female friend’s suicide: “Think you not that your sex is too blame? There are too many faithless husbands.” Southerners’ essentialist understanding of the reproductive purpose of the human body and sexual intercourse framed the way they thought of men, but it also granted men sexual license as the more physically powerful gender. Southern society even institutionalized patriarchal sexual liberty to the degree that it recognized an appropriate moment for male infidelity: the “gander months,” the late term of pregnancy when husbands pursued sex outside marriage.20
In most cases, intercourse with female slaves was a different type of performance, one to affirm power more than potency. As Southern sons realized in the slave quarters and Byrd asserted on the billiard table, sex related to more than reproductive desires. In the 1970s, French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that “deployments of power are directly connected to the body—to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures.” Sex is a form of power, and patriarchs could wield their masculine authority almost without restraint.21
Hence, patriarchs had to protect their masculine power from the male Other on the plantation: the black male whose sexual actions they believed they needed to suppress or surpass. On the auction block or when occasionally punished, black men were stripped and exposed. Since masculine power was invested in the phallus, visibility of slaves’ penises contributed to assumptions about sexually charged black men, in contrast to the white patriarchal penis, which remained hidden from view and therefore supposedly controlled. Slave men bragged of their sexual potency and freedom, highlighting the importance they placed on male sexual veracity and colliding with patriarchs’ own sense of sexual virility as a tenet of manhood. Some historians have suggested that patriarchs used slavery to emasculate black men by reducing them to dependents, but patriarchs also actively sought to diminish black manhood by denying male slaves’ sexual access to female slaves (including wives), raping female slaves, and even publically denigrating black male sexuality. One common minstrel song performed in blackface included the lyrics:
Nigger, put down that jug,
Touch not a single drop.
I hab gin him many a hug
And dar you luff him stop.
I kissed him two three times,
And den I suck him dry
Dat jug, he’s none but mine
So dar you luff him lie.
By mocking and even converting black male sexual prowess into male-male intimacy, white performers counteracted the imagined power of the black phallus. The Other is so often a reflection of the Self, however, and patriarchs interpreted black male sexual prowess through an assumption that slaves—as men—were just as boundless in their sexual appetites as white men were allowed to be.22
When a white plantation woman gave birth to a visibly mulatto child, not only did racial lines blur but the child challenged patriarchal manhood because a child’s legal status followed the mother. Children of black men and white women not only violated the equation of blackness with slavery, but they existed independent of Southern patriarchy. Sadly but tellingly, in trials concerning black males accused of raping poor or working-class women, many patriarchs (who restricted sexual contact between black men and white women on their own plantations) demanded their accused slaves be forgiven and returned to them, whether it was rape or not. Continually asserting the power of white manhood, the law often forgave black rapists of unruly women, in effect acknowledging the common bond between black and white men—the boundless male sexual appetite.23
In contrast, when white men had mulatto children with enslaved black women, the children could easily be hidden (and consequently ignored) with their mothers in the slave community, seamlessly assuming dependent roles as slaves. The South’s judicial patriarchy regulated its black and white women’s sexual relations not only as a means of social control but as a way to strengthen male authority over the household. Men also acted in personal and immediate ways to assert that authority. When a white man “flourished” his wife, he asserted his gendered authority; when he raped a slave woman, he declared gender, class, and racial dominance. In neither case was the act exclusively an attack on one woman. Indirectly, it made a statement to the entire household, where wives, children, female and male slaves provided an audience to the patriarch’s sexual power.24
Not surprisingly, if we look at dreams—where no audience existed and men were freed from performance—we find patriarchs emotional, anxious, and confused. Cyrus Stuart dreamt: “O! delicious thought, I lay my neck upon her arms, and put my arm around her and reveled there with sweet kisses on her rudy lips, until We were both overcome by Morpheus. Yet, I woke alone, isolated, and still in celibacy.” “I had her in my arms, in arms which pressed her convulsively, frantically to my bosom . . . “recorded Mississippian Harry St. John Dixon,
My soul was on fire, my brain was dizzy with excitement. I was strangely enthralled, and my feelings defy words. My vile hand felt its way to the sacred grotto of love. Then my arm should have been severed from my body. It was unendurable—nature’s pent up substance flowed from me as I stood. I thought, “it is over,” but it was not. As the flood was subsiding, I found myself lying almost senseless between her downy thighs, wallowing in a deluge of illicit love. . . . I was pursued by my mother. We still travelled on foot, and she spoke of our iniquity lamentably. . . .
Dreams relate sex not as power but as uncontrolled passion, feelings commonly associated more with emerging patterns of romantic love than with Chesterfieldian gentlemanliness. Yet, both men had imbibed Chesterfield well: unconsciously, at least, their recountings concluded with disappointment, loss, and loneliness, as Chesterfield had warned would come from romantic wishfulness.25
There was still hope for Stuart and Dixon because emotional restraint and sexual aggression could be learned, but another quality of patriarchal sexuality was assumed to be innate—that sex should be between a man and a woman. Successful sexual performances demonstrated potency through the conception of children. In this regard, procreation had as much to do with confirmation of masculinity as it did with intimacy, signifying the performative nature of sex as an important instrument in seeming the patriarchal Self.
We should not overlook, then, sex as power among men. Same-gender sexuality was clearly antithetical to Southerners’ conceptualization of the reproductive purpose for sex. Still, the act was not beyond comprehension. Minstrel songs about performing fellatio on a whisky jug reveal how audiences were in on the joke. Most historians have been reluctant to explore same-gender physicality in the Old South, however, and this is most evident in the case of James Henry Hammond and his “long fleshen pole.”
Two years before Hammond courted Catherine Fitzsimmons, he received a couple of letters from his law school roommate, Thomas Withers. “I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail,” Withers wrote, “and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole—the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling? . . . Sir, you roughen the downy Slumbers of your Bedfellow—by such hostile—furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him—when he is least prepared for defence against the crushing force of a Battering Ram.” Withers may have been “hardly referring to overt homosexual behavior,” as historian Drew Faust insisted. In fact, Withers continued that “unless thou changest former habits in this particular, thou wilt be represented by every future Chum as a nuisance,” suggesting that even if Hammond did poke Withers in bed, it was likely an incidental and unwelcomed consequence of the nineteenth-century practice of men bundling together when cold or in cramped accommodations. But Faust concluded that even such harmless physicality was not what Withers meant either: instead, she employed a reductio ad absurdum, arguing the ridiculousness of Hammond’s obsession with aggressive Southern patriarchy by associating it with the untenable possibility of same-gender intimacy. Apparently, inconceivable to Faust is the notion that two men who became prime examples of heteronormative Southern patriarchy would have compromised that sexual identity in their youth.26
Historians’ reluctance to read the episode as same-gender physicality must be partially attributed to an unreflective acceptance of essentialist definitions of male and female. That continuum of gender leaves no room for variability except as deviance; and because it assumes the eventual triumph of the male/female binary, it subordinates everything that is not heteronormative. Wyatt-Brown, for example, did not mention same-gender sexuality once in Southern Honor. When considering the “three broad categories in the realm of sexual ill-conduct,” he listed male fornication, adultery, and varieties of miscegenation—all of which are described as socially problematic but nonetheless heterosexual. Orlando Paterson took Wyatt-Brown to task for this exclusion: “I draw attention to this not out of intellectual fashion, but simply because anyone acquainted with the comparative ethnohistory of honorific cultures will be immediately struck by it. Homosexuality is pronounced in such systems, both ancient and modern. Southern domestic life most closely resembles that of the Mediterranean in precisely those areas which are most highly conducive to homosexuality. Does the author’s silence imply its absence in the pronounced male bonding of the Old South?” At least Wyatt-Brown just remained silent; Faust not only dismissed the possibility that Withers and Hammond were sexually intimate, but concluded that Withers, who wrote so imaginatively and descriptively about the episode, actually viewed same-gender intimacy as absurd. Carol Blesser insisted that any suggestion of same-gender relations between Withers and Hammond results “from a rather tortured reading of passages”—although it seems rather evident that any dismissal of that possibility requires an even more tortured argument. After all, Withers was not inclined to employ innuendo in his letters: when he penned, for example, “Southeasterly breezes doth make my cock stand as furious as a stud’s,” he literally meant that the lofting smells from a house of ill repute southeast of his tenement room gave him an erection! We cannot assume that, in the pre-Freudian nineteenth century, before categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality existed, intimate same-gender sexuality did not exist merely because it did not neatly fit the essentialist norms of the era.27
So, let us trust Withers’s words: Hammond poked him, even if just incidentally. Withers’s openness to discussing the episode relates the exclusive power of masculine sexuality. Historian Martin Duberman argued that because the Old South existed in “one of those rare ‘liberal interregnums’ in our history when the body could be treated as a natural source of pleasure and ‘wanton’ sexuality viewed as the natural prerogative—the exemplification even—of ‘manliness,’” sexual intercourse between Withers and Hammond was plausible. After all, male sexuality was supposedly boundless. Extending that natural prerogative to male-male relationships raises interesting questions about homosociality, the sexual performance of power, and an emerging, modern discourse of natural oppositions that elevated white male heteronormativity as the fulfillment of American civilization.28
Until the mid- to late-nineteenth century, language exchanged in male homosocial friendships was often indistinguishable from the idiom and images of love relationships. “With you I could speak of everything—Love, Ambition, Life and all things and all feelings of my heart were known to you,” wrote another of Hammond’s academy friends. Since affection was allowed, friendships could be intimate while not sexual. “Must we then be so long separate?” opined Daniel Baker to a friend in Georgia, “shall one sweet interview be allowed us in all that time?—’tis painfull to think of it, will not our former intimacy be forgotten? . . . shall we long for a friendly and tender and sweet embrace?”29
But where was the line between homosocial intimacy and homoerotic interests drawn? At dinner in 1860, Harry St. John Dixon and a friend bantered:
“Harry, they tell us your p[enis] is harder than your head. Is it so?”
“Do you judge others by yourself?”
“They tell me this, I speak from hearsay.”
“Oh! Well what they tell you may be true—it is possible.”
The phrasing is curious: the original question was not meant to imply Dixon’s stubbornness (which would have been stated: “Is your head harder than your penis?”) but rather to suggest Dixon’s unrestrained sexuality. So too did Withers allude to Hammond’s sexual power. In a second letter, Withers continued his interest in Hammond’s phallus: “I fancy, Jim, that your elongated protuberance —your fleshen pole—your turgeus inguen [swollen groin]—has captured complete mastery over you—and I really believe, that you are charging over the pine barrens of your locality, braying, like an ass, at every she-male you can discover.”30
If Withers’s complaint had been that Hammond inadvertently screwed his chums—either literally or figuratively—in his reckless pursuit of Southern masculinity, why now characterize those men (including himself) as “she-males,” gendered aberrations who compromised their manly, power-filled sexual roles and therefore confused genders? Men commonly depicted other men as feminine in order to challenge their authority, particularly in the nineteenth century as definitions of masculine and feminine grew more rigid. The practice was most public in the political sphere. For fifteen years, James Buchanan lived with William Rufus King, an Alabama senator and briefly vice-president of the United States. During those years, Andrew Jackson called King “Miss Nancy” and “Aunt Fancy,” and Tennessee’s governor referred to the two as “Buchanan and his wife.” In 1802, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina faced public ridicule in the Richmond Examiner as “Miss Charlotte Cotesworth PINCKNEY,” and the paper repeatedly referred to him as “she.”31
Part of the modernization of America and the South, however, was more rigid delineation of natural oppositions—free/slave, white/black, domesticity/patriarchy, masculine/feminine—that projected onto others specific racial, gendered, and sexual attributes differentiating “us” from “them.” While “she-male,” “miss,” and “aunt” could serve as markers of gendered Others, suggesting effeminacy as a way of signifying weakness, their use was far more nuanced. Although “miss” signified a young unmarried woman, it also indicated a kept woman, a concubine that a man used in lieu of a wife for sexual satisfaction. “Aunt” could represent familiarity with and respect for an older woman, often a relative, but the term also referred to someone who provided sex outside of marriage. Similarly, use of “she-” as a feminizing qualifier had been employed since the seventeenth century. By the mid-nineteenth century, Webster’s Dictionary (1860) defined it as “female, representing sex; as, a she -bear; and she -cat” . . . or she -male. Whatever Withers and others intended by their use of such words, the possibility for double entendre was there and certainly purposeful, raising doubts about the individual’s sexuality. In a society in which male-female sex predominated, patriarchs struggled to grasp how some men did not meet the expectations of manly, heteronormative sexuality. Beyond suggesting feminine qualities, “she-male,” “miss,” “aunt” recast the male body to imply sexual passivity. What is interesting here, then, is that in his letters Withers relinquished his masculine Self by conceding sexual power and privilege to Hammond who became the dominant male in their relationship because he seemed the more sexually powerful: poking, punching, lunging, crushing, braying.32
Hammond and his contemporaries lived in a world awkwardly situated between the premodern and the modern. In premodern America, gender and sexuality were diverse: historians have uncovered cross-dressing, sodomy, beastiality, sadomasochism, gender-bending, intercourse with the Devil, child molestation, and homosexuality. (Apparently, Duberman’s “liberal interregnum” was not so rare after all!) Such acts were at times “similar to other sinful acts, that all individuals could be capable of” and at other times were “distinct and unusual,” according to historian Thomas A. Foster. In either case, such acts did not lead to identification as abnormal, as would happen in the modern era, when the construction of a rigid male-female binary would lead to such judgments.33
Traces of premodern America’s gendered and sexual diversity lingered in the Old South, but by the late antebellum period, the social context for gender and sexuality was changing. White Southern patriarchs lived under constant criticism from the North and Europe for their “peculiar institution.” Even as they characterized blacks as uncivilized, white Southerners were critiqued as backward and vulgar. As historian Jeanne Boydston described, “the embrace of a modern trope of gender was part of a historically situated discourse that allowed them to divide the world into natural oppositions that bolstered their own brutal domination even as it redeemed them as the fulfillment of idealized civilizations.” In other words, in order to respond to modern critiques and define themselves as modern, over the course of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, white Southern men embraced oppositions that situated them as dominant racially (white/black), in gendered terms (male/female), and sexually (heterosexual/homosexual).34
From our twenty-first-century perspective, we wonder why Withers in 1826 did not express shame over being poked by Hammond. Elements of the pre-modern remained in their increasingly modern world. Whatever had happened between the two—incidental sexual contact or more purposeful sexual intimacy—did not identify either as abnormal. In the absence of a language about homosexual and heterosexual behavior, Withers interpreted the episode as one of power, specifically manly dominance. Premodern Americans had constructed masculinity as a status more than as a gender; indeed, instead of defining manhood in opposition to womanhood as modern Americans would, they defined it in opposition to childhood and, more specifically, to those who were childlike—dependents. Hammond’s sexual interactions with his wife, nieces, slaves, and Withers demonstrate how sex was one device employed by white men in the incessant contest of seeming and becoming, providing a way to establish power over others—women, men, black, white—and ultimately, to demonstrate manliness.35
NOTES
1. James Henry Hammond to Harry Hammond, December 20, 1852, Papers of James Henry Hammond, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia (hereafter cited as SCL).
2. Entry for December 9, 1846, James Henry Hammond Diary, SCL.
3. Carol Blesser, ed., Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xii.
4. Daniel Boorstin, “The Historian: ‘A Wrestler with the Angel,’” New York Times Book Review, September 20, 1987.
5. Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 338, 346.
6. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 20.
7. Ibid., 295.
8. Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1059.
9. Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 221–222.
10. Catherine Clinton, Half Sisters of History: Southern Women and the American Past (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 4; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 7. On masculinity studies, see Bryce Traister, “Academic Viagra: The Rise of American Masculinity Studies,” American Quarterly 52 (June 2000): 274–304.
11. Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South; Clinton, Plantation Mistress; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor; Scott, “Gender,” 1067.
12. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 48; Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1982), 309; Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 323; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordon Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1976), 4–7.
13. Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 46; John Ramsey to Thomas Jones, May 26, 1810, Thomas Williamson Jones Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Michael Curtin, “A Question of Manners: Status and Gender in Etiquette and Courtesy,” Journal of Modern History 57 (September 1985): 404; The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield: Letters on Education (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 100.
14. Laura F. Edwards, “Law, Domestic Violence, and the Limits of Patriarchal Authority in the Antebellum South,” in Gender and the Southern Body Politic, ed. Nancy Bercaw (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 66; entry for February 24, 1828, Cyrus Stuart Diary, Special Collections, Clemson University Library, Clemson, S.C. (hereafter cited as CU); Craig Thompson Friend, “Belles, Benefactors, and the Blacksmith’s Son: Cyrus Stuart and the Enigma of Southern Gentlemanliness,” in Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, ed. Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 92–122; entry for July 3, 1845, Hammond Diary, SCL; entry for June 26, 1848, Henry Craft Diary, Craft, Fort, and Thorne Family Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
15. L. Diane Barnes, Artisan Workers in the Upper South: Petersburg, Virginia, 1820–1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005); John Mayfield, Counterfeit Gentlemen: Manhood and Humor in the Old South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009); Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Ted Ownby, “Southern Manhood,” in American Masculinities: A Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Bret E. Carroll (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2003), 429; Jennifer R. Green, Military Education and the Emerging Middle Class in the Old South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Lorri Glover, Southern Sons: Becoming Men in the New Nation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2007).
16. Daniel Blake Smith, Inside the Great House: Planter Family Life in Eighteenth-Century Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980); Christine Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Origins of the Bible Belt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Anya Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic: Elizabeth and William Wirt and the Companionate Ideal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
17. Entry for March 19, 1828, Stuart Diary, Special Collections, CU; entry for December 21, 1851, Henry Hughes Diary, published in Princes of Cotton: Four Diaries of Young Men in the South, 1848–1860, ed. Stephen Berry (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 286.
18. Richard Godbeer, “William Byrd’s ‘Flourish’: The Sexual Cosmos of a Southern Planter,” in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 135–162.
19. Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 72; Withers to James Henry Hammond, September 24, 1826, and James Henry Hammond to Harry Hammond, December 20, 1852, Papers of James Henry Hammond, SCL; Kenneth A. Lockridge, “Colonial Self-Fashioning: Paradoxes and Pathologies in the Construction of Genteel Identity in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 274–339; Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South, 83.
20. J. S. Buckingham, The Slave States of America, 2 vols. (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1842), 2:241; Melton A. McLaurin, Celia, a Slave: A True Story (New York: Avon Books, 1991); Annie Young, in The WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives, ed. T. Lindsey Baker and Julie P. Baker (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 13; Anna Matilda King to Thomas Butler King, June 20, 1849, Thomas Butler King Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
21. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 12; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
22. Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 241; Christy’s Ram Horn, 76–77, quoted in Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology,” American Quarterly 27 (March 1975): 11–12.
23. Martha Hodes, White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 96; Victoria E. Bynum, Unruly Women: The Politics of Social and Sexual Control in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
24. Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 300; Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black Scholar 2 (December 1971): 12–13.
25. Entry for May 13, 1828, Stuart Diary, Special Collections, CU; entry for April 4, 1860, Harry St. John Dixon Diary, published in Berry, ed., Princes of Cotton, 140–141; Mechal Sobel, Teach Me Dreams: The Search for Self in the Revolutionary Era (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), chap. 4.
26. Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South, 19n18; Jeff Withers to Hammond, May 15, 1826, Papers of James Henry Hammond, SCL.
27. Blesser, Secret and Sacred, 5; Thomas Jefferson Withers to James Henry Hammond, May 4, 1826, Papers of James Henry Hammond, SCL; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 294; Orlando Paterson, review of Southern Honor, in Reviews in American History 12 (March 1984): 29.
28. Martin Duberman, “‘Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence,” in Carryin’ On in the Lesbian and Gay South, ed. John Howard (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 23; Jeanne Boydston, “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” Gender and History 20 (November 2008): 574.
29. H. W. Hilliard to James Henry Hammond, April 21, 1826, Papers of James Henry Hammond, SCL; Daniel Baker to George Palmes, October 5, 1811, George E. Palmes Papers, Special Collections, Duke University, Durham, N.C.
30. Entry for July 6, 1860, Dixon Diary, published in Berry, Princes of Cotton, 137; Withers to Hammond, September 24, 1826, Papers of James Henry Hammond, SCL.
31. Jean H. Baker, James Buchanan (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004), 25–26; Richmond Examiner, October 2, 1802.
32. Mechal Sobel, “The Revolution in Selves: Black and White Inner Aliens,” in Hoffman, Sobel, and Teute, Through a Glass Darkly, 172; Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (Springfield, Mass.: George and Charles Merriam, 1860), 1020.
33. Thomas A. Foster, “Introduction: Long Before Stonewall,” in Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 8. For examples of the sexual and gendered diversity of premodern America, see Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Formation of American Society (New York: Knopf, 1996); Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, eds., The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004); Clare Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and the many essays in Foster, Long Before Stonewall.
34. Boydston, “Gender as a Question of Historical Analysis,” 574; Foster, “Introduction,” 8.
35. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 81. Also see Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers, chap. 3.