HAMMOND

The Awakening

1807–1842

JAMES HENRY HAMMOND WAS HARDLY A TYPICAL PLANTER, BUT then no planter was typical. Some were descendants of eighteenth-century colonial slaveholders; others were new arrivals who married into the oldest planting families. At least ten of the largest slaveholders came from Europe, mainly England, Ireland, and France; many were Northerners by birth, including a particularly ruthless slaveholder who came from Portland, Maine. At least twenty-eight planters went to Harvard for some level of education, another eighteen to Princeton. Fifteen of the largest slaveholders were women who had inherited land and slaves from dead husbands. One planter was a Choctaw chief named Greenwood LeFlore.

As of Election Day 1860, Hammond was master of Redcliffe Plantation in Beech Island, South Carolina, and three other plantations, where he owned over three hundred enslaved Blacks and fourteen thousand acres of land, equivalent to nearly twenty-two square miles. For much of the century he had been a leading advocate of secession, but his greatest influence stemmed from his role as one of the foremost architects of a profound shift in how the South thought about slavery and therefore how it thought about itself. That he would achieve such stature in a culture governed by rules and customs designed to ensure that the old families, the chivalry, held full control over everything was remarkable in that Hammond began life as that most abject of creatures, an outsider of low birth: a yeoman.

Born in 1807, Hammond was raised by a father who was a failure in all that he did. Resentful of his lot, the elder Hammond, named Elisha, sought to instill in his son a thirst for greatness, to the point of whipping him when he failed to excel at his schoolwork. Elisha may have failed at all else, but he did succeed in instilling in the boy an overwhelming ambition, manifested in an unslakable need for recognition and distinction. “No passion rules the soul with half the force Ambition does,” Hammond wrote later in his diary.

Hammond attended what he and his father both recognized to be a second-rate rural preparatory school called Poplar Spring, but Elisha assured his son that great things lay ahead. “When President of the U.S., you will tell many anecdotes about the Poplar Spring,” his father told him. At the time, Elisha was employed as a steward at South Carolina College, the school of the planting aristocracy situated in Columbia, the state capital. Though the job was not particularly lofty—Elisha provided food for the students—it did give his son an edge over other low-born applicants and helped him win admission. Attendance was almost a prerequisite for success in the state, especially if one sought to go into politics.

Rewards and punishments at the college were administered in accord with “the principles of honor and shame” that governed the behavior of gentlemen, according to the school’s “By-Laws,” a fifty-page handbook of rules that each boy was required to sign. It included a host of prohibitions, among them bans against playing cards or dice, setting off explosives, blowing trumpets, “lounging under the trees” on Sundays, and sitting “in an indecorous position” on any day. The bylaws included a final species-conflating admonition: “The striking of servants and cruelty to animals is expressly forbidden.”

The students developed a hair-trigger sensitivity to abrasions of honor, and with it a corollary penchant, and reputation, for violence. This became acutely evident on February 18, 1856, with the “Guard House Riot,” when, according to one account, “more than one hundred enraged young men, with rifles in their hands”—all enrolled in the college—confronted the city’s militia, this after one student struck the city’s chief of police and the chief struck back with his club. The confrontation was calmed by the intercession of a well-liked former college president. A separate event had a less salubrious outcome. In the dining hall two students reached for a plate of fish at the same time, causing the slower of the two to feel affronted. He issued a challenge. The ensuing duel killed both.

It was at South Carolina College that Hammond may have engaged in sexual explorations involving men, or at least one man. Hammond was eighteen at the time; the other, Thomas Jefferson Withers, was twenty-two, a law student destined to become a prominent jurist in the state (and to make regular cranky appearances in the diary of his niece, Mary Boykin Chesnut). Two letters survive that have led to endless speculation, both written in 1826 after the two men had graduated. One Hammond expert, Carol Bleser, took a boys-will-be-boys view, arguing that in this time students often shared beds and that, since Hammond was sixteen upon entering college, eighteen upon exit, he fell into that always problematic cohort, the teenaged boy, known to be “frequently tumescent without any specific sexual stimulation.”

Whatever the interpretation, the letters do suggest some ribald moments among the magnolias. In one, dated May 15, Withers, calling himself “the old Stud, Jeff,” wrote, “I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, 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?”

Fleshen poles aside, the college inculcated in its privileged and pampered students a reverence for all things Southern and for their own exalted stature as gentlemen, a point the bylaws made explicit, stating that the ultimate goal of the college “is to train a body of gentlemen in knowledge, virtue and religion and refinement.” More importantly, it gave them the connections to help them on their way toward success in the two realms that mattered most to the white aristocracy—politics and planting, with achievement in the latter counted in the number of enslaved people you owned and the array of fine possessions displayed in your home. If a student had any qualms about slavery, he found them eased at every turn, particularly in his senior year, when graduating students attended lectures in “moral philosophy” that taught them “to delight in the possession and exercise of power,” affirmed the rightness of the existing social hierarchy, and reinforced that it was “absolutely necessary to keep the blacks in the present condition.”

Not surprisingly, the school’s budget for 1845 included nine hundred dollars for the “Purchase of Jack, (a slave).”

UPON GRADUATION HAMMOND WAS disappointed to find that despite being fourth in his class, the best he could do in terms of employment was to take a job as a teacher at a provincial school, unhappily following in the footsteps of his father. Unlike the rest of his classmates, he did not graduate into the full embrace of the planter aristocracy with the prospect of receiving a large share of family land and, with it, instant admission into the upper reaches of society. For a landless soul like him, his father had counseled, there was one sure path, and that was marriage.

He was a good-looking man, tall, with black hair, obsidian eyes—a “beautiful face,” as one friend put it—and he was clearly smart and on the rise. He gave up teaching to study law and eventually built a successful practice. He allied himself with a new legion of political radicals devoted to asserting the state’s right to nullify federal laws that it determined to be unconstitutional. His advocacy of nullification, or what its proponents liked to call “states’ rights,” drew him into the orbit of South Carolina’s most powerful politician, John C. Calhoun, then vice president of the United States. The movement’s leaders established a newspaper, the Southern Times, and made Hammond its editor. His looks and improving prospects made him an appealing commodity among marriage-ready women. It was a matter of some surprise, therefore, when he set his sights on a fifteen-year-old heiress named Catherine Fitzsimons renowned for two things: her stature as a member of one of South Carolina’s richest families, and her plain appearance. As one descendant cruelly put it, “Young wags in Charleston used to say they wouldn’t marry her if every pimple on her face was worth a million dollars.”

Though he met significant opposition from her family, who suspected Hammond’s true motive, he prevailed. The wedding took place on June 23, 1831. Catherine by then was seventeen; Hammond, twenty-three. Thus, through an act of strategic matrimony, Hammond in a relative instant became one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. He quit his editorship at the Southern Times, closed his law office, and settled into his new life as a gentleman planter, which he deemed the only “honorable” occupation. “The planters here are essentially what the nobility are in other countries,” he wrote. “They stand at the head of society and politics.”

Hammond’s newly acquired empire included 10,800 acres of land, most of it undeveloped, centered initially on a plantation called Silver Bluff that was said to be named for the gleam emitted when the sun struck deposits of mica in the underlying terrain. His dominion also included one hundred and thirty hogs, ninety-five cattle, twenty-five mules, and twenty sheep, with all but the mules roaming free on the land. The plantation had a sawmill, gristmill, and cotton gin, and a small village of structures that housed the plantation’s greatest asset: its enslaved laborers. In all he now owned one hundred forty-seven, of whom seventy-three were men, seventy-four women. Sixty-four were between the ages of fifteen and forty-five, considered the ideal range. On paper, at least, the age and sex composition promised both a productive workforce and one capable of achieving that desideratum of planters, “natural increase,” meaning a population likely to bear children. Enslaved Blacks were capital, and a slave family that regularly bore children—a biological compounding of interest—was about as robust an asset as one could dream of. A single “No. 1” man or “Fancy Girl,” as the most-coveted Blacks were often labeled when put up for sale, could have a value in twenty-first-century dollars of nearly fifty-three thousand dollars.

Sixty-four of Hammond’s enslaved workers fell into these categories; if they achieved top prices in the marketplace, their value alone could have reached over three million in today’s dollars.

HAMMOND WORKED HIS SLAVES HARD. Partly because of that, but also for less clear reasons, they had a penchant for dying. Each death inflicted a financial cost in terms of lost labor and diminished capital. In one diary entry, he bemoaned the death of a three-year-old, not out of any sense of emotional loss, but because this was the seventy-eighth death in just under ten years. During the same period, he wrote, the plantation experienced only seventy-two births among its enslaved population, leaving a deficit of six. “One would think from this statement that I was a monster of inhumanity,” he wrote. “Yet this one subject has caused me more anxiety and suffering than any other of my life.” Hammond conflated human lives with other plantation assets. “Every thing dies,” he wrote, “not only people, but mules, horses, cattle, hogs—life seems here to be the mere sport of some capricious destiny. Whether it is a judgement on me or on the place I know not.”

Hammond pursued a strategy of absolute dominance. He allowed his enslaved Blacks to visit town only twice a year; he determined who would be allowed to marry, who to divorce. He selected the names of babies, changing them at will, sometimes assigning a name to honor a guest in his house. When Josiah Nott, a racist physician and influential proslavery writer, came for a visit, Hammond named a newly arrived Black infant “Nott.” To encourage marriage and the births that he hoped would follow, he offered a five-dollar bonus to newlyweds. For second marriages, apparently less valuable, he paid only three dollars and fifty cents. Divorce earned one hundred lashes.

To Hammond, as to other planters, whipping was an important element of control to remind the enslaved of their place in the plantation hierarchy. Planters preferred the more genteel term, “correcting.” So routine was this on Hammond’s Silver Bluff plantation that he included precise instructions in a manual he wrote for his overseers, the men who directed his enslaved workers on a daily basis. “The highest punishment,” he wrote, “must not exceed 100 lashes in one day and to that extent only in extreme cases.” The lash itself was to be one inch wide. “In general 15 to 20 lashes will be a sufficient flogging: The hands in every case must be secured by a cord. Punishment must always be given calmly and deliberately and never when angry or excited.”

If one of Hammond’s Blacks escaped, he or she got ten lashes for each day absent from the plantation. If the fugitive returned voluntarily, this was reduced to three for each day. Escapes occurred so often throughout the South that means arose to help prevent them. At night slave patrols with unrestricted access to plantations roved the countryside and were required to visit each plantation once a month. Planters seeking to retrieve escapees often hired trackers with bloodhounds, a method of proven efficacy. The dogs, known in the trade as “n—r dogs,” were often transported by train along with their handlers. “Some fellows take just as much delight in it as in runnin’ a fox,” an Alabama tradesman told Frederick Law Olmsted, then a thirty-two-year-old journalist exploring the South. “Always seemed to me a kind o’ barbarous sport.” The man paused. “It’s necessary, though.”

BOOSTED BY HIS SUDDEN wealth and growing political notoriety, Hammond was selected by the state legislature to be a candidate for the House of Representatives in the 1834 U.S. congressional election. The public did the ultimate electing, but given the mechanics of Carolina politics, being thus anointed pretty much assured that Hammond would become his district’s next congressman. So ritualized was this process that candidates were counseled to avoid campaigning altogether. The chivalry did not go door to door begging for votes. As expected, Hammond won.

Although the official start of his term was March 4, 1835, he and his fellow representatives did not physically convene until December 7, nine months later. In the interim, Hammond, at age twenty-seven, moved his family to Washington. They found a rough-hewn place but one that must have felt familiar. The slave trade thrived there and would continue to do so openly until 1851, when a federal law took effect that made it illegal to transport enslaved Blacks into the city “for the purpose of being sold.” Coffles of slaves routinely moved over city streets to and from Washington’s many slave-auction houses and the pens, or barracoons, where they were held between auctions or before transporting them to buyers and markets in the Deep South. One especially dreary pen was situated at Third Street (not yet designated as Third Street “SW”) and Pennsylvania Avenue a couple of blocks from the Capitol.

The Capitol building had not yet been expanded and still had its original wooden dome, a modest affair shaped roughly like a pith helmet, which would be replaced about thirty years later with a far taller dome fashioned from nine million pounds of cast iron. The building’s architect, William Thornton, said of his own creation that it resembled a “large sugar dish between two tea canisters.” Shortly before the Hammonds’ arrival the building’s East Portico had been the scene of an assassination attempt against President Andrew Jackson. The assailant was named Richard Lawrence, who believed himself to be England’s long-dead King Richard III and claimed that Jackson had interfered with the delivery of payments long owed to him by the colonies. The would-be assassin had two guns, both of which misfired—a good thing because Jackson already had one bullet in his body from an 1806 duel in Tennessee in which he killed his challenger and was himself shot in the chest. After the assassin’s second gun misfired, two men charged to the rescue, one a congressman named Davy Crockett. At the ensuing trial the prosecutor was Francis Scott Key. The assassin was deemed not guilty by reason of insanity.

The land around the Capitol was in a primitive state. Cows milled about on what would become the National Mall. As depicted in a detailed 1839 rendering, anyone approaching the building from the West Front, which faced the Mall, would enter the grounds through a gate in a tall wrought iron fence and then traverse a dense forest before reaching the base of the building’s stairway. Charles Dickens visited the city in 1842 and climbed to the balcony of a “very pleasant and commodious library in the Capitol”—the Library of Congress, overlooking the Mall—in order to better gauge the city’s progress in realizing the grand design proposed in 1790 by Pierre L’Enfant. “It is sometimes called the City of Magnificent Distances,” Dickens wrote in his American Notes, “but it might with greater propriety be termed the City of Magnificent Intentions.” L’Enfant had envisioned grand boulevards radiating from the Capitol, linking distant quarters of the city. To Dickens on the balcony, it became very clear that full execution of L’Enfant’s plan would take some time. “Spacious avenues that begin in nothing, and lead nowhere; streets, mile long, that only want houses, roads, and inhabitants; public buildings that need but a public to be complete.”

Hammond moved his family into a boarding house on the city’s Capitol Hill, where they lodged with John C. Calhoun, former vice president and now U.S. senator, and various South Carolina congressmen and their families. They shared meals and late-night conversation and shunned participation in the broader life of Washington. They brought with them their own homegrown proclivity toward clubbiness and the hauteur instilled in them by their lives back home as masters of their personal slave empires. Even the White House, the hub of Washington social life, was beneath them, occupied as it was by Jackson, the benighted Democrat who forcefully crushed Carolina’s nullification movement. They made a point of declining invitations to the elaborate parties Jackson threw on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day.

This unwillingness to engage with colleagues from other states—and their own state’s reputation as a petulant, possibly treasonous force in national politics—gave them an insularity that reinforced the men’s view of themselves as a special presence, a lofty cadre of chivalric gentlemen motivated by honor and higher purpose. Hammond’s wife, Catherine, found it oppressive. “We Carolinians are in such bad odor here,” she wrote in a letter to one of Hammond’s brothers. Shy, reserved, and only twenty years old, she was reluctant to engage in the kinds of social calls made so commonly by society women back home. Hammond in his diary called her “a passive nobody.” She also had four children to supervise, all under four years of age, the youngest a two-month-old infant. Hammond acknowledged that his children were a difficult and ill-behaved brood, as he confessed in a letter expressing his surprise “that children would be such a nuisance.” He could rule an empire of slaves but not a canton of toddlers.

FROM THE START OF his congressional tenure, Hammond proved himself to be an effective partisan in the proslavery movement. To help defend the institution against potential threats, he opposed all growth in federal power and presence, even “internal improvements” like railroads and canals, no matter how beneficial they might be. He and fellow activists went so far as to oppose funds bequeathed to America by an English philanthropist named Joseph Smithson, whose will directed that the money be used “to found in Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”

What most troubled Hammond and his fellow Southerners was the rapid intensification of antislavery sentiment in the North, epitomized in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison’s founding in Boston of his abolitionist newspaper the Liberator. Antislavery societies soon proliferated and began bombarding the South with pamphlets and broadsides that depicted slavery as an unalloyed evil. Many Virginians blamed Garrison’s rhetoric for igniting the Nat Turner Rebellion of August 21–22, 1831, in which Turner and coconspirators killed fifty-five whites. In the days after Virginia’s suppression of the revolt, three dozen Blacks were murdered on mere suspicion that they had taken part; another nineteen were executed after standing trial.

In July 1835 Charleston reacted with outrage as news spread that the city’s postmaster had discovered a large shipment of abolitionist tracts published by Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, mailed from New York and addressed to leading local citizens. The news so incensed the city that several hundred Charlestonians marched to the post office, confiscated the pamphlets, and set them on fire. The arrival of the tracts in Charleston, the heart of the South, abetted by that most prosaic of federal institutions, the U.S. Post Office, seemed to be evidence of a broader threat and raised anew the miasmic fear that white Southerners had always felt about the dangers of slave insurrections and the horrors of emancipation. Vigilantes set out to identify anyone harboring abolitionist sentiment, while a special committee began examining all incoming mail for signs of further postal incursions. Free Blacks especially came under suspicion, with the memory of a barely averted slave insurrection in 1822, planned by a free Black Charlestonian, Denmark Vesey, still fresh in the community psyche.

In the midst of the controversy over abolitionist mail, Hammond, on February 1, 1836, delivered the first unabashedly proslavery speech Congress had ever heard. Newly turned twenty-eight, he stood in jarring contrast to the veteran legislators doddering about the floor. Slavery, he assured his audience, was anything but evil. “On the contrary, I believe it to be the greatest of all the great blessings which a kind Providence has bestowed upon our favored region.” Only the abolitionists with their “mad and fatal schemes” demanded emancipation, he argued. “As a class, I say it boldly, there is not a happier, more contented race upon the face of the earth than our slaves.”

He explained why the antislavery petitions that filled Southern post offices so inflamed him and his constituents. “Sir,” he said, “I do firmly believe that domestic slavery regulated as ours is produces the highest toned, the purest, best organization of society that has ever existed on the face of the earth.” If slavery was good, so too were the slaveholders: To attack slavery as an evil was to soil the honor of the owners themselves, the chivalry. If this abolitionist assault on Southern honor did not subside, he warned, the consequences would be grave. “We may have to adopt an entire non-intercourse with the free States, and finally, Sir, we may have to dissolve this Union.”

The speech won him high praise from the Southern press and states’ rights advocates, some of whom saw him as the next Calhoun, but now stress seemed to overwhelm him. Since the age of seventeen he had suffered from what he called dyspepsia, a blanket description typically applied to chronic digestive unrest. What Hammond endured, however, was something far worse than mere indigestion. His intestinal tract was a river of pain and gastric flamboyance marked by constipation, diarrhea, hemorrhoids, and hemorrhaging. Whether the cause was dyspepsia or something else, several weeks after his speech, while walking near the Capitol with a fellow congressman, he collapsed, overcome by what he called a “rush of blood to the head.” His companion guided him to the second floor of the building and summoned a doctor, who gave him a cup of brandy and subjected him to a round of bloodletting in the still-prevalent belief that doing so eliminated the malignant humors that caused illness. Hammond retreated to his boarding house. Anxious that he might once again collapse, he remained sequestered until the spring.

When he emerged, his malaise once again engulfed him to the point where he could not even enter the House chamber without feeling faint. Just on the cusp of success, his psyche and body had failed him. “Broken down at Twenty-Eight,” he wrote; he had “one foot in the grave—Dying of decay in the very blossom.”

He resigned and on the advice of a physician fled to Europe, which, second only to bloodletting, was considered a cure for most ills. But the journey had another benefit. The “Grand Tour” was a symbol of social status and prestige, and Hammond understood this as well as anyone. He bought sculptures and paintings by the trunkload and commissioned a bust of himself. The sculptor knew his mark: He told Hammond his bust looked uncannily like that of Caesar Augustus.

On his return to South Carolina, he decided to run for governor, a position with little actual power but high visibility. The state legislature appointed the governor. Thus, to become governor also meant that one had the faith and confidence of the state’s leading politicians, a crucial thing given that they were the men who also would choose the state’s two U.S. senators—a seat in the Senate being what Hammond wanted most. By the same token, to lose the gubernatorial election would signal to all that he lacked status among the chivalry, which for Hammond would mean crippling humiliation. The risk, however, seemed worth it.

He understood that if he was to become governor, he could not remain isolated at Silver Bluff among a populace he denigrated as “low-bred country folk” and resolved to build a presence in the state capital, Columbia. He began construction of a grand house that would draw attention to him and testify to his standing as a member of the state’s planter aristocracy. This was not particularly difficult in Columbia. Though it was the state’s second-largest city, it was hardly a bustling metropolis. According to the 1850 U.S. Census it had a total population of 6,060, of whom 3,184 were white and 2,680 enslaved Blacks; another 196 were free Blacks, leaving the city almost equally divided between races. To address this discomfiting ratio, the city established various mechanisms for racial control. One civic official was an overseer of carts, streets, and “negroes,” all of whom, whether enslaved or not, had a nighttime curfew just like their peers in Charleston, signaled by a bell that in winter sounded at nine P.M., in summer, nine forty-five. No more than five Blacks were permitted to assemble at a time unless a white person was present to supervise them. The city’s white population was a willing audience for a series of lectures given in 1850 by Louis Agassiz, a Harvard zoologist who claimed that scientific observation proved that Blacks were inferior to whites and thus merited enslavement.

Hammond built his house on a two-acre lot at the center of town and based its design on a building he had admired in Rome. The resulting structure, finished in June 1841, had thirty-six exterior columns and was surrounded by a raised and covered piazza. Each of its interior rooms had thirteen-foot ceilings and occupied about five hundred square feet. Hammond was unabashed about his motives in building so fine a house: to best the homes of the great planting dynasties and further distance himself from his lowly past. “I beat them in their own line,” he crowed, “—furniture, balls and dinner parties.”

In the months before the December 1840 gubernatorial election, Hammond moved into his new but still incomplete home and began filling it with his European treasures. Catherine stayed behind in Silver Bluff, having delivered yet another baby, this one a girl. To help decorate his home Hammond enlisted the aid of two nieces, Harriet and Catty Hampton, daughters of Catherine’s sister Ann, whose husband, Wade Hampton II, owned eighteen thousand acres of land and five hundred enslaved Blacks and wielded immense political power. The girls—along with two of their sisters—were soon to occupy a good deal of Hammond’s imagination, with disastrous consequences.