HAMMOND

Scandal

1857–1858

AT A TIME OF POLITICAL FLUX, WITH CALLS FOR SECESSION MOUNTING and heated rhetoric on all sides, James Hammond suddenly found himself being put forward to fill a seat in the U.S. Senate left vacant by the death in May 1857 of its previous occupant. Short of the presidency it was the post he deemed most worthy in American politics.

Up until now, however, his electoral record had been mixed. In December 1840 he had lost his bid for governor in humiliating fashion, winning just forty-seven votes to the victor’s 104. He tried again in 1842 and this time won, but by only seven votes, a dishearteningly narrow margin. The Senate seemed beyond his reach.

In fact, winning the seat would be nothing less than a political miracle, given that few men pursued such high political office bearing deeper moral stains than Hammond.

IT HAD ALL STARTED, apparently, in 1841 with Hammond’s move to Columbia and the construction of his house. His nieces, the youngest thirteen years old, had reason to come to the house on a regular basis because Hammond’s wife, their aunt Catherine, served as their surrogate mother, stepping into the role after their own mother had died some years earlier. They adored their handsome uncle. Whether the thing was triggered when the girls came over to help him decorate the new house or had some other proximate cause is not at all clear. Hammond, however, soon found himself engaged in sexual dalliance with all four girls.

He confessed it later in his diary. “Here were four lovely creatures, from the tender but precious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19 (in 1840–41), each contending for my love, claiming the greater share of it as due to her superior devotion to me, all of them rushing on every occasion into 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 from it, in the most secret and sacred regions, and all this for a period of more than two years continuously.”

Hammond complained that instead of condemnation, he deserved praise. “Is it in flesh and blood to withstand this?” he wrote in his diary. “Is there a man, with manhood in him and a heart susceptible of any emotions of tenderness, who could tear himself from such a cluster of lovely, loving, such amorous and devoted beings? Nay are there many who would have the self-control to stop where I did? Am I not after all entitled to some, the smallest portion of, credit for not going further?” He should be honored for his restraint, he wrote, and likened himself to “a creature of chivalric romance.”

The relationship lasted from 1841 to 1843, during which, he wrote, “I gave way to the most wanton indulgences. It would be improper to state in detail what these indulgences were. It will be sufficient to say that they extended to every thing short of direct sexual intercourse, that for two years they were carried on not with one, but indiscriminately with all of them, that they were perfectly habitual and renewed every time or very nearly every time we met at my house in Columbia, which was never less than once a week while I was there, and most usually much oftener.” The nieces never balked at his “amorous advances,” he claimed, but rather “again and again made the advances themselves, so much so as often to excite my astonishment and to fill my mind with the most extraordinary suspicions as to their past experience.”

All this came to an end on April 13, 1843, when the second-eldest niece, also named Catherine and now eighteen years old, “took offense at a familiarity from me, which under the circumstances and considering all that had passed between us, excited my surprise.”

This had the effect of awakening him from whatever reverie had allowed him to continue a five-way affair for two years: “At this first check,” he wrote, “I saw clearly and at once the full extent of my past indiscretions.” He apologized and believed his apology had been accepted. He resolved to stop the affair immediately, and from that moment forward, he wrote, “there was no more wanton toying between us.” The girls continued to come to the house, however, including for a ball that Hammond and his wife had thrown to honor the wedding of the girls’ brother, Christopher.

Hammond assumed, with great relief, that the matter had ended without damaging relations between his family and the Hamptons, and left town for the summer “full of self-congratulation that such was the case.”

HE RETURNED TO COLUMBIA in the fall to begin his final year as governor, and there, on November 1, 1843, he received a letter from Wade Hampton, the girls’ father, severing ties between the families. This shocked Hammond. He had presumed Hampton would have wanted the whole affair kept quiet to protect their honor. In his reply, apparently hoping that by coming clean he might salve Hampton’s anger, Hammond confessed to a liaison not just with niece Catherine but with the other three as well, and acknowledged that these relationships “had been long continued.”

Hammond felt that in fact it was he who had been wronged, and that if the truth of the whole multiyear affair were ever revealed, he would be exonerated. But that could not happen, he wrote in his diary, and as a result, “the loose manners and ardent temperaments of these lovely and luscious creatures would never be known.” They had come to him, he claimed; he had never engaged in seduction or coercion. To understand that final incident in April, he wrote, one had to know all that had gone before; otherwise it might appear to be “a deliberate attempt to perpetrate a base crime. Yet I declare that on that night I felt no more animal excitement than I do at this moment. And worn down as I was with fatigue and full, the very moment, of anxious cares, I was almost literally incapable of sexual connection.”

Wade Hampton did not see it that way. Hammond learned through a family messenger that “atonement and oblivion were impossible.” Relations between the families were irrevocably broken. Within the planting elite, rumor alone was enough to ruin Hammond’s social and political life. Few outside Hampton’s immediate circle knew actual details of what had occurred. Even Catherine Hammond knew nothing of the affair, as became apparent when the couple hosted a ball toward the end of 1843. “My wife, ignorant of every thing, sent invitations to the whole set,” he wrote. He did nothing to stop her. “To have objected to it would have rendered a disclosure necessary.” She was perplexed at why so few people came. “To her I pretended ignorance of all causes of difficulty,” Hammond wrote, “and made light of their not coming to see us.”

Hammond feared that Wade Hampton might challenge him to a duel or simply assassinate him. He bought a pair of “small pocket pistols,” and while doing so learned that just the day before, two of Hampton’s brothers-in-law also had bought guns. But Hampton did not issue a challenge.

Hammond would have preferred a duel to what followed. “I would jump at an opportunity to settle and bury all, by fighting one or even more duels,” he wrote in his diary. But Hampton had something else in mind, a more prolonged torment of a kind he surely knew would be uniquely hurtful to Hammond, who bled ambition from every pore.

What Wade Hampton planned was Hammond’s social and political death.

AT FIRST IT WAS a campaign of whispers, which in that tight-knit arena of the planting aristocracy proved brutally effective. Though still in the midst of his two-year term as governor, Hammond felt the chill of social opprobrium. Rumors of an indiscretion, if not the details themselves, traveled quickly. “They have gone all over the State and are generally believed,” Hammond complained in his diary. “The effect is crushing to me.” He chafed at being unable to defend himself. “I often feel like coming out with the whole truth and fighting my way through,” he wrote, “but the idea of the injury I would do to those I hold dearest on earth is shocking to me, and, after all, my triumph would not be complete. Calumny can never be killed.”

Hammond resolved that his only course of action was to remain silent. “My policy then was concealment,” he wrote. “Profound and utter secrecy.”

He dreaded returning to Columbia to preside over the opening of the legislative session of 1844, the last of his term as governor. “The crisis of my fate personally and politically has arrived,” he wrote. “I leave here alone for Columbia in two days, to meet it. Whatever it may be. My path is dark, and I see no gleam of light before me.”

THE LAY PUBLIC WAS not yet aware of Hammond’s relationship with his nieces. His antagonist, Wade Hampton, had counted on rumor alone to destroy Hammond but failed to reckon with Hammond’s unquenchable ambition. From the press and the public at large, Hammond received plaudits for his performance as governor and exhortations to run for the U.S. Senate. Hammond’s confidence grew. He cast himself as the torchbearer for slavery, in part because this of all things seemed to draw him acclaim.

In 1845 he began writing what would become two long “letters”—essays really—in defense of slavery, addressed to Thomas Clarkson of England, “the Patriarch of Abolition,” as Hammond called him. Clarkson, then eighty-four, had led the campaign that resulted in Britain, in 1807, ending its involvement in the international slave trade, and triggered what by mid-century had become a worldwide drive toward abolition. Hammond’s “Letters” were published by the Columbia South-Carolinian “and have produced quite a sensation,” Hammond noted in his diary. “I have received many extravagant compliments.”

By 1846 Hammond was widely considered a contender for the Senate. To stop him, Wade Hampton took the scandal public; he circulated to state legislators a document full of details. In Carolina’s honor-bound culture this was a risky thing to do. Hampton himself came in for significant criticism for airing so private a matter in the legislature and thereby publicly tarnishing the reputations of his own daughters, but he succeeded in hobbling Hammond’s candidacy. Hammond lost by a vote of 97 to 46.

“My career as a public man is over, I am crushed,” Hammond wrote on December 21, 1850, after the final results were recorded; “—annihilated forever. God’s will be done.”

To Hammond, this was more than simply a political loss. It was the state’s verdict on him personally, as a man. He was furious; he felt unjustly wronged. Others in high office had done far worse than he without harm to their careers. The state had turned “prude,” he railed in his diary. “She surrenders herself to be ruled by gossip and gossipers and discards her best servant, because he does not pass immaculate through the hands of the Tea Table Goddesses. Where was a Statesman ever put down before for his amours and conjugal infidelity?”

But now, still smarting from his Senate loss and buffeted by winds of social and political odium—a time when another man might have strived to avoid even the slightest appearance of new impropriety—Hammond revealed another sexual escapade, but of a different sort, one that also arose from his striving for domination of all around him.

THERE WERE TWO ENSLAVED women in which Hammond took a particular interest. In January 1839 Hammond purchased an eighteen-year-old named Sally Johnson and her one-year-old daughter, Louisa, for nine hundred dollars with the idea that Sally would serve as one of his “house slaves.” These positions were typically assigned to Blacks who for one reason or another were deemed attractive: good looks, good teeth, good diction, or light skin. In Charleston’s thirty-two slave brokerages, Sally would likely have been graded a “Fancy Girl.” While many such women were, like Sally, selected for duties in the “big house,” others were hired out for purposes of prostitution, with their owners pocketing the income. Hammond likely acquired Sally because of her overall appearance, for he promptly made her his mistress. In this case there was no question of his sexual interest: He slept with her repeatedly. Their relationship lasted years, and when Sally’s daughter turned twelve in 1850, Hammond made her his mistress as well.

Hammond did not address any of this in his diary but eventually disclosed it in a letter to his son Harry in which he revealed that in his will he bequeathed both Sally and Louisa to him, “and all the children of both.” The letter alludes to children sired by both him and Harry and cautioned Harry never to sell Louisa or her offspring. “Do not let Louisa or any of my children or possible children be slaves of Strangers. Slavery in the family will be their happiest earthly condition.”

He somehow kept his relationship with the two a secret from his wife for over a decade, until in 1850 something occurred to bring it to light. He blamed his own “want of caution.” Outraged by her husband’s craven infidelity, Catherine demanded “concessions,” presumably that Hammond sell the women. Hammond refused. Catherine’s rage persisted and in December 1850 she left him. She first fled to Charleston with their daughters to stay with family, then moved to the Sand Hills, near Augusta, Georgia, a community favored as a haven from lowland fevers later named Summerville.

Her absence stretched from weeks to months. In that interval they lost a son, William Cashel, sixteen, who died of typhoid fever while staying with his mother at the supposedly fever-free resort. The boy had expected to return to school the next day. “I can make no comments on this calamity,” Hammond wrote in his diary. “I feel overwhelmed by it and attendant circumstances. My thoughts and feelings are unutterable.”

NO ONE WAS MORE surprised than Hammond when, in 1857, the South Carolina legislature decided he was the man to replace one of the state’s U.S. senators, who had died in office. His self-banishment had taken him from public view, and amid the political clamor raised by the states’ rights crowd, his absence and his quiet had made him seem conservative, just what the legislature wanted. The balloting—only state legislators could vote—took place over three days, starting November 27, 1857, with Hammond the victor in the final poll, besting the next-closest candidate 85 to 59. “I record now the strangest and most unexpected chapter of my history, or of almost any history,” he wrote in his diary on December 9. He added: “This is a signal triumph over all my enemies and, speaking as a mere mortal, a full compensation and more for all I have endured. It wipes off every calumny and puts my name among the foremost of SoCa without a stain.”

By this point he and his wife had achieved a rapprochement and were again living together. Catherine had come to accept the presence of Sally and Louisa with the proviso that they occupy quarters far from the main house. Catherine agreed to move with him to Washington.

They arrived in early January 1858 with three of their children, and occupied rooms in a hotel favored by Southern delegates, Brown’s Hotel, situated on Pennsylvania Avenue between the White House and the Capitol. Hammond found a city far different from the one he had encountered as a young congressman two decades earlier, both in terms of its physical appearance and the vibrance of its social life. The National Mall, previously a muddy and barren expanse, was now nicely landscaped, and a number of elaborate new federal buildings had been erected, among them the Treasury building and Smithsonian Institution, though the Washington Monument remained an unfinished stub. Hammond received myriad invitations to receptions, dinners, and balls, even one from fellow senator William Henry Seward of New York, an outspoken critic of slavery who was considered the likely Republican nominee in the upcoming 1860 presidential election. Hammond’s wife found the city’s heated social atmosphere intimidating. “I began to despair of making anything but blunders and mistakes, and heartily wished myself at home before I should be disgraced,” she wrote in a letter to her brother-in-law Marcellus. Hammond, on the other hand, seemed to fit right in. At a White House dinner, even President James Buchanan showered him with attention. “In a word, he is in his place,” Catherine told Marcellus.

Hammond entered the Senate as the nation writhed through yet another conflict over slavery. In May 1854, Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois had won passage of what became known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which established two new territories and allowed the inhabitants of each to decide whether to permit slavery, a doctrine known as popular sovereignty. It also repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery in all new territory north of the 36º30' parallel. The act set off a race between slaveholders and free-soil advocates to populate the new territories in order to influence the choice. In Kansas, that race soon led to open warfare between factions and gave rise to the term “Bleeding Kansas.” Opponents of the bill founded a new party committed to halting the expansion of slavery and eventually settled on the name Republican. Southerners dubbed its leaders “Black Republicans.”

Hammond was uneasy at first about his status in the Senate and was reluctant to make any formal speeches. He wrote many practice drafts until finally, on March 4, 1858, he at last addressed his fellow senators—and delivered a speech that would eclipse even his previous congressional address as a milestone in proslavery rhetoric. The speech would make clear to anyone who paid attention just how deep the chasm had become between North and South.

Only the day before, Senator Seward, deploying strikingly impolitic language, had described the South as a “conquered province.” The South was anything but conquered, Hammond proclaimed in his speech, and proceeded to outline the South’s strengths in warlike fashion.

“If we never acquire another foot of territory for the South, look at her,” he said. “Eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles; as large as Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain. Is that not territory enough to make an empire that shall rule the world?” The South had “the finest soil, the most delightful climate,” twelve thousand miles of shoreline, and most of the Mississippi Valley. What’s more, slavery assured that the white male populace would be free to fight without disrupting the economy. “At any time, the South can raise, equip, and maintain in the field, a larger army than any Power of the earth can send against her, and an army of soldiers—men brought up on horseback, with guns in their hands.”

But the most potent weapon, he proclaimed, was the South’s control of cotton. “Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, when they make war on us we can bring the whole world to our feet.” The South could simply stop producing this vital crop, he warned. “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? I will not stop to depict what everyone can imagine, but this is certain: old England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her.”

And here he waved a scimitar of words that would bring him lasting fame: “No, sir, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King.”

He also used the occasion to argue that the enslavement of Blacks simply fulfilled a societal imperative. Someone had to do the menial work, “to perform the drudgery of life”—to serve as the “mud-sills” of Southern society, as he put it, alluding to the portion of a house that stands between the frame and the earth. “Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to herself, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for the purpose, and call them slaves.” The speech would be known to future generations simply as the “Mudsills Speech,” a watershed moment in the South’s decades-long movement to reassure itself that slavery was indeed a positive good. Always needful of affirmation, Hammond was delighted with the reaction to his speech. Congratulations flowed from the South, intense attack from the North. “The speech was extremely successful in the Senate and in the country,” he wrote in his diary. “It justified my friends and my State in sending me there. It fixed me at once as the Peer of any one upon the Senate floor. That was glorious to me.” He was immediately taken up by Washington society and invited to the most important dinners and receptions. Lord Francis Napier, British minister to the United States, invited him and his family to a formal party at his Washington mansion.

At the close of the Senate session, June 14, 1858, Hammond returned home to adulation and talk of his being a candidate for president in the 1860 election.

What no one appreciated at the time was the extent to which Hammond’s “cotton is king” thesis would blind Southern radicals to the risk that if the South seceded, real war could result, prolonged and ugly. The North would not dare make war, the reasoning went: It could not afford to lose its supply of cotton. And if a war did begin, it would be short—all the South needed to do was shut down cotton production, and the North’s economy would collapse. Nor could the North risk the corollary wrath of Britain, which also depended on Southern cotton and would surely throw its might into the fray on behalf of the seceded states.

Cotton was the radicals’ scepter. A simple agricultural product could bring the mighty industrial North to its knees.