James Henry Hammond

Biography

Hammond graduated from South Carolina College in 1825, where he was a member of the Euphradian Society, and went on to teach school, write for a newspaper, and study law. He was admitted to the bar in 1828 and started a practice in Columbia, South Carolina. He established a newspaper there in support of nullification.

Hammond "secured his financial independence" by marrying Catherine Elizabeth Fitzsimmons, who was a shy, plain 17-year-old with a substantial dowry. He became a wealthy man through this marriage and entered the planter class. He ultimately owned 22 square miles, a number of plantation houses, and more than 300 slaves.

After his marriage, he was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Nullifier Party, serving from 1835 until his resignation the next year due to ill health. After spending two years in Europe, he returned to South Carolina and engaged in agricultural pursuits; managing his large holdings took much of his time.

He was elected as Governor of South Carolina, serving from 1842 to 1844. The legislature chose him for the United States Senate in 1857 following the death of Andrew P. Butler, and he served from 1857 until his resignation in 1860 in light of South Carolina's secession from the Union. Hammond died on November 13, 1864 at what is now the Redcliffe Plantation Historic Site in Beech Island, SC.

Pro-slavery

A Democrat, Hammond was perhaps best known during his lifetime as an outspoken defender of slavery and states' rights. He popularized the phrase that "Cotton is King" in his March 4, 1858, speech to the US Senate, saying:

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. . . . It constitutes the very mudsill of society.” He went on to utter the oft-repeated words, “You dare not make war on cotton — no power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king.”

In his writings, he consistently compared the South's "well compensated" slaves to the free labor of the North, describing the latter as "scantily compensated" slaves (as he termed the hired skilled laborers and operatives).

Going beyond articles in local newspapers, he co-authored The Pro-Slavery Argument with William Harper, Thomas Roderick Dew, and William Gilmore Simms. Hammond and Simms were part of a "sacred circle" of intellectuals, including Edmund Ruffin, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and George Frederick Holmes, who promoted reformation in the South in various forms. As supporters of slavery, they both justified it in terms of stewardship of inferior beings and promoted slaveholders' improvement of their treatment of slaves.

Hammond promoted Redcliffe, his plantation in Beech Island, South Carolina, as his ideal of the perfectly run plantation in his Plantation manual, 1857-58. It includes a wide range of material, with detailed rules regulating treatment of pregnant and nursing slaves (whom he allowed to nurse their infants for 12 months), old slaves no longer fit for heavy field work, together with rules about clothing, quarters, food, etc., in addition to livestock and crop management.

Sexuality

In the late 20th century, historians learned that Hammond as a young man had a homosexual relationship with a college friend, Thomas Jefferson Withers, which is attested by two sexually explicit letters sent from Withers to Hammond in 1826. The letters, which are held among the Hammond Papers at the South Carolina Library, were first published by researcher Martin Duberman in 1981; they are notable as rare documentary evidence of same-sex relationships in the antebellum United States.

Hammond's Secret and Sacred Diaries (not published until 1989) reveal that his sexual appetites were varied. He described, without embarrassment, his "familiarities and dalliances" over two years with four teenage nieces, daughters of his sister-in-law Ann Fitzsimmons and her husband Wade Hampton II. He blamed his behavior on what he described as the seductiveness of the “extremely affectionate” young women. The scandal "derailed his political career" for a decade to come after Wade Hampton III publicly accused him in 1843, when Hammond was governor. He was "ostracized by polite society" for some time, but in the late 1850s, he was nonetheless elected by the state legislature as US senator.

Hammond's damage to the girls was far-reaching. Their social prospects were destroyed. Considered to have tarnished social reputations by his behavior, none of the four ever married.

Hammond was also known to have had long-term sexual relationships with two female slaves, one of whom was his own daughter. He took the first slave, Sally Johnson, as a concubine when she was 18 years old. Such behavior was not uncommon among white men of power at the time; their mixed-race children were born into slavery and remained there unless the fathers took action to free them. Later, Hammond took Sally Johnson's daughter, Louisa, who was a year old baby when he bought his mother, as a concubine when the girl was 12; she also bore several of his children.

His wife left him for a few years, after he began the relationship with the slave girl, taking their own children with her. She later returned to her husband.

Legacy

Hammond's quotes on slavery

"I firmly believe," said Governor J. H. Hammond, "that American slavery is not only not a sin, but especially commanded by God through Moses, and approved by Christ through his apostles."

Governor J. H. Hammond once said: "I endorse without reserve the much abused sentiment of Governor McDuffie, that 'slavery is the corner-stone of our republican edifice;' while I repudiate, as ridiculously absurd, that much lauded but nowhere accredited dogma of Mr. Jefferson that 'all men are born equal.'"