Hammond

Hampton

Sordid, salacious and the ultimate betrayal of trust is how the Hamptons, Prestons and the Mannings viewed the matter. Maligned, framed and too gentlemanly to utter the truth is how James Hammond saw it - "it" being the scandal of the century that involved the governor of South Carolina and his improper relationship with his teenage nieces. Could Shakespeare have known of this matter, it'd have made a much seamier tale of seduction than Richard III's attempted tryst with Lady Anne. Only in the last quarter of a century has the general public become aware of the circumstances of the rift between famous Carolina families united by marriage.

The tale of James Henry Hammond has broken into the mainstream and away from the restricting barriers set up by the Hammond family - barriers to conceal the private matters of their famous kinsman - 19th century governor, senator, states rights champion - James Hammond. This is the same James Hammond who made the famous "mud sill" and "cotton is king" speeches in the United States Senate. A brooder and a loner by nature, James Hammond lacked a confidante with whom to vent his worries and frustrations, so he did what Samuel Pepys, John Evelyn and numerous other gentlemen of the 18th and 19th centuries did - he kept a private journal.

A formerly private diary entitled "Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder" (University of South Carolina Press, 2008) edited by Carol Bleser with a foreword by Charleston native Louis D. Rubin, Jr., presently of Chapel Hill, lays bare the most private thoughts of an esteemed antebellum statesman. What we discover by reading Hammond's brutally honest reflections is that Hammond, the most ardent states rights advocate in the South following the death of John C. Calhoun, was a man beset with self-doubts and fears of inadequacy. Most of all, Hammond is revealed to us as a man consumed with remorse for transgressions committed with his underage nieces while he served as governor in the early 1840s.

One must be careful to note when reading this private diary that Hammond depicts himself as a man set upon by precocious and adoring young women who, because they were motherless, lacked the proper upbringing that they would certainly have had in their lot as a Hampton of Millwood Plantation had their mother not died at an early age. Hammond admits to undue familiarity but vehemently denies the seduction charge hurled at him by his brother-in-law, Wade Hampton II. Hammond actually saw himself as showing enormous restraint in resisting the numerous advances of his nieces as they cuddled alone in his townhouse in Columbia.

The forbidden dalliances took place under the nose of Hammond's long-suffering wife, Catherine Fitzsimons Hammond, a Charleston heiress and the source of the Hammond family fortune. Her sister married Wade Hampton II, the son of the great Revolutionary War leader and the father of Wade Hampton III, the Confederate cavalry general. The Hamptons were spoken of as the wealthiest planters in the South. They cultivated land in three states and possessed more than 3,000 slaves. Apparently after numerous illicit and amorous encounters with their uncle James, the eldest Hampton niece, Harriet, confided some of the sordid details to her father while they were attending race week in Nashville. The Hamptons owned a stable of fleet thoroughbreds that were raced for grand purses across the South.

Wade Hampton II returned abruptly to Columbia determined to kill James Hammond in a duel. Hampton's confidantes, the Prestons and Mannings, waylaid Hampton and persuaded him that such a rash deed would forever cast his daughters in an un-ladylike way and that he could better deal with the matter by working privately to destroy the reputation of Hammond by character assassination. Thus began the bitterest era of whispering campaigns in the state's history.

Both men walked around the capitol armed with pocket pistols. Hammond abandoned his mansion in Columbia after his two-year gubernatorial term concluded and removed to his plantation on Beech Island near the Savannah River.

He continued his political career through the publication of speeches and essays - most dealing with the legitimacy of slavery as a sanctioned institution. Hammond also continued to confide his innermost thoughts concerning the leading personalities of his day, many of whom he knew personally.

The diary, however, dwells but little upon the debauched nature of James Hammond's relation with his female kin. He also confides his lust for one of his slave women, a seamstress named Sally. Were these immoral lapses the only topics, "Secret and Sacred" would hardly be worth the time it takes to flip the pages. What lovers of antebellum history will find appealing is the "unvarnished truth" of the state's leading men on the run up to secession as seen by a well-connected keen observer.

James Hammond was the son of Massachusetts-born Elisha Hammond. Elisha worked his way through Dartmouth after the Revolution and bought passage in 1802 on a schooner bound for Charleston. He taught for a while in a classical academy he founded in Newberry, and then Elisha became a professor of languages at the new South Carolina College in Columbia. He married Catherine Fox Spann of Edgefield, perhaps with an eye toward winning an inheritance from Catherine's rich uncle, John Fox. Acrimony ensued and Catherine was cut from the will and the Hammonds were poor as church mice for much of James Hammond's youth.

Envy of his wealthy Carolina classmates and their splendid country estates tormented James in his teen years as a college student and law apprentice. James Hammond bore the markings of a stern New England Puritan upbringing, yet his surroundings were those of the Cavalier South. Young James possessed the passion for intellectual pursuits while his associates gambled, smoked cigars and sampled the forbidden pleasures that college life in Columbia afforded.

Wealth, then as well as now, could be had by earning it, inheriting it or by marrying it, and James Hammond exploited in all avenues. It wasn't uncommon in the 19th century for older men to pursue the hand of a teenager in marriage, especially if the young lady possessed a large dowry.

Catherine Fitzsimons, age 15, was eight years the junior of her suitor, yet that was not the reason that her family protested the union. The Fitzsimons clan and their allied Hampton and Manning kin labeled Hammond a parvenu, a propertyless, low-society son of a New England schoolmaster.

Stung to the bone, Hammond redoubled his amorous pursuit of plain looking Catherine, and she did her part by pitching a fit to have the man she chose over the men her parents would rather her have. A dutiful Paul Fitzsimons bestowed Redcliffe Plantation on Beech Island on his daughter and son-in-law. To James Hammond's credit he took to farming and improved the place and made a handsome go of plantation life - even if he did father more children with slave women than he did with Catherine.

Redcliffe gave Hammond entree into the realm of the landed aristocracy of Carolina. Politics was his ambition, and the issue he embraced more than any other was the preservation of slavery.

To this end, James Hammond was second only to Calhoun in publicly defending the "peculiar institution." In his famed "Letter to A Glasgow Congregation," leading men in the state rated him as the most eloquent apologist of Southern rights.

After the lapse of 150 years, the descendants of James Hammond together with the overseers of the manuscript repositories where the diaries are filed have allowed the "secret and sacred" thoughts of Hammond to be opened to public scrutiny.

What is evident from the first few pages is that James Hammond is a towering intellect, a man so insightful that had he not succumbed to prurient desires, he might have walked boldly onto the national stage rather than be the one issue man in Washington that his U.S Senate role amounted to.

What else we learn about Hammond is that he had a profound love for the so-called "life of the mind," a trait not shared by many of his plantation-owning contemporaries. He was a lonely man, an introspective fellow haunted constantly by fears that others plotted his ruin or that others would gain something that by right should be his. However, rarely does one see such honesty in the self-admissions of another. Hammond is self-effacing in his journal at times, not giving himself the appropriate credit that he deserves in a political or literary triumph.

He provided amply for his family and even managed to get the will of his uncle broken when he had been cut out of it.

History books will forever remember James Hammond as the author of the "Mud-sill theory."

In a speech before the Senate in 1858 Hammond stated "All great civilizations require menials to perform the drudgery of life; such an inferior class constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government." South Carolinians of the planter class cheered the speech but privately whispered about the integrity of the quiet and withdrawn man who made it. Now they know the truth.

(Dr. Thomas B. Horton is a history teacher at Porter-Gaud School. He lives in the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. See more columns online at www.moultrienews.com. Visit his Web site at www.historyslostmoments.com).