James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery (review)

Abstract

262CIVIL WAR HISTORY strengths. It willbe welcomed by close students of theperiod; itwill also prove appealingto a much larger audience, for itis a finely crafted book and written in an easy and engaging style. Major L. Wilson Memphis State University James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery. By Drew Gilpin Faust. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982. Pp. xviii, 407. $27.50.) The sketchy outlines of James Hammond's personal indiscretions—his antebellum interracial liaisons, his extraordinarily irregular relationship with four of his nieces (and his subsequent extended exile from politics and polite company)—alone have guaranteed the South Carolina planter-politician bemused notoriety among students of Southern history . Moreover, he has been the subject of several essays and at least one political biography describing his public role as a politician, proslavery essayist and agricultural reformer. But Drew Faust, who had earlier explored Hammond's relationship with other Southern intellectuals, has given us the first full biographical treatment of this remarkable figure and she does her story justice. Faust has organized her biography around a number of topics and subthemes, but the core of her study is reflected in the subtitle she has chosen. Hammond waged a relentless drive for mastery over his family (with mixed success), his slaves (with equally mixed results), and his political constituents (where he was nearly undone by his own weaknesses ). While he was born in 1807 with few assets beyond intelligence and ambition, Hammond soon showed that a young man of his charm and appearance could go far with these attributes when he set out to marry the sister-in-law of Wade Hampton II. Catherine Hampton lacked most of the social graces and she was certainly no beauty. ("Young wags in Charleston," recalled one relative, "used to say they wouldn't marry her if every pimple on her face was worth a million dollars." p. 59.) But she had two overwhelming advantages: family position and a 10,000 acre plantation on the Savannah River. Brushing aside the well-founded suspicions of the Fitzsimmons family (Hammond may have even seduced her in order to be certain he would gain her hand), he gained the bride and the plantation he desperately sought. With his new position in the South Carolina aristocracy and his finances reasonably secure, Hammond moved quickly up the ladder of success and status in South Carolina public life. In 1834, he temporarily abandoned his aristocraticpretensions and campaigned successfully for Congress as a representative of the "undistinguished mass of the people . . . imbued with the love of democratic institutions" (p. 151). BOOK REVIEWS263 Eight years later he took office as South Carolina's governor. By this time, Hammond had established himself as a successful politician, as well as a brilliant agricultural reformer and intellectual defender of slavery. But at the very moment of his greatest achievement, Hammond let slip the protective mask of emotional self-control that had guided him throughout his life. Beginning in 1840, the lonely and repressed Hammond had become increasingly intimate with his four nieces, ages fifteen through twenty. During these same years he was to be estranged from his wife by sexual liaisons with at least two of his slaves, but in this case, the young women were not only relatives, they were the daughters of Wade Hampton II. While Hammond apparently stopped short of sexual intercourse with the four young girls, it is clear that his attentions went far beyond the usual affection a doting uncle might show toward his nieces. When Hampton learned of the series of incidents in the fall of 1843, he set about to destroy Hammond's reputation by making a sketchy account of his actions available to South Carolina political and social leaders. In the end, Hampton succeeded most completely in destroying the reputations of his daughters (none ever married). And Hammond, after an extended political exile, returned to the United States Senate and served until the state's secession in 1860. But this last political act in Hammond's long career was an anticlimax. His new found hesitancy on the issue of secession, his seemingly lukewarm adherence to the new nation, and his resistance to Confederate demands...