James Henry Hammond
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| “ | No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on Earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is King; until lately the Bank of England was King; but she tried to put her screws, as usual, on the cotton crop and was utterly vanquished. | „ |
| ~ James Henry Hammond. |
James Henry Hammond (November 15, 1807 - November 13, 1864) was an American Democratic Party politician and slaveowner who served as U.S. representative for South Carolina from 1835 - 1836, governor of South Carolina from 1842 - 1844 and Senator for South Carolina from 1857 - 1860. He was one of the strongest supporters of American slavery in the leadup to the American Civil War.
Biography edit
Hammond was born in 1807 in South Carolina. Studying law at South Carolina College, he was admitted to the bar in 1828 and established a newspaper in support of the nullification doctrine - the idea put forward by John C. Calhoun that the 10th Amendment of the United States Constitution gives states the right not to obey Federal laws that they believe are unconstitutional. He married Catherine Fitzsimmons in order to secure his financial future, in the process gaining possession of an estate numbering 22 square miles and at least 300 slaves.
Hammond was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1835, running on the Nullification Party ticket. He resigned the following year due to ill health, and later joined the Democratic Party in 1842. He was elected on the Democratic ticket as Governor of South Carolina the same year, serving until 1844. During his governorship, his brother-in-law Wade Hampton publicly accused Hammond of having raped his sister-in-law's four teenage nieces other a period of four years. Hammond denied the accusations, but the scandal tarnished his reputation enough that he lost the gubernatorial election in 1844 and was ostracised by polite society for several years. His diaries, published posthumously in 1989, revealed that Hammond did in fact abuse his nieces, blaming his actions on the seduction of the "extremely affectionate" young women, and that he had also raped his 18-year-old slave Sally Johnson and her 12-year-old daughter Louisa on multiple occasions.
Hammond's political career was derailed until 1857, when the scandal had died down and his party were able to convince him to run for Senate in order to replace the late Andrew Butler. Hammond was successfully elected to Senate and spent his career ardently defending the institution of slavery. In an 1858 speech to the Senate, he declared that America and Europe were both dependent upon the South's cotton economy and so would have to intervene to prevent any threat to slavery, upon which this economy rested. In this same speech he referred to "King Cotton", one of the first mainstream uses of the phrase. In writings in his local newspaper, Hammond compared slavery to the free labour in the North and Europe, believing that this was also slavery but with less reward for the slaves than in Southern chattel slavery. He co-wrote The Pro-Slavery Argument with several associates, arguing that white Americans had a right to enslave inferior black Africans and that the majority of slaves were well-treated and happy. Hammond authored The Plantation Manual, 1857-58 setting out how he believed an ideal slave plantation should be run.
Hammond resigned from the Senate in 1860 after South Carolina seceded from the United States, starting the Confederate States of America. He became disillusioned with the Confederacy after the South Carolina government attempted to requisition 16 of his slaves to work on fortifications and requested he hand over grain to the Confederate army. Hammond died on his plantation in November 1864, two days before his fifty-seventh birthday.
Trivia edit
- Letters discovered in 1981 by researcher Martin Duberman revealed that Hammond was in a same-sex relationship with his friend Thomas Jefferson Withers.