This Day in Southern History (The Hammond-Hampton Slaveholding Scandal)

November 1, 1843—Governor James Henry Hammond of South Carolina received epistolary dynamite from brother-in-law Wade Hampton II, accusing him of sexual improprieties with one of Hampton’s teenage daughters. The message not only hinted at the ruin of a life and career but also exposed the paternalistic and hypocritical worldview of the entire Southern slaveholding class.

The film—and especially the novel—Gone With the Wind is so detailed about the Southern plantocracy that for a long time, Margaret Mitchell’s vision of antebellum Dixie was regarded as something akin to a documentary. Increasingly, historians have pointed out the constricted limits of her vision of the “peculiar institution.”

If Hammond’s life resembled Hollywood, it was more like three scripts rather than one:

* Imagine, if you will, that Catherine Sloper, the naïve and besieged heroine of The Heiress, had lived not in Henry James’ Washington Square but in South Carolina, and that her cad-sniffing relation was not her father but the husband of her sister.
* Imagine next that the real-life Catherine married the man her relatives regarded as a fortune-teller, giving her spouse the wealth and connections he desired for a political career—and, in a scenario that Alex Haley could have written, that he now had his pick, for sexual purposes, of hundreds of female slaves on his new property.
* Imagine finally—since Hollywood likes its pitches boiled down to a pithy phrase (e.g., “fish out of water story”)—this one for the not-so-surprising last twist: “Chinatown Among the Palmettos.”

Believe it or not, the homely females at the heart of both The Heiress and the Hammond scandal are, in fact, both named Catherine. The contours of the personality of Catherine Fitzsimmons’ ambitious young swain, Hammond, are outlined, with all the precision of an entomologist describing a praying mantis, by William W. Freehling in The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854.

At the time he met Catherine Fitzsimmons, the whipsmart Hammond was tired of being the son of a New England outsider in a state that patronized native sons even more exclusively than most, tired of having to outperform the sons of aristocrats at college, and especially tired of tutoring them in the backcountry after college. He decided to do what other young Southern males (including George Washington) had been doing for years: Marry up.

If you think of a politician as someone who seduces voters, then Hammond’s courtship represented excellent practice for his electoral career. Catherine yielded to his importuning, and within a few years he’d been elected to Congress. There, this son of a Northerner outdid Southerners by introducing the infamous Gag Rule, by which Congress would not deign even to receive abolitionist appeals—a blatant violation of the constitutional right to petition that John Quincy Adams, in perhaps the finest hours of his long career, spent years trying to overturn.

Departing Congress after a few years for health reasons, Hammond went briefly to Europe, returned to Silver Bluff Plantation, then won a two-year term as governor of his state. Even that wasn’t enough for him: The U.S. Senate beckoned.

Until that little problem with the Hamptons came up. What happened, and how did it all came apart so fast?

For some of the background, we can turn to an admittedly biased source: Hammond’s diary, which was not made public until more than a century later. The Hampton sisters came frequently to visit him at the governor’s mansion in Columbia. There, he recounted, his intimacies with the four girls—ranging in age from 13 to 19—“extended to everything short of direct sexual intercourse,” though he claimed he “had never designed anything criminal.”

Well, maybe not—but these were the most sexually self-incriminating passages written by a politician that I know of until Senator Bob Packwood recounted his exploits with any woman that got within reach of him. Oh, and another thing: like Packwood, Hammond sought to throw the blame on someone else—it was the oldest Hampton girl, Harriet, who had initiated the whole thing! If this sounds like the classic profile of a sexual predator—a praying mantis, if you will—you’re right.

In a biography of Wade Hampton II’s son, the Confederate general Wade Hampton III (I know this gets confusing, but bear with me, okay?), Walter Brian Cisco speculates that at races held in Nashville in October 1843, the second-oldest Hammond girl, Catherine, told her dad her secret: On April 13, Uncle James had attempted to seduce her.

In his diary, Hammond recorded receiving a message from Hampton “denouncing me in the coursest terms” and breaking off relations. The governor wouldn’t have been surprised if his wealthy in-law had challenged him to a duel.

Before that transpired, Hammond tried a rapprochement through an intermediary, but Hampton was having none of it. Indeed, he had embarked on something sweeter than taking Hammond’s life: plotting his political destruction. The powerful planter and outraged father began to bruit it about through friends and allies what Hammond had been up to.

Plenty of tongues were wagging about the crackup between the in-laws when Hammond stepped down at the end of his term—enough so that two years later, when he made a run for the Senate, the legislature voted him down. (Remember that this was before the direct election of U.S. Senators.)

For 13 years—an eternity in politics—James Henry Hammond was in political exile. When his isolation finally ended, it was because the Hamptons were increasingly devoting time to lower Mississippi properties.

Once he made it to the Senate, Hammond demonstrated that the years hadn’t made him any less obstreperous in defending slavery. One of his speeches gave rise to a phrase—“King Cotton”—as he attempted to show why the North was acting insanely by even thinking about limiting slavery’s reach.

But one of his other defenses on the subject is particularly interesting when contrasted with his own background. Yes, miscegenation did occur on plantations, he admitted, but “its character and extent…are grossly and atrociously exaggerated.” In fact, the number of the “mixed breed” was “infinitely small,” except in the towns, where there was an influx of “natives of the North or foreigners.”

Leave aside the brazenness of the son of a Northern native decrying this insidious source. The thing that really makes you sit up when you read this is knowing that Hammond had sexual relations with his own slaves.

Indeed, it was the discovery of the latter that made Catherine Fitzsimmons Hammond decide, like Catherine Sloper, to assert her autonomy, no matter what the cost. Though she had stood by her man when the rumor mill went into overdrive about her husband and his nieces, she decided she’d had enough when she discovered his relationship with two slaves, a mother and daughter.

Catherine gave her husband an ultimatum: End it or I leave. When he refused to break it off, she was as good as her word, and did not return to the plantation for another several years until Hammond finally terminated these liaisons.

The Hampton girls were not as lucky. And here’s where we come to one of the most tragic aspects of the slaveholding system: it involved not merely the subjugation of a race, but the silencing of women. By the sexual double-standard that operated—not a little like the one in another aristocratic society, that of Russia in Anna Karenina—men might suffer temporary difficulties for misconduct, but women’s punishment would be forever.

Wade Hampton II may have been annoyed more by what he saw as the damage to the family name than the damage to his daughters’ virtues by Hammond’s misconduct. In the patriarchal system that ruled southern mores of the time, virtually no male would go near any of the Hammond girls again—they were soiled. None of the four girls ever married.

Wade Hampton II died in 1858, and Hammond six years later, in the midst of the South’s final 12 months of catastrophe. At least two decades before, when the rumors of his disgrace began to air, he could fall back on his land and his slaves. Now, he was staring into a future where neither might exist.