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

by Drew Gilpin Faust

Book Overview

From his birth in 1807 to his death in 1864 as Sherman's troops marched in triumph toward South Carolina, James Henry Hammond witnessed the rise and fall of the cotton kingdom of the Old South. Planter, politician, and an ardent defender of slavery and white supremacy, Hammond built a career for himself that in its breadth and ambition provides a composite portrait of the civilization in which he flourished.
A long-awaited biography, Drew Gilpin Faust's James Henry Hammond and the Old South reveals the South Carolina planter who was at once characteristic of his age and unique among men of his time. Of humble origins, Hammond set out to conquer his society, to make himself a leader and a spokesman for the Old South. Through marriage he acquired a large plantation and many slaves, and then through their coerced labor, shrewd management practices, and progressive farming techniques, he soon became one of the wealthiest men in South Carolina. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives and served as governor of his state. Evidence that he sexually abused four of his teenage nieces forced him to retreat for many years to his plantation, but eventually he returned to public view, winning a seat in the United States Senate that he resigned when South Carolina seceded from the Union.
James Henry Hammond's ambition was unquenchable. It consumed his life, directed almost his every move and ultimately, in its titanic calculation and rigidity, destroyed the man confined within it. Like Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen, Faust suggests, Hammond had a "design," a compulsion to direct every moment of his life toward self-aggrandizement and legitimation. Despite his sexual abuse of enslaved females and their children, like other plantation owners, Hammond envisioned himself as benevolent and paternal. He saw himself as the absolute master of his family and slaves, but neither his family, his slaves, nor even his own behavior was completely under his command. Hammond fervently wished to perfect and preserve what he envisioned as the southern way of life. But these goals were also beyond his control. At the time of his death it had become clear to him that his world, the world of the Old South, had ended.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0807112488
• ISBN13: 9780807112489
• Release Date: July 1985
• Publisher: LSU Press
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A good read about a not nice guy

Hammond is not a nice guy. He married for money, was not a great father, and campagined for elected office at time when no one else did and against the 'party' candidate to boot. Most interesting of all was his commitment to the Confederate cause but resistance to the call for material and manpower to help the cause. In the end, he could not believe it when his slaves were jubilant about the prospect of freedom. Through Hammond's eyes we see the south changed forever by the Civil War, not only due to the lost of their slaves but also by the unsouthern actions the Confederate government had to take and how they affected the southern way of life. Hammond is not a nice guy but this very readable book provides an excellent insight to the antebellum southern mind.