Hammond “secured his financial independence” by marrying Catherine Elizabeth Fitzsimmons, who was a shy, plain 17-year-old with a substantial dowry. He became a wealthy man through this marriage and entered the planter class.
Hammond rejected any government encroachment on slaveholding, even in wartime. When the South Carolina government requisitioned 16 of his slaves to improve fortifications for Charleston, he refused, calling it “wrong every way and odious.” Also, when a Confederate army officer stopped by to requisition some grain, he tore up the requisition order, tossed it out a window, and wrote about it that it compensated him too little, and that it was like “branding on my forehead: ‘Slave’”.
Giving some of the grain my slaves harvested to an army that’s protecting my rights to own slaves is the same exact thing as being a slave.
CW: Sexual violence
Hammond’s Secret and Sacred Diaries (not published until 1989) described, without embarrassment, his sexual abuse over two years of four teenage nieces, daughters of his sister-in-law Ann Fitzsimmons and her husband Wade Hampton II. He blamed his behavior on what he described as the seductiveness of the “extremely affectionate” young women. The scandal “derailed his political career” for a decade to come after Wade Hampton III publicly accused him in 1843 when Hammond was governor. He was “ostracized by polite society” for some time, but in the late 1850s, he was nonetheless elected by the state legislature as a U.S. senator.
Hammond was known to have repeatedly raped two female slaves, one of whom may have been his own daughter. He raped the first slave, Sally Johnson, when she was 18 years old.
Later, Hammond raped Sally Johnson’s daughter, Louisa, who was a year old baby when he bought her mother; the first rape apparently occurred when Louisa was 12; she also bore several of his children.
It’s not made clear in the Wikipedia article, but Hammond was 23 when he started grooming then 16 year old Catherine. Also, his non-heteronormative sexual escapades as a youth are, interesting:
In an 1826 letter to Hammond, classmate Thomas Jefferson Withers reminisced about feeling the “exquisite touches” of Hammond’s “long fleshen pole,” and he celebrated Hammond’s “furious lunges” at bedfellows. In another 1826 letter, Withers portrayed Hammond “braying, like an ass, at every she-male you can discover”
Fucker was a chaser.
Bonus content:
He was behind mudsill theory, which amounts to “class society is good actually, and the exploited underclass should be Black slaves because Black people are too stupid to rebel unlike the white proletariat.”
Here’s George Fitzhugh, with the big-brain idea that not only is slavery of Black people just, but white people should be slaves too. In fact, every worker should be a slave. Considering his reactionary beliefs and him poo-pooing about socialism and communism, he really should be considered a proto-fascist.
And he successfully re-entered politics after all of his abuse got out. I guess this shit is nothing new for the US, but it’s still really disturbing.
Unsurprising though that the people who fight so hard against bodily autonomy would also prey on the populations that lack bodily autonomy.
jesus christ… they named a school after this guy. in the mid 1960s.
Hammond School in Columbia, South Carolina, was named the James H. Hammond Academy when founded in 1966. It was one of a number of private schools known as segregation academies, founded to preserve racial segregation in schools. Although many of these segregation academies are now defunct, Hammond School continued to develop; after the 1970s, it expanded its admission policy, as federal law mandated, to be non-discriminatory. The school changed its name to reflect this.
What a fucking charmer.
