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

Chapter 11. The Sound of the Trumpet

C H A P T E R I I The Sound of the Trumpet AMMOND'S LONG-ANTICIPATED RETURN was every bit as gratifying as he had dreamed. Carolinians and former congressional colleagues visiting in New York provided an enthusiastic welcome, as well as company for a round of homecoming celebrations, excursions to the races, and shopping expeditions. But Hammond did not tarry long in the North. By steamboat and carriage he passed through Philadelphia and Washington to Columbia, arriving in time to observe his thirtieth birthday on November 15 "among friends," A military band serenaded the travelers on the night of their arrival in the state capital, and they found themselves the objects of excited and flattering attention. Even the Fitzsimonses seemed to have forgotten past hostilities in their pleasure to have their family reunited again. Wade Hampton II, husband of Catherine's elder sister Ann, demonstrated this new amity by providing his sister and brother-in-law with a coach-and-five to transport them in speed and style from Columbia to Silver Bluff. By the eighteenth, they were home at last with their tribe of sons, grown and changed nearly beyond recognition but, their parents noted gratefully , in good spirits and fine health.1 The thrill of homecoming was soon replaced by the difficulties of resuming life in circumstances quite different from those that had prevailed when Hammond had left Carolina for Washington two years before. The nationwide Panic of 1837 had depressed the cotton economy generally, but the less-productive lands of the old seaboard states had been far more harshly affected than those of i. James Henry Hammond European Diary, 11 (MS vol. bd., 1837, JHH Papers, SCL), November 15, 1837. H The Sound of the Trumpet the new Southwest. In these changed conditions, Hammond felt even more strongly than before his departure that western cotton land was a necessity. Silver Bluff seemed in many ways a marginal enterprise; it had to be supplemented by other investments. The land company Hammond had bought into in Texas had failed in the panic, so the acquisition of another tract in the Southwest and the further rationalization of operations at the Bluff stood at the top of Hammond 's agenda as he began to organizehis businessaffairs. But his dissatisfaction was not simply economic. After exposure to sophisticated continental taste, Hammond found the area around Silver Bluff culturallyand socially inadequate as well. Each new contact with his neighbors—their rudeness in not answering his invitations, their indifference to his European treasures—intensified Hammond 's determination to escape "from the woods into the world."2 Despite this resolution, Hammond remained uncertain about where his destiny lay. Because of the trip's failure to relieve his physical complaints, Hammond now regarded himself as a chronic invalid, one whose dyspeptic constitution would always prevent him from executing too active a public role. Yet the limitations imposed by his health seem not to have been entirely fixed in Hammond 's mind and largely reflected his own changing inclinations and ambitions. For the rest of his life, the invocation of illness would serve to moderate that political ambition he had always found it so difficult either to banish or to restrain ; it would mediate his successes and excuse his failures. Dyspepsia functioned for Hammond as a means of evading the overwhelming burden of responsibility inherent in power and achievement. His reentry into the political arena was complicated as well by the drastically altered contours of Carolina public life. As one former political associate had written Hammond in Europe, "you won't know your state when you return." The economic issues the panic had inserted into public life had destroyed the tenuous alliance of Calhoun and the Whigs, united briefly by their common resistance to Jackson's executive "usurpations." Political forces had regrouped and were now aligned around the issue of the national bank. Antagonistic to all enhancement of federal power, Calhoun opposed reestablishment of a central bank, while the nationalist Whigs supported the financial institution. In his advocacy of the subtreasury as an alternative system, Calhoun demonstrated an antipathy for the national bank that attracted the support of many traditionally antibank Jacksonians. Calhoun now found himself in the camp of his old enemy, 2. Hammond Diary {MS in JHH Papers, LC), February 6, 1841. 205 James Henry Hammond and the Old South Jackson's successor in the White House, Martin Van Buren...