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

Chapter 12. The Crisis of My Fate

C H A P T E R 12 The Crisis of My Fate OR JAMES HENRY HAMMOND, as for most South Carolinians in the early 18405, times were hard. Nationwide depression had struck so deeply in the seaboard cotton states that even many masters of five hundred slaves, Hammond reported, found difficulty procuring the cash to "pay their negroes for chickens." The expenses of his lavish new Columbia house and the neglect of plantation business during the gubernatorial campaign had reduced Hammond's liquid resources , and he was compelled to borrow to meet daily expenses. Although he estimated his worth at nearly $200,000, the cost of maintaining the style of life befitting his growing prominence had him scramblingto pay his bills.1 Yet this unsettling situation seemed to disturb Hammond less than did a cluster of other anxieties produced by his recent political campaign. He was in the grip of emotional as well as financial depression. The hostility surrounding the recent election had not only shattered any lingering idealism about public life but had raised profound doubts about the depth of his commitment to apolitical career. Hammond's experiences as a candidate had left him "morbidly melancholy " and had reinforced a longstanding ambivalence about his ambitions. The attacks to which he had been repeatedly subjected had created in Hammond a sense of deep personal as well as political isolation. During 1840 and 1841, he began to seek a remedy for these intensified feelings of loneliness and to look beyond politics for the fulfillment of his drive for fame. Hammond's dissatisfaci . James Henry Hammond to M. C. M. Hammond, June 8, 1841, March 19, 1840, in JHH Papers, SCL. F The Crisis of My Fate tion was at once personal and more broadly social; he wanted adoration and validation from intimates, as well as from the world at large. Indeed, each of these needs continually stimulated and enhanced the other, ultimately producing by the middle of the decade a crisis in both his private and his public life.2 A difficult and contentious man, Hammond appeared to most of those around him as hard, cold, aggressive, even unfeeling—"a shrewd calculator," as he himself described his public image. Yet, he insisted in characteristicallyselfpitying introspection, these were misperceptions by those who did not see the reality behind his mask. The "world judging by appearances my bearing &. conversation have been wholly deceived in my character." Hammond maintained that he had "always been a shy &. sensitive person. . . . The very excess of my sensitiveness has led me to assume as much as possible of the reverse in order to conceal it." Far from hard, Hammond explained, he simply could not "bear that others should see my emotions & even those which might be honestly exposed I shrink from exhibiting." By withdrawing, Hammond feared he conveyed an arrogant and superciliousimpression. Yet he felt incapable of overturning this image by reaching out to those around him. Imprisoned within himself by a pride that inhibited him from risking rebuff and by a desire for power that made him resist emotional dependence as strongly as he did financial or social subservience , Hammond not surprisingly longed for meaningful human contact. In early 1841 he began a new diary with the explanation, "I want a friend . . . to whose sympathetic bosom I could confide anything—To whom I could speak of myself as I am. . . . Such a friend," he concluded sadly, "I can now only find in this book."' Yet he would continue to look elsewhere for the emotional sustenance he knew he required. Nurtured on Byron and Shelley, on romantic notions of spiritual exile as well as visions of friendships that "link soul to soul," Hammond craved that intensity of feeling and intimacy of human relationship that his outward coldness and his judgmental defensiveness made all but impossible to achieve.4 During the height of the gubernatorialstrife, Hammond had sought comfort in personal ties. But no one could "understand, sympathise, console me." Catherine , though a "good soul," would only be threatened by any revelation of his deepest thoughts, for he was certain she would not understand him. Under the 2. James Henry Hammond Diary (MS in JHH Papers, SCL), February 16, 1840. 3. Ibid., December 16, 1849; Hammond Diary (MS in JHH Papers, LC), December 12, 1844, April 17, 1836, February 6, 1841. 4. Hammond to I. W. Hayne, January 21, 1841, in JHH Papers, LC. 225 James Henry...