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

Epilogue

Epilogue HAMMOND LIVED A LIFE of irony and contradiction. Caught in the rapidly changing world of the early nineteenth century, he was lured by the future , yet clung to the past. As a result, his design for self-aggrandizement,for fame, fortune, and dynastic achievement crumbled under the weight of the illusions on which it was based. As slaveowner, politician, plantation manager— even as father and husband—Hammond sought to impose an order that reality could not sustain. In the realm of public affairs, Hammond vowed an allegiance to republican values not only at odds with the altered substance of Carolina political life but directly opposed to his own boundless aspirations. His image of a permanent, stable, and fixed social order hardly fit with his own career of rapid upward mobility . This paradox created enormous and unrelenting stress; Hammond's aggressive ambition tormented him, and left part of him always longing to retreat into the more transcendent satisfactions of intellectual life. Yet he knew that in the South only politics could bring him the recognition he craved. Within the public realm, Hammond was so torn between promoting his irrepressible desires for office and appearing the disinterested statesman that he succeeded in both displeasing those genuine unionists with whom he disagreed and alienating the advocates of the states' rights cause he regarded as the "hope" of his life. Not only was Hammond too rigid to accept the concessions and compromises required by the nation's democratizing party politics, he often seemed to regard contentious isolation as the only sure hallmark of the principled purity that he had come to identify as the essence of republican virtue. His inability either Epilogue to abandon or to implement these traditional notions of public life rendered Hammond unable to fully comprehend or manipulatethe political environment in which he functioned; his style of political behavior left him alone and misunderstood. In his family life, Hammond seemed torn as well between older notions of patriarchal dominance and an undeniable need to be not just feared but loved. He desired a wife who would be both vassal and companion; he could not admit that these goals were hardly compatible. With his children too, Hammond's dynastic designs made him incapable of satisfying emotional longings that his romantic era had encouraged him to recognize and articulate. Imprisonedwithin theseunyielding and contradictory expectations, Hammond was doomed to frustration, futility , and perhaps worst of all in his view, ineffectiveness. Yet the dimension of Hammond's life in which his illusions were most fully and dramatically destroyed was undoubtedly his commitment to a social order based in black slavery. His ideas about human bondage were not simply an intellectual position he had developed for his proslaveryessays, nor a political stance to advance his career. Hammond's feelings about the peculiar institution and about the duties and burdens of masterhood made up an important part of his own self-image and sense of personal worth. No one believed his arguments about the benevolence of human bondage more completely than he. The ideologyof southern slaveryoffered him legitimationin his never-endingquest for despotic sway at the same time it promised that as paternalisthe would be both revered and loved. Hammond's conceptions about the peculiar institution implied a resolution of these conflicting imperatives so central to his emotional and psychological constitution. But this too was an illusion, as the disintegration of slavery under wartime pressures showed Hammond all too well. He did not have to live until the actual hour of southern surrender and black emancipation to know that the system as he had understood it was destroyed—had indeed probablynever existed. Hammond came to what wasperhaps the most painful realizationpossible:his slaves regarded him with, at best, indifference. They preferred their Christmas celebrations without him; their decades of cheerful greetingshad been simply calculatedmanipulations now rendered unnecessary by impending Union victory. The people at Silver Bluff did not rise in revolution against those who had oppressed them for so long. Unlike many bondsmen who fled duringthe war itself, the Hammond slaves did not depart even when freedom was proclaimed. "We have not lost many negroes," the widowed Catherine complained in September, 1865, asshe worried 38i Epilogue about having too many mouths to feed. "I wish we could get cleat of many of the useless ones." These blacks were seemingly more concerned about remaining together in a group than fleeing white domination; the positive meaning...