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

Chapter 2. Ways and Means

C H A P T E R 2 Ways and Means AMMOND LEFT South Carolina College with ambition, but without vocation . For almost three years the institution had provided a social place and purpose. In gaining his degree, he lost the securityof the academic world in which he had thrived. But James was not to be permitted the luxury of idleness while he sought an appropriate career. His father's "seric, is fears that my debts will ruin me before I can pay" compelled young James to ^ek employment at once.' Like many ambitious young men of the nineteenth centur/, including several of the less privileged of his classmates and even his own father, Hammond turned to teaching. James grudginglyaccepted a position at Poplar spring Academy , four and a half miles outside Orangeburg, a market town and district seat about fifty miles from Columbia. The role of rural schoolmaster was one the ambitious youth had never envisioned for himself, and he chafed under the humiliation of filling what he regarded as a demeaning position. His nine months at Poplar Spring he would later remember to have been "time most unprofitably spent." Not only did his social and intellectual advancement come to a halt, but Hammond found himself miserable and overworked as well. Many of the pupils in his charge, who were preparingfor admission to South Carolina College, were hardly younger than he. Hammond feared exposure of his ignorance, especially in mathematics; he was certain his understanding of algebra was insufficient for him even to pretend to teach it to others. Beset by such anxieties, Hammond i. Elisha Hammond to James Henry Hammond, January i, 1826, in JHH Papers, SCL. H James Henry Hammond and the Old South felt lonely and isolated as well, for he had become accustomed to the liveliness of Columbia society and to the company of his college friends. Lacking sympathetic companionship, he lapsed into romantic brooding; he poured out his unhappiness in correspondence, bemoaning "pleasures wh. have fled forever," recounting his "solitary walks" among "melancholy groves," and inquiring wistfully after the fate of a favorite "pink bonnet" in Columbia. To one former college associate, he melodramaticallyproclaimed, "My soul pants to throw off this weight of mortality and with it the cares & troubles of this world." Removed from the political intrigues that had begun to fascinate him in Columbia, Hammond turned once again to poetry. In the conventional romantic lament he found a congenial mode for the expression of his own feelings. Oh! I had once a soul as proud, As proud as e'er was broke The future smil'd and not a cloud The gathering storm bespoke 1 bask'd in fortune's genial beams Nor long'd for pleasures gone; While glory and thy golden dreams, Ambition lured me on.2 Hammond did not spare his struggling father these self-pitying effusions. Unlike James's college associates, who replied with odes to melancholy rivaling Hammond's own, Elisha had little patience with his son's complaints. The boy's situation seemed genuinely enviable to the older man. "I had rather be JHH surrounded by poverty," he declared bluntly to his son, "than any young man in the State who is only buoyed up by property and family." College, Elisha insisted , had been an unreal situation. In fact, he reminded his son, the boy had always been sheltered from the struggle for the necessities of life. "This is your first excursion into the common and illiterate world. You have always been within the walls of a seminary amongst your equals—you were a community by yourselves." But it was time James learned more of reality. "It is absolutely necessary to understand some of the drudgery of life. I know your confinement is irksome but it will help you to form a habit of business." Elisha summarily dismissed his son's dejection. "One of your age, talents & prospects low spirited pshaw 2. James Henry Hammond, "Thoughts and Recollections" (MS vol. hd., 1852 —53), February 24, 1852, Hammond to Henry W. Hilliard, July 17, 1826, Hilliard to Hammond, July 15, 1826, Hammond to Dear Frank, May 26, 1826, clipping from Columbia Telescope (Hammond Scraphook, MS vol. bd., 1825-40), all in JHH Papers, SCL. 24 Ways and Means Courtesy of the South Caroliniana Library Elisha Hammond, James's father. pshaw !!" Hammond urged James to look upon his situation as "a state of sad probation" from...