James Henry Hammond was a powerful and controversial figure in antebellum South Carolina. A U.S. representative, governor, and senator, Hammond was celebrated in his time for his political skill, wealth, and influence. Yet behind this public image lay a far darker reality: Hammond was not only an enslaver of more than 300 people, he was a sexual predator who meticulously recorded the abuse of enslaved African girls and teenage relatives in secret diaries.
Hammond was born on November 15, 1807, in Newberry County, South Carolina, to Elisha and Catherine Fox Hammond. He graduated from South Carolina College in 1825, where he was a member of the Euphradian Society. After college, he worked as a teacher and newspaper writer before studying law and gaining admission to the bar in 1828. He then established a legal practice in Columbia, South Carolina, beginning his career in public life.
Hammond’s rise to wealth was secured through his marriage to Catherine Elizabeth Fitzsimmons, a shy 17-year-old with a substantial dowry. This union brought him control over 22 square miles of land, multiple plantations, and more than 300 enslaved Africans, firmly placing him within South Carolina’s elite planter class. His wealth and status gave him both the time and influence to enter public life.
Hammond began his political career as a U.S. representative, serving from 1835 to 1836 before resigning due to ill health. He then spent two years traveling in Europe, broadening his connections and perspective. Returning to South Carolina, he focused on managing his vast estates while steadily building his political influence.
His growing prominence led to his election as governor of South Carolina, a position he held from 1842 to 1844. Later, following the death of Senator Andrew Butler, Hammond was chosen by the state legislature to serve in the U.S. Senate, where he remained from 1857 until his resignation in 1860, after South Carolina seceded from the Union.
Throughout his career, Hammond was an outspoken defender of slavery. In a famous 1858 Senate speech, he declared that “Cotton is king” and argued that Southern society required a permanent class of enslaved laborers to perform menial and manual work. He called this class the “mudsill,” comparing them to the lowest supporting beam of a building that carries the weight of everything above it.
In Hammond’s view, enslaved Africans were the foundation of Southern wealth and social stability, essential to the comfort and prosperity of the free population.
While Hammond publicly praised enslaved labor as orderly and “well-compensated,” his private actions revealed a brutal abuse of power that extended even into his own family.
The most shocking evidence of Hammond’s personal depravity comes from his private writings. His Secret and Sacred diaries, published more than a century after his death in 1988, reveal in chilling detail his sexual abuse of four teenage nieces over a two-year period. Hammond described their behavior as “extremely affectionate,” justifying his predation in his own words. The scandal became public in 1843 when the girls’ father, Wade Hampton III exposed Hammond’s crimes, temporarily derailing his political career.
Hammond’s sexual abuse extended beyond his nieces to enslaved African girls, though historical records document only two cases: Sally Johnson and her daughter Louisa. Louisa, born to Sally and believed to be fathered by Hammond, was just twelve years old when he first assaulted her, and she later bore several of his children.
His repeated abuse of Louisa was such an abominable act that it drove his wife, Catherine, to leave him for several years, taking their children with her before eventually returning. While these two cases are the only ones clearly recorded, Hammond’s ownership of over 300 enslaved Africans makes it likely that his sexual exploitation was part of a wider, systemic abuse of women who had no legal rights and no way to resist.
These horrific acts by James Hammond were not isolated incidents but part of a broader and deeply entrenched system of exploitation in the antebellum South. Enslaved African women were treated as property, stripped of any legal rights or protections, and left entirely vulnerable to the desires of the men who claimed ownership over them.
Sexual abuse was widespread, and children born from such assaults were automatically enslaved, perpetuating the cycle of control and oppression. Within this system, women like Sally Johnson and Louisa had no ability to resist or seek justice, making them especially powerless against Hammond, whose wealth, social standing, and political influence shielded him from accountability.
Even as he committed these crimes, Hammond cultivated the image of a model planter. He promoted Redcliffe, his plantation in Beech Island, South Carolina, as an ideal estate, producing detailed manuals on crop management, the care of enslaved people, and plantation operations. Yet his diaries reveal a clear contrast between this cultivated public persona and the private reality of sexual predation.
James Hammond died on November 13, 1864, at Redcliffe Plantation, two days shy of his 57th birthday. Today, he is remembered not only for his political influence and defense of slavery but also for the sexual violence he inflicted on those he considered property and family.
Sources:
https://potus-geeks.livejournal.com/1058308.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20091110224927/https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/29/books/monster-of-all-he-surveyed.html
