5.1 Mudsill America part 1

James Henry Hammond

Ancient Athens produced philosophies and plays on morality that continue to shape our values and laws. Athens flourished on the labor of its slave population (15-40% varying over time). With the highest priced brothels next to the agora, prostitution was legal, regulated, and often merciless. Prostitution taxes were critical for public construction such as the Parthenon.

Ancient Roman law distinguished between the patricians, free persons, and slaves. The patrician social values were less diverse. Either you owned property or you were a slave. Without property you were subject to someone’s will and could not protect your, or other property owners’ interests.

In drawing from the past the American Patriots adopted the slavery system, not Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom. Their repurposing Enlightenment is clear from the selective borrowing from Locke’s Two Treatises on Democracy. They kept his “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” while rejecting his claim that God gave all men (including women) equal rights. Instead the Founders explicitly dehumanized most of the people in the Americas.

To call this a moral failure is ,itself, a moral failure. That rationalization misunderstands the purpose of dehumanization. If you killed an ancient Greece prostitute you owed her owner compensation just as if you borrowed and broke his hammer. Aside from pleasing customers, as non-persons prostitutes had the individual relevance of an inflatable sex doll. Where wives and daughters were protected, non-persons had no individual existence that deserved consideration. Like grabbing a rock on a beach, you could do anything you wished to a woman with no owner. Non-persons have no basis for moral consideration.

Despite debates while drafting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Patriots’ creation of non-persons became United States law. They believed themselves moral because they defended the rights of the only group they believed had moral existence: themselves.

Thomas Paine and the Aristocracy

Thomas Paine drew the common man to the revolution with Common Sense. He rallied support in the darkest days writing, “Now is the time that tries men’s souls.” As important as these were, Paine’s beliefs threatened the Patriots’ vision of a natural aristocracy. The Patriots  stripped Common Sense of Paine’s criticism of aristocracy, using only his call for independence from Britain.

Paine’s aristocracy criticism is sharpest in Rights of Man, his response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Burke’s anger at nobles being executed was the magician’s magic wand. Burke’s greater fear was the loss of class privilege. The Patriots’ American Revolution was about economic independence. The French Revolution was about individual freedom, including laws that protected aristocrat’s land privileges. Paine did not distinguish between hereditary nobles and natural aristocrats.

“Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominion.“

The Revolutionary War and Constitution were not heralds of personal freedom. They enshrined rule by an intended aristocracy. That is why they fought against any Bill of Rights. If they supported individual freedom there would not have been a Constitution that turned the majority of people into non-persons. The Constitution was a deliberate, debated choice to deny personal agency to all but themselves. There is no good faith argument that the dehumanization was an oversight or the founders were prisoners of their time. Dehumanization was publicly championed from the signing of the Constitution to the attack on Fort Sumter. It declared that only some people deserved moral consideration. Fifty years later the Senator from South Carolina stated it clearly.

James Henry Hammond:

Proclaiming the Truth

James Henry Hammond (1807-1864) was governor of South Carolina (1842-1844) and a U.S. Senator (1857-1860). The “Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina” with its lineage aristocracy and eternally enslaved blacks was his heritage. His beliefs were, if anything, more repressive than Greek and Roman slavery.

Hammond made his Senate “Mudsill” speech March 4, 1858. A mudsill is the foundation of a building. It is the material on or under the ground sacrificed for something of “worth” to be built upon. Despite moral pretensions, Hammond’s theory justified his behavior. In 1839 Hammond bought an eighteen-year-old slave and her two-year-old daughter. He began having sex with the mother, then daughter as she got older. He shared both with his son. His wife abandoned the home for years, unable to tolerate his “appetites”.⁵

Hammond’s Mudsill theory:

“In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. That is a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mud-sill of society and of political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one of the other, except on this mud-sill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. A race inferior to her own, but eminently qualified in temper, in vigor, in docility, in capacity to stand the climate, to answer all her purposes. We use them for our purpose, and call them slaves. We found them slaves by the common “consent of mankind.” which, according to Cicero, “lex naturae est [the law of nature].” The highest proof of what is nature’s law. We are old-fashioned at the South yet; slave is a word discarded now by “ears polite;” I will not characterize the class of the North by that term; but you have it; it is there; it is everywhere; it is eternal.“

Next: Mudsill theory: slavery and America.

¹ Patricians (aristocratic ruling class), equestrians (wealthy commercial middle class), plebeians (free common citizens), non-citizens, and slaves.

²  Paine, Thomas 1776-83 The American Crisis A series of sixteen pamphlets supporting the Revolutionary War.

 ³ Paine, Thomas Common Sense “Monarchy and Hereditary Succession”

⁴  See also Hammond, James Henry (1845) Gov. Hammond’s letters on southern slavery: addressed to Thomas Clarkson, the English abolitionist Charleston, Walker & Burke, Printers

⁵ Hammond kept the children from those women in the family, believing that “slavery in the family would be their happiest condition”. Freehling (2007) pp. 30-32; John Henry Hammond, Two Letters on Slavery in the United States, Columbia, SC Allen, McCarter & Company 1845 p. 15