5.2 Mudsill America part 2

Harriet Flud Hampton (1823-1848)

1. Spring ILR (Institute for Learning in Retirement) is here. I’m taking three classes and teaching one. I may not be able to write one post a week. I’ll do what I can.

2. Cindy’s comment about Mudsill part 1 was very helpful. Hammond was a more of predatory sexual rapist than I had identified. I had focused on his Mudsill speech, not the man. As a leading Southern advocate of slavery, Hammond championed preventing blacks from gaining any existence sufficient to require moral consideration. Slave holders could not imagine any moral considerations guiding their treatment of blacks. James Henry Hammond was worse than that.

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I have described two ways to consider the relationship between the individual and society. One, how the individual is useful to the society. Two, how the society is structured to benefit its members. These are our two rivers.

Hammond’s Mudsill Theory declared that individuals have value only in so far as they benefit society. Non-persons, such as slaves, existed only to serve the interests of their owners. The implicit non-person membership reached beyond slaves to include all blacks, all poor, and all women. Thomas Paine attacked the Patriots’ presumption of non-persons and the aristocratic belief that only their desires counted. Fifty-six years after Hammond’s Mudsill speech Vilfredo Pareto rephrased that theory, laying the foundation for fascism.¹

Yankee abolitionists argued that slavery led to the corruption of family and Christian values. Hammond and other slave owners raged against Northerners’ claims that slavery turned the South into a vast brothel. Mixed identity children, confirmed by DNA, show that high percentages of black children were born to women who held no authority over their bodies. That makes Hammond’s slave rape relevant.²

Hammond’s personal hypocrisy distracts from the greater issue: making people non-persons. How did slavery became so embedded in white, antebellum society that it became impossible for many Southerners to question its existence. The exploitation of non-persons continued even after slavery the Civil War because the Southern weltanschauung legitimized slavery.

Like Hammond, slavery’s defenders argued that the Bible sanctioned slavery. It Does. They defended slavery as central to their traditions, heritage, and way of life. More directly than in the Mudsill speech, Hammond and others argued that regardless of race all lower-class people should be enslaved for their own good. They used the exploitation of Northern industrial workers to argue that compassionate slave owners provided food and shelter for their slaves who, by nature, were too mentally feeble to govern themselves. The exploitation of factory workers was real and deadly. Southern slaveholders deluded themselves that they offered slaves a more “protected” exploitation. Hammond’s comparison of factory workers to slaves fails. First, while Northern factory worker exploitation was real and grievous that did not make slavery less grievous or more moral. Even a lesser of two evils remains evil.

Second, as limited a benefit as moving from one exploitative job to another may be, it offered the possibility of control and relief. Factory jobs offered the possibility of forming families not dissolved at the owner’s whim, a sale to a new owner, or forced breeding. Somehow, in defending slavery from abolitionists’ claims Southerners ignored events like the Tidewater North Carolina planter who offered a friend $20 for each slave he impregnated “to improve his “stock”.³ Or slave holders justifying fracturing slave families because intact families threatened white plantation domesticity^.4

Sadly, because there is no joy in this, Hammond, moral defender of slavey, raped his four nieces: Harriet Flud Hampton, Ann Hampton, Caroline Hampton, and Catherine “Kate” Hampton. A textbook example of victim blaming, he cast himself as victim of their seductiveness.

“From the first I had found these young ladies extremely affectionate, lavish of their kisses and embraces, professing great love for me, and not only permitting but promptly responding to every species of dalliance which circumstances brought about between us… And for two years I gave way to the wanton” indulgences.⁵

The teenage victims’ father, Wade Hampton III, exposed the crime to the public. No chargers were filed, leaving a convoluted history. Hammond had a homosexual relationship in college with Thomas Jefferson Withers. Hammond made a good living as a lawyer and newspaper publishers, but entered Southern society by marrying Catherine Elizabeth Fitzsimmons. It was her wealth that lead to owning several large plantations (22 square miles) and 300 slaves. It also led to Hammond’s election to the U.S. House of Representatives (1835), which he resigned after a year for health reasons. He returned, was elected governor (1842-1844) then to the U.S. Senate (1857-1858).

Where does the rape of Hammond’s nieces fit in this timeline? In 1843 Harriet told her father, Wade Hampton III, about the repeated rapes when they visited Hammond’s plantation. Hammond was governor of South Carolina when Hampton III exposed him. Polite society ostracized Hammond for several years, but elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1857 knowing his history.

Hammond’s Rapes in Southern Context

Hammond argued that slavery was established by God, while Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” violated Biblical cannon. What Biblical cannon was relevant? Biblically, any sexual contact with Hampton’s unmarried daughters was rape⁶ and theft of their bride price (Deuteronomy 22:28-29).⁷ By Biblical law Hammond owed Hampton the bride price for each daughter, had to marry them, and could not put them away. That would compensate the father and ensure the women’s future care and public legitimacy. Without those marriages the women remained damaged goods with no chance for honorable marriages.

In a world where women were blamed for any moral impropriety, Hammond blamed the teenagers for enticing him. Rape judgements habitually hinge on “What did she do to deserve it?” Hammond’s claim that they responded to any dalliances established their guilt. Outcasts from proper society, the daughters never married.

How does the rape of four teenage girls relate to mudsill theory? The Patriots enshrined mudsill principles in the Constitution. Hammond and Pareto divided society into those who mattered and those bound to serve the desires and profits of those who mattered. Whatever Hampton III may have done to reveal Hammond’s crimes, the South Carolina men who counted did not care that a powerful, wealthy man raped Hampton III’s daughters and destroyed their public lives. Powerful men could do whatever they wished to women and men who were so stripped of legal identities that they no longer held moral significance. It was not that the wealthy ignored immoral values; it was that moral considerations were not imagined relevant for non-persons. Like throwing away a used tissue, “aristocrats” could do whatever they wished with mudsills.

Next: Mudsill Theory and the Social Contract.

¹  Pareto, Vilfredo The Rise and Fall of the Elites (1901) edition used: Totowa, New Jersey Bedminster Press Inc. 1968

 ² A person lacking the right to refuse lacks the authority to grant permission.

³ Woodard, Colin American Nations: A history of The Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America Penguin Books: New York (2011) pp 226-227.

 ⁴ American Slavery as It Is, New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1893 pp 16,93, 169-170

 ⁵ Redcliffe Southern Times “The Women Behind the Scandal Vol10, issue 9 March 2016. Material from his “Secret and Sacred Diaries”..

⁶ Rape in a modern sense does not exist in the Bible. Biblical women, like slaves, had no authority over their bodies. They could not give consent. Any sexual activity before marriage was theft of the father’s property rights (bride price) of his daughter.

⁷ “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold of her, and lie with her, and they be found; Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of sliver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days. (Deuteronomy 22:28-29).