Scope and Content Note
The papers of James Henry Hammond (1807-1864) span the years 1774 to 1875, with the bulk of the material dated 1823-1864. The collection consists largely of bound volumes of correspondence and speeches but also includes diaries, plantation account books and manuals, scrapbooks, and manuscript and printed copies of Hammond’s speeches and for the most part reflects state and national politics in the decades preceding the Civil War.
The earliest diary, in a volume labeled “Commonplace Book, 1829,” covers the year 1831. Three small volumes of diary notes and memoranda, chiefly 1836-1838, record Hammond’s travels in America and abroad. Later diaries contain entries from 1841 to 1846. Plantation books, 1832-1858, contain memoranda of crops to be planted, lists of slaves, and notes on the management of slaves.
Subjects mentioned in both the correspondence and speeches include states’ rights, slavery, state banks, the Southern Convention of 1850 at Nashville, Tennessee secession, nullification, and the tariff. Correspondents include A. P. Aldrich, Bert Alvord, Lewis M. Ayer, Ker Boyce, A. H. Brisbane, Pierce Mason Butler, John C. Calhoun, James L. Clark, John Myers Felder, James Gadsden, James Hamilton, Isaac W. Hayne, Robert Young Hayne, Laurence M. Keitt, George McDuffie, Angus Patterson, A. H. Pemberton, F. W. Pickens, Wm. D. Porter, William C. Preston, Paul Quattlebaum, Robert Barnwell Rhett, William Gilmore Simms, William Henry Trescot, Ben Tucker, and James M. Walker. A card index to names of correspondents is available in the Manuscript Division Reading Room and on reel twenty of the microfilm edition of the papers.
The collection also includes a letterbook, 1774-1780, consisting of mercantile letters of Andrew McLean, written from Savannah and Augusta, Georgia, to Clark & Milligan, merchants in London, England.