James Hamilton, Jr., whether deliberately or unwittingly, became the center of the Denmark Vesey controversy. On the one side were people from old South Carolina families like John Cordes Prioleau and John Lyde Wilson who supported secret tribunals, but allowed Hamilton to take credit. On the other were men like William Johnson, Jr. and Thomas Bennett who feared some conspiracy might exist, but believed the rule of law should prevail.
Hamilton later played the same role in the nullification crisis of the 1832 when he was governor. Then, John Calhoun was more adept at positioning himself politically, and while he lost any hope of becoming president, still served in the United States Senate until he died from tuberculosis in 1850.
In both cases Hamilton held positions which were largely symbolic. Power in South Carolina is held by the General Assembly, and in Charleston by the city council. One wonders what kind of man was willing to countenance the execution of potentially innocent men and threaten the political stability of the United States for political celebrity.
Robert Tinkler says Hamilton’s parents preferred life in Newport, Rhode Island, to that on a humid, disease infested lowland rice plantation. For many years of his childhood, he stayed north to attend school while his father returned to South Carolina.
However, by the time he was a teenager, the family wealth was evaporating. His parents had guaranteed loans for his mother’s stepfather, William Mountrie, who died in debt in 1805. His father was from Pennsylvania, and had no aptitude for managing a rice plantation. When he married, his wife’s lands were worth $250,000; they later were valued at $6,000.
Young Hamilton was forced to sign away any rights to his inheritance when he turned 21 in 1807. His father finally declared bankruptcy in 1811 and moved in with his daughter, Hannah Prioleau. James Junior found himself in exactly the same position his father had been, a young man without means living in an aristocratic society.
He first studied law and served as secretary to the 1810 governor, Henry Middleton, the son and grandson of friends of his father. Tinkler says he found politics more to his likely than the routine of law. Then like his father, he enlisted in the War of 1812 and married a young heiress he met in 1813.
Like him, Elizabeth Heyward was raised in lowland Carolina society, but was no longer part of it. When her wealthy father died, his family took over managing the estate until his widow married a New Yorker who sued the family to protect the girl’s rights and those of her mother. While she owned Callawassie Island in the Colleton River on the south coast of the state, she’d lost any connection with the Heywards and probably any protection by the dowagers.
Apparently, her stepfather, Nicholas Cruger, didn’t trust James Hamilton, or was naturally suspicious. He demanded a prenuptial agreement to place Callawassie Island in trust. William Behan says Hamilton refused. Instead, he sold her land and slaves and put the money in a postnuptial trust in 1919. Behan believes he wanted to speculate in banks and other investments.
For the next two years he served in the state House of Representatives, then became intendant of Charleston in 1822. While he was pursuing Denmark Vesey in June of 1822, he accepted the congressional seat of William Lowdes, who’d been forced to resign in May by tuberculosis.
In the years he served in the national House of Representatives as a Jacksonian, Behan says he was manipulating the funds in the trust in contravention to the postnuptial agreement. He bought back Callawassie Island from Cruger, who had been ruined by the Panic of 1819, and bought two other rice plantations and slaves in his name alone.
One term into Jackson’s administration, he left Washington to become South Carolina governor, just as the tariffs of 1826 and 1832 were an issue. A previous governor, John Lyde Wilson, and Hamilton’s brother-in-law Samuel Prioleau, who was the first cousin of John Cordes Prioleau, had first bruited the possibility of nullification in the mid-1820's.
The state divided into two parties, the one led by Hamilton unified in its demands for nullification, the other more diverse in its responses. Politicians were pressured to take sides, and even John Calhoun, then the vice president, was forced to support nullification or lose political support in the state.
Hamilton called the Nullification Convention of 1832 which formally refused to obey the law. When Andrew Jackson passed a bill that gave him the right to use the military to enforce United States laws, Hamilton called another session of the convention to repeal its 1832 acts and nullify the Force Act. South Carolinians claimed surprise at the president’s actions and the failure of other southern states to support their actions.
Hamilton remained in the state senate and turned to business, first with the Bank of Charleston and then as a cotton broker with his oldest son, James. By 1836, Behan says, he had title to 16 plantations in four states, all mortgaged, and was buying land script in Texas for the South Carolina Land Company. His investors included large planters like Wade Hampton and politicians like Robert Young Hayne.
The Panic of 1937 destroyed his Texas plans and left him financially vulnerable. The panic had been caused by problems with the Bank of England that led to the failure of three banks that handled southern cotton. Nicholas Biddle successfully manipulated cotton prices the next year, by buying cheap cotton and holding if off the market until prices rose.
After Biddle died, Hamilton thought he could do the same thing, only his son James died from yellow fever in 1839 before he could sell at a profit. The next year he changed the terms of his trustee relationship for Mary Martha McRa, through an agreement with her son, and started depositing her dividends from the Bank of Charleston into an account with a Charleston cotton factor.
In 1842 Hamilton owed over $700,000. His wife, with his consent, sued him for violating the terms of the 1819 trust. The judge stopped any claims against her money until the suit was settled, which took four years. Aggravating matters, in 1842 Sam Houston took over the government of Texas, and cancelled any financial agreements the republic had made with Hamilton.
In 1846 Hamilton and his wife moved to a cotton plantation in Alabama, and two years later he declared bankruptcy in the state of Georgia. In 1850, the McRa estate sued him for diverting funds from her estate, and discovered he had promised the proceeds from his claim against Texas to at least six different creditors.
He took over management of his daughter’s plantation in Bluffton on the Savannah River in 1849, when her husband made clear he preferred to spend his time in Newport. They moved there in 1855, after he was forced to sell his Texas sugar plantation. He died in a steamboat accident two years later still trying to get reimbursed for his claims against the state, while his wife died in exile in Savannah during the Civil War.
His sons, who bought the Texas plantation, finally gave up in 1868. In 1911, Texas leased the plantation from Nellie League for a prison farm and bought what had become known as Burnin’ Hell outright in 1918.
Notes: Samuel Prioleau and Providence Hext were the parents of John Cordes’ father Samuel and Samuel’s father Philip according to Rob Salzman’s e-familytree website.
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004, on Elizabeth Matthews Heyward.
Lucko, Paul M. "Retrieve Plantation," Handbook of Texas Online.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004.
No comments:
Post a Comment