James Hamilton’s life, as he saw it, and as it’s largely retold, had three acts: years as a successful politician associated with nullification, years as an important businessman and agent for the Republic of Texas to European bankers, and impoverished years caused by investments soured by a bad national economy.
Robert Tinkler believes many were hesitant to look for a deeper pattern, because his personal narrative "reminded his fellow planters that their world of wealth and honor rested precariously on the vagaries of an international commodities market they could little influence."
However, there were those at the time that looked for more consistency and personal responsibility. William Behan’s description of a man intent on fraud from before his marriage to Elizabeth Heyward is probably not as malicious as the private opinions of his creditors.
Those who supported nullification in the 1840's and 1850's could only see Hamilton’s willingness to compromise on slavery to get his Texas claims repaid as "the last cry of a child against being put to bed in the dark." A man who might benefit from his support for Texas, Sam Houston, believed the man "was destitute of all sincerity."
Tinkler himself was more interested in Hamilton’s political importance, and provided little evidence in his biography from the details of the various law suits and his associates that would shed light on his character. In the absence of such hard facts, it’s too easy to pick and choose evidence to support any personal prejudice.
Historians with a scientific bias have tried to use theoretical constructs to provide some objective way to interpret an incomplete factual record. In the 1960's, some historians were trying to use different ideas drawn from psychology to describe the link between people like James Hamilton and their political cultures.
In 1961, David McClelland suggested there were three basic things that motivated people to act: the desire for achievement, for power, or for social acceptance, and that individuals and cultures were some mix of the three.
As old as those ideas may be, they spring to mind when one looks at the life of a man who spent his childhood and youth in boarding houses and private schools where proprietors were probably more interested in flattering him to maintain their income, than socializing him as they would their own sons. Oliver Hazard Perry remembered that at John Frazer’s Latin school "the local boys took their turns at cleaning the classroom each week," but "the comparatively rich - or self-consciously aristocratic - southern students often paid others to perform their chores."
Hamilton spent much of his later youth living with men, rather than with families, where comfort, if not success, depended on pleasing others. After time in the army, he went to Washington, DC., where he lived in boardinghouses or messes with other congressmen. He did spend time with his wife in South Carolina, but, Tinkler says, he always became bored if isolated too long from the society of Charleston or Washington and displayed what one his sons remembers as a "peculiarly mercurial temperament subject to fits of elation and gloom."
One rather suspects that he had no strong political opinions, but absorbed those of others, like John Lyde Wilson and John Cordes Prioleau, and lacked the instinct for power of a man like John Calhoun, who knew how to temper actions. After South Carolinians backed away from the more extreme implications of the nullification crisis in 1832, one of his friends, William Preston, said Hamilton’s problem "was an over anxiety to exhibit himself strikingly to the public eye."
Once he lost an opportunity to return to Washington and recognized he had no serious interest in running plantations, I would guess Hamilton took up one scheme after another because some friend of his supported it. He became involved in Texas after Joel Poinsett invested in land there and after Bernard Elliott Bee joined the government of the republic. Poinsett was a neighbor who supported him after nullification. Bee had worked for him when he was a governor and claimed to be a brother-in-law, apparently through the Prioleaus.
Hamilton supported Nicholas Biddle’s national bank before nullification, and believed he stayed close to the man without realizing men seeking power use people seeking affirmation. No doubt, he believed he had absorbed enough watching the man to successfully exploit the cotton market without any experience of men who make their living in speculation.
Similarly, he thought he could grow rice in South Carolina, cotton in Alabama, and sugar in Texas, if he left others run his plantations, especially if the subordinates were his own sons. Only one, Daniel Heyward Hamilton, became an independent planter, and he ruined his political fortunes when he refused to support nullification in 1852.
Hamilton’s willingness to exploit the trusts of his wife, Elizabeth Heyward, and the widowed Mary Martha McRa probably has deeper roots, and may come from the way his father treated his mother’s lands and the way his step-grandfather exploited the lands of his mother’s mother.
Notes:
Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004.
McClelland, David. The Achieving Society, 1961.
Perry, Oliver Hazard. Quoted by Tinker from a biography by Alexander Slidell Mackenzie; the Perrys ran the boardinghouse where the Hamiltons stayed in Newport.
Tinkler, Robert. James Hamilton of South Carolina, 2004; "last cry" quotation from Charleston Mercury, 5 June 1838; Houston quotation from 9 December 1842 letter; quotation from Preston in 15 October 1833 letter.
No comments:
Post a Comment