James Henry Hammond's Progression

1.In 1831, James Henry Hammond inherited through marriage Silver Bluff Plantation, on the shores of South Carolina. He was a Lawyer, Teacher and a Newspaper editor. He undertook the running of his plantation and soon realized it was not an easy job to overcome the dominance of the complexity of social system that existed. He struggled to control and manage it for the next thirty years. He called a “a system of roguery. “Hammond astutely recognized that black life on his plantation was structured and organized as a “system “, the very existence of which seemed necessarily a challenge to his absolute control and therefore, as he perceived it a kind of “roguery.” Because Hammond’s mastery over his bondsmen depended upon his success at undermining slave society and culture, he established a carefully designed plan of physical

“For decades Hammond’s slaves were quietly asserting their right to their own religious life in face of his attempts to deny it to them”. (Source-1) Power struggle and conflict for religious autonomy to supervising slaves work patterns was Hammond’s goal to achieve. He thought they were unregulated, undisciplined for long before he took over his plantation Silver Bluff. Hammond was strict and unyielding, punished slaves when they were lazy, whipping and flogging them when they did not shop to work. It seemed instead of mastering over them, he manipulated then with positive inducements like work competitions, like picking contests, diligent hands and arranged barbeques, Christmas, food ratios. The slaves used these privileges as baits to their advantage as their dues, whenever they felt the need and thus too manipulated their master, Hammond too. This kind of arrangement became typical pattern between Hammond and his slaves. “While Hammond sought to assert both dominance and legitimacy, the slave’s T Silver Bluff strove to maintain networks of communication and community as the bases of their personal and cultural autonomy”.