James H. Hammond
[1] After his marriage, Hammond was elected to the United States House of Representatives as a member of the Nullifier Party, serving from 1835 until his resignation the following year due to ill health.Hammond died on November 13, 1864 (two days before his fifty-seventh birthday), at what is now the Redcliffe Plantation State Historic Site in Beech Island, South Carolina.[4] He popularized the phrase that "Cotton is King" in his March 4, 1858, speech to the U.S. Senate, saying: "In all social systems, there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life...It constitutes the very mudsill of society."[6][7] Hammond and Simms were part of a "sacred circle" of intellectuals, including Edmund Ruffin, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and George Frederick Holmes, who promoted reformation in the South in various forms.[11] Hammond's Secret and Sacred diaries[12] (not published until 1988) described, without embarrassment, his sexual abuse[1][13] over two years of four teenage nieces, daughters of his sister-in-law Ann Fitzsimmons and her husband Wade Hampton II.The letters, held among the Hammond Papers at the University of South Carolina, were first published by researcher Martin Duberman in 1981; they are notable as rare documentary evidence of same-sex relationships in the antebellum United States.Although many of these segregation academies are now defunct, Hammond School continued to develop; after the 1970s, it expanded its admission policy, as federal law mandated, to be non-discriminatory.