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I have to begin this diary with a bit of an apology. I was actually planning a different (more substantial) subject for this month, but life has gotten in the way. I’ve been fighting off not one, but two mystery illnesses (fortunately, I’m much better now), now I have a sick cat on my hands, and to top it off, I have an unexpected guest this weekend. Not wanting to cancel or postpone this month’s diary (what a bad way to begin the year!), I decided on a shorter Plan B diary, which overlaps with a past diary that I wrote. Forgive anything that is repeated or reused from that diary, but I think it’s old enough that it will be worthwhile to go over again in greater detail.
Instead of featuring a book as I normally do in this series, I’ve decided to focus on an article. It’s a rather old article (first published in a 1980-1981 volume of the Journal of Homosexuality) by prominent gay historian Martin Duberman titled “‘Writhing Bedfellows’ in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence.” I first read it in grad school, and it remains one of my favorite journal articles—partly because of its “juicy” contents (we’ll get there), but also because it wrestles with important historiographical and methodological questions that I deal with all the time in my own research, writing, and teaching. In short, the central question of this article (as I see it) is: What conclusions can we make about a historical figure’s sexuality based on written evidence? Going along with that, can we call a historical figure who existed in the distant past “gay” when the written evidence seems to strongly suggest a sexual attraction to members of their own sex?
Every so often, I’ll come across a claim that James Buchanan was our first gay president, for example, or that Abraham Lincoln was gay because of his letters to Joshua Speed. I have to admit that I cringe when I hear modern terms like “gay” applied to these historical figures, because my own tendency is to avoid pushing individuals from the past into modern identity categories that they wouldn’t have recognized. This has been a major historiographical debate within the field of LGBTQ history, and scholars don’t necessarily agree on this. I discuss the divide between the so-called “social constructionists” (I’d count myself among them) and the “essentialists” at greater length in a diary I published a while back on homosexuality in the 19th century:
There are “camps” of historians—so-called social constructionists and essentialists—who approach this issue quite differently. Social constructionists engage (whether consciously or not) with Michel Foucault, who basically argued that the sexologists’ “construction” of the “homosexual” category in the late 1800s gave way to the rise of homosexuality as an identity—whereas, before, homosexuality was thought of as a sexual act (“sodomy,” “buggery,” etc.). Essentialists—who, I think it’s safe to say, are outnumbered by social constructionists in the field—don’t deny that language changes, but they assert that queer people have always identified themselves as different (in much the same way as queer people today do), even if they used different words (such as “Uranian”).
Of course, back in the early 1980s—when the academic field of gay history was first established, and when this article was written—these questions were even more important, and probably more hotly contested.
Duberman’s article revolves around letters that were exchanged in the 1800s between two important southern men: Thomas (“Jeff”) Withers and James (“Jim”) Hammond. Both of these men were aligned, in their own ways, with the pro-slavery southern “strict constructionists” who advocated for the sovereign rights of southern states against the power of the federal government. The two men exchanged letters and became friends—and, apparently, a bit more than friends.
Jeff Withers in 1828 became editor of the Columbia Telescope, an organ of the powerful nullification movement that had arisen in South Carolina to protest and defy the recent federal tariff. For several years thereafter he gave full energies to the struggle, delaying the completion of his law studies until 1833 (the same year he married Elizabeth Boykin, whose niece, Mary Boykin Chestnut, later won enduring fame for her Civil War journals, published as Diary from Dixie). Elected a common-law judge soon after, Withers later moved up to the state Court of Appeals, where he served until his death in 1866. His moment of greatest public prominence came in 1861, when he was chosen to be one of fifty delegates sent by the seven seceded states of the lower South to meet in Montgomery, Alabama, there to draw up a provisional government for the pending new Confederacy. Except for a few additional details, little more is known about Withers’ public career.
[...]
We know a great deal more about “Jim.” James H. Hammond became one of the antebellum South’s “great men,” his career ranging from politics to agricultural reform to pro-slavery polemics. At various times he was governor, congressman, and senator from South Carolina, a leading exponent of southern economic diversification, and a highly influential “moralist” whose theories in defense of slavery became cornerstones of the South’s “Pro-Slavery Argument.” Hammond’s name may not be well known today, but in the antebellum period he was likened in importance to John C. Calhoun—and considered his likely heir.
Duberman goes to some length to explain the difficulty he had when it came to acquiring the letters that are at the center of his article. The existence of the letters was brought to his attention by a doctoral student, and when he tried to get his own hands on them, it was quite the struggle. I won’t go into full detail about the fight he had with the archivists who held the letters, but it became clear that the archive was quite concerned about such “intimate” letters being uncovered and associated with Hammond. The donor of the Hammond papers had apparently asked that the document not be used in a way that would “result in embarrassment to descendants.” Long story short, Duberman was finally able to access the documents, but he was not given permission to publish them. In the end, after consulting with his own legal experts and considering the implications of not publishing the letters, he decided to publish them in full anyway. I particularly enjoyed this line from a letter Duberman sent to the person who had denied his request:
For two men like Hammond and Withers, who have gone down in history as among the country’s staunchest defenders of human slavery, I should think their reputations could only be enhanced by the playful, raucous—the humanizing—revelations contained in the two letters.
As for the letters themselves, they are indeed published in full in Duberman’s article, and they are indeed quite juicy. I won’t use the entire letters (you can probably easily find them if you google), but I’ll post the “best” parts. This excerpt is from a letter by Withers to Hammond, dated May 15, 1826:
I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your Shirt-tail, and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing Bedfellow with your long fleshen pole—the exquisite touches of which I have often had the honor of feeling? Let me say unto thee that unless though changest former habits in this particular, thou wilt be represented by every future Chum as a nuisance. And, I pronounce it, with good reason too. Sir, you roughen the downy Slumbers of your Bedfellow—by such hostile—furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him—when he is least prepared for defence against he crushing force of a Battering Ram. Without reformation my imagination depicts some awful results for which you will be held accountable—and therefore it is, that I earnestly recommend it. Indeed it is encouraging an assault and battery propensity, which needs correction--& uncorrected threatens devastation, horror & bloodshed, etc.
The letter signs off with the following:
With great respect I am the old
Stud,
Jeff.
There is a second letter, also from Withers to Hammond, which is dated September 24, 1826. Again, straight to the good part:
I fancy, Jim, that your elongated protruberance—your fleshen pole—your [two Latin words; indecipherable]—has captured complete mastery over you—and I really believe, that you are charging over the pine barrens of your locality, braying, like an ass, at every she-male you can discover. I am afraid that you are thus prostituting the “image of God” and suggest that if you thus blasphemously essay to put on the form of a Jack—in this stead of that noble image—you will share the fate of Nebuchadnazzer of old, I should lament to hear of you feeding upon the dross of the pasture and alarming the country with your vociferations. The day of miracles may not be past, and the flaming excess of your lustful appetite may drag down the vengeance of supernal power.—And you’ll “be damn-d if you don’t marry”?—and felt a disposition to set down and gravely detail me the reasons of early marriage. But two favourable ones strike me now—the first is, that Time may grasp love so furiously as totally[?] to disfigure his Phis. The second is, that, like George McDuffie, he may have the hap-hazzard of a broken backbone befal him, which will relieve him from the performance of affectual family-duty—& throw over the brow of his wife, should he chance to get one, a most foreboding gloom—As to the first, you will find many a modest good girl subject to the same inconvenience—and as to the second, it will only superinduce such domestic whirlwinds, as will call into frequent exercise rhetorical displays of impassioned Eloquence, accompanied by appropriate and perfect specimens of those gestures which Nature and feeling suggest. To get children, it is true, fulfills a department of social & natural duty—but to let them starve, or subject them to the alarming hazard of it, violates another of a most important character. This is the dilemma to to which I reduce—choose this day which you will do.
The existence of these letters, of course, is undeniable. But the real question is how to interpret them? An even bigger question is, what conclusions can we draw from these letters about the two men themselves? A bigger question yet is, what conclusions can we draw about the time period? Was this kind of interaction between two men commonplace (it’s not as if Withers was writing in code, so maybe his openness says something), or was it aberrant? These are the questions that Duberman struggles with in this article, and you probably won’t be surprised to learn that he isn’t really able to answer them. That doesn’t make them any less important, though.
We do know quite a bit about Hammond himself, however, and his sexual appetite—and what we know certainly seems to line up with the Withers letters. Like many “conservatives” today, Hammond was on the one hand known as a staunch moralist, but on the other hand, he was quite the hypocrite. From the Duberman article:
As an adult, Hammond had the reputation for stern rectitude, and was at pains to reinforce it. For example, he haughtily denounced as “grossly and atrociously exaggerated” the abolitionists’ charge that racial mixing was common on southern plantations; the actual incidence of miscegenation, he insisted, was “infinitely small” in contrast to the “illicit sexual intercourse” known to be widespread among the factory populations of England and the North. As a plantation owner, he sternly enforced puritanical sexual mores among his slaves. He allowed the slaves on his plantation to marry but not to divorce unless a slave couple could manage to convince him that “sufficient cause” existed; even then he subjected both members of the couple of a hundred lashes and forbid both the right to remarry for three years.
Hammond’s entrenched reputation as the guardian and exemplar of traditional morality got a sudden, nasty jolt in 1846. In that year, George McDuffie resigned his seat in the U.s. Senate, and the state legislature seemed on the verge of choosing Hammond to succeed him. Hammond’s brother-in-law, Wade Hampton, thwarted that result. He warned Hammond that he would publicly reveal an incident that took place three years earlier unless Hammond immediately removed his name from consideration for the Senate seat. The nature of that incident was finally revealed twenty years ago, when the historian Clement Eaton discovered and published excerpts from Hammond’s secret diary. That diary reveals that Hammond had attempted to seduce Wade Hampton’s teenage daughters.
[...]
As both a young and a middle-aged man, his lust—whether aroused by male college friends or by teenage female relatives—continued strong, arrogantly assertive, ungoverned. Hammond never seems to have struggled very hard to control it.
When it comes to the larger questions posed above, Duberman acknowledges that we can’t answer them. He does come to some kind of cautious conclusion, however, shaky as it may be:
At the least, Jeff’s lighthearted comedic descriptions of male bedfellows “poking and punching” each other with their “fleshen poles” seems so devoid of furtiveness or shame that it is possible to believe male-male sexual contact was nowhere nearly stigmatized to the degree long assumed. Withers and Hammond, after all, were ambitious aspirants to positions of leadership and power. Could Hammond have indulged so freely (and Withers described so casually) behavior widely deemed disgraceful and abhorrent, outside the range of “permissible” experience? If homoeroticism had been utterly taboo, wouldn’t one expect Withers’ tone to betray some evidence of guilt and unease? Instead, it is breezy and nonchalant, raising the possibility that sexual contact between males (of a certain class, region, time, and place), if not commonplace, was not wholly proscribed either. Should that surmise be even marginally correct, our standard view of the history of male homosexuality in this country as an unrelieved tale of concealment and woe needs revision.
I don’t have a better answer than that. I remain rather torn on how to talk about historical artifacts like the Withers-Hammond letters. I am still quite cautious about how I interpret historical evidence like this, and I continue to resist applying modern terms such as “gay” to people who existed in the 1820s. But, as I continue to incorporate material about sexuality into my early American history courses (an ongoing project), this is something that I often think about and wrestle with. If you have thoughts about this topic, I’d be very interested to hear them in the comments below.
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