The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

Hammond conflated human lives with other plantation assets. “Every thing dies,” he wrote, “not only people, but mules, horses, cattle, hogs—life seems here to be the mere sport of some capricious destiny. Whether it is a judgement on me or on the place I know not.” Hammond pursued a strategy of absolute dominance. He allowed his enslaved Blacks to visit town only twice a year; he determined who would be allowed to marry, who to divorce. He selected the names of babies, changing them at will, sometimes assigning a name to honor a guest in his house. When Josiah Nott, a racist physician and influential proslavery writer, came for a visit, Hammond named a newly arrived Black infant “Nott.” To encourage marriage and the births that he hoped would follow, he offered a five-dollar bonus to newlyweds. For second marriages, apparently less valuable, he paid only three dollars and fifty cents. Divorce earned one hundred lashes. To Hammond, as to other planters, whipping was an important element of control to remind the enslaved of their place in the plantation hierarchy. Planters preferred the more genteel term, “correcting.” So routine was this on Hammond’s Silver Bluff plantation that he included precise instructions in a manual he wrote for his overseers, the men who directed his enslaved workers on a daily basis. “The highest punishment,” he wrote, “must not exceed 100 lashes in one day and to that extent only in extreme cases.” The lash itself was to be one inch wide. “In gene...