By 1846 Hammond was widely considered a contender for the Senate. To stop him, Wade Hampton took the scandal public; he circulated to state legislators a document full of details. In Carolina’s honor-bound culture this was a risky thing to do. Hampton himself came in for significant criticism for airing so private a matter in the legislature and thereby publicly tarnishing the reputations of his own daughters, but he succeeded in hobbling Hammond’s candidacy. Hammond lost by a vote of 97 to 46. “My career as a public man is over, I am crushed,” Hammond wrote on December 21, 1850, after the
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