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News and Views: James Henry Hammond's Defense of Slavery
The abolitionist movement is well documented in America's history books. Schoolchildren learn the names of William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner. Senior college papers abound on the lives of these warriors for freedom. But the slaveholders, too, had their champion. The most eloquent spokesman for slaveholding interests was James Henry Hammond of South Carolina.
After the Constitutional Convention of 1787 slavery in the United States continued to be a bitterly contested issue in the newly formed republic. Leading the abolitionist forces in Congress were men such as John Quincy Adams, who served for 17 years in the House of Representatives after he left the presidency of the country. Other famous abolitionists who sat in Congress were Joshua Giddings, Theodore Weld, Benjamin Wade, Henry Wilson, Elijah Lovejoy, and Charles Sumner.
The slaveholders also had their champions. The most eloquent of these was Congressman James Henry Hammond of South Carolina. He was governor of the state in the 1840s and a U.S. senator immediately prior to the state's secession from the Union. Hammond was a young 29-year-old congressman on February 1, 1836, when he rose to the House floor to deliver an...