Selected letters, 1855-1938, from and to the Hammonds of
"Redcliffe," on the South Carolina bank of the Savannah River: a
correspondence which carries one Southern family from antebellum
eminence to Depression egg-purveying. . . to "historic
preservation." Singly, the letters are unremarkable - except for
the experiences of two of the Hammond women. Plantation-founder
James Henry (1807-1864) was the only Hammond of large affairs -
remembered for boasting, on the Senate floor, "Cotton is king" (and
terming slaves "the mudsills of society"). His letters, however,
dwell chiefly on the besmirchment of his name (he had, admittedly
but unashamedly, carried on a long dalliance with four young
nieces) and the worthlessness of his sons. "A tough son of a
bitch," editor Bleser calls him unceremoniously. At his death (in
flight, one son wrote another, from Southern defeat), his eldest
son Harry put most of the 14,000 Hammond acres up for sale; but as
"no one was buying land," it remained in the family - to slip away
piecemeal over the next 70 years. Of Reconstruction, and succeeding
upheavals, we see little: most of Redcliffe's blacks apparently
remained on the plantation (out of choice or no-choice) as wage
labor - from which Bleser infers that the number who remained,
overall, may "have been greater than indicated in previous
studies." On firmer ground, she notes that "the lot of the Southern
woman" changed far less than that of her planter-menfolk. Harry's
strong-willed wife Emily silently endured his peccadilloes and bore
his rages - while eldest son Henry mocked him (and daughter Julia
fumed). More interesting - and ambiguous - were the situations of
Julia and her sister Katherine. For uncertain reasons, they, not
their brothers, were urged on to higher education - so we find
Julia, in 1881, at Harvard Annex studying Botany and Physics,
glimpsing "real New England life" (with "no servant to wait at the
table"), assessing the platform performance of her sex ("Women will
do very well while you praise them but we don't like the other
side"), and telling her mother unceasingly of "the intolerable
anguish of being separated from you." She shortly returned home,
rejected the man she loved - and, long after he married, wrote him
one after another desolate, not-to-be-mailed letter. Katherine, the
beauty, went to Johns Hopkins to study nursing, and almost stuck it
out - despite the filthy, all-hours work and a loathsome
supervisor. She turned away suitor after suitor; then finally
married, at 30, ardent, disarming Dr. John Sedgwick Billings (son
of prominent New Yorker John Shaw) - only to be miserable. (He
philandered - but also scored her attachment to Redcliffe.) And -
in the story's most curious twist - it was their son, John Shaw II,
a Time editor enamored of Redcliffe since childhood, who rescued
and restored the plantation-house; and, being childless, left it to
the state. Bleser sees a feminist lesson in the fates of Julia and
Katherine (reasonably, perhaps, in the former case; heavy-handedly
in the latter); she hasn't the humor to appreciate John Shaw II's
disgruntled flight from Luce-dom to Tara-hood. But the letters are
copiously annotated, and certainly worth an airing - for their
time-span, plus the light they throw in all sorts of odd
directions. (Kirkus Reviews)
The riveting saga of an articulate, intelligent southern family
blessed with wealth but marred by personal scandal Drawing on four
generations of family correspondence --reflecting the hopes, fears,
desires, frustrations, and failures of an American family touched
by personal scandal-- this book presents the saga of the Hammonds
of Redcliffe from before the Civil War to after the New Deal. Set
in Redcliffe, the plantation home of the Hammonds, this sweeping
collection of letters, many of them by women, recaptures a way of
life that is gone forever as it provides fascinating insights into
the reactions of the participants to disaster on the battlefield
and on the homefront and into the agony of an eminent plantation
family that had to adjust as best it could to a new social order.
More than just the story of one family, the book casts in high
relief the whole fabric of society: how all people worked and wept,
married and mourned, lived and died.
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