One night in late November 1857, Alfred Huger warmed himself by a fire in the office he occupied as postmaster of Charleston, South Carolina. He had just returned from "a cold & cheerless journey" to a plantation more than fifty miles distant, where he had called on the widow of a recently deceased friend. Now, as he glanced over the newspapers accumulated during his absence, his gaze fell upon the printed message of Governor Robert F. W. Allston, delivered to the new session of the South Carolina legislature a few days before. Scanning it, Huger must have thought his nearly seventy-year-old eyes were playing tricks on him. But even a closer, more deliberate reading of the governor's words convinced Huger that his vision was just fine. Governor Allston had in fact neglected to mention a particular topic. The omission bothered, even angered, Huger, an otherwise genial man whose affability had helped him retain his patronage job for over twenty years through both Democratic and Whig administrations. What Huger found so alarming was that, in all of Allston's official message, no word appeared about the death of the man whose widow he had just consoled, his old friend, James Hamilton.[1]

Allston could not be excused on grounds of ignorance of Hamilton's death, for newspapers in the state carried the sad intelligence several days before the governor gave his speech.[2]

Nor could one of his apologists claim that the news was inappropriate for an occasion of state. In fact, the speech opened by acknowledging the recent deaths of three other men prominent in Carolina's public life, including Senator A. P. Butler, Congressman Preston Brooks and former Speaker of the U.S. House Langdon Cheves. Yet Hamilton went unmentioned. "Can it be possible," Huger wrote that night, incredulous at this official snubbing, "that in the very same 'Senate House' where Hamilton decided upon the destiny of S. Carolina, they cannot find either time or feeling to notice his death?" As Huger well remembered, in the closing days of another November a quarter-century before, James Hamilton had stood at the very pinnacle of the state's political structure as governor and, even more importantly, as presiding officer of the Nullification Convention. The culmination of Hamilton's labors as governor, this 1832 Convention theoretically represented the will of the state's people and, with Hamilton's guidance, that popular will expressed itself in a stunning document. The Ordinance of Nullification claimed that an individual state, in its sovereign capacity as a co-creator of the constitutional compact of 1787, could determine on its own the constitutionality of federal laws. Not content with merely asserting principle as a political protest, the Ordinance also declared the federal tariffs of 1828 and 1832 null and void in South Carolina. Moreover, the Ordinance warned federal authorities that, should they test the state's resolve, South Carolina would respond with armed force and even secession.[3]

Following the adjournment of the convention, Hamilton, brigadier general of the state militia in Charleston, readied his troops to defend the state from an anticipated invasion by land and naval forces of the federal government.[4]

For Hamilton, the crisis was a delicious moment of personal glory for which destiny had seemingly prepared him. Son of a Continental Army hero and grandson of a member of the Stamp Act and Continental Congresses, Hamilton inherited a dual legacy of service to the new republic created by the American Revolution. Following his father's lead, Hamilton shouldered military obligations, while, like his well-heeled maternal grandfather, Thomas Lynch, he took on political responsibilities. As a young man, he eagerly volunteered for service in America's "Second War for Independence" from 1812 to 1814. With national independence assured, he assumed a seat in the South Carolina legislature, served as the intendant (or mayor) of Charleston during the Denmark Vesey conspiracy, and then entered Congress where he chaired the House Military Affairs Committee in the 1820s. Then came his greatest triumph, the crisis of 1832-1833, when, as both a political leader and a soldier, Hamilton organized the nullification movement and opposed a "tyrannical" government to preserve the republican liberties guaranteed by the Revolution in which his relatives had played such important parts. Hamilton's leadership of the Nullifiers confirmed and enhanced his impressive public stature in South Carolina. In elegant drawing rooms overlooking Charleston's Battery, madeira-sipping gentlemen raised fine crystal in his honor, while yeomen at upcountry muster fields toasted him with more potent brews from ruder vessels. His reputation in affairs of honor was such that, according to Charlestonian Frederick Porcher, Hamilton's word could bring a dispute among gentlemen to a conclusion all parties acknowledged as perfectly satisfactory.[5]

John Randolph of Roanoke, a close friend, favorably compared Hamilton to the medieval chivalric ideal when he called him the "Bayard of the South." Harriet Martineau concurred with these southern observers. The English writer, who met Hamilton in the mid-1830s, considered him a "perfect representative of the Southern" gentleman.[6]

Even allowing for some exaggeration on the part of those who knew him, clearly Hamilton stood out as one of the prestigious of the southern gentry class. Following the nullification episode, however, Hamilton's position declined considerably. Porcher went so far as to suggest that, had Hamilton died in 1833 right after the tariff crisis, "his memory would have been held sacred by every man in Carolina," but that "unfortunately for his reputation his life was protracted about twenty years."[7]

Why did so many Carolinians wish to forget James Hamilton? An examination of the relationship between his public activities and his personal debts after 1833 suggests an answer. Moreover, such an examination also serves to refute the notion put forward by John McCardell in The Idea of a Southern Nation that Hamilton emerged from the nullification controversy as a dedicated southern nationalist.[8]

Even if Hamilton entertained dreams of a separate southern nation during the nullification crisis - which is highly debatable - an ideological commitment to its creation certainly did not motivate him following the crisis of 1832-33. Following the nullification controversy, Hamilton scaled back his political commitments and instead threw his considerable energies into the booming economy of the mid-1830s. He served as the first president of the Bank of Charleston, successor to the city's branch of the Bank of the U.S., and also founded a cotton export firm. For a time he enjoyed prosperity, even as the Panic of 1837 caused ruin for others. Fortune soon turned against him. His troubles began when he hatched a scheme to push up cotton prices in 1839. Based on a successful strategy employed by Nicholas Biddle the previous year, Hamilton bought up a great deal of cotton, which he planned to withhold from the European market until prices reached higher levels. Unfortunately, however, European demand for cotton slacked off and he found no buyers for his cotton shipments. His friend Hugh Legare estimated that Hamilton lost $250,000 in the process, and the failure of the cotton scheme seriously wounded his export business. Other financial problems cropped up in the late 1830s and early 1840s. For example, his plans for a passenger ship business ended with the sinking of the steamer Pulaski off the Carolina coast in the summer of 1838. Then, after nearly two years of legal wrangling, a South Carolina court judgment in 1844 forced the sale of his Carolina rice plantation. Although the full financial impact of reversals such as these cannot be determined from extant records, one contemporary estimated Hamilton's liabilities at $700,000 in the early 1840s.[9]

This figure I think too high; still, clearly he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars.As his debts piled up, Hamilton sought new opportunities to make money and possibly to achieve political greatness in the Republic of Texas. Initially, in the mid-1830s, his investments in Texas land were the speculative ventures of a wealthy planter and businessman with money to spare. As his personal financial situation worsened in the late 1830s and early 1840s, however, Texas came to represent his main chance to escape the disgrace of debt. Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the Texas Declaration of Independence in 1836, Hamilton became identified as a defender of the new republic. Primarily he gained this status because of his widely-circulated speech decrying South Carolina governor George McDuffie's rebuke of the Texas revolutionaries. But Hamilton's support for Texas went beyond mere words. During 1836, he not only contributed $500 to the cash-strapped Texas army, but he also visited Philadelphia and New York on a mission to feel "the pulse of the Capitalists" about potential investments in the Republic.[10]

While in New York, Hamilton occupied the seat of honor at a public dinner sponsored by "friends of Texas."[11]

Meanwhile, a leading Texas newspaper endorsed the former Nullifier to succeed Sam Houston as commanding general of the army once Houston assumed the presidency: [I]n James Hamilton, of South Carolina, we believe Texas would find a general worthy to lead her army; and one who would not only lead her to victory and independence, but would throw a degree of lustre around her that would soon make our country the abode of talent, wealth and chivalry. The gallant heroes of the south and west and north would be proud to be marshalled under his banner; and that moment the congress of Texas shall declare that General James Hamilton is commander of her forces, that moment the independence and future prosperity of the country will be placed on a basis which all the attacks of despotism cannot shake.[12]

In December 1836, Congress voted to offer Hamilton the command, and President Houston, despite his personal misgivings about the South Carolinian stemming from their disagreements over nullification, wrote to make the request official.[13]

Hamilton turned down Houston's overture, tempting and flattering though it was. At that point, Hamilton's South Carolina business ventures were too lucrative to justify leaving the state even for so grand an adventure as leading a revolutionary army. For the time being, Hamilton preferred to pursue his Texas prospects from the comfort of his Charleston home. He began buying Texas real estate as early as mid-1836.[14]

The next year, Hamilton led a group of prominent Carolinians in organizing the South Carolina Land Company, an outfit dedicated to Texas land speculation.[15]

Hamilton's luminary partners included former senator Robert Hayne, ex-House Speaker Langdon Cheves, planter Wade Hampton, and Charleston postmaster Alfred Huger. Acting on the Company's behalf, Hamilton spent 50 cents per acre to acquire the rights to about 30,000 acres of the republic's public domain.[16]

He expected that investment to pay off handsomely once he and his partners had staked out choice acreage. In the spring of 1838 he wrote Cheves that "I hope to fix upon a Tract of Country which in five years will make the Capital of our Company $300,000 from $15,000." Such an enormous increase were possible if one condition were satisfied - the firm establishment of "the independence & pacification of Texas."[17]

Assuring the viability of the Republic of Texas in order to attract settlers, therefore, became Hamilton's objective, indeed, his passion. To do so, he enlisted in the Republic's efforts to obtain a five-million-dollar loan that would provide it with financial and political stability. Hamilton's banking background made him a logical choice as one of the commissioners delegated to negotiate the loan. Following an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Nicholas Biddle to advance Texas the full five million - although B.U.S. did grant a $400,000 loan - Hamilton and another loan commissioner took their credit search to Europe in 1839.For nearly three years beginning in 1839, from the hill country of Texas to Continental capitals, Hamilton negotiated with and cajoled a cast of kings, government ministers, and bankers. Obtaining the loan always remained his paramount objective, but his reasons for seeking that loan changed over time. By 1840, he no longer simply wished to attract settlers to his Texas land. Instead, as his personal economic standing deteriorated after the failure of his cotton scheme in 1839, he desperately needed the $250,000 commission that, under Texas law, would be his if he succeeded in landing the loan. That commission would, as he sanguinely informed one of his personal creditors, "wipe off all my losses at a blow."[18]

Early in his career as a Texas loan agent, Hamilton realized that European bankers would not take his mission seriously so long as the Republic lacked formal diplomatic relations with any European nation. Therefore, upon his arrival on the Continent in late 1839, Hamilton inserted himself into delicate ongoing negotiations between France and Texas over recognition. In his hurry to see relations established, he undercut the chief Texas diplomat in Paris, who was holding out for a better commercial treaty, by making unauthorized concessions to the French. Hamilton cared little for future trade; he simply wanted the quick establishment of diplomatic relations so that he could proceed to the business of loan negotiations. Once the government of King Louis Philippe officially recognized Texas, Hamilton began dickering with bankers not only in France, but also the Netherlands, Great Britain, and Belgium. To increase his chances of obtaining the loan, he convinced Texas to grant him diplomatic powers as well as loan agent status. In essence, he served as the Republic's de facto ambassador to Great Britain and a roving diplomat on the Continent. In that capacity, Hamilton achieved notable successes. For instance, he convinced Holland and, more importantly, Great Britain, to establish formal ties with Texas. But, by the beginning of 1842, he had failed to persuade financiers to extend his adopted country a loan.In January 1842, an impatient President Sam Houston fired the hapless loan agent. The timing could not have been worse for Hamilton. His cotton export firm had recently failed, and more than ever he needed the quarter-million-dollar loan commission to pay off mounting personal and business debts. Denied that commission, Hamilton sought the more than $10,000 in back pay that Texas owed him as its ambulant ambassador. He also petitioned Austin to be reimbursed for the various other sums he had expended in the Republic's service. The largest single item for which he put in a claim was $50,000, which, it turned out, Hamilton owed to a Virginia canal company. It seems that while in Europe working for Texas, he had also tried to sell bonds for the James River and Kanawha Company. An Amsterdam banking house took some of the company's bonds and advanced him $50,000, which Hamilton, showing poor judgment to say the least, failed to dispatch to the company headquarters in Richmond. Instead, he diverted the money to his Texas loan mission, spending some $30,000 of it to bribe various French officials. At the time, he reasoned that the commission on the loan - which he expected shortly - would allow him to reimburse the company. Unfortunately, the bribes had failed to work their magic, which left him in debt to the Virginians. The Texas annexation debate of the early 1840s quickly diverted attention from Hamilton's pleas for reimbursement. In retrospect, it also provides further evidence of how Hamilton's debts affected his views on public issues. As a Texas diplomat, Hamilton had opposed talk of annexation because it made Europeans less likely to extend a loan to the Republic. Once Sam Houston relieved Hamilton of his duties as a loan agent, however, he changed his position to favor annexation. His investment in a Texas sugar plantation in 1844 also contributed to his change of heart. Hamilton became concerned that, if Texas were not rapidly brought into the Union as a slave state, the Republic might very well drift into the orbit of abolitionist England and he would lose his Texas labor force. Hamilton's annexation anxiety manifested itself in his changing presidential preferences for 1844. Like most South Carolinians, he began the campaign season as a supporter of John C. Calhoun. Once the "cast iron man" withdrew from the contest, he turned to Henry Clay whose "election is about as probable as any human event . . . can well be." He saw in Clay a man not unlike himself - a gentleman who appreciated the benefits healthy commerce and a well-regulated banking system brought to a slave economy. He praised Clay as a man of "gifted sagacity" and rare "moral courage," for whom "a vista of renown will be opened . . . which has awaited the administration of no previous President, since that of the 'Father of our country.'"[19]

The publication of Clay's Raleigh letter opposing annexation, however, altered Hamilton's perception of the Kentuckian. "Clay's brochure against Texas has been a sad thing to me personally," Hamilton wrote revealingly to James Henry Hammond, "as in the Union I have enough there to redeem all my affairs."[20]

So he switched his allegiance to the annexationist Democratic nominee, James Polk. Significantly, his approach to bringing Texas within the Union was a moderate one; he opposed Robert Barnwell Rhett's Bluffton movement, which called for South Carolina's secession should Texas not be immediately annexed. Naturally, the annexation of Texas by congressional joint resolution in March 1845 delighted Hamilton. Once Texas joined the Union, he began preparing petitions to the U.S. Congress asking that the federal government take responsibility for at least a portion of the Texas public debt. Such an arrangement, he believed, would hasten his own reimbursement. But the U.S. war with Mexico again delayed consideration of Hamilton's requests for money. Following the war, Hamilton's hopes for getting paid became entangled with the status of the new territories acquired by the U.S. in the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. Specifically, his hopes rested on the resolution of the dispute between the state of Texas and the federal government over the precise boundary of New Mexico. The Lone Star State claimed a huge tract of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande including Santa Fe, much to the consternation of New Mexicans themselves.[21]

It soon became apparent that Texas would relinquish its claims to New Mexican soil for a price: federal assumption of the old Republic's debt or a cash payment to Texas sufficient to retire that debt. Hamilton enthusiastically supported linking the boundary dispute to the settlement of the public debt of Texas because it made it more likely he would soon receive financial satisfaction. "The payment of the Debt of Texas," he wrote James Henry Hammond, "will enable me . . . to do a partial if not a total & plenary justice to all my Creditors."[22]

To help make federal assumption of the Texas debt a reality, Hamilton went to Washington in early 1850 to lobby members of Congress.[23]

He arrived soon after Henry Clay introduced his proposals for sectional compromise. To Hamilton's delight, Clay called not only for California's admission as a free state and congressional non-interference with slavery in the rest of the Mexican Cession, but also for federal assumption of the Texas debt in exchange for the state's relinquishing its claims to the disputed New Mexican territory.[24]

Hamilton associated himself with Clay's resolutions and organized Texas bondholders to support them. In mid-February, Clay himself presented to the Senate a petition co-authored by Hamilton and endorsed by the bondholders with the comment that its pro-assumption argument "is better than the one which I offered."[25]

Eventually, the Texas Boundary Bill that took shape in Congress called for an appropriation of ten million dollars to help the state pay its bondholders including its former diplomat and loan agent.Although Hamilton touted the compromise measures as perfectly consistent with demands for justice to the South, his nullification-era allies back home hardly agreed. They perceived principles other than concern for southern interests as underlying their former leader's lobbying campaign. As early as 1845, Francis Pickens expressed what became the dominant view of Hamilton in South Carolina when he suggested that the former Nullifier was "so utterly prostrated and pressed in his private affairs that he cannot act" with his former political independence.[26]

During the compromise debates in 1850, James Henry Hammond confided to his diary that Hamilton was "now moving heaven and earth to get the U.S. Govt. to assume the debts of Texas, and his very scheme is that of [Tennessee senator John] Bell, Clay & Co, to make it part of the Compromise at Washington. In other words to sell the South to get his Texas claims."[27]

Hamilton's pains on behalf of the bondholders also ran counter to the wishes of his old friend, the gravely ill Senator Calhoun. Despite their political differences, the two men kept up cordial relations, and Hamilton visited the feeble man for long talks almost every evening before leaving town in late March.[28]

Indeed, when it came time for Calhoun to make what many believed would be his final speech in the chamber he had so long dominated, he chose Hamilton to escort him onto the Senate floor.[29]

That March 4th speech, read by Virginia's James Mason because of Calhoun's poor health, warned of inevitable disunion should the North prevent the expansion of slavery into all of the Mexican Cession.[30]

Apparently, Hamilton's long evenings with Calhoun had not softened the old man's southern rights views. Three days later, Hamilton listened in the same chamber as Daniel Webster delivered a speech he much preferred to Calhoun's. The final member of the Senate's "great triumvirate" to address the territorial question, the Massachusetts legislator gave a much-anticipated rhetorical performance. Taking advantage of his privilege as a former congressman, Hamilton avoided the crowded public spaces and sat downstairs near the action. Webster's support for the compromise earned the silver-tongued orator the wrath of anti-slavery men but the gratitude of Hamilton and other moderates.[31]

Reporting on congressional news in a letter to the Charleston Courier, Hamilton neglected to mention Calhoun's speech but instead praised Webster for his "moral courage" in striking a "great blow" for sectional compromise. He assured his former neighbors that "we have every reason to hope that a pacification will be soon be established between the two great sections of the Confederacy, on terms of safety and honor to the South, and in which the North will not be called upon to surrender a single right or interest which she can fairly claim."[32]

Despite the opposition of the South Carolina congressional delegation, the bills constituting the Compromise of 1850 became law late that summer. Running into Hamilton in Philadelphia in September, James L. Petigru found his old law partner and nullification-era opponent "in very good spirits." The Unionist lawyer explained Hamilton's good mood by pointing to the passage of the Compromise, particularly the Texas Boundary Bill, which, Petigru observed, "will put money in his pocket, to which, the said pocket is little accustomed."[33]

In the wake of the passage of the Compromise, South Carolina's leaders pushed for a state convention to consider secession, but James Hamilton counseled calm. In a public letter addressed to his home state's citizens in the fall of 1850, Hamilton declared that nothing in the Compromise measures warranted secession. He claimed that "the admission of Texas furnished a far greater provocation to the North to secede, than the admission of California does to the South." Besides, he argued, southern masters should be glad California was free. Had the Golden State been made a free state, he wrote, the South would have been drained of its black labor force because so many slaveholders would have migrated there. Hamilton also dismissed southern anger over the cession of Texas claims to New Mexico. The territory Texas relinquished, he argued, consisted of worthless lands - as barren as the "Arctic coasts." "It would take a gang of negroes from January to Christmas," he wrote, "to hunt buffalo to support themselves for the year, and do nothing else." Hamilton further warned that all the talk of secession simply played into the hands of the abolitionist and free soil enemies of South Carolina.[34]

South Carolina's leaders ignored Hamilton's pleas to support the Compromise. Instead, they proceeded with their convention, one modeled on the nullification conclave Hamilton had organized two decades before. By the time it met in early 1852, however, grudging acceptance of the Compromise of 1850 throughout most of the white South made it highly unlikely the Palmetto State would actually secede. Convention organizers did plan to use the occasion to assert "southern rights" defiantly. During the convention, Hamilton himself was in Texas lobbying legislators, but the citizens of his old lowcountry parish had tapped his thirty-five-year-old son, Daniel Heyward Hamilton, to represent them. In the proceedings, Hamilton's son joined a tiny minority of Unionists and the more numerous cooperationists to frustrate the radical southern rights men. Dan even opposed a resolution that declared South Carolina had a theoretical right to secede.[35]

Doubtless, the old Nullifier himself would have done the same had he been there. It turned out that winning approval of the Texas Boundary Bill was easier than receiving the full payment Hamilton expected. Various delays set in at the state and federal levels, and he only received what he considered partial reimbursement for his efforts on behalf of the Republic. For much of the 1850s, he traveled frequently to Austin and Washington in search of the rest. Then, in November 1857, on what he prophetically termed "my last pilgrimage to the Shrine of the public faith of Texas," the steamship on which he was traveling sank in the Gulf of Mexico.[36]

After surrendering his life jacket to a young woman and her child in the last gesture of a southern gentleman, Hamilton left the troubles of this world behind. As his behavior as a Texas diplomat and lobbyist for the Compromise of 1850 demonstrates, the politics of debt rather than an ideological commitment to a southern nation shaped James Hamilton's responses to public issues. Sometimes - as with nullification or the latter stages of the annexation debate - his personal economic interests meshed well with broader state rights or southern rights concerns (which, in any case, are hardly tantamount to a fully-fledged "southern nationalism.") On other occasions - most notably with the Compromise of 1850 - his personal financial status positively clashed with southern rights men or proto-southern nationalists. For Hamilton, as this biographical excursion has indicated, his struggle to escape debt always trumped other influences in shaping his public stands. In looking for reasons for Hamilton's loss of popularity in South Carolina, one might point to his opposition to the advanced southern rights position taken by leaders of that state. But other opponents of southern rights remained respectable in the Palmetto State, including Hamilton's strongly Unionist former law partner, James L. Petigru, whom the state legislature appointed to codify the state's statutes in 1859.[37]

Neither was Hamilton's indebtedness itself the major cause of his decline in public estimation; many, if not most, southern planters knew debt only too well. Instead, Hamilton's very public attempts to extinguish his debts proved the real difficulty. His post-nullification activities embarrassed his planter friends as the rantings of an odd relative might disturb members of a family. How could southerners claim moral superiority in the intensifying sectional crisis of the 1840s and 1850s when the man they once looked to as the very soul of southern chivalry behaved no better than the average money-grubbing Yankee? More troubling still, Hamilton's example reminded his fellow planters that their world of wealth and honor rested precariously on the vagaries of an international commodities market they could little influence, let alone control. The truth was sobering: The market had made the planters, and it could also unmake them. When a debt-ridden planter looked into that fancy French mirror he could ill afford, perhaps he saw a bit too much of the latter-day James Hamilton staring back. By ignoring the reflected image, by forgetting Hamilton, perhaps that planter could hold off, at least in his own mind, his personal day of reckoning.