Virginia Clay-Cloptin was in her mid-30s when the Civil War began. The prominent wife of a United States senator who resigned from Congress when his state, Alabama, seceded in 1861, she knew many of the leading political figures of her day and she travelled in the highest circles of Southern aristocracy. Her husband, Clement Claiborne Clay, was one of six Southern senators who gave speeches on January 21, 1861 resigning from the U.S. Senate. Clay used his final speech to explain his reason for leaving:
“No sentiment is more insulting or more hostile to our domestic tranquility, to our social order, and to our social existence, than is contained in the declaration that our negroes are entitled to liberty and equality with the white man…” [Thomas Ricaud Martin,The Great Parliamentary Battle and the Farewell Addresses of Southern Senators on the Eve of the Civil War (New York and Washington: Neale Publishing Co., 1905), pp. 202, 204.]
After he returned to Alabama, Clement Clay was selected to represent the state in the Confederate Senate. In 1864 he travelled to Canada to work with Confederate agents there on secret service operations against the United States, including the failed raid on St. Albans, Vermont. Clay’s portrait adorned the fourth Confederate dollar bill. After the war, the former senator was imprisoned because of suspicions that he had been involved in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination.
Following her husband’s 1866 release from prison, Virginia Clay returned to Alabama. After his death in 1882 she became a leading figure in women’s suffrage and the Confederate memorialization effort. In 1902 she was elected Honorary Life President of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
At the start of the 20th Century, Virginia Clay-Clopton wrote a memoir of her life before and during the Civil War, as well as her successful year-long campaign after the war to win her husband’s release from prison. A Belle of the Fifties: Memoirs of Mrs. Clay, of Alabama, Covering Social and Political Life in Washington and the South, 1853-66 was published in 1904 by Doubleday Publishing, one of the largest book publishers in the world.
The book was heavily promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, in part, because of its admiring stance on the Confederacy’s dominant economic institution. Virginia Clay wrote:
From Maryland to Louisiana there had reigned, since colonial times, an undisturbed, peaceful, prosperous democracy, based upon an institution beneficial alike to master and servant.
She described the relations between whites who enslaved Blacks as having a nearly familial relationship with those they abused. She wrote that; “None but a Southerner to the manner born can appreciate or imagine the tie that bound us of that old-time South to our dear black mammy, in whose capacious lap the little ones confided to her care cuddled in innocent slumber.” [Clay-Clopton, Virginia; Sterling, Ada. A Belle of the Fifties (Expanded, Annotated) (p. 184). BIG BYTE BOOKS. Kindle Edition.]
In writing of life during the Civil War, Virginia Clay writes that as hardships increased in Richmond in 1864, she travelled to South Carolina to be able to resume the lifestyle of the region’s white elite. There she stayed at the home of former-United States Senator James Hammond. She wrote a long soliloquy on life at Hammond’s massive plantation with more than three hundred enslaved Black people because, she said, “the conditions that obtained [there] were so typically those of the Southern home that I could choose no better example for description…” [p. 185]
Mrs. Clay describes Hammond as an excellent businessman. She writes that he was responsible for the “splendid system that directed the colony of slaves at Beech Island. Each marriage and birth and death that took place among them was registered with great exactness. The Senator’s business ability was remarkable. He knew his every possession to the most minute particular…” Of course, Virginia Clay says, the Black people were happy to be enslaved: “The Hammond slaves formed an exclusive colony, which was conducted with all the strictness of a little republic. They were a happy, orderly, cleanly, and carefree lot, and Mr. Hammond was wont to say that if the doctrine of transmigration of souls was true, he would like to have his soul come back and inhabit one of his “darkies.” [p. 187] Of course he would.
A generous man, he would share some of the luxuries produced by his enslaved Blacks with his white neighbors and he would readily receive white refugees from the upper class, though there is no indication that he offered succor to Black refugees from slavery.
The author was most impressed by Hammond’s concern about bringing Christianity to those he enslaved. He built three churches for slaves, and once a month he brought in a white minister to conduct a service. He, like most enslavers, banned Black preachers. According to to Mrs. Clay, this was to avoid the possibility of sexual license at Black services. She said that Black ministers would so arouse their congregants that some of the women would faint and “the wenches were altogether likely to fall into the arms of the best-looking young brother who happened to be near.” [p. 191] Hammond was a faithful guardian of his enslaved females who might have sought comfort from their Black male counterparts.
Senator James Henry Hammond was Confederate General Wade Hampton’s uncle. In 1842 he was elected governor of South Carolina. Shortly before he was elected to the state’s highest office, he began molesting his nieces, Wade Hampton’s sisters, who ranged in age at the time from thirteen to eighteen.
In his diary, Hammond wrote afterwards:
Here were four lovely creatures from the tender but precocious girl of 13 to the mature but fresh and blooming woman nearly 19, each contending for my love, claiming the greater share of it as due to her superior devotion to me, all of them rushing on every occasion into my arms and covering me with kisses, lolling on my lap, pressing their bodies almost into mine, wreathing their limbs with mine, encountering warmly every portion of my frame, and permitting my hands to stray unchecked over every part of them and to rest without the slightest shrinking from it, in the most secret and sacred regions, and all this for a period of more than two years continuously. [Found in: Andrew Jr., Rod. Wade Hampton (Civil War America) (p. 31). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.]
Hammond continued the molestations until April of 1843. He only stopped when one of the teenagers stood up to him. She later told her father. Rumors that there were irregularities in his relations with the Hampton family spread, which he wrote in his diary, “deprived me of all satisfaction at the proceedings of the Legislature and will embarrass me through life.” [Andrew Jr., Rod. Wade Hampton (Civil War America) (p. 33). The University of North Carolina Press. Kindle Edition.]
While his political rise stalled over his sexual assaults, by 1857 the hard driving slavery advocate was selected to represent South Carolina in the United States Senate. Shortly after he took his seat in the Senate, he arose to give his most famous speech on March 4, 1858. He told the Northern critics of slavery, “you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.”
Note: The feature painting is of Virginia Clay.
Read more by Virginia Clay on Slavery and Race Relations.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:
2 thoughts on “A Southern Belle Set a Child Molester Up as a Paragon of Christian Virtue for Black People”