It is apparent that James Henry Hammond’s struggles with his slaves began almost immediately after he acquired Silver Bluff following his marriage to Catherine. Part of the tension between slave and slave-owner was a result of the absentee status of Silver Bluff’s prior owner. Consequently, the slaves had perhaps more freedom than their counterparts on other plantations.
Perhaps Hammond’s most notorious attempt to dominate the lives of his slaves came in the form of his directives to dominate their religious expression. Prior to Hammond’s arrival at Silver Bluff, slaves enjoyed wide ranging freedom to worship and congregate with each other. Notably, a Black Baptist church located on Silver Bluff claimed to have been the first separate Black church in America. The slaves had evening services and some of the slaves themselves served as preachers. Hammond made deliberate, concerted efforts to abolish these practices. Initially, he refused to allow his slaves to attend the Negro church and discontinued night services. When a slave named Ben Shubrick indicated his desire to join the Negro church, Hammond denied his request and arranged for him to be admitted to Hammond’s church. He even tried to persuade other local plantation owners to disallow similar services on their plantations. Eventually, he was forced to allow Sunday evening services and would build a Methodist church on his plantation to accommodate the spiritual needs of his slaves.
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Another example of his attempts to dominate the lives of his slave is found in the fact that exerted complete control over naming of all slaves on his plantation. In addition to sexually abusing several of his female slaves, Hammond also recorded each birth that occurred on his plantation and named each new slave, irrespective of the infant’s paternity. This , of course, served to further cemented his control, by serving notice to the slaves that their children, essentially, belonged to him and not to them.
As on many other plantations, resistance was subtle, yet effective. In response to his efforts to implement a gang system of labor (as opposed to a task-based system), the slaves slowed down and worked inefficiently, “forgetting” to pick up weeds, ignoring cotton boils and damaging property through “carelessness”. Eventually, Hammond was forced to compromise and returned to a task-based system. Notably, he was also forced to compromise with respect to spiritual worship, as indicated by the fact that night services (or meetings) would eventually return to Silver Bluff.
