School of Humans. Did you guys know that back in the day, boys used to share beds. Oh, but it's true. You know, today sometimes the boys don't want to share beds. Like I'm going on a trip soon and one of my friends was like, I don't want to share the bed with this other boy, and I said, fine, you guys can have the room with the bunk beds.
So you know, if he was trying to not touch the other boy.
Unfortunately, technically in the bunk beds, they're still going to be on top of each other.
But actually, back in the.
Day, it was quite normal to be a man sharing your bed with another man, and sometimes not even with a man you knew, just like a random guy.
Like maybe you're going to.
A hostel, a motel, a hotel, and you're in one of the cheaper rooms. You might be sharing your bed with another guy, just a rando. Yeah, just like you might be sleeping and then another man might be slipping into your bed and then he might be slipping into something else, if you know.
What I mean.
Yes, sometimes men would sleep in beds with other men just to be practical. But then sometimes they weren't just bedfellows. Oh No, sometimes they became headfellows.
What a good joke.
As we all know, puns are the most sophisticated type of humor. And sure, it's hard to like prove that, you know, these men were sleeping together.
People weren't really.
Talking about sexuality that much, whether hetero or homo, but there is plenty of conjecture and some evidence that some notable politicians in fact were headfellows. Again, that's men who share beds, who have sex. It's a term I just made up, but I am going to submit it to the official historical record as a new thing to say. And so American Filth we're having our.
First mini series. That's right.
We're gonna be looking at several cases of headfellows. And first we're gonna start with a pair of spicy, zesty letters between two men who would go on to be some Southern and Confederate politicians. And these letters, well, they prove that some man on man hanky panky was occurring during the early nineteenth century.
You know what to do?
Cue the theme song. This is American Filth. I'm your host, Gabby Watts. Every week I tell you a filthy story from American history. Today's episode Bedfellows Headfellows Part one. Let's get into the meat of this episode and meet one of the worst men in American history, James H. Hammond ding ding ding Ding ding ding ding ding Ding introducing our first headfellow. Yeah, this guy was a huge piece of shit, if not maybe one of the worst. One
historian called him nothing less than a monster. So here's some of the horrendous stuff that he did. Ps huge trigger warning.
For sexual assault.
Hammond was born in South Carolina in the early nineteenth century, and he wasn't born well off, but he managed to snag himself a wealthy lady named Catherine Fitzsimmons, and through her he was able to enter the planter aristocracy. Catherine was a shy seventeen year old whose family was convinced that Hammond was just after her money, which he probably was.
As her new husband, he got all her stuff, a ten thousand acre plantation, and he had two hundred and twenty enslaved people, and oh boy, did he love slavery. He's the one who coined the term cottones king. And he was also really into states rights, and by the mid eighteen thirties he was making political moves He eventually went on to be the governor of South Carolina, a congressman, and a senator, And if you guys can believe it, he didn't have a great personality among the other planters.
He had a pretty bad reputation. They thought of him as.
Aloof and vain, willful, proud, moody, reactive, and he seemed to have a pretty heavy streak of sadism. He himself would frequently beat the enslaved people on his plantation, and then he would sometimes send them into malaria infested swamps. So, yeah, this guy was absolutely horrendous. But the thing is, his bad behavior came to bite him in the back, in the leg, in the butt.
It bit him.
Somewhere, and his political career was interrupted for fourteen years. Okay, So what happened is he was eighteen forty six, he was already well on his way into.
His political career.
He had served as the governor of South Carolina, and at this point, one of South Carolina's senators was about to step down and Hammond was going to take his place. But suddenly Hammond withdrew from the seat because Hammond's brother in law said to him, Hey, if you become Senator, I am going to expose some revealing information about you. At the time, there were rumors of a sexual scandal going on at the Hammonds, but there is no documentation
of what exactly happened. But some sneaky, sneaky historians published his diaries in the nineteen eighties and they revealed what that incident was.
That his brother in law was referring to.
What had happened is that Hammond had repeatedly sexually abused his four teenage nieces And oh, do you think he was apologetic about it? Absolutely not. Then his diaries, Hammond was like, I'm the victim. He's like, oh, goough, Why am I being punished like this? All I did was quote a little dalliance with the other sex. He also just blamed the girls who he abused over two years. He was like, oh, it's their fault. They were extremely
affectionate with me. They were the ones who permitted my hands to stray unchecked, and they did not shrink from my touch. I fucking hate this guy. And it was even worse than that, because Hammond was also a frequent sexual abuser to the enslaved women on his plantation.
He might have even.
Sexually assaulted a girl who was his own daughter. After all of this sexual abuse, his wife left him and took their children with her.
But as history has taught us again and again.
It is literally impossible to cancel a powerful white man. So like thirteen fourteen years years later, his wife had already come back to him, and then he won a seat in the Senate in eighteen fifty seven. Yay, nothing ever changes. So now that we really hate this guy, let's get to the Bedfellows stuff. Also, I do think this episode is slightly timely because Taylor Swift just put out her album where she had a weird line where she's like, I would live in the eighteen thirties without
all the racist or whatever. Well, this episode is mostly set in the eighteen twenties with all sorts of racists, so I guess Taylor watched out for the eighteen twenties as well.
There were also racists.
Then, so yeah, it's pretty relevant to the modern day. Also, I do kind of consider myself the Taylor Swift of podcasting, because sometimes I used too many words to describe a simpler point and could have been more thoughtful about what I said, but instead decided to do quantity words instead of quality words?
Do you guys see what I'm saying? See I'm doing it right now.
But anyway, let's get back to Hammond and start learning about this bedfellow's headfellow's stuff. Before he was married, had an established political career, and maybe before he was a complete pile of shit, he was a young guy and had a pretty interesting relationship with another young aspiring politician slash lawyer named Thomas Jefferson Withers or just Jeffrey Withers or just jeff. Around the time that Withers and Hammond became friends, Withers was studying the law and he freaking
hated it. He was like the time one spends in college's time murdered.
He's like, why do I have to learn all.
These stupid dead languages like Latin Ugh dumb? But Withers, through his own education and education of himself, because school is stupid, he was like, I love States rights, national power boo. Like Hammond, Withers was pretty unlikable. Some people described him as irritable and moody and reactive. And maybe it's their general bad attitudes that drew these two South
Carolinians together and how they ended up being bedfellows. We don't know exactly when they were in the same bed when they were doing bedfellowing, but it seems that there was an opportunity where they were doing that, and they were doing a lot more than sleeping. Yeah, as they were two ambitious men who were hustling and grinding, they might have also brought that hustle and mostly that grind to the bedchamber.
And how do we know this well.
Because those sneaky sneaky historians who love the hot goss they found a couple letters that Withers wrote to Hammond, and damn they are freakin' spicy as hell. And after these soothing advertisements, I'm gonna.
Read those letters to you. Brb.
Are you guys ready for this spice? Not like from Dune, but like from the Gossip? Okay, So this is one of the letters. On May fifteenth, eighteen twenty six. It was sent from one Jeff Withers, our second bedfellow, ding ding Ding, to our first bedfellow, Jim Hammond.
Jeff and Jim how romantic.
Pammond at the time would have been like nineteen and Withers was about twenty two.
Okay, here's the letter.
I'm going to try to get into my best like saucy Southern man voice.
Dear Jim.
No, I'm not gonna do that, Okay, Dear Jim.
I got your.
Letter this morning at about eight o'clock from the hands of the bearer. I was sick as the devil when the gentlemen entered the room, and have been so during most of the day. At about one o'clock I swallowed a huge mass of epsom salts, and it will not be hard to imagine that I have been at dirty work. Since I feel partially relieved enough to write a hasty, dull letter. Mmm. So yeah, y'all are probably like, Wow, this isn't actually that spicy. I don't need to know
about what he does when he doesn't feel good. But also Ebsen salts still using that shit. Okay, whatever, But it's about to get very spicy because he's like, I'm gonna write you a dull little letter, but actually he's gonna write him a spicy little sex note. I feel some inclination to learn whether you yet sleep in your shirt tail and whether you yet have the extravagant delight of poking and punching a writhing bedfellow with your long flesh and pull the exquisite touches of which I have
often had the honor of feeling. Let me say unto THEE that unless thou changest former habits in this particular, thou wilt be represented by every future chum as a news sense. And I pronounce it with good reason too. Sir, you roughen the downy slumbers of your bedfellow by such hostile, furious lunges as you are in the habit of making at him when he is least prepared for defense against the crushing force of.
A battering ram.
Without reformation, My imagination depicts some awful results for which you will be held accountable, And therefore it is that I earnestly recommend it.
Indeed, it is encouraging.
An assault and battery propensity which needs correction. An uncorrected threatens devastation, horror, and bloodshed.
Did you guys get what he's saying.
He's basically being like, oh, my god, your flesh and poll it's like a battering ram. And if you keep ramming it, baby, awi aUI aUI, there's gonna be devastation and bloodshed Daddy.
Like this is a real thing that they wrote in history.
Isn't this amazing? And the rest of the letter it's not really that interesting, but they just have this very vulgar paragraph. But it ends with Jeff Withers saying, with great respect, I am the old stud Jeff. No warm regards, no best wishes, just I am the old stud Jeff. Also, what I'm getting from this letter is that mister Hammond was the top to mister Jeff Withers, unless that battering
ram was a power bottom. Unfortunately, we do not know what Hammond said back to Withers, but Withers wrote again to Hammond a few months later, on September twenty fourth, eighteen twenty six.
It reads, my.
Dear friend, your excellent letter of thirteen June arrived a few weeks since, and it's up to our imagination to imagine how excellent that letter was. But in this one that Withers is writing, he gets pretty saucy.
Yet again, it.
Seems that Weathers is trying to warn Hammond that Hammond's sexual appetite is maybe a little bit too much. I fancy, Jim that your elongated protuberance, your flesh and pull your two Latin words indecipherable has captured complete mastery over you, and I really believe that you are charging over the pine barrens of your locality, braying like an ass at every she mail you can discover.
I should lament to hear of you, feeding upon.
The dross of the pasture and alarming the country with your vociferations.
The day of.
Miracles may not be pass and the flaming excess of your lustful appetite may drag down the vengeance of supernal power. And you'll be damned if you don't marry.
These horny guys Jesus.
The historian who found these letters is Martin Duberman, and apparently the archivists didn't want to give him these letters because they didn't want him to see how gay these guys were. He wrote a really excellent essay about these letters that he called Writhing Bedfellows. What Duberman was trying to understand was are these letters representative of the cultural context and attitudes around homosexuality at the time, or was this just one specific case of homosexuality that occurred. So
here's the tea. Back when these were written in the eighteen twenties, there was a more relaxed attitude towards sex. This was before the second grade Awakening, This was before there was a lot of evangelical sentiment in the South. I mean, it wasn't completely relaxed or anything, but it was pretty common that men, especially planters, were having lots of sex outside of marriage. Durroim was also like, well, if you look at the tone of these letters, it's
very casual. It's very flirtatious. You know, Withers isn't ashamed of his behavior. He's like, murmurmur, your flesh and poll or whatever. And so Duberman's guy of suggesting, like, well, they're not trying to hide it. So maybe it was actually more common than we think that men would have homosexual relationships when they shared a bed when they were bedfellows. He's like, yeah, maybe homosexuality and that kind of behavior was casually tolerated at the time, meaning there might have
been a lot more headfellow bedfellows out there. But the great thing about this is there's no real conclusion because there's just not enough evidence out there. But whether or not this was a larger trend or whether this was an isolated incident Withers and Hammond went on to have successful political careers despite their jaunt into homosexuality. Yeah, they got to be those eighteen thirties racists that Taylor Swift didn't want to have anything to do with. Hammond, as
we said, was a huge piece of shit. He got canceled for like ten years, but then came back because again cancelation doesn't work. And his four nieces who he sexually abused, they were ruined and they never went on to marry. Hammond died shortly before the Civil War, while Weathers went on to be part of the Confederate government. But don't worry Whethers died shortly after the end of the Civil War as a big old loser.
As always, we learn.
A lesson from American filth, and I think today's lesson is.
That you can call your we we a flesh and poll.
Also, I guess it just reiterates that no one can ever be canceled, and we are all alone and there's nothing we can do. I know, I know that's not a good attitude. I am trying to work on my nihilism, I promise. But we are going to have another episode about Bedfellows next week.
And this time it's about none other than.
Drum roll, drum Roll, Abraham Lincoln. We cue the credits. American Field is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcast. It is produced, hosted, written by me Gabby Watts. I also sound designed this episode. Our theme song is by me and Jesse Niswanger. Our executive producers are Virginia Prescott, Elsie Crowley, and Brandon Barr. Please leave the show a review some stars you know, love it, hate it?
Do whatever help the algorithm.
Also, you can follow along with the show on Instagram at American filth Pod. And just as a special little treat, I am going to write a song that's gonna be like a parody's Taylor Swift song, but the lyrics are going to be the words that we're in Wither's Letter to Hammond. Okay, so it's gonna be called Writhing Bedfellow or Flesh and Poll or something. But yeah, go to Instagram, go see it. Talk at you next time.
School of Humans