William Gilmore Simms
William Gilmore Simms was a poet, novelist, politician and historian from the American South. His writings achieved great prominence during the 19th century, with Edgar Allan Poe pronouncing him the best novelist America had ever produced. He is still known among literary scholars as a major force in antebellum Southern literature. He is also remembered for his strong support of slavery and for his opposition to Uncle Tom's Cabin, in response to which he wrote reviews and the pro-slavery novel The Sword and the Distaff. During his literary career he served as editor of several journals and newspapers and he also served in the South Carolina House of Representatives.
Early and family life
Simms was born on April 17, 1806, in Charleston, South Carolina, of Scots-Irish ancestors. His mother, Harriet Ann Augusta died during his infancy; his father William Gilmore Simms Senior failed in business and joined Coffee's Indian fighters. Simms was raised by his maternal grandmother, Jane Miller Singleton Gates, who had lived through the American Revolutionary War and who told Simms stories about it.In his teen years, Simms worked as a clerk in a drugstore and aspired to study medicine. Simms began to study law when he was eighteen. He would receive an honorary LLD from the University of Alabama in 1841.
He married Anna Malcolm Giles in 1826. After her death, he married Chevillette Eliza Roach, with whom he had 14 children, only 5 of whom lived to adulthood. He was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1827; however, he soon abandoned this profession for literature.
Early writings
Simms first wrote poetry at the age of eight. In his 19th year, he produced a monody on General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Two years later, in 1827, he published Lyrical and Other Poems and Early Lays. In 1828 he became a journalist as well as editor and part owner of the City Gazette, a position he held until 1832 when the publication failed. Simms devoted his attention entirely to writing and in rapid succession published The Vision of Cortes, Cain, and Other Poems ; The Tricolor, or Three Days of Blood in Paris ; and his strongest long poem, Atalantis, a Tale of the Sea. Atalantis established his fame as an author.His novel Martin Faber, the Story of a Criminal, an expanded version of an earlier short story called "The Confessions of a Murderer," was published in 1833. Though not considered one of the author's major works, this novella proved consequential for Simms's career in two ways. First, “it was the publication of Martin Faber that changed a poet into a novelist,” as the modest success of this first book-length fiction from the writer launched the prose career that would dominate the rest of Simms's professional life. Second, Martin Faber is highly innovative in its adaption of Gothic tropes to southern fiction. This, combined with the fact that its publication predates the earliest Gothic works of Poe, makes Simms, “for all practical purposes, the founder of the Southern Gothic genre.” The novel, thus, gained Simms a national audience.
Editor and politician
Simms also edited several South Carolina newspapers, and in the 1840s and 1850s edited important southern journals, including the Magnolia, the Southern and Western, and the proslavery Southern Quarterly Review. During the nullification controversy prompted by South Carolina in 1832, Simms supported Union. In the 1840s he pushed for American freedom from British literary models and supported the intensely nationalistic Young America group.Based on the popularity of the novels described below, Simms became part of the Southern planter class. He came to firmly support slavery, an attitude that when held widely by Southerners helped lead to secession and creation of the Confederate States of America and the American Civil War. Elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives, Simms served from 1844 to 1846. However he lost election for lieutenant governor of South Carolina by only one vote.
Novels about the South
Simms wrote a number of popular books between 1830 and 1860, sometimes focusing on the pre-colonial and colonial periods of Southern history, and replete with local color. His first success was with The Yemassee. Simms also published eight novels set in South Carolina during the American Revolutionary War, beginning with The Partisan, which was perhaps Simms's most-read novel, and Katharine Walton. Other South Carolina-related books included Mellichampe, The Kinsmen, Woodcraft, The Forayers, Eutaw, and Joscelyn.He later published ten novels dealing with the expansion into the frontier territory from Georgia to Louisiana, including Richard Hurdis; or, the Avenger of Blood. A Tale of Alabama and Border Beagles: A Tale of Mississippi. He also wrote about the conflicts between Native Americans, Spaniards and French in Florida in The Lily and the Totem, or, The Huguenots in Florida ; Vasconselos ; and the overlapping experiences of Native Americans, Spanish, and English in The Cassique of Kiawah. Regarding America's native population, Simms once said that "Our blinding prejudices... have been fostered as necessary to justify the reckless and unsparing hand with which have smitten them in their habitations and expelled them from their country."
At first, Southern readers, especially those in his home town of Charleston, did not support Simms's work, in part because he lacked an aristocratic background. Eventually, however, he was referred to as the Southern version of James Fenimore Cooper, and Charleston residents invited him into their prestigious St. Cecilia Society.
In 1845, Simms published The Wigwam and the Cabin ; a compilation of short stories, one of which describes a loyal slave. Edgar Allan Poe thought the collection "decidedly the most American of American books". and declared Simms to be "immeasurably the greatest writer of fiction in America." In 1852, Simms published As Good as A Comedy; Or, The Tennessean's Story. It and "Paddy McGann" constitute his two full-length works of Southern humor; he also wrote "Sharp Snaffles" and "Bill Bauldy", two tall tales. He also wrote poetry and, in a letter to literary critic and poet Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Simms said that he was not interested in form as much as content, torn "between the desire to appear correct, and the greater desire to be original and true".
Nonfiction history and biography
Simms' History of South Carolina served for several generations as the standard school textbook on the state's history. He also wrote The Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence and several very popular biographies of Revolutionary War heroes Francis Marion, Nathanael Greene, and John Laurens. He also penned a compendium of Captain John Smith's works covering the founding of the Virginia Colony as well as a book detailing the Chevalier Bayard. Simms wrote a history of Alabama, and was a popular lecturer on American history. He accumulated one of the largest collections of Revolutionary War manuscripts in the country. Most of this collection was lost when camp followers of the Union Army burned his home, "Woodlands", located near Bamberg, South Carolina.Pro-slavery writings
Simms strongly supported slavery. In the November 1837 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, Simms published a lengthy review of English social reformer Harriet Martineau's Society in America, a review that essentially functioned as an extended defense of slavery. This essay would be published as a standalone pamphlet the next year under the title Slavery in America; the essay would be republished in 1852 under the title "The Morals of Slavery" as part of the edited volume The Pro-Slavery Argument. Simms was very critical of Uncle Tom's Cabin and wrote negative reviews. Some scholars have argued that his 1852 novel The Sword and the Distaff—republished in a slightly revised edition in 1854 under the title Woodcraft—is an example of Anti-Tom literature; these scholars often rely on the readings of Joseph V. Ridgely. Other scholars see Ridgely's reading as faulty, citing an excessive reliance placed on an offhand remark Simms makes in a letter from 1852 and problems with the chronology of Simms's composition of Woodcraft alongside the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin.Simms was part of a "sacred circle" of southern intellectuals including Edmund Ruffin, James Henry Hammond, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and George Frederick Holmes. Together they published numerous articles calling for moral reform of the South, including a stewardship role of masters in relation to slavery.
American Civil War and final years
During the American Civil War, Simms espoused the side of the Secessionists in a weekly newspaper. Only his eldest son, who shared his name, was old enough to serve in the Confederate army, and because of the common name, his identification as a volunteer or conscript private is unclear. While it appears most likely that camp followers of the Union Army burned Simms's house, "Woodlands", one of the previously enslaved people there, Isaac Nimmons, was charged but acquitted of the arson. In the fire a reported 10,000 books and Revolutionary era manuscripts perished.Other than for the backwoods novel Paddy McGann, Simms published little after the Civil War began. He advised several southern politicians and made elaborate proposals for Confederate military defenses. During the war, he wrote little of literary importance.
At the end of the Civil War, his reputation in tatters as a result of his vocal support of both slavery and secession, Simms attempted without success to relaunch his literary career. He compiled an uneven anthology of Southern war poems in 1866. He died of colon cancer in Charleston on June 11, 1870, and was posthumously inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 1986.