Dedication

Acclaimed America’s outstanding novelist in 1859, William Gilmore Simms was born in Charleston in 1806 and died there in 1870. Though Simms was always identified with Charleston and South Carolina, Bamberg County proudly identifies William Gilmore Simms as its most outstanding citizen because of his long tenure as proprietor at Woodlands, ancestral home of his second wife, Chevillette Eliza Roach.

It was at Woodlands on the Edisto, 1836-1870, that this prolific author of eighty-two book-length works lived and made an indelible impression on the American conscience.

The following tribute to William Gilmore Simms was written and delivered by Dr. John C. Guilds, author of the latest Simms biography, Simms: A Literary Life, published in 1992, shortly after Simms’s induction into the South Carolina Hall of Fame on Friday, February 7, 1992. Dr. Guild's remarks on that occasion are reproduced here with his permission.

With a profound sense of gratitude to William Gilmore Simms for his contribution to American letters, this History of Bamberg County is dedicated to his memory.

William Gilmore Simms - 1806-1870

William Gilmore Simms was born in Charleston on April 17, 1806, the son of William Gilmore and Harriet Ann Augusta Singleton Simms. The elder Simms, an emigrant from Ireland, left Charleston in 1808, after the death of his wife and financial losses, to seek his fortune in the Mississippi territory; his young son, left in the custody of his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Jacob Gates, grew up to love the city of his birth and the only “mother” he ever knew. Thus, in 1816, when his father sent for him, young Simms balked; and, when the matter was taken to court, the judge allowed the ten-year-old youth to choose his own destiny. It was probably the most important decision of his life, for it committed Simms to Charleston, to the polite professions, and ultimately to literature, rather than to the Southwest with its emphasis upon rugged frontier life.

Simms did not have an easy avenue to success in Charleston. Mrs. Gates gave her grandson the best education she could afford but lacked the money to send him to college in the North or abroad, as wealthy Charlestonians traditionally did for their sons. Though Simms’s schooling ended at twelve, he was a gifted child and voracious reader and readily attained the educational level of his more affluent peers. First apprenticed to a druggist, he later undertook the study of law in the office of Charles Rivers Carroll and was admitted to the Charleston bar in 1827 on his twenty-first birthday, a few months after his marriage to Anna Malcomb Giles of Charleston.

Simms’s literary talents had become manifest even before his marriage. At nine-teen he had edited (and written extensively for) a short-lived literary journal, the Album (1825), and two years later he published his first two volumes of verse, Lyrical and Other Poems (1827) and Early Lays (1827). Simms’s career continued to advance steadily despite the shock of his first wife’s death (after the birth of a daughter, Augusta) and the failure of the Charleston City Gazette, which he edited—both in 1832. In 1833 he published Martin Faber, rapidly followed by his first full-length novels Guy Rivers (1834), The Yemassee (1835), and The Partisan (1835). A bright new star had emerged on America’s literary horizon.

In 1836 Simms, one of Charleston’s most eligible bachelors as a young widower who had won national literary honors, married Chevillette Eliza Roach, daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. Over the years fourteen children were born, and their descendants have contributed much to South Carolina: a granddaughter Mary C. Simms Oliphant was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1983; great-granddaughter Mary Simms Furman is seated at my right and over seventy family members are present in the audience today. As proprietor of Woodlands, a lovely 7,000-acre plantation on the banks of the Edisto River, Simms became a member of South Carolina’s landed aristocracy and, as years passed, he became increasingly embroiled in political affairs as a widely recognized spokesman for the Southern point of view—he even served as a member of the South Carolina Legislature. But apart from the responsibilities of managing Woodlands and those of husband and father, Simms the planter had more time than ever before for writing books.

Amazing productivity earmarked Simms’s literary career; he published no fewer than eighty-two book-length works: novels, short stories, poetry, drama, literary criticism, essays, history, and biography. Correctly called by Jay B. Hubbell “the central figure in the literature of the Old South,” Simms played a major role, as editor and critic, as well as author, in encouraging the development of Southern letters; but, though quintessentially Southern, Simms was also a national literary figure, being acclaimed America’s outstanding novelist in 1859, just prior to the Civil War. After the war, “long years of neglect” tarnished Simms’s reputation, but not his achievement, the magnitude of which is just now being fully acknowledged.

Alone among American novelists of the nineteenth century, Simms perceived a national literary need, sensed his capability to fulfill it, developed a plan to attain it, and lived to complete it. Simms had vision, commitment, intensity, and perseverance—ingredients without which sustained literary accomplishment of first magnitude is impossible. Relatively early in his career, in 1845, Simms articulated his mission for artistic fulfillment with precision and comprehensiveness, and through-out his life he remained constant to that mission, neither altering its formulation nor wavering in his commitment. Simms’s vision of America depicted in his fiction extends from sixteenth-century Florida (Vasconselos and The Lily and the Totem); colonial South Carolina (The Cassique of Kiawah and The Yemassee); the Revolutionary War (Joscelyn, The Partisan, Mellichampe, Katherine Walton, The Scout, The Forayers, Eutaw, and Woodcraft); through the trans-Mississippi migration in the early nineteenth century (Guy Rivers, Richard Hurdis, Border Beagles, Confession, Beauchampe, Charlemont, Helen Halsey, The Wigwam and the Cabin, The Cub of the Panther, Voltmeier). To Simms, his writings about ante-colonial America, the English colonies, the Revolutionary War, and the rampaging frontier were part of a sustained, interconnected literary saga. He traced the development of American national consciousness through four centuries in two dozen books which, taken together, form a powerful, intense, highly readable epic and constitute a unique national literary treasure. Though Simms’s achievements are various and varied—his poetry in particular is important for both historical and aesthetic reasons—his vision of an American literature by Americans found its fullest expression in the novel; and it is here that his immortality is assured.

Yes, all things considered, Edgar Allan Poe may well have been right in saying of Simms: “. . . in invention, in vigor, in movement, in the power of exciting interest, and in the artistical arrangement of his themes, he has surpassed . . . any of his countrymen. . . .” Simms deserves place as a major American writer.

But I cannot close this testimonial to Simms the American author without paying tribute to Simms the South Carolinian. Born and buried in Charleston, Simms throughout his life and since his death has been closely identified with Charleston and South Carolina, much as Faulkner has been linked inseparably with Oxford and Mississippi. Despite the blandishments of political and financial renown in the Southwest (offered to Simms by his Irish-born father, who became wealthy in Mississippi), and the inducements of literary fame in New York and the Northeast (offered by Simms’s confidant and literary agent, James Lawson), Simms remained steadfastly a “Southron” through successive and decisive political, military, and financial defeats. In an attempt to bring alive Simms, the man and South Carolinian, at this point I should like to quote from my forthcoming biography a paragraph or two citing an anecdote that captures the essence of Simms’s dynamic magnetism:

. . . In 1847 William Gilmore Simms was forty-one years old, nearing the height of his powers—well established as South Carolina’s most distinguished man-of-letters, noted far and wide as a gifted orator and a brilliant conversationalist. He was known to almost every South Carolinian of intellectual inclination, and looked upon with awe and reverence by the aspiring young writers, one of whom was Paul Hamilton Hayne. In later life the poet remembered the charm and excitement of his first impressions of the fellow South Carolinian who was to become his friend and mentor. There are many accounts of Simms’s impressiveness as a person—as speaker, conversationalist, raconteur, confidant, ally—but none so rich in meaning and substance as the one written by Hayne.

In the midsummer of the year 1847 I chanced to be one of a large audience assembled in the Charleston theater.

It was the period of our war with Mexico, and the whole country was agitated and unsettled. (. . .) The stage . . . was crowded with local celebrities, noted editors, politicians, and lawyers, together with a few distinguished publicists and legislators from other Southern States. There was the usual flow of feeling sacred to these occasions through every variety of mental spout. When the last orator, having pumped up and set afloat some magnificent platitude about the American eagle screaming over the Halls of the Montezumas, he seemed to be so overpowered by his own elocution that he stammered, paused, convulsively recovered himself for a moment, and then came to a dead stop, before taking the advice, loudly uttered, by some free citizen, “Sit down old boy! don’t you know that you are ‘played out’?”

A curious hush followed, and some persons had risen as if to depart, when there was a cry, at first somewhat faint, but rapidly taken up, until it became earnest, even vociferous, for Simms, Gilmore Simms! I felt a thrill of excitement and delighted expectation, for like most lads of any fancy or taste for reading I reverenced literary genius, and having already been fascinated by some of Simms’ [sic] novels, I had long desired to see the author. He now came forward with a slow, stately step, under the full blaze of the chandeliers, a man in the prime of life, tall, vigorous, and symmetrically formed. His head was a noble one, with a conspicuously high forehead, finely developed in the regions of ideality, and set upon broad shoulders in haughty, leonine grace.

Under strangely mobile eyebrows flashed a pair of bluish-gray eyes, keen and bright as steel. His mouth, slightly prominent, especially in the upper lip, was a wonderfully firm mouth, only less determined, in fact, than the massive jaw and chin which might have been molded out of iron.

An impressive personality, likely to catch and hold one’s observation any where, he paused near the footlights, rapidly glanced about him for an instant, and then began his speech with a bold, startling paradox.

Every body’s attention was sharply arrested, and to the end of his address as closely retained.

An extraordinary speaker, certainly. For some time his manner was measured and deliberate, but once plunged in he became passionately eager. His gesticulation was frequent, unrestrained, now and then almost grotesquely emphatic. This manner was rightly his own, being the outward, unpremeditated expression of a fervent temperament, of hot, honest blood, and a buoyant, indomitable nature, which sustained him subsequently under trials of no common power.

According to another contemporary admirer, Simms did for South Carolina what Shakespeare did for England — Simms’s portraits of South Carolina history, character, and landscape are living monuments of the author’s love for his place of nativity. It is appropriate that Simms memorials, first at White Point Gardens and now at the Hall of Fame, attest to South Carolina’s reciprocal love and esteem for its most famous native literary son.

JOHN C. GUILDS - February 7, 1992

“We have very little sight seeing. Our country is without palaces or public works of much importance. An agricultural country leaves few monuments but moral ones.”

William Gilmore Simms,
Letter to William Cullen Bryant from Woodlands
January 10, 1841