[In the following essay, Shaner analyzes William Gilmore Simm's work The Yemassee, where the Native American is depicted as a creature who needed to be subject to the white man.]

By the time nineteenth-century American novelists were writing of the colonization of America, the lives and cultures of the Indian tribes already were obscured not merely by change and passage of time, but by the world view of the European. The same is true of the land. Whatever the American wilderness was in its existential reality, Western man seems to have seen it as the raw material which could give substance to the mythic ideals of a society which had failed hitherto to achieve its dreams. Of the land the early settlers primarily asked sustenance. Of the Indians they sought, primarily, cooperation or death. But each was a part of the movement to build in the New World the physical reality of those ideals which, though never realized in the Old, never had been relinquished. In American fiction, therefore, we must not look for the Indian, or the land, as they actually were, but rather for the western dream and the way the European tried to shape them by that dream. In the American novel may be discerned what we asked of the red man and his land, and what we made of both.

The vision of the New World which permeated the imagination of the Old was twofold. On the one hand it appeared to be another Eden, not yet lost to man—a God-given second chance to re-establish an earthly paradise. From this vision of the New World, two of the roles forced on the Indians by the European imagination derive. If the New World was Eden, the Indian was the Noble Savage, wise in his simplicity, uncorrupted by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: “Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind / Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind; / His soul, proud Science never taught to stray / Far as the solar walk, or milky way” (Pope, Essay on Man, I, 99-102). The other role of the Indian in the second Eden was that of the serpent, the Devil, the evil agent who caused man to be expelled from paradise. But this time, Judeo-Christian man was determined that he himself would drive out the “Red Devils”—a motif of American fiction well into the twentieth century.

The second part of the Judeo-Christian vision of the New World was also a vision of paradise: the Holy City. In this new land, the New Jerusalem, a perfect paradise, could be established. The Indian becomes the Canaanite, who must be destroyed so that the Chosen People may take control of the Promised Land where they can build Jerusalem. The two ideals of Judeo-Christian myth both were pursued, consciously and unconsciously, in the conquest of the Americas. No one noticed, evidently, that they are nearly mutually exclusive; that “spacious skies and amber waves of grain” do not long persist where “alabaster cities” are rising. These conceptions of the people and the land are part of the heritage of every American writer. We are here concerned with only one work and one author, William Gilmore Simms's The Yemassee, and Simms's particular variations and insights into American myths concerning the Indian and the land.

Simms recognized The Yemassee as one of his significant works. More than once he sought to define its genre: “The Yemassee, & in fact most of my works are romances, not novels. They involve sundry of the elements of heroic poetry. They are imaginative, passionate, metaphysical; they deal chiefly in trying situation, bold characterization, & elevating moral. They exhibit invention in large degree, & their progress is dramatic; the action being bold salient & with a regularly advancing convergence to the catastrophe. They exhibit frequent new situations, which are effective, & exercise large ingenuity in the extrication of the dram. pers. … The standards of my novels—all of them—are either epic or dramatic—especially the latter.”¹ His portrayal of the conflict between Indian and colonist is a part of the western dream of the New World.

The subject matter of The Yemassee is appropriate to the epic. Like most classical epics, it records the death of one civilization and the founding of another, greater one. There is, however, a distinct sense of a missed opportunity for both white and Indian in The Yemassee, rather as though the epic struggle was fought on too low a level for the participants to realize each other's true stature: “They would have subdued the aborigines, as William of Normandy subdued the Saxons. An European colony of ten thousand men would have done this. They would not have paltered with the ignorant savages, flattering their vanity in order to conciliate their prejudices and disarm their anger, as was done by the feeble settlers of James Town, and other places. They would have overrun them, parcelled them off in tens, and twenties, and hundreds, under strict task masters, and, by compelling the performance of their natural duties—that labor which is the condition of all human life,—would have preserved them to themselves and to humanity. Properly diluted, there was no better blood than that of Cherokee and Natchez. It would have been a good infusion into the paler fountain of Quaker and Puritan—the very infusion which would put our national vanity in subjection to our pride, and contribute to keep us as thoroughly independent of the mother country, in intellectual, as we fondly believe ourselves to be in political respects.”²

The Indian refused to fit the roles assigned him in the European Eden-New-Jerusalem myths, and the whites had no inclination to mix with another race save to breed slaves. Thus Simms's “what if” questions of American history were negated before they were asked. The strictures which Indian Removal or genocide placed on white perceptions caused Simms a great deal of trouble. He had had a chance to see the Indian in his own environment and also as a participant in an epic struggle in a New World. He could not see him as equal to the white; neither could he support fully the view of him as an ignorant and bestial savage. The basic irrationality of Simms's Christian racism led him to romanticize his Indian characters accordingly, and to take up positions paralleling those encountered in the national debates on Indian Removal (1817-1835).³

Schemes of defense and development made it desirable for the federal government to move the Indians west of the Mississippi and out of the way. Yet that project was attended by a dilemma. How could land be taken from tribes which had been America's allies in the Revolution and in the War of 1812? John Marshall resolved it when he re-defined the legal status of the Indians as “domestic nations” rather than sovereign tribes able to make treaties with the national government. This solution took no account of the sufferings of the Cherokee and others on “the Trail of Tears” in 1835, the very year in which The Yemassee was published. Simms's rationalization for past genocide and future removal was exactly the same as the federal government's: whites deserved the land because they were a greater race and would make proper use of it; Indians were happier and safer placed at a remove from white civilization. Perhaps the most agreeable aspect of removal to its proponents was that it was a slow and unobtrusive form of genocide, in fact, almost the type of bondage Simms had in mind in 1845: on the reservation one could try to make red men into whites by work and the educational stimulus of starvation.

But Simms's political views in The Yemassee seem to have been determined more by the conditions of creating an epic out of the colonization of South Carolina than by any clear historical or philosophical system. The actual Yemassee tribe lived along the coast of Georgia and Florida where it came into conflict with Spanish slavers about 1570. It moved to South Carolina in 1687 to live under the protection of the English. According to William Tredwell Bull, a missionary at the time of the Yemassee War, the Yemassee cheated and improverished by English traders, had fought out of desperation.⁴ Although they nearly managed to drive the English out of South Carolina, the combined forces of the Carolinas, North and South, and of Virginia, defeated them. Contrary to Simms, given their experience with Spain, the Yemassee probably got no shipment of arms from Florida. Although the governor of South Carolina was on his way to the western parishes with a force of men at the outbreak of the war, he probably did not garner information as a romantic spy.

Simms's assumption that the Yemassee are native to South Carolina is a glaring error. He is equally mistaken in visualizing a fairly equal contest between Indian and settler. These distortions make it possible to justify the Yemassee War as part of the epic struggle to found this nation: war is one of the prices which possession of the land exacts. The epic pattern forces a difficult role on the Yemassee. They must be worthy opponents, yet lose. They must offer an interesting contrast to white society, yet be inferior. These paradoxical demands already were present in the Eden-New-Jerusalem myths. By altering the myths, Simms reconciles these disparate demands.

Simms's New Jerusalem is the developing social order of the South Carolinians. Unlike the Christian metaphor for an ideal state, it is to be realized through hard work rather than achieved by spiritual grace. Conquest is part of that hard work. Simms's vision implies a harmonious society based on the subjugation of Nature, the ordering of natural resources and human personalities. His ideal society resembles an aristocracy improved by democracy. Lower class whites and black slaves form the base of Simms's social pyramid; the Indian is portrayed as an enemy or a romantic inhabitant of lands remote from civilization. The rat in this earthly city is the man who cannot contribute to society: the renegade, the thief, the idle dreamer. In The Yemassee, the internal enemies are Cherley, the pirate, Rev. Matthews, the misguided idealist, Nichols, the demagogue, and Granger, the incompetent. The good man combines the civilized sensibilities of Europe with the skills of the Indian and frontiersman. This man, Harrison, is not necessarily attractive, but he is effective in the establishment of society in place of wilderness.

In The Yemassee, the wilderness has all the beauty and promise of Eden: “All things within it [the grove] seemed to breathe of love. The murmer of the brooklet, the song of the bird, the hum of the zephyr in the treetop, had each a corresponding burden. … The rich green of the leaves—the deep crimson of the wild flower—the gemmed and floral-knotted long grass that carpeted the path—the deep, solemn shadows of evening, and the trees through which the new declining sun was enabled only here and there to sprinkle a few drops from his golden censer—all gave power to that spell of quiet, which, by diverting the mind of its associations of every-day and busy life, throws it back upon its early and unsophisticated nature—restoring that time, in the older and better condition of humanity, when, unchanged by conventional influences, the whole business of life seems to have been the worship of high spirits, and the exercise of living, holy, and generous affections.”⁵ In such a setting Bess Matthews, the embodiment of feminine purity, goes to meet her lover and finds instead a snake which mesmerizes her with its “star-like eye.” She is rescued by Occonestega. When Harrison arrives to find the Indian kneeling over the prostrate Bess, he reacts as if Occonestega were a rattlesnake and prepares to tomahawk him. Although he discovers his mistake in time, his gratitude does not keep him from getting Occonestoga drunk and sending him out to spy on his own people, an adventure which leads to his capture and death.

Simms's American Eden has to be ordered and controlled; it must be forced back into the pattern of the first Eden, in which every living thing was subject to Man. But to Simms the Indian is not Man, but “Savage Man,” a creature who, like the wild beasts must be subject to the will of the White Man, Eden's true heir. “A feeble colony of adventurers from a distant world had taken up its abode alongside of them [the Indians]. The weaknesses of the intruder were, at first, his only but sufficient protection with the unsophisticated savage. The white man had his lands assigned him, and he trenched his furrows to receive the grain on the banks of Indian waters. The wild man looked on the humiliating labor, wondering as he did so, but without fear, and never dreaming for a moment of his own approaching subjection. Meanwhile, the adventurers grew daily more numerous, for their friends and relatives soon followed them across the ocean. They, too, had lands assigned them in turn, by the improvident savage; and increasing intimacies, with uninterrupted security, day by day, won the former still more deeply into the bosom of the forests, and more immediately in connection with their wild possessors; until, at length, we behold the log-house of the white man, rising up amid the thinned clump of woodland foliage, within hailing distance of the squat, clay hovel of the savage. Sometimes their smokes even united; and now and then the two, the ‘European and his dusky guide,’ might be seen, pursuing, side by side and with the same dog, upon the cold track of the affrighted deer or the yet more timorous turkey.”⁶

The “dusky guide” taught the white settler how to survive in the wilderness; but to the European, survival was the first step toward conquest. Either when the white was strong enough, or when the Indian realized his danger, the wars began. In The Yemassee, the Sanutee foresees the weakening of his tribe and takes up the war club. Once war is begun, Simms's Indians become the serpent to be cast out of Eden. In defeat, Simms's Indians return to a romantic dignity. After the last battle, when the New Eden is irrevocably lost and white America begins to build New Jerusalem or Babel—even as black slaves comb the battlefield with clubs to kill wounded Indians—Simms pauses to record the passing of a race: “Life went with the last effort, when thinking only of the strife for his country, his lips parted feebly with the cry of battle—‘Sangarrah-me, Yemassee—Sangarrah-me—Sangarrah-me!’ [¶] The eye was dim for ever. Looking no longer to the danger of the stroke from the club of the Negro, Matiwan threw himself at length upon the body, now doubly sacred to that childless woman. At that moment the Lord Palatine came up, in time to arrest the blow of the servile which still threatened her. [¶] ‘Matiwan,’ said the Palatine, stooping to raise her from the body—‘Matiwan, it is the chief?’ [¶] ‘Ah-cherray-me, ah-cheray-me, Sanutee-Ah-cheray-me, Ah-cheray-me, Yemassee!’ [¶] She was unconscious of all things, as they bore her tenderly away, save that the Yemassee was no longer the great nation. She only felt that the ‘well-beloved,’ as well of herself as of her people, looked forth, with Occonestoga, wondering that she came not, from the Blessed Valley of the Good Manneyte.”⁷

Simms gives neither an accurate history of the Yemassee War nor a picture of “the Indian as our ancestors knew him in the early period.”⁸ He does show us an attitude toward the Indian's role in the founding of this nation that foreshadows government policy toward the Indian and purports to justify it. The Yemassee is a major piece of Americana. Although Simms fails to maintain a consistent level of epic and myth, he reveals more than he thought he had about the visions and compromised dreams which early shaped the nation.

Notes

1. Simms to Evert A. Duyckinck (1855). The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Oliphant, Odell, and Eaves (Columbia, S.C., 1954), III, 388-389.

2. William Gilmore Simms, Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction, ed. C. Hugh Holman (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 138-139.

3. For fuller treatment see Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in the Formative Years, the Indian Trade and Intercourse Acts, 1790-1834, first ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1962; rpt. ed., Lincoln, Neb., 1970.

4. Frank J. Klingberg, “The Mystery of the Last Yemassee Prince,” South Carolina Historical Magazine, LXIII, January, 1962, 23-26.

5. William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee, ed. Joseph V. Ridgely, N. Y., 1964, pp. 166-167.

6. The Yemassee, p. 29.

7. The Yemassee, p. 415.

8. The Yemassee, p. 22.