SOURCE: Watson, Charles S. “Simms and the Civil War: The Revolutionary Analogy.” The Southern Literary Journal 24, no. 2 (spring 1992): 76-89.

[In the following essay, Watson illuminates William Gilmore Simms's comparison of Revolutionary America with the antebellum South in his novels of the 1850s and 1860s.]

In the first part of his career, William Gilmore Simms, the leading novelist of the antebellum South, commemorated the great war for independence by recounting exciting battles and heroic deeds.¹ After the sectional conflict worsened, he retained his principal subject, but with a radical difference. Now he used the American Revolution to guide the South in its fateful conflict with the North. He drew a parallel with the present in each of his last Revolutionary novels as one critical issue after another arose: the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, Secession, and, following the Civil War, the Lost Cause.

It has long been suspected that Simms was indirectly commenting on the present in his last Revolutionary novels, but demonstration of this theory has been lacking. Heretofore, scholars have mentioned briefly, but without elaboration, the Revolutionary analogy in Simms's novels. William R. Taylor, noting that South Carolina orators compared current crises with the Revolution in 1844, 1850, and 1860, concluded that Simms likened conflicting loyalties in Katharine Walton (1850) to those experienced by Southerners during the debate over the Compromise of 1850. According to J. V. Ridgely. Simms in the same novel identified Revolutionary patriots with rebellious South Carolinians of the 1850s. C. Hugh Holman wrote that Simms used the Revolutionary novel in the decade before the Civil War to rally South Carolinians to “their embattled traditions and institutions.”²

What is lacking in these valid but brief statements is an examination of all of Simms's last Revolutionary novels in their contemporary contexts in order to grasp the specific timeliness of each. When they are analyzed in the light of succeeding sectional crises, it becomes clear that Simms is responding to each with a relevant depiction of the American Revolution. He exhorts Southerners to follow the precedent of that great conflict in each of his last Revolutionary novels from 1850 to 1866: Katharine Walton (1850), Woodcraft (1852), The Forayers (1855), Eutaw (1856), and Joscelyn (1866).

Simms explicitly recognized the parallel between the Revolution and the present in the pages of the Southern Quarterly Review, the leading political journal of the South, which he edited from 1849 to 1855. In reviewing the Fourth of July oration by his friend the secessionist William Porcher Miles, delivered in 1849, he praised the speaker for stressing the “parallel” between the Revolution and events of the present. He ridiculed those who objected to remarks on the current crisis in a speech recalling the past. “We were required to enjoy an unmixed sentiment of pride and triumph in past achievements, without any regard to the present cares and anxieties. As if this were possible!” What better use of the anniversary of “American freedom” could be made, he asked, than “habitually to compare its objects and acquisitions with the degree of security which we enjoy under its supposed guarantees” at present?³

In an article on the Southern Convention, which was called to discuss the Compromise of 1850, Simms pointedly compared the Revolution to the present. Just as it had required the colonies twenty years, from 1756 to 1776, to assemble for a general meeting, it had taken the Southern states an equal number of years, from 1830 to 1850. He further compared the relations between the colonies and Great Britain to those between the Southern and the Northern states. “So far, the history of our relations with the Northern states is a precise counterpart of the case of the whole of the colonies of Great Britain prior to 1776, with the mother country.” In both cases, he pointed out, there had been “unjust legislation and continual encroachment” of the stronger upon the weaker.⁴

Taking inspiration from the Revolution was by no means confined to issues of the Southern Quarterly Review. The widespread expression of this sentiment permeates the Fourth of July celebrations of the time. In the pages of the Charleston Courier, the observance of the national anniversary became increasingly the occasion for raising the issues of the day.⁵ In 1849, one speaker gave a toast to “South-Carolina” because she “knows her rights and dares to assert them” (July 9, 1849). The Wilmost Proviso, which prohibited slavery in the new Western territory, and the Compromise of 1850 were denounced in Independence Day speeches (July 9, 1849, and July 9, 1851).⁶ After proslavery citizens of Missouri supported “popular sovereignty” in Kansas, there was a toast to “Missouri,” who had taught abolitionists that Southern men know their “rights” (July 6, 1855).

In speeches and toasts reported in the Charleston Courier, the point was repeatedly stressed that the Revolution should guide South Carolinians in their conflict with the federal government. Speaking to the “'76 Association” on current relations with the “Federal government,” Henry Laurens Pinckney warmed the hearts of all, according to the Courier, when he recalled the “principles of '76.” These would inspire his auditors to be “ready and prepared for any and every emergency” (July 9, 1851). At the celebration of the Battle of Fort Moultrie, a military officer made this toast to the famous Revolutionary fort: “In 1776 we entrusted it to the Federal Government to protect us from invasion. Should the Government betray its trust, we will take it back” (July 3, 1850).

Simms's first Revolutionary novel to confront an immediate issue is Katharine Walton. This work appeared during the controversy over the Compromise of 1850, which many Southerners considered an abject surrender to the North. In his Fourth of July oration (1849), William Porcher Miles declared that the South had had enough of “compromises.” “Every concession has but emboldened our adversaries to more unscrupulous aggression.”⁷ Simms also opposed Henry Clay's compromise measures. He wrote to the Virginia secessionist Nathaniel Beverley Tucker on January 30, 1850: “I have no hope, and no faith in compromises of any kind.” Neither did he have patience with Southerners who lent support to the Compromise. Any compromise must originate in “cowardice and a mean spirit of evasion on the part of the South,” he believed.⁸

Read in the historical context of the Compromise of 1850, Katharine Walton emerges as an attack on those who stoop to pusillanimous compromise and a tribute to those who do not. Although the action takes place when the British have occupied Charleston, the parallel with the present lies just below the surface. General Andrew Williamson, considered the Benedict Arnold of Carolina, deserted the Revolutionary cause by accepting British protection. Captured by his fellow Americans, he is tried for treason. At his trial he points out that one accuser, Colonel Robert Walton, accepted British protection also, in order “to indicate the true character of that compromise which the necessities of the time forced so many of us to make.”⁹ The critical word “compromise” signals the parallel with the present. Pressure from Northerners, successors to the tyrannical British, was causing modern Southerners to compromise also. What would be the consequence? In the novel the penalty for compromise becomes painfully clear. General Williamson must stand trial for his offense. Colonel Walton receives no mercy when captured by the enemy and loses his life ignominiously on the gallows.

In narrating this trial, Simms borrows the worst epithet of his day to emphasize the parallel with compromisers of the present. The accusers of General Williamson repeatedly call him “traitor.” One impatient patriot, Captain McKelvey, wants immediate execution. “I say, for one, that he is a proven traitor, and deserves the death of one” (355). During the debate over the Compromise in South Carolina, those who supported it were likewise branded “traitors,” as shown by the following case.

William J. Grayson, a rare dissident of Charleston, defended the Compromise of 1850 in a published letter to the governor of South Carolina. Significantly, he repudiated the so-called “parallel” being drawn by many between the revolution against Great Britain and the present crisis, saying that a moment's consideration showed “the essential differences in the two cases.” Then the colonies took no part in the government; now the South enjoys full representation in Congress and her just influence on election of the president.¹⁰ In “Letters from ‘Curtius’” (1851), a collection of anonymous pieces previously published in the Courier, Grayson complained that those who did not share the foolish dreams of secessionists were called “traitors, cowards, corrupted slaves of the Federal government.” When his authorship became known, he was summarily removed from his position as Collector of Customs in Charleston. As Richard J. Calhoun has pointed out, Grayson is regrettably remembered only as the author of The Hireling and the Slave (1854), a defense of slavery, not as a staunch Unionist and fearless opponent of Secession.¹¹

Women of the Revolution, like the title character of Katharine Walton, supplied the highest inspiration to those of the present. Simms had found abundant material for his heroine in Elizabeth Ellet's recent book on women in the Revolution. He wrote an admiring review entitled “Ellet's Women of the American Revolution” for the Southern Quarterly Review (July, 1850), in which he remarked that every little community of the South had such stories of female patriots.¹² Toasts to women, designed to inspire courage in the present, were among the most common in celebrations of the Fourth of July reported in the Courier. A “volunteer” toast of 1849 expressed the following sentiment: May the noble patriotism that inspired the ladies of '76 ever be the characteristic of the “daughters of South-Carolina” (July 10, 1849). In 1855, there was a ringing toast to “The Women of South-Carolina—their smile is the highest incentive to patriotic effort” (July 6, 1855).

In Simms's novel Katharine Walton displays all of the patriotism that would inspire Carolinians of the 1850s. Choosing the “manly course,” Katharine tells how she defended her home from intruders by shooting a British soldier (274). She bears the sobriquet, “rebel,” that would in time be worn proudly by seceding Southerners. The subtitle of the novel dubs her “The Rebel of Dorchester.”

Simms's next Revolutionary novel, Woodcraft (1852), presents his forceful support of the Fugitive Slave Act. This law, which authorized Southerners to recover run-away slaves in the North, enraged anti-slavery forces. It was condemned by Emerson and Thoreau. In fact it was the immediate occasion for Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), in which the slave Eliza seeks freedom across the Ohio River, hotly pursued by men acting under the Fugitive Slave Act. Southerners considered enforcement of this act to be the acid test of the Compromise of 1850. Writers for the Southern Quarterly Review discussed it frequently. Before enactment Simms ridiculed the law as unenforceable.¹³ Afterward, as seen in Woodcraft, he advocated strict enforcement.

In Woodcraft Simms uses the most common terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, as well as a dramatic episode, to underline the analogy with the present. According to the law, a slaveholder could “recover” his “fugitive” before federal “commissioners.”¹⁴ In Simms's novel, which takes place immediately after the Revolution, the Widow Eveleigh recovers her abducted slaves in Charleston as well as those of her neighbor, Captain Porgy. Despite a British officer's rejection of her claims to the “negroes claimed as fugitives,” she proves ownership before “the American commissioners.”¹⁵ After she has repossessed the slaves, kidnappers steal them again on the return to her plantation. Simms gives a stirring precedent of how slaveholders can apprehend their fugitive slaves by acting boldly. Porgy and his men overcome the slave-stealers with “woodcraft,” the guerilla tactic practiced during the Revolution, and recover “the fugitive negroes” (149). Afterward, the grateful Porgy thanks Mrs. Eveleigh for her help in “recovering” his slaves (167).

The lesson that Simms wishes Southerners to learn from this passage comes through strong and clear in the context of the Fugitive Slave Act. Southerners whose slaves have fled to the North should stand together in their common interest. They should act firmly like Mrs. Eveleigh by demanding before “the commissioners” the return of their slaves. If necessary they should use “woodcraft” to capture their slaves, whom Simms did not believe acted freely but had been enticed to run away. The title of this novel, “woodcraft,” recommends the aggressive means by which slaveholders can regain their fugitive slaves.

If the policy that Simms wished to promulgate in Katharine Walton was to reject compromise, the one he advocated in Woodcraft was to adopt a warlike spirit, essential in the current crisis. Above all Southerners should not be indecisive at this juncture. For Simms the besetting sin of the Southern planter was languorous indecision, a trait also afflicting Stowe's St. Clare, whose prevarication keeps Uncle Tom in slavery. Simms thought that his closest political acquaintance, James H. Hammond, former governor of South Carolina, also suffered from this Hamlet-like flaw. He tried to overcome Hammond's indecision in 1849 by warning him, “Remember Hamlet—‘whose native hue of resolution / was sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought.’”¹⁶ Simms urged Hammond to assume leadership of South Carolina after Calhoun's death, but to no avail. The historian Clement Eaton called Hammond “the Hamlet of the Old South.”¹⁷

Simms's antidote for indecisive Southerners is shown by the changing behavior of Captain Porgy. For most of the novel, after returning to his plantation, he fritters away his life in desuetude, bemoaning his indebtedness. He comes close to losing his slaves when he cannot repay his debt to a slave-stealing Tory named McKewn, who wants to become a respected planter, but who is no better than Simon Legree. At the end, however, Porgy is aroused to the kind of militant action that Simms favors in combating abolitionists, whom he considered no better than slave-stealers. When the sheriff arrives at Glen-Eberley plantation to seize Porgy's slaves as payment for his debt, the slavemaster returns to his warlike ways. Outfitted in Revolutionary attire, Porgy emerges suddenly on the piazza, “his eyes glaring like meteors,” waving his saber (486). He puts the sheriff to rout, thereby saving his slaves from McKewn's clutches. That would-be slave-master perishes finally by his own hand.

Simms's Woodcraft inevitably provokes unfavorable comparisons with other works which appeared during the years of the American Renaissance.¹⁸ The publication date of Woodcraft, 1852, comes two years after Moby Dick, one year after The Scarlet Letter, and three years before Leaves of Grass and Walden. Though Simms's most artfully crafted work of fiction, Woodcraft clearly falls short of these great works. It is more appropriately compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin, also published in 1852, which Jane Tompkins calls “probably the most influential book every written by an American.”¹⁹ The importance of Stowe's work is undeniable since it played a large part in starting the Civil War, as Lincoln remarked. Woodcraft also played a part in fomenting that war. Although set in Revolutionary times, Simms's novel takes up the same political issue as Stowe's famous work. In Woodcraft Simms calls for enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, thereby refuting Stowe. He wrote, significantly, to James H. Hammond that this work was “probably as good an answer to Mrs. Stowe as has been published.”²⁰ Simms's climactic novels of the Revolution, The Forayers (1855) and Eutaw (1856) use the Revolutionary analogy to support Secession. The former work is dedicated appropriately to David F. Jamison, president of the Secession convention which proclaimed the independence of South Carolina in 1860.²¹

Fourth of July orators and writers for the Southern Quarterly Review called on South Carolina to head the Secession movement. Henry Laurens Pinckney, speaking in 1851, called on South Carolina to lead the South out of the Union. South Carolina's action would produce “a communion of States, founded upon the strongest ties that can bind them together … [a] Southern Confederacy.”²² Writing for the Southern Quarterly Review, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker urged South Carolina to provide leadership in “South Carolina—Her Present Attitude and Future Condition.” Deploring the weakness of his native Virginia in the current debate, he turned to South Carolina. After defending the right of a state to secede, he called on the state of John C. Calhoun to heed the inspiration of her “prophets” and look to the future. Invoking the name of a Revolutionary hero, he asked, “Is she not the land of MARION? Let his spirit animate her.”²³ Mary Ann Wimsatt points out Tucker's influence on Simms and the latter's belief in their correspondence that South Carolina should secede.²⁴

In The Forayers Simms likewise urges South Carolina to lead the Secession movement by emphasizing that state's primacy in winning the previous war for independence. At the strategy meeting of American officers near the end of the war, Governor John Rutledge of South Carolina nominates General Thomas Sumter, a native South Carolinian, to command the daring Raid of the Dog Days. Sumter readily agrees to direct the combined forces, which will include mainly men from South Carolina but also those from “the sister states of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Delaware” (519). Troops from the Northern states are conspicuous by their absence. Rutledge also appeals for “volunteers” to drive the British from South Carolina, just as modern Southerners were recruiting “volunteers” to drive free-soilers from Kansas (520).²⁵

The banquet that follows this scene bears a striking resemblance to the Fourth of July assemblies reported in the Courier. Colonel Robert Singleton, hero of The Partisan (1835), toasts the most popular subject reported in the Courier: “South Carolina—almost freed from the footsteps of the foreign tyrant, and rising to the full assertion of her sovereignty!” (547-48). The implication of these stirring words is that South Carolina will win her sovereignty in the present, just as surely as she did in the past.

As the South moved toward secession in the decade before the war, writers for the Southern Quarterly Review assumed the roles of prophets, predicting Southern independence. Did not the achievement of independence in the American Revolution offer an undeniable precedent? Making a comparison to the American colonies in the Revolution, the author of “The Destinies of the South” (1853) declared: “The South … will, in time, imitate the example. This is her destiny.” Some predictions make us smile or wince today. In “The Prospect Before Us” (1851), the author sought to dispel fears of war after Secession occurred: “It would not be followed by war.” He felt safe in making this assertion because Northerners were a calculating people. How could their government be supported were “their supply of cotton stopped”?²⁶

In Eutaw Simms has his own characteristic way of predicting the achievement of Southern independence in the present. He writes that the final battle in South Carolina at Eutaw Springs foreshadowed American independence. “The battle of Eutaw left but little to be done.” Events moved forward unerringly, and “the final capture of Cornwallis, at Yorktown” persuaded Great Britain to accept American independence as “a decree of fate—one of the fixed facts of Destiny.”²⁷ With equal confidence Simms believed that the coming of Southern independence was “one of the fixed facts of Destiny.”

In Eutaw Simms gives his most inspiring models for modern Southerners by contrasting those characters who can foresee the future with those blind to coming events. Besides patriots who conclude rationally that deserted forts foretell British defeat, there are two extraordinary visionaries. Captain Travis, whose painful imprisonment by the Tories maddens him, resembles “a Jewish patriarch or prophet” with his long, white beard (561). Repeating words from the Song of Solomon (2:12), he predicts truly despite his derangement: “The wars are over—the spring is come … the voice of the turtle is heard in the land” (568). The most inspiring prophet of this novel is the clairvoyant maiden, Hurricane Nell. She repeatedly foresees the deaths of marauding Tories, who pay no attention to her predictions.

Those characters who refuse to see the coming of American independence and continue their nefarious ways represent Northerners who ignore the warnings of dire consequences if they continue their oppression of the South. In his article “The Southern Convention” Simms condemned Northerners who had embarked on a reckless course despite numerous “warnings” of dire events to come.²⁸ In Eutaw a slave-stealer named Hell-Fire Dick laughs at Hurricane Nell's predictions, but only a copy of Pilgrim's Progress over his heart saves him from a bullet at the Battle of Eutaw. Declaring in amazement that there must be “sperrits” in the world and “a blistering hell o'brimstone somewha,” this drinking, swearing Tory is almost frightened into forsaking his violent ways (556). Hell-Fire Dick, however, is one of those labeled a fool throughout the novel. Failing to reform, he is decapitated at the end by Major Willie Sinclair, a young South Carolinian.

Simms gives a humorous model of one who joins the cause of independence, providing guidance for the present. At first Colonel Sinclair, the crusty old aristocrat of this novel, will have nothing to do with the rebellion that his son has joined.²⁹ The more he sees of “this wretched rebellion, the more absurd” it appears to him (293). By the end of Eutaw, he undergoes what J. V. Ridgely calls perceptively, but without elucidation, a “conversion from loyalty to secession,” as he forgives his son for joining the rebellion.³⁰ Colonel Sinclair observes philosophically that laws and nations change, persuading him to accept this “rebellion” and the future it brings (414). Thus does Simms show the predecessor of an old fogey who becomes a supporter of Secession.

Simms was indeed prescient. In 1856, four years before South Carolina's Secession, he foresaw Southern independence. He must have taken pride in this vision since he considered himself something of a seer, choosing as his personal motto, “Volans Video” (Soaring, I see).³¹

When the Civil War broke out, Southerners viewed it as the Second American Revolution, climaxing the previous comparisons made by Simms, Tucker and many others.³² The analogy with the Revolution was recognized in speeches, poems, and also in Simms's last Revolutionary novel, Joscelyn (1867). In 1860, the South Carolinian John Belton O'Neal declared Secession to be “Revolution, exactly equal to that in '76.”³³ In Simms's collection, War Poetry of the South (1867), the parallel between the Revolution and the present conflict was the theme of many poems. A Louisianian in “Seventy-Six and Sixty-One” invoked the “spirits” of the Revolution to embolden each “Southern son” who “shouts for sixty-one.”³⁴ Nor should it be forgotten that the American Revolution was the nationalist movement with which the Confederacy most closely identified. Jefferson Davis emphasized the parallel between the American Revolution and Secession in his inaugural address.³⁵ After the war, Methodist Bishop Warren A. Candler of Georgia declared, “Putnam and Greene and Washington in 1776 made it absolutely certain that Gordon and Jackson and Lee would come in 1861. The issues involved and the men engaged were wonderfully alike.”³⁶

In the post-Civil War novel Joscelyn, Simms returns to the Revolution once more to defend the Lost Cause. The debate over why the South went to war provoked diametrically opposed positions. Edward Everett, a Northerner, declared in his famous oration, “The Causes and Conduct of the Civil War,” that the South fought to preserve slavery.³⁷ Southerners, however, argued that the South seceded because the North had violated its Constitutional rights, that is, states' rights to control internal affairs. Jefferson Davis in his Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government (1881) contended that the war was a Constitutional action waged to gain independence. In the review of a book presenting the Southern argument, Simms, who had now returned to his former belligerence, wrote that if the North had been as true to its “constitutional obligations” as the South, peace and prosperity would have continued over the land. True history must show that the North's “persistent aggression upon the constitutional rights of the Southern states was what provoked and compelled the war.”³⁸

Joscelyn, with its inflammatory subject, was published appropriately in The Old Guard, a rabidly pro-Confederate magazine edited by the Copperhead J. H. Van Evrie. Castigated by Northern editors, it vilified Lincoln throughout the war.³⁹ Unable to place his post-war writings in former outlets, Simms, the known secessionist, was reduced to publishing in this disrespected magazine.

In Joscelyn Simms narrates the debate over the Revolutionary cause, which reflects the debate over the Lost Cause. William Henry Drayton, sent from Charleston to the back-country of Georgia and South Carolina in 1775 to advocate the Revolutionary cause, speaks, significantly, at a barbecue. After the Civil War politicians like General Wade Hampton of South Carolina addressed audiences at barbecues, not at Fourth of July meetings, which had ceased in the South.⁴⁰ In his speech at Augusta, Drayton describes “the rights of the people under the British Constitution; in what manner these rights had been invaded” and what will be the danger to American “liberties” if such aggressions are allowed to continue.⁴¹ Next, in Up-Country South Carolina, he attacks the crown's “usurpations” of the people's rights because all governments exist only by “the consent of the people to be governed.” Simms stresses the application of Drayton's statements to current times in a footnote: “Ninety years of experience as independent States have confirmed the propriety of these arguments to the people of the United States” (126-27). Even after the issue of “independent States” had been settled by the Civil War, Simms still insisted that they were “independent.”

After the Civil War there was also a heated debate over which side initiated the hostilities. Each blamed the other for the Battle of Fort Sumter. J. T. Headley in The Great Rebellion: A History of the Civil War in the United States (1864) gave the Northern version. He wrote that Lincoln did not receive the Confederate commissioners before the battle because to do so would have given recognition to the rebel government. The Southern historian Edward A. Pollard, on the other hand, contended that the Confederate commissioners were unfairly rebuffed even though they came to make peace.⁴²

In Joscelyn Simms tells how the revels of 1775, the prototypes of later rebels, made a similar attempt to avoid war. Stephen Joscelyn, a “Commissioner” of the rebels, arrives at the loyalist camp in South Carolina to treat for peace. The loyalist leader, Thomas Browne, however, haughtily rejects his offer, declaring that he will consider no terms “from rebels to their king” (291). As a result, the Battle of Great Cane Brake, which Simms considered the opening battle of the Revolution in the South, ensues.

Simms also writes of vengeance, a particularly acute problem following the Civil War. He had deplored vengeance in the earlier Revolutionary novel Mellichampe (1836), and now to his credit he did so again. In Joscelyn Thomas Browne, having been tarred and feathered for supporting the crown, vows to take vengeance without mercy. This “loyalist” declares that “the insolent rebel” Drayton should meet a bloody end (132-33). Browne is probably modeled after the Radical Republican Thaddeus Stephens, considered the scourge of the South, who declared that he had dedicated the remainder of his life to the humiliation of “rebels.”⁴³ By the labels “rebel” and “loyalist” used throughout, Simms leaves no doubt as to the application of this work to the present. “Rebel” was of course the common name for a Confederate; “loyalist” was the term employed after the war for those citizens who gave full support to the federal government. “Loyal Leagues,” formed immediately after the war in the South, supported voting by Negroes.⁴⁴

Simms also furnishes the Revolutionary model for renouncing vengeance. Stephen Joscelyn's brother, Martin, believes in forgiveness toward the loyalists. After the son of an old loyalist assaults his brother, Martin forgives him magnanimously. Simms offsets his pugnacious arguments for the Lost Cause with this conciliatory appeal for the end of vengeance.

Simms's unshakable faith in the American Revolution as a precedent for the South raises an interesting question. Why did he and others so misread the Revolutionary analogy? Aside from miscalculating that no war would occur, they overlooked the most obvious truth to us: the South was doomed to lose any struggle with the powerful North, which was vastly superior in population and industrial might. As Grayson observed correctly, the Revolution and the present case were essentially different. Indeed, the North was a closer, more determined opponent than Great Britain. Its power was a reality that only those blinded by wishful thinking could miss. Simms and others of like mind, seeking assurance that their course of action would succeed, found it in the American Revolution.

Simms's last Revolutionary novels illustrate strikingly the inspiration that Southerners gained from the American Revolution. This leading author of the South transferred to literature what fire-eating Southerners proclaimed repeatedly: the analogy with the present crisis. Simms recalled the first American Revolution above all to win support for the second. In light of the repeated analogies between Revolutionary times and emergencies in the present, there can be no doubt that he used his novels to advance the cause of Secession. This finding opens the way for new readings of Simms's writings, studied in historical context with the parallel of past and present always in mind.

Simms's recollection of earlier times as guidance for the present was a typically Southern reflex. Southerners were in love with history and revered the past. By contrast Stowe, the Northerner, choosing a more modern form than the historical romance, wrote a sentimental novel set squarely in the present. She thereby constructed a supremely effective instrument for mobilizing public opinion. Whatever place Uncle Tom's Cabin ultimately attains in the canon of American literature, it is securely established as the principal literary work of the Northern cause. Simms's series of Revolutionary novels can now receive its appropriate recognition: the principal effort of the South in the literary war.

Notes

1. For a recent study of much value, see Mary Ann Wimsatt, The Major Fiction of William Gilmore Simms: Cultural Traditions and Literary Form (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989).

2. William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: George Braziller, 1961) 264-66; J. V. Ridgely, William Gilmore Simms (New York: Twayne, 1962) 95; C. Hugh Holman, “The Tory Camp is Now in Sight” in The Immoderate Past: The Southern Writer and History (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1977) 23. For the relevance of works by Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, and Whitman to the Revolution of 1848 in Europe, see Larry J. Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988).

3. “Oration Delivered before the Fourth of July Association by Wm. Porcher Miles,” Southern Quarterly Review 16 (October, 1849): 257-58. Simms's authorship of all articles in the Southern Quarterly Review is verified in The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, ed. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, et al., 6 vols. (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1952-82).

4. “The Southern Convention,” Southern Quarterly Review 18 (September, 1850): 207.

5. For a thorough treatment of this subject, see A. V. Huff, Jr., “The Eagle and the Vulture: Changing Attitudes Toward Nationalism in Fourth of July Orations Delivered in Charleston, 1778-1860,” South Atlantic Quarterly 73 (1974): 10-22.

6. Simms attacked the Wilmot Proviso in “Southern Ode,” a polemical poem written during the debate over the Compromise of 1850. See Selected Poems of William Gilmore Simms, ed. James Everett Kibler, Jr. (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990) 374.

7. Quoted by Huff, “The Eagle and the Vulture,” 21-22.

8. Letters, II, 8.

9. Katharine Walton or The Rebel of Dorchester (1854; rpt., Spartanburg, South Carolina: The Reprint Co., 1976) 353. Further references are cited in the text.

10. William John Grayson, Letter to His Excellency Whitemarsh B. Seabrook, governor of the state of South-Carolina. On the dissolution of the Union (Charleston: S. C. Miller, 1850; rpt., Louisville, Kentucky: Lost Cause Press microcard, 1958) 19-20.

11. Richard J. Calhoun, “The Anti-secessionist Satires of William J. Grayson,” The South Carolina Review 22 (1990): 50-57.

12. “Ellet's Women of the Revolution,” Southern Quarterly Review 17 (July, 1850): 314-54.

13. “The Southern Convention,” Southern Quarterly Review 18 (September, 1850): 212.

14. David Herbert Donald, Liberty and Union (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978) 49; Avery O. Craven, The Growth of Southern Nationalism, 1848-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1953) 149-50.

15. Woodcraft or Hawks About the Dovecote: A Story of the South at the Close of the Revolution (1854; rpt., Spartanburg, South Carolina: The Reprint Co., 1976) 8-9. Further references are cited in the text. Simms first published this novel under the title The Sword and the Distaff in 1852. For a modern reprinting of this work with an introduction, see Charles S. Watson, ed., Woodcraft (New Haven, Conn.: New College and UP, 1983).

16. Letters, II, 488.

17. Clement Eaton, The Mind of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1964) 21. For an analysis of the Hamlet-like character of Porgy in Woodcraft, see Charles S. Watson, “Simms's Use of Shakespearean Characters,” in Shakespeare and Southern Writers: A Study in Influence, ed. Philip C. Kolin (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1985) 20-24.

18. See C. Hugh Holman, “William Gilmore Simms and the American Renaissance,” Mississippi Quarterly 15 (1962): 135-37.

19. Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) 267.

20. Letters, III, 222-23.

21. The Forayers or The Raid of the Dog-Days (1855; rpt., Spartanburg, South Carolina: The Reprint Co., 1976), dedication page. Further references are cited in the text.

22. Quoted by Huff, 20.

23. “South Carolina—Her Present Attitude and Future Condition,” Southern Quarterly Review 20 (October, 1851): 247, 297.

24. Wimsatt, Major Fiction of Simms 156.

25. Craven, 215-19.

26. “The Destinies of the South,” Southern Quarterly Review 23 (January, 1853): 23; “The Prospect before Us,” Southern Quarterly Review 19 (April, 1851): 537-38.

27. Eutaw (1856; rpt., Spartanburg, South Carolina: The Reprint Co., 1976) 526, 580-81. Further references are given in the text. Mary Ann Wimsatt analyzes this novel as a plantation comedy of manners. See Wimsatt, Major Fiction of Simms 160-62.

28. “The Southern Convention,” 231-32.

29. In her perceptive analysis of this well-drawn character, Mary Ann Wimsatt analyzes Eutaw as a comedy of plantation manners. See Major Fiction of Simms 160-62.

30. Ridgely 113.

31. This motto is therefore printed on the cover of each volume of Simms's Letters.

32. John McCardell writes that Simms, like many Southerners, regarded the Civil War as a reenactment of the first American Revolution. See “Biography and the Southern Mind” in “Long Years of Neglect”: The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms, ed. John Caldwell Guilds (Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1988) 212.

33. Quoted by Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970) 241.

34. William Gilmore Simms, War Poetry of the South (New York: Richardson and Co., 1867) 41-42.

35. Drew Gilpin Faust, The Creation of Confederate Nationalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988) 11-15.

36. Quoted by Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1980) 40.

37. Thomas J. Pressly, Americans Interpret Their Civil War (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1954) 8.

38. Charleston Courier (November 13, 1866).

39. Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1938-68), II, 544-46.

40. Robert S. Henry, The Story of Reconstruction (1938; rpt., New York: Peter Smith, 1951) 262.

41. Joscelyn: A Tale of the Revolution, ed. Stephen E. Meats (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1975) 54-56. Further references are cited in the text.

42. J. T. Headley, The Great Rebellion: A History of the Civil War in the United States (Hartford: Hurlbut, Scranton and Co., 1864), Chapters II and III; Edward Pollard, Southern History of the War. The First Year (Richmond: West and Johnson, 1862), Chapter II.

43. J. G. Randall and David Herbert Donald, The Civil War and Reconstruction (Lexington, Mass.: Heath, 1969) 568-69.

44. Randall and Donald 590.