[In the following essay, Howell discusses the attitude of William Gilmore Simms, the preeminent Southern writer of his time, toward the American Indian and compares it to that of James Fenimore Cooper.]

The history of the white American's attitude towards the Indian ranges the full gamut of human emotions. He hated the red man while he was still a threat to his existence and idealized him when the threat was removed, and in some cases heaped on the white man bitter accusations for the rape of a continent. The Puritan settler of New England saw the Indian as an agent of the Devil, a view later translated into secular terms as the frontier moved west. As late as 1867, the Topeka Weekly Leader called the Indians “a set of miserable, dirty, lousy, blanketed, thieving, lying, sneaking, murdering, graceless faithless, gut-eating skunks” and called frankly for their extermination.¹ But before the end of the century other voices were also being heard, Helen Hunt Jackson's, for example, which called a nation to account for “the stain of a century of dishonor.”² Today, the Indian along with other minority groups has assumed a new dignity in the national life, as reflected in the news media, for example, or in films and fiction, where he is no longer the convenient villain of the old days of the Western. And today's Boy Scout is reminded of “the many thousands of beautiful and desirable things” in the lives of these primitive people, and, in order to win a merit badge, required to memorize the Omaha Tribal Prayer.³

These vacillations in a comparatively short history suggest not only moral confusion but the inability of the American to view clear-headedly an issue where head and heart tug in different directions. Charles Brockden Brown gives a frank picture of red brutality in his novels of the 1790's, but a generation later when the Indian had been liquidated on the Eastern Seaboard, Philip Freneau, and others, made him a creature of romance and sentiment, in the old world tradition of the Noble Savage. Even James Fenimore Cooper, whose mind was of firmer texture and who had no illusions about human nature, succumbed to the cult of the vanishing American, with its attendant nostalgia and ill-defined feelings of self-reproach. And so the stage was set for the coming of Hiawatha and all the other mythical red heroes who played so large a part in the Victorian imagination. Sentiment leads easily into the more positive role of the humanitarian, like Helen Hunt Jackson, and to the moral qualms of modern Americans. “Is there any real difference in principle,” asks Edmund Wilson in a recent dispute between the New York Iroquois and the local government, “between uprooting whole communities of well-to-do Russian farmers and shipping them off to the Urals, and depriving the Senecas of the use of their lands?”⁴

James Fenimore Cooper, who made the Indian an intimate figure in American literature, was a formative influence on William Gilmore Simms, whose The Yemassee appeared only nine years after The Last of the Mohicans. Their common approach, however, is not due to Simms' imitation so much as to a spiritual kinship of the two authors, who were men of large views and catholic interests, both firmly committed to a traditional organization of society. Reading The Yemassee is in some respects like doing Cooper again in a Southern setting, and yet there is a basic difference in their handling of the Indian.

Like Simms, Cooper grew up in a section of the country that had for the most part disposed of the Indian population. His imagination was fired, not by the few stragglers and half-breeds left around Otsego Lake and Cooperstown, but by a book, the Rev. John Heckewelder's Indian Nations, in which that devout Moravian missionary paints a noble picture of the Delawares. Cooper brought a more solid mind to bear on the matter, but it was a truism in his own day that his Indians were “of the school of Mr. Heckewelder and not of the school of nature.”⁵ Simms' experience was broader. His mother died when he was a child and his father left him with his maternal grandmother in Charleston, while he went off to Tennessee to join General Jackson's campaign against the Creeks, and eventually wound up as a well-to-do planter in Mississippi. As a boy, Simms made at least two long visits with his father, during which time he became intimate with life in the Southwest.⁶ The Indians were still in the country, the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokees and Creeks, the naked Creeks on the streets of Mobile first attracting his attention. He visited them in their homes and even dabbled with their languages.⁷ Along with his father, he penetrated the Choctaw fastness of the Yazoo and Mississippi bottoms, “through swamps and creeks and bayous, half the time swimming and wading through mud and water waist deep.”⁸ His border novels about the Southwest are based on “very early personal experience,” he recalled in later life. “I have seen the life—have lived it.”⁹ In this respect, Simms had an advantage over Cooper, not only in first-hand knowledge of savage life, but in the sense that the Indian problem had not yet been settled, that history was still being accomplished. Though Cooper moved his characters west to the prairie, he lacked the sense of mission which binds the east and west together in Simms, who viewed the Southwest first of all as a new increment to Southern civilization. As a product of Charleston, he could indulge in the romance of a vanished race, like Cooper; but romance was tempered with the knowledge that the vast region where his father's plantation lay still looked on the Indian as a potential threat that must be dealt with in a practical manner.

II

The first of Simms' novels dealing with Indians conforms to the tastes of his generation, at least in surface rendering. The Yemassee of South Carolina, once a threat to an infant colony, are down to the last man: like Chingachgook, Sanutee is “a blazed pine in a clearing of the pale faces.” But Simms had a mind and imagination of his own, and the effect of the two books is different. Both authors were practical men, fully aware of the seamy side of savage life. The massacre at Fort William Henry is brutally real in Cooper's pages and so is Magua the malignant Huron; but Cooper somehow gives the impression that there are good Indians and bad Indians without relation to their savage state, and Magua's treachery is directly related to the ill treatment he received from whites. In all of this there is subtle extenuation of Indian shortcomings, which leaves the reader in a receptive mood for the romance of the Mohicans. There is nothing of this in The Yemassee. The whites often condemn the Indians unfairly, Simms admits. It is the custom, for example, to regard their surly, inexpressive faces as an index to character; but we should be careful, he adds, not to speak of them as we casually see them, “when, conscious of our superiority, and unfamiliar with our language, they are necessarily taciturn.”¹⁰ Conscious of “our superiority”—there is the phrase which sets Simms' attitude in perspective. On the surface, it can be misleading, because he refers to race, not in any inherent sense, but to the Indians' standing with the whites in terms of civilization. In that respect, they are inferior, Simms says, a fact which sentiment and romance are never allowed to gild over in his pages. In this matter-of-fact approach to a difficult social question where head and heart are carefully balanced, Simms is unique among major American writers of the nineteenth century.

In “Oakatibbe, or the Choctaw Sampson,” he writes about a young brave who has all the qualities that would grace a hero of romance. Having killed another Indian, a drunken bully and trouble-maker, Oakatibbe is condemned to die by tribal law. Colonel Harris, a white planter among the Choctaws, admires the young man and encourages him to escape rather than die willingly for an act, which according to the white man's view was justified as self-defense. Oakatibbe is doubtful but finally accepts a horse and slips away from the settlement on the night before he is to be executed. The result is confusion among the Choctaws, since the next of kin must be killed in his place. But Oakatibbe returns in time to vindicate his honor and die according to the law of his nation.

Oakatibbe is the Noble Savage—but the exception, says Simms, not the rule. The real interest in the story is not in the hero but in the white Southern planter transplanted hundreds of miles into an Indian jungle. The fertile land, newly cleared with the dead ringed trees standing like ghosts in the fields, grows more cotton than the Negroes can pick, and so the Choctaws are called in to help out. The experiment is a failure. Only women and children and a few men are willing to work, for most of the males lurk in the background ready to rob or cheat the workers on payday. As a whole, Simms concludes, the Indians in their present state are a lazy, undependable race, whom even the Negro slaves of Colonel Harris look down on.¹¹

Simms' most mature handling of the Indian comes in a late novel, The Cassique of Kiawah, in 1859, where the infant colony of Charleston in the reign of Charles II is surrounded by the potentially hostile Kiawahs. Attitude towards them ranges from friendly acceptance to fear and suspicion, dramatically represented in two brothers. Colonel Berkeley, who has just arrived from England to take possession of a vast plantation along the Ashley River outside Charleston, insists that the Indians will respond to fair treatment. He has had no experience with savages, however, as his more practical brother Captain Calvert reminds him. For the most part, Calvert, along with his woodsman and scout, old Gowdy, represents Simms' attitude. Colonel Berkeley has a notion, says Gowdy, “that these red devils are real humans, and never would do wrong if they worn't pushed to the wall.”

“They'll feed on him all they can, and he'll never content 'em so long as he's got anything left; and when he won't give any more, they'll take; and the first fine chance, when they sees that his barony's full of good things, they'll make a midnight dash at 'em, and he'll never know his danger till he feels their fingers in his hair. …

“He says it's all our fault; that we treated the Injuns badly, and made 'em what they are; that they're ‘Nature's noblemen,’ and Christians … talking like a man in a dream.”¹²

The old scout is right. The Indians attack on a dark night, and the Berkeley family escape massacre only through the intervention of Gowdy and Captain Calvert. People newly out from the old country, says Gowdy, are not prepared to deal with savages.

“They've got the notion in their heads that all these redskins are a sort of natural Christians that only wants a leetle sprinkling to become convarts to our religion, and grow into honest, sober, home-keeping Christians. But water aint going to do it, your honor—no, nor soap and water, nor all the preaching from London down to Vera Cruz. It's whipping, and hard work, and l'arning how to eat good bread and meat well cooked, and gitting a taste for vegetables as well as venison; this is the way to teach a savage how to git religion. The cook-pot is a great convarter of the heathen—that and the whipping-post.”¹³

Simms' novel is by no means a denigration of the Kiawahs. Gowdy and Berkeley move comfortably among them, with respect on both sides; and the idealist Colonel Berkeley is in one respect a man after Simms' own heart. He takes the long view of the life of the colony, and his head is full of projects. “He's always at something new. Now he's for draining all these swamps—he says they'll make the best meadows in the world; then he's for great cattle-ranges and sheepwalks; and for making wine out of the grapes.”¹⁴ Moreover, his trust in the savages is not altogether misplaced. Against the advice of his brother, he employed the chief's son on his plantation, where he would have access to his house and family; and during the uprising the young Indian remained loyal to his white master. Simms tries to strike a balance and be fair to both sides. But one point underlies all his writing about the Indians: in spite of the appeal of romance, or the claims of the humanitarians, the first object is the firm establishment of white control of the new continent. To Simms, savage life is human nature reduced to lowest terms, and it is the white man's destiny to civilize and, in keeping with this mission, to prepare the Indian for participation in civilized life.

III

Although the vocabulary of Simms may appear strange today, his attitude towards the Indian is characterized by a moderation unusual in his time and by a philosophical detachment which the modern generation with its causes and crusades rarely achieves. As for his own age, one has only to read a best-seller of 1837, Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods, to understand the deep-seated hatred of the red man still felt perhaps by a majority of Americans. Writing of Kentucky's “dark and bloody ground,” Bird gives his pages a dark fascination. From a distance, the wigwam village is part of an idyllic landscape; inside, there is appalling savagery: “unmeaning shrieks, roaring laughter, the squeaking of women and the gibbering of children, with the barking of curs”; and finally “the wild demoniacal glitter of eye” as victims are readied for an orgy of torture.¹⁵ Bird's Indians are “the most merciless and brutal of all the races of men.”¹⁶ Writing a generation later, Mark Twain agrees with Bird. The Goshoots that he came across on his way to the West in 1861 were “treacherous, filthy, and repulsive,” and “wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found Goshoots more or less modified by circumstances and surroundings—but Goshoots after all.”¹⁷

Simms had as much direct experience with Indians as Bird, a prosperous Philadelphia physician who went down to Kentucky to get material for his novel, and more than Mark Twain. He was also aware of Indian atrocities, which did not blind him, however, to savage virtues—of the discipline of the young, for example, into manhood. “In the complacency of our civilization we rate the red men somewhat below humanity,” and yet in this respect at least we are “wanting somewhat in the wisdom of the red man.”¹⁸ But virtue to Simms was always measured in terms of his own culture. He had no illusions about the natural state. The white man was superior to the Indian because a civilized man is superior to a savage. Simms, who has been called everything from racist to crackpot and fool by those who are inimical to anything in the Old South, was an unabashed sponsor of Western civilization, and in particular of the civilization of his own state; but his defense was not based on any narrow views of race or nationality. His mind was far-ranging, and everything he wrote was touched with a sense of history. Civilization to him was a precarious state achieved with difficulty over a long period of time; and there was a time when the most advanced races ranged the forest like the Yemassee and Kiawahs. A race is not to be measured by intrinsic merit but by the degrees to which it has risen to the civilized state. Consequently, the nineteenth century Indian that Simms saw in the Southwest did not rate very high, though his capabilities were immense. “The Saxon boor when first scourged by the Norman into manhood and stature, moral and physical, had given scarcely more proofs of intellectual endowment than the red men of the great Appalachian chain.” They are as “noble a specimen of crude humanity as we can find.”¹⁹

The whites have not lived up to their obligation, Simms feels, in their failure to assist the red man to civilization. It could not have been done on the individual level, since the individual Indian taken from his people and educated among the whites will revert through sympathy to the interests of his own kind. It should have been a collective action at the beginning of our history applied to the whole race, by force if necessary, as the Saxons were “scourged into manhood” by the Normans.

And what would have been the effect upon our Indians—decidedly the noblest race of aborigines that the world has ever known—if, instead of buying their scalps at prices varying from five to fifty pounds each, we had conquered and subjected them? Will anyone pretend to say that they would not … by this time, have formed a highly valuable and noble integral in the formation of our national strength and character?²⁰

Simm's view of Indian capability is a reflection of his generous nature, particularly in view of the fact that he saw the Indian of the Southwest in a pathetic state just before their removal to the West. On one of his trips to Mississippi his vehicle stuck in the mud and nearby Indians were called in to help pull it out. One of them brought his Negro slave, who actually assumed control of the operation and ordered his master about, as well as the other Indians. The Negro gains caste among the Indians, Simms says, even in slavery. But why? Is it that he brings along with him white associations that the Indian respects?²¹ At any rate, the Indians Simms knew were a pitiable remnant of a people with little of the tribal consciousness and pride that he wrote about in The Yemassee. Like Cooper, he felt the sadness at the passing of a race, which the aggressiveness and indifference of the whites made inevitable. But the red man could not be allowed to maintain his ground in a savage state. At this point, Simms gives over the romantic pose in his hard pragmatic line that civilization must go forward and that the wild man along with the wilderness must give way. He would prefer that he be instructed and assisted into the corporate life of the new nation, to which he would make his own contribution. But he must not stand in the way. In taking the long-range view of a difficult social problem, which few Americans then or later have faced without passion. Simms presents the Indian with an objectivity unusual in American fiction.

Notes

1. Robert Taft, Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, 1850-1900 (New York, 1953), p. 66.

2. Helen Hunt Jackson, A Century of Dishonor (Boston, 1903), p. 30.

3. A. Irving Hallowell, “The Backwash of the Frontier: The Impact of the Indian on American Culture,” The Frontier in Perspective, eds. Walker D. Wyman and Clifton B. Koreber (Madison, Wis., 1957), p. 233.

4. Edmund Wilson, Apologies to the Iroquois (New York, 1960), p. 274.

5. Gregory Lansing Paine, “The Indians of the Leather-Stocking Tales,” Studies in Philology, XXIII (Jan., 1926), 28.

6. Hampton M. Jarrell, “Simms' Visits to the Southwest,” American Literature, V (March, 1933), 29-35.

7. Letters of William Gilmore Simms, eds. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell and T. C. Duncan Eaves (Columbia, S. C., 1952), IV, 178.

8. Ibid., I, 37.

9. William Gilmore Simms, The Wigwam and the Cabin (New York, 1856), pp. 4-5.

10. William Gilmore Simms, The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina (New York 1878), p. 300.

11. Ibid., pp. 179-182.

12. William Gilmore Simms, The Cassique of Kiawah: A Colonial Romance (New York, 1859), p. 193.

13. Ibid., p. 192.

14. Ibid., p. 193.

15. Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods, or The Jibbenainosay (New Haven, Conn., 1967), p. 265.

16. Ibid., p. 189.

17. Mark Twain, Roughing It (New Haven, Conn., 1901), pp. 157-58.

18. The Cassique of Kiawah, p. 250.

19. William Gilmore Simms, “Literature and Art Among the American Aborigines,” Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, ed. C. Hugh Holman (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), pp. 136, 140.

20. The Wigwam and the Cabin, p. 185.

21. Letters of William Gilmore Simms, I, 28.