In early American frontier novels, the Indian was inevitably characterized in one of two ways: either as a noble savage, a natural primitive untainted by civilization’s corrupting influences, or, more commonly, as a savage barbarian who took pleasure in cruelty and violence toward innocent white settlers. Even America’s most famous author of historical romances, James Fenimore Cooper, divided his Indians into absolutely good and bad types and developed his novels accordingly. Perhaps only William Gilmore Simms in The Yemassee succeeded in creating believable, human Indians with mixed qualities, natures, and potentials; that is the primary reason The Yemassee, in spite of severe artistic flaws, must be acknowledged as one of the best nineteenth century frontier novels.

Through the first one-third of the book, the action is seen primarily from the Indian viewpoint. Simms carefully describes the Yemassee tribal members as they plan and attempt to execute an uprising against the white settlers. Their motives spring not from innate hostility or from cruelty but from a realization that the powers and needs of the white settlers make the conflict—and their own ultimate defeat—inevitable. Simms thus imports to the Yemassee a kind of doomed, almost tragic, grandeur.

It is in his depiction of the intimate lives of the Yemassee that Simms is most impressive. Unlike Cooper, Simms describes the natives in their own environment and shows their daily routines, tribal mores, rituals, and politics in minute, careful detail. This Indian culture is presented with respect, and individual tribe members are presented as fallible but admirable human beings.

The most vivid portraits are those of Chief Sanutee, his wife, and their son. Sanutee is a proud, intelligent, brave but flawed leader who understands and accepts the unavoidable dissolution of his tribe but nevertheless inspires his people to heroic resistance. His wife, Matiwan, shares her husband’s courage and insight, but her compassion elevates her above racial identity, so that she becomes a kind of earth mother figure. Their son, Occonestoga, contaminated by contact with the white culture’s whiskey and promises, finally finds his courage and nobility in a time of crisis, although too late to salvage his tribal status. Few scenes in nineteenth century fiction are as powerful as the one in which, during the ritual that is to strip Occonestoga of his tribal identity, Matiwan kills her own son before the assembled Yemassee to save his honor and dignity.

Had Simms been able to sustain the insights and intensity of the first one-third of the book, The Yemassee might have been a great novel. Unfortunately, once the focus of the novel shifts to the white culture, the characters, both Indians and whites, become stock figures, and the novel degenerates into a clichéd adventure story.

Simms’s sympathetic treatment of the Yemassee, however, does not mean that he considered them the equal of white people. Even Sanutee “well knew that the superior must necessarily be the ruin of the race which is inferior.” As a staunch upholder of the southern position in the pre-Civil War American South, Simms firmly believed in racial superiority and what he and others called an “organic society.” In Simms’s view, the Indians were doomed because theirs was an inferior race and culture, and, unlike blacks, they could not be placed into any useful positions in the white world. However tragic and seemingly unjust it might be, the displacement or destruction of the Indians was, to Simms, a necessary price.