Writing War and Reunion

Selected Civil War and Reconstruction Newspaper Editorials by William Gilmore Simms

Jeffery J. Rogers, Jeffery J. Rogers

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781643360904
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Collections littéraires nord-américaines

A collection of Civil War and Reconstruction era journalism by one of the most popular and acclaimed authors of the antebellum South. Nineteenth-century writer William Gilmore Simms was once considered the South's premier literary figure, with achievements including more than twenty major novels, several volumes of poetry, and biographies of important figures in American history. Less well known are his newspaper writings, which include fascinating and trenchant work from the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Writing War and Reunion offers a selection of the best of Simms's articles and editorials from that period, offering a window into his thoughts on the conflict and its deeply fraught resolution. In the decades following the Civil War, Simms's reputation suffered a steady decline. Because of his associations with the antebellum South, slavery, and Confederate defeat, as well as changes in literary tastes, Simms came to be regarded as a talented but failed Southern author of a bygone era. Today a robust scholarly literature has reexamined Simms and finds him to have been an important figure in the development of nineteenth-century American literature and worthy of serious study.

Part 1

THE PEN AS SWORD

Simms’s Civil War Writings, 1860–65

South Carolina’s secession from the Union found William Gilmore Simms at his plantation named Woodlands. The coming of the war that followed did not surprise him. As early as 1847, Simms had become convinced that the dissolution of the Union was inevitable and that an independent Southern nation would be the result. He embraced this outcome as desirable and was ardently committed to the Confederate project until the very end. The war brought death, destruction, and profound transformation to the South, and of this Simms experienced his share. Both his second wife, Chevillette, and son Sydney Hammond died during the course of the war, although not because of it. His oldest son, William Gilmore Jr., was wounded while serving in the Confederate cavalry in Virginia and nearly died as a result. His home caught fire in 1862 and was severely damaged. It was repaired, but as Gen. William T. Sherman’s army moved through South Carolina in February 1865 toward the capital of Columbia, Woodlands was first looted and then burned completely, including most of Simms’s personal library of some ten to twelve thousand volumes. He had evacuated himself and family along with a few precious books and rare manuscripts and thus did not witness the event. His refugee destination, however, was Sherman’s as well. Amid the rubble and ashes of Columbia, Simms returned to the editorial chair of a newspaper and wrote of the city’s destruction. Despite the personal losses, the hardships of life on the Southern home front, and humiliating experience of defeat, Simms’s commitment to the Confederate cause never broke. It did, however, change him. The documents in this section demonstrate that commitment and transformation.

The selected pieces that appeared in the Charleston Mercury in September and October 1860 constitute the end of the second phase of Simms’s engagement with the newspaper medium. They were identified as being from Simms by the editors of The Letters of William Gilmore Simms and were signed using the pseudonym “Nemo” (Letters 4:309n). Since selling the Charleston City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser in 1832 and the national literary success that soon followed, Simms’s contributions to newspapers became less regular. Simms’s correspondent contributions to the Charleston Evening News and the Mercury during the 1850s frequently carried the designation “From an Occasional Correspondent.” During that decade, as well as the previous, Simms’s contributions to newspapers were episodic and semiregular, but he certainly considered newspapers a legitimate venue for his creative energies. His correspondence from New York City in the 1840s and 1850s and these pieces from 1860 as well are news reports, but with their lively, creative tone and subjective impressions, they read more like contemporary travel writings than twentieth or twenty-first century news reporting.

This approach was doubtless intended to make these pieces more appealing to readers, and Simms certainly was not the only nineteenth-century newspaper correspondent to write in this manner. It is not known what compensation he received for writing these pieces, but it is obvious that the editors of the Southern Patriot, the Evening News, and the Mercury believed having Simms writing of his experiences in interesting places such as New York City and Washington, D.C., added value to their papers and attracted readers. It is also noteworthy how in several examples of these Simms casually shifts from one topic to another, sometimes with little to no thematic connection, suggesting the freedom that he must have had to write what he chose and the trust the editors had in him that it would be worth publishing.

With the commencement of the Civil War, Simms’s occasional correspondence from New York came to an end, not to be resumed until after war. These contributions to the Mercury from 1860 are dissimilar to what Simms had written from New York in previous decades, especially the 1840s. They are concerned entirely with new books and the business of publishing, a topic about which Simms knew a great deal. He had written of the subject before and believed that at least some in his Charleston audience shared that interest, but these pieces lack his earlier wide-ranging impressions of society and culture in New York City. It is also noteworthy that with the secession of South Carolina imminent, the heat of sectional friction is absent from them until the final “Nemo” letter of October 2, 1860, in which Simms discusses The Union, a fifty-page poem published by Crocker and Brewster of Boston, anonymously authored by Boston Courier editor George Lunt. Here, however, we do have something of a commonalty with his earlier writings from New York, one that casts a light on another facet of Simms’s life: the general dearth of harsh, sectional comments when writing from or about New York City. Through his own identification and that of his contemporaries, Simms was the “representative man” of Southern literature. As his correspondences from New York City, as well as passages from his vast collection of letters, reveal, however, this most Southern of writers clearly harbored a genuine affection for New York City. Manhattan enchanted the South Carolinian, even as he never forsook his primal and deeper love for Charleston. This affection has been known to serious students of Simms and his place in American literary history, but these texts reveal how Simms conceptualized sectional identities and his relationship with New York City and the world beyond South Carolina.

Beginning with the essays from 1861, Simms’s engagement with newspapers entered a new phase. He was no longer an “occasional correspondent” but a writer of what might be termed guest editorials. The Charleston papers, the Robert Barnwell Rhett Jr.–edited Mercury specifically, were Simms’s forum to share his opinions on the tumultuous events that followed the secession of South Carolina, the formation of the Confederacy, and the Civil War. Those from 1861 in particular are testaments to the depth of thought and tremendous energy Simms devoted to the political and military developments of that momentous year. The piece on Confederate tariff policy as it was being debated in Montgomery at the Confederate constitutional convention appeared in the March 2, 1861, edition of the Mercury. It was identified by the editors of the Simms letters, and it publicly asserts what Simms privately espoused in a letter to his friend and South Carolina delegate to Montgomery, William Porcher Miles, on the same day (Letters 4:337). It is signed, appropriately enough, using the pseudonym “Gossypium,” Latin for cotton and a known Simms pseudonym (Kibler 1976, 55). At Montgomery a debate was underway as to the direction that the new Confederate government should pursue with respect to trade policy. The argument was between advocates of export duties and those who advocated some combination of both export and import duties. Simms’s letter to the editor is a balanced critique of the two sides of the dispute in which he carefully outlined the positive and negative features of both. This piece offers some insight into his ideas about political economy, a largely unexplored dimension of Simms’s thought.

“Straws of Politics,” which appeared on May 11, 1861, in the Mercury, is a good example of Simms’s sarcastic wit as he mocked Northern newspaper commentary of Confederate military efforts in Charleston Harbor prior to the surrender of Fort Sumter and tweaks what he viewed as Northern hypocrisy, cowardice, vanity, and deceitfulness. Here we read Simms venting his long-simmering resentment at the North, although in a humorously composed public essay. The remaining pieces from 1861 are significant documents for students of Simms as they demonstrate the intensity with which he focused on the Confederate war effort in 1861. We see again the importance of the newspaper in nineteenth-century America. As a public forum, it is unsurprising that Simms thought the Mercury a proper venue for recommendations to South Carolina and Confederate authorities on the best strategy to defend the South Carolina coast from Union assault. Simms knew those authorities read the Charleston papers. We also find Simms’s respectable knowledge of warfare on display, gained from his historical researches and evident throughout his Revolutionary War novels, biographies, and other works. While his specific recommendations went beyond Confederate logistical abilities at that moment, they were well conceived, and his estimation of future Union strategy in the summer of 1861 was perceptive. While some South Carolinians believed, or naively hoped, that the war would soon end, Simms warned them that the long, vulnerable coast of the Palmetto State was not only a tempting military target but a politically valuable one as well. He predicted in the fall of 1861 that South Carolinians could expect an attack upon their coast. In early November Port Royal and Hilton Head Island fell to Union forces.

The harsh editorials criticizing Confederate president Jefferson Davis in 1861 led Simms to discontinue his regular writing for the Mercury. During the war years of 1862–64 he only occasionally penned an article for newspaper publication as he turned his creative energies to more literary efforts such as Paddy McGann; or, The Demon of the Stump, which appeared in the Richmond, Virginia, weekly journal Southern Illustrated News in sixteen installments from February 14 to May 30, 1863. This was the author’s chief literary work written during the years of the Civil War. With his crossing of the Savannah River from occupied Georgia, William T. Sherman forced the return of the war to South Carolina and indirectly caused Simms to return to the editorial chair of a newspaper.

The destruction of Columbia in February 1865 left it without a newspaper. The most influential paper in the capital city had been the South Carolinian, managed by Julian A. Selby and edited by Henry Timrod. It had been founded in 1838, but the great fire of February 17–18, 1865, had consumed its offices. After Sherman’s army departed Columbia on February 20, Selby scoured upcountry South Carolina in search of printing materials and equipment. Traveling first to Newberry, he was the first to bear news of Columbia’s destruction to the area’s inhabitants. Finding no useful materials there, he traveled next to Abbeville and then Greenville before returning to Columbia with the necessary paper and type. From the ruins of the South Carolinian, Selby reconstructed the press machinery to publish the Columbia Phoenix. The first issue of the new paper, with its offices on Gates Street near its intersection with Hampton, appeared on March 21, 1865. From that issue until that of October 1, 1865, Simms served as editor in chief. This marked the next phase of Simms’s engagement with the medium of the newspaper as he once again occupied an editorial chair. The motivation for taking the position was simple. With home destroyed and family scattered, he needed money. Unfortunately for him, initially the work Simms did for the Phoenix did not pay at all. It was not until June 15 that he could report receiving “a few dollars a week” for his efforts (Letters 4:502). Well into August 1865, Simms still complained of the “miserable stipend, hardly the wages of a Journeyman printer,” which he was receiving (4:512). Regardless of its meager pecuniary rewards, Simms took a strong measure of pride in the Phoenix, his first time running a newspaper since selling the Charleston City Gazette in 1832. Upon resigning as editor in October, he wrote to Evert A. Duyckinck: “I resign the Editorial chair of the Phoenix Newspaper. I created it, & have already made it the best organ of opinion in the State. In the end it will make a fortune to its publisher” (4:522).

Simms’s tenure as editor of the Phoenix is best remembered for his Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia, S.C. The work first appeared serially in the Phoenix, beginning with the first issue of March 21 and ending with that of April 10, 1865, under the title “The Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia.” The first three issues included a list of property destroyed during the fire of February 17–18, but throughout the serialization Simms added to and corrected this original list. He significantly revised the text and published it as a seventy-six-page, twenty-seven-chapter pamphlet. This document is an important part of Simms’s nonfiction writings and, as the title makes obvious, is his narrative of the events leading to the burning of Columbia and of its aftermath. The pamphlet was reprinted twice in the twentieth century, but the text that originally appeared in the Phoenix was republished only in 2005 as A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia, edited by David Aiken with a useful introduction and annotations. Aiken’s edition is the reason the document has been excluded from this collection.

The greater availability and scholarly awareness of Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia, S.C. has obscured Simms’s other writing for the Phoenix. As the selected editorials here demonstrate, his devotion to the Confederate cause was not dampened by what had happened to the capital of his beloved South Carolina. If anything it stiffened his resolve. The editorials tend to be short and pithy, but in them we hear Simms urging his fellow Confederates to continue the fight, even to the point of guerrilla warfare. We read his commentaries on some of the rumors that circulated during the final month of the war, such as that of imminent foreign intervention, and we perceive his skepticism with regard to news of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender in Virginia. By May 1865, however, Simms accepted the reality of Confederate defeat, and in that month’s editorials, we glimpse his first efforts at coming to terms with that defeat, its meaning, and its consequences, a process that would continue during his tenure as editor of the Phoenix and for the rest of his life.

The Charleston Mercury

7 September 1860

“Our New York Correspondence”

NEW YORK, August 30.

Review of New Books—Woods and Waters—Queens of Society—Physiology of Common Life—The Ebony Idol—Poems of Henry Lynden Flash—The Lady in White, &c., &c.

There are some clever volumes, recently put forth, my dear MERCURY, which will interest the general reader, and in some degree instruct the student. In the first of these classes is the clever rambling book, entitled:

1. Woods and Waters; or, the Saranac and Racket. By Alfred B. Street. This work comprises a lively and animated narrative, as dramatic as possible, of sporting life on the lakes and northern rivers. It is from the pen of one of our authors who deserves, and possesses, the reputation of one of the best descriptive poets of America. CHARLES WILSON, ALFRED B. STREET, and your Dr. WM. H. SIMMONS, the author of “Onea,” are among the best descriptive poets that the country has ever produced. They possessed, respectively, fine eyes for details; were curious observers; and each sufficiently and contemplative poet to be able to marry the mere detail to those fine fancies which give it vitality in the mind of the reader. It is an error to call BRYANT a descriptive poet. He is a contemplative poet, like WORDSWORTH, and generalizes his subject; but does not paint details. STREET has a passion for details, which, indeed, somewhat affects his ability to generalize. He is wonderfully minute in his delineations; and this volume, which describes hunting life, and the peculiar sports and aspects of the lakes and the contiguous country, with wonderfully graphic pen, is equally instructive in the description of scenery, the effects of light and shade, and the various distributions in nature, which enable the poet-painter’s special interest in behalf of [illegible words] jutting prominence, cool clouds [illegible words] sunsets, and the rippling courses of the water, as affected by winds or secret currents. His book, in brief, is a series of graphic sketches of men and scenes, in a region of the salient and the picturesque. It is illustrated by numerous wood cuts, which seem to us the work of some ‘prentice han’. They do not strike us as ornamental, however they may be illustrative.

2. You will find the Queen of Society a very pleasant body of biography, from the pens of GRACE and PHILIP WHARTON, who may be brother and sister, or husband and wife, for aught we know; it is enough that they work together harmoniously in book-making, even should they fail in house-keeping. The style of the volume is not as uniform as if traced by a single pen; but it is not wanting in harmony and unity. It is easy, and sometimes slip-shoddical: perhaps a little too easy and loose for a biographical work which is expected to live; but what is lost in propriety, is sometimes gained in animation and spirit, and we have found the work agreeable even when it has failed to prove authoritative and dignified. Altogether, we may commend the volume as one of very attractive material, at once social and literary. The book is illustrated by pictures, and these are numerous, if not calculated to prove the superiority of art in the present over the past ages. The subj...