When William Gilmore Simms talked about students, his orations focused on their lives after graduation, only occasionally touching on their experiences in the classroom. This may be a consequence of Simms’s own modest education as a child, “the want of which I often feel & shall continue to feel while I live,” he told James Henry Hammond in 1839 (Letters 1:161). A couple of indifferent years in Charleston’s “common schools” and two more at a grammar school operated by the College of Charleston were the extent of his education before ultimately being apprenticed to a pharmacist around age thirteen (Guilds 8, 15). Simms lacked a point of reference to discuss college life. He was largely an autodidact, his curiosity and voracious reading substituting for a standard curriculum.

As the orations of the preceding sections indicate, Simms’s self-taught knowledge of ancient and American history, not to mention his careful study of current events and trends, provided an education on the progress of civilizations, including his own. Societies rose and fell, and the United States and the American South were no different, though he thought he could steer the evolution of these, especially the latter, with his insights. So he resumed this purpose, albeit more indirectly, when he took as his subjects the postgraduate lives of South Carolina’s college students for two 1855 orations. “Choice of a Profession” and “Inauguration of the Spartanburg Female College” discuss the responsibilities of men and women, not only for the well-being and prosperity of the individual but also for the society to which they belong. Simms elaborates on the principle that individuals have a responsibility to their homes and communities, the particulars of which are based on their innate talents. These unique endowments determine how a person should contribute to society, and in turn, it determines their place in society’s hierarchy and the privileges that accompany that position. “ The capacity to be useful in one’s proper sphere is that alone which affords the only real right which we possess …,” Simms explains in “Inauguration” (175). Other than what is due because of one’s ability, “[w]e have no rights inconsistent with our endowments” (175). This may not have been what ambitious, optimistic undergraduates wanted or expected to hear. But if they aspired beyond their means to positions of professional or political authority, it invited an apocalyptical reckoning that his self-taught course in history repeatedly revealed. As he argued in “Choice”: “all the mischiefs done by licensed Ignorance … [and] hence most Page 128 →of the corruption, growing, and festering as they grow … precipitate […] the fate of Empires & the destruction of a race. Reading the histories of men … the most direct & destructive agency of Evil, has been invariably the incompetence of men in power” (143). In matters of education and the professions as well as in agriculture and community, freedom is best managed within the parameters of what is owed to home and society, not to one’s personal interests.

“Choice of a Profession” was the first of Simms’s two speeches on these topics in 1855. It was initially written for the College of Charleston’s Chrestomathic (“useful learning”) Society, and Simms read it on the literary society’s anniversary on February 23, 1855. It is not clear when the undergraduates invited Simms to speak, but as was becoming his habit, Simms worked on the address almost until he left Woodlands to give it, juggling writing the draft with other major projects. He wrote John Esten Cooke on February 20 to say that “[a] confounded college oration is now taxing my brains, and I have a novel [The Forayers] in preparation.” He confessed to his fellow author that “I am thoroughly sickened with sight of pen & paper” (Letters 3:364).

What Simms ultimately collected from his harried brain was an oration that addresses the familiar topic of individual rights and societal responsibilities, but through the lens of gender and, more obliquely, class. Simms discusses the occupation of planting, including the importance of incorporating science into agriculture like he did in his Barnwell address in 1840. However, Choice focuses more on the “professions”—medicine, law, the clergy, and education. Contrary to stereotypes that antebellum Southerners were rigidly class-conscious (likely due to the retrospective fiction of later Southern authors like Thomas Nelson Page and Margaret Mitchell), Michael O’Brien observes that antebellum Southerners did not have a consistent understanding of class or class criteria other than to acknowledge that different economic categories of people existed, albeit fluidly and contingently. Southerners inherited from the previous century an understanding of what some class positions or labels meant, but these seemed increasingly less relevant to their society. Southerners were also informed by emergent paradigms, and “professional and commercial people … were in the middle of an evolving social order,” as Jonathan Daniel Wells explains (10). Furthermore, says O’Brien, “[b]y the late 1840s … there is some evidence that a quasi-Victorian idea of a middle class was beginning to develop, such a class being defined as urban, respectable, and the chief guarantor of social order and progress” (1:375). The class of “the professions” dovetailed with the latter two concepts. They were on one hand a category of occupations, but, on the other hand, they had a nascent class sensibility and social significance that seemed more relevant than anachronistic notions of social “aristocracy.” That respectability implied responsibility, as O’Brien notes, to be stewards of society’s development. “Choice” advises students on how to make sure a young man is not only suited for a profession, Page 129 →but also for the contribution he will make within it to the order and progress of his people.

“Choice” begins with a long anecdote about John Abernethy, the turn-of-the-century British surgeon and teacher who allegedly looked at a lecture room of five hundred medical students and asks, “Good Heavens! young Gentlemen,—what is to become of you all!” (137). Simms wonders the same thing in 1855. He was concerned about the literal overcrowding of and competition within professional fields and especially about the experiences of recent graduates whose aspirations led to misguided choices. Imagining the medical field of Abernethy, for example, Simms offers that many physicians “have abandoned the profession in disgust. Many more but indifferently pursue it, having neither heart nor hope in the labour.… It is, with most of them, a helpless drudgery—the mere continuance of an ungrateful pursuit which they can now neither change nor abandon” (138–39). Simms’s point is that life becomes unrewarding, unremitting toil for young men who choose careers for which they are neither disposed nor competent. Simms argues that students lead themselves into such traps by allowing superficial considerations to interfere with their own honest self-assessment of whether they have the necessary aptitude for a profession. For some recent graduates, it is the “the love of gain,” the allure of high salaries (148). For others, the professions “are chosen … in the hope to escape from the severer labors of society” due to a mistaken belief that professional work requires less diligence than other occupations (148).

Simms also claims that “the strongest lure which the Professions hold out to the Incompetent, is in their appeal to the social vanity” of these aspirants (148). Coinciding with O’Brien’s observations, Simms explains that professional careers “in a country like ours, which enjoys none of the privileges of an [sic] hereditary aristocracy, are necessarily the highest passports to Society. They constitute our principal aristocracies” (148). Professional men are a natural aristocracy because the requisite skills involved in these occupations “imply special gifts of intellect from God, and, a superior education at the hands of men, [which] naturally clothes them with dignity & authority” (148–49).

Despite this ostensibly divine appointment, Simms acknowledges that young men motivated by greed, incipient laziness, or prestige may be able to fake their way through “a superior education” and enter the fields of medicine, law, education, the clergy, science, or letters (149). The aforementioned drudgery awaits them, but even worse, Simms argues, is the opportunity cost born by humanity and society. “Choice” repeatedly uses the word “usurpation” to describe the undeserved authority that unqualified men wield in positions that their ambition encouraged them to assume. Simms evokes the moral and social authority associated with the professions, noting “every man in a false position,—in a place for which his endowment leaves him unfitted,—must be dishonest. What right Page 130 →has he to be there? He defrauds the proper man. He defrauds the country” (144). The poser is not just cheating the qualified candidate for the job, but also the nation of its rightful economic, cultural, and political stewards. Progress is stymied when the wrong person or people are in the positions of authority represented by the professions.

“Choice” explains to his audience that there is a natural distribution of aptitudes, “a chosen Priesthood” of talent (141–42). Reflecting on the occupation for which one is best suited, therefore, will lead one to make a decision congruent with one’s talents and with the benefit of society at large. Simms demands that his listeners ask themselves, “Have I really a call to this pursuit? Am I specially fitted for it? Does it seem, from all that I can see & learn of myself—after devout self-examination, of my own nature & resources, that, I have been endowed for this one profession in greater degree than any other” (145–46). Motivation matters, but only to the degree that it corresponds with fulfilling the profession’s service to man and society: ministers attending to the spiritual needs of their neighbors, lawyers preserving order, physicians healing the sick, professors educating future leaders. Only then is the cachet and authority associated with being a professional justified since the high-minded aspirant contributes to the occupation’s ability to manage national well-being. Rather than money or fame, suitable ambition’s “grand motive is its own development—which seeks nothing, but the free exercise of great & conscious powers;—looking fondly forward, whatever the pursuit, to carry, on & onward, to yet loftier heights of art & civilization, the professional banner which it bears” (153). Simms thus reiterates the reciprocal relationship between an individual’s abilities and responsibilities to society and the appropriate freedom and rights that are accordingly conferred, this time, though, with an emergent class valence.

“Choice” concludes by advising listeners that choosing a career will likely involve challenging conventional wisdom. Recognizing that one might not be suited for a desired profession or may be better qualified for a less-appealing occupation involves disregarding what the community considers to be markers of success—often wealth or renown or lifestyles associated with these qualities. The present materialistically inclined society, rather than the more progressive one that Simms imagines that the professions can lead, mistakenly “honour[s] him, as the Gentleman, who has no toils” and “give[s] preference to Inanity, in fine society” (154). Again, not unlike earlier orations, especially “The Social Principle,” Simms denounces superficial values and insincerity, which discourage what is necessary for achieving and sustaining social permanence. For example, Simms argues that society’s “false standards of honor & excellence” mean that “certain professions [are] the almost necessary conditions, by which to enter its conventional precincts” (154). These empty measures of success and artificial entrées to society breed the unhealthy ambition and pretension that encourage unqualified Page 131 →students to join the professions. Or, once there, even if marginally qualified, to go through the motions rather than perform their jobs with the earnestness that the moral progress of society demands.

The “Inauguration of the Spartanburg Female College,” Simms’s other major 1855 speech addressing the uses of education, approaches this topic from a more explicitly gendered perspective. Not that “Choice” is not gendered masculine—Simms takes for granted that his audience assumes that young men should be educated for an occupational life in the public sphere. In contrast, “Inauguration” supposes the argument still needs to be made for the education of women as well as for the proper purpose of it. It is probable, though, that the defense of educating women may be a rhetorical convention. Well before 1855, says O’Brien, “matters had progressed to concede the reality, if not the universal necessity, of female higher education” (1:258). This was particularly true in the South, where over eighty percent of women’s colleges were located in the 1850s (Harper 5). As such, orations at the openings or commencements of female colleges discussing the need for or the benefits of educating women may be exercises in performative ritual rather than persuasive rhetoric. Anne Firor Scott’s survey of these orations suggest they may constitute their own genre of collegiate lectures (69–70). Or they may be the timeless tradition of men presuming to explain what is best for women.

Regardless, what these orations do not do is encourage women to consider how to use their education in the public sphere to best serve their communities, similar to the way “Choice” does with respect to men. Not that Simms’s demand that young men follow their endowment rather than their inclination offered them that much occupational freedom, except that which would benefit society. But still, “Choice” offers some agency in the public sphere. In contrast, male orators universally prescribed domestic affairs as the vocation proper to women, arguing “that an educated woman could inhabit the sphere more gracefully and conduct her female responsibilities more effectively” with a degree (Scott 71). This is the theme of “Inauguration.”

Unlike his other orations, there is neither existing correspondence indicating a timeline for when Simms received the invitation to speak at the new women’s college in Spartanburg, which was dedicating its chapel and opening its doors to students when he spoke there on August 22, nor any record of when he wrote the address. He mentions in the address itself that “[i]t has been written almost along the roadside, in a few brief hours of interval” (166) while on a pleasure trip through the western part of South Carolina that began at the end of July. This may account for why it takes Simms so long to arrive at his point in the oration. After flattering the founders of the institution, Simms reminds the audience of “vital duty of education, in its highest sense, as the great agent for all moral purposes,” namely preparing the individual to play their role in the great march Page 132 →of progress (162).¹ “Inauguration” assumes a homogenous plan for all white women, a future based on the characteristics associated with their gender, which, more than any latent skills or abilities, determines their position in life and how education should prepare them for it. Simms does not intend this as a negative reflection on the status of women in America or as criticism. (Simms says he is “speaking of the country as a whole,” though his attitudes and claims echo that of other Southern orators speaking on the same topic, which probably informed his own [172].)

In fact, “Inauguration” argues American women are unique in history for their assumption of positions of intellectual and emotional equality with their spouses without sacrificing their femininity. In ancient times, women would “only acquire distinction as she became unsexed” (172). In contrast, says Simms, “[h]ere, only, does she take her proper place … here only does she enjoy her proper authority—regulating the manners of society—refining the intercourse between the sexes—restraining the encroachments of insolence—checking … the outbreaks of ferocity” (172). This “proper authority,” represented as the ability to ameliorate conflict and promote harmony, leads to mutual affection and cooperation between the sexes. As a testimony to the authority associated with this aspect of women’s character, “Inauguration” claims that “no country in the world is man a greater dependent upon the woman, than in ours” (173). This reliance suggests an equality based on a mutual reliance between men and women despite the privileges typically afforded to man. The distinctions between men’s and women’s privileges (as well as the concomitant duties and responsibilities) are a consequence of the sphere—public for men, private for women—associated with those different characteristics.

Simms patiently distinguishes how women are different and the implications of these distinctions in relationships. (Needless to say, there is an assumed heteronormativity in this and all of Simms’s orations.) Women, says Simms, demonstrate “household virtues,” including loyalty, gentleness, emotional control, deference, affection, patience, sensitivity, solicitude, and humility. They also provide unquestioning support for the spouse and are nurturing to him and others deserving of her care. Simms delineates masculinity in “Inauguration” in ways he felt unnecessary to in “Choices.” Men possess a “stern, inflexible will, which accords with authority and makes it respected”; they are adventuresome, competitive, assertive, courageous, inventive, curious, and broad-minded (177). “Inauguration” says of these masculine traits, “[t]hese are the properties and qualities which make nations … make laws … provide resources for society …” (177). These activities may be more visible and may have more historical prestige, but Simms counters that the private sphere is just as critical to support these endeavors and to encourage the men responsible for them: “there must be a household, and one must maintain it, while the other goes abroad, in toil, labor, peril and Page 133 →conflict” (174). Consequently, though woman does not do—cannot do—all that her spouse may, “she is not less his ally” and thus is his figurative equal (174).

Simms was aware of the dissent that existed about the constraints on women’s participation in public life. According to the writer of The Carolina Spartan who reviewed “Inauguration,” Simms broached the “the vexed and vexatious question of ‘Women’s Rights’” (Meta 2). Simms acknowledges that “[o]f late days it has become a frequent complaint with certain of the sex, that their rights, as women, are withheld them; that, presuming on his physical, rather than his intellectual powers, man has usurped something more than his share of authority—has denied them that share of power in social, if not political affairs, to which they may properly lay claim” (174). Due to propriety or to avoid conferring credibility to the objection, Simms does not specify who is claiming that women are being “degraded … to a rank of moral inferiority” (174). Perhaps Simms had in mind the arguments of writers such as Margaret Fuller, the New England Transcendentalist who had argued for the dissolution of separate spheres in Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845). “Inauguration” acknowledges that women may be more capable than some mediocre men in certain professions, but the oration responds with two lengthy arguments that reemphasize the aforementioned innate differences between women and men on which “authority” and “power” are contingent.

Simms warns that if women venture into the public sphere, they can expect “no longer to be observed with love and admiration; no longer to receive attention from devoted worshippers” (176). If they become the rivals of men, it will disrupt the harmonious relationship between the genders based on the complementary differences of their allegedly innate characteristics—“woman ceases to be his ally” (176). Moreover, Simms claims women will be the ultimate loser since they will also forgo the customary “privileges of a peculiar power … having certain sacred and special functions” due to their sex. In chasing the alleged rights of man, she’ll lose “[t]he rights of woman” that constituted her equality and demanded respect as the natural authority within the domestic sphere (176).

The other counterargument “Inauguration” offers is whether women are physically, mentally, and emotionally prepared for the aggressive competition of business and government. Simms asks, “[c]an they exercise this weary, working, business faculty?” (176). The requisite qualities that men are supposedly exclusively endowed with to manage such activities are allegedly gifts from God. In what should have been an obvious fallacy if weren’t so often repeated by Southern commentators on gender arguing that “the sexes had their spheres … founded upon their physical natures,” Simms points to the physical differences between men and women as analogous to their mental and emotional capacities, thus validating their separate capacities and usage (O’Brien 1:257). “If God has given to man the supremacy of strength, it would seem almost equally clear that He has Page 134 →not decreed that the sway should be with woman.… If, in addition to this, we discern such moral differences between the two sexes as fully confirm the physical … the inference seems inevitable” (176–77). Since scripture also deeds the difference, it is “immutable”—nothing “can materially change these relations” (178). Consequently, difference is equitable in the eyes of God and society. Women, “Inauguration” argues in its almost-final words on this topic, “now occupies her natural sphere, and fills her proper position in the circle of humanity” (177). If inequality of natural difference is still imagined as unjust, Simms concludes by offering analogies from the environment to demonstrate that difference is a part of natural harmony.

Simms eventually returns to addressing the earlier focus of “Inauguration,” namely, to argue that women must educate themselves to “maintain” their proper “rank” in life (178). Given the qualities women innately possess and given the domestic duties that are required of her, Simms offers here a curricular version of his occupational advice that he advocated in “Choice”: Study the skills most compatible with one’s endowments and their highest societal use. First, if women begin their adult lives and begin to contribute to society as spouses supporting husbands, women need an education that will facilitate this role. The oration imagines the emotional labor women will offer their men, moderating “the excess and violence” of passions, encouraging virtue, fostering a spiritual life, and keeping spirits up (179). She inevitably will need to accomplish these things “by love, truth, fidelity, devotion, and the exercise of that sweet humility” (179). She will “train his affections by these … and by her feminine tastes and fancies, her arts and her accomplishments” (179). Simms says, “[f]or these performances, her education must contemplate her manners,” for which he prescribes the fine arts (179). He suggests poetry, painting, music, or sculpture, the latter “not sufficiently honored with regards of the sex,” to improve on a woman’s ability to artfully and imaginatively “win and to subdue” the more aggressive instincts of men at home (179).

Second, Simms acknowledges the necessity that women be intellectual companions, albeit not necessarily equals, to their spouses. He was not unique in this. Explains Scott, “[i]t was desirable … that wives have something more on their minds than the best recipe for scuppernong wine or the most effective treatment for measles” (68). Thus, “Inauguration” counsels, if women have higher aspirations than just the fine arts, the proper and the “true ambition of the woman, in the development of her mind, is to raise it to the dignity of his; so that she may commune with him as an associate, whom he will delight always to encounter; counsel him as a friend in whom he finds it grateful to confide” (180). Simms is more liberal in his recommendations of subjects that might help a woman become an intellectual companion to her husband. “Inauguration” suggests “the vast and various fields of polite literature—nay, the sciences, such as botany, Page 135 →astronomy—as regions in which she may find grateful employment.” Simms advises pursuing these disciplines “without any miserable rivalry” begotten by pride or ambition, which may cause dissension within the household (180).²

Finally, Simms recommends educating women for their eventual roles as mothers. “[H]er relations to man and to society do not end,” as a spouse, says Simms: “she is to be the mother of his children” (181). This is the second means by which women ultimately but indirectly exercise authority in the public sphere: “Not a man herself, she is to be the mother of a race of men—of heroes, statesmen, philosophers, priests, and poets—the most glorious orders of nobility which the world can anywhere behold. As the mother of men, and such men, she holds in her hands all the destinies of humanity through all surrounding ages” (181). Shaping the future of the Nation through childrearing was typical of both the older paradigm of Republican Motherhood and the more contemporaneous expectations of True Womanhood. In contrast to the emphasis on training children in the spiritual dimensions of Nature seen later in “Sense of the Beautiful,” “Inauguration” focuses on a more conventional moral stewardship. “She is their first teacher, and at that only period when their morals can receive the readiest impress in the formation of character,” offers Simms (182). With the absence of educated mothers at home, individual virtue is jeopardized as is the civic integrity of the next generation of the Nation’s citizens and leaders.

The responses to “Choice” and “Inauguration” that survive were tepidly flattering and warmly enthusiastic, respectively. The difference seemed to correspond to how well the orations’ themes about gender, education, and its societal relevance coincided with prevalent public opinion. The Charleston Daily Courier’s February 24 review of “Choice” offered generic platitudes about Simms’s reputation and accurately summarized the gist of the oration, but it lauded only the fitness of the topic for the undergraduate audience, which was notably small in number (“Mr. Simms’ Oration” 2). The review mentions bad weather, but the snide allusion to the empty seats and the lukewarm review of the oration’s merits could also have been a response to the address’s pointed criticism of the values of the students’ elders. The reception for “Inauguration” was more enthusiastic. A review from The Carolina Spartan of August 23, 1855, claimed that “Inauguration” was “an address of rare excellence.” Despite the proliferation of orations on women’s education, the review enthused that “[f]ew addresses have been more appropriate to their occasion—few more replete with sound poetical thought, and fewer still—hasty as the preparation in this case evidently was—have excelled this in the freshness, richness and beauty of its imagery, or the chasteness and gracefulness of its style” (Meta 2). In keeping with Simms’s earlier patterns of publication, he concurred to the printing of “Inauguration” since the address was particular to the occasion. The trustees of the school published it that year. However, Simms demurred when the Cresthomathic Society requested “Choice.” Page 136 →Simms claimed the manuscript “is yet altogether too crude, as a work of art, for the inspection of the critical reader” (Letters 3:370). He later acknowledged that “Choice” was “a favorite with me,” perhaps because of its evergreen topic, and he subsequently delivered it to audiences in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and New York (Letters 6:167).

Donald M. Scott and Jonathan Daniel Wells note the coincidental timing of the emergence of the professions and the lyceum circuit in the antebellum era. The latter provided an opportunity for members of the former to demonstrate their ascension to an occupation relevant to the public by the sharing and application of knowledge. Scott explains that a “public lecture signaled the possession of wisdom [and] general learning” and “because it was an act in the public good, it displayed civic character.” Thus as a performance, the public lecture not only rhetorically conveyed a theme, it was also “an act in the construction of a professional or intellectual career” (797). Simms’s lectures, “Choice” and “Inauguration” included, were akin to these kinds of performances. Aside from his success publishing literature and poetry, public speaking established Simms’s credibility as a professional man of letters and as a public intellectual. It was a visible confirmation of a calling Simms might have sensed during the modest start to his education, albeit one that seemed very distant. If not of birth, he at least had the benefit of gender to see it come to fruition.