Page xxvi →Page 1 →Introduction

William Gilmore Simms as Orator

The correspondence between lecture committees and orators in the antebellum South followed an effusive script. Reputations were flattered in invitations to speak, followed by fulsome replies acknowledging the honor of the request. The phrasing of an 1854 solicitation from a group of prominent Charleston, South Carolina, gentlemen to William Gilmore Simms to give his “Poetry and the Practical” address that summer is typical. The members of the city’s intellectual and social elite wrote Simms that they “desire to profit by the opportunity … of listening to” his lecture addressing the significance of the arts that he had given elsewhere in the South to “marked praise.” This appeal to the vanity of the speaker was pro forma. Equally rote was the invitation’s reverential conclusion, though the connotations of its language likely resonated with the 48-year-old author, editor, historian, and lecturer in ways that the committee may not have imagined. The Charlestonians wrote Simms that they “beg, at the same time, to tender you our cordial wishes for the continued success of your honorable and brilliant labors” (“Mr. Simms’ Lectures”).

Simms’s reply followed the formula of graciousness, acknowledging their “kind and complimentary application” and agreeing to speak, but the notion that his orations were considered “honorable and brilliant labors” likely struck him as factually correct but also as figuratively meaningful. On one hand, Simms’s correspondence to friends that reference his work on his orations during his—by that time—fourteen-year career at the lectern reveal that composing a lecture lasting close to an hour was, indeed, laborious. Simms sandwiched his research and composition of orations amid an outpouring of poetry and prose, periodical editing, and correspondence, not to mention a busy homelife that included the management of a plantation and the birth of a child (and often its death) almost every two years. Simms was hectically multitasking as he worked on his orations, often finishing just before he traveled to deliver them. Yet on the other hand, these “labors” did yield dividends in the form of rare public recognition of Simms’s “brilliance.” Over the years, reviewers praised his “fine voice and agreeable manner,” his “masterly and impressive” command of topics, and the “rapturous Page 2 →enthrallment” in which he held audiences as a public speaker, acknowledgments of his talent that he elsewhere complained were far too infrequent (“Editor’s Table” 79; “Mr. Simms’ Lecture” 1; “Opening of the Female College” 2).

Yet the notion that these labors were also considered “honorable” may have been even more significant to Simms than the positive reviews from critics. A son of Charleston from a modest social background who pursued a career outside of the customary masculine occupations of the American South, Simms consistently felt himself to be on the periphery of traditional centers of authority and prestige in the state and the region. He felt this way despite publishing close to fifty novels and collections of tales, hundreds of poems, over a half-dozen book-length histories and essay collections, plus his work writing for and editing periodicals, much of it ideological labor in service to his native state and region. To have his orations characterized as “honorable” by men of Charleston’s privileged class, given all that term’s regional connotations respecting public image and reputation, would have seemed an even more significant legitimization of his career, one conferring respect on his standing in the community.

That Simms is today less well known as an orator than as a poet, novelist, historian, and editor is partly due to his more prolific output in the latter genres but is also a consequence of his laboring at a time when many public speakers were brilliant. Simms’s public speaking career coincided with what historians call the “Golden Age of American Oratory.” Barnet Baskerville explains that in the decades before the Civil War “oratory, even when directed at the most practical ends, was regarded by both speaker and audience as an art form, to be cultivated and admired for its own sake” (33). Figures such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner remain as well known today as in their lifetimes for the eloquence of their expression and for the substance of their ideas. Simms was working on smaller stages. His emergence as a speaker in the early 1840s coincided with and was enabled by the flourishing of “popular” lectures. Open to the public for modest admission charges, these talks were arranged in cities, towns, and hamlets by lyceums, literary and historical societies, young men’s groups, and trade associations. A response to antebellum Americans’ appetite for advancement and self-improvement, popular lectures aspired “to satisfy their seemingly insatiable craving for ‘useful knowledge,’” explains Donald M. Scott, especially the kind that “would give them the hold on life that their aspirations seemed to require” (791, 801). The lectures typically eschewed politics but otherwise “included all the basic categories of knowledge and an almost limitless range of topics” (Scott 802). Filling this need were professors, clergymen, physicians, lawyers, and reformers but also authors and public intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Ellery Channing, and Horace Greeley, who, like Simms, supplemented their incomes by lecturing (Scott 794).

Page 3 →Historians have acknowledged that oratory was especially significant in the Old South, where, with only a couple of notable exceptions, Simms’s speaking career was centered.¹ Simms himself noted the sectional significance of public speaking in an 1851 review of recently published speeches, observing “[l]ectures, orations and addresses, in the South, are required to assert a higher rank than they are apt to do in other regions” (“Popular Discourses and Orations” 319). More was expected of them, Simms explains, because the dearth of Southern cities and attendant intellectual coteries and markets of readers hampered traditional belles lettres (320). Orations filled the cerebral and cultural voids in an agricultural society. “In these performances,” says Simms, “lie the most ample proofs … of our intellectual activity” (319). Moreover, given the physical dispersion of Southerners and their inability to support (or their indifference to) traditional channels of thought like books and periodicals, orations were the “only open medium by which the leading minds of the South may approach their people” (319). Public speaking was the preeminent means for aspiring public intellectuals and not just politicians to influence the “people”—an audience, but also the character and the spirit of the society to which listeners belonged (Faust, Sacred Circle 88). As Simms’s own orations in this volume make apparent, he was among these ambitious “leading minds” of the South. He earnestly believed in the power of articulate and insightful thinkers and speakers to inform, elevate, and shape the consciousness of a region. Simms believed “all his efforts—in politics, in editing, in public lecturing, in literature per se—were directed to the intellectual betterment of the region and his nation,” observes biographer John C. Guilds (112).

The orations in this volume reflect this aspiration of Simms. They address a wide variety of topics, but what they share is a desire to guide fellow Southerners and Americans through the manifold societal changes they were then experiencing. Like other writers and public intellectuals, North and South, conservative and progressive, Simms harbored mixed feelings about the pace and symptoms of progress during the antebellum era. The rapid commercialization of the economy, innovations in transportation and communication technology, the acceleration of westward national expansion, and the democratization of politics resulted in sustained financial prosperity (with notable exceptions during the Panics of 1819 and 1837), mobility, and personal freedom for white men. These trends were collectively characterized as material progress by Simms and like-minded American thinkers and writers. And although they embraced the improved quality of life that accompanied these changes and cheered the spirit of initiative that seemed inherent to the character of the United States, Simms and others simultaneously professed concern that moral progress did not seem to be keeping pace with change. In fact, progress often seemed to come at the cost of virtue and tradition. Affluence, for instance, also appeared to encourage self-interestedness and Page 4 →materialism. Declining respect for religion’s authority allowed spiritual indifference and utilitarianism to flourish. Access to affordable lands in the West undermined ties to communities. And in the South, enslavement further complicated intellectuals’ relationship to progress. As Eugene Genovese observes, progress was customarily imagined to result from the extension of personal and economic freedom to the broadest number of people. Southerners were thus obliged to reconcile progress with its ostensible antithesis (14).

As Genovese, Michael O’Brien, Drew Gilpin Faust, David Moltke-Hansen, and Adam L. Tate have documented, Simms was among an intellectual class of slaveholders who aspired to be stewards of progress by bettering the minds and elevating the character of their fellow white Southerners, including through orations. If they could foster an appreciation for a balance of material and moral progress by inculcating the values inherent to regional traditions and hereditary institutions, the disruptive tendencies of change might be minimized and the beneficial qualities of the past preserved. The popular touchstones for these conservative Southern intellectuals, Simms included, included religion, the family, the experience of history, and agriculture. Foremost among these, though, was the institution of slavery and the ostensible social influence conveyed by its alleged paternalistic character.

It would be reasonable to ask whether, following the removal of so many memorials to slaveholders, the orations of one of slavery’s defenders still merit attention. Particularly from a writer and thinker whose contributions were not always original, as some of the most astute students of Simms have observed (Kibler, The Poetry of William Gilmore Simms, 12; Moltke-Hansen, “Ordered” 139; O’Brien 1:451, 452). But what is singular about Simms’s treatment of progress in his orations and thus why they continue to demand study is the attempt to navigate the contradictions of progress by synthesizing the different responses of his era to it, including seemingly incongruous perspectives. Simms uses typical patterns of Southern conservative thinking, its reprehensible defense of enslavement included, with approaches typically considered more characteristic of Northern progressivism, particularly its leading Romantic authors. Simms may have spoken most often to Southerners, but he drew from a much larger intellectual and cultural context, one whose currents he adapted to or integrated with his topics and purposes. Moreover, the expansive, diverse scope of Southern life that Simms believed his syntheses relevant to was likewise unusual among his peers. His orations sought to integrate its different dimensions. To the modern mind, for example, public support for the humanities and secession may seem incongruous, as would manuring and Transcendentalism. The orations in this volume offer insight into the ways Simms created meaning out of unexpectedly complementary topics to inform the culture of “the people” in an era of dizzying change.

Page 5 →These patterns of thought can be found elsewhere in Simms’s novels, tales, biographies, histories, essays, and poems. His “thinking was remarkably of a piece,” James Everett Kibler Jr. observes (The Poetry of William Gilmore Simms 35). But in contrast to the volume of—and, frequently, the verboseness of—other texts in his oeuvre, Simms’s orations are a more concise, accessible index of the relationships he established among his topics and how he articulated them in his role as a public artist and intellectual. The orations chosen for inclusion in this volume thus reflect the circumstances of progress that were as much the exigences of his orations as the invitations that solicited them. They also represent Simms’s syntheses of conservative and progressive responses. Finally, they reflect the influence of national and transatlantic patterns of thinking upon Simms, which link him, despite his growing sectionalism beginning in the late 1840s, to a community of thinkers and writers outside of the South. To a lesser degree, these selections also reflect the range of genres of orations that Simms gave over the course of his public speaking career.

Special consideration was given to orations that served earlier generations of scholars well as primary documents, but which exist only in manuscript form at the University of South Carolina’s South Caroliniana Library and thus are not readily accessible to all students of nineteenth-century literature, oratory, and intellectual history. Hence the inclusion of “Choice of a Profession,” the Social Moral series, and “Antagonism of the Social Moral.” However, these criteria also informed the decision not to include Simms’s most “inspired” lecture, “Poetry and the Practical,” since a modern edition has been published and edited by Kibler (“Introduction,” xii). Similarly, Simms revised some of his favorite orations into essays, including The Epochs and Events of American History, which appeared in Views and Reviews in American Literature, History, and Fiction and is readily available in both digital and print form thanks to the Simms Initiatives. The Initiatives has likewise digitized copies of published pamphlets of some of Simms’s orations, including the Barnwell Agricultural Society address, “The Social Principle,” “Sources of American Independence,” “Inauguration of the Spartanburg Female College,” “South Carolina in the Revolution” (a version of which is reprinted in volume three of Simms’s Letters), and “The Sense of the Beautiful,” all of which are included in this volume for their representatives of the aforementioned motifs. However, if a manuscript existed for these orations, it was used as the source text, given that Simms revised his orations after their delivery if they were intended for publication. A complete list of Simms’s known orations and their probable dates of composition can be found in the appendix at the end of this volume.

The orations are organized by themes that are a part of the nexus of aforementioned ideas and by chronology to reflect different periods and rhetorical contexts in Simms’s three decades-long speaking career. Part I is the exception. Simms’s Page 6 →lifelong faith in the spiritual dimensions of Nature, especially as an alternative to institutional religion and to ameliorate materialism and pragmatism, is best exemplified by his first major speech in 1840 and by his last one in 1870. His advocacy of Nature’s divine, elevating influence coincided with two watershed moments for South Carolina, one a crisis of outmigration and the other the aftermath of military defeat. In part II the orations are interpretations of national and regional history Simms offered in the mid-1840s amid growing sectional tensions between North and South and the Eastern Seaboard and the Old Southwest. Simms’s narratives accentuate the social virtues inherent to the experiences of the past that he argues are still relevant to social stability and posterity. Part III represents Simms’s perspectives on gender, education, and the private and public sphere in the mid-1850s. Simms celebrates women’s education but is more restrained on where and how young women ought to use that knowledge, echoing broader antebellum debates on women’s opportunities and responsibilities. Similarly, Simms embraces the emergence of a professional class in the South but advises the young men aspiring to its ranks that duty and self-discipline must temper professional ambition. Part IV includes Simms’s addresses from the late 1850s, including his disastrous attempt at a lecture tour in the North following a period of heightened regional animosity. His failure leads him to make a vehement case for Southern independence based on distinctive regional characteristics, including those stemming from the institution of slavery. Yet the same series of orations reflects Simms’s most urgent demand for recognition of the artist as a public servant, as the figure most responsible for articulating a region’s culture to establish its permanence. As is typical with Simms, though, all these topics engage one another, and it will not be unusual to find throughlines in thought, albeit adapted to changing circumstances over the course of his career.

The introductions to each part provide context and relevance for reading the addresses. Each introduction offers the circumstances for the orations’ occasions and their reception. Each also includes synopses of the address, given Simms’s propensity to use one topic as a metaphor for, or to signify the consequence of, another sometimes-seemingly anomalous, subject. The introductions also offer background on Simms’s treatment of the subjects, with an emphasis on connecting him not only to Southern patterns of thought, particularly on progress and the role of the intellectual in shaping society’s response to it, but also to other influences. The introductions do not address the oratorical features of the text, but notes are included to suggest relevant scholarship that discusses the rhetorical conventions of an oration’s genre.²

In transcribing the orations, deviations from modern-day usage of spelling, grammar, syntax, and punctuation in the original documents were preserved. Simms’s idiosyncrasies were systematic, suggesting they reflect not so much carelessness as much as his personal style (or perhaps the absence of consistent Page 7 →standards during his childhood and early education). Where the addition of punctuation or a missing letter seemed necessary to clarify the meaning of the text, or if there was an apparent typesetting error in the orations copied from pamphlets, it has been corrected silently. Keeping the long dashes, underlining, and exclamations suggests the performative nature of his public orations—the pauses for dramatic effect, the rising emotion, and points of emphases. Simms’s handwriting becomes less legible the faster he was apparently writing (ostensibly to meet his deadline), and when words are illegible, either a best guess has been substituted in brackets or is signaled by a question mark.

Hindsight demonstrates that in only a few cases was Simms ultimately able to influence the minds of the people. When he was most persuasive, as in the case of his advocacy for secession to defend the rights of white Southerners to enslave African Americans, his logic was abhorrent. Furthermore, given the subsequent mortality of the Civil War, the consequences of his success were appalling (emancipation notwithstanding). In other words, many of Simms’s oratorical labors do not incline us to consider him especially honorable or particularly brilliant. Nevertheless, because Simms’s orations demanded that their listeners reflect on the progress of their nation and be mindful of its direction, these calls to action still merit heeding. In looking back on what Simms sought to do in the cause of honor and brilliance, the orations lead us to question our own assumptions about what constitutes progress, and they challenge us to envision more just ways to advance society.