Simms’s new orations in 1856 and 1857 include several themes from earlier in his lecturing career. They speak to the social value of art in an age of rapid change, the usefulness of history as a guide to respond to present contingencies, and the distinguishing characteristics of regional identities. However, these motifs assumed new relevance and greater urgency in the late 1850s due to the events and sectional tensions associated with slavery’s accompaniment of westward national expansion. These circumstances spurred Simms to adapt his standard topics to new purposes, chiefly to prepare listeners for Southern independence.

Despite Simms’s established reputation as an orator and the salience of his themes, audiences in the late 1850s were less inclined to heed him. In fact, at the very point in his career when Simms aspired to professionalize his public speaking and expand the market for his orations, he was met not only with indifference but also with outright hostility. The volatile political environment was the likely culprit, including the consequences of his and his peers’ earlier rhetoric on sectional character and rights. The assertion of Southern identity and prerogatives beginning in the 1840s had fostered an atmosphere wherein, by the late 1850s, these themes were either prosaic or inflammatory, depending on the audience. Thus, when Simms attempted in 1856 to reap the financial and ideological yields from two decades of public speaking, he instead suffered his most ignominious public failure and private mortification. His experience is representative of how Southern orators became susceptible to forces they had earlier set in motion but could no longer manage, and it was an inflection point that had dire consequences for his own individual critical legacy.

James Perrin Warren observes that Simms approached public speaking more intentionally in 1856, focusing on it more as a profit-making enterprise than he had earlier in his career (154). Contemplating the prospects of a speaking tour, the author wrote New York historian and illustrator Benson John Lossing on May 22 to ask whether he “can give me any hints in regard to this Lecturing business, which is new to me as a business” (Letters 3:434–35). In addition to advice on logistical considerations such as scheduling and fees, Simms was seeking guidance about new venues. For the first time in his career, Simms planned to speak in Northern cities.

Page 190 →The motivation for this more ambitious public-speaking tour evolved over the course of 1856. Initially, it was financial in nature. In April, Simms wrote Boston publisher James Thomas Fields to say, “I propose to gather up a few of my Lectures and undertake a rambling Lecturing campaign in the North the coming winter—i.e. if I see any reasonable prospect of their being desirable to others, & compensative to myself” (Letters 3:429). On May 20 he mentions the tour to Southern Literary Messenger editor John Reuben Thompson, writing, “I shall go, if the demand is sufficiently numerous.… My cares & children increase. I need to earn $3000 per ann. apart from the plantation, to live decently in broadcloth” (Letters 3:434). A growing family—six surviving children and his wife pregnant again—and the upkeep of Woodlands, their plantation home, were absorbing more and more of Simms’s income from writing (Guilds 262). Speaking in larger, more prosperous boroughs rather than the small Southern communities that he usually addressed promised some financial relief.

The topics Simms initially considered using for his 1856 Northern tour suggest his awareness of the importance of discretion with unfamiliar audiences in partisan times to maximize ticket sales. He contemplated a new, unobjectionable two-part travelogue on the mountain scenery of western Carolina, and he offered organizers earlier, innocuous speeches such as “Poetry and the Practical” and “Choice of a Profession” (Letters 3:429, 436–37). However, by the end of the summer, at the same time his publisher Justus Starr Redfield was helping him negotiate “nightly employments for two months or more” in New York and New England, Simms’s motivation, and consequently his topics, evolved (Letters 3:444). In a letter to SC Congressman James Lawrence Orr on August 30, he mentioned working on new speeches, noting that “long labours are before me of historical controversy” (Letters 3:442). Events far from Woodlands prompted Simms to see the forthcoming tour as not just as a source of much-needed income, but also as an opportunity to remedy what he believed were misrepresentations in an ongoing “historical controversy” over South Carolina’s participation in the Revolutionary War.

Like many other topics in the antebellum period, American history had become weaponized in the conflict between North and South over the issue of enslavement. Regional historians and their readers wielded interpretations of the past “[i]n their frenzy to establish the legitimacy of their current positions” for and against enslavement, observes John Hope Franklin (“The North, the South” 18). The author of The History of South Carolina, from its First European Discovery to its Erection into a Republic (1840) as well as dozens of historical romances, Simms was especially sensitive to unflattering accounts of Southern history. Renewed allegations in 1856 that enslavement historically enfeebled the character of Southern society compelled him to start conceptualizing his tour as a series of rebuttals as much as a profit-making venture. Simms later recalled that “[i]t was Page 191 →especially important that the North should be disabused of the notion that the South is imbecile. Imbecile because of her slave institutions—imbecile in war—unproductive in letters—deficient in all the proper agencies of civilization …” (256).

These were allegations made by the Northern historian Lorenzo Sabine and amplified by Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Sabine’s The American Loyalists (1847) questioned the degree to which the “Whig leaven was diffused through the mass of her [South Carolina’s] people” during the Revolution (30). He claimed that “it is hardly an exaggeration … that more Whigs of New England were sent to her aid, and now lie buried in her soil, than she sent from it” (32). He compared the number of enlistments from the thirteen colonies, pointedly observing that those from Southern colonies were proportionately less “compared with the States destitute of a ‘peculiar institution’” (32). In other words, the practice of enslavement was responsible for diminishing South Carolina’s ability to supply soldiers for its own defense or for that of other colonies. Enslavement thus made South Carolina “imbecile,” weak and unable to sustain itself militarily or to contribute meaningfully to the patriot cause.

Simms had already challenged Sabine’s interpretation prior to 1856. Simms’s review of American Loyalists appeared in the July and October 1848 issues of the Southern Quarterly Review, and in 1853 he combined them and another review essay into South-Carolina in the Revolutionary War: Being a Reply to Certain Misrepresentations and Mistakes of Recent Writers, in Relation to the Course and Conduct of this State. Sumner was likely unaware of (or unpersuaded by) Simms’s rebuttals, and the abolitionist elaborated on Sabine’s allegations in two Senate speeches. The first, “Reply to Assailants: Oath to Support the Constitution; Weakness of the South from Slavery,” was on June 28, 1854. In part a rejoinder to SC Senator Andrew Butler’s assertion that the Revolution “was won by the arms and treasure of … slaveholding communities,” Sumner cited primary documents to illustrate the feebleness of South Carolina’s militia as well as the state’s readiness to negotiate an independent peace with England (191). He then quoted notable Revolutionary-era Carolinians to demonstrate that fears of insurrections by enslaved people and runaways diminished the willingness of whites to enlist, concluding that the historical record is a “confession, not only of weakness, but that this weakness was caused by Slavery.” Rebuking Butler, the Republican senator continued, “[n]ot by slavery, but in spite of Slavery, was Independence achieved” (212).

Sumner’s second allegation of South Carolina’s impotency was made in his May 21 and 22, 1856, “The Crime Against Kansas” speech. He renewed his argument with Butler, asking, “Has he read the history of ‘the State’ which he represents? He cannot surely have forgotten its shameful imbecility from Slavery, confessed throughout the Revolution, followed by its more shameful Page 192 →assumptions for Slavery since” (29). This time, though, Sumner extended his analysis of enslavement’s enervating effect on South Carolina, postulating, “Were the whole history of South Carolina blotted out of existence, from its very beginning down to the day of the last election of the senator to his present seat on this floor, civilization might lose—I do not say how little; but surely less than it has already gained by the example of Kansas” (30).

Simms’s extant correspondence following Sumner’s first speech in 1854 does not include any references to it, a curious silence for such a vigilant guardian of the memory of South Carolina’s Revolutionary experience. But the second speech in 1856, which precipitated Sumner’s caning by South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, would engage his pen. The earliest existing reference in Simms’s correspondence to “The Crime Against Kansas” and the subsequent imbroglio is late, September 7, when he writes James Henry Hammond that “Butler and [South Carolina Senator Josiah James] Evans are flooding me with the attacks of the Northern Press on South Carolina.… But [Butler’s] blunderings have provoked them, & he is one of the victims in all the attacks. In brief he wants me to take up the cudgels and fight his battles” (Letters 3:446). Simms here grumbles to Hammond about Butler’s presumptions, but as he would later admit, his exactness as an historian and his indignation as a Carolinian would not let Sumner’s allegations go unanswered, even at the risk of alienating Northern audiences and thereby risking much-needed speaker fees. By September 20, Simms had completed the lecture that was his response to Sabine and Sumner, writing Marcus Claudius Marcellus Hammond that “I am drudging upon my Northern course … I have just finished one to be delivered in Boston, on ‘South Carolina in the Revolution.’—If they will listen to me!” (Letters 3:449).

The orator uncannily anticipated the unreceptiveness of many of his Northern listeners following his delivery of “South Carolina in the Revolution” in Buffalo on November 11, in Rochester on November 13, and in New York City on November 18. The speech seems to begin inoffensively enough, with Simms condemning the politicization of history. He denounces any “outrage upon sacred histories,” which in addition to slandering the reputation of the Revolutionary generation, also invalidates their legacy of virtue to which present-day Carolinians “refer their sons, when they would train them to honorable aims and a generous ambition” and by “which the future generations are to be taught becoming lessons & examples” (208).

Simms then corrects what he believed were the historical inaccuracies of Sabine and Sumner in lengthy detail. He claims they lacked the necessary context to understand the circumstances they cited to support their assertions about South Carolina’s underwhelming support for independence, alleged to be the consequence of a slaveholding society’s imbecility. In doing so, though, Simms was also challenging a more widely held Northern attitude about the South that Page 193 →transcended Revolutionary history. In denying the link between enslavement and indolence, Simms was attempting to combat the prevailing notion about the former’s effect on the character of Southern whites, similar to his attempts in his 1840 “Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration.” Eric Foner observes, for instance, that in Northern minds, “[i]nstead of progress, the South represented decadence, instead of enterprise, laziness” (51). Many antislavery advocates compared agricultural statistics or cited anecdotes from travelers’ accounts of the South as evidence to support their case for the economic and social disadvantages caused by enslavement. Sabine and Sumner and their Southern counterpart, Simms, were instead looking to the past of the South to both make and to refute that charge.

“South Carolina in the Revolution” attempts to rebut these Northern allegations by offering alternative factors that limited the number of soldiers that South Carolina contributed to the Revolutionary cause, such as its heterogenous colonial-era immigrant population that possessed a spectrum of allegiances. Simms also includes examples of South Carolina’s early enthusiasm for independence to counter the claims that enslavement weakened Carolinians’ commitment to it, such as the state’s call to create an independent Provincial Congress in 1774 and its drafting of a constitution in March 1776, prior to the Declaration of Independence. “[N]o imbecility here—no lack of will, resolution” was demonstrated by South Carolinians, claims Simms (214). He also references the state’s defense of Charleston in June 1776 and the successful repelling of Cherokee and Loyalist attacks the same summer as confirmation of slaveholding Carolinians’ military strength, sarcastically observing that “[t]hese were prodigious exertions for so feeble a State as South Carolina” (214). And though enslavement is never explicitly mentioned in the speech, Simms’s detailed explanation of Carolinians’ alleged willingness to surrender Charleston in 1779 as a misunderstood ruse and his lengthy tribute to the state’s guerilla fighters are further attempts to persuade Northern listeners of the shrewdness and tenacity of South Carolina’s patriots, the practice of enslavement notwithstanding.

Simms transitions to the conclusion of “South Carolina in the Revolution” by advising his Northern listeners that present-day Carolinians remain as vigilant of their rights and reputations as their Revolutionary forebearers. He returns to the sectional nature of the historical dispute, arguing that South Carolina is owed respect, both to its past and at the present moment as an equal peer in the Union. Simms argues that criticism by Sumner and others is a pointless attempt at intimidation: “Massachusetts gains nothing by showing that South Carolina is faithless as a friend, & worthless as a foe! Let her establish the fact in either case, & what follows? Is the argument meant to persuade the imbecile that she should yield without struggle?” (228). Simms bellicosely suggests that if, following all his historical evidence of slaveholders’ confidence and valor, there still remains doubt as to the mettle of South Carolinians, there are less equivocal means to Page 194 →settle intersectional disputes than via historical interpretations: “Better, braver, nobler, the short process, of the mailed hand, & the biting weapon. Better for both parties—for the honor of the one, and the due conviction of the other” (228).

Simms ends “South Carolina in the Revolution” with disingenuous compunction for his pugnacity, pleading, “Forgive me, my friends, if I have spoken warmly; but you would not, surely, have me speak coldly in the assertion of a Mother’s honour!” (229).¹ Unfortunately for the proud son of South Carolina, Northerners were disinclined to forgive or even hear his heated defense of her past and present character. The numbers of attendees at Simms’s lectures progressively dwindled from 1,200 in Buffalo to 150 in New York City a week later as initial reviews of “South Carolina in the Revolution” circulated (Letters 3:456, 467).

The criticism ranged from reproaches of Simms’s rhetorical improprieties to sectional protests to ad hominem attacks. The first category admonished Simms for violating the norms of popular lectures by delivering an oration with partisan overtones. The Buffalo Commercial Advertiser of November 12 noted “it was a literary production that they [The Young Men’s Association] and their patrons expected—The lecture-room is the place to forget political and religious aspirations, and to cultivate our knowledge of science and appreciation of the amenities of polite letters” (“Home Matters” 3). Similarly, on November 12 the Buffalo Evening Post expressed “regret that [Simms] should have allowed himself to have so widely departed from his legitimate sphere as a Lecturer” in his discussion of regional antagonisms (qtd. in Letters 3:457n122). The second motif of criticism, an aversion to Simms’s boasts about South Carolina, was likely inspired by the sectional distrust following the events of “Bleeding Kansas” and a presidential election decided earlier that month along regional lines. The November 13 Buffalo Morning Express observed that “[w]ith an impudence unsurpassed, [Simms] comes into our midst and makes an harangue abusive of a Northern State and running over with fulsome and false praise of the least deserving state of the Union” (qtd. in Letters 3:457n122). Likewise, on November 14 the Rochester Daily Democrat mocked Simms’s and South Carolina’s prickly honor, commenting the latter “is constantly fretting and fuming about the insolence of her neighbors, and threatening every morning before breakfast, to set up an independent kingdom” (“Quattlebum in Rochester” 2). The third vein of criticism was more personal in nature. The same Rochester review, for example, claimed that Simms had “a loud, imperious, crackling voice, and manners suited to an overseer of a plantation, where slaves have to be daily cursed and flogged” (“Quattlebum in Rochester” 2). The New York City Tribune was perhaps the unkindest, remarking on the ambivalence of South Carolina to its most devoted son of letters. On November 19, the Horace Greeley–edited Republican paper observed that “Mr. Simms, after spending a laborious life in efforts to write South Carolina into Page 195 →notice and admiration, is turned over, in his declining age, to the cold charity and empty seats of Northern lecture rooms” (“Review” 4).

Stung by the low turnout and the criticism, Simms cancelled his second and third speaking engagements in New York City (which were to have been the unoffensive series on southern Appalachia) on November 21, explaining to the organizers that “such is the antipathy felt to my topics—such the rancorous feeling which they have provoked,—that they (the committee [of arrangements]) could not only sell no tickets, but could not succeed in giving them away” (Letters 3:458–59). Nor did he wish to encumber the organizers of his other lectures with financial losses, as he explained in letters written to all of them on the 21st. However, these same letters are also characterized by terse assertions about the preservation of his honor. He explained to the Young Men’s Association of Troy, New York, for example, that he was obliged to cancel his engagement with them “in consequence the singular odium which attends my progress as a South Carolinian, and the gross abuse which has already assailed myself, personally” (Letters 3:460).

To Southern friends that winter, Simms attributed Northern hostility to “the rancorous temper of Black republicanism; so completely does New England rule N.Y.” and the “probable effect of the election” in which Democratic candidate James Buchanan defeated Republican John Fremont (Letters 3:466, 467). While plausible, Simms’s claim that he was a victim of disaffected Northern Republicans is more likely reassurance about the relevance of his intellectual labor to the cause of his state. Historian Paul Quigley recognizes similar patterns of identification by Southern nationalists with a victimized South that they aspired to speak and write into independence. “[T]he imperatives of honor and masculinity moved back and forth between the realms of personal and southern identity,” Quigley explains, especially among men like Simms, Edmund Ruffin, and William Lowndes Yancey, putative outsiders in their honor- and status-conscious culture (61). Cognizant of the fragility of their social positions, which ideological service to the South could solidify, they were inclined to interpret Northern criticism of the region that was the focus of their intellectual and rhetorical work as personal attacks. In a culture wherein masculinity demanded that any infringement on reputation be responded to publicly, Northern criticism thus tended to trigger virulent reactions. The political became personal, and their sensitivity and responses could be disproportionate, as the indignation in Simms’s correspondence reflects.

Simms’s accusation that support for Republicans was responsible for the hostility and indifference of his listeners also effaces a more probable explanation underlying the Northern reaction to “South Carolina in the Revolution.” Simms misappraised the volatile rhetorical situation in the North not by underrating the influence of the emergent Republican Party, but by failing to account for Page 196 →the influence of earlier Southern antagonisms. First, Simms apparently underestimated how Brooks’s caning of Sumner resonated with his Northern audience. Second, Simms seems to have overlooked the mutual regional distrust that he himself contributed to through his participation in a decade’s worth of rhetorical attacks on Northern society.

While Buchanan’s election may have disappointed New Yorkers like Greeley, not all residents of the Empire State were as committed to radical Republicanism as Simms would like to have imagined. Instead, Simms likely failed to give enough consideration to the galvanizing effect of the Sumner-Brooks Affair and its implications regarding free expression. To Northerners, Brooks’s caning of Sumner epitomized Southern intolerance of dissenting ideas. Along with the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, by proslavery forces, Brooks’s assault “stirred fierce and pervasive indignation by dramatizing the threat that proslavery Southerners posed to the lives and liberties of free Northerners,” observes historian Michael E. Woods (150). Rather than the issue of emancipation, which remained divisive even among Republicans, the resentment of intimidation by “The Slave Power” united moderate and radical Northerners. Not just wielders of canes, but also bellicose orators whose speeches invoked images of “the mailed hand, & the biting weapon” were interpreted as threatening Northerners’ ability to exercise safely their Constitutional rights.

New York newspapers, for instance, were quick to associate “South Carolina in the Revolution” with patterns of Southern bullying. For example, on November 12, the Buffalo Evening Post characterized Simms’s speech as an “ill-digested, bitter and to at least nine-tenths of the audience, [an] offensive defence [sic] of South Carolina politicians of the Brooks school” (qtd. in Letters 3:457n122). Greeley’s Tribune not only pointed out the parallels between the two South Carolinians on November 19, but also the egregiousness of Simms’s miscalculation so soon after Sumner’s assault. The article observed “it was not only a great lack of good taste, but a great lack of ordinary rhetorical prudence, to commence his discourse by a pointed attack upon Senator Sumner as a wicked and malicious maligner. Such an attack sounds too much like a covert apology for the brutality of Bully Brooks” (“Review” 4).

Even Simms’s confidant James Henry Hammond perceived a relationship between canes and words, writing Simms on November 27 to say, “As I see it, you have gone North at a somewhat critical time for you & martyred yourself for So Ca … & for Brooks … who in his supreme vanity will think your sacrifice only a slight oblation. What Demon possessed you, mon ami, to do this?” (qtd. in Letters 3:465n136). Simms’s response on December 8 is notable not only for its grudging, partial admission of the inappropriateness of “South Carolina in the Revolution” for the rhetorical situation, but also for acknowledging his apparent naivete regarding the climate that proved so hostile to it. He wrote, “I grant you Page 197 →that, if, at the outset, I had dreamed that I should have been denounced because of my local subjects, I would have taken others … who could have fancied that the rancour had become so universal & so universally blinding” (Letters 3:468).

Simms’s rhetorical question at the end not only suggests his underestimation of the implications of the Sumner-Brooks Affair but also his apparent obliviousness to his own rhetorical contributions to the climate of mutual distrust that preceded it. Since around the time of “Sources of American Independence” (1844), Simms was among Southern writers and thinkers elaborating on the distinctions between Southern and Northern society. In the 1850s, he began to emphasize the degeneracy of the latter. For example, Simms observed in the Southern Quarterly Review in September 1850 that “[t]here is, in the Northern States, a growing and monstrous disregard of all the usually recognized securities of society. Mobs, riots, murders, mark the daily events in their progress. Wild philosophies, vague and vicious, penetrate the better informed circles.… Property is held by a doubtful tenure … Marriage is denounced, as hostile to the proper exercise of the legitimate passions […]” (“The Southern Convention” 198). That Simms could not anticipate the animus that these and other similar diatribes by Southern nationalists would engender in the North taxes credulity were it not for his apparent conviction in what he had wrote. In other words, Simms may have been so persuaded of the truth of his own simulacra of Northern society that the incongruity of Northern listeners asserting their own regional sense of honor and propriety may have left him in disbelief.

Simms tried to make sense of his Northern experience in a three-lecture series he gave in Charleston on May 25 and 27 and June 1, 1857, that he titled Our Social Moral. The series title references the belief that regional populations possessed distinct cultural characters (the “social”) as a consequence of their underlying values (their “moral”).² Similar to most of his Southern peers, Simms believed the institution of slavery was the paramount source of the latter in the South, followed by other touchstones such as agriculture, faith, the home and family, and art. The “peculiar institution” transcended its material value as a system of labor, creating social relationships imagined to be “essentially moral rather than economic,” explains Drew Gilpin Faust. “In the idealized system of human bondage [Southerners] portrayed, their particular values seemed fully realized. Duty and responsibility, not despised greed, tied master and slave together” (Sacred Circle 121). This supposed paternalism encouraged virtues of stewardship, discipline, and dignity that represented moral progress, which Simms and other writers differentiated from material progress as the true benchmark of improvement. The institution of slavery also allegedly encouraged social stability in an age of rapid economic change, an admittedly conservative security wherein rights, liberty preeminent, were accorded to one’s ability to exercise them appropriately.

Page 198 →Southern intellectuals like Simms believed that free labor, absent the framework of paternalistic relationships and their associated values, “meant submission to laws of economic development that condemned the laboring classes to unprecedented exploitation, immiseration, and periodic starvation,” explains Eugene Genovese. More problematic for the character of Northern society were the allegedly inevitable destabilizing consequences of this desperation: “Faced with unbearable privation, they [the Northern working class] would rise, were already rising, in insurrection. Worse, the intellectual freedom essential to all progress, including economic progress, was inexorably extruding every possible kind of utopian and demagogic scheme,” similar to the ones Simms noted in his 1850 review (17). Despite its ostensible material progress stemming from economic growth and the expansion of freedom to working-class males, Northern society was characterized by the economic inequality, social instability, and the subversive ideologies that its system of free labor unleashed. This delineation of the character of the North, especially as an oppositional social identity to the South, was a popular motif of Southern intellectuals since at least the beginning of the decade, exemplified by Simms’s denunciation of Northern mobs, murderers, and marriages (Quigley 12).

The South was ostensibly less susceptible to such anarchy thanks to the hierarchies and virtues generated by the practice of enslavement, but as Simms’s earlier orations demonstrate, he was nonetheless wary that the priorities and values associated with materialism were taking root in a South that was becoming heedless of its moral character. By the 1850s, this anxiety was even a thematic motif in his regional fiction. David Moltke-Hansen observes that Simms’s Revolutionary Romances of the decade were critical of how “[a]varice and the new, socially destructive methods of wealth’s generation were undermining political resolve and corrupting arts’—and thoughts’—producers, productions, and consumers” (“The Revolutionary Romances” 304). Acquisitiveness, selfishness, and superficiality threatened the superstructure of alleged virtues emanating from the institution of slavery, which made the foundation itself vulnerable to Northern schemes, especially abolition. Like Simms’s novels of the era, the 1857 Our Social Moral lectures are critical of these influences and Southerners’ failure to thwart them. In particular, Simms reproaches Carolinians’ indifference to the intellectual and cultural labor—such as his own—that he argues nurtures the virtues that constitute moral progress and that are proof of its resiliency. On the surface, his criticism of Carolinians’ apathy echoes some of the symptoms Sumner alleged were indicative of the state’s imbecility. However, rather than enslavement enervating the South, the Our Social Moral lectures posit that Carolinians’ incipient weakness is ultimately a consequence of the influence of a materialistic mindset more typical of Northern culture.

Page 199 →The character of the South that Simms outlines for his fellow Carolinians in the three “Social Moral” speeches in May and June 1857 is vulnerable at that historical moment to threats from within and without. Internally, Southern materialism and the ensuing apathy toward local intellectual and artistic endeavors diminish the vitality of its society. Externally, Northern awareness of this susceptibility will continue to embolden their radical “schemes,” which include assaults on Southern institutions. Simms alleges that the antagonism that precipitated and characterized the Northern response to his “South Carolina in the Revolution” was a warning sign of this. Consequently, Carolinians must resist their growing materialistic proclivities, become less complacent about the security of their social institutions, and support the artistic and scholarly class whose endeavors reinforce their regional character and its latent moral progress. With more stridency than 1844’s “The Sources of American Independence,” Simms claims that intellectual leaders, not political ones, can preserve South Carolina and the South.

“The Social Moral, Lecture 1” (hereafter referred to as “Lecture 1” to distinguish it from the second oration, titled “The Social Moral, Lecture 2”) begins this admonition by arguing that Sabine’s and Sumner’s allegations of South Carolina’s historical imbecility were more than mere rhetoric. Simms claims their interpretations of history are harbingers of future encroachments on the honor and the slaveholding prerogatives of Carolinians, positing that “all assaults upon the rights and possessions, the inheritance, on the institutions of a people, are always coupled with, or prefaced by, a defamation of their character” (231). Simms characterizes Sumner as “malignant” but also insists that the Northern politician felt confident enough to disparage Carolinians because of their alleged indifference to their historical reputation and because of Southerners’ customary willingness to compromise their principles to preserve the Union (235). Simms scolds his listeners, explaining that Sumner’s “courage comes from our submissions; his insolence from our forbearances; his judgment, upon our character, upon our own indifference to honorable fame!” (233).

Simms admits that this alleged apathy and deference does border on “imbecility.” However, rather than enslavement accounting for it, as Sabine and Sumner alleged, Simms attributes it to Carolinians neglecting their own intellectual and artistic class. Any real or perceived weakness is “first due to our intellectual inactivity;—to the fact that we have lost curiosity, zeal, faith, enthusiasm, and that eager impulse to performance.… Energy and action are not original motors. They spring from deeper sources in the soul and mind …” (243). The stakes were existential rather than aesthetic. Indifference to ideas and art made a prosperous but complacent society vulnerable to one more ambitious: “When, therefore, you behold a people grown sluggards in the race, you may feel very Page 200 →sure that they are sluggish in intellect—that their virtues are feeble as their will—dead or dying out;—and that they must succumb before any stirring competitor in the great race for power!” (243). These grim counsels reflect Simms’s belief that art was “the chief vehicle of civilization,” says David Moltke-Hansen (“When History” 28). If the evolution of and especially the permanence of society was contingent on moral, not material, progress, then art and the first principles and the virtues it expressed were a social necessity. They demanded an audience. “Where the Imagination & Fancy remain without cultivation, the morals, as well as social progress of the people must be low & slow,” Simms explained in a letter to a fellow South Carolinian starting a lyceum (Letters 4:422). For example, James Everett Kibler Jr. explains that Simms believed that “[t]he poet stood centrally in society as its best friend and guide … pointed to the central truths … [and] aided in the growing of the soul” (“Introduction” xii). Consciousness of and appreciation for these values demanded that people be vigilant that society progress in ways consistent with their core beliefs and priorities to preserve them. That direction could itself be guided with the influence of literature, which, prior to the specialization of disciplines, encompassed history (Busick 2). “[H]istory, when written as he [Simms] felt it should be, was a vast source of moral instruction and thus an engine of progress” by use of hindsight to provide guidance for the present day (Busick 9).

To illustrate the relationship between the public intellectual and the vigor of a community, Simms focuses on the social values of historians’ labors. “Lecture 1” explains that historians provide models of personal virtue for the present generation, claiming their interpretations of past events lead to “a just sense of what is really great and noble in the deeds of our ancestry;—and this right appreciation of their real virtues …” (239). The connections historians make to the past also foster the traditions and sensibilities that are cornerstones for group identity, pride in which deters antagonists who threaten its autonomy. However, the South, Simms warns, has been “perfectly satisfied that our Enemies should write our histories, and provide the teachers for our young;—that their infant minds should be trained and tutored by a people who were eagerly busied in the grateful labor of destroying our institutions, and casting a slur of perpetual infamy upon our name” (231).

Historians thus encourage the self-awareness, pride, and vigilance requisite to a community’s solidarity and security. Any responsibility for the absence of historians, though, rests with Southerners themselves, according to Simms. “It is not the Histories that we lack, but the readers of them,” he observes, also complaining that, generally speaking, “[a]s a people we read too little …” (244). The reasons for this neglect of the work of South Carolina’s intellectual and artistic class are varied, though all have their origins in either the vanity or the acquisitiveness associated with materialism. Simms argues this in both “Lecture 1” and Page 201 →“Lecture 2.” In the former, for instance, Simms’ analyzes Carolinians’ pejorative attitudes toward scholars. He decries the stigma that the fashionable, practical, and worldly associate with intellectual labor, which discourages its pursuit. “Here & there, only, do we see some single laborer, buried in his books, and pursuing his secret studies at great self sacrifice, in cell or studio, and we scorn him for his self sacrificing homage to wisdom …” Simms complains that “[t]he community taboos him […] and his labors. He must be a blockhead to yield up present distinction, worldly gain, and sensual delights, in laborious searches into the abstract & the obscure” (244). Simms also denounces Carolinians’ indifference to their own thinkers and artists, preferring instead what they imagine to be the superior ideas and work of outsiders, even when they may be antithetical to the character of Southern culture. “This miserable Provincialism is the source of some of our worst mishaps, as of some of our grossest absurdities,” Simms explains. “It makes us reject and despise the native for the foreign; though the one strives in our battles, & the other openly toils for our destruction” (246).

“The Social Moral, Lecture 2” (hereafter referred to as “Lecture 2”) of which only manuscript fragments remain, analyzes other contributing factors to South Carolina’s sterile artistic and intellectual environment. One is the familiar complaint about the absence of forums for ideas in rural areas, whereas educated and creative minds can encourage each other in urban, cosmopolitan environments. “To be kept bright, minds must be brought into constant collision kept rubbing together.… This is the true secret of the activity of intellect among citizens. You rarely or never hear of great mental achievement emanating from the country.” However, cities contain their own hazards. Despite Charleston’s intellectual circles, the era’s prosperity has encouraged acquisitiveness and frivolity among residents rather than an appetite for art and ideas. Simms observes with chagrin that “wealth & temptation … beguile from duty time & talent in a sort of life which was fatal to all proper living.” Simms warns his audience that forgoing the support of artists and scholars to instead “yield up to society any large portion of our time is … to sap society itself of all stability & security.”

Rather than “darting & driving through King Street, or the Battery …” in the pursuit of fashion and attention, Charlestonians must esteem art and ideas (“Lecture 2”). This will encourage the artists and intellectuals whose ideas and expression in turn inspire a society, strengthen its moral character, and ensure its posterity. “Lecture 1” ends with an elaborate image of ancient Athens, Simms’s vision of this ideal. Simms visualizes a fervid interest on behalf of all Athenians in the work of the sculptor Phidias as he prepares and unveils “Zeus at Olympia.” “It is a God that speaks to their senses. It is a God that suddenly fills all their souls,” Simms imagines (252). Beyond offering an anecdote about how art redeems the sensual and spiritual capacities of Athenians, elevating their taste and consciousness, Simms is also trying to demonstrate that Phidias’s achievement is Page 202 →representative of Athens’s underlying social character, and, in turn, perpetuates it. The statue itself reflects the values of religious duty and aesthetic elegance, and its execution and its reception are an expression of Athens’s core virtues, including refinement, confidence, and self-sufficiency. These are the same qualities that enable Athens to resist the assaults of antagonists and even time itself. “The great secret of Athens,” explains Simms of its civilization’s posterity, “lay in her mental independence! She made her own books—her own arts; had her own histories, and encouraged her own genius, in every department, esteeming the great poet, dramatist & painter, as fully as she did the great Politician, engineer or Banker. She did not, accordingly, have to wait upon opinion from abroad. She made opinion; not only for home, but for all the world!” (249).

The final speech in the Social Moral series, “The Antagonisms of the Social Moral, North and South” is a more dire admonition about the present state and inevitable future of Carolinians, and, as suggested by the oration’s title, the South as a whole, if they become subject to “opinion from abroad.” Simms’s disastrous experience in the North the previous year provides the context for this warning. He explains that his tour is emblematic of the current state of crisis in sectional relationships, “ris[ing] into an importance which otherwise it would not possess” (253). He explains to his fellow Charlestonians that he went north to try and educate listeners there about not only the inaccuracies of Sumner, but also about the dangers of taking Southerners’ indifference to their history as a license for further aggressions. Simms claims, “I held it vastly important to our future relations, that the truth should be made known, even to unwilling ears, if only to prevent those mistakes of policy, which, under false notions of our neighbors, so frequently lead to the most disastrous consequences” (256). Significant among these “false notions” is the assumption that enslavers are accountable to Northern courts of law and public opinion: “We are to understand, and to make them understand, that, socially & politically, we are their equals; and any effort which they may make us to appeal to their courts of judgment, are aggressions, usurpative & offensive, and a direct invasion of our independence” (258).

The South that is represented in “Antagonisms” is an aggrieved minority partner in the Union, its citizens subject to unjust arrogations by their Northern peers, who were motivated by the South’s desultory social character. The speech is lengthened by a catalog of these injuries, epitomized by Simms’s own experiences. He summarizes and responds to the Northern papers’ criticisms of his defense of South Carolina’s history, and he interprets a second-hand encounter with the Underground Railroad in Rochester as proof of the wanton indifference to Southern rights by a federal government controlled by Northern interests: “Here is an Institution [the Underground Railroad], openly avowed and existing, for carrying on a regular warfare against the sister states of the Confederacy.… Only think of the monstrous anomaly of an organization [the national government], Page 203 →asserting union and common necessities, which beholds, without rebuke or remedy, the perpetual warfare of one section upon the rights of another” (267).

Stepping back from the tour itself, Simms concludes that all spheres of Northern society—religious, political, educational, cultural—have become allied in a desire to end enslavement, which suggests there will be no internal brakes to abolitionism’s momentum: “No circles escape the contagion—no place remains free of the usurpation—no class has the courage, or will, to resist the phrenzy, which, taking the guise of a Crusade, & armed with the coercive will of a vast majority, is inevitable in a community” (280–81). This marks a change in tone from the earlier sectional rhetoric of orations like “The Sources of American Independence” and the previous two speeches in the Social Moral series. Simms had previously suggested that either vigilance or the support of the region’s intellectual class might be sufficient enough to safeguard or reinvigorate the character of the South and thus deter hostile influences. However, in “Antagonisms” he explicitly advocates preparedness for separation or for conflict for the sake of self-preservation. Simms concludes by counseling his listeners to take seriously the intentions of Northern radicals: “my advice is that you take them to mean the very things that they avow. They tell you, honestly enough, that they mean to abolish slavery in the South, that it is a war to the knife … until they succeed in their objects. And I believe them. Do you the same, by way of decent precaution …” (281).

Simms’s characterization of the South’s position and its fate was not unique in 1857, though his advocacy for the patronage of the region’s artistic and intellectual class to try and better its standing was representative of the perspective of a much smaller group of Southerners. Simms’s claims that Northern aspirations to end enslavement were a betrayal of republican principles and amity, for instance, reflected many radical Southerners’ opinions. Robert T. Oliver describes it as a pattern of “reiterating that the States below the Mason-Dixon line were doomed to particular political inequality and inequity” (180). Other Southern historians also perceived this inevitability, including fellow Carolinian William Henry Trescott, who argued at the beginning of the decade that patterns in history demonstrated that “time has changed a compromise of interests into a conflict of sections, and the submission of one, or the separation of both is the only alternative” (11). Victimhood was also a staple sentiment in the orations of politicians such as Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Robert Augustus Toombs, Judah Benjamin, and William Lowndes Yancey (Oliver 182).

Vulnerability also provides the criteria for the affinity necessary for regional cohesion and independence. As Paul Quigley observes, Simms’s and other radicals’ emphasis on Northern aggressiveness toward enslavement “creat[ed] a potent sense of shared victimhood that provided a visceral stimulus for Southern nationalism” (53). By cataloging Northern antagonisms, from insults to the South’s Revolutionary past to attempts to limit and abolish enslavement, Simms created Page 204 →a sense of susceptibility wherein a unified South and ultimately its independence were the only guarantees for maintaining Southerners’ rights. Furthermore, by demonstrating that national comity was already ruptured by Northern disrespect and aggression, Simms offered the emotional prerequisites to independence that more moderate Southerners may have been reluctant to take. As Michael Woods notes, rather than claim that abolitionism “would destroy the emotional bonds of the Union,” Simms and Southern radicals instead “maintained that those bonds had already been dissolved” by Northern aggressions (29). Secession was thus merely a legal recognition of an existing, irreconcilable break.

In assuming responsibility for marshaling public support for independence, the Social Moral lectures seeks to demonstrate how public intellectuals, rather than politicians, are the more authentic, reliable leaders of the South. “Antagonisms,” in particular, is representative of Southern intellectuals’ frustration with politicians’ inability to remedy the South’s ostensible victimhood at the hands of Northerners in the union. In particular, Simms’s denouncement of “[t]he office seeker, and office holder, to whom fleshpots are precious things …” echoed criticism that Southern politicians were too beholden to the Democratic Party and their own political fortunes rather than the rights of the South, and thus could no longer be trusted to have the region’s best interests in mind (281). Simms advises disregarding the counsel of Democratic politicians who choose to dismiss Republican policies as mere rhetoric rather than a genuine threat. Simms alleges that “[t]he Politician, anxious to save his party, swears there’s nothing in it” (281). Rather than take that chance, the Social Moral series advocates instead for the intellectual class’s warranted leadership. Faust summarizes how the members of the region’s “Sacred Circle” believed intellectuals had a pair of responsibilities in public life: “to free the Southern mind from the domination of corrupt demagogues, both northern and southern, and to replace their leadership with that of the spiritually elect. This moral elite would release southerners from a reign of political corruption by subjecting them to the principles of truth in which alone man might find true freedom” (Sacred Circle 107). Simms’s rhetoric of injustice may be a strategy to illustrate how public intellectuals inspire a citizenry to action to preserve their autonomy. By cultivating a collective sense of inequality and dishonor, Simms assumes the role he outlines in the Social Moral series, stimulating Southerners to a more robust vigilance of their rights and encouraging defiance of Northern attempts on them.

However, Simms’s and the Sacred Circle’s faith in their own leadership abilities encountered resistance amid the same complacency that Simms identified as the cause for the South’s incipient vulnerability. Charleston’s reaction to the Social Moral series is a conveniently representative example. In contrast to the dire warnings and urgent calls to action of the Social Moral series, the responses by Charleston newspapers were affably noncommittal. The Charleston Mercury Page 205 →of May 26 observed that in “Lecture 1” of the series Simms “dwelt, with great force, upon a leading idea, that the South had always left herself to be delineated, socially, politically, and morally, by her enemies.” Yet though the Mercury ostensibly understood the oration’s theme, it conspicuously avoided commenting on Simms’s indictment of Carolinians’ indifference to intellectuals and artists. “We attempt no analysis of his very interesting lecture, which we hope will be soon published,” the writer added (“Mr. Simms’s Lectures” 2). Likewise, The Charleston Daily Courier of May 26 flattered “Lecture 1” in generic terms, observing that the “discourse itself in matter and moral, was one richly stored lesson and utterance of wisdom and well-ripened sagacity.” But it, too, averred responding, explaining that it “would only be unjust to the lecturer, and would fail in the thought quickening impulses and suggestive freshness which accompanied the lecturer…” Those whose thoughts may have been quickened the night before were few, for “the audience in numbers was not as we would have wished,” observed the Courier (“Simms’ Lectures” 1). Attendance on June 1 for “Antagonisms” was better, the “largest of his audiences,” the Courier of June 3 reported, and they enjoyed the “veritable” words of Simms, “who enchained the attention” of his listeners (“Mr. Simms’ Lecture on Monday Night” 2).

Simms’s own assessment of the Social Moral series and his thoughts on Charlestonians’ reception of them do not exist. He did not print the former, and extant correspondence contains no references to the critical reaction. Doubtless, following the vitriol of the Northern newspapers the previous year, he was at least cheered by the positive, albeit restrained, response in his hometown. But despite the praise, the apparent reluctance or lack of desire to engage seriously with his message, particularly any acknowledgement of the relevance of a native intellectual and artistic class to the autonomy of the region, may have reinforced his belief that his warnings were not being taken seriously. Of course, three years later, South Carolina did in fact assert its prerogatives and secede from the Union following the victory of a Republican president. Yet the Palmetto State never embraced its intellectual and artistic classes in ways Simms thought were appropriate, which epitomized his life-long conflicted relationship to the culture with which he most identified. Simms never stopped trying, though, probably because he took solace in seeming relevant to the political situation, even if his audiences ignored his appeal for the support of intellectuals. As Faust explains, Simms and other Southern intellectuals “defined themselves both as neglected prophets, speaking truth to an unheeding world, and as stewards, destined to provide practical guidance for the human race” (Sacred Circle x).

In contrast, Northern listeners proved to be especially and tenaciously attentive. The 1856 and 1857 speeches proved to be an inflection point in Simms’s career and legacy as a national man of letters. Simms’s comments in “Antagonisms” that the negative reviews of Northern newspapers proved “fatal to my mission” in Page 206 →1856 were only partially true; the damage to his reputation lasted longer than he thought (272). Simms would resume speaking in familiar towns and small cities in the South prior to the Civil War, but he would never again attempt a sustained speaking tour, even after 1865. Moreover, as Miriam Shillingsburg has observed, memories of the 1856 insults may have contributed to the diminishment of his postwar stature among major publishers and critics (“Failed,” 199). Simms experienced difficulties having his new work reviewed, fueling a gradual eclipse in his national reputation that lasted until the late twentieth century. Thus in an irony unforeseen by Simms, it may not have been that his words were heeded too little by his countrymen, but that his words were remembered too vividly.