Following his major debut as an orator in 1840 in front of his local agricultural society, Simms received requests to speak before different audiences in South Carolina and beyond. The invitations to address lyceums, historical societies, undergraduate organizations, and municipal celebrations in the first half of the 1840s reflect Simms’s growing prominence as an author and public intellectual.

Extant manuscripts and correspondence suggest that American history tended to be the focus of the orations Simms wrote and gave in the early 1840s, including “The Social Principle” (1842), “The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the Purposes of Art in Fiction” (1842), and “The Sources of American Independence” (1844). The two addresses chosen for this section, “The Social Principle” and “The Sources of American Independence,” reflect Simms’s understanding of historical processes and their relevance to contemporary public affairs. Both orations interpret the stimuli for the “progress of society” (“The Social Principle” 76). In “The Social Principle,” Simms alleges that it was the domesticity of British colonists that was responsible for their successful settlement of North America. Subsequent generations of Anglo-American colonists inherited this disposition, and their regard for their homes led to their unexpected success during the War of Independence. In “Sources,” Simms traces Americans’ love of freedom back to Great Britain’s early medieval period, arguing that the American Revolution was the legacy of a hereditary Anglo-Saxon spirit of liberty.¹

“The Social Principle” and “The Sources of American Independence” also address the modern threats to the continuation of this national progress. In short, the moral character responsible for America’s settlement and independence is waning. “The Social Principle” argues that Americans’ allegiance to their homes and their communities is being eroded by a spirit of materialism. Similar to the claims of the “Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration” two years earlier, Simms claims the lucrative lands and opportunities in the west are a temptation, facilitating migration. The second threat was more sectional in nature: “Sources” claims aggressive Northern abolitionism endangers the autonomy of Southerners. Simms believed both were existential perils. First, mobility diminished the value historically attached to the home, which Simms believed was the repository of society’s cultural virtues, as David Moltke-Hansen explains in his biographical Page 60 →introduction. An itinerant people thus imperil one of the sources of their moral character (others being agriculture, the institution of slavery, faith, and gendered spheres, as the previous two orations argued).² Second, the longevity of a society is endangered if its people do not assertively defend their prerogatives. The past demonstrated that complacency and deference were dangerous: “People … were not unchanging.… They either advanced or were overrun by history” (Moltke-Hansen, “Biographical Overview” xviii).³ “The Social Principle” and “The Sources of American Independence” seek to inspire the attitudes necessary to reverse these trends, avoid those consequences, and sustain the Nation’s and region’s progress. “The Social Principle” encourages loyalty to hereditary homes and communities, also making the case that domesticity’s relationship to the arts can influence the moral character of society. “Sources” encourages its listeners’ vigilance against infringements on Southerners’ Anglo-Saxon birthright of self-determination.

The occasion for 1842’s “The Social Principle” was the anniversary of the establishment of the Erosophic Society at the University of Alabama, founded in 1831. The Erosophic (roughly translated, the love of wisdom) Society was the oldest of the two undergraduate literary organizations at the university located in Tuscaloosa, then the state capital. Extracurricular societies ostensibly existed for the purpose of cultivating their members’ knowledge of literary, historical, and cultural topics, which probably accounts for the invitation to Simms to speak. However, the societies were also opportunities for undergraduates to learn about and practice debating other topics, observes James B. Sellers (176, 178). Michael O’Brien notes that such societies offered “a training for oligarchy,” the members imagining themselves in courtrooms and statehouses after graduation (1:422). The lectures the societies heard from guest speakers synthesized the humanities with these ambitions. Alfred L. Brophy’s survey of antebellum orations at the University of Alabama, for instance, reveals an emphasis on the relevance of education to national progress, social stability, and civic leadership (379).

The themes of Simms’s address on December 13, 1842, likewise “celebrated the role that education might serve in leading progress” (Brophy 380). In “The Social Principle,” Simms argues that antebellum Americans, Southerners in particular, are not perpetuating the characteristics of their British colonial forebearers that led to the successful settlement of North America and, later, Americans’ eventual independence from the mother country. The oration’s assessment of the nature of progress begins with a comparison of the motivations and the experiences of the continent’s European explorers and colonizers. Simms attributes the Spanish and French failures to establish permanent communities in North America to the fact that the disposition of their colonists was soldierly. Simms imagines that the Spanish and French were brave and earnest but “lacked the only one [quality] Page 61 →which makes conquest permanent.… That domestic feeling” (80). In contrast, British colonists were ostensibly less martial in their colonization, were from allegedly less prestigious backgrounds, and were comparatively under resourced. But because “[t]hey came to colonize and not to conquer,” they were successful in spite of these handicaps (77).

Simms explains that the British were inspired to recreate “the sacred character of home” that colonists had either left behind or that was taken from them due to conflict or persecution (78). This devotion to the “social virtues” that home and family life encourage were also what ultimately inspired English-speaking colonists to revolt against Great Britain. Simms claims that by the eighteenth century, Americans allegedly felt the crown and its colonial representatives were committing “abuses and usurpations” against colonists’ sacred hearths (79). American patriots rebelled to preserve their homes, “the repose and security of society,” not to resist unreasonable taxation, says Simms (79). This willingness to defend their homes and the values they nurture revealed American colonists had assumed “custody of the social principle” from their British ancestors (80).

However, Americans’ esteem for their homes and communities had waned during the post-Revolutionary period of nation-building, according to Simms. “The Social Principle” theorizes that “[t]he latent enthusiasm of the English character, grew into flame, in that progress from enterprize to enterprize, from danger to danger, which distinguished the career of the Anglo-American … [and] English imperiousness became American impetuosity” (95). Confidence born from Revolutionary successes and postwar growth led to a modern-day reckless impulsivity. This tended to be gratified in wasteful, materialistic pursuits. Simms alleges it “stimulates largely, and equally, our thirst for acquisition and the profligacy with which we waste our gains” (95). The ancestral communities that British colonists so carefully established were among the victims. An “insatiate rage for gain” and affordable, fertile western lands diminish the traditional “veneration for the soil” of one’s ancestors, says Simms, leading to the “desertion” of old homesteads, including the graves of elders (96, 85). Rather than imagining the frontier as the site of new communities and networks of kinship, though, Simms perceives its absence of domestic institutions and traditions that provide order and discipline as an invitation for Americans to further neglect their hereditary moral character. “In degree, all wanderers cease to be laborers,” Simms claims. “Their habits become desultory and unsettled. They obey impulses rather than laws, and toil in obedience to their humours rather than their necessities” (93). Simms imagines the consequences for his listeners. “The Social Principle” invites the audience to consider “the change produced in the case of an individual family, emigrating to a wild from a long settled region of country. The restraining presence of society once withdrawn—the provocation to civilization which the Page 62 →ancient customs of a settled neighborhood once inspired,—at an end,—and how indifferent do the wanderers become to all appearances.—Into what a miserable hovel does the father and the husband crowd his little family, once so accustomed to all the luxuries and charms of civilization” (93).

This interpretation of America’s colonial and early 19th-century history as an evolutionary—and perhaps devolutionary—process is characteristic of Simms’s stadialism. Rooted in Scottish historical philosophy from the previous century, stadialism posits four phases that societies universally pass through: hunting/gathering, herding, agricultural-based sedentary societies, and, ultimately, more commercially focused communities (Dekker 76). George Dekker observes that Scottish historians such as Adam Ferguson, William Robertson, and Dugald Stewart “believed that society was stepping forward further than it was falling backward” (76). However, the realization of this final stage did not necessarily entail the permanence of civilization. Progress became a liability if it was measured solely in terms of economics, technology, individualism, or by other pragmatic criteria. Dekker says the Scottish historians “feared the withering effects on essential human charities and relations of a society divided, for the sake of material progress, into wholly separate and self-interested callings” (83). Lacking equivalent moral development, such societies—Rome was looked at as an example—were liable to be victims of their own material success; it would become a cancer that would prove fatal to the permanence of a society.

The universality of the historical experience that stadialism imagined, and the susceptibility of progress to stagnate or even reverse itself that it posited, created the need for intellectuals to interpret the trajectory of history for the benefit of their society. Simms and his intellectual peers in the South believed that “in the records of past events lay the empirical data for the derivation of social laws,” says Drew Gilpin Faust, and students of history were necessary to extrapolate them (Sacred Circle 73). Simms, along with George Frederick Holmes, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, James Henry Hammond, and, to a lesser degree, Edmund Ruffin, capitalized on this opportunity to leverage historical enquiry into public awareness of what constituted desirable progress. In “The Social Principle” Simms characterizes this kind of work as a “duty,” and he invites the University of Alabama’s young scholars “to inquire … by what agency we have triumphed,—what means have effected our successes” (76). What is apparent about the past respecting domesticity is still relevant to today: “The more we examine this proposition, by a reference to British and other histories, the more certain, we imagine, will appear its truth. Having security in the homestead … and a farther appreciation of the vast importance to civilization of a community, at once stationary, yet susceptible of progress … how naturally does the man improve his condition” (82).

Simms is carefully emphasizing here the connection between man, homestead, community, and civilization. What was historically true for the moral Page 63 →character of the man would be historically true for the moral character of his society given their contingent relationship. Sean Busick explains that Simms believed “history was intimately linked with ideas of nationalism and progress. In order to be truly great, a nation needs to progress morally” (7–8). For example, Simms reminds his listeners that “[w]e obey the laws of progress as promptly as any other nation—perhaps much more so” (101). As post-Revolutionary events revealed, moral progress would not keep pace with its material equivalent on its own accord. Without some governing consciousness or established institutions to guide progress, Simms and his intellectual peers imagined that it would, at best, be defined by material and utilitarian benchmarks and, at worst, lead to anarchy that would foreshadow the end of the new nation (Busick 8). Already, Simms warns in “The Social Principle,” the rampant pragmatism and avarice of American society has twisted notions of what its citizens imagine to be improvement. “We hear ad nauseam, the applause of those toils or inventions which may be applied to the acquisition or the preservation of property, and this seems to be the whole amount of our national idea of progress” (98). The desertion of old homes and communities to migrate west and make a quick fortune epitomized this: It ostensibly marked material progress in terms of the expansion of American borders and economic output, but “The Social Principle” argues that it ignored the precedent of early Anglo-American colonial history.

To avoid the examples of Rome’s fall and Great Britain’s later colonial failures, progress had to follow the lessons of history. James Everett Kibler Jr. and David Moltke-Hansen explain that Simms believed progress “had to be carefully considered and carefully, intelligently, and vigorously managed” (“Man of Letters” 10). Simms’s and others’ historical analysis showed that the “restraining presence of society” and the “ancient customs of a settled neighborhood” reliably controlled growth and change and led to sustained national prominence. At the heart of both was the home, hence its centrality to “The Social Principle.” Simms believed it to be “the center of cultural production and reproduction,” Moltke-Hansen explains in his biographical overview.⁴ The oration argues that the values necessary for the orderly operation of society are here first taught and nurtured. Simms argues “[o]ur reform must begin … at home—in each home—in all homes—by the hearths we are too prone to abandon” (100). They prepare citizens to exercise their rights and fulfill their responsibilities outside the home, especially to each other and their community rather than in the pursuit of self-interest.⁵

“The Social Principle” helps the student members of the Erosophic Society, who, qualified by their learning to be the vanguard of reform, make these connections. The value of domesticity, says Simms, “provides always against the future,—makes home comfortable,—cares for the feeble,—exalts the woman,—protects her with no common courage, and hedges her in with a pains-taking solicitude that suffers not the winds of heaven to blow too rudely upon her Page 64 →cheeks. She, in turn, thus guarded,—thus elevated and endowed,—becomes a creature of superior sentiments,—refines the worship which she receives, and softens the stern bosom which she charms” (80). Home life fosters the human relationships that provide social security, not to mention the complementary values of patriarchal strength and feminine moral suasion—all virtues needed for moral progress. “The Social Principle” likewise illustrates how domesticity cultivates authority, deference, and duty. Simms asks his listeners to visualize a “snug mansion always distinguished by plenty,—the cheerful fireside, equally clean and unpretending, enlivened by the happiest faces, and the sweetest evening recreations,—the curtained chamber,—the decorated walls,—the order which regulates without being seen,—the authority which is felt without being heard. The prompt, unpresuming attendance of servants,—the reverential bearing of children,—and that warm but subdued current of domestic love” (82). Even the fastidiousness and orderliness of the decor reflect and inspire respect for order and authority, which itself is an exercise learned and practiced in walls of the home.

In addition to the home’s ability to foster the virtues that guide (and sustain) healthy progress, “The Social Principle” posits that the home encourages the sensibilities that appreciate art, especially literature. This would seem to be a curious digression were it not for Simms’s own esteem of art and literature, which he likely assumed his student audience shared. Simms boldly claims that “next to religion, the business of Literature, is the noblest concern of human society” (86). Its analogous ability to develop moral character, encouraging the individual to higher and better aspirations, testifies to its ability to manage progress as well. Simms’s hypothetical household, for instance, posits:

[i]f gentle spirits make it desirable within, the busy fingers of an equally gentle fancy render it attractive without. Vines and flowers encircle the habitation, birds … fill the atmosphere with song,—whilst art, with a rival melody, astonishes and provokes the imitative ability of the natural musician. With the progress of one taste to perfection, is the birth of another. With newer desires of sentiment, industry is impelled to exertion, that the demands of sentiment shall be satisfied; and thus it is that men advance, by the natural and moral process of accumulation, step by step, to the possession, not only of superior fortune, but of superior refinement. (80)

Art ostensibly contributes three things to moral progress. First, it elevates taste and imagination to a state “of superior refinement” than transcends the utilitarian values of modernity. Second, similar to other social touchstones like slavery, agriculture, and domesticity, art cultivates the intellectual sensibilities and virtues of people, offering a counterweight to self-interestedness. Finally, the existence of Page 65 →an artistic canon demonstrates that a society had reached a stage of civilization ripe for its culture’s expression. “Literature … and the sister arts were the crowning glory” of a civilization, explains Moltke-Hansen, a validation of its place on the world stage and in the pages of history (“Ordered Progress” 130). Society needed to be sedentary enough, though, to foster the necessary preconditions. Hence Simms’s demands in the final minutes of “The Social Principle” that we “abridge our propensity to wander,” “concentrate our energies upon the little spot in which we take up our abodes,” and practice “a more devout adherence to the laws of domestic comfort,” eschewing the material forms of progress that falsely promised happiness (100, 101). In an evocative conclusion, Simms tells his young listeners, “I do not believe that all the steam power in the world can bring happiness to one poor human heart. Still less can I believe that all the rail-roads in the world can carry one poor soul to heaven” (102).

Though Simms was not alone among his intellectual peers in imagining that emigration posed a threat to the home, art, and, consequently, moral character, James David Miller observes that “[f]or most planters, emigrant or otherwise, their society was not dying; it was in the process of changing into something else” (58). Consequently, admonishments like “The Social Principle” “left most slaveholders cold” (Miller 58). The undergraduate lovers of wisdom at the University of Alabama apparently felt otherwise. In their letter soliciting the manuscript of the oration for publication, members of the Erospohic Society expressed their appreciation for the “highly interesting and deeply instructive manner” of “The Social Principle.”⁶ The reviewer for Tuscaloosa’s Independent Mirror echoed their estimation, describing it as “one of the most eloquent and polished Discourses ever listened to in the South-West” (qtd. in Letters 6:59n5). It may have been false modesty, but Simms’s own assessment of “The Social Principle” was more restrained. He told fellow novelist John Pendleton Kennedy that the oration was “a performance to which I attach no great value myself” (Letters 5:382). The pamphlet version of the speech was reviewed by Thomas Caute Reynolds in a July 1843 notice in the Southern Quarterly Review. Reynolds characterizes Simms as “a vigorous writer and a patriot” and claims the oration “contains more matters worthy of note, remembrance and commendation, than most of the productions ordinarily elicited by such occasions” (247). Elsewhere in the review, though, Reynolds does suggest that Simms overstates his argument. He suspects Simms “carried his theory of home rather too far” in claiming that it was one of the impetuses for British emigration and American independence (242). He also disputes Simms’s claim that the abundance of western lands contributes to the desertion of “paternal estates” (244). Thus in spite of his appreciation for the oration’s style, Reynolds was, like Southern planters, cool to the argument.

Simms’s next major oration, “The Sources of American Independence,” an Independence Day address in Aiken, South Carolina, in 1844, also addresses Page 66 →American history. Not unexpectedly, this was typically the focus of a genre of oration dedicated to a national holiday. Fourth of July speakers were invited by communities or patriotic organizations “to recall the historical significance of the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence or to use the occasion to interpret contemporary life for their neighbors,” says Howard Hastings Martin (1). However, by the 1840s, Southern iterations of Independence Day addresses were more circumspect about celebrating the birth of a Union that seemed increasingly indifferent or hostile to sectional interests.⁷ Southerners interpreted the increasingly vocal antislavery activism of Northerners as violating the respect ostensibly owed to Southern states and their institutions. As a consequence, Southern Independence Day addresses began offering interpretations that “praised the states as the guardians of individual liberties,” observes Martin (157). By the end of the decade, says Paul Quigley, “[m]any celebrations of the Fourth … were marked by an emphatically conditional unionism” predicated on whether Southern autonomy would be respected (95).

This political valence characterizes the historical subjects of “The Sources of American Independence.” Politics may have also contributed to Simms giving the address in the first place. He was running for the state legislature in 1844, and the invitation to speak may have been arranged by his political supporters.⁸ Just a little over two weeks from the occasion he wrote to his friend James Lawson in New York to share that “I am appointed, only think at this time of day, to deliver the fourth of July oration at the town of Aiken in the interior.” The parenthetical comment suggests his “appointment” may have been a last-minute opportunity for additional public exposure. He had recently been speaking on the campaign trail, for in the same letter he tells Lawson that “[m]y neighbors have put me in nomination for the Legislature. They have had me making stump speeches” (Letters 1:419). Despite the quick turnaround, though, Simms completed “The Sources of American Independence” by the end of the month (Letters 1:421).

James Perrin Warren describes “Sources” as “an abstract narrative of spiritual and ethnological development,” beginning with British history, then American Revolutionary history, then culminating in contemporary events (145). Simms promises his listeners that an exploration of the ancient transatlantic roots of Americans’ freedom is necessary to understand the national holiday and the spirit it celebrates. “What a sufficient subject in itself,” he enthuses, “to trace the gradual progress of English liberty, from the days of Hereward the Saxon, to the period made famous in the usurpation of Cromwell!” (106). It is in “the study of that long conflict of the Saxon with his Norman conqueror … [that] we trace the first dawnings of our own emancipation” as an independent people (107). Simms does not actually devote much time to British precedents for American freedom other than to reference leaders and conflicts traditionally associated with self-determination. Instead, he is more interested in the teleology that Page 67 →leads to America. Here, the “sovereign principles” associated with the Anglo-Saxons’ struggles in Britain “accompanied our grandsires into the wilderness,” and the “American Revolution, was but a closing act of the great drama begun on the fatal field of Hastings” (107). In fact, English-speaking America “was the appointed battlefield for European liberty” between the freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon and the inflexible Norman (108). However, now the former was assumed to be the American colonists, and the latter, the British themselves.

Simms explains that North America was the providential site for the flourishing of liberty because of the absence of institutions and orders invested in maintaining a status quo of hereditary deference, including the monarchy, the aristocracy, and an established church. In addition, the scale of the land itself ennobled the character of Americans and prepared them for the responsibilities of freedom: “The broad wildernesses of our forest land … were as necessary to the development of the natural man for the unsealing of his mental vision—for his extrication from that social training, which, in highly sophisticated communities, is apt to emasculate the simplicity of a great soul” (114). Consequently, “[s] eventy years of self-training, in the new world, added to the glorious inheritance of thought, and character, and ancient experience, which had come from their European ancestry, had brought out all the vigor of the Anglo-Saxon race;—had opened to their eyes the most startling visions of a great truth,—visions full of the most glorious promise,—by which they were lifted, in moral respects, very far above the great body of the people they had left” (111).

Similar to “The Social Principle” two years earlier, Simms denies that unfair taxation precipitated the Revolution. “It was not because of any miserable tax on stamped paper, or any half-penny duty upon teas. It is high time that these absurdities should be blotted from our books,” he grumbles (112). The real reason for the Revolution, Simms repeats, was that a cadre of American leadership was intellectually mature enough by 1776 to lead their people themselves. “It was a revolt of the native mind of the country, confident of its strength, assured of its resources, and resolving, with equal patriotism and courage, that no nation can be permanently safe which is not under the direction of the native intellect” (112). Local leadership had emerged—“Sources” cites “the Henries, the Franklins, the Gadsdens, the Adamses, the Marions, and the Washingtons”—to assume responsibility for American affairs, but it was prevented from doing so by Great Britain (112). This was a “wrong done to the native genius,” says Simms. He is careful here to emphasize that it is in “the advent of the superior intellect that we are to behold the first proofs of a people’s capacity for freedom” and that “self government does not imply, as is sometimes erroneously imagined, the universal diffusion of a capacity for rule among the great body of a people” Similar to the “Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration” and “The Sense of the Beautiful,” Simms argues that abstract ideas about innate equality are an “absurdity” Not every Page 68 →member of a community has to be—or even can be—suited for freedom, claims “Sources”; the best minds of a people can govern the progress of the rest in their appropriate capacity.

After a brief survey of South Carolina’s valor in the Revolutionary War to demonstrate its people’s devotion to liberty, “Sources” pivots to more recent history. Simms interprets patterns of events in the 1840s as posing new threats to the self-governance of South Carolinians, the inheritors of the independence-loving Anglo-Saxons, in ways that seem analogous to pre-Revolutionary circumstances. There is a new adversary that allegedly presumes to impose an inimicable authority on Carolinians and their rights. In the years since the end of the Revolution, Simms says South Carolina has “firmly and honorably held to all the conditions of our compact” of the Union. “We never penetrate the borders of a sister State to interfere with its laws, to denounce its customs, to disturb the harmony of its society. We pry not into their concerns, vex not their abodes with our surveillance,—disturb none of their securities,” Simms assures his audience. “We conceive the duties of forbearance, to be quite as imperative as those of performance” within the Union, but, he claims, the same respect and deference deference has not been extended to Carolina (117).

The perpetrator of these improprieties is “the people of Massachusetts Bay” (117). Perhaps Bostonians themselves, but more likely Northern abolitionist groups and politicians in general for whom Massachusetts and the Puritans had become metaphors. In a series of rhetorical questions, Simms demands answers he already knew regarding their alleged lack of respect for South Carolina, a putative obligation due to a state on equal footing in the Union. Simms asks whether Northern abolitionists have “yielded the same deference to our intellect, the same heed to our securities,” if they do “not hourly encroach upon our rights, insult our pride and denounce our institutions,” and if they have “not converted the halls of our common council … into an arena for most fearful conflict, and the least justifiable passions” (117–18). These affronts to intellectual freedom, physical security, sovereignty, honor, and political decorum all have to deal with, of course, enslavement. The “war upon our domestic institutions must have an end,” Simms demands, includes attempts to limit the westward expansion of enslavement by preventing the annexation of Texas (118). “Sources” reminds its audience that the same Anglo-Saxon spirit of freedom that motivated American patriots still lingers in the character of Carolinians today, and that encroachments on South Carolina’s autonomy will enflame it. “The same sense of mental independence which prompted our ancestors to enter the field in 1776, with the British oppressor, will make us warm now, and watchful, to resent every assault upon the province of our local government, from whatever quarter it may come,” warns Simms (118).

Page 69 →Simms leaves the door open to the possibility that the South ultimately may have to leave the Union to preserve its sovereignty, its honor, and the moral character its white residents derived from the allegedly paternalistic practice of enslavement. This may have been paradoxical in an address on the anniversary of American independence if Simms had not already established that a spirit of liberty predated the Union and that abolitionists were in violation of the national compact that followed the war. For the moment, though, Simms advises his listeners to be patient but watchful. Texas will likely join the Union as a slave state, and Northern aggressions are a test of the national compact. Simms explains, “[w]e are now only engaged in the trial of our institutions. Let us give them a fair trial. Our experiment was one of equal difficulty and novelty. We must not despair of its final success, because of the vicissitudes which attend its progress” (122). If secession should occur at some future date, “Sources” claims that Northerners’ rashness will be responsible, and the potential consequences “shall mock and mortify the whole world’s hope of Liberty” (122–23).

Simms thus imagines an ancient racial conflict possibly playing out along sectional lines in the near future. He was not alone among Southerners in associating national and, increasingly, regional identities with early medieval identities, nor was he unique among Independence Day speakers in associating Anglo-Saxonism with liberty (O’Brien 1:321; Martin 180). References to “race,” as O’Brien observes, were “used by Southerners with marked eclecticism, though most often as a synonym for a ‘people,’” differentiated by characteristics other than skin color (1:233). Thus “the Anglo-Saxon race” could be characterized broadly as “a stubborn, an invincible people—not easily deceived—not easily driven from their purpose, and never to be mocked in their hope,” and “Normans” could be identified by their “despotism,” explains “Sources” (110, 107) This criteria of race and people worked to the benefit of Southern commentators like Simms, who, while compiling a selective historical tradition to interpret present circumstances, could swap in protagonists and antagonists as part of an ongoing struggle to achieve the final imagined outcome of freedom. “Sources” also uses these white racial categories to legitimize speculative regional differences between North and South based on labor. As will also be apparent in Simms’s orations in the late 1850s, free labor and enslaved labor were imagined as the basis of the collective character of the (white) inhabitants of their respective regions. Different categories of white “race” like the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons neatly accommodated and helped naturalize the emergent conflict between abolitionists and enslavers.

Moreover, a racial taxonomy founded on assumed shared characteristics and values eventually provides a rationale for disunion, which “Sources” tentatively broaches. Quigley observes that there was “a generally accepted differentiation Page 70 →between a government—the institutional apparatus of a nation-state—and a nation—a group of people who shared common interests, mutual affection, and a national identity” (65). In other words, the people could justifiably leave the government if it impinged on their essential character. Hence the validity of America’s revolution from Great Britain when its leading minds had sufficiently matured to assume responsibility for their people, as well as Simms’s claims that the Union in 1844 is contingent. “The common cause did not make us a common family,” he is careful to point out to Carolinians, “and the government which grew out of common concessions, can only be maintained by a continuance of such concessions. The ligaments which now chiefly bind us together, are those of our political union,—a tie, the value of which, as it was originally the fruit of compromise, can never be beyond calculation” (122). In other words, it is not a covenant to be assumed to be permanent if “concessions” to South Carolina and its institutions are not made by the people and elected representatives of the North. It would not be disloyalty to the Union if South Carolina left. The federal government ceased to fit the character of South Carolina’s people, and their freedom within it was being curtailed by Northern encroachments. As long as Southerners, as a people, had progressed sufficiently, and as long as they had mature leaders ready to assume responsibility for independence, history would ostensibly justify secession.

As Quigley, Michael Woods, and Robert T. Oliver have all observed, Southerners imagined themselves as being victimized in what was supposed to be an association of equals within the Union, which “must not be made the instrument for the annoyance or the destruction of its individual members” (118). Simms is like other speakers of the time period in portraying political debates on enslavement as an insult to the honor of enslavers and as potentially inciting violence among enslaved people themselves. “Our pride, not less than our securities, requires that the discussion of this matter shall not be suffered to invade the halls of our National Council,” he asserts (118). But Simms, again similar to other Southern speakers and politicians, also perceived that Southerners were being forced into “a minority status in the Union” on several fronts (Quigley 58). The battle over the annexation of Texas, for instance, was a proxy fight in the conflict over enslavement. If the newly independent Republic joined the Union, enslavement not only had room to expand, but the balance in legislative power in Washington, DC, would be preserved.⁹ “Without this balance of power, we have no securities.… A vast domain, essential to our safety, and, with time, to the natural expansion of the race, is not to be flung from our grasp to satisfy a sectional prejudice, and secure votes for hungry candidates … indifferent to the great destinies and the superior prospects of the nation” (121). Likewise, the Tariff of 1842 appeared to protect the interests of Northern manufacturers at the expense of Southern planters, who depended on international markets to sell Page 71 →cotton and consumed British imports, which were now more expensive. Simms decries these alleged “miserable abuses of the tariff,—the creation of unnecessary treasures, unequally gathered for still more unequal distribution” (119).

Simms was not quite ready to propose that South Carolina was safer out of the Union than within it—that would come in 1847.¹⁰ In addition to giving the Union time to demonstrate its promise, he knew it would take time for Southerners to progress to the point that that they were prepared for independence. “Sources” suggests that one of the delaying factors was leadership. As Moltke-Hansen observes in his biographical overview, citing Simms’s review of Francois Guizot’s Democracy in France (1849), the orator believed that individuals of special character were necessary to assume responsibility for managing the destiny of a society. “‘[T]he true governor, as [Thomas] Carlyle call[ed] him—the king man—’ guided rather than impeded the forces of change and progress” (xvii). However, these figures in the South were lacking, especially compared to their Revolutionary predecessors. Simms believed that “most politicians failed as representatives because they were too careerist and not sufficiently visionary and decisive,” explain Kibler and Moltke-Hansen (“Man of Letters” 3). Simms imagines someone who will serve the interests of the South alone, and like Patrick Henry and his generation, rally Southerners to a common understanding of their shared interests and mobilize their strength in the spirit of Anglo-Saxon struggle. Simms imagines a “statesman, who, armed only with the sufficient spear of truth, shall make a political progress among us—who shall devote his genius and his life to this consummation,—whose eloquence shall bind conflicting parties,—who shall compel the deference of sordid politicians,—and teach, with the eloquence of a perfect faith, the single principle, ‘the South, and the South all together,’—and shall succeed in rallying our united powers in the great domestic issues which are before us …” (120). Noteworthy here is the distinction Simms draws between the “sordid” politician and a statesman characterized by his “genius.”

Simms might have had in mind his friend James Henry Hammond, then governor of South Carolina, as such a leader. It is also possible that Simms was branding himself as a statesman that would represent the interests and the character of his potential constituents (and like-minded people elsewhere) rather than those of South Carolina’s political factions. However, it is equally plausible Simms was imagining public intellectuals like himself and his “sacred circle” (including Tucker, Holmes, and Ruffin as well as Hammond) as encouraging a regional consciousness among Southerners as well as their awareness of their rights and the threat posed to them. Simms wonders aloud whether there exists “some one great patriarchal mind among us … with the view to this glorious consummation!” (119). He reflects on the possibilities of the present situation: “why should there not be gatherings of the people,—and great orators—in this[?]” (119). Like the statesman’s “eloquence [that] shall bind conflicting parties,” similar to his ability Page 72 →to “teach, with the eloquence of a perfect faith,” and akin to his “deep thought and searching eloquence,” public intellectuals possess the vision, articulateness, and persuasiveness that are the requisite qualities for leadership (120, 112). Simms may be trying to demonstrate, as Warren observes was typical of public intellectuals and public speakers of this time period, that “through eloquence, the prophetic genius exercises a quasi-sacred form of stewardship on the audience” (143).

Campaigning for office or his desire to influence audiences beyond Aiken may have informed Simms’s agreement to have the oration published by Aiken’s town council. The pamphlet was in proofs by the end of July and was printed by August 12 (Letters 1:428, 430). Simms apparently sent a copy to The Charleston Mercury, if not other newspapers, whose August 19, 1844, review observed that “[t]he sketch of the progress of Anglo-Saxon liberty … is full of animation and freshness.” In what Simms may have imagined was an endorsement of his ideas, if not his eloquence, the paper quoted at length the end of the oration, given its relevance to “subjects of present interest … which will be found worthy of study” (2).

Simms’s orations of the early 1840s reflect his abiding interest in history, but also the purposes for which he used it. The cycle of history and the character of people were means of understanding the laws that governed present-day circumstances: They revealed warning signs, and they suggested opportunities for moral progress. Public speaking was certainly not the only way by which Simms aspired to share these messages directly with the public whose minds he sought to shape.¹¹ But due to the prestige conferred upon oratory, especially in the antebellum South, his addresses assumed a cachet not associated with even the cultural periodicals he edited. But as Miller recognizes, Southerners seemed less inclined to heed admonitions about moral progress or the circumstances affecting it. The opportunities afforded by migration to the Old Southwest, especially relating to the sustained profitability of enslavement, not to mention the racial privilege founded on it, mitigated receptiveness to the problems that history suggested accompanied geographic mobility. Simms found more ready listeners in his interpretation of the Nation’s revolutionary past as a justification for Southern independence. On this topic, Simms’s message dovetailed with the interests of enslavers. Later in the 1840s and into the 1850s, Southern radicals would assert that “slavery and the civilization that had developed around it provided the South with a distinctive national identity,” one that “warranted—even demanded—political independence” (Quigley 50). Simms would continue to advocate for this distinctive identity for the rest of his career.