William Gilmore Simms’s 1840 address to a South Carolina agricultural society and his 1870 lecture before a Charleston horticultural association were congruent bookends to his long public speaking career. Simms, a planter and avid gardener, thought often and deeply about the land, what grew on it, and man’s relationship to it.¹ Simms’s first oration and his final oration offered occasions for sharing these perspectives. Both speeches also address a broader array of topics that seem nominally less germane to agriculture and horticulture. The reason for this is because the orations were as much responses to moments of seismic social change as they were to invitations from the respective organizations. The year 1840 represented an ostensible environmental, demographic, and political crisis, precipitated by the diminished fertility of cropland. In 1870, challenges to the South’s traditional gender and racial hierarchies in the wake of the Confederacy’s defeat were on Simms’s mind. Simms’s assumption of the roles of interpreter and guide for the public during critical moments like these would also be characteristic of the rest of his public speaking career.

Simms, like other public intellectuals in the South, realistically expected change to occur. He was amenable to it so long as it did not threaten the social institutions responsible for the moral character of the region’s white population, the culture derived from that temperament, and the societal permanence for which culture was a precondition. Christianity, family, agriculture, and enslavement were among the South’s traditional moral foundations, important sources of individual virtue and thus social order. Agriculture encouraged diligence, for instance, the home promoted ties to place, the institution of slavery ostensibly cultivated duty and responsibility, and faith diminished materialism. But in 1840 and 1870—and at many points in between—undesirable symptoms of progress threatened the institutions responsible for fostering these values: rootlessness in pursuit of “the main chance,” radical reform movements aspiring to alter social relationships, empiricism’s ascendency, utilitarianism becoming a measure for behavior, and new claims to rights made in the name of democracy. Simms and other members of the South’s intellectual class knew they could neither entirely stop progress nor “return to the past,” observes Adam L. Tate (189). However, through their intellectual and artistic work, including public speaking, the region’s thought leaders “could construct, at least partially, a culture devoted Page 12 →to conservative principles” to provide some continuity of tradition to resist or mitigate what they believed was reckless progress (189). Simms’s discussion of not just crops and flowers but also topics such as enslavement and separate gendered spheres are representative of these patterns of conservative thought.

However, the Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration and “The Sense of the Beautiful” are singular in their prescription for a Romantic engagement with the natural world. The orations’ emphasis on a spiritual relationship with Nature is an uncommon complement to Southern conservative touchstones such as enslavement and True Womanhood. Simms’s 1840 oration, for instance, celebrates the individual’s ability to apprehend the divine qualities represented by and shared with Nature. 1870’s “The Sense of the Beautiful” elaborates on how this elevates an individual’s consciousness, ennobling and redeeming their character and, by extension, the society to which they belong. It was more typical among Southern intellectuals to emphasize Christianity as a means of furthering moral progress (Genovese 27, 29). Instead, Simms substitutes claims more commonly associated with Northern, progressive peers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau or with British and German Romanticism, influences that Simms shared with these writers.²

Simms imagined this synthesis of conservative values and less orthodox spiritualism in the Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration and “The Sense of the Beautiful” as part of his blueprint for ensuring stability in a world threatened by change, or, in the case of Charleston in 1870, a semblance of stability approximating the order overturned by the Confederacy’s loss and by Emancipation. Simultaneously, the cultural work done by the orations aspired to confirm and to sustain Simms’s position among the intellectual and cultural vanguard of white Southerners. “By rehabilitating thought and then demonstrating its value to society at large,” explains Drew Gilpin Faust, Simms, along with his peers, “believed they would contribute to the solution of the social dislocations of the day, as well as to the improvement of their own status” (Sacred Circle 70). Such were the impetuses that led Simms to launch his public speaking career in 1840 and agree to speak in the throes of late-stage terminal cancer in 1870.

The first major oration of Simms’s career had its origins in a January 1840 meeting of planters in South Carolina’s Barnwell District (today known as Barnwell County), a cotton-growing locality bordered to its south by the Savannah River. The planters gathered “for the purpose of forming a District Agricultural Society” and voted to hold two seasonal meetings, the winter gathering featuring an oration (“From the Carolina Planter”). Former congressman and future governor and senator James Henry Hammond, one of South Carolina’s more conscientious planters, was among the Society’s organizers. It was probably Hammond who proposed that Simms—his new friend, another Barnwell planter, and a recently famous novelist—give the inaugural address in November.

Page 13 →Simms first references the oration in a July 27, 1840, letter to his New York friend James Lawson, sharing that his “hands will soon be filled with … various labors,” including “my agricultural oration” (Letters 1:180). Simms’s “various labors,” which included finishing his novel The Kinsmen, were apparently demanding. On September 28 Simms sounded exasperated, writing Lawson that he is still working on “an agricultural oration which I am to deliver in Barnwell on the 2nd of November—a task, which will somewhat interfere with other tasks, to me of far greater importance” (Letters 1:191). Simms’s prioritization of the lecture over work allegedly “of far greater importance” suggests that he attached a special significance to addressing the new agricultural society. On one hand the novelist shared the interests of the group. In February 1840, for example, Simms wrote Hammond to thank him for some seeds, expressing that “sober attention to the soil, is worth all the commercial Bank & Rail Road conventions in the world” (Letters 1:168). On the other hand, there were personal and professional reasons for Simms launching his public speaking career in 1840 at this small rural agricultural society meeting.

Faust observes that Southern agricultural societies like Barnwell’s were “almost exclusively the preserve of the planter class” (“Rhetoric and Ritual” 47). Simms was a relative newcomer to both Barnwell and this social stratum. He moved to Woodlands plantation in 1836 after marrying his second wife, Chevillette. Simms himself did not own the plantation—his father-in-law Nash Roach owned and largely managed the property until his health failed in 1855 (Guilds 225). Simms was the author of five novels and four books of poetry at the time of his marriage, but he did not bring much economic or social capital to the union. Despite his burgeoning body of work and favorable notices in Northern periodicals, Simms felt that popular acclaim remained elusive, especially close to home, says biographer John C. Guilds. The novelist and poet believed “his literary efforts had gone largely unappreciated, particularly by fellow Southerners” (103). Simms’s ambitions for recognition and the desire to establish himself as a member of the planter class may explain why he was willing to pause work on a novel for a national audience to try his hand at a new genre for a more provincial one. Speaking on issues of economic and social importance to the district’s agricultural society would be an opportunity to establish credibility among local social and political elites.³

The only existing assessment of the speech is Simms’s own. He reported to Lawson on January 8, 1841, that “[m]y agricultural oration seems to have pleased the audience” and that the society had requested the manuscript for publication. Simms was vacillating, saying, “[I] know not that I shall consent” (Letters 1:212). By February Simms decided to put the address to a more lucrative use, revising it for publication in the New York-based periodical The Ladies’ Companion (Letters 1:233). The Companion was “one of the leading women’s magazines in the nation Page 14 →during this period,” according to Kathleen L. Endres and Therese L. Lueck, and its editor, William W. Snowden, had a “reputation for paying contributors well and promptly.” This meant the magazine attracted the “leading popular writers of the day” A byline among well-known authors, a national audience, and reliable renumeration were likely more appealing to Simms than a pamphlet with limited circulation published by the society once the immediate occasion of—and social benefits accruing from—the oration were past. Thus, two extracts from the Barnwell oration appeared in the Companion in 1841 under the titles “The Ages of Gold and Iron” (in May) and “The Good Farmer” (in August), for which Simms received $50 (Letters 1:276).

The manuscript of the original oration is missing. Simms apparently sent it to Hammond, perhaps as a reference for the latter’s own address before the State Agricultural Society of South Carolina on November 25, 1841 (Letters 1:276). However, comparing “The Ages of Gold and Iron” and “The Good Farmer” to Faust’s analysis of the conventions of Southern agricultural orations reveals that the two excerpts generally correlate to patterns of the genre. It thus seems plausible to assume “The Ages of Gold and Iron” and “The Good Farmer” represent the substance of Simms’s text for November 2, allowing, of course, for edits apropos to publication in a national women’s periodical.

The first published excerpt, and likely the Barnwell oration itself, begins by focusing its audience’s attention on the history of agriculture, a trope of the genre that Faust explains was intended to testify to farming’s timeless nobility (“Rhetoric and Ritual” 39). Simms invites his listeners to reflect on the Ages of Gold and Iron, an adaptation of the Ages of Man, the classical myth of early human history. First appearing in Hesiod’s Works and Days (ca. 700 bce) and retold in Virgil’s Eclogues (37 bce) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 ce), the Ages are an account of the decline of man from an idyllic existence to a state of depravity and warfare. In classical iterations of the myth, the Golden Age follows the creation of man by the Gods of Olympus. It is an era of happiness and harmony; there is no labor or illness because the fertility of the land provides for men, and their innate virtue means that peace reigns. The subsequent Ages of Silver and Bronze are less prosperous and harmonious, characterized by men’s indifference to the Gods and a growing contentiousness. Declension reaches its nadir in the Age of Iron, an era of labor, amoral wickedness, and rampant warfare.

The Ages of Man is a flexible myth that was frequently adapted by later Christian and Renaissance authors. Simms’s 1840 Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration likewise takes creative liberties, condensing the timeline to just the Ages of Gold and Iron and positing agriculture as essential to the harmony of the first epoch. Contrary to the typical claim that the land provided for early man without the need for tillage, Simms says the Age of Gold was the “period when the great majority of mankind was engaged in agriculture” (31). He explains that Page 15 →farming was bestowed to man by God, “the great first planter” (31). Capitalizing on the resources God created, “kings and princes drove the harrow, and dropped the grain … and, for ages, the destinies of the world were happily committed to the hands of man, whose chief distinction lay in their superior use of the sickle and the ploughshare” (32). Also contrary to the conventional belief that labor was a punishment for or was associated with a state of degeneracy, Simms claims working the land was instead responsible for the virtue of men and the amity of human society. He explains that agriculture “had the natural effect of subduing the passions of men, of regulating their appetites, promoting gentleness, harmony, and universal peace among them” (31). Simms concludes the image of an agricultural Age of Gold by imagining its poets singing its “praises, without qualification, that it gave health to the body, strength to the frame, energy to the will, and nobleness to the purpose—that it conduced temperance, pure desires, devout thought, and becoming patriotism …” (32).

To Faust’s point that Southern agricultural society orations referenced history to honor the institution of farming, Simms’s revision of the Ages of Man myth dignifies the avocation of Barnwell’s planters as “a divine institution” (31). They are ostensibly participating in a sacred tradition that is a cornerstone of civilization and is elemental to human happiness and prosperity. Simms’s anomalous inclusion of labor in the Age of Gold also aspires to flatter and inspire his listeners by drawing on another equally long tradition equating agriculture with character. Farming’s industry, simplicity of life, and insulating distance from urban depravity allegedly fostered behaviors associated with personal and civic integrity. “The republican virtues, including modesty, self-discipline, sobriety, and frugality, grew most readily, according to common belief, among farmers,” observe Edwin C. Hagenstein, Sara M. Gregg, and Brian Donahue (14). In espousing these connections, Simms’s Barnwell address is also part of a Georgic tradition that included early American participants Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, and John Taylor of Caroline.⁴

If Simms’s Age of Gold was an appeal to the self-regard of his audience, the liberties he subsequently takes with the mythic Age of Iron may have been to encourage his listeners to reflect on their potential moral complacency. In Simms’s version of the narrative, indifference to labor and a diminished investment in the soil trigger a decline in prosperity, moral dissoluteness, and social volatility. It begins, incongruously enough, with shepherds. Once herding became plausible, the men who attended flocks “were required to contend with the yet unsubdued monsters of the wilderness” to protect their animals (33). This led to hunting, and “the use of arms brought with it a passion for their exercise” (33). Soon hunters of animals transitioned “to hunting MAN! and WAR” followed (33). Warriors “knew the weakness of the peaceful and unsuspecting farmer” and “gathered their harvests with the sword,” leading to the suffering Page 16 →that characterized the Age of Iron: “the desertion of fields, the depopulation of countries, the desecration of altars, the famine, the slaughter and undiminished misery every where!” (34).

Simms emphasizes it was the dereliction of man’s duty to labor—in this instance, hunting for sport rather than defending livestock—that precipitated the end of the Age of Gold. “These crimes … were the inevitable result, accruing from the adoption … as a trade and occupation, of one of the incidental necessities of his [man’s] condition. The first ordinances of the Deity were forgotten. The decree of labor …” (34). Simms also suggests that an ambivalence to work, especially agricultural, was the root cause of the vulnerability of the victims of the Age of Iron. Similar to how harmony and fortitude are byproducts of farmers’ diligence, antipathy to labor led to a moral rot manifested by self-interestedness and factionalism. It undermined communities’ ability to unite and effectively resist external threats. “Toil had given place to cunning,” observes Simms, “and the barriers of moral and physical defence were all swept away” (35).

The long literary history of the appropriation and the revision of the Ages of Man, Simms’s version included, validates rather than distorts the purpose of this myth, explains Harry Levin. Broadly speaking, the narrative accounts for “how men came to be alienated from nature and why they have lived too seldom in peace and plenty, justice and freedom, leisure and love” (4). The durability of this theme despite its many versions speaks to the sustained resonance of these discrepancies to subsequent generations as well as to the relevance of their underlying causes. Each reiteration of the myth invites its audience to consider not only the original reasons for a mythic fall from grace but also to reflect on analogies in their own era. It also invites consideration of what is necessary to reapproximate the prelapsarian ideal (Levin 4). The conclusion of “The Ages of Gold and Iron” (and probably the first half of the oration) signals the gravity Simms attaches to the former proposition. He ends on an ominous note, warning that “The story is every where the same. It admits of no variation.… The nation whose sons shrink from the culture of its fields, will wither for long ages, under the imperial sway of Iron” (35).

Simms’s grim admonishment was typical of antebellum agricultural society addresses, and, in general, the agricultural reform literature of the era. According to orators and writers for periodicals such as The Cultivator, The Farmer’s Register, The American Farmer, and The Southern Agriculturalist, America was on the threshold of—or was already in the throes of—an analogous Age of Iron. The mythic motifs in the first half of Simms’s Barnwell oration symbolize these antebellum anxieties. At the root of them was the concern that a century or more of traditional farming practices in Eastern Seaboard states had depleted the soil. New York’s Jesse Buel, for instance, was candid with the readers of his Farmer’s Companion in 1839: “Generally speaking, our practice is bad. Its tendency is to Page 17 →exhaust the soil of its natural fertility—to render the products of our farms less and less annually—until they become too poor to support our families, or pay us for our labor” (qtd. in Carman 4). The decline of nutrients in the soil had various causes, but the most commonly cited ones included a failure to rotate crops, a reluctance to let fields lie fallow, and an indifference to amending the soil.

As Buel observed, the immediate impacts of the decline in soil fertility were smaller crop yields and diminished earnings. The reformers, including Simms, also feared there were or would be long-term demographic and political implications. The availability of affordable, fertile acreage in western territories meant it was cheaper to move to and clear new lands rather than invest the time, labor, and capital in regenerating existing fields. Agricultural reformers believed this “heedless expansion represented a threat to the economy and society of the old states,” explains Steven Stoll (24). Emigration by farmers from the seaboard states did, in fact, soar, especially following the compelled cessations of lands and removal of Indigenous peoples. Once-thriving communities declined as land values and populations did.

South Carolina was especially susceptible to outmigration. James David Miller estimates that “free South Carolinians were almost 80 percent more likely than other Americans to have left their state in the first half of the century” (19). A decline in population also reduced a state’s political representation in Congress. For example, the South’s percentage of seats in the US House of Representatives declined from 43% in 1810 to 39% in 1840, the year of Simms’s Barnwell oration (McCardell 339). For Southerners like the planters of the Barnwell District, this decline in economic vitality and of legislative clout had portentous implications for the institution of slavery. Not only were they reliant on their political representatives to thwart growing abolitionist demands to end enslavement but also they relied on a robust economy to demonstrate the value of enslaved labor. Consequently, poor soil management and outmigration seemed analogous to the causes of the Age of Iron. Émigrés’ antipathy to diligently improving their hereditary acreage was linked to the specter of barren fields and empty homes in South Carolina and the threat of lost autonomy. “No figure proved more incomprehensible … than the planter emigrant: a man who not only abused his land but then deserted it,” explains Miller (48). In Simms’s mythic context, this phenomenon was a rejection of the sacred “decree of labor” to pursue easier profits elsewhere.

To reverse these trends, agricultural reformers enthusiastically encouraged strategies to replenish the soil and make older fields profitable again. Buel, for instance, promoted new methods of plowing, and he supported curricula for teaching scientific agriculture (Carman 5, 6). Manuring and soil amendments were popular proposals, too, with Virginian Edmund Ruffin among their leading advocates. Solutions like these were often expensive, labor-intensive, and contrary to local tradition, but their adoption was justified as “improvement.” Page 18 →In this context, explains Stoll, “improvement” meant “a link between an enduring agriculture and an enduring society in the long-settled places”; it connoted “the changes that enabled land to be cultivated in the most prosperous possible way over the longest possible time” (Stoll 20, 21). Such intentional investments in the soil, argued reformers like Buel, Ruffin, and Simms, would thus return economic, social, and political stability to the seaboard states.

In addition to inspiring periodicals, the spirit of soil improvement fueled “the formation of hundreds of state and local agricultural societies,” observes Albert Lowther Demaree (201). South Carolina was typical of this pattern. “Between 1826 and 1847 the number of these [agricultural societies] nearly tripled, from eleven to thirty-two” (Faust, “Rhetoric and Ritual” 46). Barnwell District’s new organization was one of them. The societies’ objectives were in keeping with the mission of improvement: identify local examples of successful cultivation and animal husbandry, share those methods and other research at society meetings, and encourage and reward the breeding of superior examples of livestock. The annual orations like Simms’s Barnwell address were also important rhetorical tools to raise awareness of the need for and to advocate methods of improvement. “So important were the annual addresses that prominent men were, without difficulty, prevailed upon to deliver them,” notes Demaree, including Martin Van Buren, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay (210).

In keeping with these conventions of its genre, the second half of Simms’s Barnwell oration pivots from ancient myth to focus on present-day circumstances to urge the improvement of the soil, and by extension, the vitality of the district, state, and region. Simms’s estimation of South Carolina’s planters in the second half of the Barnwell address, excerpted as “The Good Farmer” in The Ladies’ Companion, echoes Buel’s assessment of contemporary husbandry, for example. Simms observes that “[i]n the cultivation of his fields, the Good Farmer, in our country, is not often to be found” (40). The typical planter has carelessly exploited the natural fecundity of the soil and “has grown heedless,” leading to “the wasteful manner of our cultivation” (40). Simms demands a new approach. He advises Barnwell’s planters that “[i]t is becoming more and more necessary, with the progress of each day’s experience, to make our toils more general, to make our tillage more thorough, more analytical, and, in consequence, more intellectual” (40). The specific measures Simms advocates are similar to those promoted in other agricultural society orations and publications: planting crops best suited to local conditions, manuring fields, embracing agricultural education, and conserving woodlands rather than clearing them. Complementing these is a commitment to the soil of the “paternal acres which bound his [the farmer’s] fortunes” (36). New practices and attitudes can restore the profitability of inherited land, preventing emigration and its consequences and thus “bring back the golden ages of the world!” (35).

Page 19 →The good farmer is also a judicious enslaver, according to the Barnwell oration. Simms first emphasizes the authority of the planter, who “insists on obedience” which “he promptly enforces, without faltering and without delay” (38). He explains that the resulting respect for enslavers’ authority ultimately mitigates the need for violence, for “in this way, and by this only, can he [‘the good farmer’] avoid the humiliating necessity and pain of punishment” (38). Simms then expounds on the ostensibly mutual benefits of bondage. Invoking the customary paternalistic metaphor of a family, Simms imagines the good farmer as a firm but beneficent father figure who perceives “his servants as so many children, entrusted to his guardian management, whom he is to subdue to obedience, and instruct in the regular toils of industry” (38). The language echoes imagery elsewhere in the address. As a child, “the good farmer” himself was likewise “subject to the daily duties which belong to his lot in life” (36). Simms here is naturalizing enslavement as part of the obligation to labor that all men are allegedly providentially destined to perform. The planter, though, has an alleged moral responsibility to compel enslaved people to do so. This authority and its ostensible counterpart, compassion, are joined in the oration’s subsequent observation that the good farmer only “compels their [the enslaved workforce’s] labor in moderation” (38). Simms elaborates on this putative humaneness of enslavement, claiming a good farmer “rejoices to increase their [enslaved people’s] comforts, and to behold their growing improvement. Upon this depends equally their happiness and his own” (38). This, too, echoes Southerners’ stock arguments of paternalism, namely that involuntary servitude allegedly improved the moral and intellectual condition of Africans and African Americans.⁵ As benevolent guardians, enslavers were as invested in this development as were their alleged wards.

The oration’s characterization of the good farmer as a good enslaver served dual purposes. Pragmatically, Simms’s argument reflected the link that planters imagined between the administration of an enslaved workforce and agricultural output. They believed “management practices … underpinned increased productivity,” explains Caitlin Rosenthal (102). More broadly, though, Simms’s emphasis on the character of the enslaver was part of the oration’s response to the self-interestedness that Simms saw as endemic to material progress and that underlay the neglect of older farmlands and westward migration. Paternalistic slavery ostensibly contributed to the good farmer’s morality and, collectively, that of the society to which he belonged. The practice of self-control, generosity, and responsibility to others was an antidote to the vices characteristic of reckless progress, including the impulse to make money at the expense of ties to hereditary communities.

Simms segues from the discussion of enslavement to other virtues of the good farmer that simultaneously encourage soil improvement and resistance to the Page 20 →sins of the age. “He is, himself, industrious, methodical in all his proceedings, and inflexibly temperate” (39). Like the diligent citizens of the Age of Gold, the good farmer “knows nothing of that cowardly temper which skulks from the sight of the industrious, and shrinks from the manly toils which the moral citizen delights to grapple” (39). Simms may also be responding to the popular abolitionist image of the indolent planter. (Ironically, Southern agricultural orations’ denunciations of planters’ indifferent management of the soil suggested there may have been some credibility to such a caricature.) Claiming the good farmer “rises among the first at morning and lies down among the last at night … [and] finds sufficient employment for all the intervening hours” effaces the incongruity between the customary belief that husbandry fostered integrity and the fact that enslaved people were actually cultivating the land, not planters (39). Aside from imagining planters as more rustic “farmers,” visualizing their “manly toils” provides the link between tilling the soil and the virtue that purportedly accrues from it.

Slavery and agriculture were among the institutions that Southern conservatives often argued were responsible for the region’s character and subsequent balance of moral and material progress. The Barnwell oration makes its case for soil improvement by echoing this traditional causal relationship. However, Simms relies on Romanticism, and not Christianity as so many of his fellow Southern conservatives did, to conceptualize the spiritual life of the good farmer. Simms likewise positions it as simultaneously relevant to improvement and as a corrective to the pragmatism and materialism of the modern age. To wit, he argues that the land possesses more than just commodity value; the planter’s relationship to it enables him to capitalize on the land’s spiritual capacity as well.

Like other Romantics, Simms believed that the tangible properties of Nature represented underlying principles and truths imbued by its creator. By virtue of man sharing these divine origins, there was a correspondence between natural phenomena and human consciousness. When man contemplates the landscape, the intuitive recognition of its latent divinity elevates his mind, soul, and taste beyond worldly and prosaic desires and anxieties. Simms explains that “all men, turn, at length, for relief and restoration, to the unsophisticated face of nature, and find solace and refreshment” there (37). The farmer’s intimacy with his land facilitates his apprehension of what its physical dimensions symbolize. Walking his property and observing the appearance of a young plant “awakens him to thoughts and fancies … true to the cravings of his immortal spirit” (37). Simms posits that physical beauty is symptomatic of virtue, and the good farmer experiences “a moral grace which the mind … decidedly derives from the contemplation of innocent and lovely objects …” (42). Consequently, the good farmer derives not just his livelihood but also moral character from a commitment to his land. If he nourishes its soil, it will nourish his soul.

Page 21 →The oration’s argument that Nature elevates the soul and is a mitigating influence on the corrosive effect of material progress is more akin to New England Transcendentalism than Southern conservatism. Simms tended to sneer at Transcendentalism, dismissing it in 1852, for instance, as “simply balderdash, and very bald balderdash too … neither more nor less than a laborious mystifying of the common-place” (“Critical Notices” 544). However, as Matthew Guinn observes in his analysis of Southern critical responses to Emerson, such deprecations were often informed by perspectives of style (damning the propensity of Transcendentalists to “mystify […] the common-place”) and resentment of New England’s literary pretentiousness (181–82). There were also substantive differences between Simms and the Transcendentalists relating to conceptions of freedom as well as the relationship of the artist and intellectual to society. Simms did not believe in the primacy of the individual and their conscience, nor did he share the Transcendentalists’ humanism, especially their faith in the perfectibility of man or that all men were inherently created equal. Moreover, in contrast to the New England inclination that the intellectual ought to remain independent from society to honestly critique its traditions, Simms believed the public intellectual and artist was a part of the community, molding public opinion with the help of its hereditary institutions, slavery included (Moltke-Hansen, “The Critical Revolution” 202; Kibler, “Introduction” xx). The latter issue was itself an important difference in opinion contributing to Simms’s public ambivalence toward his peers in Concord.

These important distinctions, though, should not obscure the significant congruencies between Simms’s and the Transcendentalists’ faith in the underlying moral properties of the natural world and their ability to elevate minds and redeem souls imperiled by skepticism, pragmatism, and capitalism. At a minimum, the similarities reveal the influences of European Romantic philosophers and authors that Simms shared with Emerson and Thoreau, among others. For example, in his Aids to Reflection (1825) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, influenced by Immanuel Kant, appropriated Reason from its customary empirical connotations to instead refer to humans’ supersensual faculty for intuiting the divinity inherent within the environment (Hochfield 40). This concept is at the heart of Emerson’s Nature (1836). Four years later, Simms’s Agricultural Society oration likewise claims that the contemplative farmer’s “soul feels the force of that Divine benediction … written on the wide face of universal nature,” that his “mind wanders among mysterious apprehensions” after reflection upon young plants, and that moral “truth lies within our hearts and beneath our feet …” (37, 42). As for the environment’s ameliorating effect on a humanity that was spiritually impoverished by the demands of modern life, Matthew Brennan notes that Simms shared William Wordsworth’s faith in “the power of nature … to teach and nurture the soul” (“Simms” 37). The Barnwell oration’s claims that the good farmer’s Page 22 →relationship with the environment “fill[s] his mind with religious musings” and leads to “[w]orlds of moral discovery …” echoes themes in Lyrical Ballads (1798), not to mention Nature (38, 42).⁶

Cumulatively, the oration’s claims about the spiritual yield of the environment and the harvests of its manured land sought to encourage Barnwell’s planters to confirm their commitment to their native soil and resist the temptations of easier profits elsewhere. The good farmer “seldom departs from his estate, and only in compliance with the requisitions of society and the laws,” though Simms did not specify what these were (37). Simms uncharacteristically took his own advice, experimenting with manures and guano, aggressively rotating crops, and judiciously clearing land to allow for their rotation (Ensley 7, 8). Eric William Ensley observes that Simms’s management practices at Woodlands following the illness of his father-in-law “demonstrate a sensibility that, while reverent towards nature’s beauties, he possessed no qualms about further developing its resources in order to increase his crop yields …” (9). Capitalizing on the moral and material qualities of the earth were not mutually exclusive, as long as both were done concurrently.⁷ However, Simms was an anomaly. Stoll observes that South Carolina’s planters typically disregarded the guidance of agricultural orators and editors. Even when experiments demonstrated improvements in yields (or when rhetoric made the spiritual benefits of farmland seem plausible), as long as planters had more wooded acreage they could transform into fields or as long as fertile western lands remained affordable, there was little incentive for collecting and applying manure and waiting for its effects (Stoll 34, 35). Despite fears of outmigration or, less often, Romantic handwringing about ignoring the moral dimensions of the environment, in reality there was little incentive for an individual planter to change his traditional habits. Simms acknowledged this inertia in 1841 to Hammond, ruefully observing “[t]he accursed routine character of all our performances is perhaps the most invincible barrier in the way of our success or even improvement” (Letters 5:350).

In the three decades that separated Simms’s “Barnwell Agricultural Society Oration” from his “The Sense of the Beautiful,” circumstances other than indifferent management of the soil led to the disastrous economic and political instability that Simms was trying to avoid in 1840. Four years of total warfare from 1861 to 1865 left South Carolina in ruins. The state bore a heavy cost for the conflict that its leading men, Simms included, precipitated. Walter Edgar notes that over 30 percent of South Carolina’s white male population of military age died during the war. The economic toll, especially relating to agriculture, was likewise devastating. Land values diminished by 60 percent, and South Carolina lost more livestock than any other former Confederate state (374, 375). “The fields are shriveled up in their dimensions, and the general aspect of houses, fences, and Page 23 →settlements—all declare for the terrible impoverishment of a region,” Simms reported in an 1867 dispatch for the Charleston Daily Courier (qtd. in Rogers 191). Households, towns, and even the capital city of Columbia were destroyed (Edgar 374).

Simms shared in this post-War suffering. His son survived the conflict, albeit wounded in battle. When William T. Sherman’s Union army neared Woodlands, Simms fled to Columbia, only to become an eyewitness to its burning (Guilds 294, 297). When his son returned to their plantation in the summer 1865, he found it had been declared abandoned by the Freedmen’s Bureau. It was being farmed by its formerly enslaved workers who resisted attempts to direct their labor (Foley, “Nimmons” 98). The house itself was no longer there, having burned twice during the war, the second time ostensibly by men from Sherman’s army. If “the reduction of his family to almost abject poverty” was not disorienting enough for the once-proud planter, allegations that one of Simms’s enslaved workers was responsible for the second fire deeply unsettled an orator whose antebellum work predicated white male identity on paternalistic enslavement (Guilds 300; Foley, “Nimmons” 102).

Simms was not unique in feeling that the principles that ordered life in the antebellum South—those that he himself had articulated in orations like the Barnwell address—no longer offered direction after Appomattox and during Reconstruction. “In a world turned upside down,” observes Dan T. Carter, “white Southerners had lost their bearings” (149). Yet 1870’s “The Sense of the Beautiful” sought to orient its listeners via a much-diminished assemblage of values that Simms maintained faith in despite his losses, his frustration, and, by then, his painful suffering from cancer. Nature was still central to them. His belief in human receptiveness to Nature’s beauty, the universal, immutable truths represented by it, and their uplifting influence on the character of mankind could not be shaken (Moltke-Hansen, “When History Failed” 4). Within the “sense of the beautiful lie all the best securities of the race,” Simms explains. “It is this sense which develops all the soul’s activity. It endows the soul with the eyes to see, the heart to feel, and all the subordinate senses to enjoy the marvellous beauty in this beautiful world which comes to us … directly from the hands of God” (XXX).⁸ The oration also attempts to argue that this ennobling influence can collectively inspire a resumption of the domestic-based order and hierarchies of the antebellum era. For a white population nostalgic for their former hegemonic authority, “The Sense of the Beautiful” aspires to reconstitute its patriarchal foundations using Romantic paradigms. However, mindful of the disruptions of the Civil War, Emancipation, and Radical Reconstruction, Simms accommodates and attempts to leverage the recent experiences of women in assigning them the responsibility for doing so. Even though “feeling badly,” as Simms wrote his son Page 24 →the week before he was scheduled to deliver “The Sense of the Beautiful,” he felt “it is incumbent upon me to prepare my address” and its message for the sake of a demoralized public (Letters 5:310).

The occasion for “The Sense of the Beautiful” was the opening of the first floral fair held by the Charleston County Agriculture and Horticultural Association. On the evening of May 3rd, the city’s Academy of Music was “beautifully decorated with wreaths and festoons of evergreens and flowers” as Simms took the stage to address participants, visitors, and local dignitaries (“Floral Exhibition” 2). The arrangements from Charleston’s gardens provided the putative inspiration as well as a complement to Simms’s paean to Nature’s effect on the human soul and society.

Simms begins “The Sense of the Beautiful” by reminding his listeners that Nature and Beauty exist for them but also exist within them. By “Beauty” Simms again meant not only the pleasing physical attributes of an object but also the underlying divine qualities responsible for that attractiveness. “Beauty … becomes the visible representative of a principle and a virtue” (54). These truths and morals are interpreted as beautiful by individuals whose capacity to recognize them as such is developed “involving models which govern our inventions, even as they refine our tastes; which elevate our genius even as they conciliate our affection” (54). The capacity for reflection on and the interpretation of flowers and other aspects of Nature animates the soul. Again, this conceptualization is not unlike what Emerson outlines in Nature and what Simms himself argued thirty years before in his Barnwell oration and in dozens of poems in the intervening decades. Like Emerson, Simms explains to his gathered listeners that every person possesses the capacity to apprehend Beauty and the virtues and wisdom represented by it. However, very few have cultivated this intuitive faculty.

Simms characterizes the reasons for this underdeveloped ability as the powerful inclinations of “the animal”: “eager appetites, fiery passions, lowly instincts” of basic, worldly needs and instinctual desires (44). Simms calls the opposing force in humanity the “angel.” “The Sense of the Beautiful” locates this innate spiritual inclination in each individual’s “head and heart” but emphasizes it must be carefully cultivated (44). The responsibility for doing so follows traditional divisions of gendered labor, ostensibly because the qualities of the angel manifest themselves “in the development of a beautiful femininity, which involves fidelity, gentleness, tenderness and love, the grand necessities as they are the grand virtues of humanity” (45). These sensibilities make women the logical candidates for fostering these virtues in children. Fittingly for an audience of gardeners, Simms advises them to train children as vining plants themselves are trained: “You twine about the delicate tendrils of his mind and heart, about his sensibilities and susceptibilities of taste and fancy, a little thread of blended love and authority” (45). First by walks in nature, where the child learns not only the names and properties Page 25 →of its surroundings but also by a cultivated appreciation for “their wondrous beauty of form and color, and delicious sweetness of scent” (45). This introduction to the physical representations of wisdom and virtue is perpetuated by carefully monitoring the child’s activities and influences so the child can “take light, color, form, sweetness and sentiment into his soul” instead of succumbing to the temptations of “the animal” (45).

Simms begins expanding the scope of virtues Beauty can connote by associating it with other responsibilities historically under women’s purview. For instance, Beauty also signifies the sanctity of a domesticity that women were responsible for according to the tenets of True Womanhood (Welter 162–65). Simms includes a lengthy imagined scene of rustic domestic tranquility in which the husband plants, the wife maintains the household, and a young daughter earnestly tends the family garden and livestock. Beauty attaches itself to every member laboring according to their ostensible Providential roles, and thus this microcosm of society “may realize this exquisite ideal of a Golden Age” (52). Juxtaposed to this ideal are the consequences if the Sense of the Beautiful is “left untrained … and die[s] out like so much unexercised muscle” (48). What atrophies are the virtues that the Beautiful represents and encourages in mankind. Simms imagines “the father an idler at the tavern—the mother a slattern” (49). The son of such a couple is “[a]t home a scullion; abroad, … an incipient ruffian” (49). The daughters of such parents, untrained to recognize the supernal qualities of Nature’s beauty, become insipidly ostentatious: “Vanity, will prompt them thus to decorate their persons, as for a market, while their habitations are as foul and barren as their souls” (50).

Simms’s emphasis on the responsibility of women for the moral education of their children and their husbands, not to mention their duty to supervise a wholesome, well-ordered household, echo motifs of gender in his antebellum orations, including “The Social Principle” (1843) and “Inauguration of the Spartanburg Female College” (1855), both of which are included in this volume. At the same time, though, Simms subtly acknowledges that the Civil War, Emancipation, and Radical Reconstruction occasioned changes to traditional spheres of influence and hierarchies of social order. For instance, amid his prescription for the training of children, Simms directly address the “women of Carolina,” asking them, “do you not see, in the performance of this precious duty of training your young, the noblest as it is the fittest employment of the noble woman[?] You are the only trainers and teachers for the infantile mind, and when you know that the whole moral of the future life is shaped and moulded by the first twelve years, you will feel the solemn responsibility which rests upon you” (45–46). The rhetorical question “do you not see” begs the question of what other “employment” women may have been imagining or remembering in a post-War environment. The conflict itself had offered women opportunities to take an expanded role in Page 26 →their households, and, in more limited ways, in the public sphere.⁹ Some of the latter was voluntary and reflected women’s prescribed domestic roles, such as participation in Soldiers’ Aid societies or nursing. Oftentimes, though, women involuntarily participated in the public sphere by assuming the responsibilities of farm manager or bill payer and collector while male relatives were at the front or after they were killed or returned home maimed. This fostered a sense of independence from men for the first time in many of these Southern women’s lives. LeeAnn Whites observes that after the war, some women may have been reluctant to renounce that autonomy when male relatives returned: “The war had made some women less dependent and less willing to defer to the wishes of men” (233).

The emphasis in “The Sense of the Beautiful” on the congruency of Nature with femininity, and its association of Beauty’s virtues with conventional domesticity, is a subtle attempt to deter women’s interest in preserving or expanding that independence, albeit cloaked in the respect typical of the praise showered upon the True Woman (Welter 152). For example, Simms praises the aesthetic spirit that inspired the Floral Fair, which its female planners ostensibly organized for the sake of Beauty itself, “not merely the market garden, the money consideration” (46). This assumed renunciation of economic interests follows a loaded question of whether the women present would want to extend their authority in the public sphere in other ways associated with male, historically white, privilege. Simms asks whether the women present would “prefer the hustle at the polls with Clym Chowder, for the great privilege of casting your vote for George Washington Bangs, who is opposed, for the Senate, by Napoleon Bonaparte Brick” (46). Simms questions the femininity of any woman inclined to neglect their alleged domestic obligations to participate in the democratic process by reminding them that “[w]hile thus engaged abroad in loathsome associations, the beast is making fearful havoc with all your little angels at home” (46).

In contrast, Simms encourages his female listeners to imagine “[h]ow beautiful the spectacle of the young mother training her offspring, on her porch, under mantling vines, under God’s grand school house of azure arch, surrounded by his great colonnades of trees, and freshened by the pure breezes bringing perfumes from those gardens which have yielded you all these Floral Beauties that begird us now” (46). It is a pastoral image also made “beautiful” by the domestic virtues it portrays. Simms’s emphasis on the woman’s position in the home, dutifully raising her children to become spiritually enlightened citizens who can make a better world, echoes conservative models of femininity, including Republican Motherhood, wherein women were encouraged to make their contributions to public life through dedication to their families (Kerber 202). Additionally, it replicates the template for gender conventions among the white Southern Page 27 →planting class before the Civil War. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese observes that although the productive capacity of the antebellum household discouraged strict separation of spheres, the gendered nature of domestic responsibilities persisted (80). Southerners, she explains, “shared an ideal of the universal division between women and men. They agreed that defined male and female spheres constituted the bedrock of society and community” (195). Simms championed these gender paradigms before the Civil War, including in his 1850 review of Elizabeth Ellet’s The Women of the American Revolution (1850), wherein he lauded how women fostered the patriotism, valor, and resilience that led to victory in the War for Independence. From the home, explained Simms, “spring all the virtues and securities of a nation.… The household, in fact, is not only the source but the true guardian of the nation” (320). Simms’s enthusiastic declaration in “The Sense of the Beautiful” that “the pater familias must be a man! His help-meet, a woman,” the latter ennobled by her “grace, domestic duty, motherly watch over dutiful children, and that cheery and elastic spirit which ever welcomes with smiles, conciliation and tenderness” echoes that patriarchal order of the antebellum world of planters (51).

Simms’s encouragement in “The Sense of the Beautiful” for a return to the gender status quo represents a desire for, or at the very least, a nostalgia for, a return to a broader hierarchy of authority founded on white supremacy that was upended by the end of enslavement and Reconstruction. References to race in “The Sense of the Beautiful” are infrequent and veiled, allusions to “brute and baboon and barbarous days” (52). They reflect an anxiety, if not anger, at being required to share political power with African Americans.¹⁰ Since his 1837 defense of enslavement, Simms, like other apologists, had denounced literal interpretations of the founding documents’ claims respecting natural rights. Following the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, such complaints had new salience. “We are told by wretched traders in politics, and the stupidest of all philosophies, that all men are born equal. Even if this were true, it is not possible, as the world’s experience has shown, to keep them so” (48). Simms continues by arguing that “[s]o far from men being equal, it is the absolute necessity of society that men should be unequal, unlike, different in tone, temper, attribute and faculty, so that each shall act an individual part, playing into the hands of one another, in various occupations, for the common good” (48). Emancipation’s upsetting of white hegemony as well as white Carolinians’ (and Simms’s own) struggles to remain solvent following African American emancipation and resistance to exploitative labor arrangements add a new subtext to familiar demands that Carolinians—including female and African American—abide by their allegedly destined role in a supposedly natural hierarchy. As Ehren Foley explains, “Simms’s view of African American character had not changed; what Page 28 →had changed was the context” (“Nimmons” 102). Thus when Simms wistfully imagines a scenario “were each to find out the use for which he was designed, and pursue it, the reign of Astræa would prevail again on earth, and the golden age be no longer a fiction of the poets,” he may not be thinking of the era imagined by Hesiod, Virgil, and Ovid, but of the pastoral image of a well-cultivated, highly cultured antebellum South led politically and socially by white men (49). Ironically, one that, white men aside, never materialized before the war, no matter how eloquently and earnestly he advocated for it.

Sick with the cancer that would kill him on June 11th, Simms was as proud of his stamina on May 3rd as he was of his text. He sent his faithful friend Lawson a copy of the address the next day, explaining that he “delivered [it] last night at the Academy of Music to a large & brilliant audience … I was quite feeble, & exhausted from delivery, but contrived, by sheer will, to hold out & hold forth to the last” (Letters 5:313). Simms’s performance was well received according to the Charleston News, who ended a lengthy summary of the oration by noting that Simms “received round after round of applause” (“Floral Exhibition” 2). The Charleston Courier also did Simms the honor of publishing the address in its May 4th edition (Letters 5:313n68). Though Simms did not allude to any requests for its publication in his correspondence, that may have been a consequence of his ill health. It may have been after his death that the oration was published in Charleston by the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, which had merged with the Horticultural Society. If so, it was Simms’s elegy to himself, one testifying to the transformative power of Romanticism that neither war nor cancer could kill.

If the “Golden Age” in “The Sense of the Beautiful” refers to reapproximating an imagined social order of a pastoral prewar South rather than the mythic origins of man, history suggests Simms’s socially relevant Romanticism may have appealed to women in 1870 more than it did male planters thirty years earlier. Sara Georgini observes that “white women came to the fore of Simms’s postwar program” for rehabilitating the South, and that the oration was part of a broader trend of texts that encouraged women to channel the vestiges of their wartime authority into becoming “savvy caretakers of home, hearth, and culture” (221). Culture, especially public memory, may be the most visible evidence of how women responded to calls to action like Simms’s in “The Sense of the Beautiful.” If nurturing the sense of the Beautiful also meant figuratively fostering a usable memory of a past social order, thereby providing some imagined continuity despite all the social change, then the promotion of the myth of the Lost Cause—the noble culture whose virtues were ostensibly destroyed by the war—allowed white Southern women to serve a public purpose in helping chart a new South based on the old. “In acting as guardians for the sacred past, Southern women Page 29 →joined in restoring the old domestic order,” but in ways that seemed analogous to their former roles in the domestic sphere, observes George Rable (228).

The final oration of Simms’s life may have been his most prescient regarding the direction of his region’s culture. As a harbinger of postwar Southern orations advocating the Lost Cause and women’s stewardship of its putative virtues, “The Sense of the Beautiful” anticipated a sequence of events whose culmination Americans are only now witnessing. “The orators of the Lost Cause,” explains W. Stuart Towns, “reinvented the past and their vision of what they recalled and how they wanted to remember it,” and in doing so shaped the narrative of antebellum Southern history for subsequent generations (Enduring Legacy xii). The school textbooks white Southern women authored, the pageantry their descendent groups hosted, and most tangibly, the statuary for which they raised money, shaped not only the narrative of history of Southern combatants but also the cause they defended. But as the twenty-first century has revealed, even stone monuments, like the spoken word, can be ephemeral.