University of Virginia Library

The Album (1826): The Significance of the Recently Discovered Second Volume
by
James Everett Kibler, Jr.

I

In 1952, the editors of The Letters of William Gilmore Simms made known the existence of The Album (1825) for the first time.[1] Heretofore, this earliest Charleston literary magazine, unique in the South to its day as a journal devoted exclusively to literature and significant because it was W. G. Simms's first editorial venture, had not been known beyond a prospectus in the Charleston newspapers. W. P. Trent, Simms's biographer, had not mentioned it;[2] and various scholars had concluded that The Album was never published. "Projected but did not appear" and "failed to materialize" were the verdicts.[3] Still after three decades, the copy used by the editors of the Letters in 1952 is the only one to surface.[4]

John Guilds, in the first study of The Album, explored the magazine's importance, which he rightly found to be considerable.[5] His article, while still largely accurate in its assessments, now requires a few corrections, some refinings of several points, and the addition of significant new information, some of which is of major importance to Simms biography. All are made possible by the recent discovery of a second volume of The Album,[6] the existence of which no one had guessed.

The Album, Volume I, was published from 2 July 1825 to 24 December 1825, for a total of 26 numbers in 210 pages.[7] Volume II began with a first issue of 7 January 1826 and ran at least through the 25th issue of 24 June 1826, for 200 pages. (Volume II may also have continued with a 26th number, but issue 25 is the last we have to date.) The format[8] and editorial policy of Volume II remained essentially unchanged, as an octavo weekly costing 25 cents per week, and published by Gray and Ellis at No. 9 Broad-Street. Its editors continued to encourage local Southern contributors of original material and repeated that they would not serve up European reprints and translations, or borrow heavily from the files of other periodicals for copy. Their three great emphases remained demanding high literary quality, publishing original productions, and "cultivating Native Talent." For the last-named purpose, they began offering premiums in March 1826 for the best original essay and story, to be judged by a "Committee of Literary Gentlemen" II (11 March, 1826), p. 76.

One significant alteration in format, however, was the addition of the subtitle, "Or, Charleston Literary Gazette." This change pointed even more clearly to the editor's intention of making The Album the South's first exclusively literary magazine. More importantly, it suggests the possibility of continuity between The Album and Simms's next editorial endeavor, The Southern Literary Gazette, published in Charleston from 1828-1829.[9] It is not unlikely that there was some 1827 bridge between The Album, Or, Charleston Literary Gazette of 1826 and The Southern Literary Gazette of 1828, particularly when one considers Simms's statement that he "commenced editing" at 18 and "continued to do so until I was 23," in other words from 1824 to 1829 (16 October 1841, Letters, I, 285). Although no issue of a Volume III is known, the strong possibility of its existence should not be discounted. For after all, it has taken over a century for Volume I to surface and a century and a half for Volume II.

With the discovery of Volume II and thus a knowledge of another six months of life for the periodical, John Guilds's statement about The Album's quick demise requires adjustment: "in view of the fact

that the Album was admittedly a literary miscellany in a political-minded section, was edited by inexperienced hands, and lacked even the attraction of European reprints or translations, it seems surprising that it survived for as long as six months" (SB, 8 (1956), 175). The record now stands that the journal lasted at least a year, and perhaps continued more or less unbroken in a new form, The Southern Literary Gazette, until 1829. Charleston, once called "that deathbed of Southern periodicals," may thus have claimed one less casualty. Judging from Simms's own recollection of the great number of rival literary societies of young men in the city in the 1820's, who pooled their books and encouraged the performance of drama and the writing and discussion of essays, poetry, and fiction, one must conclude that there was a very great interest in and vigorous support of literature. In fact, Simms recalled that there were during the time of The Album's publication "fully twenty or thirty of these juvenile societies, counting each from twenty to forty members."[10] It was, he concluded, "a period of great literary activity, among all classes." The extent of Charleston's support of literary activities in the 1820's may thus require further examination. The Album did not fold so rapidly as has been thought. The section was indeed "political-minded"; but there was apparently much more interest in the arts than the popular twentieth-century view has credited.

The mistaken assumption that there were few interested in literature in the Charleston of this time may have also led to the conclusion that Simms was very possibly the sole editor of The Album and indeed wrote most of its copy.[11] Volume II proves conclusively that he was not, and did not. The editors of The Album called themselves a "Society of Young Gentlemen," and they indeed were. One should not "hazard a guess that young Gilmore was the only editor, posing as the 'Society of Young Gentlemen' in an effort to hide his identity and to win supporters for what seemed a community project" (ibid., pp. 171-172), for it certainly was just that, an undertaking in which several members of a segment of the literary community each had a hand. As the evidence of Volume II reveals, Simms made a journey to the Southwest from January through April 1826 and was thus not in residence while most of Volume II issued from Charleston week after week. Although he continued to send poems and letters back for publication through the post,

this "Society of Young Gentlemen" kept up its work and in the manner it had before his leaving, and, as already shown, with emphases and editorial policies unchanged. In other words, although he was likely a most valuable staff member, perhaps even the most energetic one, he was not indispensable. The "Society" continued to rely heavily on his pen for original contributions, to an amazingly great extent considering he was some thousand miles distant; but at least one other prolific contributor, most probably a member of the editorial staff, can now be identified.

That contributor was William Allen, a young Charlestonian whom Simms recalled in 1870 as "another of those promising lads of literature in our city . . . a ready and indefatigable writer in prose and verse, . . . the writer of more than one novel, or romance, of the old English narrative school, . . . a thin, nervous person, of spasmodic eagerness and impulse" who "dabbled in chemistry as well as literature" and who died young, "having swallowed a solution of phosphorus in mistake for water" (Reminiscences, pp. 921-922). Simms further recalled that among Allen's pennames were "Juan," "J. A. O.," "Rinaldo," and "St. Eustace." (Simms probably erred slightly here; the last two should read "Roderick" and "St. Pierre.") To Volume I, Allen contributed at least twelve poems and five prose works under these pseudonyms and his initials "W. A."[12] For Volume II, he wrote at least four poems for the eight extant issues, using pseudonyms "Juan," "I. A. O." and "St. Pierre"; and there are prose works also likely by him.

In addition to Allen, the publishers Gray and Ellis had some hand in important matters;[13] and James Wright Simmons (1790-1858), coeditor with Simms of The Southern Literary Gazette of 1828, may have been a member of the editorial circle. He was a very strong influence on and close friend of Simms during the time, and had worked on the staff of the New York Mirror, which periodical Guilds has proved to be a model for The Album.[14] Hence, though Simms was an active member of the editorial staff, The Album in no way could be considered a one-man project. Later, as editor of The Magnolia and The Southern and Western Monthly Magazine, he would indeed be sole editor and primary contributor; but with The Album he was an important part of a communal effort.

II

Simms in THE ALBUM (1826)

The newly-discovered volume reveals biographical information about Simms which is of the first importance. For here he published a series of four letters from the West[15] that documents a heretofore unrecorded trip to the frontier in early 1826, thus requiring certain revisions of our notions about this primary formative influence on his career. In 1933, Hampton Jarrell and William Stanley Hoole explored in three articles the significance of the frontier travels as a shaping force on Simms's writing.[16] As a result of their work, they were able to prove two Southwestern journeys; whereas Trent (fifty years before them) had shown positively only one. These two trips were made in 1824-1825 and in 1831. The Album's second volume now proves a third journey of 1826, thus Simms's second jaunt West, this time carefully detailed as to route.

His excursion can be reconstructed from the letters as follows. Simms sailed from Charleston 12 January 1826, then passed the Florida Keys within fifty miles and in sight of the Cuban shore "at 54° North," before stopping on land for the first time eighteen days later at the Balize, "a resort for Pilots and Fishermen" some ninety-five or a hundred miles from New Orleans. He then sailed up the mouth of the Mississippi to within fifteen miles of New Orleans, where he took "a kind of chariot" into the city. There, on the day of his arrival, he wrote his first letter of 3 February 1826. From New Orleans he travelled "by water" to Mobile, crossing Lake Pontchartrain and Spanish River. He arrived at Mobile some time before 13 February 1826, from where he wrote his second letter. He then "took passage on board a steam boat . . . up the Tombigbee River" to Columbus, Mississippi, where on 1 March 1826, he wrote Letter III. After having remained at Columbus for "a week or more," he proceeded "over the Tombigbee" by "flat" to the Choctaw Nation and proceeded by horse through swamp and prairie to Pearl River. Although he did not give his specific destination, Simms no doubt made his journey, as he had the year before, in order to visit his father who

lived at Georgeville, Holmes County, Mississippi, some sixty miles north of Jackson. By 12 April 1826, he had completed "my excursion to Pearl River" and was back in Columbus, Mississippi, where he wrote Letter IV. After his stay in Columbus, he planned to "start directly on to Charleston," which likely meant that he travelled downstream from Columbus to Mobile and thence home.[17] The date he returned to Charleston is unknown, but the entire Western journey must have been of no less than four months' duration.

In his four letters, he gave impressions of customs, social life, women, the theatre, the court room,[18] steamboat travel, and flora, descriptions of squatters, Indians, the Choctaw Nation, and candid opinions about New Orleans, Mobile, Columbus, the backwoods between and the frontier beyond. These early accounts would be significant enough in themselves even were the author unknown, but the value to our understanding of Simms's life and career is rather staggering. First of all, they are his earliest surviving letters. The six volume Letters of William Gilmore Simms begins with an entry dated 16 July 1830, over four years later than The Album epistles. Considering the scarcity of primary information on the young author, who was but nineteen years old at the time, the material gleaned from these sources is of paramount importance. The letters reveal their writer to be a strongly opinionated young gentleman who has carefully viewed his world and made up his mind about certain things. He has the highest scorn for materialistic values and finds the mere money-seeker dull and base. He himself has already chosen to devote his energies to higher goals. Nature is obviously a first love. Her beauties are a great solace throughout his travels, which are at

times tedious and strenuous. For wild nature, he reserves his only unqualified praise. The Mississippi River, he calls "majestic" and a "proud and beautiful sight." The Southwestern prairies are "not only singular, but stupendous." In short, the unspoiled landscape inspires and awes him.

The works of man, however, are a terrible disappointment, and he describes his dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms. New Orleans is "nothing more" than a "mere place of business" where money is the great measure, and money-making the chief drive of life. Gambling, and every other form of money-oriented vice, is carried on "to a most enormous extent." At the New Exchange, "at one view, will present an auctioneer straining his lungs to the utmost; a bar keeper circulating through the medium of a tobacco burnt atmosphere, his spirits; a couple of foggy CANAILLE . . . diabolically intent on the result of a layer of domino; and in several other sections of the room, cards, dice, billiards, and as many other modes by which money can be won or lost, as ---- himself could invent." He is finally "disgusted" by the city—its vice, filth, and shoddiness, all faults stemming from mistaken values. Even the American Theatre leaves him "completely disgusted." And as for the Masquerade Ball he attends, it is but a "ridiculously odd assemblage," where a "scamp of the first water, wore the fool's cap and bells, ill assorted with Minerva's underclothes, etc." His summation: New Orleans is "a vile reservoir of infamy and baseness," a raw boom town revolving around the marketplace.

Of Mobile, he is only slightly less critical, her central focus likewise being the making of wealth. Its theatre is better than the American in the former city, but there are frequent interruptions by backwoodsmen who had never seen such things before. The pitiful tribal outcasts from the Choctaw Nation line her streets, sadly a "public nuisance and offending forever the eye of delicacy." Of the Mobile Bar, its pleadings are "dull, heavy and unimportant." He sets out at last for the wilderness "perfectly fatigued with Mobile."

These works portray the world realistically as he found it and without idealization, but always measured against an implied high ideal. The author is finally, then, bored by these specific "places of business" and in general with a frontier society based on the philosophy of getting rich quick. The last he will simply not tolerate; and as for himself, after visiting his father, he would return home to Charleston. By 1826, the young Simms had apparently reached the conclusion, which he was to voice frequently throughout his life, that the impulse to westward migration was largely ignoble, stemming from the basic vice of material greed. He thus found the frontier a deleterious force on society, encouraging

rootlessness, the breaking of ties, and the undermining of those established centers necessary to the furthering of the noble ideals of high culture which he already espoused. These letters thus point to what must have been a central conflict within the young writer in 1826: whether to reestablish familial ties in a West he abjured as a destructive force, or to remain without family in his home community which encouraged the higher cultural values he had come most to admire. At the age of nineteen, Simms was obviously a high-toned young patrician who valued honor, dignity, propriety, and artistic endeavor, and deemed materialistic values at best boring and at worst "disgusting." When encouraged by his father to relocate to the West and make his fortune, he would, therefore, judging from the philosophy expressed in these letters, understandably, say no. That the young man was doggedly devoted to principles, intolerant, and headstrong, these letters also provide considerable proof, thus demonstrating the necessary ability to make his decision stick.

These epistles also contribute, beyond revelations about the life and personality of the man, key insights into a time when Simms's literary career was being born. As an example of their great significance in this sphere, one has only to consider the last section of Letter IV. From Columbus, Mississippi, 12 April 1826, in writing of incidents of travel through the Choctaw Nation, Simms presented this comic sketch:

Here, then, in rough and fledgling form, is Simms's first known use of backwoods humor, and published, incidentally, nearly a decade before the issuing of A. B. Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835), commonly accepted as the seminal work of the genre. The vigorous little sketch which comes to dominate the Pearl River epistle shows enthusiasm for this material. Though he could never favor Western migration, he was quick to realize the lively drama it presented. It is as if Simms, while writing this sketch for a Charleston audience, opened his eyes wide for the first time to rich sources which would lead very shortly to realistic treatments of the Border in five novels,[19] and finally to such excellent backwoods humor stories as "Sharp Snaffles" and "Bald-Head Bill Bauldy." It is interesting to note also that no such backwoods rendering had been published in The Album in 1825 after his first trip west.

The introduction of the awe-inspiring Choctaw Chief, the description of his clothing and ornament, and the rendering of his speech all likewise demonstrate a knowledge of materials Simms was perhaps to find useful in his treatments of the Indian in such works as "Indian Sketch," the story of a Choctaw which was Simms's first fictional treatment of the Indian (1828), and The Yemassee, his Indian novel of 1835. It is not surprising that Simms's treatment of Indian character would be called "probably the most balanced" in American literature.[20] For records such as these letters prove that he knew the material first hand and was interested in recording the facts. One of the most significant bits of information to be gleaned from this letter of 12 April is Simms's statement that he was keeping a good "note book" of what he was seeing and hearing. Was he not, then, intending to make literary use of these backwoods experiences? And was not, then, one purpose of his travels, to gather such native American materials for future use?

The material in this same note book may have been either in hand or in mind when he came to write "Sharp Snaffles."[21] While Simms drew most heavily for this story from lore that he recorded in an 1847 journal

of hunting trips in the Carolina mountains,[22] The Album sketch and "Sharp Snaffles" have some interesting similarities. First, "Yaou" is the name given Sharp Snaffles by the members of the hunting camp. One hunter explains that "in the Choctaw dialect" the word "simply means 'yes,'" as it is related in The Album sketch. "Snaffles," he remarks, "had rambled considerably among the Choctaws, and picked up a variety of their words." So, evidently, had Mr. Simms. And Sharp, renowned as the best teller of tall yarns in his parts, bears some resemblance to the local "wit" of the sketch, whose great pleasure comes in trying to create belief in outlandish statements delivered in deadpan manner—the whole purpose of the hunter's "lying camp" as recorded in "Sharp Snaffles." Finally, The Album sketch ends by the group "liquoring," an action also important to the framing device of the short story.

Further, this sketch is likewise significant as the first known example of what would become a separate story type in the Southern backwoods humor genre—that of the dandy greenhorn being gulled by the backwoodsman. The greenhorn was frequently to be a Yankee city-slicker, or only a city-slicker come to the country; but often enough too he would be a European, and most frequently a Frenchman, as he is here in the Simms sketch.

In addition to "Letters from the West," Simms contributed by post to the eight extant issues of Volume II, sixteen poems certain to be by him and another two which may be his. Three of these are again biographically significant. "Song" describes the voyager-narrator's impressions of sea travel around the Florida Keys[23] within view of the Cuban shore at sunset. The poem was written on the spot in January 1826 and sent back to Charleston with the first Western letter. In the letter itself, he noted that "Song" was composed during a calm at sea and "without much regard to meter." Of such poetic endeavor, he wrote in Letter I during a moment of weariness and depression: "I have grown quite indifferent to such efforts, and will in future endeavor to forget that I was ever capable of them. They have been more a pain than a pleasure; and in other views have been an injury." No matter, later issues of The Album continued to contain his verse sent from the West in undiminished quantity. "I Do Not Ask Thy Tear" is dated Columbus, Miss., 10 April 1826; and another "Song" is said to be written while on the Tombeckbee River in Alabama.[24]

Moreover, of the sixteen proved poems, ten are heretofore unrecorded,[25] and the other six are the original publications of later versions. The newly discovered poems are marked with an asterisk and are reprinted in the Appendix.[26] Through these issues of Volume II, therefore, knowledge of the early poetic career (his first proved poem had appeared only less than two years before), has been substantially increased. The following listing, based on the format of John Guilds's article on The Album, presents Simms's contributions to the newly-discovered issues of Volume II:[27]

I. Poetry

• Almirez * "By Almirez" (Not mine the joys) 28 Jan. 1826, p. 31.
• * "Invocation" (Come, o'er the waste) 4 Feb. 1826, p. 39.
• * "By Almirez" (Go, shed the lustre) 4 Mar. 1826, p. 71.
• "By Almirez" (Thou cam'st when Pleasure) 11 Mar. 1826, p. 79.
• "Oh! Let Me Dream" 1 Apr. 1826, pp. 103-104.
• * "The Blighted Trees" (It was but late) 20 May 1826, p. 160.
• M. E. S. * [Untitled] (Come! Let thy hair my fingers twine) 4 Feb. 1826, pp. 39-40.
• * "Dithyrambic Song" (Fill up the bowl) 11 Mar. 1826, p. 79.
• "To --- ---" (I come to thee) 11 Mar. 1826, p. 79.
• "The Outlaw's Farewell" (When the hopes) 29 Apr. 1826, p. 135.
• Wilton * "To --- ---" (The dreams that in my slumbers) 28 Jan. 1826, p. 31.
• * "To Spain" (Go weep, go weep) 1 Apr. 1826, p. 104.
• * "Song" (Wake, wake, the song!) 29 Apr. 1826, p. 135.
• S. * "Song Written on the Tombeckbee River" (Long, long, dearest maiden) 24 June 1826, p. 200.
• S. G. W. "I Do Not Ask Thy Tear" 20 May 1826, p. 160.
• W. G. S. "Song" (Calm o'er the wave) 4 Mar. 1826, p. 71.

II. Prose

• W. G. S. "Letters from the West. No. I. New Orleans, Feb. 3." 4 Mar. 1826, pp. 68-69.
• "Letters from the West. No. II. Mobile, Feb. 13." 11 Mar. 1826, pp. 76-77.

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• "Letters from the West. No. III. Columbus, March 1, 1826." 1 Apr. 1826, pp. 100-101.
• "Letters from the West. No. IV. Columbus, April 12, 1826." 20 May 1826, pp. 157-158.

III. Other Contributions Possibly by Simms

• Myself "Nothing." 28 Jan. 1826, pp. 27-29.
• William "To Mary" (When first I met thee) 1 Apr. 1826, p. 104.
• Unsigned "Matrimony" (Cries Nell to Tom) 4 Feb. 1826, p. 40.
• Review of miscellaneous poems selected from the current U. S. Literary Gazette, 24 June 1826, pp. 195-196.
• Review of Sir Walter Scott's Woodstock, 24 June 1826, pp. 196-199.

Appendix

Notes