University of Virginia Library

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