An Early and Strong Sympathy: the Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms.

Carson, James Taylor

An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms, edited by John Caldwell Guilds and Charles Hudson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. li, 604 pp. $39.95 cloth.

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS WAS THE pre-eminent man of letters in the antebellum South. His literary review, short stories, poems, novels, and nonfiction essays were popular in their time and, today, challenge the prevailing notion that the Old South was a society of blacks and whites. Simms's inclusion of Creeks, Cherokees, and Catawbas in his fiction reminds us of the degree to which popular fascination with slavery, blackness, and whiteness has obscured other important parts of the region's past. Still, reading Simms can be a chore. His writing is squarely in the romantic tradition, and it exemplifies some aspects of that tradition which may be unattractive to many readers today: florid prose, contrived plots, and archetypal characters. However, his knack for period detail and his interest in the intersections of native, settler, and slave life make him an author of note to both historians and literary scholars of the antebellum South.

The editors, literary scholar John Caldwell Guilds and historical anthropologist Charles Hudson, have gathered together for the first time fourteen short stories, twenty-one poems, and various letters and essays that all express Simms's abiding interest in the region's native population. In selecting such works, the editors have sought to balance literary merit with ethnohistorical significance. The stories and poems run the gamut from awful to insightful. "The Arm-Chair of Tustenuggee. A Tradition of the Catawba" (1840), for example, bears no relation to either Catawba culture or history. It is a story of young Indian lovers who speak Elizabethan English. As Emathla, an old chief, asks, "Thou wilt take this dog to thy lodge, that he may hunt thee venison?" (p. 208). The "Indian Sketch" (1828), later elaborated as "Oakatibbe, or, the Choctaw Sampson" (1841), however, probably reflects Choctaw notions of murder and justice that Simms witnessed when he visited his father's plantation in Mississippi.

Guilds and Hudson offer complementary interpretations of the stories, poems, and essays that explicate their usefulness to scholars across disciplines. To Guilds, William Gilmore Simms was a man ahead of his time, an iconoclast, and a pragmatic humanist. While acknowledging the patchy quality of Simms's work, Guilds argues persuasively that he resisted the stifling intellectual and literary conventions of his time. Indeed, Guilds notes Simms's ability to craft characters that defied normative assumptions about skin color, intelligence, and character. Hudson rounds out Gould's appraisal of Simms's art by tackling his value as a proto-ethnographer and historian of native Southerners. Few know the South about which Simms wrote more than Hudson, and he concludes that while little of the material that found its way into Simms's prose and poetry should be taken as ethnographically accurate, the multicultural jumble of his South is singular and important.

The collaboration between Guilds and Hudson clearly positions Simms as an important figure in the history and intellectual life of the South. His stories braided early-nineteenth-century literary conventions with his own ongoing attempts to come to grips with imagined Indians, their savagery, and their looming disappearance. Whatever the literary or ethnohistorical value of Simms's work, though, his consideration of a South peopled by Euroamericans, African Americans, and Native Americans foregrounds recent scholarship by Daniel H. Usner, Jr., Claudio Saunt, Woody Holton, and others. It reminds us today of a forgotten South that was far more complicated than notions of black and white can ever convey. The editors are to be applauded for making his disparate writings accessible and for making a persuasive case that Simms matters to any scholarly or literary attempt to articulate the region's multicultural past and to overcome the perceptual blinders that have made this past so difficult to see.

JAMES TAYLOR CARSON

Queen's University