A review of Honorable and Brilliant Labors, Orations of William Gilmore Simms (University of South Carolina Press, 2024), edited by John D. Miller
Out of this 298 page book, 70% are Simms’s orations with a small part of that the index, bibliography and an appendix that lists all of Simms’s known orations.
The 195 pages of Simms’s work – his orations, alone – make this book a worthwhile addition to your library though there are problems with this book.
The editor, John D. Miller, associate professor of English at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia wrote a general introduction to the book and an introduction to each of the four sections. There is also a biographical overview by well known Simms scholar, David Moltke-Hansen.
Moltke-Hansen does a good job but it appears that editor John D. Miller’s philosophy of history is Presentism[i] and condescension. His introductions are supposed to put Simms’s oratory in historical perspective but he often fails at that because his default position is that everything is about slavery, or, as he calls it, “enslavement.”
Many times he appears to look down on Simms and Southerners and that seems an ineffective way to bring out the truth, essence or significance of Simms and his work. For example, on page 7, at the end of Professor Miller’s general introduction, he writes:
Hindsight demonstrates that in only a few cases was Simms ultimately able to influence the minds of the people. When he was most persuasive, as in the case of his advocacy for secession to defend the rights of white Southerners to enslave African-Americans, his logic was abhorrent. Furthermore, given the subsequent mortality of the Civil War, the consequences of his success were appalling (emancipation notwithstanding). In other words, many of Simms’s oratorical labors do not incline us to consider him especially honorable or particularly brilliant.
If Professor Miller thinks that the South seceded from the Union to “defend the rights of white Southerners to enslave African-Americans” his thinking is shallow and he is incapable of putting Simms in perspective.
With all that Southerners had to gain from independence such as a magnificent new nation as large as Europe and a government more suited to them, the question is, why didn’t the North just let them go if the North was so offended by slavery, which it was not.
New Englanders and New Yorkers had brought all the slaves here and made huge fortunes in the process. They were America’s slave traders the entire existence of the country and were still slave trading, illegally, during the war. Boston, New York City and Portland, Maine were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862.[ii]
Professor Miller wants to condemn the South because of slavery but the “enslavement” he talks about started with Africans in Africa enslaving other Africans because of incessant tribal warfare. Poor captives were held in slave forts on Africa’s west coast such as Bunce Island off modern Sierra Leone waiting for European then New England and New York slave traders to pull up and pick up their cargo. For centuries slaves were Africa’s primary export. See Clyde Wilson’s African-American Slavery in Historical Perspective (Columbia, SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2024).
When the war started there were more slave states in the Union than in the Confederacy. There were nine slave states in the Union, soon to be increased by one, and only seven in the Confederacy.[iii] That, alone, proves that the war was not fought to end slavery or Unionists would have ended slavery in their own country first with no bloodshed. Of course, if they had attempted that, the Union slave states would have seceded, and clever Lincoln was no fool.
Five slave states fought for the Union the entire war: Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Kentucky and Missouri. West Virginia, the sixth, came into the Union as a slave state just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation became effective, January 1, 1863. Union slave states and already-captured Confederate territory were exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation.
The South had an enormous economic future with 100% control of King Cotton and a 10% tariff versus the Union’s Morrill Tariff of 47 to 60%. The North was in economic trouble and they had known it since South Carolina seceded December 20, 1860.
An independent South meant Southerners would not be forced to buy overpriced goods from the monopolist North because they would be able to buy from the whole world, especially Great Britain, at far lower, non-tariffed prices. Southerners were also anxious to manufacture for themselves and grow their own nascent industries.
All of this petrified Lincoln and Northern leaders who did not want a powerful, free trade nation on their southern border. Especially worrisome for them was the Confederate Constitution, which allowed free states to join.
The Confederate Constitution also prohibited the slave trade (which would disqualify Massachusetts, New York, Maine and most of New England from joining) and slavery was not required. In true States Rights fashion, what a state wanted to do about slavery was up to the state.
With the advent of agricultural machinery around the 1880s, Southerners would have ended slavery in a much better way than a war that killed 750,000 and maimed a million followed by 100 years of second class citizenship for African-Americans.
Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America said race relations were better in the South than anywhere in the country. He said race relations were worst in New England. It was in the South’s best interest to end slavery with love and good will for newly freed slaves, and help.
Northerners, when they ended slavery, did not really end it. Many ever thrifty Yankees sold their slaves to the South just before a slave was to be free such as before his 21st birthday. This is well documented.[iv]
Northerners did not want free blacks in the white supremacist North. Several Northern states had laws forbidding blacks from even visiting, much less living there. In Lincoln’s Illinois, the law was called “An act to prevent the immigration of free Negroes into this State” and it said that any free black person staying longer than 10 days “was subject to arrest and imprisonment.”[v]
Northerners did not want black people in the West for the same reasons they did not want them in the North. The West was to be reserved for white men from all over the world as Lincoln said in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.
There is an irony that much of the abolitionist movement was not for the benefit of black people. It was a way to rally votes. Might as well substitute the term “anti-South” for “anti-slavery” because it was anti-South – against the South – not pro-black.
Historian David M. Potter states that Northern anti-slavery was “not in any clear-cut sense a pro-Negro movement but actually had an anti-Negro aspect and was designed to get rid of the Negro.”[vi] Abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a mob in Alton, Illinois November 7, 1837.
The North did not even consider ending slavery until massive white immigration from Europe made it cheaper to hire a white man, who could be fired, than buy a black whom you had to take care of from birth to death.
Presentism and selective indignation such as Professor Miller exhibits do not lend themselves to valid interpretations of history. One must look at things the way the people who lived in the past looked at them. It was not the past to them, it was their present. They can’t be expected to adhere to the often idiotic standards of the twenty-first century such as men in women’s bathrooms and sports, and murdering babies as they are about to come out of the birth canal.
One of Simms’s orations in the book, “The Antagonisms of the Social Moral, North and South,” is an important antebellum document about the causes of the war. It was delivered by Simms in Charleston in 1857, four years before the guns of Fort Sumter sounded. It gives an account of his failed 1856 lecture tour to the North, which he had to cut short because of the hostility of the Northern public and press toward the South.
Simms came back to Charleston and said that the two sections were “in absolute and direct antagonism” and needed only a spark to ignite the “fiery furnace” of civil war:[vii]
Did you not feel – have you not feared – for a long season, the open hostilities of the very people from whom you hear this slander? Did you not know that all assaults upon the rights and possessions, the inheritance, on the institutions of a people, are always coupled with, or prefaced by, a defamation of their character?[viii]
That reminds me of Nazi Germany in the 1930s against the Jews. Simms warns Southerners:
Do you not see that, when Hate grows into open insolence, that the enemy is prepared to gratify all his passions? – that, having so far presumed upon our imbecility as to spit his scorn and venom into our very faces, he feels sure of his power to destroy![ix]
Simms delivered his Social Moral lectures, two out of three of which are in this book, in Charleston at the Hall of the Industrial Institute, better known as Hibernian Hall, the nights of Monday, May 25th, Wednesday, May 27th and the following Monday, June 1st, 1857.
The primary source of Northern agitation on the lecture tour was Simms’s “South Carolina in the Revolution,” which is also in this book. It is a great oration, full of history and detailed information in response to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner’s 1856 The Crime Against Kansas speech in the United States Senate and Northern historian Lorenzo Sabine’s slanderous 1847 work, The American Loyalists.
Simms knew the American Revolution better or at least as well as any historian of the time. He had written a series of eight outstanding romances (novels) about it (The Partisan, Mellichampe, The Scout, Katharine Walton, The Forayers, Eutaw, Joscelyn, and Woodcraft). They take you back and suddenly you are there, in the middle of Revolutionary drama in South Carolina. The books are a thrill to native Southerners because you instinctively understand their thinking on fighting, honor etc.
Simms’s knowledge of early American history was profound. Simms scholar and biographer John Caldwell Guilds writes in Simms, A Literary Life that “Alone among American novelists of the nineteenth century William Gilmore Simms perceived a national literary need and opportunity, sensed his capability to fulfill it, developed a plan to attain it, and lived to complete it.”[x]
Dr. Guilds said that Simms’s writing about the frontier and its interaction with civilization is “the unifying principle of a career devoted largely to historical novels about the development of American identity from 1539 to 1862….”
Simms, writes Dr. Guilds,
provided the reader of his day and today with four centuries of comprehensive Americana, modes of thought and action in our growing consciousness as a nation, compressed into the contents of two dozen works of fiction with a single broad, but clearly identifiable goal: an enlightened understanding of the history of civilization in America made vivid through fictional illustration. . . . He succeeded to a degree that is unmatched by any of his contemporaries in productiveness and surpassed by only a few in the quality of his best work.[xi]
Simms had been too busy to lecture until Northern falsifications became too much to take and “an earnest desire to vindicate our State and section from the grievous slanders to which they have recently been subjected, furnished an impulse which proved superior to all personal considerations.”
He writes:
These slanders of our Past, worked upon my mind, as I fancy, they worked upon yours. I felt that, in a fair field, they were easy of refutation. I had already, thro’ the press, done something toward their refutation; but the publications of the South, which hardly circulate at home, still more rarely reach the North; and the Lecturing system of that region seemed to promise a much more ample field.[xii]
The tour started out good with some twelve-hundred people attending in Buffalo where Simms read “South Carolina in the Revolution.” He felt things had gone well and that Buffalo was willing to hear South Carolina’s side.
During the lecture itself there was “frequent applause,” though Simms was told the next day there had been some hissing, which had been drowned out by the applause. He said “Fortunately, being rather deaf, I had heard none of these exhibitions of discontent.” He said he had no idea that offense had been taken by some because none had been planned.
He said “I had resolved, fearlessly to assert the truths of history, but not to assail or irritate.”
Apparently, the Buffalo press objected to comparisons Simms had made between the Revolutionary careers of South Carolina and certain Northern states, but Simms writes:
I had a mission . . . South Carolina was under the ban. She was herself the subject of odious comparisons. It was necessary, not only to assert her history; but to show what was that of her assailants; not only to defend her against the assaults of those who had mutilated her history, but to show where they had [misstated] their own. It was quite legitimate that I should endeavour not only to protect our own rooftree, but tear away from others their stolen garlands.[xiii]
The Buffalo press also objected to Simms denouncing Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts who had attacked South Carolina viciously on the Senate floor then got a good caning from South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks for doing so. Simms writes:
[W]hy should I forbear Wm [Simms means “Charles”] Sumner? Is he immaculate? Was he not a wanton assailant? Did not his cold blooded, venomous, deliberate assault upon our State, so entirely gratuitous, invite and justify retort? So. Carolina was not the subject before the Senate. He went out of his way to despoil her, and in a more deliberate expression of malignant hatred than was ever suffered to show itself in Senate House before. This was not done in the heat of passion – it was a work of time, of cool deliberate purpose & studied preparation. Seward and others . . . had counseled him against it. . . .[xiv]
There is a good comparison here of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner with today’s Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Both falsely attack other people’s history while hiding their own dishonorable record of slave trading and treason (think Hartford Convention in the War of 1812). They are both hypocrites and in Elizabeth Warren’s case, also a fraud for stating for years that she was a Native American when she is as white as the pure driven snow: “. . . Warren held herself out as Native American, allowing Harvard Law School to use her [1995-2004] as cover for its impotent diversity efforts.” See the Boston Globe investigation in The Intercept, in this endnote.[xv]
About Sumner, Simms says “The two main characteristics of this senator, the sophomoric vanity, and the political ambition, were too powerful to suffer either prudence or policy.” Simms said Sumner’s “slanders were on record, and still demanding refutation.”[xvi]
Some of the press in Buffalo was moderate but “other presses used a different sort of language” and described Simms as “a Southern pauper seeking Northern charities;” and “the people of the North, sometimes called in a Southern orator or Lecturer, as they would a foreign fiddler, with his dancing dogs & monkey, – to amuse them.”[xvii]
Simms points out that this time, the ‘Southron’ did not amuse them but made them mad.[xviii]
The negative Buffalo press reports preceded Simms to Rochester where he again read “South Carolina in the Revolution,” but all seemed to go well. There was regular applause and around a thousand attended. There was a nice party afterwards and Simms noted that to succeed politically in the North, one had to adopt “all the popular rages.”
At Syracuse, the committee would not allow Simms to read “South Carolina in the Revolution,” and another “wholly innocuous” lecture was substituted.[xix]
Vicious press reports continued and followed Simms to New York, which he noted got half its sustenance from the South.
Simms expected the New York lectures to go well since he had been invited by “several of the most distinguished citizens” and “men of national reputation,”[xx] but such was not the case.
Simms’s nervous New York friends had him edit “South Carolina in the Revolution” to remove any possibility of misunderstanding or insult. He tried to accommodate them but it didn’t matter. The Buffalo press had done real damage and only 150 people showed up in a large hall. The press, more vicious than ever, identified Simms “With the affair of Brooks and Sumner” and that caused huge resentment in the North. Simms was not surprised when his New York lecture committee came to him and said, in part:
We are afraid that you will have to give up your Lectures. We can do nothing for them. We have canvassed the whole city, in all its leading centers, and can neither sale the tickets or give them away. Such is the offense taken by your allusion to Sumner, – who is described as in a dying state from the assaults of Brooks – such the odium of South Carolina – such the rancour of public feeling, just after the election – that the common answer to an application is one of imprecation! – The answer is, in brief – “D__n South Carolina, and every thing that hails from her. We want no more blowing about South Carolina.”[xxi]
Simms refunded the money paid in advance and wrote numerous letters canceling further appearances. He came back to South Carolina approximately $2,500 poorer.
We are in a similar position today with attacks on Southern history that began in the 1960s with the politicization and degradation of American history by academia and the news media. That is why distinguished historian Eugene D. Genovese (Roll, Jordan Roll, The World the Slaves Made, et al.) said:
To speak positively about any part of this Southern tradition is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity – an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners, and arguably black Southerners as well, of their heritage, and therefore, their identity. . . . [xxii]
Presentism and the politicization of history falsify history. They should be called out every time just as Simms did in 1856 and Genovese did above.
Honorable and Brilliant Labors points out that today, there is a growing and enthusiastic interest in Simms that started in the early 1990s with the William Gilmore Simms Society and the Simms Review. In 2011 the South Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina launched a digital Simms edition that gives “digital access to all of Simms’s separately published works.”
Moltke-Hansen writes that the “last three decades of the twentieth century saw more published on Simms than the previous hundred years” and the last thirty years “saw more dissertations and theses on him than had appeared in all the years before.”
Simms’s is unquestionably worthy of being anthologized and made widely known to the world.
His tremendous productivity included eighty-two book length works.
While Nathaniel Hawthorne had his Scarlet Letter, in his entire life he finished only five novels at most. Herman Melville had his Moby-Dick, but in his life only eleven. Simms’s total was twenty-three novels, “perhaps fifteen of which should be considered major.” Not even James Fenimore Cooper’s productivity compared to Simms’s.[xxiii]
In 1845, Edgar Allan Poe called Simms “the best novelist which this country has, upon the whole, produced.”[xxiv]
Poe even admitted that the best ghost story ever written by an American was Simms’s “Grayling, or Murder Will Out.” Poe wrote:
[I]t is really an admirable tale, nobly conceived and skillfully carried into execution – the best ghost story ever written by an American. . . .[xxv]
In addition to being a novelist, short story and novelette writer, and historian, Simms was a dramatist, briefly a politician, a businessman running a working plantation, lecturer, and one of the leading poets of the Old South “with an ultimate ranking somewhere between Bryant and Whittier not out of the question.”[xxvi]
As a literary critic “Simms, a critic of exceptionally high quality, was one of the most influential and judicious in all American literature before 1860.”[xxvii]
As a writer of letters “No literary man of his time wrote as many, as varied, or as interesting, informative, and entertaining letters as did Gilmore Simms.” Simms’s letters also document life in the North “Since Simms’s circle of friends included Northern authors, critics, and publishers; since he visited the North frequently and commented thoughtfully and sometimes pungently on his impressions of the conditions of life there; and since his correspondence covers a wide range of American politics, economics, and philosophy as well as literature and publishing, his letters have national implications and importance. They are in effect a cornucopia of Americana – the most vital collection of its kind of a nineteenth-century man of letters.”[xxviii]
Let me end with the opening of “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and South” because it gives the lecture’s significance in Simms’s own words and gives you a taste of his writing. The bold emphasis is mine:
. . . I very well knew that much of the prejudice of sections against each other was the result of mere ignorance, and I held it vastly important to our future relations, that the truth should be made known, even to unwilling ears, if only to prevent those mistakes of policy, which, under false notions of our neighbors, so frequently lead to the most disastrous consequences. It was especially important that the North should be disabused of the notion that the South is imbecile – imbecile because of her slave institutions – imbecile in war – unproductive in letters – deficient in all the proper agencies of civilization, – and so, incapable of defense against assaults upon these notions our enemies very strenuously insist, & in every form of phrase, & through every popular medium – the press, the pulpit, the Poet and the Politician. A miserable paragraphist will prate of the intellectual, moral and military deficiencies of a region which has produced a Washington, Jefferson, Marshall, Rutledge, Calhoun; Randolph – Marion, Sumter, Jackson, Scott & Taylor; a catalogue including all the master minds in statesmanship & war of which the whole country rings from the earliest period to the present – not to speak of Scenes, besides, – where wisdom, virtue, valour, eloquence, have established the government; given it its form and pressure; fixing our laws & national policy: – mistreating our rights in field & council; – and, in spite of these recorded names, the babble about our imbecility, as a race, will be uttered every where, by the most miserable scribbler of a venal press, & fanatic pulpit – by flatulent orators & trading politicians, – creatures who themselves have done, and can do, nothing for the nation; – and there will be nobody to rise up to confront them, with a manly indignation – to cry aloud – “Fools! Get ye to Jericho: till your beards be grown!” This is the daily history. Shall we stop to ask, wherefore this malignant desire to prove base & worthless, the sister states to which we are bound in solemnly written contract? Enough that it argues a condition of hostility which must ultimately break all bonds. There is a Rubicon in every progress which, once passed, return becomes impossible. Return for all who deal, in this language, is even now impossible. Now, my friends, once persuade a jealous, grasping, arrogant race, always usurping, – that the section which they hate and denounce is at once rich in wealth and poor in spirit; – worthy of the spoiler, yet feeble of will; wanting in energy and courage; slow in action & timid of resolve; – and you hold forth to them every motive for aggression and assault; you stimulate their arrogance, & endow them with audacity if not with courage. Now, unless we prepare ourselves for the last issues, it is well perhaps, if we may disabuse these people of such notions. It was somewhat my purpose to do this in my lectures – not merely to vindicate our ancestors, but to show, as indirectly and inoffensively as possible, that we inherit their blood & spirit; their intellect & will – that we are not resourceless in any of the elements that enable a nation to maintain itself in the arena with all other nations, – not imbecile, but particularly powerful, whenever the necessity for conflict shall become sufficiently apparent to compel the exhibition of our strength. This is the case especially with all agricultural people, who, sparsely settled, are slow to action; unaccustomed to daily attrition with the multitude, have little variety of movement: and wait always, some extraordinary impulse: – but who are firm when roused, concentrative of will & purpose, from the very absence of capricious impulse; are more fearless in action; more tenacious of individuality; more jealous of their liberation when threatened than all other people; – and, strengthened by a self-esteem which has been nursed in comparative solitude, find in patriotism only the exercise of a personal pride which never slumbers under the invasion of its rights. These are the virtues of a rural population. . . .[xxix]
Honorable and Brilliant Labors is the final volume “of the William Gilmore Simms Initiatives, a collaboration between USC Press and USC Libraries that spans more than a decade of publishing and includes six scholarly volumes and more than sixty reprint editions.” That comes from the back cover. David Moltke-Hansen and Todd Hagstette are series editors.
Here is the Appendix:
Known Orations of William Gilmore Simms
Dates are believed to be the first public reading.
[The nine included in Honorable and Brilliant Labors are bold]“Occasional Address for the Opening of the Charleston Theatre” (1837)
“Barnwell District Agricultural Society Oration” (1840)
“The Epochs and Events of American History, as Suited to the purposes of Art in Fiction” (1842)
“The Social Principle” (1842)
“The Sources of American Independence” (1844)
“Self-Development” (1847)
“Poetry and the Practical” (1851)
“The Battle of Fort Moultrie” (1853)
“The Moral Character of Hamlet” (1854)
“Choice of a Profession” (1855)
“Inauguration of the Spartanburg Female College” (1855)
“An Oration – King’s Mountain” (1855)
Series on the History of South Carolina (ca. 1856)
“On the Colonial History of S.C. Lecture 1”
“On the Colonial and Ante-Colonial History of S.C.
Lecture I -The Ante-Colonial Period”
“Lecture 3 – British Colonial Establishments in America”
“Lecture 4 – South Carolina Under the Royal Government”
“Marion, the Carolina Partisan” (ca. 1856)
“The Idylls of the Apalachian [sic]” (1856)
“South Carolina in the Revolution” (1856)
“The Social Moral, Lecture 1” (1857)
“The Social Moral, Lecture 2” (1857)
“Antagonisms of the Social Moral, North and South (1857)
“The Ideal and Real (1857)
“The Sense of the Beautiful” (1870)
“Constitution” (fragment, n.d.)
“Masonry” (fragment, n.d.)
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[i] Presentism is defined by Merriam-Webster as “an attitude toward the past dominated by present-day attitudes and experiences.” “Presentism.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/presentism. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.
[ii] According to W. E. B. Du Bois in his book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America: 1638-1870, in 1862, a year into the War Between the States, Boston, Massachusetts, New York City and Portland, Maine were the largest slave trading ports on the planet and had been illegally slave trading for 54 years since the United States Constitution had outlawed the slave trade in 1808. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America: 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 179. Du Bois is quoting the Continental Monthly, January, 1862, p. 87, the article “The Slave-Trade in New York.”
[iii] When Lincoln’s naval mission arrived in Charleston on April 12, 1861, it was one of five military missions sent into Southern waters by Abraham Lincoln in March and April to get the war started. At that point there were seven states in the Confederate States of America: South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
There were nine slave states in the Union at that time because Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina had voted not to secede. They were still in the Union. They promptly voted to secede over Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South and the issue was unquestionably their abhorrence over unconstitutional, immoral federal coercion of sovereign states, not slavery. There was nothing in the United States Constitution that gave a group of Northern states the right to invade seven Southern states.
In Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina were 52.4% of white Southerners, therefore, a majority of white Southerners who had voted at first not to secede, did secede over Federal coercion and nothing to do with slavery.
The nine Union slave states when the war started were: Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and North Carolina. West Virginia came into the Union as a slave state later (and Lincoln was glad to have that slave state and did not require it to end slavery, and it was exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation as were all the Union slave states).
[iv] A good way to characterize the North’s gradual emancipation is to say that many Northerners did not free their slaves, they just changed the slave’s master from a Northern to a Southern one. Historian Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. in his book It Wasn’t About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), Chapter 1 , “Slavery and the Yankee Flesh Peddler,” and Chapter 2, “Hypocrisy,” pgs 1 – 17, writes on page 12:
All of the Northern states had enacted anti-slavery legislation by 1830. The Northern manumission and emancipation laws were designed so that the slaves’ masters did not lose money. The laws always had a liberation date. If a slave was born before that date, he would be a slave the rest of his life unless he successfully escaped or was freed by his “Massa.” If a slave was born after that date, he would be free on this twenty-first birthday – at least in state law. “Massa,” however, could always sell his slaves south before the liberation date. If the law said that a slave would be liberated on this twenty-first birthday, for example, the black person could be pretty confident that he would celebrate that birthday in a tobacco field in Virginia or a rice paddy in South Carolina. There was no moral outrage against slavery in the North. Much of the impetus behind manumission was a desire to protect white labor from cheap black competition.
Edgar J. McManus in his book, Black Bondage in the North (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1973), writes on pages 180 – 182:
Frequently white support of abolition owned more to immediate self-interest than to any concern for the welfare of blacks. Indeed, much of the working-class opposition to slavery was motivated primarily by the desire to eliminate slave competition. “The common people,” John Adams observed, “would not suffer the labour, by which alone they could obtain a subsistence, to be done by slaves.” (“Letters and Documents Relating to Slavery in Massachusetts,” in MHS Colls., 5th ser., III (1877), 402).
Yankees used all kinds of tricks to make sure they did not lose money. McManus writes that “Some exporters evaded the law by leasing their slaves for long periods instead of selling them outright. Others manumitted slaves under long indentures which could then be sold to buyers in other states.” (p181). There were also kidnappers who would kidnap free blacks “on the streets” and sell them into slavery in the South. (pgs 181-182).
Census records, McManus writes on page 182, show:
The sale of Negroes to the slave states cut deeply into the North’s black population. Federal census returns reveal that during the period 1790-1830 the rate of growth of New York’s black population declined from 2.13 percent to about 0.57 percent yearly. In 1790 Negroes accounted for 7.6 percent of all inhabitants; by 1830 they had decreased to only 2.3 percent of the total population. This decline had parallels in almost every Northern state. Connecticut’s black population grew at an annual rate of only 0.6 percent between 1790 and 1850, and during the period 1840-50 actually declined by several hundreds. (U.S. Census Bureau, Negro Population, 1790-1915, pp. 44-45). Since there is no evidence of fewer births or greater mortality after 1800, it seems obvious that the black population was depleted by emigration. Nor is it likely that blacks left voluntarily, for their status in the North was infinitely better than in the South or the West Indies. (Bold emphasis added.)
See also Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).
[v] H. Newcomb Morse, “The Foundations and Meaning of Secession,” Stetson Law Review of Stetson University College of Law, Vol. XV, No. 2, 1986, footnote #28, 423.
[vi] David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1976), 35-36.
[vii] William Gilmore Simms, “The Antagonisms of the Social Moral, North and South,” in Honorable and Brilliant Labors, Orations of William Gilmore Simms, John D. Miller, ed. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2024), 253 – 282.
[viii] William Gilmore Simms, “South Carolina in the Revolution, The Social Moral. Lecture 1.”, 1857 Lecture in the Charles Carroll Simms Collection of the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 4-5.
[ix] Ibid, 7-8.
[x] John Caldwell Guilds, Simms, A Literary Life (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 414, N6. Given first as a lecture, March, 1842, in Savannah, Georgia. published later in Magnolia, n.s., 1 (July, 1842), and again in 1845 in Southern and Western Monthly Magazine and Review, in six installments. The one used by Dr. Guilds was in Views and Reviews in American Literature, History and Fiction, First Series (1845), 32-127.
[xi] Ibid, 342.
[xii] William Gilmore Simms, “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and South.”, 1857 lecture housed in the Charles Carroll Simms Collection of the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 4-5.
[xiii] Ibid, 25-26.
[xiv] Ibid.
[xv] The Intercept writes: “According to a much-cited investigation by the Boston Globe, Warren consistently checked “white” on personnel forms throughout her career, including in 1981, 1985, and 1998 while employed at the University of Texas. But in the 1986-1987 edition of the Association of American Law School’s directory and eight subsequent editions, Warren listed herself as a minority. She began identifying as Native American on personnel forms three years into her post at the University of Pennsylvania. And while multiple professors have attested to the fact that Warren was considered white during the hiring process at Harvard University, in 1995 she self-identified as Native American, and the school’s statistics were updated to reflect as much. Harvard recorded Warren as Native American from 1995 to 2004.” https://theintercept.com/2018/10/16/elizabeth-warren-dna-video-native-american-harvard/, accessed 12-3-22.
[xvi] William Gilmore Simms, “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and South.”, 1857 lecture housed in the Charles Carroll Simms Collection of the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 27.
[xvii] Ibid, 29-30.
[xviii] Ibid.
[xix] Ibid, 41-43.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] William Gilmore Simms, “Antagonisms of the Social Moral. North and South.”, 1857 lecture housed in the Charles Carroll Simms Collection of the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 38-40.
[xxii] Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi-xii. Dr. Genovese passed away September 26, 2012.
[xxiii] John Caldwell Guilds, Simms, A Literary Life (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 346. Also, John Caldwell Guilds, ed., Long Years of Neglect, The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1988).
[xxiv] Edgar Allan Poe in Broadway Journal, II (1845), 190-191, as quoted in Guilds, Simms, A Literary Life, 342.
[xxv] Sean Busick, “Who Wrote the Best American Ghost Story? Simms Of Course,” April 17, 2014. https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/who-wrote-the-best-american-ghost-story-simms-of-course/, accessed 11-28-24.
[xxvi] Guilds, Simms, A Literary Life, 346.
[xxvii] Ibid.
[xxviii] Ibid.
[xxix] William Gilmore Simms, “The Antagonisms of the Social Moral, North and South,” in Honorable and Brilliant Labors, Orations of William Gilmore Simms, John D. Miller, ed. (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2024), 256-257.
“These are the virtues of a rural population”
And an American Indian, and pastoral African population. We were surrounded and marbled in, with both. My slave holding families. This is a lived experience.
Bravo!!!
This is one of the most impressive writings you have done so far. Not only have you helped to introduce us to one of the South’s (and America’s) leading minds – with his awe-inspiring comprehension of his time and his prescience of the future. but you have also provided us all with a concise (and useful) summation of the many issues that brought on the War.
Additionally, and especially cogent, you provide references. Non-Southerners have often never heard – and highly doubt – some of the true things we say. That is why it is so important that we, like you, can back up our claims by quoting irrefutable sources.
You and the Abbeville Institute have done us all a service with this review.