From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms (review)

258CIVIL WAR HISTORY valued and embraced difference. If that is to be our test for evaluating Americans of the nineteenth (or even twentieth) century, who would pass? This lack of understanding for the culture of which Child was not only a product but a shaper is regrettable, for Child really does deserve a much larger place in scholarship of the antebellum period. She was one of the most influential of all abolitionists, an activist for Indians' rights and feminism, and an extremely important figure in the literature and journalism of her time. But this book will not do the trick of making Child better known in our time. The definitive biography of this fascinating and significant figure has yet to be published. Judith A. Hunter SUNY, Geneseo From Nationalism to Secessionism: The Changing Fiction of William Gilmore Simms. By Charles S. Watson. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. Pp. 200. $49.95.) Charles Watson, professor of English at the University of Alabama, moves through the novels of William Gilmore Simms showing how the South Carolina writer shifted from a devotion to a "distinctive national literature" to a militant "sectionalism" and then to a defense of the lost, Confederate cause. Watson argues that, in his early career, Simms was concerned with "contemporary questions of widespread interest" as he tried to take part in the shaping of a national literature. Books like The Yemassee (1835), The Partisan (1835), and Mellichampe ( 1 836) took on such topics as the fall ofthe Indian and the strength and resourcefulness of Americans in winning the Revolution. Watson finds a slight shift in a period where Simms wrote the "Border Romances." In books such as Richard Hurdis (1838), Border Beagles (1840), Confession (1841), and Beauchampe (1842), Simms was "concerned with the formation of a worthy society in the Southwest." He wanted to see a Southern model, rather than one of the industrial North, established there, and he felt that Texas could help balance North/South power. But basically the themes are again broadly patriotic with Simms arguing that "social solidarity rather than rugged individualism would win the West." With the end of the Mexican War and the resurgence of slavery issues, Simms became more deeply "sectional." For much of this period, at midcentury, Simms directed the very political Southern Quarterly Review. He regularly compared the Southern states at this point with the colonies of 1776 and thus saw their right to secede. By 1 853 Simms was revising his novels for a collected edition, and Watson makes good use of the changes, as he finds Simms "belligerent and defensive, but also confident and fervent." Moreover, he finds Simms's sectionalism in books like Katharine Walton ( 1 85 1 ), which defended South Carolina's contribution to the revolutionary cause; Woodcraft (1852), which was Simms's "fullest defense of slavery in fiction"; and The Cassique of Kiawah ( 1 859), book reviews259 which "espoused independence for the new nation," and ridiculed the "false promises of abolitionists." Woodcraft, of course, appeared in the same year as Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Watson places Simms with Stowe, rather than Hawthorne and Melville, because of Woodcraft's heavy political implications. The lost war found Simms still defending the South, arguing that the region was not "required to repudiate its past" and that it must avoid "fawning submission to Northern influence." Some instances found Simms approving of the extralegal law enforcement of the many "Regulator" groups that sprang up during Reconstruction. Watson's case is clear and well supported. The writing is crisp and to the point, and the documentation is both extensive and unobtrusive. Plus, Watson seems objective about Simms's place as fiction writer. Although devoted to one specific point, this book is full enough to serve well as an introduction to Simms. And indirectly, I think it says much about the South's struggle to be its own place and to be part of a nation at once. William Koon Clemson University The Reintegration ofAmerican History: Slavery and the Civil War. By William W. Freehling. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. x, 321. $14.95.) In these sometimes verbose but always thought-provoking essays, William W. Freehling discusses numerous political and...