An Early and Strong Sympathy: The Indian Writings of William Gilmore Simms (review)

William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), a white southern author and editor, was best known for his lyrical and romantic writing, as well as for his preoccupation with history, particularly the American Revolution and the world of the frontier. Like many of his white contemporaries, Simms had an interest in the creation of a national body of literature, and Simms's writings about Indians, collected in this lengthy anthology, are best viewed as part of his nation-building project. Although, as editor Charles Hudson notes, Simms also "saw himself as a spokesman on Indian affairs for the South" (xlix), it would be unwise to read Simms for information on Indians or Indian affairs, for the Indian representations in these texts are confined to that familiar trope known as the noble savage—which, as Philip Deloria notes in Playing Indian, balances both "an urge to idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them" (4).

Such attitudes are not surprising for a nineteenth-century white writer, and analysis of them can help illuminate the development of dominant attitudes toward native peoples. However, the anthology's editors—John Caldwell Guilds, a Simms scholar, and Charles Hudson, a retired anthropologist—do not provide such an analysis. Instead, their introductory materials border on hagiography, as they attempt to prove that Simms "almost certainly knew (and cared) more about the American Indian than any other man of letters of the nineteenth century," in spite of much evidence to the contrary (xxix).

The brief preface suggests that Simms accomplished an "extraordinary achievement in portraying the American Indian" and that An Early and Strong Sympathy is useful "to anyone interested in understanding the Native American in the context of emerging American civilization" (xi). American civilizations, of course, had been "emerging" for centuries before Europeans came to this continent; here and elsewhere, the editors use the term "American" as a placeholder for "Euroamerican." Equally as distressing as this normative whiteness is the notion that Simms's writing offers a means of understanding Indian peoples. Just as James Fenimore Cooper's Mohicans tell us much about Cooper but nothing about Mohicans, Simms's Indians offer us little more than insight into the mind of a white plantation owner in the nineteenth century. The introductory materials, however, do not recognize these limitations and promise a great deal more than the texts themselves can deliver.

In their separate introductions, Guilds and Hudson try to provide a context for Simms's work as a Southerner writing about Native Americans in the 1820s to 1860s. However, in the span of nearly forty pages, neither introduction discusses perhaps the most vital issue facing Native Americans in this time and place: Removal. This omission is even more puzzling because Simms himself writes on the subject, and his views here are instructive. Simms opposed Removal, but hardly out of advocacy for Indian rights. Instead of being removed to Oklahoma, Simms suggested that Southeastern Indians be "subdued and kept subordinate to a superior race, in familiar and daily contact" (121). A slaveholder himself, Simms believed in the beneficial and civilizing effects of slavery on African Americans; while he never mentions the word "slavery" in relation to Indians, it is not hard to imagine what being "subdued and kept subordinate" would have entailed. In this context, to take Simms's claim of "an early and strong sympathy" for Native Americans at face value, and to omit any mention of Removal is, quite simply, breathtakingly irresponsible.

Simms's nonfiction texts offer ample testimony to contradict the claims of sympathy and enlightenment made in the introductory material. For example, in "North American Indians" (1828), Simms refers to Indians as "a connecting link between the man and the monkey," "sullen, revengeful, and inhuman, but not cowardly" (10, 15). In an 1844 text describing the events leading to Removal, Simms hails the European colonists carrying "the banner of civilization...