Simms: our Muses reassume their powers

William Gilmore Simms refused to act like an old man. In his last full year of life, he continued working, contributing articles and poems to the newly founded Nineteenth Century magazine; he did not receive pay for his contributions but hoped to help this new organ of Southern culture. Still, he was weary. He admitted he lived only for his children (six of fifteen survived) and grandchildren (three of six were then living). Perhaps his biggest contribution in this period was a prologue written for the opening of the new Charleston Academy of Music. It earned him $55.

The address was delivered by another on December 1, 1869. "I was quite too unwell to attend the theatre at the opening," Simms wrote two days later, "but am told that the Lady who delivered the address did so with grace, spirit & propriety." On the same day, to Evert Augustus Duyckinck, Simms admitted he had not left the house in three days but heard his address was delivered "with excellent effect." The Academy, in a re-appropriated building from the 1850s, was the talk of the town. One local newspaper reported it seemed, "Everybody was going." Everybody except for Simms, apparently. In his place "a graceful blonde" named Lillie Eldridge read his poem (excerpted here from its printing in the Charleston Daily News the next day):

This once proud city, seated by the sea,
With subject realm as boundless and as free,
Though prostrate long beneath an adverse Fate
That left her homes and temples desolate,
Hath yet such wondrous gifts in sea and shore,
It needs but will her fortunes to restore;
The stern resolve; With Labor in her marts,
Hope in her homes and courage in her hearts,
To prove superior to the hostile blast,
And all repair, so glorious in her Past!

Not now in arms, but arts, we seek the strife;
The arts alone illume the paths of life;
Labor, but blindly gropes along the way,
Till Art lets in the glorious Light of Day!
'Tis she informs us with the sweet desire,
Uplifts the soul till all its wings aspire;
Trains Fancy's height, assiduous, to explore,
Our boundless realm of rock, and wood, and shore...

Such are Art's beautified toils, and such be ours!
To-night our Muses reassume their powers:
This is their temple! Bright the forms arise,
And all the world of magic fills our eyes!
There Genius comes upon his beamy car,
And lo! the crowds that gather from afar!

...To you who love the beautiful and true,
Friends of the Drama, we appeal to you!
Come with your smile, the virtuous and the wise,
And cheer the servants of the scene ye prize;
Bring fearless judgment, nail with heartiest laud;
Denounced the Wrong, and still the Right applaud;
Touch'd by the Poet's truth, embrace the True,
And be yourselves, the nobly great ye view;
Spurn shameless Vice; pluck vain presumption down,
And tear from sly Hypocrsy his gown;
Cheer infant Merit in his toilsome strife;
And crown achievement with the palm of Life;
So shall the virtues bless your name and age,
And find their noblest ally in the Stage.

Clearly, Simms saw the opening of the Academy of Music, which was really a concert hall and theater, as a stepping stone to improving the cultural literacy of the South — a cause he often considered. Particularly in the years following the Civil War, the poet/novelist hoped his fellow Southerners would make something of themselves.

Incidentally, in the month that followed, Simms was surprisingly open in discussing his ailments. In a letter to his friend and fellow Southern author Paul Hamilton Hayne, Simms admitted to having: "Dyspepsia, in its most aggravated forms,  Indigestion, Constipation, Nausea, frequent vomitings, occasional vertigo, and, as a safety valve to this, hemorrhoids." He died about six months later. The Charleston Academy of Music honored him with a tribute eight years to the month after his opening address was presented.

War Poetry of the South: favorable or inverse

William Gilmore Simms dated his preface to the anthology War Poetry of the South as September 8, 1866. Written in Brooklyn, the introduction to the book explains the editor's reason for collecting such a book: the South's sufferings have prompted a high degree of mental and artistic development. Further, Simms writes, though the sentiments seem sectional and anti-Union, the Confederate states' re-assimilation into the fold means the rest of the country assumes these writings as part of their history. He continues:

The emotional literature of a people is as necessary to the philosophical historian as the mere details of events in the progress of a nation. This is essential to the reputation of the Southern people, as illustrating their feelings, sentiments, ideas, and opinions — the motives which influenced their actions, and the objects which they had in contemplation, and which seemed to them to justify the struggle in which they were engaged. It shows with what spirit the popular mind regarded the course of events, whether favorable or adverse; and, in this aspect, it is even of more importance to the writer of history than any mere chronicle of facts.

Facts, says Simms, do not show the emotion which poetry and song allow. These works are without reservation and, therefore, "gush freely and freshly from the heart." His hope is that these poems will be recognized, "not only as highly creditable to the Southern mind," but also as a sincere expression of Southerners — people whose rich sentiments sustained them through war. The book opens with Henry Timrod's "Ethnogenesis" (a poem announcing the birth of a new people) and ends with a few post-war verses. The most emotional are the poems which express grief, as in "Only a Soldier's Grave," credited to "S. A. Jones of Aberdeen, Mississippi":

Only a soldier's grave! Pass by,
For soldiers, like other mortals, die.
Parents he had — they are far away;
No sister weeps o'er the soldier's clay;
No brother comes, with a tearful eye:
It's only a soldier's grave — pass by.

True, he was loving, and young, and brave,
Though no glowing epitaph honors his grave;
No proud recital of virtues known,
Of griefs endured, or of triumphs won;
No tablet of marble, or obelisk high;—
Only a soldier's grave — pass by.

Yet bravely he wielded his sword in fight,
And he gave his life in the cause of right!
When his hope was high, and his youthful dream
As warm as the sunlight on yonder stream;
His heart unvexed by sorrow or sigh;—
Yet, 'tis only a soldier's grave: — pass by.

Yet, should we mark it--the soldier's grave,
Some one may seek him in hope to save!
Some of the dear ones, far away,
Would bear him home to his native clay:
'Twere sad, indeed, should they wander nigh,
Find not the hillock, and pass him by.

William Gilmore Simms: no mother's smile

William Gilmore Simms was three months shy of his second birthday when his mother, Harriet Singleton Simms, died in childbirth on January 29, 1808. The young Simms had lost his older brother shortly before. His father (and namesake) was immensely depressed and, it is said, his hair turned completely white within a week. Calling his home "a place of tombs," he moved to Tennessee then Mississippi, leaving his son (the only surviving child) with his maternal grandmother Jane Gates in Charleston, South Carolina. Father was seldom heard from.

As one of his earliest biographers noted, William Gilmore Simms grew up "motherless and almost fatherless," but he doted on his grandmother, who returned his warm affection and was known as a great storyteller. Attempts at a public school education failed; in his adulthood, Simms reflected that he was an example of the "worthlessness" of Charleston schools at the time: "They taught me little or nothing. The teachers were generally worthless in morals, and as ignorant as worthless." Frequent illness kept him from attending class often anyway and, instead, he turned to reading and self-education.

As a teenager, however, he learned of an inheritance from his mother's estate, which he quickly put towards the purchase of a political newspaper. It soon failed. He married young, but his wife died shortly into the marriage. He visited his father in Mississippi, and the elder Simms told the younger he would never be successful in South Carolina.

Throughout it all, William Gilmore Simms was writing as early as 8 years old. At one point, he traveled to Hingham, Massachusetts, where he completed his long, ambitious poem Atalantis; its publication was his first major literary success. He became one of the most prolific writers of the South, publishing poetry, novels, history, and editing anthologies after the Civil War. Looking back on his early years in a letter to Rufus Griswold in 1841, Simms wrote: "Of myself, in this time, the history is no pleasant one to me." His sonnet "Childhood":

That season which all other men regret,
     And strive, with boyish longing, to recall,
Which love permits not memory to forget,
     And fancy still restores in dreams of all
That boyhood worshipp'd, or believed, or knew,—
Brings no sweet images to me—was true,
Only in cold and cloud, in lonely days
     And gloomy fancies—in defrauded claims,
     Defeated hopes, denied, denying aims;—
Cheer'd by no promise—lighted by no rays,
Warm'd by no smile—no mother's smile,—that smile,
Of all, best suited sorrow to beguil,
And strengthen hope, and, by unmark'd degrees,
Encourage to their birth high purposes.

Simms: I continued to believe in the ghost

William Gilmore Simms's ghost story "Grayling; or, Murder Will Out" was first published in The Gift for 1842. It was immediately hailed by critics as one of the best American ghost stories published (Edgar Allan Poe was one of those critics; his tale "Eleonora" was published in the same book as "Grayling"). Simms begins the tale by noting that stories of the bizarre are too often met with credulity in his day: "The world has become monstrous matter-of-fact in latter days," partly due to the need to give proof or evidence for all things. "That cold-blooded demon called Science has taken the place of all the other demons." So, he turns to a story he often heard in his youth from his grandmother.

Shortly after the Revolution, two veterans of that war are relocating their family. While traveling at a slow pace through the woods, they encounter their former commanding officer, Major Lionel Spencer, as well as a strange Scotsman calling himself Macnab. The four men recount stories of the war, though they are confused by the odd behavior of Macnab. Finally, Spencer rides off alone to continue his journey. He reveals that he is the heir to a large fortune in England and intends to sail overseas to claim it, if he can prove who he is.

Later, the younger man of the family James Grayling scouts ahead and is met by the ghost of Spencer, who claims that Macnab has killed him to take his place and steal his inheritance.

"Do not be alarmed when you see me! I have been shockingly murdered... Yes, murdered!  ...James, I look to you have to have the murderer brought to justice! James! —do you hear me, James?"

James rides on to Charleston in the hopes of stopping the boat Macnab is taking to England. The local authorities do not believe his ghost story, but agree to search for Macnab anyway. They find him on board, using the name Macleob, and he reveals he fought for the king during the Revolution. All agree he has an air of guilt about him and they search for the body of Spencer to prove he was murdered. Sure enough, they find the corpse in the same spot where James had seen his ghost. Spencer has been beaten to death with the butt of a pistol — the very same pistol Macnab has on him. He is found guilty of murdered and sentenced to death by hanging.

Presented as a story within a story, the tale is recounted by a grandmother to her grandson. Immediately after its telling, her grown son dismisses the supernatural aspects of it and offers his logical explanation, to the disappointment of the young narrator who was listening (presumably the young Simms himself):

I heard my father with great patience to the end, though he seemed very tedious. He had taken a great deal of pains to destroy one of my greatest sources of pleasure. I need not add that I continued to believe in the ghost, and, with my grandmother, to reject the philosophy. It was more easy to believe the one than to comprehend the other. 

Simms: poured to waste in Charleston

After the death of his first child, and his wife's pregnancy with his third child resulted in the death both of the child and its mother, a man moved to Mississippi, leaving his only remaining child in the care of a grandmother in Charleston, South Carolina. When the boy, William Gilmore Simms, turned 18, he visited his father in Mississippi, who predicted he would fare better there than back in Charleston. Simms disagreed and returned to his native town, where he would spend the majority of his life as a novelist, critic, historian, and poet. But, on October 30, 1858, he admitted his father was probably correct all along. "Thirty odd years have passed," he wrote, "and I can now mournfully say the old man was right." Charleston, Simms believed, was not as kind to his talents as he felt he deserved:

All that I have [done] has been poured to waste in Charleston, which has never smiled on any of my labors, which has steadily ignored my claims, which has disparaged me to the last, has been the last place to give me adhesion, to which I owe no favor, having never received an office, or a compliment, or a dollar at her hands.

With the exception of a few friends, he continued, the people of Charleston had treated him "as a public enemy, to be sneered at." Simms had every right to call the town "a place of tombs"; by the time he wrote these words, he had lost six children (two died on the same day about a month earlier due to Yellow Fever). More than that, Simms lamented the difficulty of being a man of letters in the South, an area where literature was less appreciated. Northern readers, further, were less likely to pay attention to writers of the South. Loyalty to Charleston was in part based on his hope to elevate culture, the arts, and literacy.

In fact, Simms became recognized as one of the most important leaders in Southern writing both before and after the Civil War. After his death, Charleston in particular celebrated Simms as a local legend.

Simms: left all his better works undone

William Gilmore Simms knew he would die in 1870. "I am rapidly passing from a stage where you young men are to succeed me, doing what you can," he wrote to his friend Paul Hamilton Hayne two days into the new year. "My last days would be cheerless in the last degree but for numerous good friends, who will hardly allow me to suffer... but I am weary, Paul, and having much to say, I must say no more." Simms's health improved slightly in the coming months, but quickly reverted to the point where he was often bound to his couch and rarely left his home — sometimes for weeks at a time. Making matters worse, one of his final stories had been rejected by a magazine, which never returned his incomplete manuscript.

Simms rallied long enough in early May to offer a final public appearance, delivering an opening address for a flower show in his native Charleston. A month later, the poet/novelist/editor wrote his last letter to Hayne, noting his "long and exhausting malady" was overtaking him and that his illness had left him emaciated "to such diminutive proportions" that he would no longer be recognized by his friends. It was 5 p.m. on Saturday, June 11, 1870 that William Gilmore Simms died, likely from liver disease. Nine years later to the day, the people of Charleston unveiled a memorial to him. Simms had asked that his epitaph note that "he has left all his better works undone."

His "Sonnet—Resignation":

His eye was tearless, but his cheeks were wan;
There sorrow long had set her heavy hand;
Yet was his spirit noble, and a bland
And sweet expression o'er his features ran!
Care had not tutored him to sullenness—
The world's scorn not subdued the natural man:
The sweet milk of his nurture was not less,
Because the world had met him with its ban;
He is above revenges, though he drinks
The bitter draught of malice and of hate;
And still, though in the weary strife he sinks,
They can not make him murmur at his fate;
He suffers, and he feels the pang, but proves
The conqueror, though he falls, for still he loves.

Eutaw: some things I knows jest like a book

"Steal not this book, my worthy friend,
For fear the gallows be your end!"

Thus reads an inscription on a book given to Gustavus Avinger, a character in the novel Eutaw; or The Raid of the Dog Days by William Gilmore Simms, dated on his 12th birthday, May 13, 1771. The 1856 book was a sequel to his successful novel The Forayers published the previous year; it was also the sixth novel (of what became eight) in which Simms celebrated the history of his native South Carolina. The fictional book inscription quoted above is read by a boy named Henry Travis in chapter 21, a captive aboard a vessel, to two men who can't read. He is asked to read the book because its recent owner, referred to as Dick of Tophet, says he wants to hear what's in the book, "and jest see what sort of stuff it is that makes a harrystocrat better than a common man."

The book was treasured by the aristocratic woman who gave the book to Dick. Gustavus, the original owner, was killed at age 19. The symbolism in the novel is that all people are burdened in life and seek to overcome it; Dick does not realize the book is Pilgrim's Progress.

Eutaw fictionalizes the 1781 battle of Eutaw Springs — a battle which convinced the British Army to leave South Carolina in the final throes of the American Revolution. Some have argued that Simms was actually connecting the Revolution to the ongoing crisis in the South, particularly suggesting a need to cultivate culture and education. Even Simms was a victim of the unusual striation of Southern society; as he was not of an aristocratic family, his writings were more popular in the North than in his home state for a time. As Dick of Tophet notes:

"Them harrystocrats keep all the books to themselves; but we'll see! I reckon books ain't hard to l'arn, efter all; for, you sees, a poor leetle brat of a boy, knee-high to a young turkey — why, he kin l'arn to read, and spell, and write; and I don't see what's to bender a grown man from book-l'arning, when he knows so much more than a boy. It ought to be more easy to him...
I ain't sich a bloody fool as to kick against l'arning, with the idee that I knows everything a'ready. Some things I knows jest like a book, and nobody kin teach me: but thyar's a hundred other things, I reckon, that I knows nothing about, no more than a blind old millhorse."

*The University of Arkansas Press has republished Eutaw and several other works by Simms in recent years, edited by Dr. David W. Newton.

Through fortune's bitterest hour

Photo by Randy Garsee, used with permission

The Charleston Academy of Music hosted an evening of "Dramatic Entertainment" on December 13, 1877 in support of the memorial fund for William Gilmore Simms, the Southern novelist/critic/poet who had died about seven years earlier. One year before his death, an aging Simms had written a special poem for the opening of the Academy, despite being essentially retired. Now, so long after his death, he was recognized as an important icon of South Carolina by the people of that state — including fellow writer and personal friend Paul Hamilton Hayne.

Hayne presented a long monody to Simms, simply titled in his collected works as "W. Gilmore Simms: A Poem." Somewhat shocked at how time has gone away so quickly, Hayne writes that "the past becomes the present to our eyes." The "dismal years" in between have been full of "anguished desolation," "veiled tears," and "despondent sighs." Their "curbless mirth" which once exited has since "vanished like wine-foam." But, summoning the "faithful eyes" that once beamed back at the assembled crowd, they remember the hero who can bring them back to happier days:

The man who toiled through fortune's bitterest hour,
As calmly steadfast and supremely brave,
As if above a fair life's tranquil wave.
Brooded the halcyon with unruffled breast;
The man whose sturdy frame upheld aright,
We meet, (O friends), to consecrate tonight!

In honoring Simms, Hayne recreates him in a form resembling a larger-than-life mythological warrior-poet: he was imbued with "imagination, robed in mystical flame" by angels and nymphs, who give him not only intellect but humor as well. Yet, all this manifested for one purpose according to Hayne:

All that he was, all that he owned, we know
Was lavished freely on one sacred shrine,
The shrine of home and country! from the first
Fresh blush of youth, when merged in sanguine glow,
His life-path seemed a shadowless steep to shine,
Leading forever upward to the stars...

Despite being "shadowless," however, Hayne acknowledges that Simms's life was full of "desperate and embittered strife." Still, Simms's soul was "unconquered and majestic" as he mad it his goal:

           ...not that he might rise
Alone and dominant; but that all men's eyes
Might view, perchance through much brave toil of his,
His country stripped of every filthy weed
Of crime imputed; in thought, word, and deed,
A noble people, none would dare despise.

The poem is, without a doubt, over the top (the italics above are his) and, to a degree, matches the same boisterous style of Simms's own poetry. Hayne refers to Simms as a "vanished genius," a "Titan" with "a Viking mien." When Simms's summoned spirit arises, Hayne refers to him as the "stalwart-statured Simms!" Certainly, the poem must have been inspirational enough to encourage monetary donations. The memorial fund eventually was large enough to commission a bust by John Quincy Adams Ward; it stands today at Battery Park in Charleston, South Carolina.

Simms: a fight against bitter prejudice

In a letter dated January 14, 1859, Paul Hamilton Hayne wrote to his unofficial mentor William Gilmore Simms that the older writer's career had become "a fight against bitter prejudice... [and] mean jealousies." Though this was true of "every true literary athlete," Hayne suggested, this was especially the case for Southerners, even when criticism came from fellow "provincial, narrow-minded" Southerners. He went on:

God help all such combatants. 'Tis almost enough to make one forswear his country. I cannot refrain from picturing to myself your fate, had you removed at any early age to Massachusetts or Europe. Prosperity, praise, 'troops of friends,' and admirers, but not what you now possess, and which must be a proud consolation... under disadvantages which would have sunk a weaker mind and corrupted a less manly and heroic heart.

Many Southerners felt under-appreciated in the world of literary arts throughout much of the 19th century. The Richmond-raised (but New England-born) Edgar Allan Poe, for example, conjectured: "Had [Simms] been even a Yankee, this genius would have been rendered immediately manifest to his countrymen, but unhappily (perhaps) he was a southerner." Poe elsewhere claimed that New England "lyricists" were a "magnanimous cabal which has so long controlled the destinies of American letters." When the first important anthology of American poetry was published in 1842, Poe was one of several who criticized editor Rufus Griswold for under-representing the South.

After the Civil War, Simms edited his own anthology, War Poetry of the South (1867). When New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow edited his own collection of American poetry, Poems of Places (1874) he specifically noted to Hayne that "as few as possible" of the poems in Simms collection would be represented, "and not of the fiercest."

The same year as Hayne's letter, Simms published the last novel he would ever write in book form, The Cassique of Kiawah — it was published in the North, in New York.

Hayne and Simms: whom I love & respect

Few writers define the American South as well as William Gilmore Simms (primarily remembered as a novelist) and Paul Hamilton Hayne (called "The Poet Laureate of the South"). Both were born in Charleston, South Carolina, though 24 years apart.

Hayne, the younger of the two, considered Simms an unofficial mentor in his early career, before they had even met. In the 1860s, they became acquainted and soon were friends. Simms was a booster for Russell Magazine, which Haynes edited. But, Simms was also a literary critic, one who often was a bit acidic in his reviews. In 1859, he reviewed Haynes's collection Avolio: A Legend of the Island of Cos and, though he liked the book, noted the poet's shortcomings, a "lack of care and finish." He identified his "defects" as focusing too much on the overuse of "superlatives and compound epithets" and for writing far too many sonnets.

Even as the two writers became friends, Hayne occasionally thought Simms was too harsh. In his journal on August 15, 1864, he noted that this "venerable critic (whom I love & respect)" is crotchety:

If his criticisms are now & then profound & suggestive, they are more frequently distinguished by principles partial & one-sided; nay! sometimes absolutely puerile!

Elsewhere, Hayne noted that Simms was an "old fellow on his high horse!" — though he also admitted: "I don't mind him in the least; he means well." Simms, in turn, referred to Hayne as "my dear Paul" and "the younger brother of my guild."

Below is an untitled sonnet collected in Hayne's Avolio:

Here, friend! upon this lofty ledge sit down!
And view the beauteous prospect spread below,
Around, above us; in the noon-day glow
How calm the landscape rests! — 'yon distant town,
Enwreathed with clouds of foliage like a crown
Of rustic honor; the soft, silvery flow
Of the clear stream beyond it, and the show
Of endless wooded heights, circling the brown
Autumnal fields, alive with billowy grain;
Say! hast thou ever gazed on aught more fair
In Europe, or the Orient? — what domain
(From India to the sunny slopes of Spain)
Hath beauty, wed to grandeur in the air,
Blessed with an ampler charm, a more benignant reign?

Simms fights for copyright

The 1840s were a terrible time for American writers, who struggled to protect their works without international copyright. Several writers had already voiced their opinion. From his Woodlands estate, novelist/poet William Gilmore Simms wrote an open letter on the topic on May 21, 1844.

The letter, which took up nearly 20 two-column pages in the Southern Literary Messenger's August 1844 issue, was directly addressed to South Carolina Congressman Isaac Holmes. It begins:

The discovery of printing took the world by surprise and authors not less than all the rest... But, in truth, their rights were not invaded for a long while after the discovery of printing.

Simms goes on to discuss the history of printing and its impact on society and authors, as well as the development of different versions of copyright and other protections — in detail. Common Law, he says, should protect writers but does not and, as such, a more explicit law on the books is required. He goes on:

It is an error to say, or to suppose that the object of Government is the greatest good of the greatest number. Were this so, no man would enter society at all. Society would be fatal to his individuality... Its true object is the security of the individual man... It is individual life and property which needs and claims protection.

Simms notes that writers deserve the right of protection of their property more than all others. They do not seek property elsehwere, as a miner for gold, but as the "sole creator, almost without agent or implement of any sort." These creations, he says, spring from nowhere and cannot be controlled.

But control was necessary, he contends. Despite the claim that the British dislike American books, piracy of American writers was abundant. Simms writes, "hundreds of American works have been republished in England, without the privity of the author, frequently without his name and sometimes with a most base perversion of it to make it pass for original and European." What's worse, American publishers are doing the same to British writers.

Further, by controlling our own publications, we also choose what will be published abroad, perhaps allowing American writers the chance to earn respect from British critics who continuously dismiss American writing.

Our securities against foreign injustice, slander and reproach, are to be found in native authorship, as certainly as that our protection against a maritime enemy, is in having an adequate number of stout frigates of our own.

The fight for international copyright continued throughout most of the 19th century.

*The image above is a portrait of Simms now owned by the American Portrait Gallery. Digital file is courtesy of the William Gilmore Simms Society.

Uncle Tom's Cabin published

After serializing it in 40 parts for the National Era, Harriet Beecher Stowe agreed to turn her story into a book. Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in that format on March 20, 1852. It was a major success, named a best-seller second only to the Bible. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year alone.

The book tells a fictional story based partly on the autobiography of Josiah Henson, a black man who escaped from slavery in Maryland and helped others settle down and become self-sufficient in Canada. Presented as a sentimental novel, the story tried to draw emotional reactions from its readers. Stowe did this intentionally. In particular, the death of the character Eva drew solid fan support, such that it is claimed that, the year of its publication, 300 girls were named Eva in Boston alone.

Stowe's book also is a bit heavy-handed as a Christian tale, with her narrative voice often interjecting to comment on Christian values. Ultimately, she condemns slavery as immoral and inherently evil. Though it has occasionally been criticized in modern times for perpetuating or even creating stereotypes of black characters (though, in reality, those criticisms are better aimed at the stage version of the book, created without Stowe's approval), there is no denying its purpose: to call upon Americans to end slavery.

The book swiftly drew condemnation from Southerners, including the writer William Gilmore Simms, who said the book's sentiments were completely untrue. In fact, the book spurned a whole genre of literature known as "Anti-Tom" novels. In the northern part of the country, readers were strongly turned against slavery, particularly aiming at the Fugitive Slave Law. The polarizing effect of the book (and, of course, slavery in general) later led to the Civil War — which, in turn, led to the legendary (perhaps apocryphal) meeting between Harriet Beecher Stowe and Abraham Lincoln. Legend has it that the President referred to her as "the little lady who started this great war."