One of the more important, though most-lightly studied, of Simms’s works is Sack and Destruction of the City of Columbia, SC, a narrative recounting of William Tecumseh Sherman’s entry into and occupation of South Carolina’s capital city, and its subsequent destruction in the waning days of the Civil War.  Simms originally published Sack and Destruction serially in The Columbia Phoenix, “a small newspaper edited by Simms that commenced publication in the waning weeks of the Confederacy” from the newspaper’s first edition until 10 April 1865; after the close of the War, ...

            Simms delivered The Sense of the Beautiful, his final public oration, on May 3, 1870, a little over a month before his death.[1]  The occasion was the first Floral Fair held by the Charleston County Agricultural and Horticultural Society, a group that would merge in August with the older and recently revived Agricultural Society of South Carolina.  In his speech, Simms stressed the importance of natural beauty, a harmonious home life, and female leadership.  He praised the spiritual value of the natural world and claimed that a stable domestic sphere was a precondition for the progress ...

           In his study of the role of guerilla warfare in the Civil War, historian Daniel E. Sutherland observes that Southern authors, including William Gilmore Simms, played a significant role in promoting and advancing guerilla tactics as both a patriotic duty and a means of achieving victory; Sutherland notes that Simms had explicitly “promoted and sanctified partisan warfare.”[1]  While the author’s works about Revolutionary War figures like Thomas Sumter and Francis Marion were certainly repurposed and newly understood in the context of the Civil War, Simms wrote new poetry ...