Tiger’s Meat: William Gilmore Simms and the History of the Revolution

In the early days of the United States, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton remarked: “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment.” The common national sentiment—among American peoples diverse in economic interests, folkways, and political agendas—mainly rested on a fraternal sense of the shared perils and triumphs of the War of Independence, prior to which British America had been little more than a geographical expression and which all Americans recognized as an event of world importance.

In the antebellum years most decent Americans shared in and gloried in this fraternal sense, as did Simms, that is, until it was destroyed, as I shall relate, by Northern chauvinism which reinterpreted the Revolutionary experience as part of an aggressive, highly partisan cultural and economic agenda. I hope to put Simms’s writings on the Revolution, his controversies with Northern historians, and his aborted 1856 Northern lecture tour, which has been well described by Prof. Miriam Shillingsburg, into a new and larger context.