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3 closely written pages. Autograph Letter Signed to historian Benson Lossing.

Hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as “the greatest writer of fiction in America”, Simms had produced more than a dozen historical novels in the 20 years before he wrote this letter to a New York friend about his personal cares and preparations for a northern lecture tour on Southern life and history. 

Though he expected audiences required “saliency in a popular discourse…sudden and striking thoughts and opinions, energetically… expressed,” he would “avoid present politics”, being convinced of the “wickedness” of politicians - even though he himself  had been elected to the South Carolina legislature ten years before and still held passionate political opinions in defense of Southern slavery. When the lecture tour began three months later, his “historical” talks would be so blatantly pro-slavery that a Buffalo newspaper called them “offensive” and “calculated to engender the worst feelings between the People of the North and South.” Simms would abruptly abandon the tour, rather than suffer further “abuse” from his critics.

Simms writes Lossing that he had been “something of an invalid, with the cares of a large family” to “occupy my thoughts and pile me with anxieties” as well as “pressing professional obligations” – preparing lectures, arranged by his New York publishers, which “may be best suited to Northern audiences”. He proposed talks about Southern "rural life” and South Carolina in the Revolutionary War (which would “disabuse the country of…false notions…put in circulation from the high places”).  His “head work” that summer had been “much more oppressive than usual” because Charleston was plagued by sweltering temperatures and an outbreak of Yellow fever which threatened to become an epidemic.
Simms letters are now rarely seen outside of institutional collections. The last significant letter by the novelist to appear at auction, also dated 1856, was sold at Sotheby’s nearly 30 years ago.