[2] He is also remembered for his strong support of slavery[3][4] and for his opposition to Uncle Tom's Cabin, in response to which he wrote reviews and the pro-slavery novel The Sword and the Distaff (1854).

His mother, Harriet Ann Augusta (née Singleton, 1784–1808) died during his infancy; his father William Gilmore Simms Senior (1762–1830) failed in business and joined Coffee's Indian fighters.

[16]  First, “it was the publication of Martin Faber that changed a poet into a novelist,” as the modest success of this first book-length fiction from the writer launched the prose career that would dominate the rest of Simms’s professional life.

He came to firmly support slavery (a "fire-eater"), an attitude that when held widely by Southerners helped lead to secession and creation of the Confederate States of America and the American Civil War.

[19] Simms wrote a number of popular books between 1830 and 1860, sometimes focusing on the pre-colonial and colonial periods of Southern history, and replete with local color.

He later published ten novels dealing with the expansion into the frontier territory from Georgia to Louisiana, including Richard Hurdis; or, the Avenger of Blood.

[20] Regarding America's native population, Simms once said that "Our blinding prejudices... have been fostered as necessary to justify the reckless and unsparing hand with which [white Americans] have smitten them in their habitations and expelled them from their country.

Eventually, however, he was referred to as the Southern version of James Fenimore Cooper, and Charleston residents invited him into their prestigious St. Cecilia Society.

It and "Paddy McGann" (1867) constitute his two full-length works of Southern humor; he also wrote "Sharp Snaffles" and "Bill Bauldy", two tall tales.

He also wrote The Social Principle: The True Source of National Permanence (1843) and several very popular biographies of Revolutionary War heroes Francis Marion, Nathanael Greene, and John Laurens.

He also penned a compendium of Captain John Smith's works covering the founding of the Virginia Colony as well as a book detailing the Chevalier Bayard.

[31][32][33] Simms was part of a "sacred circle" of southern intellectuals including Edmund Ruffin, James Henry Hammond, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, and George Frederick Holmes.

Together they published numerous articles calling for moral reform of the South, including a stewardship role of masters in relation to slavery.

While it appears most likely that camp followers of the Union Army burned Simms's house, "Woodlands", one of the previously enslaved people there, Isaac Nimmons, was charged but acquitted of the arson.

At the end of the Civil War, his reputation in tatters as a result of his vocal support of both slavery and secession, Simms attempted without success to relaunch his literary career.

[8] David Aiken, an editorial board member of the white nationalist, neo-Confederate, white supremacist organization The League of the South,[41] lamented that Simms was purged from the canon of American literature because of the "unpardonable sin Simms committed when he published an account of Columbia, South Carolina's destruction in which he dared to deny the North a righteous victory.

"[43] Author and segregationist Donald Davidson claimed, "The neglect of Simms's stature is nothing less than a scandal when it results....in the disappearance of his books from the common market and therefore from the readers' bookshelf.

[45] During recent years, a "Simms Renaissance" has included scholars such as James E. Kibler, Mary Ann Wimsatt, Sean Busick, Charles S. Watson, and John C. Guilds.