THE SOUTH CAROLINIAN 

by Mary C. Simms Oliphant

When Gus Graydon invited me to speak of Francis Simkins as a South
Carolinian, he told me that he had first asked my son, Simms, if he
thought I would be willing to come and that my son had replied: "Don't
ask her if you don't mean it." My son was possessed of sound judgment
as well as a sense of humor; he well knew I would be here today.

Francis spoke in his best vein when he wrote of home and I am
fortunate enough to be able to give you in his own words his feeling
about Edgefield, family, South Carolina and the South as shown in a
talk he made here some ten years ago:

"During my childhood here in Edgefield," he wrote, "the family history
was preserved in a few relics, in the tales of the elders, and in a
fat scrapbook. We read this book as often as we did our Shakespeare
and our Bible. Some would say that this volume should not have been
believed; that it was filled with Victorian fustian gleaned from the
reminiscences with which fifty-odd newspapers of South Carolina were
loaded during the fifty years following the fall of the
Confederacy. . . . But such critical disillusionment never en- tered
my mind until, as a young man, I had the experience of being
contaminated by the skepticism of Columbia University. Since then the
sentimentality or the wisdom of mature years has prompted me to
recover faith in the ancestors. Wide reading, supplemented by a
conservative faith in history, has taught me that, at least among
Southerners. an exalted life must be built upon the exaltation of the
forebears....

"Thirty years ago," said Francis, "my father, the late McGowan
Simkins, stood on the ruins of the Simkins family estate at Cedar
Fields to tell the ladies of the Edgefield Chapter of the Daughters of
the American Revolution of Arthur Simkins and his descendants ... the
occasion of this address was McGowan Simkins' proudest day, for he had
a profound sense of family pride. He was able to proclaim the
Edgefield past as worthy of memory . . . `For my part,' he said, `I
believe everyone should have a history of his family and preserve it
as a legacy'."

Francis then went on to relate that a professor of psychology had
recently asked him what possible good there was in ancestor hunting,
as he called it. Francis, always controversial, had replied that among
Southerners at least it was among the most useful of endeavors. "To
those of us," he said, "who are going down the scale financially and
socially it is a means of boosting our pride, giving us consolations
not unlike those of religion. To those of us who are climbing up the
scale . . . ancestor hunting gives us something money cannot buy, a
rationalization of our success in the eyes of neighbors who are always
family conscious. May the descendants of Arthur Simkins," he
concluded, ". . . make use of a proud heritage as a means of helping a
crazy world back into the sanity and the mercy of their ancestors."

Thus spoke Francis Simkins a decade ago, here where he was born on
December 14, 1897, within a few blocks of this church, a second son
and third child of Samuel McGowan Simkins, whose forebears were
founders of Edgefield, and Sarah Raven Lewis Simkins who never forgot
that she came to the red hills of the Piedmont from Charleston. It was
from her that Francis learned how to tell a tale and how to put a tale
down on paper. She was not beyond a little exaggeration or a bit of
satire, arts she had learned from the trenchant pen of Colonel James
T. Bacon, a tablet to whose memory is here on my right. Miss Sally,
all agreed, was an inimitable story-teller, at times a teller of
disillusioning tales about all of us; sometimes embarrassingly
realistic and amusing. My own recollection of her goes beyond my
actual acquaintance. In the stern days after the fall of the
Confederacy, when money was almost non-existent, and one's pleasures
were of one's own making, my father and Miss Sally and a few blithe
young spirits rode about the country in a one-horse jenny wagon pulled
by an old mule, giving amateur theatrical performances. Francis was
gifted with the same satiric vein and love of gaiety as his mother,
and, like her, was not above a bit of exaggeration himself, when he
found it useful in making his point.

He bore the name of the doctor who delivered him - Dr. Frank Butler,
grandson of Governor Francis W. Pickens and son of the great
Confederate general, M. C. Butler. Like most Edgefield boys of that
day, Francis grew up without the creature comforts we take for
granted. There was no plumbing in that small cottage on Columbia Road
- few of us at that time had become acquainted with plumbing - and,
while a backyard well supplied sweet cool water, it also supplied an
occasional case of typhoid fever. An ample vegetable garden, pig pen
and milk cow filled the family larder in summer, and fatback,
home-cured hams and collard greens and the like were the delights of
winter. I well remember the good things on Miss Sally's dinner table
as well as the sparkling conversation around it.

And so Francis came to manhood in this old town. Someone once said to
me that whenever I spoke of Edgefield I sounded as though I were
offering a toast. 'Twas well said; for there is a rare quality in this
courthouse village which has given birth to or nurtured in its soil so
many sons worthy of noble toasts-governors, ten of them;
lieutenant-governors, five of them; statesmen, such as George
McDuffie; chancellors, such as Francis Hugh Wardlaw and James Parsons
Carroll ; preachers, such as Basil Manly of the Baptist Church here;
editors, such as Maximilian LaBorde; heroes, such as the immortal
James Bonham and William Travis of the Alamo, and that dauntless
Edgefield girl, Lucinda Horne, who followed Company K throughout its
Virginia campaign, nursing its sick and wounded and dying. This is the
soil which produced such a race.

And this is the same soil which, this the same people who produced
Francis Butler Simkins-scholar, historian, author, orator, gentleman -
and spokesman for the South, though never its apologist. In him was
the same fearlessness, the same courage in the face of public opinion,
the determination not to be made to conform, the charm and grace and
wit and the warmth in friendship, and that unashamed pride in a good
heritage which his father had and which marked those Edgefield
statesmen and heroes of another age. The Simkins histories will serve
as his memorial; in these he has made his own written record of his
contribution to his state and to the South. For the South, as Francis
saw it was a separate entity, and he was certain that, despite all
calamities and threats of change, the South was tinged with an
everlasting, worthwhile quality which would insure its survival.

Today, all Edgefield is gathered in this dear church where Francis
worshipped with Miss Sally and Mr. Mac. Here are representatives of
the ancient families-the Woodsons, the Sheppards, the Tompkinses, the
Mimses, the Wardlaws, the Garys, the Hollands, the Dunovants, the
Colletts, the Bonhams, the Tillmans, the Rainsfords, the Pickenses,
the Thurmonds, the Hughes, the Nicholsons, the Bacons, the Brooks, the
Wigfalls, the Norrises, the Hammonds, the Butlers - and a host of
others - if not here in the flesh are surely hovering in spirit to do
honor to their compatriot and to mourn his loss with the Simkins
family. And those of us from other precincts come as pilgrims offering
oblation to the service of another Son of Old Edgefield.