THE HISTORIAN by James W. Patton By way of introduction, I think it may be appropriate to comment briefly upon the nature and length of my acquaintance with Francis Simkins. I first met him in the fall of 1924 at the University of North Carolina which I had just entered as a graduate student and where he had just arrived to assume a position as acting associate professor of history in the absence of Professor William Whatley Pierson then on leave in South America. Previous to this time Simkins had held temporary appointments as a history teacher at a military academy in West Virginia and at Randolph Macon Woman's College at Lynchburg, Virginia, and during these years, as well as the one spent at Chapel Hill, he was working on his dissertation and preparing for the final ex- aminations at Columbia University, from which he received the Ph.D. degree in 1926. Following a year in Chapel Hill, Simkins taught for two years at Emory University in Atlanta and I at a college in south Georgia for the same period, during which we exchanged visits on several occasions and otherwise continued the friendly association we had established at the University of North Carolina. In the fall of 1927, Simkins entered upon his long tenure at the then State Teachers College, now Longwood College, at Farmville, Virginia, where, except for two leaves of absence for research and writing and a three-year appointment at Louisiana State University, he was to spend the remainder of his life. Before culminating in a permanent appointment at the University of North Carolina, my own career was somewhat more migratory, but wherever I was located - in South Carolina, Ohio, or Tennessee - Simkins and I were in constant communication with each other through visits, correspondence, and, in one instance, collaboration in the writing of a book, The Women of the Confederacy. An especially pleasant phase of our association occurred during the academic year 1929-30 when I was teaching at The Citadel in Charleston and Francis was spending a year's leave in South Carolina pursuing his researches on Reconstruction and living with his mother here in Edgefield. I visited him and "Miss Sally", and he in turn made numerous trips to Charleston, one of which was to serve as best man at my wedding. As a historian, Francis Simkins was drawn in opposite directions by two areas of interest, both alluring in their possibilities and in either of which he could doubtless have attained the same degree of eminence. At Columbia University he was attracted by the exoticism of Latin American history and civilization, additionally appealing to him because the then professor of that subject at Columbia, William Robert Shepherd, was a native of Charleston, South Carolina. Also at Columbia he made the acquaintance of a young Brazilian student, Gilberto Freyre, who was later to become a distinguished publicist and historian in his native country. At Freyre's invitation Simkins spent the summer of 1924 in Brazil and the next year visited the Iberian Peninsula, returning from the first of these tours with an increas- ing awareness of the exploits of Tome de Sousa, Mem de Sa, the Emperor Dom Pedro, and other phases of Brazilian history, and from the second with equally enthusiastic accounts of visits to the tomb of the Cid in the cathedral at Burgos and to the gardens of Sintra and Montserrat near Lisbon. In view of Simkins' later preoccupation with United States history, it is interesting to observe that what appears to have been his first scholarly publication was in the field of Latin American history, "Guzman Blanco : an Appreciation," a short article in the South Atlantic Quarterly for October, 1924, dealing with a Venezuelan dictator who flourished during the latter part of the nineteenth century. But if the red clay of Edgefield was alien to the Portugese language and remote from the sources of Brazilian history, it nevertheless offered opportunities, hitherto unexploited, which might be had for the asking by an aspiring young historian, particularly one who was native to the locality. "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman had come from this country, and his widow was still living and in possession of many of the Tillman papers at nearby Trenton. It was natural, therefore, that Simkins, in search of a dissertation topic, would turn to history in his own backyard and undertake a study of the Tillman movement in South Carolina. Following the successful completion of this work and the resulting award of the Ph.D. degree by Columbia University, there remained other attractive areas of South Carolina history that could be profitably investigated. For instance, Reconstruction in South Carolina had never been treated with the same thoroughness that had been accorded to that subject in most of the other Southern states, and Simkins was in large measure an heir to the Reconstruction tradition, having grown up at a time and place where many of the events and personalities of this stirring period-the Hamburg Riots, the "Shotgun Policy," Wade Hampton and his Red Shirts, or Martin W. Gary assuaging his bitter disappointment by retiring to his stately mansion near Edgefield to gaze out among his oaks and write love letters-were still remembered and talked about. And so it was that Simkins again turned to the history of his native state and, in collaboration with Robert H. Woody, then a young instructor at Duke University, brought out South Carolina During Reconstruction, an ambitious undertaking much broader in scope than had been usual up to that time in histories of Reconstruction in other Southern states. These two works set the pattern of historical research and writing to which Simkins would adhere for the remainder of his career. Henceforth he would make no more excursions into Latin American History, would take no more trips abroad, would leave to others the task of writing and teaching about Guzman Blanco, Dom Pedro, and the other South American figures who had so aroused his enthusiasm at an earlier period. Though he would broaden his interest to include the South generally, and on one occasion would participate in the writing of what he liked to call a six-pound textbook history of Virginia (actually it weighed only three pounds), he would work exclusively in the field of United States history. Until failing health called for a slackening of pace, Simkins was an assiduous researcher, able and willing to concentrate for long periods upon the sources from which he derived his information and interpretations. At home he kept working hours that were often the despair of both his household and that of his neighbors. Retiring early, he was up at 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. to begin his composition on a noisy typewriter. In summer he took this machine into the yard at first dawn until the entreaties of neighbors persuaded him to delay these outdoor sorties until a respectable six o'clock. Often in good weather he would drive to the nearby Farmville Cemetery, disengage a card table and typewriter from his car, and pursue his research and writing under a large tree in the shade of which he now lies buried. He appeared to be the antithesis of order and system. I remember how he would arrive for a visit with a suitcase in which clothing and notes were inextricably mixed. Ordinarily he kept his research filed in cardboard boxes brought home from the local grocery store, and there appeared to be no semblance of order in the mass of 5x8 cards on which he had scribbled the items he had collected from various sources. One state archivist asserted, in exasperation mingled with humor, that it cost $150 worth of his staff's time to put his records back in order after Simkins had visited his establishment. The combined product of Francis Simkins' research and writing is impressive by any set of standards that may be applied to it. From his facile pen emerged a steady stream of book reviews, numerous articles in scholarly journals, and a total of seven books. Of his books, The Tillman Movement in South Carolina (Durham: Duke University Press, 1926), already referred to, was an incisive account of one of the most significant events in the history of South Carolina in recent times. A more extended work in the same area and a product of Simkins' more mature scholarship appeared eighteen years later in his Pitchfork Ben Tillman, South Carolinian (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1944) a well-received, fulllength, and definitive biography that gave an objective appraisal of this Edgefield County native who is considered by many to have been South Carolina's greatest political leader of the past hundred years. South Carolina during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: the University of North Carolina Press, 1932) was an important milestone in Southern historiography. At a time when most students of Southern history still looked upon Reconstruction as a "chamber of horrors," this work took a leading role in proclaming the Revisionist school of thought, holding that the travail and racial strife of Reconstruction have been exaggerated in Southern folklore and in scholarly writings alike, that actually life in those times was reasonably satisfying, and that the Carpetbagger-Scalawag-Negro constitutions and legislatures accomplished many beneficial and lasting reforms for the South. Though supplemented and to some extent modified by later research based upon resources that have become available since Simkins and Woody wrote, this work has not been superseded. Among all of Simkins' writings it remains the one upon which his reputation as a historian was the most securely and endurably established. Growing up in Edgefield, Simkins imbibed many of the cherished traditions of Confederate valor and heroism during the great conflict of the 1860's. He used to say that he never knew there were any deserters from the Confederate army until he went to Columbia University as a graduate student. But he was no military historian, and his one venture into Civil War history was a book entitled The Women of the Confederacy (Richmond: Garrett and Massie, Incorporated, 1936) of which I was the joint author. More factual than interpretative, the book is probably the least distin guished of any of Simkins' major works. Now out of print for many years, it is, I think, not likely to be long remembered; and in the light of the vast amount of source material that has later become available, I am sure that both he and I would write our respective portions of the book differently and better if we were doing it today. Another venture which added little to Simkins' reputation as a scholar but which was a tremendous success financially was his participation in the writing of a seventh-grade textbook for use in the public schools of Virginia (Francis Butler Simkins, Spotswood Hunnicutt, and Sidman P. Poole, Virginia: History, Government, and Geography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1957). Contracted for in advance and written and published under the supervision of the Virginia History and Government Textbook Commission working in close consultation with the State Board of Education, this book was quite understandably reticent about some of the darker phases of Virginia's history and obviously pro-Virginian in tone. Simkins readily admitted this fact and justified it by saying that some features of Virginia's history were not suitable for twelve-year old children, and furthermore that some of the Virginia educators who called the book "slanted" would throw it out otherwise. Another venture of Simkins into the field of textbook writing was his The South Old and New: A History, 1820-1947 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947) and its revised and expanded edition, A History of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), both designed as texts for college and university courses in Southern history. The Simkins theme of an enduring South pervades these two volumes. To him, a distinctive South really does exist, with a mind and cul- ture of its own, not quite a nation within a nation but almost one. Among the characteristics he ascribes to the South are a unique blend of race and family consciousness, personal violence, Protestant orthodoxy, political conservatism, and economic colonialism; total abstinence surrounded by tippling; literary genius in the midst of intellectual indifference and nonliteracy; implacable sectional loyalty entwined with national chauvinism; and drawling speech, feminine women, and hot biscuits. As textbooks these volumes were notably successful, enjoying wide adoption and leading, in part at least, to a number of attractive invitations to teach in summer schools; the most recent of these was from the University of British Columbia at Vancouver where our friend, had he lived, would this month, on perhaps this very day, be expounding to western Canadians his favorite themes of Southern history. The theme of an enduring South also pervades the last of Simkins' books, The Everlasting South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1963), a collection of essays previously published in scholarly journals and elsewhere. In the first of these essays, "Tolerating the South's Past," originally written and delivered as a presidential address before the Southern Historical Association in 1954, he scores the tendency of modern historians to judge Southern institutions of old by the standards of today. "Take pride," he says, "in the South as it is today without assuming that the land of slavery and nullification had no justification for existence. Historians apply this criterion to the Middle Ages. Why not apply it to the Old South?" Succeeding essays argue respectively that despite the South's democratic pose, Southern ideals are not democratic, as the South pretends them to be, but are characterized by a multitude of social distinctions aside from racial prejudice; that the South is different in important respects from the rest of the country and that these differences should be tolerated to prove the existence of a Southern region and contradict Sinclair Lewis' idea that the United States is a vast area of main streets; and that the "old-time religion", with impressive modern variations, has taken hold of the region with an intensity that makes Christian orthodoxy stronger in the South than in any other section of the United States. No single label will adequately describe Francis Simkins' scholarship. Nor are historians in agreement as to the validity of his conclusions or indeed certain as to what, at times, his real position was. For one of his most engaging characteristics was that he could be elusive as well as provocative. On one occasion he was charged with having Carpetbagger ancestors; on another he was likened to "a Bilbo with a Ph. D." But accept his reasoning or reject it, he remains a significant figure in Southern historiography, a stimulating writer, a superb raconteur, and a warm personal friend whose presence will be sorely missed wherever two or three historians are gathered together to expatiate on "The Everlasting South."