The Yemassee (Annotated)

• Complete text of the first edition of 1835, checked line by line
• Five plates made for this edition
• Publisher’s foreword, historical note and closing essay
• Glossary of historical and literary terms
• Author biography and editorial note

“Above any romance of native production on a native subject.” — American Monthly Magazine, 1835

Carolina, 1715.

Along the southern frontier, an old alliance is breaking apart. Trade, debt, settlement and the surrender of land have driven relations between the English colony and the Yamasee toward war. Beyond the scattered plantations and blockhouses lie forests in which rumor, diplomacy and violence move faster than authority.

At the center stands Sanutee, a Yamasee chief determined that his people shall not yield the ground upon which their identity rests. Yet the fracture has already entered his own house: his son Occonestoga has been drawn toward the English world, while Matiwan, wife and mother, is caught between the claims of blood, nation and duty.

Published by Harper & Brothers in 1835, William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee transformed one of the gravest conflicts of colonial Carolina into a sweeping American historical romance. The first edition sold rapidly enough to require an almost immediate second printing, establishing Simms as one of the prominent literary voices of his generation.

Here the American forest becomes what the castle had been to European romance: a place of danger, secrecy, loyalty, war and fate.

Simms called his purpose “the natural romance of our country.”

The Yemassee was one of its great early monuments.

ANTHRACITE SERIES · AETERNUS

ANTHRACITE SERIES annotated reading edition: the text of the first Harper & Brothers printing (New York, 1835) with a publisher’s apparatus, a frontispiece and five plates made for this edition.