The Life of Captain John Smith, the Founder of Virginia (William Gilmore Simms)

The Life of Captain John Smith

The Founder of Virginia

“Without John Smith, who believed that God providentially orders history and that his own preservation could only be explained by the divine protection so evident throughout his life, the English colony at Jamestown in Virginia would have perished in ignominy and defeat at its very beginning in 1607.

Smith learned the Algonquian language enough to establish the precedents for dealing with the Powhatan natives of the Virginia coast, served as Governor of the Virginia Colony, and wrote the detailed history of early English America. Both Smith and William Gilmore Simms (author of this biography) have been ignored or forgotten by the keepers of the American historical flame.”
— William Potter, Historian and author / narrator of the Providential History Series.

Rediscover this famed hero of early America!

About the Author

William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870) was born in Charleston, SC and lived much of his life in or near that city, making frequent visits to northern publishing centers and to the Gulf Coast and the southern mountains. His extensive knowledge of southern regions influenced novels and tales set in the Low Country, such as The Yemassee, The Partisan, and The Golden Christmas, which trace the development of the region from the colonial era through the Revolution and into the antebellum period. Simms also published stories set in the antebellum backwoods South.

To a greater extent, perhaps, than any other 19th-century southern author, he gave a comprehensive picture of his region in its historical and cultural diversity—of the Low Country with its class hierarchy, its agrarian economy, its increasingly conservative politics, and its keen sectional self-consciousness; of the Gulf South, both civilized and violent, part plantation, part frontier; and of the Appalachian Mountain South in its pioneer phase. His writing exhibits qualities that mark southern literature from its beginnings: a sense of time and history, a love of southern landscape, a respect for southern social institutions, and a firm belief in class stratification and enlightened upper-class rule. In addition to fiction, poetry, drama, orations, and literary criticism, he wrote a history and a geography of South Carolina and biographies of Francis Marion, Captain John Smith, the Chevalier Bayard, and Nathanael Greene. At the beginning and near the end of his career, he edited several South Carolina newspapers, and in the 1840s and 1850s he served as editor of important southern journals, among them The Magnolia.