Book Review: Woodcraft

Title: Woodcraft

Author: William Gilmore Simms

Date: 1852 (reprinted 1983)

Publisher: New College & University Press

ISBN: 0-8084-0423-7

Length: 537 pages

Illustration: frontispiece drawing signed “Richard Bough”

Quote: “One hundred guineas...Porgy had not, himself, seen such an amount of cash, in one heap, during the last seven years!”

This once popular novel has had three titles, none very satisfactory. The Sword and the Distaff, the 1852 title, may have come closest; it was understood to mean “male and female,” and the story features both kinds of characters, mostly male. Hawks About the Dovecote might be said to reflect Porgy’s view of his struggle to keep his property, but there’s nothing dovelike about him. Woodcraft suggests skills that Porgy, as a fictional member of Marion’s troop in the Revolutionary War, might have demonstrated in the years before this novel, but the novel is mostly about his life on a well cleared plantation. Fair Fat and Forty may have been the best title this not-quite-romance had; that does at least describe the heroine, although she gets little ink in the story.

No publisher would touch Woodcraft if it were a new novel. Woodcraft is more readable than some novels of its vintage, but its interest today is mostly historic. It does, however, hold some interest as a male perspective on contemporary women’s issues.

While fighting in the Revolutionary War, Captain Porgy failed to pay what he owed to his money-grubbing neighbor McKewn. By the time he comes home from the war, McKewn has quietly seized most of Porgy’s slaves. Porgy is not much of a farmer. If his farm can be saved, it will be by the slaves, of whose heroics we hear little.

The novel begins in 1782, with the Widow Eveleigh (we’re never told either of the main characters’ given names) reclaiming legal rights to her slaves and Porgy’s from McKewn. The idea that women need male guardians to protect their financial interests, later to become law, is expounded at length by the foolish Sergeant Millhouse. Eveleigh is Simms’ example of a woman who needs no such thing. She has a son, on whom antifeminists of the day would have argued that she ought to be kept dependent. She is much, much more competent than he. However, when Porgy comes home, he and his former aides in military service, Millhouse and Frampton, are able to come to the rescue as McKewn and his hired goons try to recover the slaves from Eveleigh and her son, by strength of numbers.

In real life, would the slaves have had anything to say about being stolen by McKewn and company, or would they have been chained hand and foot? Chains are not mentioned but the slaves seem unable to move independently. Simms seems to imagine them as all being so thoroughly habituated to slavery that they don’t need to be chained, but will follow whatever sort of person is leading them.

In any case, after Eveleigh has recovered the legal title to the slaves, Porgy rescues them from being stolen by force. Porgy has brought almost nothing back from the war; Eveleigh restocks his plantation with provisions. She also buys his slaves and rents them back to him on favorable terms. Her heart, cackles Millhouse, is aching; even Tom the house slave agrees that she’s making sheep’s eyes at Porgy. There is general agreement that Porgy’s excessive height and rum-barrel figure are considered repulsive, but Eveleigh, who is big enough that she and McKewn agree she could beat McKewn in a fair fight, may be willing to forgive him for shortcomings she apparently shares.

More to the point, Porgy can’t bear the idea of marrying a woman to whom he is financially obligated. The mere fact that marrying Eveleigh would secure his property against McKewn’s claims, or perhaps the fact that Millhouse keeps nagging him about it, puts him off her. His neighbors include another widow, the mother of Frampton’s fiancée. The Widow Griffin is a mousy little thing who has none of Eveleigh’s wit and experience. That, in itself, appeals to Porgy. He is intelligent enough not to share Millhouse’s view that women can’t be competent to provide for themselves, but testosterone-damaged enough to prefer the kind who are. He is attracted to both women, but determined to rebuild his family’s estate by himself, without the help of either, before he proposes to either one. Mrs. Griffin doesn’t get a speaking part but does, toward the end, get kissed.

For readers on the “sword side” of the house, Woodcraft is a fantastic story of a period in American history where an anarchical type could feed legal documents to the deputy sheriff and defy his creditors. Porgy does that, and he’s mildly funny about it—though nowhere near as funny as the fictional characters Charles Watson, introducing Woodcraft in 1983, compared him to, Shakespeare’s Falstaff, Sterne’s Toby, or Stowe’s St Clare. His success, without having to acknowledge Eveleigh’s help so far as marrying her, owes more to time and Simms’ estimate of readers’ patience than to plausibility as a strategy, even in 1782.

For readers on the “distaff side,” Woodcraft is an apology for a particularly idiotic piece of contemporary law. By 1852 women did, in fact, have to share their property with male “guardians,” and Woodcraft is a long way of saying “Yes, we men must admit that some women are competent, but we don’t liiike it when they are.” That Eveleigh’s heroics inspire scant gratitude in Porgy, Millhouse, Frampton, Tom, or even young Arthur Eveleigh, was instructive to Victorian ladies. Rather than being lauded as a real patriot who’s willing to repay her debt to veterans, Eveleigh is taunted about taking an inappropriate personal interest in Porgy.

The slaves...well, if Porgy doesn’t like a prospective wife who can really stand beside him as a friend and partner, you know he wouldn’t tolerate that sort of slave, now would he? Porgy tells Tom to his face that he’ll kill Tom rather than surrender Tom to McKewn; there’s no serious consideration that Tom might want to be free, as in fact, when asked, he knows enough to tell Porgy he doesn’t.

There were, in historical fact, many slaves like Tom. Born in North America, they knew they had no homes in Africa. They were told that they had no chance of making homes for themselves in America, either, except as slaves. In fact free Black people did own homes and earn living in some States, in Canada, or in the western territories, but slaves were not usually told about them. What the slaves saw every day were their own neighborhoods, where the rich White slaveholders held one another’s “property rights” supreme and the poor White class loathed their enslaved competitors. Many of them had little hope, and in fact not much chance, of eating as regularly if free as they did while enslaved. The Uncle Pokealong legend explains some of the slaves who, in 1852, were saying they didn’t want to be free, but in 1872 plenty of slaves who really didn’t see much hope in freedom were still working for token wages on the old plantations.

Porgy is, Simms admits, not much good for anything but combat. He threatens to work on his own farm; we never see him doing it. He dreams of making his farm profitable; we never see him doing that either. (In fact, Watson informs readers, Simms wrote five other novels in which Porgy appeared as a minor character, and those novels supported Simms’ assessment of his antihero. Porgy’s father knew how to make something of a plantation. Porgy lacks his father’s fortitude of character. He’s big and strong enough to intimidate any man he chooses to fight, even at forty-five, but not strong enough to get out and work a field. He defeats McKewn, not by any positive virtue, but by McKewn’s being too mean to live.

Nevertheless, Simms seems to say, slavery-ridden South Carolina was America! People rose or fell by merit or the lack of it! For Porgy and Eveleigh and the other adults there’s little hope; the older generation is represented solely by one old slave; but the teenagers, as represented by the son of the richest family and the “beautiful, innocent” daughter of the trashiest family Porgy knows, will have better lives than any of their parents had, because they deserve them. Simms was romanticist enough to believe in human progress.