of a Murderer", was published in 1833. This gained Simms a national audience. Editor and politician Simms also edited several South Carolina newspapers, and in the 1840s and 1850s edited important southern journals, including the Magnolia, the Southern and Western, and the proslavery Southern Quarterly Review. During the nullification controversy prompted by South Carolina in 1832, Simms supported Union. In the 1840s he pushed for American freedom from British literary models and supported the intensely nationalistic Young America group. Based on the popularity of the novels described below, Simms became part of the Southern planter class. He came to firmly support slavery (a "fire-eater"), an attitude that when held widely by Southerners helped lead to secession and creation of the Confederate States of America and the American Civil War. Elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives, Simms served from 1844–1846. However he lost election for lieutenant governor of South Carolina by only one vote. Novels about the South Simms wrote a number of popular books between 1830 and 1860, sometimes focusing on the pre-colonial and colonial periods of Southern history, and replete with local color. His first success was with The Yemassee (1835, about the Yemassee War of 1715 in the South Carolina low country). Simms also published eight novels set in South Carolina during the American Revolutionary War, beginning with The Partisan (1835), which was perhaps Simms's most-read novel, and Katharine Walton (1851). Other South Carolina-related books included Mellichampe (1836), The Kinsmen (1841), Woodcraft (1854), The Forayers (1855), Eutaw (1856), and Joscelyn (1867). He later published ten novels dealing with the expansion into the frontier territory from Georgia to Louisiana, including Richard Hurdis; or, the Avenger of Blood. A Tale of Alabama (1838) and Border Beagles: A Tale of Mississippi (1840). He also wrote about the conflicts between Native Americans, Spaniards and French in Florida in The Lily and the Totem, or, The Huguenots in Florida (1850); Vasconselos (1853; an account of DeSoto's expedition from the Native American viewpoint); and the overlapping experiences of Native Americans, Spanish, and English in The Cassique of Kiawah (1859; a novel set during the 1680s in Colonial-era Charleston). Regarding America's native population, Simms once said that "Our blinding prejudices... have been fostered as necessary to justify the reckless and unsparing hand with which [white Americans] have smitten them in their habitations and expelled them from their country." At first, Southern readers, especially