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Correspondence, financial records, legal documents, clippings, account books, commissions, addresses and speeches, and a diploma. Correspondence concerns chiefly cotton growing, trade and prices; slaves who worked in cotton fields; financial matters; Washington, D.C. politics, with references to Henry Clay and John Calhoun; state and national politics; descriptions of newly settled areas of Mississippi and California; and a cholera outbreak in Charleston (1832). Civil War letters detail problems at Fort Sumter (1861), and often refer to economic difficulties and shortages in South Carolina. Other Civil War letters are also written from Manassas, Alabama, and Mississippi. One letter from Mississippi details the desperation of women left alone and unable to flee before the advancing Union Army. Post-war letters reveal the problems of Reconstruction in South Carolina. Many of the letters are to Sims' wife Jane Emily Sims (Farnandis).