Location: US 17 Business (Market Street) at Third Street in Wilmington
County: New Hanover
Original Date Cast: 1962
“It is good to be shifty in a new country.” So advised Captain Simon Suggs of the Talapoosa (Alabama) Volunteers, the fictional creation of Johnson Jones Hooper (1815-1862), who along with Augustus Baldwin Longstreet and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, fashioned a spirited frontier brand of humor that prefigured the work of Mark Twain. Born in Wilmington, Hooper came from a prominent family. William Hooper, his great-grandfather, was a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
At the age of twenty, Johnson Jones Hooper moved to Lafayette, Alabama, to join his brother in the practice of law. There in 1840 he helped take the federal census, laying the groundwork for his first story, “Taking the Census in Alabama,” published in 1843, initially in the East Alabamian and then reprinted in the New York-based Spirit of the Times. The humorous piece, detailing backwoods objections to the intrusion of the federal government, launched his national popularity. Hooper’s Simon Suggs pieces followed, published serially to start and then gathered in a book in 1845. Suggs was, according to literary scholar James H. Justus, “a petty confidence man,” a figure who came to be “associated with the fluid values and opportunism of the entire Southwest, with its unstable economy and heterogeneous population.” Hooper, Longstreet, and Thorpe, all better creative writers than newspapermen, are today recognized as the creators of the distinctively American brand of Southwest humor that came to full flower in the work of Mark Twain.
Hooper’s political sympathies lay with the Whigs initially and in time he became an ardent secessionist. In May 1861, he moved to Richmond, Virginia, with the new Confederate government. He secured a position as secretary to the Confederate Congress, a post he held but briefly. Poor health, likely tuberculosis, cut his life short.
References:
William Stanley Hoole, Alias Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper ( 1952)
Paul Somers, Johnson Jones Hooper (1984)
Johnson Jones Hooper, Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845)
Jennings R. Mace, “Simon Suggs, Madison Tensas, and Sut Livingood: Human Nature and Three Characters from the Humor of the Old Southwest” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1979)
University of Virginia e-text edition of Hooper’s works: http://etext.virginia.edu/railton/projects/price/ahooper.htm
William S. Powell, ed., Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, III, 198-199—sketch by J. Isaac Copeland
John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography, XI, 143-144—sketch by James H. Justus