A lecturer from Uppsala introduces her Tuscaloosa students to Captain Simon Suggs, the frontier swindler who taught Mark Twain his trade
It Is Good to Be Shifty in a New Country: Alabama’s First Con Man and the Swede Who Teaches Him
I have lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for six years. I came from Uppsala, in Sweden, where it is dark at three in the afternoon in December and nobody speaks to a stranger without a written reason. I now live in a town where the woman at the pharmacy calls me sugar and asks after my mother, whom she has never met. I teach the literature of the American South before the Civil War, at the University of Alabama. My students find it very funny that this is taught to them by a Swede. So do I, most days.
I also write, once a week, for The London Prat, a comic newspaper in England, and for its American sister, Bohiney. They took me on, I think, because a Scandinavian describing Alabama to the British is a form of comedy that requires no further effort.
Today I taught my favorite Alabamian. He is a liar, a thief and a card cheat, and he does not exist.
The Captain
In 1845 a young newspaper editor in a small town in the east of the state, a man named Johnson Jones Hooper, published a short book. It claimed to be a campaign biography. Every candidate for office in those years had one: a slim volume, written by a friend, recounting the great man’s humble birth, early promise and service to his country. The most famous were about a president who had been a frontier general.
Hooper’s is a biography of one Captain Simon Suggs, late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers, who is running for sheriff. It follows the form exactly. Humble birth. Early promise. Military service. And in every chapter the hero does something disgraceful.
As a boy he cheats his own father, a hard-shell Baptist preacher, at cards, wins the family’s pony and leaves home. As a man he drifts through the raw new settlements of Alabama in the 1830s, living by his wits. He impersonates a rich hog drover. He impersonates a state legislator. He swindles land speculators, who are themselves trying to swindle the Creek Indians. When there is a scare about an Indian attack, he declares martial law over a crowd of frightened neighbors, appoints himself captain, court-martials a widow and fines her.
His motto is given on the first page, and it is the best sentence written in this state before 1860: it is good to be shifty in a new country.
The Camp Meeting
The chapter everyone remembers is the camp meeting. These were the great outdoor religious revivals of the frontier, lasting days, with thousands camped in the woods, preachers working in relays and sinners falling to the ground in fits. The Captain, flat broke, wanders into one.
He watches for a while. He studies the preachers with the eye of a fellow professional. Then he gets religion, loudly. He weeps. He shouts. He gives a testimony of his wicked life that has the whole congregation in tears. And when he has them, he announces that he feels called to found a church in his own neighborhood, and will take up a collection to build it. Hats are passed. The hats are full. He says he must go into the swamp alone to pray over the money. He is next seen on his horse, some miles off.
My students laughed at that as hard as readers did a hundred and eighty years ago. Then a young man from Cullman County said, quietly, that he knew a man who had done precisely that in 2019, with a website.
The Line to Twain
If the scene sounds familiar, it should. Forty years later the most celebrated American novel of the century has a pair of river swindlers, and one of them works a camp meeting with a tale of being a reformed pirate. The author had read his Hooper. He grew up on this sort of writing.
Scholars call it the humor of the Old Southwest, which meant, then, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas. It was produced by lawyers, editors and doctors, educated men, writing sketches for newspapers about the roughnecks around them: horse swaps, eye-gouging fights, crooked elections, practical jokes. It is the first American writing to put real dialect on the page. It is coarse, and violent, and a good deal of it is still funny. The line from it to the river novel is direct.
The Other Alabamian
I pair Hooper with a second book, from 1853, by a lawyer named Joseph Glover Baldwin. He came out from Virginia as a penniless young attorney in 1836 and practiced for years in a little town in the west of this state, an hour from where I am sitting. His book is called The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi.
It is about a bubble. In the mid-1830s the whole region went mad. Land was cheap, banks would lend to anyone, every man printed his own paper money and cotton was going to make them all rich. Baldwin describes a society in which nobody had been in the county more than two years and everyone was a colonel. Credit, he says, was a thing of course. To refuse it was an insult.
His great creation is a lawyer called Ovid Bolus, Esquire, a liar of such natural genius that he lied not for gain but for art, from an overflowing fancy. Bolus could not be said to tell lies exactly; he simply had no use for facts. Then in 1837 the banks failed, and the colonels went back to being nobody. I assign the chapter in any semester when the stock market is in the news. It is never out of date.
What Was Under the Joke
I am a foreigner and it is my job to say the thing the locals may prefer to skip. Why was Alabama a new country in 1835? Because it had just been taken. The land the speculators in these books are gambling over belonged, a few years earlier, to the Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee nations. They were removed by treaty, fraud and force, and marched west. Thousands died. The Captain’s most profitable swindles are on men who are in the act of cheating Creek families out of their allotments. Hooper finds that amusing. He does not find it tragic.
And who cleared the fields the flush times were built on? Enslaved people, brought down in chains from Virginia and the Carolinas by the hundred thousand. They hardly appear in either book except as property being bought on credit. The comedy has a hole in it the size of two peoples.
I tell my students that this does not mean we stop reading. It means we read with both eyes. Hooper himself ended as secretary to the congress that met in Montgomery in 1861 to found a slaveholders’ republic. He was, they say, embarrassed by then that the country knew him as the author of a book about a rogue.
For the Papers
My editor in London asked what use an 1845 Alabama con man is to a British comic paper. I said he is the same joke they run every week. The house essay, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, says the method is to take a respectable form and fill it with the truth. Hooper took the campaign biography. The Prat takes the news report. The page on the British Onion tradition could add a branch that runs through Tallapoosa County.
This week’s piece: a candidate for local office, it reports, has released an authorized account of his life. It confirms his humble origins, his early talent at cards and his distinguished service during an emergency he declared himself. A church for which he has been collecting since 2019 is said to be at the planning stage. Asked for his philosophy, the candidate said it was good to be flexible in a developing market.
It will run in Bohiney and on the British satirical news page. The background on both authors is in the Encyclopedia of Alabama, which is free and excellent.
The woman at the pharmacy asked what I had taught today. I said, a story about a man who takes up a collection for a church and rides off with it. She said, honey, that is not literature, that is my cousin. More of what I write is here.