A Tuscaloosa scholar of antebellum Southern humor reads about Prince William’s NOTYET plate and turns to Johnson Jones Hooper’s Alabama con man who promoted himself to captain
Friday, 23 October 2026. Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The steps of the old Alabama State Capitol ruins in Capitol Park, a few columns standing in the grass, a paperback Simon Suggs and a boiled peanut habit I cannot break, 1.15pm.
A Prince Who Waits For His Title
The London Prat reports that Prince William has ordered three personalised number plates. NOTYET is on the Aston Martin, because he is waiting to be King. NOTHARRY is on the Range Rover, because he is avoiding his brother. DISTASTEFUL is on the Bentley, because he disapproves of most things. The piece observes that the throne is the only job in Britain that cannot become vacant through retirement, redundancy or a poor annual appraisal.
I read it sitting among the ruins of Alabama’s old capitol. Tuscaloosa was the state capital from 1826 to 1846, and the building burned in 1923, leaving these few columns in a small park. It is the perfect place to think about titles and power, because it is a monument to how temporary both of them are.
Shifty In A New Country
The book on my knee is Johnson Jones Hooper’s Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, published in 1845. Hooper was a newspaperman and lawyer in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, and his hero is the most delightful scoundrel in antebellum literature. Simon Suggs is a gambler, a swindler and a con man whose motto, repeated through the book, is that it is good to be shifty in a new country. He cheats his own father at cards as a boy. He fleeces a camp meeting by pretending to be converted and collecting money for a church he will never build. He lies, borrows, steals and always lands on his feet.
Most relevant to the Prince, Simon gives himself a title. During the Creek War panic of 1836, when settlers feared an uprising, Simon organizes a militia company of frightened neighbours, appoints himself captain and spends the campaign extracting food and money from the people he is supposedly protecting. Nobody elected him. Nobody appointed him. He simply declared himself Captain Suggs, and it stuck.
Inherited Versus Self-Awarded Rank
So here are two ways to acquire a title. The British way, captured in NOTYET, is to wait patiently for decades until the previous holder dies, while the whole country watches and occasionally writes about your cars. The Alabama frontier way, captured in Simon Suggs, is to announce it yourself on a Tuesday and dare anyone to argue.
Hooper’s book was written as a jab at the campaign biographies of the day, especially those of Andrew Jackson, which turned frontier soldiers into heroes. Simon is Jackson turned inside out: a self-made man who has made himself out of lies. Hooper’s joke is that American democracy, which claimed to have abolished aristocracy, simply let anyone become an aristocrat by talking loudly enough.
The chapter at the camp meeting is the one my students love most. Simon, surrounded by weeping converts and roaring preachers, pretends to experience a dramatic conversion, falls to the ground, rises transformed, and then offers to take up a collection to build a church in his own neighbourhood. The faithful press money into his hands. He mounts his horse and rides away with all of it. Hooper narrates the scene with a straight face, which makes it funnier, and with a clear eye for how easily sincere people can be robbed by someone who speaks their language. It is good to be shifty in a new country, Simon says. He might have added that it is easiest of all in church.
The Creek War Underneath
I always stop my students at this point to remind them what the Creek War of 1836 actually was. It was the culmination of years of fraud, land theft and violence against the Muscogee Creek people, who were then forcibly removed from Alabama to Indian Territory. Simon Suggs’s comic militia is set against the background of a real ethnic cleansing. Hooper treats the Creeks as a distant rumour, a pretext for Simon’s cons. The book is hilarious. The history is not. Reading antebellum Southern humor responsibly means laughing at Simon while keeping one eye on what the laughter is standing on.
Alabama Titles Today
Alabama is still full of self-declared captains. Every county has a man who calls himself Colonel without any military record. Every football weekend produces a dozen fans who are, in their own estimation, the most loyal in Tuscaloosa. And the state’s politicians, like politicians everywhere, have a Suggsian talent for awarding themselves virtue. Hooper would be busy here today. He would also be on the Tuscaloosa site, I suspect, writing about the city’s eternal certainty that the Tide wins again.
Boiled Peanuts And Royal Patience
A man selling boiled peanuts from a cart has stopped beside the ruins and asked if I wanted another bag. I always want another bag. He asked what I was reading. I told him about Simon Suggs. He said his granddaddy was a Suggs, from over near Dadeville. I asked whether he was related to the captain. He said no, his granddaddy was an honest man, which was why nobody remembered him. Then he gave me the peanuts for free. That is the Alabama paradox in a paper bag. The scoundrels get the books. The honest men give away peanuts.
The Prince, in the report, is waiting with British patience. Simon Suggs would never have waited. He would have printed CAPTAIN on a plate, borrowed a Bentley, sold it and moved to Texas. Neither path, I reflect among these broken columns, leads anywhere permanent. Capitols burn. Titles fade. Peanuts, however, remain excellent.