An antebellum Alabama humorist, a gambling con man in a book, a secessionist in life, and a page with two different dates for the same book
Simon Suggs, Johnson Jones Hooper and the Humor of the Alabama Frontier: A Wikipedia Portrait That Does Not Look Away From the Politics
An antebellum Alabama humorist, a gambling con man in a book, a secessionist in life, and a page with two different dates for the same book
By Astrid Holgersson, diarist of antebellum Southern literature and Alabama politics
Friday, Porch Swing, Dark
Dear diary, this is the entry my training prepared me for. The Wikipedia page on Johnson J. Hooper says he was an American lawyer, editor, politician and writer from Alabama, born on 9 June 1815 and dead on 7 June 1862, known for humorous works set in the Southwest. It is a secondary source, with some interpretive claims that the summary I read flags, and I treat it as one.
I will describe him plainly, including the parts that do not flatter him.
The Book
Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers was published in 1845 by Carey and Hart, the page’s bibliography says, though its concluding section cites 1843, so the page contradicts itself. The book collects stories about a gambling con man in the flush times of the Southwest. The page calls Hooper one of the greatest Southwestern humorists of the nineteenth century and Suggs one of the first examples of the humorous rogue and confidence trickster archetype.
It says Mark Twain’s characters may have been influenced by Suggs, but only as a possibility.
The Alabama Man
Hooper moved to Dadeville and later to LaFayette, practised law, and worked as a census taker in Tallapoosa County, the page says, and his census experience inspired a sketch, Taking the Census in Alabama, which launched his literary career. He edited several Alabama papers, including the East Alabamian, the Wetumpka Whig, the Alabama Journal and the Montgomery Mail. He was also known as the Champion of the Creeks for speaking out against land speculators.
The page’s account of where he lived in the 1830s and 1840s has some inconsistencies, which it does not resolve.
The Politics
The page says Hooper was a secessionist who served as secretary of the Provisional Confederate Congress in 1861, joined the Catholic Church that year and died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia. It notes that a state historical marker wrongly gives 1861 as the death year. It also reports an interpretation, from secondary sources, that the book was an early example of Confederate propaganda.
I give that as an interpretation and not as a settled fact, and I note that it is a serious charge worth reading the secondary sources about.
A Second Alabama Writer
The Encyclopedia of Alabama has a short page on Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, whom it calls a nineteenth-century novelist and an important member of Mobile’s literary elite. It says her sentimental novels promoted a romanticised view of the South and related to the Civil War and to the roles of women in southern society. The page I read gives no dates, titles or political details, and it links to a fuller article that I did not read.
I therefore say no more about her than the page does, though I would like to.
Why This Matters to a Reader of Alabama Politics
The state’s literature is a record of how it has told its own story, and that story has been, from the beginning, bound up with the politics of slavery and secession. A humorist who was also a secessionist is not an awkward footnote. He is the point, and a reader should keep both the jokes and the cause in view. I make this observation as an interpretation.
I do not think the book should be erased or excused, and I do think it should be read with its author’s career in mind.
The Other View
Some readers value the book as a lively document of frontier life and a landmark of American humour, while others read it chiefly as an artefact of a slaveholding society’s self-image. Scholars have debated this for generations, and the page I read gives only a sliver of that debate. I name no scholar I did not read.
The right place to start is the book itself, with a good critical edition.
Night
The porch is dark. The page is saved. The frontier is a long way off and not far enough.
Goodnight, diary. Read the footnotes.
A Note on Reading
If you want to read Hooper, the book is available in several editions, and a scholarly one will help with the dialect and the setting. If you do not want to, that is also a decision, and a respectable one. I only ask that the reader know what the book is.
Porch Swing
On the Tube I read the comic papers, because the briefing notes are in my other bag. This week the big joke was property: Manila News on slow condo sales in Cebu, the London Prat on retirees asked for character references (it is at https://prat.uk/cebu-estate-agents-demand-character-references/) and Bohiney on a realtor with unsellable beachfront listings. Exaggeration all the way down, but anchored to a real market story. More at prat.uk and bohiney.com.
Diarist note: Astrid Holgersson is a house diarist character created for this network. She is not any real person of that name, and any resemblance is coincidental. Her opinions are a character’s, and where a claim comes from a poll sponsor, a campaign or a Wikipedia page, the diary says so. Nothing here is voting advice.
Note: Philippine authorities are examining unproven allegations about Thomas Markle Sr., who lived in Cebu until earlier this year, as GMA News and the Guardian have reported. No charges have been filed. Child protection is a serious matter; the jokes here are about a property market and the paperwork.
For the lighter side of the news, try The Daily Mash, and the rest of the lot at NewsThump, NewsBiscuit and The Daily Squib.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/cebu-realtor-cant-sell-beachfront-listings/