Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs: Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with Taking the Census and Other Alabama Sketches

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN SIMON SUGGS

I’m for doing things on the squar. What’s a man without his honour?

—Simon Suggs, 1845

But above all, my son, remember that Truth, is the foundation of all fame and honor—of all that is desirable in life.

—Johnson Hooper, 1861

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN SIMON SUGGS,

Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; together with Taking the Census and Other Alabama Sketches

Johnson Jones Hooper

With an Introduction by

Johanna Nicol Shields

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

Introduction Copyright © 1993

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The Library of Alabama Classics edition is a facsimile of the 1858 volume.

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hooper, Johnson Jones, 1815–1862.

      [Some adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers]

     Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; together with Taking the census; and other Alabama sketches / Johnson Jones Hooper; with an introduction by Johanna Nicol Shields.

           p.   cm.—(Library of Alabama classics)

      The Library of Alabama classics edition is a facsimile of the 1858 volume"—T.p. verso.

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 0-8173-0706-0 (alk. paper)

    1. Frontier and pioneer life—Alabama—Fiction. 2. Swindlers and swindling—Alabama—Fiction. I. Hooper, Johnson Jones, 1815–1862. Taking the census. 1993. II. Title. III. Title: Taking the census. IV. Series.

PS1999.H25S66    1993

813′.3—dc20

93-1427

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8915-4 (electronic)

CONTENTS

Introduction by Johanna Nicol Shields

Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs

1. Introduction—Simon Plays the Snatch Game

2. Simon Gets a Soft Snap Out of His Daddy

3. Simon Speculates

4. Simon Starts Forth to Fight the Tiger, and Falls in with a Candidate Whom He Does to a Cracklin’

5. Simon Fights the Tiger and Gets Whipped—But Comes Out Not Much the Worse for Wear

6. Simon Speculates Again

7. Simon Becomes Captain

8. Captain Suggs and Lieutenant Snipes Court-Martial Mrs. Haycock

9. The Tallapoosy Vollantares Meet the Enemy

10. The Captain Attends a Camp-Meeting

11. The Captain Is Arraigned before A Jury of His Country

12. Conclusion—Autographic Letter from Suggs

Taking the Census

1. Part First

2. Part Second

Daddy Biggs’ Scrape at Cockerell’s Bend

INTRODUCTION

Johanna Nicol Shields

Sometime late in the year 1844, the little town of Lafayette, Alabama, gave birth to Simon Suggs, one of the greatest comic characters of American popular literature. An outrageous scoundrel who duped everyone he met, Suggs roamed the Alabama frontier in search of victims whose soft spots he could exploit to make his way in the world (12).* Suggs first appeared in the East Alabamian, a local newspaper, but Johnson Hooper, his creator, soon wove more stories about the character into Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, which became a popular classic. Taking the satiric form of a campaign biography written by Johns Hooper, edditur of the eest Allybammyun, the book was a pitch to make Simon Suggs sheriff (141). But Johns had to make his candidate’s shady past seem heroic, and the result was unforgettable. Through gross exaggeration of a familiar campaign tactic, Hooper created a rascal who won every contest he entered, armed only with superior knowledge of human nature. The reckless spirit of Suggs’s mother wit was captured perfectly in his exuberant motto: IT IS GOOD TO BE SHIFTY IN A NEW COUNTRY (54, 12).

Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs brilliantly debunked campaign biographies, but that has little to do with its lasting value. For the target of Hooper’s satire was bigger than crooked politics. Although the story of Suggs’s past was set in Alabama, Hooper satirized not just Lafayette and its citizens, but the United States and Americans, and not just the past, but the present and the future. Suggs’s frontier was a crazy caricature of a new kind of society where men were free to act out their impulses, whether good or bad. Suggs is a powerful beast of prey in a jungle of weaker animals, but his fangs and claws draw money instead of blood (13). He is an ancient trickster in modern clothing: the confidence man. Fundamentally, one need not know every detail of Suggs’s Alabama to enjoy his cunning because he stands for human nature as Hooper found it all around him. Readers laughed at Hooper’s vulgar character; and they laughed with him—at the perils of their own freedom, at the wonders of their own ingenuity, and at the spectacle of their own greed. It was art that worked wonderfully for thousands of readers, and to a remarkable extent it still works today. We laugh at the Suggs in us.

Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs is comic history as well as literature, and it makes learning easy. Simply by making us laugh, it connects us to the feelings of people who read the book over a century ago. Seen through modern lenses, some of Hooper’s jokes are no longer funny, but there are lessons, too, in what we do not share with earlier readers. For example, Suggs was created by a man for men, and he was so crude that gentlewomen were not supposed to know about him—or so it was said. Compared to the vulgarity and violence of contemporary writing, we find the Suggs stories relatively mild stuff, but, in contrast, the racism that nineteenth-century readers found commonplace assaults our sensibilities. All in all, much of Suggs’s crudity still has the jolting effect Hooper used to make his readers laugh, then think. To see how that technique animates history, we can briefly consider a little piece of Hooper’s satire about the town of Lafayette.

Taken at face value, the backwoods village provides a stable counterpoint to Suggs’s rambling adventures. Like the real Johnson Hooper, edditur Johns calls Lafayette, the county seat of Chambers County, his home. The nefarious Suggs lives about twenty miles away just inside Tallapoosa County, not far from the site of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend where Andrew Jackson defeated the Creek Indians in 1813. Johns stays in one place, his editorial voice steadily giving us the narrative framework of Suggs’s biography, while Suggs slides from one setting to another, many of them real places like Lafayette, which was nothing more than a frontier town when Johnson Hooper first drifted through Alabama. Considering geography, it was odd that white settlement had come so late to Chambers County, which sits just next to Georgia where the Chattahoochee River begins to form Alabama’s eastern boundary. But because official land sales had to await the cession of large parts of east Alabama from the Creeks, the county was not created until 1833, fourteen years after statehood. Then it boomed. Covered by rolling, forested hills that flanked the southern end of the Appalachians, Chambers County was just north of the fertile Alabama Black Belt, and it was ideal country for small farmers. Although Lafayette was built some distance from the main road that ran from Georgia to Montgomery, the focus of commerce for the Black Belt’s huge cotton plantations, the settlement and the county around it grew rapidly in its first decade. Neither the town nor its environs were actually stable.

These were facts that Hooper and his readers knew. In the anarchy of satire, however, nothing can be taken at face value, and most apparent facts have hidden meanings. Hooper used the town of Lafayette for a symbol as well as a setting. He has been called a frontier humorist, sometimes by critics who would dismiss his work, but Hooper used his town as almost every major American writer of his century used similar places. The frontier town stood for a process, the constant opening of the American future into time as well as space. This mythic usage has marked American culture from the Leatherstocking stories of James Fenimore Cooper to the western movies of Clint Eastwood. Because of its openness, the frontier has been a place for hopes to be turned into realities or for fantasies to be fulfilled. In that important sense, Lafayette signified something far bigger than its historical realities to Hooper’s readers.

Lafayette also symbolized a special kind of frontier, however, for its southern location gave it a questionable future. Lafayette was landlocked, perhaps a day’s wagon ride from the Chattahoochee River on the east and the same distance from the Tallapoosa on the west. It was built from scratch, placed exactly on the watershed and almost exactly equidistant from all four county borders. Yet the town was distinctly not located in the middle of nowhere. Just to its north were the mineral riches of the mountains, undeveloped but full of possibilities. To its south and west lay the great agricultural wealth produced by an ancient form of labor—slavery. With better transportation, using modern roads, canals, and railroads, Lafayette might become anything. It was a frontier opening up at just the right juncture into the time and space where an old world and a new one were meeting. Who knew how it would mix them? Paradoxically, its very instability contained its promise.

All of this uncertain potential Hooper captured in a neat satiric play upon the name of the town. The organizers of Chambers County had captured Lafayette’s hopes for its future in the heroic French name with which the town was christened. (According to local legend the Marquis de Lafayette had in 1825 crossed the Chattahoochee into Alabama somewhere in this area.) It was a name to be put on the map, seen immediately as important. Granted, no ordinary American could say it, and its noble tone was a little misleading, but so what? Place names were among the commonest forms of national hyperbole; after all, the capital at Washington, a settlement in a swamp, had been an international joke for many years. That form of hyperbole, like all others, was a ready target for Hooper’s satire. In print, in his authorial preface to the Suggs stories, Hooper spelled his town’s name La Fayette. But he ended his stories with Suggs’s phonetic spelling: la Fait (141), which just about gave its actual pronunciation in the Alabama backwoods. (The folk pronunciation LA-FAY-IT, with stress on the middle syllable, is standard today, and outsiders still laugh at it.) In a stroke, Suggs deftly deflated Lafayette’s pretensions, cutting through appearances to Alabama as it was, not anyone’s fantasy of what it might become.

Such is the method of Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs. The play upon the town’s name, a clever slight of hand, suggests a much larger range of issues behind it. Like Hooper’s jokes about Suggs’s character, it made his readers laugh, but it also made them think. What could Lafayette become? In a grotesquely comic form, Suggs’s adventures in east Alabama epitomized the anxieties and hopes of Hooper’s readers about what their frontiers might hold. Everyone who laughed gave a sign of recognition. And our visceral responses involve us in their history.

Yet one more point can be made by considering Hooper’s use of Lafayette, and it is an extremely important point. Speaking through Suggs and Johns, Hooper could voice a mocking disapproval of everything in his society, and he could get away with it. In 1844, Hooper was less than thirty years old, a beginner in the newspaper business, and a new man in town. He could hardly belittle the locals openly. But Suggs could set things on the squar, and the criticism was swallowed with a smile. That is because satire is inherently ambivalent. It suggests complex truths rather than proclaiming simple ones; it raises questions rather than answering them. Lafayette is, after all, both French in spelling and vernacular American in pronunciation, and there is no answer to the question of which is right. No one could force Hooper to admit a serious meaning unless he chose to give it away.

By writing satire, then, Hooper gained remarkable freedom of expression. Could the brand-new editor seriously suggest to his neighbors that either they learn French, change the name of their town, or make it live up to its noble name? Perhaps. But satire targeted larger concerns—matters of deep social meaning. Imagine a respectable man describing a slave’s picture as having more giniwine nigger in him an you’ll find nowadaze in a whole korn-field—owin to the breed bein so devilishly mixed (142). Hooper had Suggs write this vulgar line, but it told a crude truth for Hooper. He drew attention to a vice no polite southerner wanted to discuss.

Simon Suggs was one way for Johnson Hooper to tell truths too harsh for serious prose. In effect, the writer hid behind his character. Given that intent, it probably would have amused him that scholars have found it easier to understand Suggs than the real man behind him. While Suggs flaunted his character through actions that spoke louder than words, Hooper kept his true nature out of sight. He presented the public with two personalities, one funny and one serious, but his private side was so private that it has escaped biographers (who have never used the family correspondence). As a result, his life and his work have been misunderstood.

Both were filled with contradictions. As a young man, Hooper was a charming free spirit, a warm and witty fellow whose chronic irresponsibility was forgiven by a loving family and friends. He matured imperfectly, to put the matter tactfully. With friends and relatives, he was affectionate and convivial to the end of his life—he died before he was fifty—but he grew increasingly embittered by his failure to make a decent living. Hooper won fame as a humorist and a journalist and finally as one of the most violent of all fire-eating editors in the Old South. But his life ended in tragic circumstances that contrasted dramatically with the happy period which produced Suggs. The character of Simon Suggs was bred in the aristocratic society of coastal North Carolina, born in the frontier town of Lafayette, and destroyed in Richmond, capital city for the Confederate States of America. At bottom, this outrageous character and the tragic figure of Hooper were very much alike. By understanding this paradox we can open Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs to new and deeper readings, which clarify its significance for both American and southern literary history.

Johnson Jones Hooper was born in 1815 with uncommon advantages. He had a lineage studded with notable names in European and American society, and his father Archibald Hooper had inherited land and slaves in coastal North Carolina. Johnson’s older brothers George and deBerniere (called D.B. within the family), and his younger sisters Louisa and Mary were all born during the years of their father’s prosperity as a newspaper editor and businessman in and about the port of Wilmington. (At least two others died in youth, as was often the case in the nineteenth-century South.) The families of Johnsons, Joneses, deBernieres, and Hoopers were intermarried many times over in a closely knit network of relatives that stretched from Charleston well into North Carolina. Affection, intelligence, piety, and pride marked the family. Their sense of aristocratic honor had American origins—a signer of the Declaration of Independence in the family tree of Johnson’s father Archibald—and European roots—genuine French nobility in the family history of his mother Charlotte deBerniere.

The family’s prominence notwithstanding, Johnson’s adolescence was a trial. In the early 1830s Archibald Hooper lost his newspaper business, having already exhausted most of his inheritance. Charlotte was forced to open a grammar school, and only the generosity of friends and cousins, with sacrifices by the older boys, saved the elder Hoopers and their younger children from the evils of poverty. Just to remain occupied, Archibald Hooper went to work for another printer for a trifle.¹ To make matters more unbearable, he began to lose his vision, ensuring that he would never support his family again. The family’s humiliation was painful, although they could count on relatives to continue helping them indefinitely, and the family names carried great weight. But the Hoopers knew that their proud reputation would not last forever without enough money to support a respectable existence. While keeping up appearances, they had to count every penny and seize every opportunity to make more. In effect, they became a pattern for Simon Suggs, whose wit made profit from thin air.

The reckless spirit of Suggs appeared early in Johnson Hooper. As his family struggled, their hopes for recovery centered upon George and deBerniere, who were unusually responsible, intelligent, and able young men. Johnson, on the other hand, showed little inclination to shoulder much of the family’s burden. An exceptionally homely young man, he had a lively wit that attracted friends. He, too, was bright, with a strong scribbling propensity, but he was rather spoiled and lazy. Johnson did take an afternoon job in a printing office, but that was about the extent of his contribution. Perhaps to escape embarrassment at the family’s plight, perhaps just from high spirits, he spent too much time for anyone’s liking (except his own) enjoying Wilmington’s rowdy night life in company his parents found abominable. Though he was not the unprincipled reprobate which some of his friends think, his mother acknowledged that his faults were many and inexcusable. Johnson had an endearing nature and he was quick to apologize, but there was much to worry about in his wild behavior.²

He was wild by standards that were extremely high, an inheritance from generations of deBernieres and Hoopers. Most of the complaints about poor Johnson came from Charlotte Hooper, who suffered deeply (and not very quietly) from the family’s straits. She wanted all her children to become as refined as her older sons, but their poverty posed a challenge. A pious Episcopalian, Charlotte wrote long letters about Johnson’s sins to D.B., a devout man himself. They were caused, she insisted, by the low company that led him into evil. O if he knew the misery he causes me he surely would endeavor to do his duty, she lamented in August 1832, just after the final collapse of her husband’s newspaper. A year later she described Johnson as the principal object of solicitude at present, now focusing on his need for salvation.³ Johnson was his mother’s pet, but her complaints were hard to bear. Scholars have been puzzled by Simon Suggs’s