First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama

7. Historicizing Alabama's Southwestern Humorists; or, How the Times Were Served by Johnson J. Hooper and Joseph G.Baldwin

7 Historicizing Alabama's Southwestern Humorists; or, How the Times Were Served by Johnson J. Hooper and Joseph G. Baldwin As a working laboratory of social experiment on the antebellum frontier, early Alabama could hardly have been expected not to prove hospitable literary ground for corresponding developments in the raffish new regional genre of politico-economic realism called Southwestern humor. To put this more directly, in a world of flush times and fast characters where self-making was the name of the game, it seemed only natural that such ebullient existential exercise of creative individuality would find comic literary celebration as well. In this, readers of the era at both the regional and national levels were not disappointed by premier antebellum Alabama practitioners of the form, from whose hands they received at least two acknowledged classics.' These were Johnson Jones Hooper's Adventures ofCaptain Simon Suggs and Joseph Glover Baldwin's The Flush Times ofAlabama andMississippi. The first, with prominent episodes published initially in the La Fayette East Alabamian and reprinted in William T. Porter's influential New York sporting journal, The Spirit of the Times, appeared in book form in 1845. The second, with most of its contents having been published as individual pieces in the prestigious Southern Literary Messenger, came out as a collection in 1853. Further, in the domain of literary history, the work of both of these Alabama authors has continued to earn their texts not only enshrinement in the canon of an important nineteenth-century American genre but also indepen- dent critical recognition as works of distinctly original genius. In the domain of cultural archetype, Adventures ofSimon Suggs has regularly been invoked by critics as a reigning early representation of the confidence-man archetype in American myth and literature. It has rightly been called one of the most skilled parodies ever concocted of American campaign biography.2 And in its complex politics of narration-what Kenneth Lynn has memorably analyzed as the style of the "self-controlled gentleman"-it has been held up as an exemplary document of Whig critique in its battle against Jacksonian mobocracy. Similarly, as social representation, in Baldwin's expanding on the standard cast of "hunters, hog-merchants, ring-tailed roarers, gamblers, circuit riders;' and the like rendered familiar by the genre (Justus xviii), The Flush Times, in its colorful survey of the frontier bench and bar, has been celebrated as a great, teeming gallery of period authentics and originals, a kind of living legal archaeology of the rumbustious era described in its title.] And likewise stylistically, precisely in its eschewing much of the vernacular experimentation common to the Southwestern genre for a more traditional comic realism in the grand manner, it has been singled out for an almost Dickensian robustness of rhetorical and representational vigor. On the other hand, exactly in these various forms of celebration as literary classics, both have frequently earned institutional status in studies emphasizing their uniqueness and/or difference rather than their common political origin as deeply historicized local achievements in the fullest sense of that term; and as a result, critics have continued over the years to make large cultural claims about Hooper's and Baldwin's classic volumes-albeit in many cases just and supportable ones-in increasing dissociation of the two texts not only from each other but also from the virtually identical contexts of political and economic circumstance that brought them into being in the first place as cultural representations. Or, to put this in the context of my present purpose, if no one has ever really debated that Hooper's and Baldwin's books were, as explicitly as any written in the era, quite literally about what Mills Thornton has called power and politics in early Alabama, the time has also probably come for us to take the trouble of reading them together again in exactly that way in order to reattach claims we have made about their humor in the domain of cultural myth to explicit issues of cultural formation. We need to see again, that is, despite their visible differences in style and outlook, as well as their times and places of composition, what these texts actually say about Alabama life and culture in the period that became in both cases their focal, even obsessive concern-by no coincidence, in both cases, the crucial years of 1835-37 investment boom and bust that might properly be called Alabama's age of speculation; and, as will be shown, we also...