Southern Frontier Humor: An Anthology

Johnson Jones Hooper (1815–1862)

89 Johnson Jones Hooper (1815–1862) Born in Wilmington, N.C., in 1815, Johnson Jones Hooper would move to the first tier of the South’s antebellum humorists as the creator of Simon Suggs, one of the most famous con artists and rapscallions in American literature. In 1835 after his father had experienced a series of financial setbacks, Hooper moved to Alabama to join his brother who practiced law there. This proved to be a propitious migration for young Hooper, a chance to launch himself professionally in a new country teeming with opportunity, a place where his talents and developing interests could be applied in a number of different directions over the years: lawyer, census taker, politician, and secretary of the Provisional Congress of the Confederacy, and most significantly newspaperman and author of humorous sketches. In December 1842 or early 1843, Hooper became the editor of the pro-Whig weekly LaFayette East Alabamian, where he published his first humorous sketch in August 1843,“Taking the Census in Alabama,” under the byline“By a Chicken Man of 1840.” Based on his experience as a census taker in Tallapoosa County, this sketch was subsequently reprinted in William T. Porter’s New York sporting paper, the Spirit of the Times, and in Hooper’s first and most famous humorous collection, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers , a book that in 1845 Porter recommended to Carey and Hart of Philadelphia for publication. It would go through eleven editions between 1845 and 1856. Porter became Hooper’s most enthusiastic promoter, published over 50 of his stories and sporting sketches in the Spirit, and included one of Hooper’s Simon Suggs sketches in his popular anthology The Big Bear of Arkansas, and Other Sketches (1845). In 1844, Hooper published in the East Alabamian the first of his sketches featuring Simon Suggs, a conscienceless backwoods rogue-trickster whose ethical code the author describes as resting “snugly in his favourite aphorism—‘IT IS GOOD TO BE SHIFTY IN A NEW COUNTRY’—which means that it is right and proper that one should live as merrily and as comfortably as possible at the 90 Southern Frontier Humor expense of others.” Hooper’s Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, which PorterhyperbolicallytoutedintheSpiritasthe“besthalfdollarsworthofgenuine humor, ever enclosed between two covers,” takes the form of a bogus campaign biography, perhaps a satire of several campaign biographers who heralded Andrew Jackson’s military and political actions. Hooper admitted too that Suggs’s was inspired by Bird H. Young, a Tallapoosa County resident who, in his youth, had been well known for his rowdy behavior, practical jokes, and gambling. A picaresque novel of twelve chapters, which chronicle Suggs experiences and scrapes from age seventeen to fifty, the book has a unity lacking in most other collections of antebellum southern humor. A sly opportunist who was taught by his father to disdain book learning, Suggs says that it“spiles a man ef he’s got mother-wit, and ef he aint got that, it don’t do him no good”—an aphorism he would use to his personal benefit in preying on the weaknesses of others. Many of his victims are ignorant, vain, and greedy and consequently no better than he and therefore deserving of Suggs’s deception and duplicity. Hooper would subsequently edit several other Alabama newspapers and author or edit several additional books—A Ride with Old Kit Kuncker, and Other Sketches, and Scenes of Alabama (1849), and The Widow Rugby’s Husband, A Night at the Ugly Man’s, and Other Tales of Alabama (1851) among them. During the 1850s, Hooper was active politically, first promoting the Know-Nothing Party, then with the increase in abolitionist activity in the North, supporting sectionalism and states’ rights, and finally being elected secretary of the Provisional Confederate Congress. Called by British novelist William Makepeace Thackeray the “most promising writer of his day,” Johnson Jones Hooper, except for George Washington Harris, the creator of Sut Lovingood, was the best humorist the Old South produced. His character Simon Suggs, whom Hooper came to regard as a liability and hindrance to his aspirations in public life, left a rich legacy to later southern literature, providing the probable source for the Duke’s swindling of a camp meeting congregation in chapter 20 of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and a likely prototype for later southern scoundrels and con artists such as Faulkner’s Flem Snopes, Flannery O’Connor’s bogus Bible...