Alias Simon Suggs: The Life and Times of Johnson Jones Hooper

IX. “… If it be agreeable to the Convention …”

CHAPTER NINE " If it be agreeable to the Convention. · ." THE PROBLEMS instantly befalling Alabama after the passage of the Ordinance of Secession were vexatious and many. Ji"irst, the state had somehow to be converted rapidly but gracefully into a new cCfree and independent Republic." Most surely this was a colossal undertaking. Matters previously unthought of pressed for immediate action: problems judicial, legal, military, postal, civil, social, economic, and many more. Overnight, officials of every conceivable type and authority were needed. And myriad other perplexing and crisis-ridden difficulties cried out for solution. Added to these was the grave political uncertainty of the day and of the morrow. Unnoticed amid the sound and fury of jubilation a civilization was crumbling at a people's feet ...1 Already disharmony had reared its ugly head in Alabama: old political feuds die slowly and in their death throes agon~e. Many North Alabamians, far from enthusiastic over the Ordinance of Secession, felt that the hot-headed ,cSeparatists" of the Low Country, led by fire-eating "Bill" Yancey, had acted unwisely in quitting the Union without benefit of popular poll-in short, the South had usurped the North within Alabama ! Bitterness ran rife. In Huntsville men declared they would spend their "last dollar" to preserve the Union. Others threatened to lead the northern counties into secession from "IF IT BE AGREEABLE TO THE CONVENTION • 149 the state and join with counties of South and East Tennessee in the formation of a new "State of Nickajack." Citizens of other localities burned Yancey in effigy and otherwise indulged in "violent manifestations of resentmevt" over what they considered the unfair, incautious and precipitant decisions of the convention. "Separatists" and "Cooperationists" fought it out in the press and on the stump in every comer of Alabama . The former joyfully boasted that "they would drink every drop df blood" shed because of the state's withdrawal from the Union; their opponents foresaw only doom and destruction : one man actually kept his home in complete darkness during all the celebrations, prophesying that every house "would be in mourning before the end of twelve months."2 Nevertheless, amid such confusion, misunderstanding, and feuding Alabama continued its preparations for a called meeting , February 4 in Montgomery, of the '''Southern Congress," to which all seceded states had been invited to send representatives for the purpose of forming a new national government. Newspapers squeezed every conceivable drop of publicity out of the proposed assemblage as well as out of even merest rumors. The organization of "Home Guards," military companies , the movement of men, the speeches of politicians, the hour-by-hour events in Charleston Harbor, the designing of flags, the election of delegates, the size and strength of forts and arsenals, the perfection of new-type rifles or artilleryanything was grist for the journalistic mill. Poems, letters, essays, speeches appeared in the press day after day from burning, praiseful Southern pens, and scissors-and-paste were freely used to extract from Yankee journals articles reflecting even the slightest weakness, fallacy or naivete of that teeming and likewise turbulent region. Down at the Montgomery Mail Johnson J. Hooper was swamped. Second Corporal Whitfield, his youngest partner, had "to the wars gone" with the "True Blues" and was now 150 ALIAS SIMON SUGGS stationed near Pensacola, Florida. Coyne, "the Junior," had been forced on account of ill health to take leave of absence, departing January 23 for Mobile and New Orleans. Thus did the unusually heavy responsibility of publishing the paper single-handedly fall on "the Senior" who, himself, was far from robust. "All aloneI" he cried late in January. "When one man is called on to pass on all correspondence . . . , to correct . . . the crudities of manuscripts which must go to the printersand , (least of all,) to write the hasty paragraphs which appear .. " it is an occupation not much more pleasant than that of a man on a tread-mill, with only about equal honor and emolument."3 Whitfield did his best to help, however, by writing long letters to the Mail, describing his tour of duty at Fort Barrancas, and Hooper eagerly printed them in full.4 Then, as always, letters from soldiers made good copy. One in particular, from an anonymous member of the "Montgomery Rifles," explained the naming of their cannon at Fort Morgan: "Number 5" they had dubbed the William L. Yancey, "that pet and pride of Alabama, the political...