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

I. “… people is more like hogs and dogs …”

CHAPTER ONE " ... people is more like hogs alld dogs . .. " ""~ILLIS BREWER says that in going from his father's home in 'Vilmington, North Carolina, to his brother's home in frontier La Fayette, Alabama, Johnson Jones Hooper "journeyed through the Gulf States, and remained in Tuscaloosa several months."! To have reached this West Alabama community, on the opposite side of the state from Chambers County, he would have had to come by ship from Wilmington, via Charleston and Savannah, to Mobile, and thence up the Mobile , Tombigbee and Black \Varrior rivers-a long, slow and circuitous voyage which would have ultimately deposited him yet many miles from his known destination. As Alabama's capital, Tuscaloosa doubtless held a charm and opportunities not to be expected in the county-seat of La Fayette, and Hooper might well indeed have wished- to "look the field over" from that vantage point.2 But this is not likely, in view of subsequent facts. Another writer, obviously following Brewer's lead, romantically states that Hooper "set out on a journey of the Gulf States, living by his wits, a few months here and a few there, until 1840 when he settled in La Fayette ... and read law under his brother, already a resident of seven years' standing."3 Another possible though highly improbable route would have been the Fall-Line Road all the way across the Carolinas and Georgia, a tedious stage-coach 16 ALIAS SIMON SUGGS journey of approximately six hundred miles.4 And still another, even more improbable, would have been the northern road through western North Carolina, Knoxville, Huntsville and Tuscaloosa. None of these routes seems plausible. As will be seen, Hooper was in East Alabama much earliel· than 1840. Moreover , the logical and most attractive route for him to have followed from Wilmington to La Fayette was certainly not the longest way round. By taking passage on one of the regularly scheduled schooners from Wilmington, Hooper could have reached Charleston in less than two days. There he could have boarded the newly-constructed, IS6-mile South-Carolina Rail-Road, then the longest in the world, and have arrived in Hamburg, across the Savannah River from Augusta, in a matter of hours.5 In Augusta, Georgia's principal stagecoach terminal, he could have taken the Fort Mitchell route directly west, through Sparta, Milledgeville,' Macon and Columbus, across the Chattahoochee River to Fort Mitchell, Alabama, and thence to Opelika and La Fayette, a distance of but two hundred and sixty miles.6 This route, from ~Iiddle Georgia westward a part of the old Washington-New Orleans Federal Road and because of surveyors' nlarkings commonly called the c'Three Chopped Way," was the most frequented southwestward highway of its time. Immigrants from the Carolinas and Georgia who settled in Alabama, as well as those who pushed farther on, to Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, had used it extensively and long.7 Moreover, Chambers County, one of Alabama's most easterly counties, strategically situated near famous Fort Mitchell on a chief pioneer thoroughfare, was widely known as one of the state's gateways. It is wholly logical to assume, therefore, that Hooper journeyed this way, rather than the longer and more circuitous route via Tuscaloosa. At the time of Hooper's arrival, La Fayette was a mere • PEOPLE IS MORE LIKE HOGS AND DOGS • • ." 17 frontier crossroads, a muddy-streeted, log-cabin village of scarcely two hundred inhabitants. Chambers County, of which it was the "chief city," contained not more than twenty settlers to each of its 620 square miles, almost one-half of whom were Negro slaves, and an unknown quantity of Muscogee Indians of the Creek Nation who still roamed the countryside, frightening women and children and in general adding no pleasure to an already rugged pioneer existence. Scarcely three years old, the county had been created December 18, 1832, carved out of territory ceded to the United States at the Treaty of Cusseta the preceding March. Already, however, settlers from Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Virginia and the older counties of Alabama to the west were pouring into the new land, staking claims, clearing the piney-woods, building log houses and trading posts, planting crops, and otherwise slowly converting the backwoods wilderness into a livable outpost of civilization.8 By 1840, five years after Hooper's coming and the year of Chambers County's first census, 17,333 had arrived .9 Within...