simon suggs revised 25pp

Abstract

Counterfeit “Presentments”: Political Biography and

Johnson Jones Hooper’s Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs

Johnson Jones Hooper’s fictitious campaign biography of Simon Suggs, presented by the author as a

burlesque version of presidential campaign biographies written in behalf of Andrew Jackson, can be read

as an extended critique of the corrupting effects of democratic institutions upon their constituencies, as

well as a satirical examination of the speculative presentation of fabricated personas of popular candidates

in political life. The adventures of Hooper’s candidate for county sheriff refer, in particular, to Jackson’s

leadership of Tennessee militia troops during the Creek War of 1813-1814, to his enforcement of martial

law provisions following the Battle of New Orleans, and to the fraudulent practices of speculators

contending for Creek land tracts during Jackson’s presidency. The complex trafficking of interests

between popular leaders and their constituents that is characteristic of representative politics are uniquely

suited to the “shifty” stratagems of confidence men like Simon Suggs, who thrive under the conditions of

uncertainty in the democratic game space of politics.

0

Counterfeit “Presentments”: Political Biography and

Johnson Jones Hooper’s Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs

The fiends of the Tallapoosa will no longer murder our women and children, or disturb the

quiet of our borders. Their midnight flambeaux will no more illumine their council-house, or

shine upon the victim of their infernal orgies. In their places, a new generation will arise,

who will know their duty better. The weapons of warfare will be exchanged for the utensils

of husbandry; and the wilderness, which now withers in sterility, and mourns the desolation

which overspreads her, will blossom as the rose, and become the nursery of the arts. But

before this happy day can arrive other chastisements remain to be inflicted. It is indeed

lamentable, that the path to peace should lead through blood, and over the bodies of the

slain; but it is a dispensation of Providence, and perhaps a wise one to inflict partial evils,

that ultimate good may be procured.

—Andrew Jackson, address to troops at Fort Williams, 1814. John Henry

Eaton, Memoirs of Andrew Jackson, Major-General in the Service of the United

States1

Johnson Jones Hooper’s Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa

Volunteers (1845) has been recognized for fifty years as a burlesque narrative of Andrew Jackson’s 1824

and 1828 campaign biographies, the latter titled Memoirs of Andrew Jackson, Late Major-General and

Commander in Chief of The Southern Division of The Army of the United States.2 Yet the historical and

thematic links between Hooper’s political humor and the books written by Jackson’s future Secretary of

War, John Eaton, have remained largely unexplored. Because the adaptation of a popular narrative genre,

the military campaign biography, to the purposes of electoral politics is in fact the point of origin of the

book-length political campaign biography, Eaton’s books can be seen as one of the many long-lasting

innovations of Jacksonian “machine” politics. The campaign biography’s main purpose was to provide

1

an in-depth account of the characteristics, achievements, and controversies that helped define the popular

image of the candidate in the minds of constituents to whom the books would be distributed. Due to his

generalship of militia forces in the Creek War of 1813-1814 and especially to his command of federal and

militia troops at the Battle of New Orleans, Jackson’s image was already larger than life before his

presidential campaigns were conducted. Because his military career was rife with controversy, one of the

functions of Eaton’s biographies was to explain the circumstances Jackson faced as a commanding officer

and the reasons for the extreme measures he took in the field. Voters pledged to his cause needed to

know, for instance, the rationale for Jackson’s use of violent force against his militia troops to counter

challenges to his authority in order to answer election-year controversies over Old Hickory’s volatile

temperament. If Jackson’s supporters did not know enough to defend their leader, his critics would know

enough to attack and in so doing would take the lead in defining the fractious general’s image in the

public eye.

The subject of Johnson Jones Hooper’s burlesque campaign biography is far removed from the

arena of national fame in which Jackson moved. A candidate for a local sheriff’s office from Tallapoosa

County, Alabama, Simon Suggs is a roving confidence man in an extreme state of dissipation whose own

life story is a serious hindrance to his chances for success in the political marketplace. Like Jackson, who

led his troops to victory in the Creek War of 1813-1814 as a Tennessee militia general, Suggs comes from

obscure origins and rises to prominence on the basis of his election to a militia captaincy during what was

known as the Second Creek War, an outbreak in hostilities in the 1830s that led to the forcible expulsion

of the tribe from the state. Assuming leadership of his volunteer forces on the basis of appeals that recall

Jackson’s manipulation of public opinion during the outbreak of the Creek War and encountering

controversies that recall the general’s declaration of martial law in the aftermath of the Battle of New

Orleans, Suggs becomes the subject of his biographer’s recasting, in the context of the comic buffoonery

of Southwest humor, incidents upon which Jackson’s military fame rested. Suggs is able to make use of

Jackson’s doctrine of military necessity overruling civilian rights, for example, to extort money and liquor

from his frightened constituency.

2

In certain ways Suggs might be said to resemble Jackson as a rugged frontier chieftain and a man

of action of questionable judgment. But as becomes apparent to readers of his adventures, Suggs also

exemplifies Jackson’s frontier constituency, one that Old Hickory found difficult to control in pursuing

his Indian removal policies during his presidency. The historical process proceeding from Jackson’s

military victories to the rapid white settlement of lands ceded by the Creek to the U.S. government

created a loyal constituency in the deep South to which Jackson was able to appeal during his presidential

campaigns. The corrupt land speculation practices and mob violence of settlers in cession areas during

his presidency, however, would ultimately overrun the attempts of Jackson’s administration to impose

authority over his popular constituency, arousing national controversy in a political climate already

sensitized to the issue of Indian removal. The inglorious consummation of Jackson’s efforts to create a

homeland constituency in the frontier was a carnival of rapacious greed in which a besotted squatter like

Simon Suggs is able to speculate on sheer nerve, without funds. In the rapid transactions of a frontier

marketplace which resembled his favorite form of entertainment, the faro tables of antebellum gambling

parlors, Suggs takes advantage of federal policies initiated by Jackson’s administration to drive individual

Indian landholders seeking to live within the laws of the state out to western reservation lands. An

example of the corruption of republican virtue not by aristocratic interests but by democratic institutions,

the land speculation schemes of the 1830s took advantage of arrangements of democratic opportunity that

unleashed the depravity in all men, who warred upon the interests of all others.

The art of identity formation lies at the root of Eaton’s attention to Jackson’s public image in his

official campaign biographies. While his forbidding countenance, staring from the opening page of his

biography, suggests the value of the mass production of the ubiquitous image of Jackson’s commanding

personality, it also indicates the problem of that image. While preserving the military bearing of the

candidate, Eaton had a lot of explaining to do. A fractious, hot-tempered statesman who made many

enemies and provoked a wide variety of rumors, Jackson relied upon Eaton’s presentation of his

perspective in order to make himself electable. Suggs’s biography faces longer odds in its efforts to

restore its candidate’s image, presented pictorially on its opening page as that of an ominous, sneering

3

highwayman in a black coat. Following Eaton’s lead in attempting to pass off impulsive behavior as

generous conduct, Hooper must also contend with the issue of Suggs’s perpetual motive of greed, a

quality which would seem to circumvent all attempts to explain away his shortcomings. Pursing gain

during the deep South’s “flush times” of easy credit and abundant state currency, however, Suggs is

unusual among his peers only to the degree of deceptive practice his “shifty” expedients engage him in

his pursuit of gain at the expense of others. For Suggs, identity formation consists of a series of rapid

expedients aimed at deception, disguising his true intentions as he perpetually engages in acts of fraud. A

horse trader among his other avocations, Suggs engages in exchanges with strangers used to dealing with

others from whom the downright honesty and simple virtues of the yeoman farmer can be expected; in the

midst of the overland migration of slaves and livestock from the middle to the deep South which occurred

during the Jacksonian era, Suggs is a smooth operator of new economic arrangements whose deceptive

potential is insufficiently appreciated at the local level. Hooper reveals Suggs as a scoundrel who seems

proud of his exploits in the sense that they show him to be a superior predator in the social landscape, an

adept in the arts of “getting along” whose drink-treating hospitality among his own ruffian class of the

electorate might well propel him to office. In his biography the candidate is often portrayed in the acts of

impersonating others from whom credit or recognition is desired, misrepresenting his financial worth, or

trafficking in false knowledge in order to swindle not simply the credulous, but the somewhat savvy who

compete in the democratic game spaces he frequents in his travels. Because he fools those who connive

at the expense of the people, he may even win a grudging respect for his depredations.

Suggs’s creator, arriving in eastern Alabama in the midst of the Creek removals, would become

involved in Alabama state politics as the partisan Whig “country editor” of the Lafayette East Alabamian,

a post from which he was later to move to the state’s capital to edit its most highly influential newspaper,

the Montgomery Advertiser. In his editorial position Hooper would be directly engaged in the building of

the machinery of the new national political organizations aligned for and against Jackson’s contentious

rise to power following the republican “era of good feelings.” As in much of the West and South,

4

newspapers were established as Democratic or Whig party organs in nearly all of Alabama’s counties,

informing a far-flung rural populace loosely connected by dirt roads in a state with few navigable

waterways. Their editors enforced party discipline in ways that popularity-seeking candidates for public

office could not, disseminating party ideology, directives, and innuendo from the behind-the-scenes

operators of the political party “machines” which employed them. In the broad regions of the country in

which the Bible, the newspaper, and the occasional letter were the primary forms of reading matter

available to the public, the country editor’s literacy was a significant form of cultural capital which

allowed the ambitions of vernacular stump orators to become more broadly communicable through the

informed perspective of party intelligence. As a gregariously effective communicator of partisan causes

for the Whig Party and, following the demise of the party, of the pro-slavery cause, Hooper would

become one of his state’s most powerful political insiders in a career that culminated in his appointment

at the outset of the Civil War as Secretary of the Congress of the Confederate States of America.

Identifying himself on the title page of Suggs’s fictional campaign biography as an anonymous

“Country Editor,” Hooper plays the familiar role of a behind-the-scenes party ideologue who must serve

as both apologist and champion of the candidate he represents in print. The editor’s work is a tongue-in-

cheek exercise whose ironies culminate in the reader’s gradual realization that he is in fact an opponent of

the Democratic ticket on which Suggs is running. Suggs seems unaware of the significance of this fact in

the production of a book promoting his candidacy, commenting favorably in his own “Autographic

Letter” at the end of the text only upon the illustrations which appear in it. Hooper leaves it to Simon

himself to reveal his identity as Sugg’s author in the candidate’s “Autographic Letter,” which is addressed

to “Johns[,]” the “edditur of the eest Allybammyun, la Fait, chambers Kounty, Al.”3 By his admission of

having “altered—or rather added” the punctuation necessary to navigate Suggs’s autographic text, which

in its raw form is largely a rendition of vernacular speech sounded out on the page, the editor wields his

influence as a party insider not simply in his capacity to articulate party ideology, but to impose structure

upon his candidate’s disorderly units of speech to clarify what he “means” to say. In the preceding

chapters of Hooper’s text the country editor labors to make Suggs’s life story “readable” in a larger sense,

5

providing an interpretive framework that will make his candidate’s actions understandable in the political

and social contexts in which his legitimacy as an office-seeker will be tested. To provide the

verisimilitude necessary to legitimate Suggs’s appeal to the confidence of the public a great deal more

than a transcription of the facts of the candidate’s life is, of course, undertaken. Liberally “quoting” in

vernacular form his candidate’s dialogue and even his muttered thoughts in dramatized scenes based on

little more than his subject’s own “memoranda, contemporaneously taken” of incidents occurring in his

life, the writer wields the power of the pen to almost wholly fabricate the persona of his candidate.4

Suggs himself appears to have little inkling of the artistic license involved in the creation of his character,

of the possibility that his Whig editor is presenting a creation to be laughed at rather than one who in his

various confidence games has the last laugh. Complicating the issue of the country editor’s intentions is

the possibility that the unflattering portrait he provides of his candidate may in fact be perfectly in

keeping with Suggs’s self-concept of himself as a superior predator of the open road.

Found “snugly settled on public land” in the midst of the settlements of Jackson’s former allies,

the Oakfuskee or Upper Creek Indians, Simon Suggs emerges in 1833 from a twenty-year gap in his

official biography “as jolly as Bacchus, with a pretty large family and considerable experience, but

without funds[.]”5 An early prototype for a long line of confidence men that have figured significantly in

the history of American literary narrative, Suggs’s “whole ethical system [lay] snugly in his favorite

aphorism—IT IS GOOD TO BE SHIFTY IN A NEW COUNTRY[.]”6 It is “right and proper[,]” in other

words, that by deceptive maneuvers and expedients “one should live as merrily and as comfortably as

possible at the expense of others.” To be “shifty” in the Southwest meant to exploit all the possibilities of

personal mobility to fraudulently extort profit from others: to wander from place to place, to take on serial

identities, to pursue illicit gain through false representations of wealth, knowledge, courage, or spiritual

integrity. According to James H. Justus, “the bemused stripping of facades” in which Simon engages is

characteristic of much of Southwest humor. “One of its premises is that all conduct in a society of

permeable class lines is necessarily an ongoing performance in which presentation of the self is an

abiding, competitive priority.” In his wanderings, Suggs make use of impersonation “simply because it

6

works.” Seemingly respectable folk “are unable to tell the difference between the real and the sham,

because most of those who claim status are themselves sham.”7 Contending for the trust of the democratic

electorate on the basis of a deceptive personality unattached to a coherent account of his life-story as

miraculously, as his campaign biography goes on to show, as he speculates without capital for Creek

lands, Suggs is a “miracle of shrewdness” equipped by “nature” with “the precise intellectual outfit to be

desired by a man of his propensities.” He has been sent “into the world as a sort of he-Pallas, ready to

cope with his kind, from his infancy, in all the arts by which men ‘get along’ in the world; if she made

him, in respect to his moral conformation, a beast of prey, she did not refine the cruelty by denying him

the fangs and the claws.”8 Simon’s fully-evolved, intuitive survival skills and finely-attuned intelligence

make supremely suited to the conditions of upheaval in the cession lands of the Old Southwest, where in

the “general fight” for Creek land tracts “those would fare best, who struck soonest and hardest.”9 Able

to play upon the confused expectations of others entering into the proprietary fight, Simon is an

opportunistic predator whose deceptions are practiced upon those whose fond expectations, feverish

desires, and inferior cunning are aroused by the openly competitive arrangements of Jacksonian

democracy.

To account for the “moral and intellectual endowments” of the “he-Pallas” he has ushered onto

the political stage, Hooper directs the reader’s attention to the candidate’s portrait, or “counterfeit

presentment[,]” drawn by illustrator Felix Octavius Darley to bring him figuratively to life in the public

eye. Remarking upon the mass reproduction of images of national luminaries of Suggs’s party, Hooper

observes that it is by such means that “all the country has in its mind’s eye” the curious image of Martin

Van Buren’s “sleek, bald pate, delicate whiskers, and foxy smile,” and that “future generations of naughty

children who will persist in sitting up when they should be a-bed, will be frightened to their cribs by the

lithograph of ‘Major General Andrew Jackson,’ which their mammas will declare to be a faithful

representation of the Evil One[.]”10 Simon’s portrait reveals the shrewd, angular face of a fifty-year-old

man, his nearly browless eyes edged with a “sanguineous hue,” his long, low nose overhanging a long

mouth fixed in an “ever-present sneer[.]”11 Pictured on horseback, slouched and facing slightly away from

7

the reader, Suggs is draped in a black coat. “[L]ithe, long, and sinewy,” he wears a broad-brimmed hat,

sports a “bristly, iron-gray beard” and is “clad in Kentucky jeans, a trifle worn.”12 Suggs has the cunning,

steely countenance of a man who inspires confidence not in his good intentions but in his capacity as a

survivor and an adversary. He has the austere look notable not only in the power of Jackson’s

countenance to terrify naughty children, but as was generally seen in “the baleful faces of backcountry

leaders” such as Old Hickory’s first-term vice president and states-rights adversary John C. Calhoun.

Such men, according to historian David Hackett Fischer, were characteristically “tall, lean and sinewy,

with hard, angry, weatherbeaten features” that testified “to their strength of character and force of will,

and also to their courage and cruelty.”13 Simon’s gravity of appearance indicates his inner ferocity,

sometimes played as a bluff in the context of his daily interactions to unnerve and confuse his victims as

to the nature and seriousness of his true intentions.

Simon’s portrayal as a backcountry chieftain is undermined, however, by his threadbare clothes,

dissipated features, and indolent slouch in the saddle; he is at best a seedy pretender to the impressive

figure Jackson cut in the mind’s eye of his backcountry constituents. In many ways he resembles the

class of “horse-jockeys” described by D. R. Hundley in his 1860 taxonomy of social relations in the

South, a degraded, vagrant type of the “native Southern Yankee” that did not raise horses to sell like the

“plain, plodding yeomanry” but were “merely traders” in horseflesh.14 This “voluble, smooth-tongued,

plausible race of miscreants” was, according to Hundley, deplored by southern gentlemen and virtuous

yeomen alike, representing to the former the vagabond ways of a transient white proletariat and to the

latter a commercial predator upon the natural, straightforward relations of republican life. The southern

horse-jockey, in Hundley’s words, was

Ever the same sly, cunning fox, and thinks it a monstrous noble action to get the better of a

credulous purchaser in a sale, and the very apotheosis of wit and shrewdness to swindle a poor

countryman in a swap. He is usually unlettered…rough in manners, and rude in speech, being

much given to the use of slang expressions; never makes a wry face at any kind of grog…wears

Kentucky “jeans;” swears roundly all the time; tells all manner of tough yarns…affects to be

8

amiably and confidingly drunk, plying all the while [with] the strongest of strong waters, the poor

pigeon he intends to pluck…all the time in the scheming horse-jockey’s eye a cold, clear, snake-

like gleam of cunning calculation, which proclaims even to the dullest observer how great is the

sham he is perpetrating.15

In his restless wanderings as a “native Southern Yankee” Suggs, whose life history includes twenty

unaccounted-for years during which his biographer vigorously denies any knowledge of his having been a

horse thief in the infamous “Pony Club” of Carroll County, Georgia, does not occupy social space in the

same way as those who might be said to properly belong to the South. In the impersonal relations of

modern commercial exchange that were supplanting personal contractual relations in which a rural

populace had long placed its trust, familiar modes of Southern hospitality came under the depredatory

assault of “shifty” personages ranging from outside interlopers to wayward kin dislodged by the

speculative temptations of the marketplace from their fixed place in the social order. The rapid settlement

of the region in midst of the Indian removals, with its frenetic commercial speculations and the general

upheaval of the overland transport of livestock and slaves on a scale never before seen on the continent

had rapidly brought about circumstances under which social interlopers thrived at the expense not only of

the “plain, plodding yeomanry” but of those who, seeking to adapt themselves to the complexities of the

speculative marketplace, lacked the cunning to survive. Jacksonian political discourse, which identified

the victimization of the democratic electorate with entrenched interests receiving government preference,

was unable to fathom the competitive imbalances and instabilities of the “flush times” it helped to create.

The simple contract based upon the handshake and the taking of mutual oaths, as enshrined in Jacksonian

orthodoxy, was a nostalgic theme of which men like Suggs, with their talent of simulating sincerity, could

take direct advantage. Ironically, the man taking advantage of the credulity of the people is now

attempting to win their vote as a Democratic sheriff, where he will presumably import his predilection for

confidence games into the workings of law enforcement.

Simon Suggs comes to his disorderly ways in the early years of the century from the subsistence

farming class of the furthest-settled reaches of middle Georgia, having commenced at an early age “to

9

contract all the coarse vices incident to such a region.”16 Having settled his family “only a hundred and

fifty mile[s]” outside of Augusta, his father Jedediah appears to have followed the rush of middle Georgia

farmers migrating westward into public lands opened by the Creek cessions of 1804-1806.17 Having

turned seventeen around the time of Jackson’s 1814 campaign against the Creek in Alabama Territory,

Simon has always been “too sharp” in his wits for his severe but rather perplexed father, a “hard-shell”

Baptist who has, in addition to setting his sons to the labors of the farm, “reared his boys—or endeavored

to do so—according to the strictest requisitions of the moral law.”18 While “very pious and remarkably

austere,” however, Jedediah is also “very avaricious” and it becomes apparent in the opening chapters of

Hooper’s narrative that the unreflecting hypocrisy of the father’s conflicting values has had the effect of

encouraging the unregenerate rapacity of the son.

Jedediah owns one, possibly more, slaves with whom he and his sons work side-by-side in the

field, a phenomenon noted by northern visitors and southern commentators alike years later when many

small farmers beyond the plantation districts began keeping a few slaves to be worked, hired out, or sold

at market as circumstances dictated.19 Frederick Law Olmstead, in his extensive travels through the South,

found skeptical attitudes among Alabama farmers who resorted to slave ownership because, as one put it,

“the white men here who will labor, are not a bit better than negroes,” requiring constant supervision,

working carelessly, and often refusing to do what was asked of them. Olmstead summed up the

complaints of many southern farmers that “slavery breeds unfaithful, meretricious, inexact and non-

persistent habits of working” among white laborers.20 With these caveats in mind, Jedediah’s discovery

of Simon gambling at cards with the slave boy Bill in a fence corner while they are supposed to be

working at the plow is especially significant. Simon despises the slow and laborious toil of the farm; he

will do it only if he is made to, and being made to work will not teach him any particular lesson. As his

own body “writhe[s] and ‘wriggle[s] in involuntary sympathy” in witnessing his father’s disciplinary

blows “[descend] upon the bare shoulders of his sable friend,” Simon thinks his own impending beating

as an instance of the hereditary slavery of abused sons: “’Drot it! what do boys have daddies for, any

how? ’Taint for nuthin’ but jist to beat ’em and work ’em.”21

10

His father’s authoritative position to “correct” his son alongside his slave, however, is

undermined not so much by Simon’s rejection of his subservient lot as by his shrewdness in discerning

the “soft spots” in his father’s investment in the virtues of his yeoman’s status. The hand of wrath is

distracted momentarily by Simon’s boast that he can “win more money in a week than you can make in a

year” as a professional gambler, a claim which sets Jedediah to pondering the apparent contrast between

Simon’s flush-with-cash assurance and his own embarrassed financial circumstances as an independent

farmer.22 As Jedediah confesses to his son upon learning of his stash of nearly eleven dollars in silver

coin won at cards at a nearby grocery depot, “[y]our old daddy is in a close place about payin’ for his

land” and could badly use the money himself. As a result Simon is able to tempt his father to wager “this

here maulin’ you owe me” plus a fractious Indian pony against his illicit earnings, to be decided by a card

trick Jedediah doesn’t think his son can perform because, as he solemnly tells him, “[i]t’s agin nater[.]”23

Reasoning that the impossibility of his son’s defeating the forces of nature means that he is not engaging

his father in a sinful bet, but is simply giving him the eleven dollars, Jedediah makes use of his powers of

self-deception to clear his moral path. His more worldly son wields the tools of deception, by both

sleight-of-hand and suggestive influence, not to fool himself but to win the devil’s bounty on his father’s

selfish designs.

Jedediah, despite surreptitiously moving all the “picter” cards to the bottom, witnesses Simon’s

triumphant cut of the Jack of Hearts from half-a-dozen cards into the deck with the dismayed cry that

“Satan has power on this yeath!”24 Adapted to the phraseology of anti-Jackson partisans, the trick of

“cutting the Jack” is referred to in a similar vein in a satirical anti-Van Buren campaign biography

attributed to David Crockett, in reference to Jackson’s endorsement of the New York politician as his

presidential successor. In the opening pages of this work, very likely written by Whig party regulars

rather than Crockett himself, Old Hickory is accused of having “so shuffled and stocked the cards, that

unless we can cut the pack in the right place, he will turn up a Jack upon the country.”25 The text’s

belabored metaphor, like Hooper’s sketch of Simon’s trick upon his naively conniving father, depicts the

yeomanry outwitted by smooth operators with the wit and malice to play political confidence games at

11

their expense. “Statesmen are gamesters,” the supposititious author of this unauthorized biography

declares, “and the people are the cards they play with.”26 Having played his befuddled father for a fool,

Simon rallies him for his pious trust in the providential workings of God’s will through natural events,

loudly confiding to his brother Ben that “daddy couldn’t help it, it was predestinated[.]”27 To Jedediah’s

weary reply that his son’s conjuring of the Jack was indeed “all fixed aforehand” Simon laughs until he is

“purple in the face[,]” repeating the phrase twice for his less rebellious brother’s amusement.

Repudiating the productive labors, pious habits, and simple virtues of the yeoman farmer upon

which, according to the familiar Jacksonian panegyric, rested the strength of a democratic republic,

Simon’s incorrigible appetites are forged in the internal contradictions of a father whose appearance of

republican simplicity masks traits of avarice, duplicity, and complacent provincial pride. Rather than

providing the “security, stability, and continuity” needed to form character in the absence of civilizing

institutions, the frontier home is the place where Suggs, according to one reader, “first learns that human

nature is fueled by self-interest, vanity, and greed, and his mentor is his father.”28 With the mentoring of

the assorted company at Bob Smith’s grocery, where he has learned to win money at cards, Simon

proceeds from the “precocious development” of illicit talents to a career of vice by which the implicit

greed of the father is unleashed upon the world at large in the “unrestrained license” of his son’s explicit

confidence games. The desire for socioeconomic mobility which lay at the heart of Jedediah’s purchase

of land on credit and his keeping of slaves on the family farm is disproportionately magnified in the

peripatetic activity of a son whose self-interested desire sets him in ravenous pursuit of wealth without a

corresponding interest in accumulating or preserving it. The zero-sum game that Simon “merrily” plays

“at the expense of others”29 exploits, consumes, and quickly exhausts societal wealth, securing little of

permanent value and hastening the day when the Captain will look for public recognition of his audacious

notoriety to secure him in public office.

Simon lets loose a “a tolerably fair imitation of a Creek war-whoop” as he leaves home the next

morning on the wagered Indian pony “bestowed” upon him by his father, falling into convulsions of

laughter at the anticipated discomfit of his mother, in whose pipe he has packed a thimbleful of

12

gunpowder as a parting gift.30 As he passes Bob Smith’s grocery, Hooper’s country editor admits that

“here, we are sorry to say, we lose all trace—at least all authentic trace—of him, for the next twenty

years.”31 Though he might clear the matter up himself, “[t]he Captain chooses to be silent on the subject,

and it does not become his friends to press him with questions.”32 Admitting that is “revolting, that every

body should know all about us in our lifetimes,” the country editor has only resorted to the “unusual and

improper” step of writing the biography of a living person at all because a plausible account of his

candidate’s life, “by the stern demands of a self-immolating patriotism, MUST be written. It is an

absolute, political necessity. His enemies will know enough to attack; his friends must know enough to

defend.”33 Exercising its sovereign power of moral dispossession, the public gaze enacts the ritual death

of the private person exhibited in the democratic marketplace. Held up “before the full gaze of ‘the

community,’ with all his qualities, characteristics, and peculiarities written on a large label and pasted to

his forehead[,]” the public man is what is left after the gentle virtues of self-possession “die of

bashfulness[.]”34

In the eyes of the popular democratic constituency that would twice elect him to the U.S.

presidency, the story of Andrew Jackson’s rise to fame as an Indian fighter during the Creek War of

1813-1814 was more than simply the highland saga of an embattled back-country chieftain defending his

people from death and dishonor. Federal policy decisions following Jackson’s military campaign would

have far-reaching historical consequences, laying the groundwork for the establishment of a new political

order in the frontier South and West that would significantly alter the relationship of American leaders to

their constituent publics. The Tennessee militia general’s pursuit of warring Muscogee insurgents into

the heart of Alabama Territory to render the brutal outcome of the Creek War, recounted at length in his

1824 and 1828 presidential campaign biographies, would serve as a foundational narrative regarding the

speculative use of martial power to carve out new democratic constituencies in the American hinterlands.

The defeat of the hostile Creek factions, followed by the forced cession or over 30,000 square miles of

Alabama tribal lands (an area larger than Scotland), would open the way for rapid white settlement in the

13

years that followed. Figuratively springing from the soil of national conquest, newly-enfranchised

popular majorities eager to stake their destinies on the presumptive claims of coercive state power would

supplant those of ill-disciplined savages who “were ignorant of the influence and effect of government on

the human powers[.]”35

Following the climactic attack of his collected forces on To’hope’ka, a fortified encampment

tucked into an encircling bend of the Tallapoosa River where an estimated 850 Creek warriors were

killed, Jackson, newly commissioned as major general of the 7th Military District by the U.S. War

Department, personally negotiated terms of surrender ending the war. Only one of the surviving leaders

of the hostile Creek factions, however, could be persuaded to attend. Undaunted, Jackson turned to the

astonished leaders of the 500 Muscogee Creek that had fought as allies alongside the militia forces

against the rebellious baton rouge warriors of their tribe and demanded that they surrender. Directing

them to sign a federal treaty ceding half their tribal domains, he vowed to drive those refusing to

capitulate to Spanish Florida to face the wrath of surviving Creek rebels that had retreated there to join

forces with their Seminole allies. Having already suffered the death of hundreds of their full and half-

blood kinsmen in raids launched by the hostile factions at the beginning of the conflict, Jackson’s Creek

allies had little choice but to comply.

To supporters of the Jacksonian cause, Eaton’s portrayal of the general’s treacherous negotiating

tactics in his presidential campaign biographies signaled his willingness to exploit the treaty process as a

means of securing Indian lands for his democratic constituents. Writing to James Monroe during his

presidential campaign in 1816, Jackson urged that Alabama lands claimed in his treaty be put up for sale

immediately in order to populate the territory with loyal settlers that would rise to its defense.36 Squatters

and settlers were not long in arriving, zealously asserting their presumed rights as white male democratic

subjects to public lands by forcing Creek families off the 320-acre tracts treaty stipulations had permitted

them to retain in the ceded area. Two years after Jackson’s own election to the presidency in 1828

Congress would ratify his Indian removal policy, inciting a second rush of intruders into the Creeks’

remaining tribal lands in the southeastern part of the state. Plying a ruinous whiskey and merchandise

14

trade that by 1832 would influence heavily indebted chiefs and their followers to cede remainder of their

territory, they were soon followed by land speculators eager to drive hard bargains for privately-owned

Creek land tracts arranged for under the new treaty.37 As the ineffectual attempts of Eaton’s successor as

Secretary of War, Lewis Cass, to control mobs of squatters that set fire to Indian homesteads, seized their

crops and livestock, and drove dispossessed families into the woods to starve showed, the use of the

power of the sword to preserve order beyond the battlefield was precariously subject to the consent of an

often ungovernable public.38 Far from proceeding from the ignorance of the “influence and effect of

government on the human powers” that Eaton ascribed to Native Americans, the people’s disorderly

assertion of power arose from the corrupting influence and effect of appeals to white male sovereignty

upon which government derived its political legitimacy. Exploiting the vulnerable position in which the

government’s assumption of legal authority over the disempowered Creek had placed them, the people’s

disorderly assertion of power acted as a force multiplier of the process of Indian removal, rapidly wiping

out what was left of the region’s indigenous settlements.

The volatile frontier electorate which empowered Jackson politically turned out to be a double-

edged sword for the battle-scarred president, revealing the limits of his power to impose upon a popular

constituency the martial authority he had not shrunk from imposing on rebellious troops under his

command. Jackson’s embattled leadership of the Tennessee volunteers, in many respects, foreshadowed

the difficulties he would face in controlling the depredations of Alabama squatters and speculators during

his presidency. The underlying cause of Jackson’s persistent difficulties in keeping volunteer militia

troops in the field in the difficult months preceding the victories over the Creek in 1814 was, according to

Eaton, the corruption of the people’s loyalty by powerful interests who sought to exploit them. The

designs of rogue officers who “hoped to make themselves popular” by spreading “the infection of

discontent” among his troops,39 as well as the bad faith of commercial contractors who defrauded the

people’s army by failing to adequately provision it, leading to starvation, delays, and retreats, were to

blame for Jackson’s embattled leadership of the people’s army.40 Anticipating election-year controversy

over Jackson’s efforts to counter challenges to his authority during the Creek campaign, which had

15

included the court-martial and execution of a mutinous private and orders to artillerymen to fire upon

recalcitrant troops, Eaton reminded readers of the ever-volatile temperament of citizen-soldiers who rose

from their agrarian pursuits to defend the nation in times of crisis:

Upon the yeomanry alone must every country depend for its liberty; they are its sinews and its

strength. Let them continue virtuous, and they will cheerfully, nay, fearlessly, maintain

themselves against aggression; but if they become corrupted, or through the intrigue or

misconduct of their rulers loose (sic) confidence in their government, forthwith their importance

and value will be impaired.41

While Jackson’s threats to shoot disloyal militia volunteers would not seem a promising subject to treat at

length in a campaign biography, Eaton’s discussion of such incidents did serve the purpose of informing

party supporters where blame for incidents likely to be raised by his political opponents could be most

effectively diverted. The relative steadfastness or corruptibility of the people’s collective virtue, long a

persistent theme of republican rhetoric, served as both a critique of the self-serving ambitions of political

rivals and an appeal to populist economic sentiments. Eaton’s exposure of unscrupulous military

contractors rehearsed an important Jacksonian campaign theme, reminding virtuous countrymen cut off

from the advantages of wealth, power, and influence of their own long-suffered deprivations at the hands

of well-connected mercantile capitalists. The corrupting influences of democratic institutions, as it turned

out, unleashed more destructive kinds of greed, the chaotic effects of which resulted not only in the

violent usurpation of indigenous peoples by frontier squatters and settlers, but in the fraudulent trade of

land speculators who would ultimately acquire 87% of the newly opened public lands, the nefarious

practices of political appointees put in charge of new publically-operated state banks, and the economic

panic following the “flush times” of easy credit and abundant paper currency invested in future cotton

crops in the Deep South, whose value in international markets suddenly plunged in 1837, sending the

nation into a long period of economic recession.

In their capacity to wreak havoc upon the powerless, the intensified economic and political

effects unleashed by Jacksonian democracy did not limit themselves to targeted ethnic minorities. The

16

colliding interests of white settlers rushing into the proprietary vacuum left by the destruction of the

Indian nations of the Deep South would ultimately lead them to practice deceptions on each other,

undermining the very institutions in which their power was invested. In the years of economic recession

following the Panic of 1837, charges of corruption involving directors, borrowers, and legislative

overseers at the publically owned Bank of Alabama, which had been specifically set up to empower

Jackson’s constituency of small farmers, led to widespread disillusionment among state Democrats in the

people’s integrity and capacity for self-government.42 Adding to this sense of disillusionment was the

landslide victory given by the “ignorant portion of the people” in the state to Whig candidate William

Henry Harrison in the 1840 presidential race, turning Jackson’s Democratic successor, Martin Van Buren,

out of office after one term on the strength of the opposition party’s noisy “log cabin and hard cider”

campaign theatrics. The failure of the state bank and the electoral losses of the party which had vested

itself in the “deep and extraordinary trust in the capacity and goodness of the Alabama farmer”43 revealed

unsettling doubts which found expression in the deterministic rhetoric of human nature Jacksonian

Democrats had traditionally evoked to assert the “natural rights” of men antecedent to societal laws.44 If,

as one Alabama Democrat wrote of the popular clamor for Harrison, “[m]an is I believe a selfish animal

by nature and is rarely governed by motives unconnected with self,” it followed that even institutions

created by and for the people would inevitably corrupt them. Those who benefitted from the

arrangements of democratic opportunity would naturally exert the advantages they had won to destroy the

rights and freedom of their countrymen45. Rather than blaming the corruption of republican virtue on the

designs of aristocratic interests, disillusioned Democrats began to distrust democratic institutional power

itself as a corrupting agent that unleashed the depravity in all men.

It is in the midst of the incoherent traffic in Creek land sales in the 1830s that Simon Suggs

emerges from a twenty-year period in which his private identity remains “buried to the world.”46 Giving

his biographical subject the power to dispose of his life story as he wishes, Hooper’s country editor

allows him a kind of fugitive possessive identity that asserts its own speculative value even though the

17

person it represents cannot be legitimately “accounted” for. The biographical loss of “all authentic trace”

of Suggs’s young manhood can be compared to the process by which the wealth the Captain extracts from

his luckless victims invariably “melt[s] away” and is soon “gone forever”47 due to his predilection for

gambling and rioting upon his gains. Life, like the financial windfalls Suggs extracts from his luckless

victims, is to be “spent” rather than cultivated. In his participation in the general fight for Creek land

tracts following his biographical hiatus, Suggs is not interested in acquiring property to heed Eaton’s

Jacksonian call to make the wilderness “blossom as the rose[.]”48 Seeking instead to take advantage of the

distortions of value introduced in “the business of fraud” practiced upon the Creek by rapacious land

speculators, the “fortune-makers who bought with hundreds what was worth thousands[,]”49 Suggs has no

other aim than to reduce private wealth to liquid assets to be poured into the barren sands of dissipation.

The assurances of Hooper’s country editor that in the Panic of 1837 the Creek would be “avenged” by the

ruin of Alabama land speculators, “nine out of ten” of whom would live out an “old age of shame and

beggary…blighted, root and trunk and limb[,]”50 do not really meet the standard of “retributive justice” he

claims for it because the general destruction of financial wealth extracted from the sale of their lands in

no way benefits those who were originally dispossessed. The collapse of an economy driven by

“excessive bank issues” of notes of credit revealed the effervescent nature of the fortunes accrued by

morally bankrupt speculators and their agents in the rapidly-completed transactions of the “flush times,”

to be collectively wiped out when the financial bubble of inflated cotton prices burst. The price paid for

the unrecoverable forms of capital lost in the adventure—the displacement and exile of an entire

indigenous culture—was incalculable.

Hooper’s country editor prefaces the story of Suggs’s 1835 land speculations with an unusually

elaborate frame tale involving the betrayal of an Indian maiden by a land speculator who promises to

marry her if her aged father will certify his property in his son-in-law’s name. Selling the lands at a

$2,000 profit, the land agent repudiates his wife, who has since become pregnant, leaving her to be

carried off with her father in the public wagons leaving the state. Hooper’s romantic tragedy serves, in its

relatively elevated tone and style, as a kind of shadow-play to the ribald farce of the Suggs’s entry into

18

the bargaining, played opposite an older, sexually experienced Creek woman referred to as “Big Widow.”

Having received gifts of tobacco and “sweet water” from the Captain, whose “sweet tongue” has won

from her a promise to sell her government-assigned tract of land to him for $200 and three blankets, she

tells competing speculators making offers as high as $800 that she will bargain only with the “Mad Bird”

she has befriended. As in many other circumstances in his biography, however, in order to take

advantage of the exclusive bargain offered by the Big Widow, Suggs must overcome the tactical problem

of his own worthlessness. While ready at all times to rely on “the force of his own genius” to “speculate

without funds[,]”51 in the present case federal law requires that his payment of the Big Widow’s $200

asking price be witnessed by a federal land agent. Once Suggs is in possession of the land he will be able

to sell it for at least four times that value; in order to pay for the Big Widow’s property he must somehow

lay hands on his anticipated profits in advance. The subterfuge by which the Captain circumvents the

legal arrangements which stand in his way demonstrates the uncanny sagacity by which this jolly

“Bacchus” figure gets along in the world at others’ expense. Leaving the scene with the stated intention

of visiting an “old friend” flush with “hamper baskets-full” of Mexican gold dollars, Suggs returns the

next day with his horse burdened under the weight of a “very plethoric pair of saddle-bags”52 and is

besieged by anxious speculators offering bids to buy out the contract he seems about to make. After

listening to various offers, the Captain demands $200 in full payment for the widow’s land plus $500 in

cash. The arrangement supplies Suggs with the money to make his transaction with the Big Widow under

the watchful eyes of the federal land agent, then transfer the title to another speculator. The plethoric

weight of the capital by which Suggs produces such an impression in the marketplace turns out, as is soon

revealed, to be illusory. Asking if “every body’s satisfied[,]” he opens his saddle-bags to “throw out

these here rocks and old iron, for its mighty tiresome to a horse!”53

Assuming, with the loss of her property, dependent legal status as a ward of the state, the Big

Widow will presumably join her brethren on the dangerous journey into exile in the western territories.

Unlike the Indian maiden in the melodramatic frame tale that introduces the broad farce of Suggs’s own

flirtations, however, the Big Widow at no point becomes an object of sympathy in Hooper’s sketch.

19

Being pushed and pulled by competing speculators to the federal land agent’s shed produces no

discernable emotional effect upon her. Used by the Captain as a foil to siphon off the enormous profits of

those who contend for Creek lands, the Big Widow is only a pawn in the democratic game space in which

he exercises sovereign rights and privileges. Regardless of his true aims, he is part of the white male

constituency to which Alabama political leaders were pledged to “getting every family a farm.”54

Eventually someone would turn the soil, once the land speculators into whose hands 87% of Alabama

public lands ultimately fell exacted a sufficiently high price for the independence sought by farmers and

planters alike.

Accounts of fraudulent practices in the sale of Creek lands like those practiced by Suggs and his

competitors captured national attention in 1834, greatly embarrassing Jackson and his party’s leaders.

Locally-established land companies had hit upon the scheme of hiring “stray” Indians to falsely represent

themselves to government certifying agents as owners of the 320-acre tracts assigned to heads of families

by the cession treaty, offering to sell them for as little as $10. The land companies then sold the

allotments at exorbitant profit margins to Alabama settlers, who upon arriving at the fraudulently acquired

claims would force unsuspecting Creek families off their lands. Nearly half of the Creek allotments in

eastern Alabama were acquired through this stratagem.55 Finally attacks upon Chattahoochee valley

settlers were staged in 1836 from villages established by dispossessed Creeks in the inaccessible swamps

and pine forests into which they had been driven in the southern interior of Georgia and Alabama. Many

of the same tribal moieties that had fought against Jackson’s militia forces twenty years earlier were

involved in the hostilities, which would come to be popularly known as the Second Creek War.56

Vehemently opposed to the Indian removal policy to which many of the Creek further north had become

resigned, the war parties burned farms and plantations, destroyed livestock, waylaid stagecoaches, fired

upon and sank steamboats, killed settlers, and carried off slaves. In response, U.S. General Thomas Jesup

led Alabama militia in an attack from Tuskegee, capturing two of the leaders of the uprising, burning their

villages, and scattering Creek forces. After debating whether to hang imprisoned leaders, Alabama

officials brought 3,000 “hostiles” to Montgomery, the warriors among them escorted on foot manacled

20

and chained, to be taken away to Oklahoma reservation lands. Creek tribes that had been allied with

federal or militia troops in the conflict, or had remained neutral, departed the following year.57

At the outbreak of the Second Creek War, Simon Suggs is able to make use of his broad

experience, superior knowledge, and keen sense of purpose in an ambiguous historical moment to

translate his popularity into democratically-elected authority for the first time. At Taylor’s store, where

his “badly frightened” Poplar Spring neighbors have gathered upon reports that “the Injuns is a-killin

every body below[,]” Suggs delights in the noise and confusion and opportunities for free drinks afforded

by the impending crisis. He is in fact well informed of the peaceful intentions of the Indians “in all the

country for ten miles around[.]”58 Rather than assuring his neighbors of their safety, however, Simon

magnifies their fears in order to get himself elected captain of the militia company he urges them to form.

Hooper’s portrayal of Suggs’s rise to military leadership satirically illustrates the cultural dynamic by

which Old Hickory himself rose to prominence as a national democratic leader by the heroic device of his

own militia command. Hooper’s country editor refers to Jackson’s career at this defining moment in

Suggs’s life, “the most important period in the history of our hero—his assumption of a military

command.”59 The Captain’s fraudulent ascension to martial authority at the expense of an “excessively

frightened[,]” easily deceived Tallapoosa County citizenry, whose collective anxieties are rooted in their

lack of reliable intelligence about what is actually going on in the country they inhabit, strikes to the heart

of widely-held assumptions about collective defense in a democratic republic. The “yeomanry of the

country[,]” Hooper’s country editor reports, “those to whom, as we are annually told, the nation looks

with confidence in all her perils” have not risen to defend the republic but have “packed up their carts and

wagons, and ‘incontinently’ departed for more peaceful regions!”60 Fearlessly stepping in to fill the

breach in the collective valor of a citizenry shaken by its fearful ignorance of contingencies upon which

lives might actually depend, Suggs easily persuades his neighbors that he is the only man they can rely

upon to deliver them from the mortal perils that surround them. Declaring that “this here is a critercle

time” when “the wild savage of the forest are beginin’ of a bloody, hostile war,” he warns his gathered

constituency that their enemies will spare “nither age nor sek—not even to the women and children!”61 As

21

was evident in Jackson’s own call for Tennessee volunteer the outset of the first Creek War of 1813-1814,

in which he raised the specter of “large bodies of the hostile Creeks marching to your borders, with their

scalping knives unsheathed, to butcher your women and children[,]”62 Suggs is keenly aware that the

success of his appeal for militia leadership depends upon his ability to stir male fears of the reproach for

failing to defend the honor and safety of dependent kin.

While Hooper’s account of Captain Suggs’s command reveals the scare-mongering tactics that lie

at the heart of appeals to war, it also makes reference to a series of events which occurred during Andrew

Jackson’s generalship of federal troops and state militia forces at the Battle of New Orleans in 1814-1815.

By means of this satirical episode, spanning three chapters of Suggs’s campaign biography, Hooper is

able to recast in the inglorious context of backwoods humor the most controversial episodes in Jackson’s

victory over British forces in the final days of War of 1812, an outcome which catapulted him to fame as

a national military hero. Jackson’s declaration of martial law at New Orleans, his attempts to suppress

rumors an impending U.S.-British treaty to end the war, his arrest of a Louisiana legislator on capital

charges for publishing an inflammatory newspaper article, and his removal of a U.S. district court judge

from the city for interfering with the legislator’s arrest, were all dealt with at length in Jackson’s

campaign biographies. Eaton’s exhaustive defense of Jackson’s abuses of martial authority was in

keeping with the justification of Hooper’s country editor of the “political necessity” of writing

biographies of electoral candidates in their own lifetimes: “His enemies will know enough to attack; his

friends must know enough to defend.”63 Hooper embeds aspects of Jackson’s high-handed command

tactics in the military career of his own protagonist to expose Jackson’s doctrine of “neccessitas rei”64 as

a pretext for the exercise of corrupt, arbitrary authority at the expense of the persons and property of

others. Suggs’s appetite for money and liquor motivate his use of the doctrine of military necessity;

Jackson’s hot temper and desire for control motivate his use of similar tactics which subject citizens to

arrest on charges of treason, a capital crime in both military camps.

Jackson’s defense of his high-handed regime at New Orleans was based upon the conviction that

civil authority, with the rights and protections it offered, offered insufficient guarantees to guarantee the

22

survival of individual freedoms in times of crisis. “[T]he long approved doctrine of neccessitas rei”

required that “constitutional forms should be suspended, for the preservation of constitutional rights; and

that there could be no question, whether it were better to depart, for a moment, from the enjoyment of our

dearest privileges, or have them wrested from us forever.”65 The danger of Jackson’s rationale, in its

evocation of the spirit of community defense, lies in its potential for justifying official depredations upon

the property and violations of the personal safety of citizens. An example of the abuse of martial

authority in the humble environs of Poplar Springs is seen in Suggs’s arrest of the Widow Haycock, who

in slipping out at night to her cart to get tobacco for her pipe alarms the camp’s sentinels and starts a

volley of gunfire. As the Captain gravely puts the matter to Mrs. Haycock at the court-martial proceeding

that follows the next morning, her act of “infringin’ on the rules of war, by crossin’ of the lines agin

order” puts her beyond the pale of a community pledged to defend itself. Though she must be put to

death, Suggs assures her that “it aint me that’s a-gwine to kill you; it’s the Rules of War,” which are

“mighty strict”; even if he and his lieutenant officer “wanted to let you off ever so bad, the rules of war

would lay us liable ef we was to.”66 The inescapable logic of the “rules of war” to which commanding

officers hold themselves accountable, as Suggs would have it, forces them to bear the burden of forms of

arbitrary authority that even they cannot control. Wielded not to accomplish direct aims but to indirectly

result in contingent outcomes, however, the tools of martial authority turn out to be quite useful in

attaining goals far removed from its proper aims.

Hooper’s sketch of the Widow Haycock’s predicament refers to Jackson’s arrest of a Louisiana

legislator whose criticism in a newspaper article of the general’s attempts to suppress news reports of

peace treaty negotiations led him to be charged under the second section of the Rules and Articles of War:

SECT. 2. And be it further enacted, that in time of war, all persons not citizens of, or owing

allegiance to the United States of America, who shall be found lurking as spies in or about the

fortifications or encampments of the United States, or any of them, shall suffer death, according

to the law and usage of nations, by sentence of a general court-martial.67

23

Reasoning that the city of New Orleans was under martial law, and that there were “several encampments

and fortifications within its limits,”68 Jackson not only detained the legislator but arrested U.S. district

court judge Dominick A. Hall for issuing a writ of habeas corpus for him, sending the judge out of the

city for two days until news of the peace treaty arrived through official channels. Upon his return to New

Orleans, the judge called Jackson to answer charges of contempt of court, fining him $1,000. Court-

martial proceedings against the state legislator ended in acquittal. While Jackson was not allowed to

make his case on the basis of his declaration of martial law in the “extrajudicial” proceedings held by

Judge Hall, he emerged from his day in court a popular hero, having admonished cheering crowds in

attendance at the unnerved judge’s proceedings that “the same arm that protected from outrage this city,

against the invaders of the country, will shield and protect this court, or perish in the effort.”69

The Widow Haycock, who on the strength of a hundred dollars in cash and a single slave is

“accounted wealthy” in the community, doesn’t quite know if Suggs is serious in his court-martial

proceedings. Groveling at his feet, she hopefully pleads, “You’re just in fun!—ain’t you?”70 As in the

case of their entire ignorance of the disposition of the local Indians, Suggs’s self-defensive community is

uncertain how far its seemingly fearless leader will go in exercising the powers of arbitrary they have, at a

gamble, vested in him. In fact, Suggs is willing to go quite far in his high-handed antics precisely

because of the confusion his farcical performance, which might alternately end in uproarious laughter or

cold-blooded homicide, creates. Seizing upon a seeming slip of the tongue by the Captain, by which he

admits his wish that he could let his prisoner off with a fine, the Widow Haycock desperately promises to

“give up all the money I’ve got, ef you’ll jest let me off!” Concealing his capricious exercise of authority

by appealing to the higher powers of the rules of war, Suggs reluctantly agrees to assess the widow a $25

fine in place of her death sentence, thus “layin’ myself liable to be tried for my own life.”71 Stressing his

role as a public servant, Simon declares to all assembled that the widow’s fine “aint my money.” He will

“keep it here” in his pocket “ontwell I git my orders about it. It’s the government’s money, and I daresnt

spend a cent of it[.]”72 The Captain’s pocketing of the “government’s” money, extracted through his

exercise of the “rules of war,” recalls the rhetoric of Jackson’s Whig opponents, who derisively referred

24

to him as the “Government” for his usurpation of legislative and judicial powers while in office.

Exemplifying “that union of the purse and the sword, in the hand of one man” referred to by Henry Clay

in his Senate-floor condemnation of Jackson’s removal of federal deposits from the Bank of the United

States in 1833, “which constitutes the best definition of tyranny which our language can give,”73 the

dubious security provided by Suggs’s custody of public funds grows evident with his transfer of one of

the widow’s Mexican dollar coins to a lieutenant, who declares “Less go in and liquor; damn expenses!”74

As indeed the sequel proves, while no “‘arbitrary,’ ‘despotic,’ ‘corrupt,’ and ‘unprincipled’ judge” like

Dominick Hall has fined” the Captain for his abuses of authority as a militia leader, for reasons

“inexplicable” alike to himself and his biographer, “the money which he had contrived, by various shifts

to obtain” over the course of his brief military career “melted away and was gone forever” by its

conclusion.75

The ironic representations of identity which proliferate throughout Suggs’s campaign biography,

the textual equivalent of the sleight-of-hand arts by which the painter or illustrator bring to the eye of the

voter the “counterfeit presentment” of his candidate, make knowable through the episodic construction of

a static, comic personality a man who ultimately refuses to account for himself. The mass production of

the looming countenance of Andrew Jackson preceding the text of Eaton’s biography, with its capacity to

frighten “future generations of naughty children” throughout the land as “a faithful representation of the

Evil One[,]”76 finds its counterpart in the scoundrel whose sentencing of the Widow Haycock to be

“baggonetted to deth” prompts the condemned to query, “You’re jest in fun—ain’t you?”77 The political

calculation being made in the confidence game being played by Hooper’s country editor is that the

shrewd voter interested in sharing the spoils of democratic politics will identify his interests with those of

the superior predator. Those possessing only modest talents or audacity to get along in the world on the

basis of their own coercive self-interest might not disapprove of a popular leader with the nerve to do in

the interest of his constituents what they dare not do for themselves. Hooper’s irony, in this regard,

focuses upon the institutionalization of greed on the part of Democratic politicians. Mutual confidence in

“machine” politics might require the party supporter to underwrite confidence games played at the

25

expense of partisan opponents or the disempowered, but to be part of the machine was to be strong in

numbers and more than simply a biological unit of the dominant race whose interests Jackson’s party

championed. Jedediah Suggs, in this respect, was wrong in declaring it “agin nater” for his rebellious son

to cut the Jack at his expense. Sleight of hand was nature’s way of designating those with “the fangs and

the claws”78 to press circumstantial advantages to the limit, whether they were wielded by the natural

aristocrats who controlled the interests of partisan party politics, or by the shrewd operators who manned

its burgeoning empires.

26

Notes

1. John Henry Eaton, Memoirs of Andrew Jackson, Major-General in the Service of the United States (New York: Arno Press, 1971), 168.

2. Robert Hopkins, “Simon Suggs: A Burlesque Campaign Biography,” American Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1963): 459.

3. Johnson Jones Hooper, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with “Taking the Census,” and Other Alabama Sketches. By a Country Editor (Nashville: J.S. Sanders & Company, 1993), 141.

4. Ibid, 82.

5. Ibid, 34-35.

6. Ibid, 12.

7. James H. Justus, Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain (Columbia: University of Missouri Press 2004), 513-514. Suggs is especially adept, according to Justus, at making use of fraudulent identities to wield the weapon of sentimentality, “the very instrument that is meant to counter the hypocrisy of social life.” Investing confidence in expressions of “honest emotion, candor, and credibility” rather than in presumptions of status—the “aping of elitist manners and language” assumed to be the telltale mark of unscrupulous pretenders—egalitarian democrats risked being taken in by their own simplistic models of human behavior. “[A]s most of the humorists knew, and as some of them dramatized, sincerity was merely another arrow in the con man’s quiver.”

8. Hooper, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, 13.

9. Ibid, 79.

10. Ibid, 8-9.

11. Ibid, 11.

12. Ibid, 11.

13. David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 647.

14. Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States (New York: Henry B. Price, 1860). Hundley’s delineation of antebellum social types was the point of origin for Frank Owsley’s landmark study of nine socioeconomic classes he was able to identify through his research of Southern tax records, Plain Folk of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1949). Debate over the perceived socioeconomic status of vernacular speakers in Old Southwest humor and the supposedly elitist or democratic attitudes of gentlemanly “frame” narrators toward them has been persistent in critical assessments of the genre. The research of Owsley and other historians following in his wake has informed recent literary scholarship that has sought to more closely delineate the bases of social differences and attitudes in the Southwest in the antebellum period.

27

15. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, 236.


17. Joseph Jones, Agricultural Resources of Georgia. Address before the Cotton Planters Convention of Georgia at Macon, December 13, 1860 (Augusta: Steam Press of Chronicle and Sentinel, 1861), 8. The Georgia farmer’s strategy of prospering through mobility, financing moves westward by selling out existing properties to buyers establishing large cotton plantations, was itself a “shifty” arrangement carried out at the expense of both the area’s indigenous peoples and the lands they had occupied. The unsustainable agricultural practices of both farmers and the planters who followed them soon exhausted soils, their departure for fresh lands leaving behind a “monotonous landscape” of “bald red clay hills, marred by deep furrows and yawning red gullies, and by deserted dilapidated houses” which, in the words of Joseph Jones, a speaker addressing an 1860 Georgia cotton convention, would “long remain monuments to a system of agriculture…which had had for its great object the enrichment of the living generations, regardless of the interests of future generations.”


19. Robert Heilbroner and Aaron Singer, The Economic Transformation of America to 1865 (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 118-119. See also Lewy Dorman, Party Politics in Alabama from 1850 through 1860 (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1995), 14.

20. Frederick Law Olmstead, A Journey Into the Back Country (New York: Mason Brothers, 1860), 228.


22. Ibid, 21.

23. Ibid, 24-25

24. Ibid, 28.

25. David Crockett, The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-Apparent to the “Government,” and the Appointed Successor of General Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia: Robert Wright, 1835), 3. Hooper would make satirical reference to Van Buren’s unsuccessful 1840 re-election bid in “Taking the Census,” an account of his experiences as a census officer the same year in Tallapoosa County, Alabama. Its uncooperative residents, believing he has been personally sent by Van Buren to assess taxes on their poultry, threaten to “sick” their dogs on him or, as one old widow vows, decapitate the President should he personally call on them to enforce the census. Hooper’s sketch was included in the 1845 edition of Some Adventures of Simon Suggs, 149-188.

26. David Crockett, The Life of Martin Van Buren, 3.


28. Justus, Fetching the Old Southwest, 516-517.


30. Ibid, 28, 30-31.

28

31. Ibid, 32.

32. Ibid, 33.

33. Ibid, 8.

34. Ibid, 7.

35. Eaton, Memoirs of Andrew Jackson, 167.

36. Harry L. Watson, Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America (Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1998), 40.

37. Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830-1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 73-76, 78.

38. Ibid, 77-80 and Anthony F.C. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 83-85. An especially difficult pass was reached in Alabama early in Jackson’s presidency when a defiant Alabama squatter charged with attempting to blow up a U.S. marshal serving eviction orders was shot and killed while resisting arrest. A county grand jury indicted the marshal, soldiers involved in the incident, and their commanding officers for murder, and armed conflict between federal troops and Alabama militia mustered to defend white squatters’ rights seemed imminent. Anxious to defuse the crisis, the federal government negotiated a compromise with state authorities, promising not to enforce treaty provisions to keep intruders out of Creek lands if the state would try to prevent harassment of tribe members by squatters and settlers.

39. Eaton, Memoirs of Andrew Jackson, 67, 83.

40. Ronald N. Satz. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 80-81, 107-108. The suffering of Jackson’s militia volunteers during the 1813-1814 Creek campaign at the hands of unscrupulous contractors would not deter the president’s administration from making similar arrangements in the 1830’s to supply dispossessed Cherokee, Creek, and Choctaw Indians as they underwent removal to Oklahoma reservation lands. Profiteering suppliers inflated prices when they could and provided short or spoiled rations in order to increase profits, contributing to the hunger, sickness, and death of the emigrants on their journeys westward.


42. J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 48.

43. Ibid, 48.

44. Lawrence Frederick Kohl, The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 166-167.

45. J. Mills Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 49.


47. Ibid, 118.

29



50. Ibid, 69-70.

51. Ibid, 75.

52. Ibid, 79.

53. Ibid, 80.

54. Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 29.

55. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail, 85-86.

56. J. Leitch Wright, Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 245-248, 264.

57. Wallace, The Long, Bitter Trail, 87 and Wright, Creeks and Seminoles, 294-296.

58. Hooper, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, 84-85.

59. Ibid, 82.

60. Ibid, 83.

61. Ibid, 85.




65. Ibid, 302.

66. Hooper, Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, 103-104.


68. Ibid, 427.

69. Ibid, 418.


71. Ibid, 107.

72. Ibid, 109.

73. Watson, Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay, 219.


75. Ibid, 118.

30

76. Ibid, 9.

77. Ibid, 104.

78. Ibid, 13.

31

Bibliography

Crockett, David. The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-Apparent to the “Government,” and the Appointed Successor of General Andrew Jackson. Philadelphia: Robert Wright, 1835.

Dorman, Lewy. Party Politics in Alabama from 1850 through 1860. 1935. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama P. 1995.

Eaton, John Henry. The Life of Andrew Jackson, Major-General in the Service of the United States: Comprising a History of the War in the South, From the Commencement of the Creek Campaign, to the Termination of Hostilities Before New Orleans. 1824. New York: Arno Press, 1971.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Heilbroner, Robert and Aaron Singer. The Economic Transformation of America to 1865. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1994.

Hooper, Johnson Jones. Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the Tallapoosa Volunteers; Together with “Taking the Census,” and Other Alabama Sketches. 1845. Nashville: J.S. Sanders & Company. 1993.

Hopkins, Robert. “Simon Suggs: A Burlesque Campaign Biography.” American Quarterly 15, no. 3 (1963): 459-463.

Hundley, D. R. Social Relations in Our Southern States. New York: Henry B. Price, 1860.

Jones, Joseph. Agricultural Resources of Georgia. Address before the Cotton Planters Convention of Georgia at Macon, December 13, 1860. Augusta: Steam Press of Chronicle and Sentinel, 1861.

Justus, James H. Fetching the Old Southwest: Humorous Writing from Longstreet to Twain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004.

Kohl, Lawrence Frederick. The Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era. New York: Oxford UP, 1989.

Olmstead, Frederick Law. A Journey Into the Back Country. New York: Mason Brothers, 1860.

Owsley, Frank Lawrence. Plain Folk of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949.

Satz, Ronald N. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975.

Thornton, J. Mills. Politics and Power in a Slave Society: Alabama 1800-1860. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.

Wallace, Anthony F.C. The Long, Bitter Trail: Andrew Jackson and the Indians. New York: Hill and Wang. 1993.

32

Watson, Harry L. Andrew Jackson vs. Henry Clay: Democracy and Development in Antebellum America. Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 1998.

Wright, J. Leitch. Creeks and Seminoles: The Destruction and Regeneration of the Muscogulge People. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

Young, Mary Elizabeth. Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830-1860. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961.

33

simon suggs revised 25pp

Documents