ABSTRACT
Charles Napoleon Bonaparte Evans was born in or near Suffolk in Nansemond County, Virginia, on October 18, 1812. His parents were James E. and Jane Shirley Evans. After leaving home at an early age following the death of his father and remarriage of his mother, Evans learned the printing trade at shops in Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina. He became editor of the Greensborough Patriot in 1835 and purchased the paper in 1836 shortly before his marriage to Elizabeth Clancy, daughter of his partner. Charles Napoleon Bonaparte Evans was a man of little formal education who learned his trade as a printer and a writer while an apprentice and journeyman in Virginia and the Carolinas between about 1825 and 1840. He earned a measure of regional celebrity with his feisty humor, notably expressed through the fictitious "Jesse Holmes, the Fool-Killer", a character who enjoyed a devoted following among newspaper readers in North Carolina and Virginia.
