ABSTRACT
Like many antebellum southern writers, Johnson Jones Hooper was an immigrant to the region that he helped to make famous as the "new country" of the Old Southwest. He was born on June 9, 1815, in Wilmington, North Carolina, of impressive forebears; both of his parents, Archibald and Charlotte DeBerniere Hooper, could claim distinguished ancestors from pre-Revolutionary North Carolina. At fifteen he published a comic poem on the accidental dunking of an unpopular and "pompous British consul" at the launching ceremonies of a schooner, thus in one gesture anticipating the two major interests, authorship and partisan politics. By the time he was seventeen and feeling the effects of his father's financial and professional failures, Johnson journeyed west to eastern Alabama in 1835, joining his lawyer brother, George, in La Fayette, a rawboned community of two hundred. In 1842, Hooper married Mary Mildred Brantley, the sixteen-year-old daughter of a well-to-do merchant and Whig politician in La Fayette.
