Essay 78 – Guest Essayist: Jeff Broadwater
William Hooper at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park

William Hooper is generally considered to have been one of the most impressive North Carolinians to have served in the Continental Congress. Yet his career is marked by irony. Initially a key figure in mobilizing opposition to Great Britain, Hooper nevertheless struggled after 1776 to adjust to the politics of a revolutionary era.

Born in Boston in 1742, Hooper was educated first by his father, the Reverend William Hooper of Trinity Episcopal Church, and later at Boston’s Public Latin School. At the age of 15, he entered Harvard College as a sophomore and graduated in 1760. Hooper continued his studies at Harvard, receiving a master’s degree in 1763, and read law with James Otis, an early defender of American rights and an obvious influence on Hooper’s political views.

Shortly after completing his studies, Hooper moved to Wilmington. The North Carolina seaport had fewer lawyers than did Boston, and it offered Hooper other advantages. The Boston merchant James Murray was a family friend, and Murray’s brother-in-law, Thomas Clark, lived in Wilmington and served as his business agent. Clark’s family provided Hooper invaluable support, and in August 1767, he married Clark’s much-admired daughter, Anne.

Hooper prospered in Wilmington and became identified with the colony’s eastern faction. Appointed deputy attorney general for the Salisbury District, he clashed on more than one occasion with the Regulators, backcountry farmers who protested—sometimes violently—against taxes, debt collection, and political corruption at the local level. In 1773, Hooper entered the colonial assembly as a representative of what is today the city of Fayetteville, and at about the same time, he began buying land south of Wilmington on Masonboro Sound, where he would eventually build a house he called Finian.

As a member of the assembly, Hooper became embroiled in the foreign attachment controversy, which involved the power of colonial courts to seize the North Carolina property of debtors in Great Britain who owed money to North Carolina residents. The royal governor Josiah Martin had been instructed by the crown to end the practice. In response, Hooper wrote a series of essays under the pseudonym “Hampden” that demonstrated considerable learning and eloquence in defending the jurisdiction of North Carolina’s courts.

Hooper returned to the assembly from New Hanover County in December 1773 and was appointed to the colony’s Committee of Correspondence. Britain’s closing of the port of Boston after the Boston Tea Party helped radicalize him. He sensed as early as April 1774 that events were driving the American colonies to independence, an end he did not relish. But he considered “the cause of the Town of Boston” to be “the common cause of British America,” and in Wilmington he led a call for a provincial congress and helped raise money and supplies for the citizens of Boston.

North Carolina’s First Provincial Congress met in New Bern in August 1774, and elected Hooper to North Carolina’s delegation to the Continental Congress. In November, he was elected to Wilmington’s Committee of Safety. Hooper became a regular fixture in North Carolina’s provincial congresses, which, as royal authority disintegrated, governed the colony until a new state government could be organized. He authored several important public papers defending American rights, but by the end of 1775, Hooper privately grew disillusioned. Politics, he wrote, “drives men to expedients that morality must condemn.”

Hooper’s defense of American rights did not spring from a hostility to the British constitution. Consistent with the classical republicanism then common in America, he believed Britain’s commercial success had produced a widespread luxury that had undermined civic virtue. The resulting corruption manifested itself in the oppression of the colonies.  Oppression in America, Hooper seemed to believe, could spread to Britain itself, making the survival of colonial liberty essential to the survival of British liberty. Hooper envisioned for North Carolina, should it become independent, a British-style government purged of corruption. This, he thought, required a strong executive, an independent judiciary, a bicameral legislature, and popular deference to an educated elite.

His service in the Fourth Provincial Congress of April 1776 only increased his frustration. He served on a committee that tried but failed to produce a new state constitution. As prospects for reconciliation with Great Britain evaporated, Hooper supported the Halifax Resolves, endorsing independence, but his presence at the North Carolina congress meant he missed the Continental Congress’s debate over the Declaration of Independence. He did, however, participate in the general signing of the document on August 2.

Hooper struggled as the Revolutionary War went on with no end in sight. Early in 1777, he contracted yellow fever and sometime later, malaria. In April he resigned his seat in the Continental Congress, partly because the new General Assembly failed to reelect his friend and congressional colleague, the Edenton merchant Joseph Hewes. Hooper remained in the state assembly, but fearing British warships, he abandoned Finian for Wilmington and then fled Wilmington before it fell to the British in January 1781. He, Anne, and their three children eventually settled in Hillsborough. There he resumed a profitable law practice while his political fortunes declined.

In 1782, Hooper won a Hillsborough seat in the General Assembly, but lawmakers voided the election results, and the next year he lost a race to tavern keeper Thomas Farmer. Hooper returned to the state legislature in 1784, but it was a last hurrah. His elitism and his support for the lenient treatment of former Loyalists and a stronger national government alienated many North Carolina voters, and in 1788 he lost his last election: a bid for a seat in the Hillsborough convention called to consider ratification of the United States Constitution. Undeterred, he continued to champion the Constitution and received a measure of vindication when a second convention, meeting in Fayetteville, ratified the document. Weakened by disease, sometimes delirious, and drinking heavily, the 48-year-old Hooper died in 1790, the day before his daughter was to be married.

Jeff Broadwater is professor emeritus of history at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina, where he taught courses on the American Revolution and on the history of the American South. His publications include Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution (2019); James Madison, A Son of Virginia and a Founder of of the Nation (2012); and George Mason, Forgotten Founder (2006). He also co-edited, with Troy Kickler, North Carolina’s Revolutionary Founders (2019).

Podcast by Maureen Quinn.

 

Bibliography:

Engstrom, Mary Claire. “Hooper, William.” In William Powell, ed. Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 6 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979-1991, 3: 199-202.

Ashe, S.A. “William Hooper.” In S.A. Ashe and Stephen B. Weeks, eds. Biographical History of North Carolina: From Colonial Times to the Present, 8 vols. Greensboro, N.C.: Charles L. Van Nappen, 1906, 7: 233-244.

Watson, Alan D. Harnett, Hooper and Howe: Revolutionary Leaders in the Lower Cape Fear. Wilmington, N.C.: Lower Cape Fear Historical Society, 1979.

Williams, Patrick G. “Hooper, William.” In John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography, 26 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 3: 145-147.

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Essay 79 – Guest Essayist: Jeff Broadwater

History remembers Joseph Hewes as one of the three North Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence. John Adams, who served in the Continental Congress with Hewes and who would later become president, believed Hewes was critical in persuading moderate members of Congress to support the break with Great Britain.

Raised on his family’s estate near Kingston in what was then West Jersey, Hewes received a classical education in a Quaker grammar school. Rather than obtaining a degree at the nearby College of New Jersey, the forerunner of Princeton University, however, Hewes, in 1749, apprenticed himself to Joseph Ogden, a Philadelphia merchant. Five years later, Hewes declined an offer to join Ogden as a partner, and with money from his father’s estate, went into business for himself. Hewes’s work for Ogden had taken him to North Carolina, and apparently dissatisfied with his Philadelphia enterprise, Hewes moved in 1755 to Edenton, a small but prosperous commercial center on the Carolina coast.

With a likeable, easy-going personality; a natural head for business; and a vigorous work ethic, Hewes quickly rose to the top of Edenton society. He formed a close friendship with Samuel Johnston, one of the colony’s most influential lawyers and political leaders, becoming engaged to Johnston’s younger sister, Isabella, in 1760. She died before they could be wed, but Hewes never married and was treated as a member of the Johnston family for the rest of his life. The year Isabella died, Hewes replaced Johnston as Edenton’s representative to the colonial assembly and served on committees on appropriations and finance, appropriate assignments considering his commercial background.

Hewes eventually became involved in the Whig resistance to British imperial policies, especially the Tea Act of 1773 and the punitive Coercive Acts of 1774, which had been adopted in response to the Boston Tea Party, and he was an original member of North Carolina’s Committee of Correspondence. In June 1774, the committee endorsed a Massachusetts’s proposal for a continental congress, and in August of that year, assembly members meeting in New Bern approved the committee report and elected Hewes, along with William Hooper and Richard Caswell, to represent North Carolina in a meeting in Philadelphia of all the colonies.

While some members of the First Continental Congress seemed ready to resort to force, the North Carolina delegates sided with moderates who held out hope for a peaceful resolution of the crisis. Hewes admired Britain’s constitutional monarchy and feared a violent revolution could lead to virtual mob rule, but he later wrote that he could accept any government the people supported. Despite their differences, the delegates did approve the Continental Association, proclaiming a boycott of British goods as long as Parliament’s objectionable policies remained in place.

Hewes returned to Edenton in late November 1774, suffering from a fever, probably malaria, that would continue to plague him intermittently. He nevertheless remained active, serving on Edenton’s Committee of Safety, which had the responsibility for enforcing the Continental Association in Edenton. The outbreak of fighting at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts and King George III’s subsequent refusal to negotiate with the colonies undermined the position of moderates like Hewes and led him to act more aggressively. When Congress reconvened in May 1775, Hewes recruited two Presbyterian ministers to rally support for the American cause among Highland Scots in the North Carolina backcountry. Mainly Presbyterians, the Scots had long been estranged from the colony’s politically dominant English Anglican faction to their east. Hewes also served as secretary to Congress’s Naval Board and helped secure John Paul Jones’s commission in the Continental Navy.

In the first half of 1776, Hewes found himself overtaken by events. Parliament’s Prohibitory Act of 1775, outlawing trade with the colonies, had created widespread resentment. In January 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, his fiery call for American independence; Hewes reluctantly forwarded it to North Carolina. In February, the victory of North Carolina militia over a Loyalist force at the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge emboldened the colony’s Whigs. In April, the Fourth Provincial Congress, meeting in Halifax, authorized North Carolina’s congressional delegation to support independence. Reserved by nature, preoccupied with his committee assignments, and at the moment the only North Carolina delegate in Philadelphia, Hewes did not introduce the so-called Halifax Resolves in Congress until May 27, when Richard Henry Lee of Virginia presented a similar resolution.

Hewes readily signed the Declaration of Independence and thereafter worked tirelessly for the success of the Revolution, particularly in securing ships and supplies for the American cause, but his conservatism created enemies for him at home. In November 1776, a Fifth Provincial Congress met to draft a constitution for what was now the independent state of North Carolina. The convention split between what historians have traditionally labeled “conservative” and “radical” factions. Conservatives favored a strong executive and property qualifications for voting and holding political office. Radicals wanted to concentrate power in the legislature and to expand the political rights of the less affluent. The result was a compromise that pleased neither side. Hewes had identified with the conservatives, and when the state’s new General Assembly met in April 1777, the radicals, alleging Hewes had enriched himself in his business dealings with Congress and violated the ban in the recently adopted constitution on dual office-holding, defeated his bid for reelection to the Continental Congress.

Hewes might have made a political comeback if not for his failing health. Still popular in Edenton, he was elected to the General Assembly in 1779, and the assembly almost immediately returned him to Congress. An arduous trip to Philadelphia in the summer heat weakened his delicate constitution. By late September he was virtually bed-ridden, and in October he resigned from Congress. Too sick to come home, Hewes died in November at the age of 49 and was buried in the graveyard of Christ’s Church in Philadelphia.

Jeff Broadwater is professor emeritus of history at Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina, where he taught courses on the American Revolution and on the history of the American South. His publications include Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution (2019); James Madison, A Son of Virginia and a Founder of of the Nation (2012); and George Mason, Forgotten Founder (2006). He also co-edited, with Troy Kickler, North Carolina’s Revolutionary Founders (2019).

Podcast by Maureen Quinn.

 

Bibliography:

Martin, Michael G. “Hewes, Joseph.” In William Powell, ed. Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, 6 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979-1991, 3: 123-125.

Mitchell, Memory F. North Carolina’s Signers: Brief Sketches of the Men Who Signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Raleigh, N.C.: State Department of Archives and History, 1964.

Morgan, Daniel T. and William J. Schmidt. North Carolinians in the Continental Congress. Winston-Salem, N.C.: John F. Blair, 1976.

Sikes, E.W. and S.A. Ashe. “Joseph Hewes.” In S.A. Ashe, ed. Biographical History of North Carolina: From Colonial Times to the Present, 8 vols. Greensboro, N.C.: Charles L. Van Nappen, 1906, 3: 172-80.

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