"Fool-Killer"

"Jesse Holmes, the Fool-Killer," was the name given by journalist Charles Napoleon Bonaparte Evans to a fictional character well known to Piedmont North Carolinians in the mid-nineteenth century. Evans, editor of the Milton Chronicle from 1841 to 1883, created the Fool-Killer as an expression of his own style of folksy humor and social views. A Whig early in his career, Evans shifted to the Democratic Party in the 1850s. But he remained a progressive in politics, a booster of rail and plank roads, agricultural fairs, steamboat lines, and other improvements. He opposed secession until the fact and then became a stalwart advocate of the Confederacy.

The Fool-Killer appeared as the ostensible author of letters to the Chronicle discussing the rambles of Jesse Holmes in counties of the northern Piedmont and characters and situations he encountered along the way. Published about once a month, the columns were accompanied by a woodcut of a feisty little character in long-tailed coat and floppy hat carrying a club. The club was for the Fool-Killer's use in bashing various kinds of fools he came across in his journeys. These included overbearing parents, harsh re-enslavers (slave patrolers), hard drinkers, faithless lovers, and a variety of others. Not infrequently, the state legislature and other institutions came in for a share of cudgeling. The flavor of a society in the process of moral decay informed the Fool-Killer's letters.

The Chronicle reached only a few hundred subscribers, but Fool-Killer columns were often reprinted in other newspapers and enjoyed a wide popularity. Their brand of humor was similar to that of Hamilton C. Jones's "Cousin Sally Dilliard" and Johnson Jones Hooper's "Simon Suggs." A quarter century after Evans's death, the Fool-Killer was resurrected in a story by William Sydney Porter (O. Henry) and in later fiction such as Helen Eustis's 1954 novel of the same title.