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Three primary documents from the Boston-born lawyer who studied under James Otis, moved to North Carolina, switched from moderate to Patriot, had his homes destroyed by the British, and was reinterred beside John Penn at Guilford Courthouse.
William Hooper was born June 17, 1742 in Boston, Massachusetts, the eldest child of a Scottish minister. His father hoped he would enter the clergy. Hooper graduated from Harvard in 1760, studied theology, and then chose law instead. He read law in the office of James Otis Jr., the Boston lawyer who had argued against the writs of assistance in 1761, the case John Adams called the first act of opposition to British power.
In 1764 Hooper moved to Wilmington, North Carolina and established a law practice. He rose quickly in North Carolina colonial society, serving as Deputy Attorney General by 1770. His early politics were moderate to conservative: he assisted Governor Tryon in suppressing the Regulator movement at the Battle of Alamance in 1771, a fact that made him unpopular among western North Carolina settlers for years. His father disapproved of his eventual support for independence and disowned him.
The people of North Carolina have from early times been remarkable for their attachment to the Crown of Great Britain and to the Constitution of their ancestors, while they have at the same time been Zealous assertors of American liberty against every Encroachment.
Hooper attended the First Continental Congress in 1774, the Second Continental Congress in 1775, and signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776. He resigned from Congress before the end of 1776 and returned to North Carolina. By the close of 1776, Hooper had attended three Continental Congresses, five Provincial Congresses, and four Provincial Assemblies.
His legal career in North Carolina had made him conspicuous. The British marked him as a target. When British forces moved through North Carolina during the war, they specifically sought out his property.
British forces destroyed Hooper's home at Finian on Masonboro Sound during the war and burned his Wilmington estate as well. He fled with his family to Hillsborough, North Carolina, where he lived out the war in reduced circumstances. His health, always fragile in the low country climate, deteriorated further.
After the Revolution, Hooper served in the North Carolina state legislature and was briefly appointed to the Federal bench. He died on October 14, 1790, in Hillsborough, at forty-eight. He was originally buried in Hillsborough's Old Town Cemetery. In 1894 his remains were reinterred at Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in Greensboro, alongside John Penn, where both are commemorated as North Carolina's signers.