Strangers to Us All Lawyers and Poetry

Theophilus Hunter Hill
(1836-1901)
North Carolina

James Wood Davidson, The Living Writers of the South 258-267 (New York: Carleton, 1849):

Theophilus H. Hill was born on Monday, the 31st of October, 1836, near Raleigh, N.C. He received a fair academic education; is a lawyer by profession, practicing in Raleigh, where he at one time edited The Spirit of the Age. Is married.

He wrote verses very early in life. Has always written under impulse,—what is popularly known as inspiration,—irregularly, with no system or ultimate end in view. . . .

A small volume of Mr. Hill's poems, entitled Hesper and Other Poems, appeared in 1861, and was, I believe, the first book published in the Southern Confederacy. A second edition of this volume appeared in 1863. It met the fate of all books, in the department of literature proper, published at that time. It was a collection of his early poems, full of fire, promise, haste, and crudeness.

Hill is the great grandson of Captain Theophilus Hunter, who gained a reputation as a soldier in the Revolutionary War and of Reverend Hill, a chaplain in Washington's army. [Gertrude Florence Jacobi, "Minor Poets of South Carolina," Master's thesis, University of Florida, 1937, pp. 242-243] Jacobi notes that Hill was educated at James M. Lovejoy's Academy in Raleigh, North Carolina; he edited The Spirit of the Age at Raleigh in 1853 and was admitted to the bar in 1858. Hill had a literary bent and abandoned the legal profession to become State Librarian, and in 1889 was editor of The Century, a literary journal published in Florence, South Carolina. He died in Raleigh, June 29, 1901." [Id. at 243]

Theophilus Hunter Hill
Eugene Clyde Brooks, North Carolina Poems 76
(Raleigh: North Carolina Education, 1912)

Theophilus Hunter Hill
Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography

Poetry

Theophilus H. Hill, Hesper, and Other Poems (Raleigh, North Carolina: Strother & Marcom, 1861)(Raleigh, North Carolina: Branson, Farrar & Co., 1863)

______________, Poems (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1869)

______________, Passion Flower, and Other Poems (Raleigh, North Carolina: P. W. Wiley, 1883) [online text]

Research Resources

Theophilus Hunter Hill Papers
Southern Historical Collection
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, North Carolinia