John Trotwood Moore

John Moore, Jr., was born on August 26, 1858 in Marion, Alabama.[2] He was of Scotch-Irish descent.[1] His father, John Moore, was a lawyer and Confederate veteran.[1] His mother was named Emily.[3] He had a sister, who later married a professor at Vanderbilt University.[1]

Moore graduated from Howard College, now known as Samford University, where he studied the classics, and was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity.[3] While in college, he wrote The Howard College Magazine.[3] Later, he read law with Hilary A. Herbert.[1]

Moore started his career as a journalist for The Marion Commonwealth, a newspaper in Marion, Alabama.[3] He was a schoolteacher in Monterey, Butler County, Alabama and a school principal in Pine Apple, Alabama in the early 1880s.[1]

Moore became a columnist for Clark's Horse Review in 1885.[3] He took the penname of "Trotwood" after Betsey Trotwood, a character in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield.[4] His column, called "Pacing Department", included short stories, poems and local histories. In 1897, Moore decided to publish a collection of his columns, entitled Songs and Stories from Tennessee. Four years later, in 1901, he published his first novel A Summer Hymnal.[3] Over the years, Moore published several other novels.

Moore founded Trotwood's Monthly, an agrarian magazine, in 1905. A year later, as it merged with Robert Love Taylor's magazine, it became known as the Taylor-Trotwood Magazine. Moore was the chief writer and editor. The magazine was discontinued in 1910.[3] Meanwhile, he was the author of historical sketches on Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, James K. Polk and Sam Houston.[5] He was also a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post.[5]

Moore was "an apologist for the Old South."[1] Labeled a "local colorist",[6] Moore's fiction typically included African Americans, horses, American Indians, bluegrass, and Tennessee culture.[7] The main repeating character in his stories, Old Wash, was compared to the Uncle Remus character created by his contemporary, Joel Chandler Harris.[8] Moore was contemptuous of low-class whites and criticized Thomas Dixon for writing sensationalist novels.[9]

Moore was openly racist.[1][3] His racist ideas were reinforced by his reading Joseph Widney's 1907 Race Life of the Aryan Peoples, a book recommended to him by Theodore Roosevelt, which Moore proceeded to review favorably.[1] He was a defender of the Ku Klux Klan and a proponent of lynching.[1] Additionally, Moore was francophobic for racist reasons, lambasting the French for "intermarrying with the Indians and treating them as equals" during the French colonization of the Americas.[1]

Moore was appointed as the State Librarian and Archivist for Tennessee by Governor Albert H. Roberts in March 1919.[2][10] He was recommended by businessman James Erwin Caldwell.[1] He served in this capacity until 1929.[3] He was invited to give a speech at the dedication of a bronze plaque in honor of President Jefferson Davis at St. John's Episcopal Church in Montgomery, Alabama in May 1925.[1]

Moore married Florence W. Allen in February 1885.[3] They resided in Columbia, Tennessee, where they raised Tennessee Pacers on their farm.[3] After his first wife died in 1896, Moore married Mary Brown Daniel on June 13, 1900.[3] They had a son, and two daughters.[3] They resided in South Nashville, Tennessee, where they organized possum hunts and literary gatherings.[1]

Moore was Presbyterian.[1]

Moore died on May 10, 1929, in Nashville.[3][5] The governor of Tennessee ordered state offices closed and flags to fly at half-mast. He was also one of the honrary pallbearers, along with four past governors. The actual pallbearers were African Americans clad in Confederate grey. [1] He was buried at the Mount Olivet Cemetery.[3]

After his death, his widow was appointed State Librarian and Archivist for Tennessee.[2][10] She served in this capacity until 1949.[2][10] Meanwhile, their son, Merrill Moore, became a poet and member of a circle of writers known as "The Fugitives", who were partly inspired by Moore's own writing.[1] One of his daughters, Helen Lane Moore, married Whitefoord Russell Cole, Jr., the son of railroad executive Whitefoord Russell Cole.[11]

In 2019, the plaque that Moore dedicated to Jefferson Davis at a church in 1925 was moved to the church's archives. The pastor cited Moore's involvement as one of the reasons for the removal.[12]

• Moore, John Trotwood (1897). Songs and Stories from Tennessee. Chicago: J.C. Bauer. OCLC 7537055.
• Moore, John Trotwood (1901). A Summer Hymnal: A Romance of Tennessee. Philadelphia: H.T. Coates & Co. OCLC 1543424.
• Moore, John Trotwood (1906). The Bishop of Cottontown: A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills. Philadelphia: J.C. Winston Co. OCLC 2175994.
• Moore, John Trotwood (1910). Uncle Wash: His Story. Philadelphia: John C. Winston Co. OCLC 2043887.
• Moore, John Trotwood (1911). The Gift of the Grass: Being the Autobiography of a Famous Racing Horse. Boston: Little, Brown, and Co. OCLC 5433142.
• Moore, John Trotwood (1925). Ole Mistis, and Other Songs and Stories from Tennessee. Nashville, Tennessee: Cokesbury Press. OCLC 1524848.
• Moore, John Trotwood (1925). Jack Ballington, Forester. Nashville, Tennessee: Cokesbury Press. OCLC 4585276.
• Moore, John Trotwood (1926). Hearts of Hickory: A Story of Andrew Jackson and the War of 1812. Nashville, Tennessee: Cokesbury Press. OCLC 1178990.
• Moore, John Trotwood (1926). Tom's Last Forage. Nashville, Tennessee: Cokesbury Press. OCLC 7865046.

• Green, Claud Bethune (1957). John Trotwood Moore: Tennessee Man of Letters. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. OCLC 3377255.

• Works by John Trotwood Moore at Project Gutenberg
• Works by John Trotwood Moore on the Internet Archive