William Hooper

William Hooper (1742–1790) was an American lawyer and statesman who signed the Declaration of Independence as one of three delegates from North Carolina, alongside Joseph Hewes and John Penn. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of a Scottish-born Congregationalist minister, and graduated from Harvard College in 1760 at age eighteen.

Hooper read law in Boston under James Otis, the Massachusetts patriot whose arguments against the writs of assistance helped frame American resistance to British taxation. In 1764 he moved to Wilmington, North Carolina, set up a legal practice, and married Anne Clark in 1767. As a deputy attorney general for the colony, he prosecuted members of the Regulator movement during the 1771 War of the Regulation, including the trials that followed the Battle of Alamance.

His politics shifted toward the patriot cause in the early 1770s, and he was elected to the North Carolina Provincial Congress in 1774 and to the First and Second Continental Congresses in Philadelphia. In a 1774 letter to James Iredell he predicted that the colonies were "striding fast to independence," one of the earliest such predictions on record. He voted for independence on July 2, 1776, and signed the engrossed Declaration on August 2.

British forces under Major James Craig occupied Wilmington in early 1781 during the southern campaign of the Revolutionary War, and Hooper's plantation, Finian, was burned. He spent much of the war separated from his family in the North Carolina backcountry. After the war he moved to Hillsborough and resumed legal practice, and in 1786 represented New York in a boundary dispute heard by federal commissioners. He died at Hillsborough in 1790, aged forty-eight.

Etymology: William comes from the Old Germanic Wilhelm, combining wil "will" and helm "helmet, protection," giving the sense "resolute protector." It came to England with William the Conqueror in 1066 and has remained one of the most enduring boy names in the English-speaking world, holding the top-five position across colonial America. He bore it from a Boston parsonage to the Cape Fear and into the Continental Congress.