Leadership Quote by William Hooper

Deadpan science is doing political work here. William Hooper, a Revolutionary-era politician with a lawyer’s instinct for sounding authoritative, borrows the prestige of “two astronomical observations” to deliver what is basically a civic roast-and-toast. The gag hinges on a deliberate category error: he treats Chapel Hill, a patch of North Carolina ground, as if it can be plotted among Jupiter and its moons. That absurdity isn’t just whimsy; it’s a way to elevate a local place by yoking it to the heavens, while also winking at how easily “observation” can be made to certify whatever story a speaker wants to sell.

The subtext is boosterism with a smirk. Hooper’s “proud to find” reads like the voice of a gentleman savant, the kind of public man for whom scientific language signals seriousness, education, modernity. In the late 18th century, astronomy and measurement weren’t neutral hobbies; they were emblems of Enlightenment competence, the same cultural toolkit that underwrote surveying, mapping, and nation-building. By wrapping Chapel Hill in planetary grandeur, he flatters the town (and, by extension, the state) as worthy of that new republic’s rational self-image.

The punchline is the “twelve years,” Jupiter’s orbital period, presented as if it were the town’s own calendar. Hooper is both parodying pedantic precision and exploiting it: numbers make claims feel inevitable. It’s an early American example of how authority can be performed with data-like swagger, even when the point is half joke, half persuasion.