Thomas Cooper De Leon

Thomas Cooper De Leon (1839-1914) was born in Columbia, South Carolina, into a prominent Sephardic Jewish family; his older brothers were David Camden de Leon, the Confederate army's first surgeon general, and Edwin de Leon, who served the Confederacy as a diplomat in Europe. Educated at Georgetown College, he gave up a federal post in Washington in 1861 and spent the war years in the Confederate capitals at Montgomery and Richmond. He settled in Mobile, Alabama, in 1868, edited the Register, the Gossip and the Gulf Citizen, managed a theater, and ran the city's Mardi Gras carnival for some twenty-five years. Blind from 1903, he wrote plays and novels such as Creole and Puritan alongside the reminiscences that made his name, Four Years in Rebel Capitals and Belles, Beaux and Brains of the 60's, and passed his last decade known as the Blind Laureate of the Lost Cause.