James Barron Hope was born on March 23, 1829 in Norfolk, Virginia, United States. He was the son of Wilton and Jane A. (Barron) Hope, the daughter of Commodore James Barron. His parents' home was in Hampton, and it was there that he spent his childhood.
Hope was in school for a while in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and later he attended the College of William and Mary, from which he was graduated in 1847.
Hope remained in Williamsburg as a lawyer, but he was soon made secretary to his uncle, Commodore Samuel Barron. He spent three years in that position, which continued in spite of his almost fatal duel in 1849, and which carried him for a long cruise in the West Indies. He then returned to his home in Hampton, where he practised law, and where in 1856, he was elected commonwealth's attorney.
He had long exhibited a certain faculty for verse and had indeed turned it to account in a series of poetical sketches published in a Baltimore paper over the designation, "The late Henry Ellen, Esq. " His substantial volume, Leoni di Monota and Other Poems, published in 1857, contains two of his most notable productions, "The Charge at Balaklava, " imitative of Tennyson, and "Three Summer Studies, " similarly reminiscent of Keats. That same year, before a gathering at Jamestown, he recited a long poem in heroic couplets concerning the founding of Virginia; and in 1858 he twice gave similar recitations--in Richmond, to celebrate Washington's birthday, and in Williamsburg, before the society of Phi Beta Kappa. These compositions, with others more purely lyric, he published in 1859 as A Collection of Poems.
When war came, he went immediately with the Confederate army and did not leave it until, as a captain with Joseph E. Johnston, he surrendered at Greensboro.
In 1866 he is said to have been at work on a "History of Southern Authors, " but it was probably never completed, and his only literary output of consequence during that year is an "Elegiac Ode Read on the Completion of a Monument to Annie Carter Lee, " a hurriedly composed but stirring poem, quick with a passion that he too often excluded from his writings.
After the war he lived in Norfolk, where he did newspaper work, first with the Norfolk Day Book, next with the Virginian, and last, from 1873 until his death, with his own able and energetic Norfolk Landmark. In 1874 he published Little Stories for Little People; and in 1878, Under the Empire, a prose story of France, based, he says in the preface, on a play which he had written but not published. In 1881, on the invitation of Congress, he prepared and read at the celebration of Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown, a long "Metrical Address, " entitled Arms and the Man (1882). In April 1885, without forsaking his newspaper, he became superintendent of the Norfolk schools. When death came to him, he had just completed a poem which he was planning to read at the unveiling of the Valentine statue of Lee at Washington and Lee University.
Hope was more notable and prolific as a poet than lawyer. He wrote numerous poems and successfully delivered them at several important events, such as the Yorktown Centennial Celebration, Lynchburg’s founding celebration and at the unveiling of the monument raised to Annie Lee in Warren County, North Carolina. He was also notable during the Americac Civil War and obtained a rank of Captain.
In 1857 Hope married Anne Beverly Whiting of Hampton.
