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Cooper and the American Revolution: The Non-Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Extract
Revolution — both the American Revolution and the general idea of revolutionary change — is an important theme in Cooper's work. Several novels are set in, and deal with, the Revolutionary period; others approach the Revolution by indirection, offering redefinitions of the period and its significance as it were by analogy (I am thinking of novels such as The Waterwitch and The Red Rover which, while they are not set in the Revolutionary period, offer their subjects as images and judgments of the Revolution); still other novels treat the problem of revolution in Europe. The conditions for, and likely results of, revolutionary change in Europe are also discussed in the non-fiction; the American Revolution is continually redefined; and in the incomplete New York the desirability and possibility of a new Revolution are considered.
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References
1 The Essential Rabelais, selected and translated by Putnam, Samuel (London: Chatto and Windus, n.d.), p. 214Google Scholar.
2 Cooper, , Notions of the Americans Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor, 2 vols. (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1963), 1, 75–80Google Scholar on Jay, and 2, 185–97 on Washington.
3 Note the stress on the “ perpetuity of the institutions ” and the “ stability of government in America ” in ibid., 2, 333–47, 153.
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10 Cooper, , New York (New York: William Farquhar Payson, 1930), p. 30Google Scholar.
11 Ibid., p. 59. The laws which are here considered as sufficient cause for revolution included the abolition of alienation fees, the admission of a tenant's right to convert a lease-holding into a free-hold under mortgage on the landlord's death, and the making illegal of any agricultural lease intended to run for more than 12 years. The importance of “anti-landlord” legislation being considered cause for revolution will be stressed below.
12 The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. Beard, James F., 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960–1968), 1, 420Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 1, 195.
14 Ibid., 2, 7.
15 Ibid., 1, 195.
16 Ibid., 2, 7. Later, Cooper made an attempt to defuse much of the “ vileness ” of the 1789 revolution by means of the somewhat implausible suggestion that its worst features were the result of the machinations of foreign aristocracies. See The Wing-and-Wing (New York: W. A. Townsend and Co., 1860), p. vGoogle Scholar; and Excursions in Switzerland [Switzerland, Part 1] (Paris: A. and W. Galignani and Co., 1836), p. 114Google Scholar.
17 Letters and Journals, 2, 19–26.
18 Cooper, , The American Democrat, eds. Dekker, George and Johnson, Larry (Harmondsworth : Penguin Books, 1969), p. 123Google Scholar.
19 Notions of the Americans, 1, 217.
20 Ibid., 2, 195.
21 Ibid.
22 Letters and Journals, 2, 25.
23 Notions of the Americans, 2, 191–92.
24 Ibid., 1, 75.
25 Ibid., p. 217.
26 Ibid., p. 269.
27 Ibid., 2, 33. This emphasis on continuity is found elsewhere in Cooper's non-fiction. See A Letter to General Lafayette and Related Correspondence (New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1931), p. 41Google Scholar: “ Democracy is not an experiment in America; it has endured, in fact, two centuries.”
28 Notions of the Americans, 2, 195.
29 Ibid., p. 339.
31 “ Lafayette is all in all here — He almost holds the destiny of France in his single hand.” (Letters and Journals, 2, 7.) See also ibid., pp. 3–5, 15–16, 28–30, 79, 100; and Switzerland, Part 2, pp. 8–152 passim.
32 John McWilliams offers a similar analysis of the nature of these three figures in Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper's America (Berkley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 40–43Google Scholar. His definition of the gentlemanly virtues as those of “ the patrician gentleman who is a disinterested upholder of liberty ” (ibid., p. 42) is an excellent formulation.
33 This architectural image is borrowed from The Chainbearer (New York: W. A. Townsend and Co., 1860), pp. viii–ixGoogle Scholar: “ The column of society must have its capital as well as its base. It is only perfect while each part is entire, and discharges its proper duty. In New York the great landholders long have, and do still, in a social sense, occupy the place of the capital.”
34 The importance of a capital city as a place where the influence of the gentry might be concentrated is emphasized in the Effingham novels, and the lack of such a capital is cited as a central reason for the increasing cultural and political provinciality of America.
35 See The American Democrat, p. 113: “ There can be no question that the educated and affluent classes of a country are more capable of coming to wise and intelligent decisions in affairs of state, than the mass of a population. Their wealth and leisure afford them opportunities for observation and comparison, while their general information and greater knowledge of character enable them to judge more accurately of men and measures.”
36 Notions of the Americans, 2, 24. In New York, the needs of the moment demand the institution of a gentry-based aristocracy, but see below.
37 New York, p. 21.
38 Notions of the Americans, 2, 24.
39 The American Democrat, p. 149.
40 Ibid., pp. 149–50. This passage should be compared with the call to revolution in New York: “they [the gentry and the wealthy merchant class] must unite their means to prevent destruction; and woe to the land which gives so plausible an excuse to the rich and intelligent for combining their means to overturn the liberties of the nation, as is to be found in abuses like those just named [the laws enacted under the New York State constitution of 1846].” New York, p. 59.
41 In his Washington and the American Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 147–48Google Scholar, Esmond Wright defines Washington's “ consistent political attitude ” as including a mistrust of faction and party, a faith in the values of land as property, and a faith in “ principal gentlemen.” On Jay and Cooper, see Dekker, George, James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 9–15Google Scholar.
42 For example, in the Littlepage Trilogy, the hegemony of the gentry is seen as constant from the period of colonial rule to the period of anti-Rentism. In this Trilogy the Revolution is a peripheral occurrence, a sequence of “ noises off,” and the generation of landowners of that period is passed over in the temporal structure of the Trilogy. Another view of the Revolution in Cooper's work sees it as specifically threatening to the gentry, as occasionally in retrospect in The Redskins, and throughout Wyandotte.
43 Among the non-fictional accounts of the Revolution, only The History of the Navy and Lives of Naval Officers suggest that the Revolution could be defined as a civil war (A History of the Navy, 1, 90, and Lives of Naval Officers, 2, 45); but in both cases this occurs in arguments for legitimising John Paul Jones (see pp. 63–64 above).
44 The Pilot (New York: W. A. Townsend and Co., 1859), pp. 59–60Google Scholar.
45 Ibid., pp. 241–42.
46 Ibid., pp. 164–77, and McWilliams, , Political Justice, p. 68Google Scholar.
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48 The Wing-and-Wing, p. 80.
49 For some amplification of the conceptual framework used here see Poulantzas, Nicos, Political Power and Social Classes (London: New Left Books, 1973)Google Scholar.
50 See Benson, Lee, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 329–38Google Scholar.
51 This is the model of Cooper suggested by Dekker in James Fenimore Cooper. It shares prevalence in Cooper studies with the “ romancer/social critic ” model.
52 The Redskins (New York: W. A. Townsend and Co., 1860), p. 452Google Scholar.
53 Pickering, James H., “New York in the Revolution: Cooper's Wyandotte,” New York History, XLIX (1968), pp. 121–141, 126–27Google Scholar.
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56 Bancroft, George, History of the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1876), 4, 596–98Google Scholar.