James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years 9780300229103

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JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

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JAMES FENIMORE COOPER The Later Years

WAYNE FRANKLIN

Copyright © 2017 by Wayne Franklin. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Fornier type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016952175 ISBN 978-0-300-13571-8 (cloth : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS  vii Introduction  ONE 

From Manhattan to Paris  

TWO 

London and the Alps  

THREE  FOUR  FIVE  SIX  SEVEN 

Italian Skies  

Imaginary Politics  

Republican Principles   Rough Homecoming   Public Versus Private  

EIGHT  NINE 

ix

Libels on Libels  

A Legacy Reclaimed  

vi— 

C ontents TEN 

Piecework and Patchwork   ELEVEN 

TWELVE  THIRTEEN 

At Sea  

Coming on Shore   Florida and the Pacific  

FOURTEEN  FIFTEEN  SIXTEEN 

Speculations   Last Words   Endings  

APPENDIX: Cooper’s Libel Suits  LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS   NOTES   INDEX  773

Illustrations follow page  268



Acknowledgments

T

he individuals I thanked in the first volume of this biography remain very much my benefactors. At this time, I single out for fresh mention Dan Peck, the late Henry S. F. Cooper, Lance Schachterle, Rochelle Johnson, Allan Axelrad, Gary Williams, Margaret Breen, Hugh MacDougall, Gina Barreca, Jason Berger, Barbara Alice Mann, Jeffrey Walker, Matthew Sivils, Keat Murray, Sandra Gustafson, Bruce Venter, Bob and Karen Madison, Ellie Stedall, Ronald Jenn, Charles Mahoney, Margaret Higonnet, Joan Micklin Silver, and the late Raphael D. Silver. I am grateful for the insightful responses to the first volume provided by Larry Buell, Richard Forman, and Robert Gross, among others. For institutional support, I remain very much indebted to the collegial staffs at the New York State Historical Association, the American Antiquarian Society, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, the Research Library of the New York State Historical Association, and the New York State Library. For particular acts of generosity, I give thanks at appropriate places in my notes as well. I am very grateful for the most useful responses of the three readers of my original manuscript for Yale University Press, who provided much encouragement and

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much fine guidance on how to shape this volume ’s final form. And the staff at the Press, especially Jennifer Banks, has been essential to all that this book manages to achieve. My original editor, John Kulka, gave critical help as well. With this volume as with its predecessor, Jessie Dolch’s work as copy editor has contributed a great deal to the final product. Funding granted by a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2004–2005 helped me finish the first volume and get this one under way. I had benefited before then from funding provided by an NEH grant at the American Antiquarian Society and from sabbaticals supported by institutions where I then taught. Means for purchasing research materials were made available by the Stanton W. and Elisabeth K. Davis Foundation while I held the Davis Distinguished Professorship of American Literature at Northeastern University and, after 2005, through funding arranged for at Connecticut by my original dean there, Ross MacKinnon, on the advice of my colleague Bob Tilton when he brought me to Storrs. I remember fondly the late Robin Worley’s use of the latter funding to buy some of the materials I used and, more recently, her successor Melanie Hepburn’s similar service. I thank them for their patience with me and especially with the relevant university staff. Long-term projects of the sort I here complete, after some two decades of work, require especially enlightened administrative connivance. I happily acknowledge that my second dean at UConn, Jeremy Teitelbaum, generously (and without being asked) extended my 2012–2013 sabbatical so that I could in fact finish the first draft of this second volume. I owe my final debts to the students who have warmed to an immersive teaching style meant to elicit their fresh interpretive contributions. From previous institutions, I recall (with admiration for their own work) Paul Gutjahr, Bruce McLeod, Hugh Egan, and Kathryn Mudgett. Among the more recent are Kathryn Kornacki, Matthew Salyer, Christopher Perreira, Abigail Fagan, Ashley Gangi, Anna Ziering, and Simone Puleo. From farther afield, I cannot overlook Barbara Rumbinas of Uniwersytet Jagiellon´ski in Kraków or Renata dal Sasso Freitas of the Universidade Federal do Pampa, Brazil. For my wife, Suzanne, I now can add: this is it!

Introduction

J

ames Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years completes the story begun in the biography’s first volume, published in 2007. Picking up with the departure of Cooper and his family for Europe in June 1826, it tells of his varied personal, artistic, and political discoveries across his seven years abroad. It then follows Cooper and his wife and children back to Manhattan in November 1833 before tracing out the various channels in which the writer’s private and public experience flowed up to his death in September 1851. Like the present volume’s subtitle, that bare summary emphasizes chronology but obscures broader thematic unities. I sometimes have designated those unities to myself by two reciprocal terms—“Absence and Return”—which, while literally covering Cooper’s European sojourn and American homecoming, also highlight several complex patterns across the whole span covered here. Given that Cooper’s homecoming was rough, and soon led to his public announcement that he would write no more books, it initiated another kind of absence. His alienation was deepened by his extended arguments with the press, which had begun even before he returned to New York and, intensifying in 1838 and 1839, led to a series of libel suits against a number of editors and publishers.

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The root causes here were political. While in post-Napoleonic Europe, where public affairs remained deeply unsettled, Cooper had come to a newly urgent sense of the virtues of modern republicanism. Witnessing reactionary countertrends in both England and France, he actively worked against them. In the process, he necessarily defended U.S. institutions from repeated attack. He also deepened and even extended his belief that power was justly derived from ordinary citizens rather than titled rulers or social elites. While in Florence in 1829, he thus proposed to an astonished visitor from the United States that the electoral college be abolished and the president elected by direct popular vote. He also grew increasingly convinced at this time that wealth, whatever its sources, was an inherent threat to republican virtue. In 1838, he would succinctly state his conclusions on the matter: “A government founded on the representation of property, however direct or indirect, is radically vicious, since it is a union of two of the most corrupting influences to which man is subject. It is the proper business of government to resist the corruptions of money, and not to depend on them” (AD 141). Cooper understood such views as profoundly American in spirit. It therefore was a bitter discovery to find himself criticized by some of his compatriots abroad and then targeted once again on his return to the United States for what he saw as his championing of American principles. He did not completely understand the political realignments that had been occurring at home since 1826, but he certainly registered their personal consequences. He did not feel himself truly at home until long after 1833. The return came through Cooper’s piecemeal efforts to revive older moments, moods, and modes even as he explored new possibilities. The first big change involved his relocation to Cooperstown, a village he had last visited as long ago as 1817. Rescuing and restoring the ruinous old Cooper mansion there, he turned the Federal-era structure, vacant for a decade and a half, into what became his wandering family’s first permanent home. A second change involved Cooper’s decision to take up his pen again, partly because his family needed the income but also because he and the causes he was attached to came under increasingly vocal attack from members of the recently founded Whig Party. Developing a new talent for controversy and engaging many new subjects, he published a surprising array of items between 1834 and 1839: thirty-some newspaper articles on French and U.S. affairs; a Gulliver-like voyage narrative, begun in Paris years earlier, that targeted European and American foibles alike; a series of travel accounts reflecting from an American perspective on much of his European experience; a pair of satirical novels based on his family’s rude homecoming; a history of the village of Cooperstown; a treatise on U.S. democracy; and, finally, his large, long-contemplated, long-delayed History of the Navy of the United States.

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While all of these publications demonstrated Cooper’s resilient spirit and adaptability, they were too closely tied to his current troubles to reestablish his old reputation. Their author was not the Cooper his first readers had welcomed so warmly in the 1820s and now missed so sorely—the inventor of the sea tale and the first novelist of the American forest. Not until he revived his famous demotic hero Natty Bumppo in a new pair of books in 1840 and 1841, then returned to the sea with fresh vigor in 1842, did he begin to regain his old audience and tap once again his original creative spirit. Here was another, more fruitful kind of homecoming, one that ushered in what would be Cooper’s busiest decade. During the forties, he would write a total of sixteen novels—more than twice as many as in the thirties and fully half his career output. His activity across the 1840s thus represented not so much a return to his past as a transcendence of even his own productive norm. Over that last decade of his life he for the first time published in the expanded magazine market and wrote books in a fresh variety of modes. He “edited” an as-told-to memoir of a broken-down sailor he had known during his own days at sea; he produced a thoughtful analysis of the infamous Somers mutiny trial; he even undertook a history of greater New York that was to recommend (and indeed map out) a rational expansion of the city’s already enormous shipping infrastructure. If Cooper still remained absent in some ways from the bright ring of fame that had surrounded him at the moment he left Manhattan for Europe in 1826, by the end of his career he had not only regained many old readers and found new ones but had also extended his reach and range as a writer. And even when he returned to old forms in newer books, he did so with a notable sense of experimentation and revision, as every reader of The Deerslayer will notice. Aware that he had been copied by other writers in the 1830s and was being copied again in the 1840s, he took on his imitators by reasserting his own values and visions and rejecting theirs—an important moral intervention in the case of the Indian-hating writer Robert M. Bird in particular. In all his late fiction he also revealed a refreshing taste for realism in both his topics and his treatment of them. His sea tales showed a new crispness in their nautical detail and often dispensed with the romantic tropes of his first decade. Even as I stress all these public trends in this volume, I also pursue some deeper, more inward themes. My imaginary subtitle therefore embraces, finally, the manner in which Cooper recovered some very old personal feelings and concerns while, in the heart of his most productive decade, he wrote a series of five quasi-autobiographical novels (the two-part Afloat and Ashore and the Littlepage trilogy) that in their form and tonal qualities offered fresh proof of his inventiveness. Cooper had always drawn on his own experience. He wrote of Westchester during the Revolution while living in a house in Scarsdale, and he

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set the first of his Leather-Stocking Tales in his almost-native (though by 1823 long-unseen) Otsego County. But these earlier forays into his own territory usually involved various self-protective evasions. In the case of Afloat and Ashore and the Littlepage novels, all five of them published within an intense two-year span in mid-decade, Cooper touched on certain deeper feelings about his past, suggesting how much it still haunted him. The unfinished emotional and material business of his youth that I traced in The Early Years, rendered once again worrisome through a series of fresh uncertainties about his social status and economic prospects, provided a rich inner element to those books that would support even more reflection than I have been able to give to it. In these various ways, that imaginary subtitle captures certain larger rhythms in Cooper’s outward and inward experience over his last quarter century. That said, I will let my readers judge its interpretive usefulness. I want to add only a few other points. The first concerns the continuing emphasis here on the material and economic conditions of Cooper’s career. This was a major focus in my first volume in part because during his early years Cooper was very much involved in the process by which his books saw the light of day. Before the publisher Carey and Lea paid handsomely for his sixth book, The Last of the Mohicans, in 1826, then promised equally high amounts for his next novel and at the same time acquired his backlist, Cooper, like other American novelists of the period, had improvised various uncertain means for getting his works to market. Only the new bargains with Carey and Lea in fact allowed him the freedom to go to Europe and the cash to fund the long trip. But neither the arrangements forged in 1826 nor the outward conditions of the literary marketplace remained unaltered during Cooper’s European period, and the changes intensified after his return to the United States. At the same time, Cooper’s continuing reliance on literature as his profession—his source of income—gave all those changes special importance for his work. Hence the continued attention to the matter in the present volume. Here a brief sketch of the larger dimensions of this theme may be helpful. While abroad, Cooper worked out methods on a mostly case-by-case basis for the material production of his new books, making sure first of all that his European partners provided him with corrected proof sheets to send to Carey and Lea in Philadelphia. (His English and continental arrangements underwent their own evolution under his innovative efforts, as I discuss in the appropriate chapters below.) Until the 1840s, the firm of Carey, Lea and Carey (and its successors) continued to bring out Cooper’s books in the United States under terms roughly similar to those set up in 1826, although with several downward adjustments in the actual prices Cooper received and with necessary changes in how the books were physically produced. Across Cooper’s final decade, large shifts

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in the economy, including the publishing sector, triggered the financial and personal worries mentioned earlier. Cooper experimented with self-publishing again in the mid-1830s and once more in the early 1840s, a topic hitherto not fully understood. In the process, he formed a temporary marketing alliance with a recently founded New York house, Burgess and Stringer, that was typical of the price-driven firms springing up at this time of upheaval in the publishing world. Cooper was so pleased with what these fresh partners did for his sales in New York that in 1844, breaking ties with Lea and Blanchard (as the Philadelphia firm was then known), he switched to the newcomers as his formal publishers. The New Yorkers did not enjoy his confidence as the Philadelphians once had; he offered Burgess and Stringer only short-term rights for his books, essentially leasing them the stereotype plates he paid other agents to craft for him. He was in this sense very much back in the literary business in which he had been engaged during the early 1820s. His ability to adjust and adapt was part of the reason— along with his ability to write so much in the first place—that he was able to keep his books before the public. Nothing could be farther from the truth, at the same time, than picturing Cooper as an aloof author who crafted his later tales in his refurbished library in Cooperstown and then let others make of them what they might—as long as they paid him the prices he imperiously demanded for them. He incessantly managed his end of the matter, not only writing the tales but also negotiating the varying contracts that turned his manuscripts into type and the type into plates and then into the books that firms such as Burgess and Stringer were allowed to distribute in specified quantities for specified periods before he resumed full control of them. His adjustments to the new conditions also included a new concern for the legal ownership of his wares. Whereas from 1826 until 1838 the Careys had regularly copyrighted Cooper’s new books as their own property, with his consent, Cooper from the latter year to the end of his life copyrighted every new one in his own name, another signal innovation. In the face of changing realities, he revealed new talents and invented new strategies. He even swapped parts of his literary holdings for books that the Philadelphians still owned so he could organize his properties better. He then managed what we might call his residuals with canny skill. This, too, is a tale told only in part before now. He persisted because he kept writing and because he kept tending to his works. Late in Cooper’s life, years after Burgess and Stringer had replaced his old publishers, they purchased many of the Philadelphia firm’s remaining rights to his titles (including those that the latter firm had acquired in the swaps with Cooper just referred to) in an effort to consolidate their control over his writings. Once that shift occurred, Cooper himself sold to Stringer and Townsend (Burgess and Stringer’s successor) most of the remaining titles he still owned,

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thereby enabling that firm to issue relatively full sets of his writings. At the same time, however, he maintained and expanded his dealings with yet another publisher, George P. Putnam, who projected but never completed a freshly revised edition of his works. Fittingly, Cooper’s last novel, The Ways of the Hour, first came out through Putnam. The economics of Cooper’s literary endeavors mattered to him from the outset, as I demonstrated in The Early Years. How he handled such things mattered, too, to the establishment and growth of an American literary culture in Cooper’s lifetime. Among the half dozen novelists who had been notably active during the 1820s (John Neal, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Kirke Paulding, and Lydia Maria Child were Cooper’s main competitors then), only he persisted in the field across the thirties and was still active, nay flourishing, in the forties. He and the American novel were identified with each other for thirty years. Telling this important story well requires attention to contracts and the financial terms they spelled out. Recognizing, however, that some of the necessary details may weigh down the narrative of a life so full of more immediately engaging themes, I have tried to relegate many of the facts and figures to my notes. In the text, I instead focus on the process through which Cooper managed the larger elements of his career. Whether he departed Florence for Marseilles in 1829 in order to secure an English-competent compositor to set his latest novel in type for an Italian printer, or left Rome for Dresden a year later in order to have yet another new book produced in English by a German house there, or decamped from Cooperstown to Philadelphia for long stints during his last years in order to see his seemingly endless flood of books through the press, Cooper was always flexible in figuring out how to conduct his artistic affairs wherever he and his family resided. Later, as economic pressure pushed book prices and authors’ earnings down in the United States, he likewise showed himself adept at seeking out or crafting new means to bring his writings before the public and provide income for his large family. In this sense, the story of his literary business is the story of the man’s character. His energy was not boundless, but, be its target a new publishing venture or a political idea that vexed or fascinated him, Cooper was ready for engagement. Not until the very end did his remarkable capacity fail his will. A second large topic here, hinted at in this last observation, concerns Cooper’s health. As The Early Years made clear, he had suffered very serious medical challenges in the years leading up to his departure for Europe. He improved somewhat during his time in France, weakened again during a London visit early in 1828, but then, while his family spent the long summer of that year in Switzerland, showed promising signs of recovery. Even at the best moments during these years (and later), however, he never returned to the

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robust, energetic condition he had enjoyed before 1823. At best, he learned how to manage or at least tolerate his symptoms. When he developed an array of more serious troubles in the late 1840s, the complications that stemmed from both his condition and the treatments meant to deal with it led, in the late summer of 1851, to a kind of immobility and general failure of various bodily systems, and finally to his death on the eve of his sixty-second birthday. In the earlier period, Cooper never spelled out his symptoms or explained exactly how he coped with them. We therefore are left with a few scattered references that resist any attempt to determine what ailed him or merely to understand the practical restraints he faced. Once the symptoms worsened and his means of dealing with them became more active and more subject to discussion by Cooper, his family, his physicians, and his friends and acquaintances, the resulting archive provides fuller, more suggestive evidence not just about that last crisis but also about his earlier history. In particular, I suspect that Cooper had used various medicines for some time, perhaps since the 1820s, to regulate what he and his physicians thought was a weak, erratic, and finally failing liver and the digestive complications they traced to that organ. There is no real evidence on the clinical condition of Cooper’s liver (it remains possible that in 1823 he had been infected with yellow fever, a disease that can involve liver damage), but there clearly was plenty of discussion surrounding it and there were plenty of attempts to bring it into line. In the latter regard, Cooper was merely one of many thousands of people in his era who became obsessed with the liver, its “torpidity” and the resulting lack (as they saw it) of the regular flow of bile from it into the digestive system. Among the various substances used to address the trouble was one that had particular significance for Cooper—mercury, which in various preparations, including calomel, was viewed as a dangerous but potent ally in the battle to make the liver perform. Mercury did so in part by stimulating secretions in general but also by promoting “proper” operation of the stomach and bowels. It was applied as both an emetic and a cathartic. That Abraham Lincoln suffered from the same perceived symptoms will suggest how widespread the problem was in the nineteenth century; that for some time he made damaging use, as did Cooper at the end, of what was known then as the “blue pill” (an especially potent compound of elemental mercury with other, generally benign ingredients) demonstrates how common were the deleterious effects of poisonous medicines, misguided practitioners, and the sometimes deadly self-administration of poorly understood remedies. Lincoln stopped his regimen in 1861 and survived to deal with the larger disorder of the American body politic. Cooper went on the blue pill only at the end, but I believe he had used mercury-containing preparations across long, though perhaps

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intermittent, periods before then. Mercury, I think, seriously compromised his health if it did not actually kill him. It is not too much to claim that his medical symptoms combined with his treatment for them resulted in a kind of disability that went undetected for some years and has not been fully described until now. His life was as heroic in these terms as it was productive. Since these last points are indeed new ones, I want to venture into more speculative realms here. Mercury probably influenced Cooper’s physical behavior and personality, as it did Lincoln’s. I suggest in my final chapter that some of the social and other challenges Cooper encountered during and after his European visit may have been partly the effects of gradual mercury poisoning. His trouble with handwriting, leading to his need for amanuenses to copy his manuscripts for long periods, certainly mirrored similar trouble observable in Lincoln’s case; and, as Lincoln was irritable and difficult to deal with while taking the blue pill, Cooper’s “difficulty” (a topic I cover in various contexts below) may have owed something to his medical disadvantages. Indeed, the public tensions I document and explore may suggest that he self-medicated as early as his 1828 London stay, when, pushing himself to finish demanding work on Notions of the Americans, he suffered from serious health problems and his supposed difficulty first emerged. Even so, I have chosen not to erect on the basis of scant evidence, the best of it dating only from Cooper’s last months, a reductive medical interpretation of his social persona and political troubles. As I say in that last chapter, the fights Cooper fought he would have fought even if his health had remained untouched by the ills that surely afflicted him or the remedies he may have used to combat them. To reduce the battle over libel law to the flow of bile (or its interruption), or to the use of mercury in its various forms, is to give much less credit to Cooper and his opponents as agents in their own affairs than both deserve. The fights were profoundly political in nature, not just personal, as noted earlier. And, even if illness and drugs did affect Cooper to the point of altering (by intensifying) his behavior, neither interrupted, let alone stopped, his creative output. The surviving evidence about his health indicates that he battled his physical ills as best he could, not overly obsessed with them and not weighed down in spirit by them. And all the time he managed to imagine more and more stories that he turned into books marketed at home and abroad. As a final point on this matter, I would add that Cooper’s compromised health, if indeed it produced some of the surface trouble mentioned earlier, may account for the ways in which a man whose conscious political values were affirmatively and deeply democratic sometimes made a less charitable impression on his contemporaries. Perhaps some trace of the same resulting dissonance has left the way open for misinterpretations that persist to the present. Even before his death, Cooper’s reputation had suffered a decline traceable in part to the political

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fights just referred to. Later changes in taste, combined with a growing misapprehension of Cooper’s essential personal character and conscious values, have left him as a kind of ruin on the shores of American memory. He has always been read, though largely in pieces. And most critics, passionate or perceptive as they might be, have failed to make whole his claims upon the public mind. That hardly is their own fault. Cooper’s insistence late in his life that his family not authorize a biography, a wish essentially honored for a century past his death, did not allow an easy statement of those claims. I hope that telling the story of his life in as full a manner as possible, with due attention to the currents that animated his imagination in his various books, will help set the stage for a more integrated appreciation of his accomplishment. I certainly recognize Cooper’s flaws, and have no wish to conceal them or excuse them out of ex parte feelings for him or his causes. He was a remarkable figure but hardly a perfect one. I do think, however, that his strengths were the counterpart of his failings, as Herman Melville said in 1851, and that those failings were small in scale and significance compared with his personal and artistic virtues. But let me be clear about where I think he stood on essential questions that concern us today. He was not, as is often assumed and stated, an apologist for American empire at home or abroad; indeed, he stressed the human and environmental costs of the country’s continental (and, at the end, extracontinental) expansion. None of his tales of frontier settlement ends with a ringing endorsement of the American nation. All, indeed, end with deaths and departures, if not with outright failure. Nor was Cooper a reactive apologist for wealth or position, as my earlier quotation of his views on that question ought to make abundantly clear. When he undertook his supposed defense of New York landlords in the Littlepage series, he wound up showing his imaginary gentry’s latest generation as self-absorbed and bigoted, concerned about the monetary value of their holdings far more than their obligations to their tenants. In The Crater (1847), a dystopian follow-up on that same theme, he gave the American castaway Mark Woolston a chance to begin the world over again in the Pacific, but at the same time he planted seeds of self-defeating pride in Woolston’s heart. While the Pacific colonists are in several notable instances no great specimens of republican honesty and simplicity, Woolston would not have fallen had it not been for his own inflexible faith in the rightness of his ways. In similar fashion, Cooper was not the condescending champion of one race as opposed to others, as his emphasis on human rights and his rising antislavery views during his last decade will indicate, to the surprise of some readers. The Whigs who attacked him tried to paint him as a hidebound critic of their own supposedly progressive values, if not an outright curmudgeon. In the mid-twentieth century, so little known was the full range of his thought that,

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despite the work of Robert E. Spiller and other early champions of Cooper, he was wrongly claimed by the new conservative movement—largely through the efforts of Russell Kirk in the 1940s—as a figure of critical, original importance to that movement’s own agenda. While Cooper was no radical, and no willing joiner of reformist causes (some of which he however thought valid), he did not suit the role into which Kirk cast him. Nor was he, as one historian has claimed of his later years, “the national scold,” or, as literary scholars have more recently suggested, a kind of pro-crypto Loyalist and therefore Anglophile. These descriptions of Cooper are based on incomplete readings not only of his works but also of his experience and context at home and abroad. While I hasten to add that Cooper’s politics hardly were identical to my own, which are well to his left, they were not nearly as far right as Kirk claimed, either. The proof of this assessment will come, I believe, in the details of my narrative. Since the labeling of Cooper as a conservative has influenced both those who identify with Kirk and those who do not, removing that tag from Cooper as I try to do will, I hope, make him available for consideration on his own terms, politically and otherwise. It may be the vacancy of the middle in contemporary American political discourse that makes it so hard for us to realize where exactly Cooper stood. My intent, in any case, is to clear the air and promote fresh considerations of Cooper’s career and thereby enable richer, more subtle readings of his individual books as well as a better grasp of the cultural and social contexts within which he worked. In the end, I have sought to produce a rounded portrait of a writer who still awaits the “Grateful posterity” to which Herman Melville consigned him in 1851.

James Fenimore Cooper

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C H A P T E R

O N E

From Manhattan to Paris

W

hen the Hudson, a fast packet boat of the Black X line, left New York waters and entered the Atlantic late on June 2, 1826, among its twenty or so passengers were the novelist James Fenimore Cooper and his family. The vessel’s captain, Connecticut Yankee Henry L. Champlin, was a seasoned, well-respected commander who inspired Cooper’s confidence, calming his natural concern about his wife Susan, their five children, and his young nephew William.1 Complete “land-birds,” like most other passengers (GF CE 7), the seven of them stayed below until they had adjusted to life afloat, then joined Cooper topside to do what transatlantic passengers typically did then: look for other ships, scan the water for drift ice, and socialize with their fellows. Cooper and his wife passed time with South Carolinian Anna Smith Pedersen and her husband Peder, the present Danish minister to the United States (see GF CE 17, 278). Together, the couples no doubt listened as wine merchant and music aficionado Dominick Lynch, whom Cooper had known well in New York, sang solo for them, after which he and Cooper apparently put on something of a show together, spoofing the “nasal” tone of New York vocalists—which they soon found equally in vogue, however, among London choruses (GF CE 38–39).2

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Having come about off Ireland and passed along the English south coast, on July 2 the Hudson put the Coopers ashore at their first staging point, Cowes, on the Isle of Wight (see GF CE 15; LJ 1:147). They took rooms in West Cowes that night and the next day went inland to the “sweet vale” (GF CE 23) where the isle’s capital, Newport, was located, thinking Susan might stay there with the children while the novelist made a short business run to London. Once they glimpsed the English coast from Newport’s Carisbrooke Castle, however, that “glowing and glorious picture” (as Cooper described it for his sister Ann in his first letter from Paris—LJ 1:148) forced a change of plans. After a single night near the castle and another back in West Cowes, they all took the July 4 steamboat for Southampton, where they rented a group of rooms for the family to occupy during the novelist’s absence (see GF CE 26–27). Cooper needed to confer with his current London partner, bookseller John Miller. The two had worked long distance to this point, often through intermediaries and via somewhat improvised means. Miller, having “no security for the Copyright” of Cooper’s The Pilot, had handled it (and the next two novels) on shares, paying all costs himself and splitting earnings fifty–fifty with the novelist (see CORR 1:95 and JFC:EY 353–57).3 Their dealings had been mostly positive, but now that Cooper was across the Atlantic he hoped to negotiate more profitable terms. A second subject concerned French translations of his novels. Since 1822, when Charles Gosselin had issued L’Espion in Paris, all Cooper’s novels had been translated by Auguste-Jean-Baptiste Defauconpret, a French exile long resident in London.4 To this point, the author had received no payments at all for these translations, but now he likewise hoped his presence in Europe might change things. Early this very year, when The Last of the Mohicans had just appeared in the United States and was in production in Britain, he had advised Miller from New York to “sell a copy to the translators, on your own account” (LJ 1:127). Going forward, Cooper would seek payments for himself from Gosselin. On this subject, he and Miller also had to talk.5 Dealing with Miller probably took only an hour or two. Afterward, Cooper returned to his room in the “Adams-street Hotel,” a small, pleasant affair on Adelphi Terrace near the Thames that was “much frequented by Americans” (GF CE 34). There he soon was greeting various other expatriates, most already known to him from New York. With one of them, Dominick Lynch (his tuneful fellow passenger on the Hudson), he went to the King’s Theatre for an opera starring the Italian diva Giuditta Negri Pasta (see GF CE 38–39).6 The next day, the pair toured London’s prestigious Drury Lane Theatre with its new manager, American Stephen Price, fresh from Manhattan’s Park Theatre. Then the trio of postcolonials dined together, no doubt relishing the fact that all of them could claim some consequence not only at home, but also here in the metropolis (see

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GF CE 39–41).7 Cooper had memories of London from his two visits there on the Stirling two decades earlier, but his 1826 trip updated and extended them, and with a decidedly different emotional tone. After some eight or nine days in London, Cooper boarded a night coach for Southampton late on Saturday, July 15. Having arrived just at dawn at his family’s lodgings and gone to bed without speaking to anyone, he arose a few hours later to find a female stranger with an oddly familiar countenance sitting in the drawing room. It proved to be Anne Charlotte, his wife ’s older sister. Left behind in England in the early 1790s, the stranded girl had had her share of troubles in the Loyalist household of John Peter DeLancey’s sister Anne and her husband, Judge Thomas Jones. News of her unhappiness must have hurt when it arrived in New York, but by the time Anne Charlotte was an adult she felt so well settled in England that she adamantly refused her parents’ urgings to come to the United States. Over time, Anne Charlotte discovered that she had many other relatives on her own side of the ocean, Loyalists for the most part, with whom she at times lived.8 When the Coopers landed in England, Anne Charlotte was settled in Hoddesdon, twenty miles north of London. As soon as she learned that Susan was in Southampton, Anne rode all night, arriving very early on Thursday morning (July 13) and remaining until the novelist and his family left for France on July 18.9 Her visit posed various challenges. The novelist was deeply curious about the chance sociological experiment represented by these sisters, unknown to each other except by repute, in whose upbringing the competing and contrasting cultures and political systems of two kindred nations, still enemies in a way, were on display (see GF CE 43). For Susan, this first contact with her sister was a heady experience: she was “agitated by this meeting,” her eldest daughter recalled, surely because Anne Charlotte was “intensely English in appearance, manner, and”—especially—“opinions” (SFM 61).10 Yet Anne Charlotte clearly endeared herself to the Americans. Between Cooper’s return from London and his family’s departure for France two days later, the couple took her around to enjoy the sights, all the time going over the DeLanceys’ fractured history (see GF CE 43–44). Then, come Tuesday the eighteenth, Anne left for Hertfordshire and the Coopers scrambled aboard the steam ferry for Le Havre. Their vessel, which usually crossed the Channel in twelve hours, was so under-powered right now (since only one of its two boilers was operating) that it was midnight before someone saw a faint line of coast and tentatively called out “land!” (GF CE 45–46).11 The arrival was as onerous as the trip. Late as it was, a dozen officious personnel—customs officers, big-hatted gendarmes, and female travelers’ agents or commissionnaires—piled aboard, causing further delays by their

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interference with each other. Once all the passengers had endured a rather rough examination for contraband, the Coopers were turned loose, without their bags, into the town’s deserted streets. Eventually they found lodgings in a five-floor walkup at the Hôtel d’Angleterre, where, come morning, they had a delicious breakfast that formed their real, and very pleasant, introduction to the country (see GF CE 46–48). A surprise guest from Virginia who ate with them, U.S. consul Reuben G. Beasley, helped retrieve the Coopers’ still-withheld baggage by dispatching to the customs house one of those female commissionnaires who scurried about the port: in a few moments, sure enough, young Désirée had expertly “scolded, coaxed, advised, wrangled, and uniformly triumphed” over the officials there, and the bags were delivered. France had “plenty of these managing females,” Cooper concluded, and Désirée was “one of the cleverest of them all” (GF CE 49). He would honor her as late as 1842 by introducing her even more “managing” counterpart, also named Désirée, into his Franco-American satire Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief (see chapter 10).12 After their second night, the Coopers boarded the “frail-looking” but crowded little steamer that was to take them, past Tancarville and Quillebeuf, up the crooked, island-filled, and “exceedingly pretty” lower Seine, as Cooper recalled it in his French Gleanings (GF CE 52–54).13 They left the vessel at Rouen, then a vital port of eighty thousand stretching around a big bend on the right bank. The city struck Cooper as old and not terribly well-built (“Ancient— Dirty and crowded,” was his description for his sister from Paris—LJ 1:149), but he thoroughly enjoyed its chief sight, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, with its chiseled stone exterior so much like a great sheet of “dark lace” (GF CE 56). Staying the night in Rouen, the Coopers also visited the old market square where Joan of Arc had been burned to death in 1431, as well as two other sites associated with her. Then on Friday, July 21, they all piled into a calèche and began their two-day, eighty-five-mile drive to Paris, at first along the scenic river road, the route d’en bas, on the north bank. Cooper found the Seine even more “crooked” than his familiar Susquehanna, but such was everyone ’s impatience for Paris that the trip proved short (GF CE 57–59; SFM 62). They spent one night at the south bank town of Vernon, then very early the next day crossed back over, going from Giverny to Limetz-Villez and Bennecourt, after which they recrossed to Bonnières-sur-Seine. Farther on, near Rolleboise, they saw Rosny, the enormous redbrick chateau of the famed (and infamous) seventeenth-century Huguenot statesman Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully. Susan and her mother had been reading the duke ’s Memoirs back in the United States, probably in French as a preparation for the European trip, and here was the splendid home of the man before them (see SFM 63). Now owned by another

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notorious aristocrat, the duchesse de Berry, widow of the younger son of King Charles X, the estate spread across the landscape like a potent relic of old and new French history (see GF CE 61–62).14 Soon the Coopers entered on the last long run of the trip, ending at St. Germain-en-Laye, in the hills bordering the plains of Paris. A former residence of French monarchs (and of the exiled James II of England, who died there in 1701), this was the town where, Cooper recalled in his travel book, he first encountered the baleful influence of the capital’s “royal magnificence”— for throughout “the entire semicircle of hills, to the west of Paris . . . palaces, pavilions, forests, parks, aqueducts, gardens or chases” marked the Bourbon dynasty’s heavy (and expensive) hand. Many of the details he liked, but not the politics that produced them, and that they in turn tended to reinforce. Later, writing his French Gleanings after having seen the frustrated results of two new French revolutions, he would wonder how long it would take to “eradicate” these traces of royal taste from the landscape—and remove the political system’s insidious roots from the hearts and minds of the people (GF CE 62). From here on, everything marked the still royal capital’s nearness. There were the remains of the cumbrous hydraulic system of “Marly-la-Machine” (GF CE 63), designed to pump water to the gardens at Versailles and soon (if not already) replaced by steam engines. Then came Malmaison, Napoleon’s favored residence, where Josephine had died in 1814 and the resurgent emperor had briefly stayed in between Waterloo and St. Helena the following year. Such reminders of Bonaparte, dead himself only since 1821, were to surround the Coopers everywhere in Europe. Soon, having passed through Nanterre and risen up a slight climb, they could see in the southeastern distance another of them, the yet-unfinished “arc de l’Étoile” (that is, the Arc de Triomphe), begun on Napoleon’s orders in 1806, suspended at various points, and not completed until three years after the Coopers returned to the United States. In 1837, mindful of the continuing turbulence of French politics, Cooper described the arch as “this imposing memorial of—Heaven knows what!” He added in his French Gleanings, acerbically, that it had had as many temporary honorees “as France has had governors” (GF CE 63).15

Settling In Past the arch, the calèche drove down Avenue de Neuilly, between the severed groves of the Champs-Élysées, where modest groups of well-dressed pedestrians were strolling. Closing the avenue’s vista was a mass of foliage, and rising above it were the pointed roofs of different parts of “some vast structure”—the Tuileries, an old royal palace begun by Catherine de Medici in 1564 where the

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city’s tile manufactories had once stood (GF CE 63). Like other sprawling monuments of monarchical excess, Versailles most of all, this palace had grown by accretion and had played a key role in various salient moments in national history. At present, it was one of two royal residences in the city. Cooper would visit here before long, admitted with crowds of other petitioners to stand by as Charles X complaisantly dined before the public. For now, it was a physical landmark, interrupting the visitor’s eye as it coursed down the avenue toward the heart of the city. As the calèche continued, the river, emerging from another meander, suddenly showed itself close at hand on the right, balanced on the left by a line of mansions. The driver turned into “a paved area, that lay between the Seine, the Champs-Elysées, the garden of the Tuileries, and two little palaces of extraordinary beauty” (GF CE 64). This open area was Place de la Concorde, the exact spot where Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been executed thirtythree years before.16 There was little chance, in the flood of impressions, to reflect on even so potent a spot during the family’s first entry into Paris. Soon, in any case, the calèche veered left toward the “Great Boulevards” that, tracing out the lines of the ancient city walls, ran between Place de le Concorde and the old aristocratic quarter, the Marais. A few blocks later it reached Hôtel Montmorency, just north of the city’s present center, off Boulevard des Italiens. Evidently having learned of Montmorency from one of his contacts, Cooper took lodgings for the family there pending more permanent arrangements (see LJ 1:147; SFM 63). Finding the latter would not take long. In his first day or two in the city, Cooper crossed the Seine to explore Faubourg St. Germain, east of the golddomed Hôtel des Invalides, an enormous Left Bank compound dedicated since the early eighteenth century to the care of disabled French veterans. And on Monday, July 24, he rented an apartment on the third floor in one of the relics of the ancient regime in that quarter, the Jumilhac mansion, located on rue St. Maur.17 The property survives today, considerably altered but still conveying a sense of what the Coopers saw on arrival. Young Susan recalled the street as “narrow, gloomy Rue St. Maur, with its muddy gutter in the centre, and a melancholy oil lamp swinging from a rope” (SFM 63). Since renamed rue de l’Abbé Grégoire, the street was indeed narrow then and remains narrow—and short— today. But, except for their final period in Paris in the early 1830s, the Coopers preferred dwellings on such out-of-the-way streets. Quarters there were no doubt cheaper, because less fashionable; but they were also less noisy and cluttered, since in every case there was no real through-traffic. Rue St. Maur, for instance, was but a single block long, running from what is now rue de Cherche Midi to rue de Sévres. At the latter end, it issued near a large charitable institution; at the former, it came out almost opposite an even narrower passage leading by several abrupt turns to rue de Vaugirard.18

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The external details were deceptive. Once through the large coach gate (another common feature of all the family’s lodgings in Paris, on which see GF CE 78–79), everything was changed. The large open grounds, with sizable gardens, afforded the children relatively quiet green space. Inside, a “noble stone stairway” led up to the family’s quarters, which even Sue admitted were “pleasant and comfortable.” Her opinion is all the more reliable in view of the fact that she and her sisters spent much time in the building, where they were enrolled in a school occupying its lower floors (SFM 63–64). Here they were to remain when their parents left them behind during an early 1828 London trip.19 The Coopers apparently moved to Faubourg St. Germain on August 7 or 8, about two weeks after reaching Paris. It was an accommodating home, but also a convenient base from which to explore the city, and almost immediately they began driving around Paris and its environs in hired carriages.20 They visited Montmartre for the view south over Paris and liked the Seine so much that each time they crossed the Pont Royal they paused to look upriver toward the Île de la Cité or down toward the meadows still visible at the city’s faded lower limits. The Coopers rode out into the country so often that the novelist claimed they had passed through “nearly every one of the twenty, or thirty, different gates” (GF CE 68). Cooper’s main concern during the first weeks, though, was to finish the novel begun in New York and make business arrangements for it and later books. At the end of August, he informed Luther Bradish, who was handling his literary affairs in New York, that the Parisian “Booksellers are now nibbling at my book, and profess a readiness to purchase—Mohicans has done very well, they tell me, and it will give the Prairie, a better chance.” If the booksellers nibbling at The Prairie were the same ones who told Cooper about the success of The Last of the Mohicans, then even this early (the third or fourth week of August, within a month of arriving in Paris), he obviously had begun discussions leading to the bargain formally agreed to a month or so later. He was “playing shy,” but would “soon come to an arrangement,” since before long it would be time to start printing (LJ 1:154). Having worked hard to establish his career in the United States, Cooper now had to relocate it to Paris. Presumably it was at about this time that he began dealing with Hector Bossange, who by year’s end was located on quai de Voltaire, a few blocks north of the Hôtel Jumilhac. This venturesome Parisian bookseller and publisher had lived in Montreal from 1815 to 1819, marrying Canadian Julie Fabre and running a branch of his father’s Parisian book business there before returning to France. The elder Bossange (“Bossange père”) still was issuing books in 1827; his sons (“Bossange frères”), to whom Carey and Lea specifically referred Cooper earlier in 1826, were issuing their own.21 The fraternal

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operation, however, had been most active in the earlier 1820s; by 1826, it seems to have been largely defunct. In the latter year, certainly, Hector Bossange began to put out works over his own name, and in 1827 he fairly emerged as an independent bookseller, with Cooper as merely the best known of his authors— along with Victor Hugo, whose poems Bossange also published. From the beginning, Bossange marketed many works in English: among his very first books in 1826, in fact, was an English guide to French grammar. And he clearly knew which Parisian printers could handle texts in English. He therefore was a quite plausible partner for Cooper’s new but untested plan.22 That plan was ingenious. In the first place, Bossange would buy the right to publish an edition in English for continental distribution, joined for that purpose by several partners named on the title page. And he also would arrange for the work to be set in type in Paris. Using the print shop of Alexandre Lachevardière at 30 rue de Colombier, conveniently between his establishment and Cooper’s lodgings, Bossange produced proofs for the novelist to inspect and correct, thus copying Cooper’s New York practice. Furthermore, as Cooper already had made a habit of sending American proof sets to John Miller in London, he now intended to use Bossange’s proofs as copy-text for all versions of the book over which he exercised some textual and financial control. These included that of Bossange and his Paris partners, the Philadelphia edition of Carey and Lea, a London edition (published by Henry Colburn, not John Miller), and, finally, the Defauconpret translation already arranged for through Gosselin. Once Cooper had corrected Lachevardière’s proofs, the standing type was accordingly altered, and several new sets of perfected proofs were printed. He then conveyed them to the relevant parties. This was production on the grandest scale Cooper had yet attempted, and its success required several precautions. Timing in every part of the process was critical. But so were things that Cooper had previously ignored. His manuscript hand having proved a perpetual challenge in the United States, he for the first time employed an amanuensis—his nephew William—to copy his own scrawl in a fair hand. The result was a manuscript that Lachevardière ’s Parisian compositors could much more easily follow. At the same time, though, this solution triggered new problems. Owing to William’s inattentive habits, and his at times insistent imp of correction, countless new difficulties arose, only some of which Cooper himself resolved when going over his nephew’s copy. Once a sufficient part of the latter was ready, in any event, it was forwarded to Bossange or perhaps right to the printer.23 It was in the latter part of September that Cooper began making his further arrangements. Having let Gosselin know on the twenty-third that Bossange ’s printers would begin work on the English text “without delay,” he wrote John

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Miller with a demand for new terms, only to hear quickly from the Londoner that he was unable to comply and so had to pass. (Cooper summarized the outcome in October: Miller, he wrote Carey and Lea, was “too poor to buy”—LJ 1:168.)24 Within days, Cooper began conversations with Francis Moore, Henry Colburn’s Paris agent. On October 16, Moore, evidently coached by Colburn in advance, called at the Jumilhac compound and offered “£100 for the sheets of the Prairie.” Cooper turned this down, and, eager to speed word of his refusal to Colburn’s premises in London, wrote the publisher the next day himself that the amount was unthinkably low (LJ 1:165). The novelist was so sure of the value of his wares in Britain that he referred Colburn to Miller for details of the American’s recent earnings. Literature was not a genteel dalliance, but a middle-class business: “it is necessary to speak of these works, now,” he insisted, “as mere articles of trade.” He would try to ensure that Colburn had a viable copyright in the book, a new point in his dealings with British publishers, but in exchange for that he demanded three times what Moore had offered (LJ 1:165).25 He already had made clear to Colburn that he wanted to change his publishers. But he would not do so if, as Colburn’s initial bid necessitated, he had to sacrifice value. Cooper asked Colburn to reply at his earliest convenience, and when no answer had reached Paris a mere nine days later, he took it upon himself to confer again with Moore, then draft with him the text of the contract outlining the novelist’s own terms for forwarding to London. Although slight changes in this version probably indicate that Moore had provided some feedback, on November 16 Colburn accepted what Cooper quite literally had dictated to him (see LJ 1:166–67). Some later slippage occurred in their dealings (see LJ 1:184–85), but the arrangement held.26 Meanwhile, production of the book in the newly complex manner proceeded, albeit with some slippage of its own. Within ten days of sending Colburn the draft contract, Cooper shipped the first three Bossange sheets to Bradish, for forwarding to Philadelphia. He promised further copy every other week, but owing to some problem at the Lachevardière shop, no more followed until December, when Cooper, informing Carey and Lea that the “Printers are just getting right,” sent both them and Colburn a large new batch of proofs (LJ 1:168, 182, 184).27 All this time, Cooper had been very much engaged in writing the book, as his early December letter to Carey and Lea indicated: “I expect to do something in the last volume” (Bossange’s third)—that is, to bring the life of Natty Bumppo to a dramatically satisfying close under the arching prairie sky (LJ 1:183). This decision was prompted not only by the evident trajectory of the book’s aged “trapper,” but also by the author’s increasing sense (first tentatively expressed to Colburn in October) that this novel, combined with The Pioneers and The Last of the Mohicans, would “form a complete series of tales, descriptive

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of American life” (LJ 1:167). He echoed this statement ten days later in writing Carey and Lea, suggesting in both instances that it would be a good idea “to print and sell separately” this “connected series” (LJ 1:168) “under some taking, general title” (LJ 1:167), especially since the two earlier books were virtually out of print by now.28 Although Cooper’s own work on The Prairie in Paris progressed steadily, writing of course was work, and absorbing as such. He thus explained the brevity of a note to Bradish in August by gesturing toward the unfinished project: “I have so much to do with my pen, per force, that I can make no great figure at letter-writing” (LJ 1:155). Despite the lightness of his tone, there is a hint of concern here with the emotional cost of creativity—a cost Cooper felt all the more because of his lingering ill health. He had never fully recovered from the mysterious fever that laid him low in the summer of 1823 or the heatstroke that followed soon after, worsening its effects.29 Even though he sought, with mixed success, to avoid company and stay close to home in Paris, he had been suffering “wretched colds” since arriving, his wife wrote her sister Martha in November, and at that time looked worryingly “thin and pale” to her.30 Nor did the trouble end with the approach of winter in the smoky French capital. In February 1827, Cooper himself confessed to Cmdre. John Rodgers, then with the U.S. Mediterranean squadron, that his condition had been shaky since arriving in Paris (see LJ 1:198); on New Year’s Day, when he did venture out into society, he came down with another cold, which laid him up for six weeks, a setback he mentioned to his old New York friend Mary Jay when writing her in March (see LJ 1:200). All of this may have slowed the pace of his literary labor, if it did not stop it completely at times. Perhaps, though, his own experience of mortality lent Cooper some insight into the terminal fate of Natty, and in that sense hastened or at least focused his work on the book. It is even possible that the decision to “do something in the last volume” may have arisen from Cooper’s perception that “something” might be done to him by the forces writing his personal story. In any case, not until the beginning of March 1827, by which point the composition of the book seems to have been at last finished, was Susan able to write her sister Caroline that her husband was “much better,” even a “little fatter.” If Natty Bumppo had not survived, Cooper had.31 Even at that point, Cooper still had many things to attend to in order to finish his present labor. As late as the start of April 1827, he was still dickering with Gosselin about Defauconpret’s translation of The Prairie (of which the author had “not seen a single page”) and about a proposal from the previous September concerning rights for the earlier translations. And there was a question, raised by Gosselin, about how Defauconpret should render Natty’s last word in the book: “Here!” (PR Bos 3:307). Cooper replied: “As to the word, present”—the

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French term the translator had chosen—“you must decide for yourself. In the original no note is needed—‘le voic[i?]’ ”—that is, “me voici”—“sounds better to my ear, but as it is a thing altogether of familiar life, the word which conveys the idea in the most familiar manner is the best, provided it be not vulgar” (LJ 1:211–12; italics added). By this point, the translation was clearly complete and Gosselin’s typesetters must have been very close to finished. His answer to Cooper does not survive but can be inferred from the second-to-last page of his edition, which renders “Here!” as “présent!” but then adds the following note: “Here! Ici! Me voici!”32 Cooper was at least on the spot and able to deal with such issues, even if Gosselin seemingly kept him out of the loop until the last possible moment. With Colburn the distance was greater, and various troubles soon arose. Cooper tried to accommodate the Londoner by sending duplicate sheets as needed. When Colburn nonetheless kept complaining, Cooper threatened to let Bossange, who would be ready to publish by April 10, precede the English edition, an eventuality that would seriously weaken Colburn’s copyright. Cooper was not looking for a fight, however, so once he learned from Moore the date when Colburn would be ready (April 21), he arranged for Gosselin’s translation to appear on the twenty-fourth and Bossange’s edition on the twenty-fifth. Carey and Lea, owing to adverse Atlantic winds that slowed proof shipments, would not be able to follow until May—Cooper thought May 10, but another week beyond that date passed before The Prairie came out, in an edition of five thousand copies, in Philadelphia (see LJ 1:212–14; S&B 48; PR CE xvi). By that point, Cooper’s plan for managing his career from a distance, and deriving more proceeds from his works, clearly had worked. The difficulties had been minimal and the rewards substantial.33

Encounters and Entanglements Paris in these busy first months offered many benefits but also challenges. On an early November day in 1826 when Cooper was about to leave his lodgings on an errand, he heard a coach come in at the gate. The girls’ school had very few visitors; the Hôtel Jumilhac’s other tenants, on the fourth floor, never had callers, at least not ones arriving by coach. Cooper therefore had the immediate impression that the newcomer intended calling on him. He paused momentarily and listened, then saw “a large, heavy-moulded man” disembark and come over to the building’s entry. From his perch above the ground-floor entrance, Cooper could see that the gray-haired newcomer limped a bit, using a cane. He vaguely recognized but could not immediately identify him. As the coach pulled away, Cooper therefore resumed his descent. The “old man” entered, crossed to the

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stairs, and began ascending with “a good deal of difficulty.” When the two met on the staircase, they paused to scan each other’s faces, then bowed and resumed their separate walks. Just as Cooper was about to go out, he stopped to look back at the stranger, who had struggled up to the first landing and, turning there to mount the next flight, glanced down in turn. The visitor then suddenly asked, “Est-ce monsieur Cooper que j’ai l’honneur de voir?” Cooper replied, “Monsieur, je m’appelle Cooper,” and the other man shot back a simple, “Je suis Walter Scott” (LJ 1:169–70; GF CE 149–51).34 Cooper rushed back, ran up to the landing, and shook Scott heartily by the hand, expressing the honor his fellow author was paying by the visit. For a time, they stood there talking, Cooper in English and Scott in French: “Well, here have I been parlez-vousing to you,” Scott at last apologized, “in a way to surprise you, no doubt; but these Frenchmen have got my tongue so set to their lingo, that I have half forgotten my own language” (GF CE 150). Switching to English, the two authors slowly mounted to the third floor, with Scott on Cooper’s arm, for it was harder for him to climb than Cooper expected (Scott had suffered from polio in his youth, the reason for his habitual cane). As they proceeded, Scott paid Cooper a compliment that derived from his amusement barely two weeks earlier at seeing Edward Fitzball’s topsy-turvy stage version of The Pilot at the Adelphi in London. While at the theater, Scott had laughed at the way Fitzball “turned the odious and ridiculous parts . . . against the Yankees themselves” (see JFC:EY 645n19).35 But now, clearly with Cooper’s novel in mind, Scott confided that he understood the American’s patriotic impulses: “ ‘I’ll tell you what I most like,’ he added, abruptly; ‘and it is the manner in which you maintain the ascendancy of your own country on all proper occasions, without descending to vulgar abuse of ours. You are obliged to bring the two nations in collision, and I respect your liberal hostility.’ ” Soon, Scott conceded something else: “I am afraid the mother has not always treated the daughter well.” Perhaps England felt “a little jealous” of the rapid growth of the United States (GF CE 150).36 Soon the writers, arm-in-arm, arrived au seconde, where, to shorten the distance Scott had to walk, Cooper took his guest immediately to his library. Sitting and talking for nearly an hour, the two got on very well. Scott asked Cooper for a copy of The Last of the Mohicans, but the American had to admit that he had none with him—indeed, that he “did not own a single volume of anything” he had written.37 To this, Scott responded with a laugh. He said he “believed that most authors had the same feeling on the subject.” As for himself, he “would as soon see his dinner again, after a hearty meal, as to read one of his own tales when he was fairly rid of it.” As this comment suggests, Scott was relaxed and humorous. When the conversation turned to their common publisher in France, Charles Gosselin (through whom Defauconpret published translations of both

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men), Scott punned on his name, expressing the hope that this gosling would lay both novelists some golden eggs (GF CE 151–52; LOM HE xxvii).38 Beyond the banter, they also broached a more serious subject. Scott was in grave financial difficulties at the present, as Cooper knew through an April letter from Henry C. Carey, and had come to the French capital at the end of October in search of fresh anecdotes for his multivolume biography of Napoleon, on which he pinned much hope.39 Cooper had learned quickly of Scott’s arrival and, concerned about his personal crisis, had already written him a now-lost letter (see LJ 3:319) about how he might profit from American editions of his works, thereby prompting Scott to come calling. The two writers agreed to discuss that question further during breakfast the next day, Saturday, November 4, at Scott’s hotel. Then it was that they went over in detail the most salient points of what Scott mentioned in his Journal as “the American attempt.” Scott was indeed in desperate straits. He had learned, beginning in the middle of the previous January, that he was financially ruined. The general collapse in 1825 of the English publishing market, and of the English economy overall—sixty banks and an untold number of businesses had failed then—had taken down Constable and Co., Scott’s publisher. This catastrophe most immediately cut off Scott’s income; moreover, since he had been accustomed to use his advances from Constable to pay for the operation of the printing firm Constable used, James Ballantyne and Co., of which Scott was then the primary financial backer, his own business and personal failure seemed inevitable. Scott’s liability amounted to more than £130,000.40 Cooper hoped that Scott might receive at least some of the American proceeds from The Life of Napoleon, which Carey and Lea would issue the following summer. At first Scott was willing to entertain the idea, confiding to his journal, “I may as well try if the thing can be done.” At the same time, he had doubts. He emphasized, apparently sincerely, that profits from the States would have to come from sharing the publishers’ current earnings: he did not want American readers to suffer increased prices.41 Scott may also have been worried about signing over literary rights to a third party, as Cooper proposed. And, lawyer and judge that he was, he ought to have had second thoughts about Cooper’s view of U.S. copyright law—as in fact Cooper himself soon did. Cooper at first assumed that “Copy Rights might be obtained by an English subject for the same work both, in England and the United States” (LJ 1:170–71), meaning that Scott’s American assignee could register his new books in the United States and then secure payments from publishers there and convey the theoretically substantial sums to Scott. After initial discussion of this scheme with Scott, Cooper went back to the 1790 U.S. copyright statute, which was to remain in effect with minor changes until the first significant revision in February

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1831. This law, he found, protected the rights of two groups of “owners”: the authors (as long as they were citizens or at least actual residents of the United States), and such other citizens or residents of the country to whom the copyright in those works was legally transferred (by their citizen or resident creators) via purchase or other means. These provisions meant that Scott, either in his own person or via transfer to an American, could not secure U.S. copyright.42 When Cooper revisited Scott on November 6, they discussed other means of securing American earnings for him, and Cooper later pursued the question with Carey and Lea, but without success (see LJ 1:171).43 This first of various encounters Cooper had with Scott touched, albeit incidentally, on a much larger issue. Whatever the financial promise of Scott’s current literary project, its subject was another reminder of Napoleon’s hold on the European mind. In Paris Cooper found many others, some of which closely entangled him. On Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814, the Bourbon pretender, Louis XVIII, had been invited to return and assume the throne, thereby undoing much of the legacy of revolution and empire alike. A hastily drafted charter had set up a weak ministerial form of government and established a house of peers and a chamber of deputies but brought neither closure nor fresh beginnings. The first elected deputies in fact included many Napoleon loyalists. With the king on the throne but the emperor’s spirit alive in the legislature, the reestablished monarchy was marked by what a pair of recent historians have called “paternalistic anarchy”: the king had technical legitimacy but lacked real authority. The awkwardness ended when Napoleon’s sudden return forced the king’s flight to Ghent in March 1815, but the emperor’s defeat at Waterloo on June 18 left France occupied by a million foreign troops. The second Treaty of Paris, signed that fall, sharply reduced their number, but not until 1818 did the last of them leave.44 Even with Napoleon gone, France remained dangerously divided. Louis XVIII returned in July 1815 to a capital in which various parties and factions were jockeying for dominance. The royalists, who mostly supported restoring the Bourbon dynasty (though not necessarily Louis XVIII), had their own internal divisions: the most doctrinaire of them, soon known as the “ultras,” in fact were determined to use the current instability to undo all the results of the French Revolution. On the other hand, the liberals, including the marquis de Lafayette (who at first supported the restoration but gradually moved leftward), increasingly hoped to erect a republican state on the ruins of the empire. Between these two poles was a weak center that usually could not hold. The reinstalled monarch, the fatuous brother of Louis XVI, hardly could make a decisive break from the nation’s deeper past. He sought most of all to keep power in his own hands. Largely out of concern over the ultraist backers of

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his younger brother and heir apparent, Charles, comte d’Artois, he nominally committed himself to parliamentary institutions. He set up a quick series of constitutionalist governments headed by relatively moderate men, including Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1814–1815), Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (1815–1818), and the lawyer and judge Élie Decazes (1819–1820). Torn between competing forces inside and outside the legislature, these governments successively failed to map a plausible way forward. Indeed, when Richelieu returned briefly with a second government (1820–1821), as a concession to the rightists it included the reactionary Jean-Baptiste, comte de Villèle, ultraist leader in the Chamber of Deputies, who himself took over as prime minister in December 1821. By contrast with all his predecessors since 1815, Villèle showed remarkable lasting power: neither the king’s death in 1824 nor the foreseen accession of the comte d’Artois as Charles X could topple him. As a consequence, Villèle remained in power until the beginning of January 1828, when Cooper was about to leave the country for an extended visit to England.45 At that point, a new left-of-center government led by the minister of the interior, Jean-Baptiste Sylvère Gay, vicomte de Martignac, was created to appease the liberals, so bolstered by the late 1827 elections that even ultraist Charles X was cowed. Martignac still remained in power when Cooper returned from England in May 1828 and when he and his family left France for Switzerland (and thereafter Italy) two months later, for what proved to be a two-year absence. On the novelist’s departure, French political affairs hardly lost their hold over him, although he was somewhat insulated from the country’s endless series of crises and alarms. Eventually, as we shall see, he rushed back to Paris in August 1830 once news of the latest upheaval, the July Revolution, resulted in the abdication of Charles X and the ascension of Louis-Philippe to the throne as a constitutional monarch. Here indeed was a new act of the play, though one that soon took several distressing twists.46 This very brief summary will suggest that French political affairs never proved easy during Cooper’s stay, a point that the July Revolution merely reinforced. He had come to Europe with a well-developed political sense. He knew not only where he stood in terms of U.S. party politics, but also how he felt about his era’s larger theoretical questions, whether raised in France or England or the other countries he visited or (as with Poland somewhat later) engaged from a distance. A republican in both senses of that term, he remained tied to the fragment of the old Jeffersonian Democratic Republicans then represented by DeWitt Clinton; at the same time, he consistently favored the abstract rights of the people over the claims of the privileged orders at home and abroad, for which reason he had already become (as had Clinton) a supporter of Andrew

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Jackson, though hardly an abject one. Jackson was complex, but his championing of the ordinary citizen—white and male, we today rightly emphasize— seemed like a bold progressive move at the time, especially against the background of European backsliding and the rise of moneyed interests in the United States. Settled as Cooper’s own views were by 1826, at first he resisted the pull of French political forces. His studied neutrality derived partly from the necessities of his nominal position as U.S. consul in Lyons—and his sense that foreigners had no right to involve themselves in the internal affairs of their host countries. In part, however, he simply preferred maintaining his artistic and personal independence. He was not so much detached from European politics as, in an artistic sense, “above” the fray. His initial wariness is not immediately evident today because most of what he wrote about the European years was retrospective. When producing the books now called Gleanings in Europe (1836–1838), he rarely dramatized the sometimes substantial difference between his early and late perspectives. Although he packaged those books as collections of actual letters written on the spot to correspondents in the United States, in reality (as we shall see in more detail in the sixth chapter) they were total fabrications. The distinct evolution of Cooper’s social and political views while abroad was thereby obscured. On his arrival in France, Cooper hardly was ignorant of what had happened there across the previous half century, or of how European social elites organized things for their own benefit. Specifically with regard to France, moreover, many of the changes sketched above had been duly reported in New York’s newspapers during Cooper’s residence there.47 Yet nothing had prepared him for the thick fog cloaking the Parisian political landscape in 1826, and at first he tried not to notice it. He did not ignore politics—he hardly could have, given his involvement in diplomatic events. But he tended to broaden his view whenever possible, writing about his Parisian outings like a novelist rather than a political creature.48 The shift in Cooper’s political viewpoint, which only gradually occurred, had much to do with his relationship with one of the key liberals in France, the marquis de Lafayette. Lafayette partly disabused him of the amusing surfaces he first encountered in Paris and eventually led him, to some extent against his will and better judgment, into the thick of French affairs—and into considerable difficulties in Europe and eventually in the United States as well. Lafayette had worked behind the scenes to cut short Napoleon’s rule (especially in the notorious Malet conspiracy of 1808) and often served as a rallying figure for antiBonapartists. He longed for the return of “Liberty” and therefore allowed others to use his name in their subsequent abortive strikes against the empire.

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Then in 1814, distressed over the foreign invasions that followed Napoleon’s first abdication, he convinced himself that the Bourbon Restoration offered the best chance for the liberal cause and therefore supported Louis XVIII.49 When Napoleon returned to France the following year mouthing quasi-liberal assurances, Lafayette temporized in the interest of preserving the recently enacted charter and its guarantee of parliamentary governance. Although he rejected Napoleon’s offer of a peerage in the upper chamber, he agreed to stand for a position in the elections Napoleon called for the new lower chamber. But at bottom he distrusted Napoleon, whom in his Memoirs he would call “the cleverest and most inflexible enemy of liberty.”50 In actuality, although Lafayette later sought to obscure both his actions and his motives at this time, he seems to have been planning a coup d’état against the emperor should Napoleon avoid or defeat the allied armies massing in Belgium. In the now transformed Chamber of Representatives, the Napoleonic body to which he had been elected and that was turning against the emperor (and therefore wished to choose Lafayette as its leader), Lafayette warily watched his opportunities and played whatever games he could in the interest of liberty but also of himself. After Waterloo, Napoleon rushed back to Paris, poised to dissolve that chamber and the peers and again assume the mantle of dictator. It was at this point that Lafayette, rising amid the other representatives, openly opposed Napoleon and urged staunch defense of the Revolution’s legacy. His prescient call for the emperor’s abdication was followed the next day by Napoleon’s decision to step aside in favor of his four-year-old son, for whom he wished a regency to be established. The two chambers instead arranged for a provisional government that had no tie to “Napoleon II” but that also excluded Lafayette. The involvement of Lafayette in the “hundred days” left him subject to suspicion, as did his recent intrigues as well as his unclear personal intentions and ambitions. Soon, however, he used his ties with Napoleonists and monarchists alike to forge a new movement of “Independents” whose primary interest lay in opposing the Bourbons and constructing a new French republic. Lafayette accepted the Second Bourbon Restoration as long as Louis XVIII shared power with an elected chamber of delegates, but his eyes were on the future as well.51 This is not the Lafayette whom Americans of Cooper’s era celebrated at such events as the Castle Garden fête in September 1824, as I suggested briefly in my first volume (see JFC:EY 445–46). He clearly harbored other, deeper aspects. He came to the United States that year not merely to honor America, for instance, but also in the hope that he might gain leverage in France by stirring up American feeling on critical European issues (and by basking in the personal glory of his many public acclamations). Lafayette had pushed the ultraist Villèle government hard in 1823, so hard that he lost reelection to the Chamber of Deputies the

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following year. He now looked to the United States as the scene of previous triumphs where, awkwardly freed of public duties in France by his electoral defeat, he might gain support for his larger liberal agenda at home and across Europe. The triumphal tour was hardly just a sentimental journey; it was deeply and persistently political. The U.S. government, in conflict over such European issues as France’s invasion of Spain on behalf of the latter’s beleaguered Bourbon monarch, and the uprising of the Greeks against Ottoman domination—not to mention possible European interventions in South America—was similarly torn over the meaning and indeed wisdom of Lafayette’s visit.52 Opportune as it was in terms of the approaching anniversary of the American Revolution, the tour could not be confined to its nominally memorial purpose. The Frenchman’s very invitation had been a subject of considerable debate, and even once it was issued, as historian Sylvia Neely has argued, its meaning continued to shift for his supporters and his opponents alike. Not only did events rush on; Lafayette’s much-delayed arrival came at a time when the invitation’s original context no longer existed. Uncertain about what stance to take vis-à-vis Spain or Greece, U.S. politicians handled Lafayette as both a symbol out of the past and a problem in the present.53 During Lafayette’s visit, Henry Clay, who had been speaker of the House when the invitation had been extended and who succeeded John Quincy Adams as secretary of state in March 1825, expressed concern that the Frenchman’s resumption of his oppositional stance on returning to France might reflect poorly on the motives of his transatlantic hosts. Clay therefore urged the old general to spend his remaining days “in dignity and tranquility, abstaining from public affairs, and most cautiously guarding against giving the least ground for the imputation of his being concerned in any Conspiracy.”54 Albert Gallatin, U.S. minister to France from 1815 to 1823, had then found Lafayette so “very ungovernable in all that related to petty plots” that during the U.S. tour he also counseled him, “in the most forcible manner,” to avoid all intrigues on his return to France in 1825.55 Such interventions were not isolated acts. When former senator James Brown replaced Gallatin in Paris, he found French views of the invitation the United States had extended to Lafayette quite mixed, as he soon explained to President James Monroe.56 Then when Lafayette ’s return to France was imminent in 1825, Brown similarly wrote Clay that he thought the tour had damaged relations with France. Brown, long a Democratic Republican, was so concerned to abstain from “taking any part” in French politics that he strove to stay away from all the liberals with the single unavoidable exception of his friend Lafayette—all the more reason for him to monitor Lafayette ’s behavior and urge “retirement” on him. For the year following his tour, Lafayette ’s quietude called forth repeated messages of satisfaction from Brown to Clay. Just

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when Cooper was crossing the Atlantic, Brown thus wrote of Lafayette: “As far as I can learn he has followed the good advice he received from his friends at Washington and takes no active share in politics.” That fall, after Cooper had become an intimate of Brown and he and Lafayette had begun their relationship, Brown added: “Our friend Lafayette seems to have profited by the advice of his friends in Washington—He has been very quiet and consequently very happy since his return from the U[nited] States.” Brown was obviously “very happy,” too.57 Ensconced at La Grange following his U.S. tour, Lafayette appeared like the ideal elder statesman—seemingly inactive and therefore not embarrassing for his American allies. When, however, he was urged to stand for the Chamber of Deputies in the spring of 1827, Minister Brown was alarmed about his possible return to public life, writing, “He can do no good and may involve himself in unprofitable disputes and enmities.” To some extent, Brown’s concern was indeed for Lafayette’s own good. When he won the 1827 election, the minister thus wrote Clay that Lafayette would be “exposed to great obloquy and vexation.” He added: “He openly calls himself a Republican, and I cannot perceive what business a Republican can have in a Chamber of decided Royalists.” Yet this change also had clear implications for the United States, and for U.S. interests, too, as Brown’s indirection in raising it to Clay suggests: “The hatred felt in relation to him in certain quarters may possibly react a little on his distant friends but this is a delicate subject and must be passed over lightly.” That subject had to be avoided, in all likelihood, because Brown was not certain that his communications with Clay were completely secure, either in Paris or in “distant” Washington.58 Lafayette was unquestionably an idealist who often risked much for what he believed in—though not always with a reasonable prospect of results. The quality that worried the U.S. government in the wake of the 1824–1825 tour may have been akin to a bothersome trait discerned in Lafayette by a friend, Achille de Broglie, who passed some time at La Grange following Lafayette ’s exclusion from the regency in 1815. Broglie, who was the son-in-law of the celebrated Madame de Staël, once a close associate of Lafayette, faulted Lafayette as a kind of political narcissist: “If he was to be loved, M. de La Fayette had to be loved for himself alone, which, however, was easy, since there was no advantage in being one of his real friends. He made no distinctions excepting between those who repeated, and those who did not repeat, whatever he himself said. He was a prince surrounded by people who flattered him and robbed him.”59 Even more insightful was the similar description left by Charles, comte de Rémusat, the husband of one of Lafayette’s granddaughters, of the way in which Lafayette controlled conversation in his chateau: “Everything was subordinated to him.

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. . . Everything was affectionate, courteous, engaging, calm, because he was all that himself, and naturally so; foreigners fell into step and adjusted, not only their opinions and their conversations, but even their gestures and voices to the customary usage and tone of the house.” Talk with Lafayette, Rémusat concluded, “obviously lacked the diversity” that “free opinions and characters” would produce. Hospitality at La Grange could be a form of indoctrination and ideological formation.60 In due time, it would prove close to that for Cooper. Lafayette had written the novelist on July 24, 1826, the very day Cooper had rented the Jumilhac quarters. The statesman, resident then at La Grange, was very generous in reaching out so quickly. He furthermore expressed regret that their contact during the U.S. tour had not led to greater intimacies and invited Cooper to visit his country estate as soon as convenient (see CORR 1:100).61 Cooper was flattered by the attention and answered immediately, but he begged off visiting until his family was permanently settled. In fact, he was not to visit Lafayette at La Grange until that fall, by which point Lafayette had already come calling on the American in Paris, embarrassing Cooper by his own delay (see LJ 1:153, 162).62 Perhaps Cooper’s tardiness was owing to incidental causes, but it is also possible that he had picked up, from Minister Brown or others in the U.S. mission, some sense of the deeper purposes in Lafayette’s hospitality, which concerned his own political fortunes and Cooper’s potential to improve them. Sometime that fall, the statesman thus invited the novelist to write the semiofficial chronicle of his U.S. tour. Before this point, Lafayette’s secretary, Auguste Levasseur, was expected to produce the narrative—as he eventually did. Just when Cooper arrived in France, however, Lafayette and Levasseur appear to have suffered a falling-out, leaving Lafayette concerned to find a substitute.63 In a January 1828 letter to Charles Wilkes, Cooper reviewed his own negotiations with Lafayette on the subject: “it is now more than a year since La Fayette manifested a strong desire that I should write some account of his reception in America. The good old man was so frank, and showed, mingled with his acknowledged personal interest, so strong a desire to do credit to the country, that I scarcely knew how to resist him” (LJ 1:242). Here was an instance of the pressure to conform that Rémusat described. Cooper finally resisted the Frenchman by writing his own book rather than the one Lafayette wanted. He did not wish to produce “a tame and monotonous account of La Fayette’s visit,” Cooper retrospectively told Charles Wilkes in that January 1828 letter, for that would put the marquis—we may add the author, too—“at fault.” Instead, he eventually proposed a compromise: he would “attempt a sketch of the U. States which should, from time to time,” touch on some of the “striking incidents” of the tour. That book’s key purpose would be to correct European errors regarding U.S. political and social realities, errors stemming from

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distrust of republican institutions (LJ 1:242). Instead of writing in his own person, as Lafayette’s proposal entailed, Cooper inserted a “frame” into the book (as Lafayette himself termed it in February 1827—CORR 1:119): this involved inventing an imaginary nobleman (“the Count,” otherwise known as “the Travelling Bachelor”) who visits the United States and sends letters to five friends back home. The device allowed Cooper to simulate—or fabricate—the responses to the United States of a reasonably observant and open-minded European. He thus could take up Lafayette’s request but in his own, prudently fictional way. As Cooper actually wrote Notions of the Americans (not in fact begun until the fall of 1827) he tried to shift attention toward general issues. He did not completely ignore Lafayette or his visit. But in that regard, one might think of the book as similar to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead—not because it shares Tom Stoppard’s absurdist spirit but rather because, as in that play, the nominally key figure in the action mostly remains offstage: Notions thus focuses on an obscure European tourist (that unnamed bachelor “Count”) and his equally obscure American guide (“John Cadwallader, of Cadwallader, in the State of New-York”—Notions 1:iii) rather than on Lafayette. While Cooper did seek to address the vexing question of Lafayette’s role in the French Revolution and his current reputation in Europe at large, questions that probably had arisen for him only after his arrival in Paris, for the most part he confined the general’s appearances in Notions to those few ceremonial occasions in the United States of which he himself had been an observer: the arrival of the Cadmus in New York waters on August 14, 1824, which Cooper must have witnessed (Letter 4); the Castle Garden fête on September 14, which Cooper helped arrange and on which he reported for the New York American the next day (Letter 11); and the general’s visit to Washington, D.C., in February of the following year, during which Cooper, there to witness the runoff between Jackson and Adams in the House of Representatives on February 9, must have failed to detect Lafayette in the House gallery, then saw the Frenchman later at the president’s house, where his fictional Count accordingly is happy to discover “the smiling features and playful eye of La Fayette” (Notions 2:183).64 Cooper tested and violated the limits of his personal knowledge in giving Lafayette even this modest presence in the book. His treatment of the voyage up the Hudson immediately after the Castle Garden fête in Letter 12, for instance, had no basis in Cooper’s own experience. In Notions, the Count and Cadwallader join Lafayette for this trip on the steamboat James Kent, stopping at West Point and several other sites en route and freely interacting with the Frenchman. To the contrary, Cooper himself had stayed in New York and written his Castle Garden report for the American at this juncture. His fictionalization of this trip in Notions is interesting for two reasons. First, it shows Cooper’s lingering wish

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to satisfy Lafayette’s hopes for the book by touching on some of the “striking incidents” of the Frenchman’s tour even when Cooper himself knew nothing about them firsthand. Second, we may assume that in this instance Cooper’s knowledge came at least in part from Lafayette and perhaps Levasseur, a point that casts some light on how Cooper actually put the book together in France. Although Cooper surely had followed contemporary press accounts as the Hudson River trip took place, it is clear that he owed his overall sense of this episode to the retrospective coaching of the two Frenchmen. Even so, his rendering of it was creative in ways that no record left by Lafayette or Levasseur themselves might lead us to expect.65 Lafayette’s presence in other parts of Notions also involved rather complicated maneuvers. His visit to the federal capital in Cooper’s second volume is a case in point. Here one can discern, by a careful study of the records of Lafayette’s experiences in and around the capital, how much cut-and-paste Cooper engaged in while writing the book. He has had the Count and his American guide part company with Lafayette’s entourage in Albany, following the September trip on the James Kent, at the start of Letter 14 (Notions 1:241). As the Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern pattern takes over, Cooper’s book splits off from the plot line of Lafayette’s tour to follow his own humbler characters as they wend their way (to Cooperstown, among other places) on an itinerary that seems contrived to remove them from the stage of the Frenchman’s public performances: theirs is an anti-Lafayette tour, so to speak. At last, however, after the two fictional friends have finished with New York State, visited New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and then Maryland, they wind up in Washington, where they observe Congress and meet President Monroe. The book’s resulting subtreatise on the U.S. government early in the second volume, part of Cooper’s tribute to Lafayette as the chief French expounder of American republicanism, at last reconciles the two threads of action in Notions. Even so, because Cooper did not know enough about the complex itineraries Lafayette followed, in the Washington section of Notions he conflated various elements derived from Lafayette’s nine separate visits there, often confusing the record. By that point in the book, Lafayette has become a fictional character of sorts, the worthy companion of Cadwallader and the Count. And Cooper has in a very real sense evaded the statesman’s control.

Escape That evasion required care. Cooper on his own visited Lafayette ’s estate at various points over the fall of 1826 and into the spring of 1827, but for Lafayette this was not enough. He repeatedly invited the Coopers to relocate to La Grange

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or its vicinity, evidently in the hope that, whatever “American” book Cooper did write, he himself could indeed manage the effort. Although Cooper enjoyed the generous hospitality and rural charm of La Grange, by early March 1827, when Cooper was about to leave Paris in Lafayette’s company for yet another trip to the latter’s estate, his wife confided in her sister Caroline that moving into La Grange was “of course out of the question.”66 One assumes that she thought it would represent too obvious an imposition on the residents of the chateau. But there were other objections as well—one probably being the close, scandalridden relationship Lafayette had with the young Scottish socialist and reformer Fanny Wright, who had lived at La Grange before and, as luck would have it, came back unexpectedly in the summer of 1827, when the Coopers would have been present if they had accepted the invitation to stay there themselves.67 Once they turned down his invitation, Lafayette tried to persuade the Americans to rent a nearby estate called Le Breuil belonging to the famous ballerina Emilia Bigottini. Lafayette contacted her through mutual acquaintances and reported to Cooper that, while it was not officially on the rental market, she would let the estate out to him for the proper fee. Lafayette also supplied detailed information about the property and soon wrote to his son George, then at La Grange, to investigate further (see CORR 1:125–26).68 Reasonably enough, the Americans wished to see Le Breuil before committing themselves. In April they therefore went to La Grange for a two-night stay. If they even saw Le Breuil, however, they did not like it as a possible summer home.69 Instead, they kept exploring the capital’s broad outskirts. One day, in a sweep of the area north of Paris, they paused in the “small, dirty, crowded and unsavoury” village of St. Ouen (as Cooper first thought it), and, passing through a coach gate, entered into the “spacious and extremely neat court” of a big old stone mansion that quickly won their approval. Long since demolished, the structure was owned at the time by textile manufacturer (and Lafayette friend and political ally) Guillaume Louis Ternaux. Renting it allowed the Coopers ready access to the city across the summer, something essential to the novelist’s work. And the Ternaux property had many charms regardless of its mere utility. Walled in on the front and sides and enjoying a steep backward view of the Seine and the countryside northwestward, it offered both privacy and a splendidly expansive vista. Increasing the property’s inherent delights was the exceptionally accommodating manner of its landlord. Ternaux, a great breeder of merino sheep and cashmere goats whose textile mills supplied the French with fashionably lush fabrics, threw open to the Coopers his famous ornate grounds at the nearby chateau as well (GF CE 191–93; see GR CE 82).70 The harsh first impression of the little village beyond the walls faded after the family settled in. What eventually intrigued Cooper was less the grand

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views, to be sure, than the humble actuality of village life—the washerwomen busy in the river right below his own terrace, for instance, chatting and joking and splashing away three days a week; or the respectful, orderly crowds of Parisians of modest means who came out on Sunday to enjoy the countryside (see GF CE 193–94). Cooper was not holed up there, to be sure. He visited Paris on many occasions to attend to various matters in the capital. On July 4, he thus helped organize a gathering of some eighty American exiles and French sympathizers at the Cadran Bleu, a restaurant some blocks north of Place de la Bastille (see LJ 1:222). The guests included not only U.S. minister James Brown but also Lafayette, his son George, and Levasseur. A key moment was the tribute, initiated by Lafayette and seconded by Brown, to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both of whom had died on this American national day the year before. After that, a volunteer arose from the floor to toast “American Literature.” Cooper acknowledged the tribute with “a neat and handsome address,” then drank to “the happy return of all present to their homes at some future day.”71 The novelist must have made other social trips to Paris across the St. Ouen period, while some of his Paris friends, including Minister Brown, came out to see the Americans at their summer lodgings (see GS CE 9). And Cooper also went farther afield. In August and then again late in September, young William reported that his uncle was about to make the long run out to La Grange by himself—and that, on his return, “we are going [there] together.”72 Cooper’s first duty at St. Ouen was nonetheless to his pen. While there, he grappled for one thing with a recent article in the Revue Encyclopédique by the Swiss-born economist Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi calling for the United States to abolish slavery and embrace the liberated blacks socially as well as politically. This article may have been brought to Cooper’s attention through Sismondi’s friend Lafayette, perhaps during the July 4 celebration. In any event, in response Cooper penned what is his first separate statement on the festering issue. His primary motivation aside from wishing to accommodate Lafayette (if that hunch is right) seems to have been an instinctive recoil, similar to that which was to motivate Notions of the Americans, from the metropolitan habit of condescension toward transatlantic life. Cooper certainly did not yet have any systematic position on the issue of slavery. That lack of a decided view made him, on the one hand, take pains not to offend Sismondi personally. On the other hand, he took offense at Sismondi’s posture and wished to make it clear that such European thinkers too often prescribed solutions to American problems without a due regard for the actual contexts in which those problems existed. On the specific question of slavery, Cooper felt that abolitionists such as Sismondi failed to acknowledge Europe ’s complicity in introducing slavery to the United States or its continuing profit

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from slavery in the remaining European colonies. In the second paragraph of his article, Cooper thus followed Jefferson’s lead: “It should never be forgotten that the U. S. of America, when colonies, protested against the introduction of slaves, and that the grievance was one of the reasons for the Declaration of Independence.” He likewise insisted, later in his reply, that Europe was even now hypocritical and self-interested on the matter. Sismondi had asserted that the United States, if it ended slavery, would merit “l’estime du monde.” On this point, Cooper replied at some length: “This is a remarkable admission for an European to make to an American. It is, in substance, telling him, ‘we have done a wrong by our injustice and cupidity which we expect your justice and disinterestedness will repair. . . . [W]e expect from you, so much better are you than ourselves, that you will put your hands into your own pockets and strip yourself of more than half your personal property . . . in order to effect this humane object. The penalty is the forfeiture of our esteem!’ ” Slavery and all its woes, Cooper went on in his final paragraph, had been “inflicted by Europe on America.”73 While such arguments were not uncommon at the time, and Cooper certainly had his point about the profit Europe derived from slavery, by 1827 blaming Europe no longer was a powerful defense of American practice. Furthermore, the obliquity of that move should already have been obvious to Cooper. Similarly, when he claimed that in their material condition American slaves were “better off ” than “the lower order of the European peasants,” we must doubt whether he knew enough about the true condition of either group to draw such a comparison, which was invidious in any case.74 On the other hand, Cooper hardly apologized for the fact of slavery or supported its continuance. His position on the question now, as later, was that slavery was “an evil,” and one that should be eradicated, although he concluded that it was “an evil which [was] much easier to remedy in theory than in practice.” He accordingly sketched the more cautious but still forward-looking positions he would develop in Notions of the Americans the next year. In particular, he celebrated the gradual changes that had already removed slavery from “ten out of fifteen of the original states” (counting Vermont and Maine, now separate states, as virtually among the original colonies), and he confidently noted that emancipation “had been gradually going south.” Finally, “on the subject of the amalgamation of the two races,” pushed by Sismondi as the only way he thought the legacy of slavery and the racial differences in which it was inscribed could be handled without the violence he otherwise thought inevitable, Cooper rejected the idea. For one thing, in this relatively quiet period before Nat Turner’s bloody 1831 uprising, he thought Sismondi overstated the threat of violence. But he also thought that the proposal for intermarriage was another instance of European interference in

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matters that were more complicated on the ground than from a distance. To deflect the proposal, Cooper countered that white Americans were as little likely to marry across racial lines as Europeans did across their rigidly enforced class boundaries. And, even as he noted that “it is difficult to write intelligibly on the subject . . . without giving offence,” he threw the question back on Sismondi and his liberal European friends: “such philanthropists in Europe as are single and wish to form one of those matrimonial connexions to which M. Sismondi alludes, have it easily in their power to do so.” Whatever the ills of slavery, meddling by outsiders did not alleviate them. Neither, though, did such articles as Cooper’s.75 He was in any case fairly new to the game of public controversy, to which in coming years he would devote much time, thereby becoming more nuanced and incisive. For now, he happily abandoned direct political discussion for fiction as the stay at St. Ouen lengthened. In October 1826, with the first parts of The Prairie finally at the printer’s, he already had begun hinting about his next novel to Henry Colburn. It would be “nautical,” he asserted, adding that he personally had never been “satisfied” with The Pilot, his first, shore-hugging nautical tale (LJ 1:167). By the following April, just when the question of summer lodgings had come up (and The Prairie was ready to appear in London, Paris, and Philadelphia), Cooper had finished the first third of what he then was calling “Red Rover,” which he was confident would come out that fall at the latest (LJ 1:214–15).76 In June, once settled at St. Ouen, he was urging Charles Gosselin to have the translator commence work on it (LJ 1:219), and soon afterward, estimating that two-thirds of the writing was done, he dispatched the first volume (in perfected proofs) to Carey and Lea. Another ten weeks, he then estimated, would see him to the end (LJ 1:221). This was efficient labor indeed, and although Cooper’s prediction was somewhat optimistic, his use of Bossange ’s proofs made the process relatively smooth. During his Paris visits, he kept materials moving with minimal interruption from his desk at St. Ouen to Bossange and his printer (Lachevardière once more), and from there to his various international partners.77 Cooper must have found The Red Rover the easiest book he had written so far. With Carey and Lea handling his American business, aided by his friend and advisor Bradish, Cooper was spared the earlier worry that had kept him juggling old books as he wrote new ones while still in New York—as well as the constant concern about how he might pay for a new book if, as had happened with Lionel Lincoln (though at Charles Wiley’s cost rather than Cooper’s), it fell flat. Most of all, although the production system he had set up with The Prairie and was now using a second time for The Red Rover was not perfect, it substantially simplified his life in France, freeing him to follow his inspirations with more energy.

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The action of his eighth book owed various debts to Cooper’s recent experience and to his present situation outside the French capital. The 1826 Atlantic crossing clearly suggested all kinds of incidents and details for The Red Rover. A thunderstorm that had struck while the Hudson scudded along the south shore of Long Island, illuminating the night sky with a “wild, unnatural lucidity,” provided memories Cooper tapped in imagining the squall that strikes the Dart and the Dolphin late in the new book (GF CE 7; RR CE 412–13). Moreover, as the Cooper Edition points out, virtually “every major emphasis” of Cooper’s account of his family’s 1826 passage—“the confusion of the departure, the burdens of command, the anxious interest of a trial of speed with another vessel”— finds its counterpart in the imagined voyage of the Royal Caroline once the novel’s action leaves Newport (RR CE xix). The departure of that vessel, as late as the fourteenth chapter, seems forestalled longer than we might expect, given Cooper’s wish to improve on The Pilot. Something of a brake seems to have operated on his imagination as he worked on the book, a foretaste of a general problem that visited him as he undertook his next two books as well. The decidedly American novelist, no longer in America, had improvised a means of production that ingeniously reduced his dependence on the publishing situation in his homeland. Yet severing the emotional ties to his native ground proved harder: it is as if the blue water denied for so long to Harry Wilder represented the universe of possibilities lying before Wilder’s creator, a universe daunting as well as liberating. St. Ouen, giving Cooper a certain insulation from Paris when he wanted it, may have eased the problem. Probably by early May, while still in the city, he had reached the point where the Royal Caroline is about to leave Newport behind. Then, just as the family moved to St. Ouen, he plunged back into the project in earnest, committing vessel and story alike to the sea. By the end of the first week of July, Cooper wrote Bradish that it was “more than two thirds written”—that is, probably up to chapter 22 (LJ 1:221). The freedom of St. Ouen and the open independence of the book’s fictional sea do seem subtly linked. Cooper’s recollection of the dirty foreground of the street scene in St. Ouen, followed by the almost magical discovery of the pleasures of Ternaux’s property, suggests an analogy with his emerging discovery of the power of the imagination unaided by, or at least unrestricted by, the claims of actuality—the claims of a spot such as Newport most literally and of the United States more generally; but also, one might speculate, those of the always political Lafayette, whose influence could be happily avoided (except during the various trips to La Grange). The green seclusion at St. Ouen, with the “little blooming paradise” of its enclosed grounds, as his daughter called it (RR HE xi), marked the inner state Cooper occupied as he wrote, the literary territory he

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was learning how to create rather than merely explore. Suitably, as his daughter also recalled, it was in the summer house or garden pavilion at St. Ouen, standing in one corner of the unwalled back terrace and looking down on the river and its washerwomen, that the novelist worked on the book. With his traveling desk open, he might write the fantasy of the pirate tale into being as, across the Seine, his eyes momentarily scanned the spectacle of “a wide reach of fertile plain, bounded by fine, bold hills, teeming with villages and hamlets,” a landscape that hovered beyond him like a potent emblem of the world from which he, like his characters, enjoyed a fruitful if temporary detachment. The chattering, singing washerwomen, as Susan noted, worked in the muddy river but never failed to bring back the whitest of linens. Cooper himself, secure from the muddy flow of reality outside the rented mansion, performed a similar cleansing magic with his pen (RR HE xii). Tendencies present from the book’s start anticipate that transformation, as if Cooper had prefigured the proper conditions of the tale ’s very creation even as he worked in Paris. He was, of course, a stranger in a strange land, speaking (and writing) French more and more and carrying on with diplomats and other foreigners from all over Europe. Most of his characters in this novel play a game of masquerade with unflagging attention from the first page. Costuming is part of it, as we see from the book’s opening scene in a dockside tailor’s shop, where a farm boy is waiting for craftsman Hector Homespun to finish “the garment . . . with which [the boy] intended to adorn his person in an adjoining parish, on the succeeding Sabbath.” Clothes do not so much make as conceal the person in this novel; rarely can we escape the issue. The Rover himself soon enters the action wearing “a high conical hat,” rakishly tilted to one side, along with “a ridingfrock of light green, breeches of buck-skin, high-boots, and spurs” (RR CE 22, 38). As if the Rover’s bizarre garb cannot of itself obscure his maritime proclivities, he claims to be a lawyer in the pay of the Crown. Meanwhile, his opposite number, Harry Wilder, dresses down, attempting to conceal his Royal Navy commission under a common sailor’s rough disguise. Elsewhere in the book, we encounter an officer of the soi-disant “marines” on the Rover’s vessel who enters the action as a kind of ghostly automaton (“A straight, rigid form slowly elevated itself through the little hatchway, very much in the manner that theatrical specters are seen to make their appearance on the stage”); who, when he talks, hardly opens his mouth; and who is “enveloped in an over-coat, which, while it had something methodical in its fashion, was evidently intended as a sort of domino,” a hooded cloak worn at masquerades (RR CE 83). Add to this the figure of “Roderick,” the cross-dressing girl who appears as the Rover’s “cabin boy” but really is his lover—or the whole masquerade of the Rover’s ship as a slaver and then, after it puts to sea, as a Royal Navy cruiser—and one has a novel

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in which, as in The Last of the Mohicans, tricks of concealment, shape-shifting, and revelation possess curious potency. A dispossessed son of wealth turned novelist could well appreciate such sleights of identity. The same pattern reappears in the multiple names many characters assume, or the different parts they assume and drop as need and whim dictate. Harry Wilder himself is Henry de Lacey, son of Mrs. Wyllys, who is in actuality not only the widow of Paul de Lacey but also the sister of the Rover—that is, of Walter Heidegger, alias Bob Bunt, Tarry (tar-coated) Bob, the Red Rover, the green-suited lawyer. One is almost in the world of Herman Melville ’s Confidence Man here, a reference that ought to remind us that this novel was among the first Cooper sea tales Melville read.78 There is even something of this theme in the list of ridiculous Puritan cognomens Cooper introduces at one point in the story as proof of the oddity of New England culture: Earthly Potter, Preserved Green, Faithful Wanton, Upright Crook, Relent Faith, Wealthy Poor (RR CE 136). And the obsession with names in the book almost turns right-angle to the page and, aiming outward, threatens to target the author’s own world. Susan DeLancey Cooper, privy to the book as her husband wrote it, understood the inside joke of her husband’s trickiest use of verbal disguise, even as it somewhat ruffled her: come November, she was writing her sister Martha that once the book appeared the young girl back in Mamaroneck would “be startled . . . in seeing some of the names.” Susan herself had chided her husband on the subject of the “De Laceys,” so near was the name to her own family’s. But he had defended himself by insisting that “it was a pretty name, and common enough too not to make it look at all pointed.” To Susan it might seem very pointed indeed, but for Cooper the “De Lacey” mask stressed how easily (and teasingly) the “real” could be transformed. The same unfolding lesson came to him in the garden pavilion and the secret landscape to which it gave access—and from the sea that he imagined, page by page, in the book’s latter part.79 Some of the afflatus Cooper seems to have felt as he finished the novel derived from—or at least was also expressed in—his growing physical wellbeing over these months outside Paris. For Cooper was on the mend (temporarily, as it proved) even before decamping from the city. “You will be glad to hear,” Susan wrote Caroline at the beginning of March, “that my dear Husband is much better[.] I think he even begins to grow a little fatter”—“quite fat,” as she put it for Martha seven weeks later. Madame Lizinska de Mirbel’s portrait of him, done in February or early March 1827 and known from an 1831 engraving (see LJ 2: plate VI), shows the dramatic effects of Cooper’s ill health during the previous several years. Remarkably thin, he seems to have aged well beyond the five years that had passed since John Wesley Jarvis painted the full-faced, ruddy portrait that is the best known early depiction of Cooper (see JFC:EY, cover).

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By 1828–1829, when first David d’Angers and then Horatio Greenough produced their busts of Cooper, however, some of the old look had returned. Especially in Greenough’s, the face (revised in fact as Cooper continued gaining weight) shows pudginess in the cheeks and about the mouth. That may have been partly the result of Greenough’s intentional naturalism, but even in that case he must have been modeling the head as he saw it.80 All the fresh air of the countryside in 1827 contributed to Cooper’s improving look. Barely two weeks into the St. Ouen rental, his nephew was declaring that the “country” was doing him “a great deal of good.”81 So hearty did Cooper himself feel by early fall that, abandoning Susan and the cabriolet altogether, he began mounting its horse and riding about the fields alone. By the last weeks of the fall, with The Red Rover done except for the final issues of distribution, Cooper was enjoying this new freedom thoroughly. He ranged west as far as “the heights behind Malmaison and St. Cloud,” where, because the royal family summered in the latter place, he regularly witnessed its members “dashing to or from town, or perhaps passing from one of their abodes to another,” with a great show of horses and equipage (GF CE 203). But his favorite course on the mare took him southeast from St. Ouen toward Montmartre, and then up the latter from the rear to the windmill-crowned summit. From there, he could survey the whole of the city once more, all of it overwritten with historical associations. “Looking down into the fissures between the houses,” as he later had it, “men appear the mites they are, and one gets to have a philosophical indifference to human vanities, by obtaining these bird’s-eye views of them in the mass.” From these thoughts, when necessity required, Cooper could wind down the hill and, joining the carriage road leading into the city, become one of the mites himself, bound on his little literary errands. But he was, in all of the resulting scurry, aware of a general improvement not just in his finances but also in his health. France had made for a significant difference in his overall condition (GF CE 199).82

C H A P T E R

T W O

London and the Alps

C

ooper’s next literary venture was Notions of the Americans, begun at St. Ouen but not taken up in earnest until the family returned to Paris at the very end of October. From his suburban retreat on the twentieth of that month, Cooper had informed Colburn’s Paris agent Francis Moore of the book, describing it as “a good deal advanced” and optimistically predicting it would be “ready in February” (LJ 1:228). By the third week of January 1828, however, he had composed only twenty-three of the eventual thirty-eight letters. Moreover, a major shift in production methods promised to further complicate the process. In November, Carey, Lea and Carey were assuming that Notions would be printed in France, like Cooper’s recent books, but long before Cooper finished writing he decided to take the manuscript to England—along with his wife and son Paul—in order to see it through the press there while also enjoying an extended visit to the British capital.1 Among the effects of this change were alterations in how the book was to be handled in France. There was still to be a French edition of the new book—translated, however, not by Defauconpret but rather by the young American Harriet Preble, an associate of Lafayette whom Cooper also knew through her naval ties. There would not, though, be a continental edition in English. Hector

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Bossange therefore was not needed as an intermediary; indeed, as it turned out, Cooper now was done with Bossange altogether. Colburn would suffice for sales on the Continent.2 The idea of visiting London had arisen independently of Cooper’s literary work. At the close of November 1827, Susan thus wrote her sister Martha that she and her husband were talking “a little of going to London for three weeks or a Month in the spring” for a pleasure trip—probably an indication that they thought Notions would be finished in France before then. Susan wished very much to see more of England, especially during London’s “high season,” and to spend more time with her sister Anne Charlotte, news of whose plan to marry the aged British inventor John Loudon McAdam had caused some uneasiness for Anne’s siblings.3 While these other purposes persisted, by the time the trip actually began late in February, it was the unfinished manuscript of Notions in the couple’s baggage that provided the main rationale. Business did not trump pleasure, but certainly constrained it. The travelers included not only Paul and his parents, but also his nursegoverness (a Swiss native named Lucie who had been hired in Paris in 1826), as well as the amanuensis William and a young American girl of the Wiggin family bound for London whom the Coopers took in hand at the last minute at the request of her relatives.4 Going by way of Calais to Dover, and from there through Canterbury, they came to London on a windy and chill February 29 and went to Mrs. Wright’s Hotel, on Adam Street, Adelphi, where the novelist had stayed solo almost two years before. The group put up there until they secured, on March 5, two floors of a modest house at 33 St. James Place, near Pall Mall and the Green Park and not that far from either St. James’s Palace or the still evolving structure later known as Buckingham (see GE CE 5–20, 28; LJ 1:428). Here the intense work on Notions of the Americans was quickly resumed. When news of the January 30 death of Susan’s father reached the couple during their first week in London, via newspaper accounts and then letters from the States, Susan’s wish “to be retired” disrupted their social plans (GE CE 24) but reinforced Cooper’s own necessity.5 He certainly had a great deal to accomplish, and since the original intent was to remain in London only six weeks (see LJ 1:248), during which Cooper was to finish the manuscript of Notions and see the project far enough through the press to leave the last details to Henry Colburn and his printers, time was always pushing. While Cooper was at work on the book, his attention was fully absorbed. When a famous Londoner paid an unexpected visit at St. James Place “about a fortnight” after the Americans moved there (that is, during the week of March 17), Cooper was so busy writing that when his hired servant, “Little Smith,” announced a visitor—it was the philosopher-novelist William Godwin—the

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name at first failed to register with Cooper. Literally lost in his work, he thought Godwin “some tradesman,” and only when Godwin himself broke the silence after the two writers had stared at each other for “near a minute” did Cooper figure out who the “quiet little old man” was. Then they spent an hour discussing “America, her prospects, her literature, and her politics” before Godwin took his leave and Cooper apparently went back to his writing desk (GE CE 24–25). Although Godwin was a key figure in spreading the “Americomania” that, as Wil Verhoeven has argued, united radical Britons in the immediate wake of the French Revolution—and he therefore was a living link to the transatlantic version of Cooper’s own republicanism—references in Godwin’s diary to the three visits the men exchanged reveal little about what exactly their discussions of “America” covered.6 Cooper liked Godwin almost immediately, in large part because he did not preach his beliefs, but exemplified them: “I cannot recall any one, who, on so short an acquaintance, so strongly impressed me with a sense of his philanthropy; and this, too, purely from externals, for his professions and language were totally free from cant.” And yet on America in particular the aged radical was a great disappointment. Given all Cooper knew of “the liberal tendency of his writings”—from his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Things As They Are; or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) especially, one must think—he surely expected that he and other Americans of his generation could still count on Godwin’s goodwill and support. “Philanthropy,” in other words, would entail a particular regard for the rising republic. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Indeed, it was impossible “to believe that [Godwin] entertained a favorable opinion of the country, . . . for prejudice, blended with a few shrewd and judicious remarks, peeped out of all his notions. . . . Mr. Godwin so clearly viewed us with any thing but favourable eyes, that I could not consider him a friend. He regarded us as a speculating rather than a speculative people, and such is not the character that a philosopher most esteems” (GE CE 25–26).7 That distinction was not without its merits, as the son of land developer William Cooper surely recognized. And yet on the subject of America Godwin’s was by this point simply another of the many European voices—especially English voices—that the novelist was seeking to answer in the book that he was at this very moment writing. That the book was to be called Notions of the Americans makes his later use of that term for Godwin’s prejudices (“all his notions”) especially suggestive. It is doubtful that Godwin affected Cooper’s book in any specific way; he certainly is not mentioned in it. But that Godwin— even he—shared the cynical views Cooper was increasingly fighting in Europe makes the encounter an intriguing part of the new book’s immediate context. What could Cooper do in the face of such things but turn back to his manuscripts and his proofs? This was now the way he could fight back.

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Doing so consumed much time and energy. That was partly because Notions represented a kind of writing Cooper had not really produced before, as I have already suggested with regard to Lafayette’s influence on the book. The plan for a visit lasting only six weeks therefore was revised repeatedly. Cooper wrote his Philadelphia publishers on March 11, after a few days of work, to indicate that he would begin sending sheets from the two-volume Colburn edition to them by the first of April—at the time he wrote, the first volume was “now in press” (LJ 1:258). By April 3, the initial volume in fact had been completed (see LJ 1:260), though not its front matter or, apparently, two longish end notes. Cooper did not, however, forward a proof set of this volume to Philadelphia until May 6, evidently because he was still revising the sheets. And even then, he noted that the “dedication, preface and some notes [were] yet to come” (LJ 1:262). As late as April 23, when Susan Cooper wrote the couple ’s daughters, she acknowledged that their planned departure had been delayed because it had proved necessary “to correct the proof sheets to the last page.” But she also indicated that even this late her husband had not yet composed that last page: the second volume, she added, was “half printed, and nearly written.” Worse yet, writing the girls again on May 19, about a month later, Susan raised concerns about the effects of her husband’s intense labor on his physical condition: “if you saw my dear Children how fatigued he is some times with writing, and his hand trembling with the agitations of his nerves, you could not desire him to hurry more than he has done.” Under this pressure, imposed by both the book’s schedule and its intellectual and political challenges, Cooper did not finish his writing until May 20.8 The day before that, in fact, he still had sufficient copy in hand that he read “several extracts from the work now in press” to a young Jared Sparks, then passing through England on his way to Germany. Even later, moreover, revising the last proofs and readying the final package for Carey, Lea and Carey absorbed some of Cooper’s attention. Only on May 28, almost two months later than originally intended, could he and Susan and the others leave London (see LJ 1:264).9

“That Old Sinner England” But that of course was at the very end of the English visit. Well before the critical last phase of Cooper’s work on Notions of the Americans, he sought to divert Susan from the sad news about her father’s death by arranging several excursions in the capital and the adjoining countryside. They went on March 10 to nearby Westminster Abbey, saw the Tower of London, and at some point went farther afield to Windsor Castle. They visited Richmond Hill and Twickenham on April 26 with the writer Gulian Verplanck’s brother Walton (a DeLancey

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cousin) and apparently went to Oxford and Cambridge shortly thereafter.10 Toward the end of March, they also visited Hoddesdon, just north of London in Hertfordshire, where Susan’s sister Anne and her new husband, John McAdam, resided and where the young women’s parents had once lived, too. Susan went ahead, followed by her husband, who traveled from London with McAdam, a ride warmly recalled in Cooper’s English Gleanings. The issues that had strained relations between the sisters were mostly, though not perfectly, resolved by this visit (see GE CE 250–55).11 Social calls in the capital were likewise numerous, although Susan, owing to her self-imposed mourning period, mostly stayed put at St. James Place while her husband made them. The many invitations he received for dinners, breakfasts, soirees, and other affairs came in response to his established literary fame but also out of curiosity about who exactly “Cooper the American” was. Such outings provided material for both Notions and the English Gleanings. Some contacts Cooper owed to an English friend in Paris, William Robert Spencer, who was responsible, for instance, for the warm hospitality extended to Cooper by poet Samuel Rogers (see GE CE 24).12 A wealthy banker’s son and art collector who happened to be Cooper’s neighbor just around the corner at 22 St. James Place, Rogers was widely known as the author of the late neoclassical poem The Pleasures of Memory (1792). Perhaps his greatest fame, however, was as a host and conversationalist. At his expansive dinners, and especially at his breakfast table, were assembled the famous writers and artists of his day. Known for his keen wit and kind manners, as well as his liberal politics and his high regard for America and Americans, Rogers proved a perfect host for Cooper. He furthermore introduced the novelist to many other figures in London society. As a result, Cooper called Rogers’s house “positively a nucleus of the very best literary society of London,” and he owed to his meals there his introduction to such men as the reformer, future prime minister, and historical writer Lord John Russell and the historian and political thinker Sir James Mackintosh, both of whom frequently crossed Cooper’s path thereafter. On a single occasion, Rogers likewise connected him with five or six other interesting figures, including expatriate Canadian painter Stuart Newton, Irish playwright James Kenney, and poet Henry Luttrell (see GE CE 27, 49–52, 60). He also met, at a single dinner, “Lords Lansdowne, Grey, and Gower”—a trio of Whig reformers, the second of whom was to become prime minister in 1830—plus the painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, with whom Cooper had a conversation about Stuart Newton’s American uncle, Gilbert Stuart (GE CE 159). On another occasion, the diplomat Thomas Grenville sparked warm memories of John Jay, whom the Briton recalled from the negotiations in the 1790s leading to the unpopular treaty that came to bear Jay’s name (see GE CE 161).13

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It was at Rogers’s house that Cooper may have met William Wordsworth, although the evidence on that question is mixed.14 We know for certain, however, that Rogers twice provided the occasion for Cooper to extend his relationship with Sir Walter Scott. Especially memorable was a dinner in Scott’s honor on April 17. Scott was accompanied then by his son-in-law and future biographer John G. Lockhart, Lockhart’s wife Sophia, and Scott’s other daughter, Ann. The party was filled out by Lord John Russell, sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, the great tragic actress Sarah Siddons, and Anglo-American painter Charles R. Leslie, along with a notorious pair of social wits, Joseph Jekyll and Richard Sharp. Following on this dinner, Scott called on Cooper regarding the estate of his recently deceased wife, a native of Lyons about whose family background the Scotsman thought the U.S. consul for that city could provide aid. Rogers thus helped deepen a friendship begun so warmly in Paris in 1826 (see GE CE 165).15 Cooper’s literary resources in London included other figures he met on his own. Scots poet Thomas Campbell, especially famous in the United States for his often recited and reprinted poem on an American theme, Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), knocked on Cooper’s door early in his stay, about the same time as Rogers. Cooper liked Campbell’s poem, from which he already had drawn three mottoes apiece for The Spy and The Pioneers, and one more for The Pilot. That Campbell was as much of a Whig as Rogers gave Cooper even more reason to appreciate the former’s company, although owing to the failing health of Campbell’s wife at this time, little seems to have come of the opening.16 More significant for Cooper was his contact with the minor poet (and especially translator) William Sotheby, who had reached out to him by March 27. The relations between the two took some time to establish themselves. A prior engagement forced Cooper to turn down Sotheby’s invitation to an April 1 dinner; not until three weeks later, on April 22, was he at last able to go to Sotheby’s house at 13 Grosvenor Street, in Mayfair, a few blocks north of his own lodgings (see LJ 6:299; GE CE xviii). Cooper enjoyed that visit, but turned down a third invitation early in May. Not until Sotheby offered to take the American novelist on a “tour of Hampstead and Highgate,” with calls on the Scots poet and dramatist Joanna Baillie, a close friend of Walter Scott, and on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Sotheby’s own close friend, did Cooper enthusiastically accept the offer. This was not an obligation, but rather a chance to extend his literary reach, and Cooper, as I have argued elsewhere with regard to Coleridge, made very good use of the opportunity (LJ 1:261).17 Even as Cooper enjoyed the experiences figures such as Rogers and Sotheby opened to him in London, he began keeping secret score of English failings visà-vis the United States and its political experiment. The results are especially to

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be found in his English Gleanings, published almost a decade later. One thread there, for instance, concerns the English habit of claiming any famous American as a native of the British Isles. Many were the hints and more than hints that Cooper—or at least his close relatives, including his father—had been born in England. Judge Cooper had never even visited England, but William Godwin for one was convinced that he had known Cooper’s father there (he apparently confused him with London-born actor Thomas Abthorp Cooper, who at one time had lived in Godwin’s house and who had spent considerable time in America; this confusion, in fact, was what led Godwin to call on the American novelist in the first place—see GE CE 25, 310). This mistake about William Cooper was no rare case. Washington Irving was thus said to have been born in Devonshire; Cooper had been asked whether the American naval hero of Plattsburgh, Thomas Macdonough, “were not an Irishman” and had read that “Commodore Rodgers was a Scotch baker.” Indeed, Cooper found a “sketch of a pretended life” of himself informing the world that the creator of Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook was a Manxman (GE CE 230–31). Even at the time of his visit in 1828, Cooper began to weary of other English attitudes and habits. From London early that May, near the end of the visit, Cooper wrote his English-born friend Charles Wilkes: “I cannot say that I am enchanted with polite life, here, though London contains a great many highly intelligent and well bred men” (LJ 1:263). His wife wrote her sister Caroline that same month that he had had “an excellent opportunity of seeing [E]nglish society,” then added, “he does not like it much.”18 Some of the feeling had political origins. To Luther Bradish three months later Cooper himself hinted that England might well “make powerful efforts in secret to divide the States.” America’s natural rise threatened England (as Walter Scott had suggested to Cooper in Paris): “I have had a good opportunity of observing the feeling in England on the subject of our manufactures, and I do not hesitate to declare my belief that, could she exert herself as she would, she would hazard a war with us at this moment, rather than that they should succeed” (LJ 1:287–88). While in London, Cooper showed a tendency to overread passing incidents as hints of deeper social or political truths. He was often the odd man out there, a solitary American exotic for whom national differences seemed to be inscribed in very personal terms: social interactions of individual Britons and Americans, that is, appeared to recapitulate the political history of the two nations, and he was intent on making sure that his country (as embodied in himself ) should not be slighted. He was hardly alone in feeling that way. With Robert Walsh and Charles Jared Ingersoll and James Kirke Paulding, Cooper intended to stand up for the United States in his works and, now that he was here, in person as well. Henry Brevoort, the mutual friend of Cooper and Irving, wrote the latter from

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Paris in 1831 that Cooper’s avowed purpose in The Bravo, his novel of the dark days of the Venetian republic, was to strike “a blow at the aristocracy of England, through that of Venice.” Brevoort added, “He and Paulding will never rest until they have laid that old sinner England upon her back, exposed to the derision of the whole world.”19 Cooper himself wrote Luther Bradish in October 1827, when he had just begun work on Notions of the Americans and had not yet gone to London, that he intended the book “to make Master Bull bleed a little more freely than [is] common.”20 Such an attitude would not necessarily make Cooper a good, or an entirely comfortable, dinner guest. Much was to happen between the English visit and the publication of The Bravo. And Notions of the Americans, the comment to Bradish notwithstanding, was no Bravo. Even so, Cooper had entered London in 1828 under somewhat false pretenses. He was like a political spy, self-commissioned to ferret out instances of English hauteur and hypocrisy. The conflict between his often gracious treatment in London and his prior intent to demystify English society created a dilemma that Cooper’s wife astutely grasped. Writing to their eldest daughter at the end of March, Susan asserted that he was writing Notions “with great spirit,” then added that “the Johnny Bulls” were being “so very civil to Him that I am afraid He will not be able to abuse them, and so the piquancy of his book will be quite spoiled.”21 Jared Sparks wrote at the same time that the English “nobility and men of letters” were “equally attentive” to Cooper—“he is talked about in all circles as a lion.” Yet when he and Cooper crossed paths early in May at the home of the painter Thomas Lawrence, Sparks wrote in his journal, “[Cooper] finds many things to dislike in England, and he takes care to express himself very freely about them.” Later that month, when Cooper read to him from the proofs of Notions, Sparks found its tone “strongly American, if not anti-English.”22 Cooper was writing at cross-purposes here, surely part of the reason why finishing the book was so difficult for him. As he completed work on the project, he softened some of the more acerbic parts, as Gary Williams indicates (see Notions CE xxix, xxxii). For instance, in a passage in which he most directly took up the question of English commentary on American society, Cooper excised two long passages and substituted for them others that were notably more diplomatic and conciliatory (see Notions CE 551, 753–54). Similarly, while his English Gleanings could be curt in handling all sorts of issues between the United States and England, even there Cooper would often go out of his way to specify how well he had been treated by particular English hosts in 1828. Even so, what he published about his experiences in England did not win him many friends there. Many years later, in 1844, Cooper would recall Notions of the Americans as the book in which he “broke ground against English aristocracy and

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in favour of rational democracy” (LJ 4:438). While he successfully avoided Lafayette’s political agenda, he followed one of his own—an agenda that he furthermore enacted as much as he dared in English society. The impressions of discontent he left behind on departing the country were renewed and deepened once Notions appeared. Writing to Jane Welsh Carlyle on July 12, 1828, the socialite Anna D. B. Montagu thus reported snippily of Cooper, whom she must have encountered in London some months earlier, that he was “one of [her] dissappointments [sic].” She had read and very much liked The Last of the Mohicans but found its author “rude, irritable, a very Yankee, with all the little pride of a little mind.” She added, “I felt just as people do, who gaze at a fire-rocket, and think it a Comet, and come in time to have their heads broken by the falling stick.” Not even Montagu, however, was unsympathetic to the position Cooper occupied in London. If she thought him “very much inclined to quarrel,” and even thought that he might have literally “beaten” her (he at least looked as if he “could pinch or bite”), she added that he probably had come upon her just after being “annoyed by some other person.” But annoyed on what score? She went on: “there were five or six professed authors who might have baited him on the score of his Country which Englishmen have a bad practice of doing.”23 The novelist Sarah Harriet Burney went further in Cooper’s defense. Having seen him in society, she found him “gentle and quiet in his manner and tone of voice”—even though “the fine folks, who are making a lion of him for the season, pretend there is abruptness about him.” The problem was with them. They were put off by the fact that he was “not rubbed down to their insipid smoothshilling standard.”24 Not that they did not try to abrade his distinctive features. Some literary figures bore down on him, partly in jest, but partly with more sinister motives. On May 22, toward the end of Cooper’s visit, Thomas Moore went to Samuel Rogers’s house for breakfast. Cooper was not there that day, but talk of him was rife. Sydney Smith “spoke of Cooper, the American writer, whom he had been lately visiting.” Smith remarked on “Cooper[’]s touchiness—his indignation against Lord Nugent for having asked him to walk to some street with him, & on being admitted where [Nugent] went to visit, leaving the republican to return alone—[Cooper’s] rage with the Duke of Devonshire for not returning his visit &c. &c. [Cooper] said that ‘the world would hear of these things!’ ”25 Moore had been among those English writers in Paris who had “held out the Olive Branch” to Cooper (as Cooper put it) the year before (LJ 1:210), but Sydney Smith nonetheless pushed Moore to proceed more militantly with the American in London: he should, as Moore recorded the conversation in his diary, “call him out the first thing I did—for, as it must come to that, I might as well begin with it.”26 On May 27, a day before the Coopers left London, came the resulting duel, with no gunpowder and much pleasure:

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“Breakfasted at Rogers’s, to meet Cooper, the American,” Moore recorded. “Cooper, very agreeable.”27 He was agreeable—that is, good fun—but no pushover. Moore explained by citing a witticism Cooper must have shared with the party. Cooper related the “Anecdote of the disputatious man,” who, when told that something was “as plain as that two & two make four,” replied testily, “But I deny that too: for 2 and 2 make twenty-two.” At this same breakfast, Cooper furthermore charmed Moore with a singularly flattering turn of phrase. He “said one thing,” Moore went on, “which, more from his manner than any thing else, produced a great effect.” It concerned Lady Hester Stanhope, who at one time had occupied a rented house in the Middle East. Cooper stated that he had a friend “who had been well acquainted” with her there; that man had told the novelist “of his having, on some particular occasion, stood beside her on Mount Lebanon”—but “when Cooper came to the ‘Mount,’ ” Moore continued, “he hesitated, &, his eyes being fixed on me, added, ‘I was going to [say] Mount Parnassus,—looking at you.” This was a very finely delivered compliment, just the sort of thing that would assure Cooper of his acceptance, at times at least, in the circles of Rogers and Moore.28 The ability to play such games and be accepted for doing so did not mean, however, that Cooper gave up his identity as an American, and a republican American to boot. Long after leaving London, as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, he kept telling new acquaintances and old what he had not liked about the experience. While Cooper’s feelings on the subject of England had deep roots not only in his visits as a young man on the Stirling, but also in his political anger over the War of 1812, it is clear that the 1828 trip revived and deepened them, making them a key element in his maturing political viewpoint.

Lowlands Once Notions of the Americans was finished, the Coopers were ready to leave for the Continent. At ten in the morning on Wednesday, May 28, they embarked on a well-made but sluggish paddle wheeler, King of the Netherlands, that left London two or three times weekly for the twenty-four- to twenty-six-hour passage to Rotterdam (see LJ 1:264).29 The elongated London stay already had radically altered Cooper’s plans for the rest of the present year. For some time, he had been discussing with his good friend Gouverneur Morris Wilkins an ambitious tour the two hoped to take through northern and eastern Europe—all the way to Krakow and, beyond, to Russia. Susan would stay behind in some never-quite-determined location, perhaps Mannheim (see LJ 1:241–42).30 The plans sounded increasingly definite as the time for the tour approached, but then Cooper began to have doubts and by April 28 abruptly and unilaterally

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called it off in favor of a family adventure. In a letter of that date to their daughters, Mrs. Cooper wrote that all of them would “be very happy this summer in Switzerland, scrambling about among the Mountains, and riding on mules,” and in a postscript Cooper himself urged the girls not to be impatient for their parents’ return to Paris but focus instead on Switzerland—and, after that, on Italy (see LJ 1:262).31 One reason for the seemingly sudden change was “want of time” (LJ 1:263), Cooper explained to Charles Wilkes, certainly plausible given the doubling of the London stay. His wife confirmed this point in writing her sister Caroline on May 1: “He could not finish his book in time to go with Governeur [sic] Wilkins.”32 Cooper also thought that his wife ’s continuing sorrow over her father’s sudden death meant that he should not leave her alone with the children even in France, let alone Germany (see LJ 1:286). And there was a third reason neither of the Coopers overtly avowed. Susan’s comments on how hard her husband had worked on Notions of the Americans in London, and the effects of that labor on his nerves, suggest that he was perilously close to exhaustion. Rushing off with Wilkins across a wide swath of European territory would require more physical stamina than visiting Switzerland, where for the first weeks the Coopers in fact were to retreat to a peaceful house near Bern. With the grand expedition called off before they left London, the Coopers looked forward to a quiet tour of the Lowlands, which in fact would pay the novelist several large dividends. In Rotterdam, they passed through Dutch customs and took a suite looking south over the river Maas or Meuse in the Hôtel du Pays Bas (see LJ 1:264–65; GE CE 308), then almost immediately hired a guide and went off in a carriage to see “all the Wonders” (LJ 1:265). As a sizable urban center, Rotterdam had plenty, from the former headquarters of the East India Company near their hotel to the Groote Kerk. Most important for Cooper, though, was the whole curious “Dutch” scene, which called up boyhood memories, thereby providing hints and motives for later books. As they drove around, Cooper saw “a hundred things that recalled Albany and New York . . . in their palmy Dutch condition” (GE CE 308)—surely the architecture in particular. The idea for the first of Cooper’s Knickerbocker tales, The Water-Witch (1830), probably arose in his mind during or soon after this tour of the Netherlands. Certainly some of what Cooper saw at this time would surface in that sea novel, set in and about New York and New Jersey in the early eighteenth century. In sketching the architecture of New York City at that book’s outset, Cooper thus gestured toward the canal houses of Holland (WW 1:30), and in a later preface he admitted that in giving the rural New York villa of Myndert Van Beverout the Dutch name of “Lust in Rust,” he was recalling the abundance of fanciful names encountered “as one moves along the canals” of the Netherlands (WW CE 7; see LJ 1:267).33

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Very early the next morning, they left Rotterdam by rented carriage and headed not south toward Paris, but north-by-northwest, using a common clockwise route to Amsterdam via Delft, The Hague, Leyden, and Haarlem. Again Cooper’s mind was being stocked with images he would recall as he worked on The Water-Witch and even later Dutch books. Amsterdam was a rich, extensive source, and the route south from there to Utrecht and Antwerp was also illuminating. But it was in the latter “very remarkable” city, as Cooper later recalled (LJ 1:268), that he had a sort of double epiphany.34 The Flemish city offered important instruction on two unrelated issues—Roman Catholic practice and the deeper backgrounds of New York history. On June 4, he visited the spectacular Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal (Cathedral of Notre Dame) in the marketplace a few blocks from his hotel, “one of the noblest Gothic structures on the continent,” according to Edmund Boyce, whose popular Belgian Traveller the Americans had purchased in London. Boyce even devoted one of his book’s few illustrations to the building (plate 1).35 Cooper’s interest in and response to Catholicism first arose here in Antwerp, not only at the cathedral on the fourth of June but also during a visit the next day to a second site. The latter day was, as Cooper noted in his journal, the occasion in 1828 for the celebration of the “Fête Dieu,” the movable feast of Corpus Christi. As the American Protestants were about to leave the city, they witnessed this celebration in honor of the holy sacrament while at another church, the late Gothic St. Paul’s, located to the north of the Hôtel de Ville. Perhaps they went there to honor their son’s name—then chanced upon not only the feast and possibly some street processions, but also the “remarkable Calvaire” in the courtyard of the church (LJ 1:267), on which Boyce offered commentary Cooper may well have shared: “The catholic devoutly crosses himself as he gazes on this frightful scene, and the protestant is not always unaffected.”36 Cooper was certainly moved. Three years later, he was similarly impressed with what he saw of Catholicism in Liège, in the heart of Walloon country, and in his Rhine Gleanings he would give expression to what one might call the Protestant sense of regret or foreclosure: “I sometimes wish I had been educated [as] a Catholic,” Cooper disarmingly wrote, “in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles” (GR CE 105). The second gift from the Flemish city in 1828 was more distinctly secular. Apparently it was near the Antwerp cathedral, in the square of the Grote Markt, that Cooper came across “a fellow vending quack medicines and vilely printed legends,” all the time singing a jaunty song. He was to see the same man at the same spot still hawking his wares and singing the same song on his third visit to the Lowlands, in 1832—despite the intervening revolution. But the really striking thing about the experience was that Cooper was sure he had first heard that

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very song in Albany while attending Rev. Thomas Ellison’s school there in 1801. This memory, unexpectedly dredged up in Antwerp, set him thinking about the deeper history of his own world. Typical accounts of Albany published during Cooper’s life stressed the city’s unmixed “Dutch” background, but that was an oversimplification. Cooper now began to conclude that New York’s first European settlers were not simply “Dutch”: “it is to be presumed that there must have been some colonists from Holland, in a province belonging to that nation,” he wrote in 1836, but by then he believed that many, perhaps most, had hailed from Flanders (GR CE 95). He was certainly correct that, among the diversity of settlers populating seventeenth-century Albany, the Dutch were a minority. One of the earliest group of migrants to land there, historian Charlotte Wilcoxen has noted, had been a group of Walloons from the southern part of Belgium. But Cooper’s ear was especially attuned to the Dutch dialects of Flanders, not the Romance tongue of Wallonia. The song of that Antwerp vendor when Cooper heard him the second time underscored this truth. So far from home, he had surprisingly found rich traces of his own past.37

Mountain Liberty On June 7, the Coopers rushed through a series of French towns (Valenciennes, Cambrai, Peronne, Roye), until at last, on the tenth, the novelist ended his journal of the London trip with the single potent word “Paris” (LJ 1:268). They went without delay to rue St. Maur, where, as Mrs. Cooper’s letter to the girls from Rotterdam predicted would happen, they probably sent up word at the school that someone wished to see “the demoiselles Cooper . . . au Sallon” (LJ 1:266). At the Hôtel Jumilhac, they not only were reunited with the girls—they also, despite indifferent memories of the previous stay in the structure, took lodgings there for the nearly five weeks intervening before they could leave for their summer adventure.38 Cooper lay low in Paris for those five weeks. His name is absent from the records of a Franco-American celebration in which he had joined the previous year—namely, the Fourth of July celebration, held in 1828 not far from the family’s lodgings.39 Given his London exertions and his Swiss hopes, he may have felt unequal to the French capital’s demands, or simply unwilling to engage things he soon must drop. It was only ten days later, on Monday, July 14, that the whole family boarded “a French travelling calèche” just purchased for their next trip. The “moment of glorious anticipation” having arrived, the Americans were “fairly on the road to Switzerland” (GS CE 5–6). Their itinerary would lead to Bern through Neuchâtel, the usual route from Paris at the time and the one that Mrs. Cooper’s distant cousin, Louis Simond,

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had followed during his journey from France to Switzerland in 1817.40 For the most part, the trip passed without notable incident, although in the “ancient, storied capital” of Dijon on July 17 the Coopers came across an uncanny reminder of home (GS CE 10). While in Paris the previous fall, the novelist had seen at Lafayette’s a group of Osage Indians who had been visiting France since August 1827 under the management of their French promoter, a longtime American resident named David Delaunay.41 In the summer of 1828, almost a year into the tour, Delaunay brought them to Dijon, where they apparently stayed, or at least performed, at the Coopers’ lodgings—the Hôtel du Parc— giving the novelist’s family a chance to see them close up. Cooper said little about the chance encounter at the time (just “Osages”—LJ 1:271), but his Swiss Gleanings would report that they were “making a sensation” in Dijon and went on to give “the history of this portion of our red brethren.” He would see them yet a third time in Florence (GS CE 10–11).42 Dijon held other attractions, but Switzerland, ever nearer, beckoned. The travelers crossed the border on July 19 and, road-weary by nine that night, at last stopped in Neuchâtel (see GS CE 21). The next day, a Sunday, they paused to enjoy the place—and wait for the banks to reopen on Monday, so Cooper could get fresh cash for this expensive country (he would later formulate his discovery in French: “Point d’argent, point de Suisse”—“No money, no Switzerland”—GS CE 106).43 On Monday, too, he went to a local bookseller for “maps” and “a copy of Ebel”—Johann Gottfried Ebel’s Manuel du Voyageur en Suisse, in the most recent Paris edition, which was boxed with Heinrich Keller’s Carte Itinéraire de la Suisse. Then, under a gloriously sunny sky, the travelers eagerly left Neuchâtel and plunged “deeper into Switzerland” (GS CE 24, 302n). Their initial route lay northeast toward the lower Aar Valley. Before long they crossed into the Canton of Bern, thus entering the core of the Helvetian Confederation. Not only was the city of Bern the nation’s capital, but the canton, though hardly the oldest, had been admitted as long ago as the fourteenth century.44 As they proceeded, the high peaks of the Bernese Oberland played hide-and-seek with them, until, on mounting the last rise at sunset, they finally gained a full view of the light-bathed Alps. Cooper was overwhelmed: “it occasioned a thrill in my whole system,” he would write—just the sort of effect he had been hoping for while imprisoned in London and Paris. The same view remained before them as they entered the pleasant outlying districts of Bern and went right to the Hotel Falken, on the Marktgasse near the center. This house, reputedly the best in the city, was as full of visitors as most of the others in summertime Bern (GS CE 26).45 Nor was it just the inns that were crowded. Decidedly urban, with a population of slightly more than twenty thousand in 1828, Bern occupied a charming,

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tightly packed horseshoe within a bend of the Aar. A natural entry point for visitors to Switzerland, it was perpetually busy. Some visitors Cooper already knew, including two old acquaintances from Manhattan (and Paris) who had recently gone through the Oberland, Richard Ray and Nicholas Low; they visited Cooper on August 23, prompting him to reciprocate the next day, after which he ran into one of the four Englishmen he had escorted around upstate New York four years earlier—John Evelyn Denison, who with his wife Charlotte was visiting the Continent. Denison had been asking all over Bern for Cooper, who had also seen him briefly while in London the past winter (see LJ 1:246, 292, 359; GS CE 51). Cooper also knew of other friends who passed through Bern, though he did not manage to see them there: Capt. Ichabod W. Chauncey, an old navy friend with whom he had circumambulated Paris in the fall of 1827 (see GF CE 199–203), and a “Mr. O., an old and intimate friend,” probably New York businessman James De Peyster Ogden, with whom he would have many dealings after both men returned home (GS CE 67). Of course the Coopers had not come to Bern in search of old friends, and they did not linger long in the city’s physically (and socially) tight confines, preferring a retired suburban location. They may already have had a notion of where to look, since the property they wound up renting had a curious, if tenuous, connection to their own past. Following Bonaparte ’s defeat at Waterloo, his brother Joseph had briefly occupied La Lorraine, a “pretty country house” north of Bern and across the Aar, in what is now a section of the expanded city named for the old estate (LJ 1:286).46 Cooper had come to know Joseph Bonaparte and especially his nephew Charles Lucien back home and may have learned from them about this particular house (or at least about the rural fringe where it stood). In any case, before the end of July, his family had settled into the “faultlessly neat” stone house, “about as large as one of the ordinary boxes of Manhattan island” (GS CE 33; see JFC:EY 517).47 La Lorraine had many attractions. The novelist’s eldest daughter liked its “quiet” position as well as its linden-shaded grounds and its “little trim garden and half-ruined fountain” (P&P 198). Situated on flat pastureland above the river, the house also had plenty of open space around it. Sue and the younger children could wander a nearby common field, where they played with their hoops and jumped rope and where Cooper spent pleasant hours teaching Paul how to fly the kite he made for the four-and-a-half-year-old (see SFM 70; GS CE 38). And from that same field through the long summer days the Americans had spectacular views of the city to the south and of the Bernese Oberland farther off. More modest pleasures also clustered around the house. To begin with, La Lorraine stood on an active farm. The property belonged to a Neuchâtel nobleman, Count Frederick de Pourtalès, who had ties to Joseph Bonaparte

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through Napoleon’s ex–chief of staff, Marshal Berthier. But Pourtalès (whose son Albert-Alexandre would accompany Washington Irving on the Oklahoma prairies in 1832) had vast holdings elsewhere—he neither lived here nor had anything to do with La Lorraine’s management. Instead, Cooper dealt with a petty nobleman and militia officer by the name of Ludwig Gottlieb Walther, who lived in the next-door tenant house (also large and impressive) and worked the land.48 Walther was more than the property agent for the Americans. He supplied the novelist with much useful information about his canton and the Swiss Confederacy and even led him around the nearby city, of which he was a proud burgher (see LJ 1:285; GS CE 34, 68–69). Furthermore, Walther’s whole family proved “uniformly kind, frank, and even affectionate” to the Americans (GS CE 261).49 The Coopers hardly locked themselves away in La Lorraine. Sue, age fifteen at the time, remembered one customary ride that led over the smooth, narrow lanes nearby, during which the Americans passed neat fields and paused to admire the “cottages, so exquisitely rural and rustic” (P&P 200). At times they wandered into Bern proper, enjoying the views of the Oberland or visiting local sights (the prison, the orphanage, even the churchyards, with their unusually regimented cemetery plots and brass grave markers), or—a favorite occupation of Paul—seeing the famous totems of the town at the bear pit near one of the old walls (see LJ 1:289; GS CE 69; HMR 1:xxiii). Soon they wandered farther away as well. On August 2, a Saturday, a few family members took a day trip several miles north to the “sequestered and insignificant” hamlet of Hindelbank to see the tiny parish church, where someone (perhaps Walther) had told them to search out “a piece of sculpture of rare merit” (GS CE 35–36)—Johann August Nahl the elder’s monument in memory of Maria Magdalena Langhans, the young wife of the church’s pastor, who had died in childbirth in 1751. The monument, in a recess under the church floor, represented mother and infant together bursting upward through the cover of the tomb as the last trumpet sounds (see LJ 1:273). Goethe and many others had visited and written about the sculpture, which was so well-known that miniatures of it had been produced in terra cotta and porcelain and other materials.50 For Cooper, the monument’s powerful conception had even more impact because it contrasted with another funerary sculpture by Nahl in the Hindelbank church, the “large, laboured, and magnificent but . . . tasteless monument” to the local noble family, the Erlachs, whose castle the Coopers passed on their way to the village (GS CE 35; see SGB 476).51 More expeditions soon followed. Although Cooper would find it “dear travelling in Switzerland,” not just living there (LJ 1:286), hardly had the family arrived before he was mapping out several ambitious itineraries. During their

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slightly more than two months at La Lorraine, Cooper and his wife, with Susan and William, undertook a pair of long tours through the Bernese Oberland (August 4–10) and Zürich, the Rhine Valley, and the northern cantons (August 25–September 3). Almost immediately on returning from the second of those trips, Cooper departed on his own for an eleven-day walking tour of the Alps (September 8–18); within a week of returning from that ramble, he undertook a second solo tour, this one lasting seven days and encompassing the Lake Geneva region (September 24–30), partly by boat. In all, the family rented La Lorraine for perhaps seventy-four days. For nearly half that time, Cooper himself was absent on his own or with others. He thereby packed an impressive amount of sightseeing (and vigorous outdoor exercise) into a short period. In his Swiss Gleanings and his journal of the Swiss visit, the fullest he ever kept, Cooper left a rich record of these experiences. On the first trip, begun two days after the visit to Hindelbank, the four travelers moved by road twelve miles upriver from Bern to nearby Thun and from there made their way with a hired guide to Lauterbrunnen, where they could contemplate the stunning Jungfrau and the famous “dusty” waterfall, the Staubbach. From there, the family went up and over the Wengernalp, far above Lauterbrunnen, and passed over the Kleine Scheidegg on the way to Grindelwald, another valley village (see GS CE 44–55). Cooper was fascinated by this towering world’s visual drama but also by the tremendous power evidently at work in it. As he came along the Wengernalp, the “sullen, short and rattling” sound of an avalanche broke like distant thunder (LJ 1:278). He heard similar groanings several more times during his family’s stop at an alpine chalet—and then, as Cooper sat on a rock staring at an overhang on the Jungfrau’s side, he saw a hole open in its white cover and a “speck of snow” tumble out and crash down. Eventually a sound like a gunshot reached him. Next, he saw a dustlike plume rise from that same place, and then more snow flowing like a fluid down the slope, spreading over an open flat area before, entering a narrow gorge, it bunched up and at last plunged over a cliff. Thereafter it hit another flat and spread out again, then clenched itself to push through a second gorge. Finally it went down as far as it could, flattening out on the green of the uppermost reach of pasture. Despite the differences between snow behaving like water and water acting like dust, Cooper thought it was very much like a cataract, even like the Staubbach (GS CE 54).52 This first trip ended when, having gone up and over the Grosse Scheidegg and down to Meiringen, the Coopers passed on to Brienz and Thun and then back to Bern. On their second venture two weeks later, the same four family members set out for a very different loop through Switzerland’s northern limits. Having followed the Aar downstream to its junction with the Rhine at the small Swiss town of Koblenz, they then moved east to Lake Constance, eventually

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returning to Bern in a wide irregular sweep through Zürich, Zug, and Lucerne. Again they interested themselves in the natural landscape and at the end undertook a mountain climb more strenuous than the one from Lauterbrunnen to Meiringen. But Cooper’s musings about nature and its processes now were often displaced by reflections on the cultural, political, and religious differences evident in this section of the country—a theme of considerable importance once he eventually wrote about Switzerland. Like most Americans, Cooper came to Switzerland knowing comparatively little about its cultural or political past. In the United States, Switzerland usually assumed an overly homogeneous appearance as one of the seedbeds of modern republicanism. Jedidiah Morse asserted the point succinctly in the 1826 edition of his school geography: “Each canton is an independent republic.” He then added the corollary—namely, that the Swiss collectively and individually were “fond of liberty.”53 Cooper’s friend William Dunlap similarly emphasized that theme in his 1796 opera The Archers; or Mountaineers of Switzerland, the prologue of which proclaimed: “We tell a tale of Liberty to-night, / How patriots freely bleed, and freeman fight.”54 In the appendix to the published version of the work, Dunlap provided “A Brief Historical Account of Switzerland,” quoting British traveler William Coxe (“I feel great delight in breathing the air of liberty”) and French philosopher Voltaire (“Never did any people combat for their liberty so long, or so bravely, as the Swiss”). Dunlap also quoted New York jurist James Kent’s opinion that “the establishment of the republics of Switzerland and Holland, bears . . . a striking analogy to that of the United-States.”55 Kent himself traced out that analogy in considerable detail. He described the Swiss cantons as having anciently enjoyed local privileges and “charter rights”—some of them even were “governed by magistrates of their own appointment.” In the fourteenth century, however, Hapsburg emperor Albert I, rejecting these rights, “placed wicked and tyrannical governors over them”—much as, to American eyes, British rulers since the Restoration in 1660 had sought to strip the American colonies of their own rights, charters, and privileges. Swiss history, point-bypoint, was the easy prototype of American.56 Other Americans in Cooper’s period, especially those who had actually visited Switzerland, took a more complex view. Closer to his eventual position was that of Philadelphia Quaker Joseph Sansom in his Letters from Europe (1805). Sansom was careful to observe the differences that made modern Switzerland only a rough parallel for the United States. Although he briefly narrated the classic republican story of how the so-called Forest Cantons originally rose up against their Hapsburg overlords, thereby providing “the foundation of the Helvetic Confederacy,” he nonetheless described Switzerland in its recent form

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as a “motley intermixture of aristocratic and democratic Republics, which maintained their independence, and preserved inviolate the advantages—and the defects of their antiquated constitutions.”57 This was an astute, unsentimental view borne out, in the eyes of observant American republicans, by recent Swiss history. Switzerland had gone through profound and at times contradictory political changes in the wake of the French Revolution, changes still being registered when Sansom visited. Indeed, their effects lingered during Cooper’s summer residence in Bern, as the novelist’s comments on subsequent political adjustments were to show. In almost every instance those changes revealed the complexly layered and uneven texture of the Swiss past. “Down to 1798,” in the words of liberal Protestant historian Wilhelm Oechsli of Zürich, “the political institutions of Switzerland were essentially medieval in character, and presented the most amazing contrasts. Side by side with the medieval Landesgemeinden (or assemblies in which every citizen had the right to appear in person) which continued to exist in several of the smaller Cantons, were the leagues, subject to the ‘Referendum,’ of the Grisons and of the Valais; and the civic aristocracies in Zurich, Bern, Lucern, Basel, Fribourg, Solothurn, Schaffhausen, not to mention the King of Prussia in Neuchâtel and the two spiritual rulers, the Abbot of St. Gall and the Bishop of Basel.” Moreover, the “legal position” occupied by various parts of the confederation at the end of the eighteenth century was equally complex: there were “the Cantons or Orte, which were full members, the ‘Associates’ or Zugewandte, and the ‘Allies’ or Verbündete, the two last being, so to speak, half-blood members.” Then there were the Gemeinde Vogteien or “Common Bailiwicks,” which were “ruled as subject lands by two or more of the Cantons together.” Oechsli went on to note, moreover, that within each canton “the most violent contrast existed between the rulers and the subjects.” In the cantons named for their sizable urban capitals, such as Bern or Lucerne or Zürich, “the town was really the sovereign, and looked upon the rural districts simply as subjects held by right of conquest or purchase.” In many of those same cantons, furthermore, “a small number of families had gradually come to monopolise all the offices of State, so that the ‘Patricians’ excluded the ‘ordinary citizens’ from any share in the government.”58 During the Napoleonic era, French radicals had agitated for significant political change in Switzerland’s thirteen loosely unified cantons. They found sympathetic audiences among the peasantry at large and among the inhabitants of the subject districts (and future cantons) of Vaud, Aargau, Thurgau, St. Gall, the Grisons, and Ticino. On the other hand, the Swiss elites resisted the spread of French radicalism and welcomed the high-born refugees pouring out of France. Owing to Switzerland’s strategic value for Napoleon’s continental ambitions, by 1798 it nonetheless fell under the control of his military forces.59

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Pursuant to French dictation, a “Helvetic Republic” was set up that subordinated the cantons to a centralized authority. As Oechsli further notes, sweeping modern reforms soon “made all Swiss equal before the law and abolished all privileges of Canton, class, or person, and all differences between Cantons, ‘Allies,’ and ‘common bailiwicks,’ between patricians and ordinary citizens, between ruling towns and subject countryfolk.”60 But this new republic, poorly financed and disliked owing to its French military backing, experienced a series of coups d’état and several abortive efforts at providing an effective national constitution. By cynical manipulations, Napoleon managed a further direct intervention by his 1803 “Act of Mediation,” which imposed a confederate government that lacked central authority but put an end to the internal subordination of the old “subject districts” (such as Vaud) by creating six additional cantons out of them. Following the “Restoration” of Swiss independence in 1814–1815, those new cantons retained their equality with the old thirteen, and three others were added (Neuchâtel, Geneva, and the Valais). The new cantonal constitutions of the postwar years nevertheless reinstated the lingering feudal arrangements of the pre-1798 era, thus returning much customary power to the ruling elites. “In Bern, Luzern, Fribourg, and Solothurn,” Oechsli observes, “the patricians drew the power again into their hands,” in part by favoring the towns over the rural districts when determining representation in their councils. These reactionary impositions had not been eased by the time Cooper arrived in Switzerland in 1828, meaning that it hardly could be described as a land of “liberty,” as his two-part Swiss Gleanings would strive to make clear. In the wake of the July Revolution in France in 1830, as Cooper would also note, the cantonal constitutions in Switzerland were all rewritten, generally establishing representative democracy as the rule. He took account of such liberalizations in “updating” his narrative in Gleanings.61 It is tempting to portray Cooper as fully aware of this tattered history from the moment he arrived in Switzerland, but he probably was not. He would have known bits of the story already and then picked up more from Ebel and especially Simond, as well as from Jean Picot’s Statistique de la Suisse, published in Geneva in 1819. And it is clear that he began to read even more widely on the subject of Swiss culture and history soon after arriving in Bern. He bought shortterm access there to “a circulating library,” where he quickly set about “devouring all the works on this country that can be had” (GS CE 41). The full range of books he consulted remains unidentified, but they clearly focused on historical, social, and political questions, not on the country’s mountains, lakes, and other scenic features.62 He thus explained in his Gleanings that his studies were meant to correct for Americans’ paucity of information about Switzerland, for, aside from “some vague notions concerning Tell, and a few leading historical facts,” his

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compatriots—and he himself—knew almost nothing of the Swiss (GS CE 41). When he added, a few pages later, that he had learned from his studies at “the circulating library at Berne” about the existence of the “kingdom of Burgundy” and its ancient holdings in what was now the western part of Switzerland, he was indicating the fundamental nature of his reading (GS CE 46). It was his family’s second tour that pushed him to undertake this research. On returning from it Cooper spent his first day back at La Lorraine reading “Picot and Simond,” and conceivably revisited the circulating library while in Bern on each of the following days to find answers to questions raised on the tour (LJ 1:311–12).63 Certainly those questions were compelling. While on the road, for one thing, he kept registering rapidly shifting religious practices of a sort that he had not really seen in Europe heretofore, certainly not in France, and not in the more tidily segmented Lowlands, either.64 Such differences, which had long splintered the Swiss population, were among the most visible signs of the country’s complex heritage. “The manner in which the people are divided into Catholic and Protestant is striking,” Cooper wrote in his journal (LJ 1:294). Americans from the Middle Atlantic region tended to view religious differences in 1830 as the result of personal (or group) choice. At the start of Cooper’s second tour, the contrasts between “rigidly Catholic” Soleure and its Protestant neighbors quickly routed that idea. The many crosses he saw in the former canton disappeared when he briefly traversed a sliver of Protestant Bern, only to reappear when he reentered Soleure. Church buildings and convents likewise abounded in the Catholic parts of the country (GS CE 72–73; see LJ 1:294). Adjusting to such shifts was easy compared with handling the challenges Switzerland presented to American ideas about what we might term the secondary characteristics of religious difference. Seeking to give the landscape more coherence than it actually had, Cooper at first saw villages and farms on the Catholic side of the cultural border as “much less neat” than those in Bern (LJ 1:293; see GS CE 72). In 1830, jotting retrospective notes about Soleure, Cooper described the town as “very Catholic, and not very Swiss,” by which he meant essentially the same thing (LJ 1:294n1). In his early cultural observations, despite the insights from Antwerp, Cooper’s views of Catholicism clearly remained unsubtle.65 Visiting the old German city of Konstanz some days later, Cooper unhesitatingly indulged his Protestant skepticism about its present condition and its infamous church council, which had adjudicated among the competing claims of three men to the papacy even as it ordered the execution of Jan Hus. In some sense, he saw the once large city’s current shrunken condition as the material consequence of its religious history (see LJ 1:297–98; GS CE 83). However, when he left there and went through also Catholic St. Gall, he found that “neat little

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city” so energetic and wealthy that it surpassed even Bern, a fact that clearly challenged his old assumptions. He handled the cognitive dissonance by not directly recording in his journal that St. Gall, city and canton, both were Catholic— he surely knew that, but did not yet know how to square the fact with his prior conceptions. When writing his Swiss Gleanings years later he similarly used the history of St. Gall’s famous Benedictine abbey to deflect the still unanswered questions. The abbey had become a great seat of learning, as Cooper happily acknowledged. With the later emergence of its abbots as princes of the Holy Roman Empire, however, St. Gall exercised oppressive control over local inhabitants. Eventually the latter divided their growing town off, literally and politically, from the abbey—“they built a high wall between the abbey edifices and the town,” Cooper sardonically noted in his book, “most probably to keep the holy celibates at home at night.” That made the townspeople quasi-Protestants, one might say, so that the history of their canton more readily fit American preconceptions. When Cooper visited St. Gall in 1828, the abbey stood vacant, whereas the town was thriving, further proof of his interpretation. A tourist more than a political thinker at that time, Cooper visited the one abbey building that remained in good condition and in use, the large Baroque cathedral. “Describe it,” he had told himself in the journal, which simply called it “superb.” In his Gleanings he indeed described it, but at that time he still sought to square the canton’s history with his own American notions (LJ 1:304; GS CE 94–95).66 Cooper did learn a good deal about religious and cultural history in the intervening years. Sorting out his impressions of Switzerland was rendered difficult, though, by a discrepancy that would have puzzled most Americans— namely, that the cantons most closely associated with political liberty were themselves staunchly Catholic. This fact was far more challenging to American prejudices than the dissonant “neatness” of a Catholic town. Cooper was to spend goodly amounts of time in dominantly Catholic cantons such as Unterwalden and especially Schwyz, whose symbolic importance for the history of Swiss political independence called forth his admiration.67 As will be clear later, the Catholic shrine of Einsiedeln, located in Schwyz, raised complications because with its throngs of believing pilgrims, many of the poorest classes, it was so evidently a throwback, as a Protestant modernist understood the matter, to earlier modes. And yet it stood in a canton whose original resistance to the Hapsburgs made it a potent emblem of modern political values. Clearly, again, not all things an American saw in Europe could be sifted using American screens.68 Although various political considerations arose for Cooper on this second trip, a good deal of it—and especially its ending—focused on nature. This was true in an even more important sense for his solo trip, which began only three days

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after he and the others returned from the St. Gall expedition to La Lorraine. The physical challenge of the family tour had focused on a climb from Arth up and over the Rigi, from which the Coopers came down on the Vierwaldstättersee (Lake Lucerne) and, crossing that, caught up with their carriage and driver, sent ahead to Lucerne. The chosen mountain, close to six thousand feet high at the Rigi Kulm (or summit), was no Matterhorn or Jungfrau, but for Cooper in his current condition it was a challenge, one he had committed himself to face. This would be his boldest venture so far in Switzerland. The crisis that had weakened his health in New York five years before had nearly destroyed him, and the stint finishing Notions of the Americans in London this past spring had threatened a relapse. Halfway up the Rigi, Cooper felt some hint of his old affliction, and after the climb was finished he was deeply fatigued. In his journal that night, weary and ensconced in his hotel room on the Kulm, all he wrote was “Ascent. Rigi Staffe[l]. Glorious view. Ascent” (LJ 1:310). But in writing about the climb in 1836, the nearest parallel to this mountain climb he could find stemmed from the single most intense experience of nature he had had during his youth—the total eclipse of the sun that he had witnessed in Cooperstown in June 1806. In all his life to date, only that event had created an equally deep sense of “admiration and awe” (GS CE 112). It was a mood the novelist had once or twice explored in his fiction—in his depiction of the wild Hudson River’s energy in The Last of the Mohicans, or of Natty’s “Leap” in The Pioneers, or of the foaming ocean in The Pilot. Here, though, it was a mood given flesh in his own experience. In fact, he later referred to Natty’s beloved perch above the Hudson, Pine Orchard, in attempting to describe the extraordinary visions he had from the Rigi (see GS CE 113). Cooper’s business with the mountains hardly had ended there. In the afternoon on September 8, having said goodbye in Thun to several family members who had accompanied him there by carriage, Cooper took his six-foot irontipped alpenstock in hand and, giving his rucksack to an unnamed “old man” who had long worked as a mountain guide, boarded the boat for Neuhaus, from which the two walked to the “small gloomy looking village” of Unterseen (GS CE 132–33; LJ 1:312).69 There they spent the night before heading off early the next day, via a passage up the Brienzersee to the first big challenge along this route—the Brünig Pass. They mastered that, then came down right into Lungern, spent a night in Sarnen, and on the following day (Wednesday, September 10), embarked on the many-armed Vierwaldstättersee. Cooper had no goal in mind but instructed the boat crew to row him out to the middle, off Küssnacht am Rigi, where he could contemplate the possible routes and pick one (see GS CE 133–49; LJ 1:314–19). He at first wanted to go down all the way to Flüelen, at the lake ’s far southeast corner, and from there hike into the Grisons, the mountainous and at that

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time relatively remote Romansh-speaking area where Chur and Davos are located. A sudden windstorm on the lake nearly swamped the boat, however, forcing Cooper (then at its tiller) to “reluctantly [give] up the point” and retreat back up the lake to Brunnen (GS CE 157–58).70 From there, he and the guide walked to (and right through) the village of Schwyz, then proceeded north to the site of the horrifying 1806 landslide that sent the side of the Rossberg down to flatten much of Goldau and several other villages, killing almost five hundred inhabitants (see GS CE 158–65). Lake and mountain alike gave lessons in the power of natural force. Contemplating the site of this disaster, as Cooper did on September 10 and again the next morning, also gave him solemn preparation for his visit, beginning late on the eleventh, to the canton’s famous Abbey of Einsiedeln. There Cooper encountered masses of impoverished Catholic pilgrims converging to worship before the Lady of the Hermits. Still working through his mixed impressions of Swiss religion, at first Cooper was more than usually skeptical. “Great air of faith in something,” he wrote acerbically in his journal, “though in most cases every appearance of excessive ignorance.” To be sure, amid all he found objectionable at Einsiedeln (“Dirt, disease, and ignorance”), he was not unmoved by the power of belief in the people. He and his “dogged protestant” of a guide had a lively conversation about the failings of the Catholic Church, but after dinner Cooper went back by himself into the church, which was thronged with the faithful. Some things touched him, such as hearing the pilgrims’ prayers once they entered, or just their look as, still bearing their heavy packs, they lay down to pray for an hour without stop. But the memory of the Goldau disaster, along with his own Protestant upbringing, steeled his will: “I was the only human being,” he wrote in his journal, “who did not seem to pray” (LJ 1:324–26). What toughened him was all he had seen and felt and remembered on this remarkable day—for, as he would put it in his Swiss Gleanings, he could scarcely recall one filled with “stronger or more varied sensations” (GS CE 167).71 Cooper returned to the church the next morning to find “priests saying mass and a crowd of pilgrims.” Even after he left, walking north on foot with his guide, he found more groups of pilgrims “carrying on their backs and heads heavy burthens, praying aloud” (LJ 1:326). Coming from the Tyrol and Germany, not just Schwyz, they were all pushing on to the shrine past the stations of the cross that punctuated the various routes to Einsiedeln. Cooper was confronting a kind of Catholic peasant culture he had not met before, and it took him time to adjust to it, a process made much harder by the fact that Einsiedeln stood in the heart of one of the most republican of the Swiss cantons. His own background had taught him nothing of such knotted attitudes and practices.

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Cooper was happy to leave religion behind, at least temporarily, and return to nature. After visiting parts of St. Gall new to him, he eventually came with the guide to Ragaz, at the mouth of the remarkable gorge down which the fierce, glacier-fed Tamina rushes north to join the nearby Rhine. Ragaz was then the jumping-off place for the famous baths of Pfäfers, which Cooper intended to visit. He and the guide therefore climbed a steep hill to enjoy the splendid northward views along the Rhine, then headed down into the gorge toward what John Murray’s 1838 guidebook called “one of the most extraordinary spots in Switzerland.”72 Eventually they came to a complex of buildings “as gloomy as the glen.” After resting for a time in his room, Cooper explored the gorge further, following a narrow, twisting plank walk thirty or so feet above the “exceedingly violent” river (LJ 1:330). Soon he arrived at the virtual head of the gorge, where the Tamina and its associated hot spring both poured from fissures in the rock, sending up steamy clouds that forced Cooper back. Overhead, where the sheer walls ran straight up, he saw a huge block of stone that, dislodged from higher up, had become wedged “in the jaws of the gorge,” seeming to keep the cleft from snapping shut on the river and anyone, like himself, foolish enough to come here (GS CE 186). More than any exertions he had made this summer, the visit to Bad Pfäfers schooled Cooper in the violent energies of nature. In common with almost everyone in his era, including the vast majority of scientists, he lacked a theory of glaciation and hence could not yet view the mountain scenery as a record of dynamic change.73 But water he understood; as a live force in the landscape, it had always provoked his respect and his fascination. During the short walk to the hot spring, he therefore was overwhelmed by a “feeling of wonder.” He glanced around the benighted scene as the water flowed noisily, and seductively, beneath his feet (GS CE 186). It was a bit like his visit to Glens Falls in 1824, when he had passed down onto a forlorn island amid the raging Hudson to explore the caverns that he soon incorporated into The Last of the Mohicans (see LOM CE 55). Standing above the even fiercer Tamina, which offered no island refuge, Cooper experienced a kind of vertigo. Adding to the risk were the turns of the plank bridge as it snaked through the gorge, playing hide-and-seek with his eye. But the dominant impression wasn’t visual or even physical—it was moral: “I was constantly muttering the word ‘infernal,’ ” Cooper concluded, “and, after all, I believe this is the epithet which best describes the place” (GS CE 186).74 In the morning he and the guide, weary of this “unearthly glen,” clambered up from the underworld into nature as Cooper preferred to think of it—nature as scenery and landscape rather than impersonal force. As the two men drew

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near the glitteringly white collection of structures constituting the nearby Benedictine abbey, the “deep intonations of the mass were audible,” and Cooper, winded but in an especially happy mood, sat on a rock some distance away to listen unobtrusively. His incorrigibly anti-Catholic guide dropped the pack and took out a bottle of Kirschwasser as Cooper imbibed something else: gazing out over an extraordinary scene, he could scan at once the source points of both the Rhine and the Rhone. He later wrote that the half hour he spent here enjoying the vista and poring over his guidebooks and maps was “one of the most delicious” of his life. He had a dramatic view in three directions, but part of the pleasure must have derived from the fact that he had been almost bereft of sight down in the gorge. Here he gloriously recovered it (GS CE 190).75 Their road led from the abbey south to Chur, in the Grisons. Cooper had good reason to enjoy this part of the trip, since on the second day after emerging from the underworld he noted in his journal that he had turned “39 years old” (LJ 1:334). For all that, the sturdy guide got him lost repeatedly, and once Cooper rented a horse and a horse-minder and pushed on ahead of the two Swiss men, things became laughably worse. “For many miles,” Cooper wrote in his journal one night, “the country now strongly resembled the newest and most [wild?] parts of America” (LJ 1:335).76 As he continued westward, in front of the guide and horse-minder, Cooper found himself almost completely isolated. For one thing, since all the Romansh inhabitants of Disentis (today known as Disentis/ Mustér) “spoke a patois [i.e., Sursilvan] known only to themselves,” he had great difficulty procuring food and a room for the night. Hand signals brought what his horse needed. For Cooper himself, however, “an intricate negotiation” was required merely to produce a simple supper of bread and milk (GS CE 202). After his two belated attendants at last showed up in the morning, the three of them headed into the ever higher country east of Disentis. Soon the thinning Rhine tributary up which they were moving split in two: the smaller of its branches came tumbling like a simple creek down the Val Medel from the south, while the other one was nothing more than “a noisy, raging mountain brook” descending at them from straight ahead. They were climbing up the Val Tavetsch to the Oberalp Pass. Beyond there lay Andermatt and Grimsel, from which Cooper would return through Meiringen and Thun, as on his family’s first tour, to La Lorraine. He was eager to forge ahead, but the guide, mindful of the previous day’s failures, persuaded him to stay back: Cooper, after all, had the map and compass. Before long, they passed Juf (or Giuf ), the last tiny village on this climb—“a cluster of six or eight miserable huts, with a small chapel,” all of it, Cooper guessed, deserted in winter (LJ 1:336).77 As their route soon degenerated into nothing more than an upward-winding trace, indistinguishable to the guide from the many cow paths over the fields, he soon admitted that he “did not know

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which way to turn.” And the horse-minder, although from relatively nearby Ilanz, had never been this far from home. “To the right and to the left, there were apparently steep ascents, through the naked pastures,” and now “mazes of paths” led in both directions (LJ 1:337). “The prospect was far from cheering,” Cooper recalled in Gleanings: “it blew a gale, was excessively cold, . . . and . . . it began to snow. Not a habitation, nor a human being, but our three selves, was in sight, or probably within miles of us” (GS CE 207–8). They had seen cowherds bringing down their herds earlier, heading for the winter pastures below, but now those men were long out of sight. All around the travelers lay the steep, inhuman mountains. The guide ventured a guess that the path, crossing the water a short distance ahead, went up the left side of the valley. So Cooper rode off to reconnoiter, though once across “the swift brook” he was halted by the old man, who was shouting up to him not to abandon the two Swiss natives to this Swiss mountain storm! For now “it began to hail, wind blew a gale, and it was intensely cold, so that [we] had the prospect of being lost in the Alps” (LJ 1:337). Given all these circumstances, Cooper probably was fed up with paying six French francs per day for bad advice: “I now thought it time to act for myself,” he would write in his Gleanings (GS CE 208; see 211). Out came his maps and compass, so that, snow or no snow, he might take his bearings when the sun momentarily cut through the storm. A lake shown on Heinrich Keller’s map, lying precisely in the pass, struck Cooper’s eye. Looking from map to landscape, he could not see how the lake could be anywhere but to the right of the course of the Rhine-stream, as indeed Keller showed it to be.78 He therefore decided that the left-hand route must be wrong, a judgment with which the indecisive guide now agreed. So Cooper urged his mount back over the narrowing stream and up a steep climb, telling the others to follow his horse’s tracks. He ascended for half an hour but found no confirmation for his hunch, and by then could hear and see nothing of the other men. At one spot, the horse was up to its saddle girths in snow. But it was still mid-September and the snow was spotty—in other places, the beast sank in marshy ground or fell in holes and had to be pulled free. From some vantage points, Cooper would look across and think that the mountain on the other side of the stream was the one he really should be climbing. But then, in a Crusoe-like moment, he saw human footprints in the snow indicating someone else had just come up this trail, and he went off following them. Throughout, as his journal makes clear, he remained more doubtful than his embellished account in the Gleanings would admit: “After a[n?] hour of toil, and hunting, and retracing steps, and examining map, got a glimpse of a sort of valley (in the air) around which were high mountains. Knew there was a lake and thought this ought to be it—Was so” (LJ 1:337–38). All

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alone up there in 1828, he persisted and triumphed, resolving the doubts and finding the way through. He turned back toward his companions, visible again once he had hit the summit, and made “a sign of success” to them, so they could follow (GS CE 209). There is something a bit amusing about the creator of Natty Bumppo being at the mercy of a professional guide who gets him lost—not once but three times. Yet the fact that Cooper solved the resulting problems indicates that he had a fairly reliable instinct for finding his own way. He obviously could ride well, for this was not his own horse, and the ground and weather both would have challenged, if not unhorsed, a less accomplished rider. His use of a map (and compass) is notable; even more notable is his ability to read the strange landscape in its complex dimensionality, both in conjunction with the map and in its own right. One inner meaning of this third Swiss trip probably derived from Cooper’s hunger for meeting such concrete physical challenges. His birthday journey aimed not only at ridding his spirit of the all-too-social encumbrances of the past several months—it also was meant to solidify his recuperation from the health complaints that had flared up in London. Even more than his experience at Bad Pfäfers, or the climb of the Rigi, Cooper’s triumph in the landscape of the Grisons allowed him to immerse himself in the destructive element of the Alps. Here was not the devilish, infernal, interior of the earth, but rather its hard, cold, obscure surface—and with nothing but his wits and a rented horse, a map, and a compass, he had endured it. He would make some use of the experience in his Swiss novel, The Headsman, in which a snowstorm strands a group of climbers on their way up to the Great St. Bernard Pass. But its best use was personal, not artistic. When he returned to La Lorraine on September 19, it was with a new sense of his strength and a feeling of success (see LJ 1:339).79

Geneva Cooper’s second solo trip, a more minor affair that began five days later, was something of a farewell to Switzerland and indeed to France. It began on Wednesday, September 24, when several family members including his wife accompanied him west from Bern to the ancient lake town of Morat, east of Neuchâtel. They paused there awhile, then passed on through Avenches to Payerne, just inside the border of Canton Vaud. They all stayed overnight in the last town but in the morning parted company: Susan and the others took the carriage east through Fribourg to La Lorraine, while Cooper headed south toward Lake Geneva on foot and, later, by carriage (see GS CE 234–39). Stopping first in Lausanne, Vaud’s capital, Cooper passed by steamboat from there to Geneva.80

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In that latter place, recently added to the confederation, he wandered the streets but also attended to several errands. The first involved looking up a Lyons native, Louis Simond, who was the brother-in-law of Charles Wilkes and an intimate associate of the DeLanceys. Simond had lived for years in New York, where Cooper had known him at least since 1812, when the two discussed the odds for the U.S. Navy in the coming war with Britain. The Frenchman had returned to Europe later in that decade, eventually taking up residence in Geneva, where his second wife’s family lived. There Susan Cooper had written him not only from France, but also from Bern. Now, on September 27, Cooper rented a carriage to drive out to Simond’s country house. Barely had he passed through the city gates, however, when he spotted the old man along the road and, stopping to reintroduce himself, asked him to climb aboard for the ride back to town. The two “had a long chat about America” in the carriage. Simond was “astonished” by Cooper’s reports about New York City’s growth over the past decade. “He did not appear to understand how we got on so well,” Cooper recalled in his Gleanings—because “he had anticipated a very different career for America.” The two intellectuals had “an amiable contest” on the subject. Simond, like so many Europeans Cooper encountered, took a skeptical view of democracy, asserting that Americans “were prosperous” in spite of their political institutions. Cooper defended those institutions and credited them with the remarkable results he had reported. Eight years later, Cooper pointedly summed up his own views when recalling the conversation with Simond: “He appeared to me to confound taste with principles. Heaven knows if America is to be judged by her tastes, that she will make but an indifferent figure, but a political system is not to be condemned because its votaries chew tobacco, or extolled because they happen to possess bon ton. This style of reasoning is much like objecting to a Fourth of July dinner, on account of its want of gentility!” (GS CE 252–53).81 The next day, Cooper took a brief ride to the village of Cologny, just outside Geneva on Lake Geneva’s south shore, the location of Villa Diodati, where Byron had lived with the Shelleys in 1816. The novelist made no extensive comments on the visit (it is unmentioned in the Gleanings, and the trip is covered by a very short entry in the journal). It may have been a simple ride in search of the picturesque—or a pilgrimage arising from his yet lingering enthusiasm for Byron. In the latter regard, it is worth noting that Cooper had been shadowing Byron’s route when, having left England in 1816 (for good, as it turned out), the poet headed to Lake Geneva, where he was soon joined by the Shelleys and by Claire Claremont. The world knew about Byron’s trip not only because of the scandal surrounding his affair with Claremont, but also because he soon used it as the basis for the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, published later in 1816. Since his death in Greece in 1824, Byron had therefore haunted this route

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from England to the Mediterranean.82 Cooper certainly knew Byron’s poem, from which he had already derived epigraphs for chapters 20 and 39 in The Pioneers and chapter 20 in The Last of the Mohicans, the first of many across his career. Yet if he was following Byron on this trip, his literary pilgrimage was covert. He did not quote the poet anywhere in his Swiss Gleanings and made but a single reference to him (see GS CE 19). Only in various incidental details can one sense that he saw the sights along this route with an eye informed by Byron’s verse and viewpoint.83 Having returned from Cologny, whatever his purposes there, Cooper made a trip in the opposite direction—briefly crossing the French border to visit Ferney, where the philosopher and writer Voltaire had spent much of his final two decades before his death in 1778. The village lay only five miles from Geneva, through a beautiful region full of other country places that impressed Cooper more than Voltaire’s own “long, thin, French house.” He walked through the formal grounds to the house proper, then went inside, as many other visitors did, “as freely as if it had been an inn” (LJ 1:342). Cooper found little to please him. The rooms were small and hung with bad prints and cheap copies of the old masters—along with a portrait of Voltaire as a kind of hero that had been painted to the philosopher’s orders. Madame de Genlis, who visited Voltaire at Ferney in 1776, two years before he left the house for Paris, called that painting “a regular ale-house sign—a ridiculous picture, representing Voltaire surrounded by rays of glory like a saint.”84 Cooper wrote simply in his journal, “It is badly done” (LJ 1:342). In his Gleanings he called it “a cumbrous allegory” (GS CE 255). The chapel Voltaire had caused to be built in Ferney in 1761, bearing the inscription “Deo erexit voltaire” (loosely, “Built for God by voltaire”), usually attracted comments about the hauteur of voltaire’s service to his less clamorous Deo. Cooper, happily reporting that the plaque had been removed, quipped in Gleanings that Dogberry (in Much Ado about Nothing) was right: “write God first; for God defend, but God should go before such villains!” (GS CE 255). Cooper thought Voltaire irreligious, as did many of the novelist’s contemporaries—who rarely reflected on why a supposed atheist would, after all, build a church in the first place. But Cooper seems to have been the only visitor who brought Shakespeare’s apt witticism to bear on the capitalized self-promotion of the plaque. In all likelihood Cooper had an ulterior motive in visiting Ferney—a motive that probably explains why he undertook the whole trip to Lausanne and Geneva in the first place. A month before setting out, he had informed Luther Bradish that he intended going “to Lyons . . . to resign my Consulate” (LJ 1:290). Since Lyons lay only a short distance down the Rhone from Geneva, in August Cooper must have been planning to cross the French border at the latter place, proceed to Lyons, and meet there with his assistant, Achille Bousquet, who had been handling

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consular affairs since 1826. By September, however, Cooper had truncated any such plan. On the day he visited Cologny and Ferney, he addressed a letter to Henry Clay from Geneva in which he tendered his resignation and gave as his reason the fact that he was “now obliged to quit the Kingdom of France.” Writing the U.S. secretary of state from the border of France and Switzerland perhaps struck him as giving that explanation some literal veracity: he had, after all, first left France months earlier, and with the intention of going on from Bern to Italy before eventually returning. To further substantiate his claim at present, he may even have taken the letter for Clay with him to Ferney and mailed it from there—it went to Paris and was forwarded by Welles and Co. to New York with the inscription “Free” on its flap, indicating that it was an official consular communication sent, it would appear, from the country where Cooper had held his post. Furthermore, visiting Voltaire’s estate provided a convenient excuse for a bit of mendacity. Even if he had not posted the letter at Ferney, his visit there made literally correct his statement that he had just quitted “the Kingdom of France” (LJ 6:302).85 Another, more involved matter also directed Cooper’s attention to Lyons at this time and helped motivate the eventually shortened trip. It concerned a favor for Sir Walter Scott, who, as briefly noted earlier, needed help in resolving questions about his recently deceased wife’s family. Lady Scott, Charlotte Charpentier (or Carpenter), was of French birth. Following her death in May 1826, Scott learned through a London lawyer that he might be able to recover her sizable trust fund in chancery. Doing so, however, would require clear evidence establishing the parentage of Charlotte and her brother Charles, who had died some years before.86 Lacking any proof on the matter, Scott wondered whether “certificates of baptism at Lyons” for Charlotte and Charles might not be found, since they would “probably refer to the father & mother as married persons.” When Scott called on Cooper in London on May 4 to discuss the matter, Cooper promised to write his consular agent for the desired records.87 He did so first once he returned to Paris, but what Bousquet initially discovered was not sufficient. Scott hoped that his son-in-law John G. Lockhart, then planning a trip to France, could follow up. When that trip was canceled, however, Lockhart forwarded a fresh request from Scott. Cooper, receiving it in Bern just when he wrote Bradish about his consulship, must have figured he would carry out Scott’s errand on his planned trip to Lyons.88 A month later, however, he decided to handle as much of his Lyons business as he could by correspondence rather than in person. He therefore wrote Bousquet sometime in September to ask that he check further, and when Bousquet answered with fresh results, Cooper forwarded them to Scott.89 A final bit of business concerned informing Bousquet of Cooper’s own intentions regarding the consulship and what it might mean for Bousquet. On the

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very day when he wrote Henry Clay from Geneva (September 28), Cooper also sent off an answer (now unlocated) to his agent’s latest communication on the Scott inquiry, and for the first time he there mentioned his resignation. Surprised, but dutifully relaying Cooper’s decision to the Lyons prefect, Bousquet let Cooper know that he hoped he might take over the post. On this last topic, Cooper seems to have been noncommittal. He would write Clay on October 8 to put in a good word for his assistant, adding, importantly, that Bousquet had “been in the U. States, and understands the language of our Country.” But he already knew that Bousquet was a long shot (LJ 6:302–3). In that unlocated September 28 letter to him, the novelist in fact had already mentioned that a young American named Cornelius Bradford, an associate of Lafayette and the nephew of former New York mayor Philip Hone, was being spoken of for the post. And before long Bradford indeed was named as Cooper’s replacement.90 On Monday morning, September 29, his forays concluded and his letters written, Cooper boarded the steamboat for an uneventful return trip to Lausanne.91 He stayed overnight there once more, making arrangements with a coachman (to whom he was introduced by a waiter at his inn) for the ride back to Bern the next day. That opened up an annoying episode, as the driver tricked Cooper on the terms of their arrangement and then, when Cooper complained, drove off with the American’s baggage. Cold stares from the crowd having shown Cooper he could expect little local assistance, he secured another ride back to Bern, and then, no doubt conscious of the connections of his neighbor at La Lorraine, Herr Walther, lost no time in “hunting up the rogue, and . . . bringing him before the authorities.” There were no witnesses to bolster his report—but soon the “scoundrel” began to contradict his own story, after which he spilled out “a volley of abuse on the magistrate,” who thereupon settled the matter entirely in Cooper’s favor. The coachman was sent to jail for two weeks, and Cooper got his belongings back—including his manuscript journal, in which he then hastened to catch up with his entries. As Cooper later pointed out, if he had not recovered the journal, his Swiss Gleanings would have suffered seriously. Indeed, one wonders whether he could have written it at all (GS CE 257–58). This episode gave the sweet summer a sour end, but the sweetness remained, as the Gleanings would show. Cooper had tasted deeply of the Swiss lakes and mountains and in the process had left behind the cares of Paris and London. He now looked south toward Italy with a renewed sense of possibility.

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aving said goodbye to the Walthers on October 8, when the weather was already turning cold in Bern, the Coopers passed south to Vevey on Lake Geneva (where they would return for a long stay in the summer of 1832), then went over the Simplon Pass and eventually crossed the Apennines. Their goal was Florence, which they reached almost two weeks later. They put up at a hotel until October 25, when Cooper signed a six-month rental agreement with Baroness Elisabetta Peruzzi, widow of Baron Luigi Ricasoli, for the furnished mezzanine and first floor of her family’s palazzo there. The baroness occupied part of the large building with two of her three sons, and, according to the novelist’s eldest daughter, other families also lived there, most of them political exiles from elsewhere in Italy (see SGB 476–77).1 Mrs. Cooper reported to her sister Caroline in February 1829 that everyone was “very comfortable here at Florence,” and in a later comment demonstrated exactly what she meant: “Mr. Cooper is in his study, correcting Proof Sheets. Caroline is at her piano, on one side of the window, and Fanny is making her Italian translation, on the other, and every two minutes is interrupting me, by inquiring how she must translate such, and such a word.—Charlotte is studying her English lessons in the sale de bagno [bath], and Sue is employed in

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something or other, but I do not know what, although I am sure it is something useful, for Sue is such a good girl, that she does nothing else—and Paul has his book in his hand.”2 Florence was cozier than Bern, but winter as it approached proved surprisingly cold. Twenty years later, during one of Otsego’s rare warm winters, Cooper would write an autograph seeker: “This winter has been milder, on the whole (a few snapping days excepted) than either of the winters I passed in Italy. In 1828–9 we skated at Florence” (LJ 5:261). “We” perhaps included the family’s favorite guest during that chill first winter, the aspiring Yankee sculptor Horatio Greenough. The two expatriate artists were to become close friends, their relationship cemented by Cooper’s commissions (for, among other works, “The Chanting Cherubs”) and his generous financial support of the impoverished Greenough. They probably were brought together in the first place by what the sculptor had learned of Cooper from their mutual artist-friend Washington Allston, with whom he had socialized closely during his recent return to the United States.3 A further link between them was another common connection, James Ombrosi, an Italian who had been a close associate of the Wilkeses in New York and was now U.S. consul in Florence. It was Ombrosi, for instance, who suggested that Greenough produce a clay portrait bust of Cooper in January, after which Cooper commissioned the “Cherubs.”4 The city being full of other resident or transient Americans, the novelist never lacked for compatriots while in Tuscany. Some were casual acquaintances with whom for the most part he and Susan simply passed some of their free time. Such were the Reverend Samuel Farmar Jarvis and his wife, Sarah McCurdy Jarvis, with whom they already had socialized in Paris. (Cooper had known Jarvis at Yale as well, and the Jarvises were related through marriage to the novelist’s old naval associate Isaac Hull.) Others had somewhat closer ties, like New Yorker John Hone, Jr., who had been among the well-wishers at the novelist’s farewell dinner in 1826. The family of William Cox, of Philadelphia, with whom the Coopers would associate closely in Switzerland in 1832, first showed up in Florence this year as well. Also from Philadelphia, the artist Rembrandt Peale came to Italy not long before the Coopers were to leave Tuscany but made a point of visiting the novelist, thereby establishing a lasting relationship. There were substantially more visitors for the Coopers to connect with here than in Switzerland. Cooper wrote Mary Jay early in the Florence stay that he found “many of our people” there.5 Among the more interesting was Thomas B. Johnson, the fortyish brotherin-law of John Quincy Adams. Susan would write her sister Martha in August that she and her husband had spent much time with Johnson, adding they were “very much pleased with Him.”6 The novelist met Johnson through Ombrosi

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early in April and spent long periods in his presence during that month and early in May, when Johnson left Florence. Crossing paths on April 8 at the park known as the Cascine, they thus passed three hours walking and talking about politics—particularly about the character of President Andrew Jackson (whom Johnson understandably liked less than Cooper) and the inner workings of his cabinet. Johnson had strong negative preconceptions about Cooper from gossip he had heard but found him quite pleasant in person. The novelist displayed his usual strong personality, asserting his views with so little equivocation that Johnson was a bit overwhelmed, as William Cullen Bryant had been on first meeting Cooper in New York five years earlier. But, also like Bryant, Johnson warmed to Cooper, admitting that he had great merit and listening avidly to his tales of England and English society: Samuel Rogers, Cooper thus told Johnson, surrounded himself with “the greatest wits, scholars, politicians, artists, & poets,” but their conversation gave no hint of “their superiority,” and as to Walter Scott, he was “shrewd, sensible, and plain spoken,” but “perhaps a little twaddling.” After an April 11 visit to the Palazzo Ricasoli to meet the whole family, Johnson updated his impressions in his diary, putting Cooper down as “a decided debater or rather an incorrigible haranguer” who was “extreme in his inferences.” Then he added, “But his intellect is vigorous and ardent, his fancy bright & bold.” Sometimes, to be sure, he was a bit too radical, as when he advocated eliminating the electoral college and deciding presidential elections by popular vote. In response, latter-day Federalist Johnson sputtered on in his prose about the dangers of “the democratic element” and “the tumultuary agitation of the mob.” In 1824, of course, Jackson had beat Adams in the popular vote but lost the electoral runoff in the House as Cooper watched.7 Through much of his time in Florence, Cooper was busy with the products of what Johnson termed his “fancy bright & bold.” He brought with him (and finished here) the one novel on which he had worked haltingly in Switzerland, The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, and started another while in Tuscany, The WaterWitch, that he would finish in Sorrento after his family moved there the following year. The former of these, while not without its champions, has often seemed lacking in plausible context in Cooper’s life. Set in Connecticut in the later part of the seventeenth century, it appears to have had few roots in Cooper’s own past—and fewer still in his present surroundings in Switzerland or Italy. But the key event in the novel, the capture of a young English girl by Indians, exemplified a theme of much interest to American readers at the time. As I have argued elsewhere, the process by which Cooper imagined the tale and then wrote it repays close study.8 Cooper appears to have first mentioned The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish in a letter sent from St. Ouen to Francis Moore, Henry Colburn’s Paris agent, on

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October 20, 1827. Having just finished The Red Rover (the last batch of copy for which accompanied this letter) and begun Notions of the Americans, he then promised to “have a tale for this time next year, of which I will shortly advise you” (LJ 1:228). Because the Coopers soon afterward returned to Paris, further discussion may have come in a face-to-face meeting with Moore. But of that, or any further exchange about the book with Colburn’s agent, we know nothing. The next mention, similarly vague, came in a March 1828 letter to his Philadelphia publishers from London. Cooper claimed that his Connecticut tale was “already on the Anvil” (LJ 1:258), but his intense concern with Notions probably kept him from doing much with the novel yet.9 Cooper’s eldest daughter recalled that the book had been “planned and commenced in the little uncarpeted study at La Lorraine” but finished at Florence; the novelist himself, later complaining that it had been “written too much on the highway” to please him, confirmed her general point (P&P 204; LJ 1:396). Not surprisingly, one result of the migratory conditions of its birth was that The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish did not appear until the fall of 1829, months past Cooper’s original target.10 Another result was the difficulty Cooper had figuring out how to produce and distribute copy text once the writing was done. Far removed from both London and Paris, he had to improvise new arrangements. He at first hoped that a well-known local printer, Giuseppe Molini of the Dante’s Head Press, could undertake the work, and initially Molini agreed. Once his English compositor, Richard Heaviside, quit and left the city, however, Molini had to back out.11 Cooper’s next plan, at the end of February, was to go by the land route from Florence to the south of France, and from there to Paris in order to have preliminary proof sets prepared, presumably through the good offices of Hector Bossange. After being delayed on the road from Genoa to Aix, however, Cooper decided to see whether it instead might be “possible to print” the book at Marseilles, where Heaviside, as he must have known from Molini, was now at work (LJ 1:363).12 On March 5, Cooper found the compositor at a local print shop whose proprietors at first agreed to produce proof sheets and, apparently, an English edition of the work for continental sale. Soon, however, this new arrangement fell through (the Frenchman had deceived him, Cooper wrote Susan on March 10), and, persuading Heaviside to return with him to Florence, the novelist instructed his nephew to renew negotiations with Molini (see LJ 1:363–65). Even this new plan was less a coup than a compromise. Cooper had to contract with Heaviside separately, agreeing to pay for his labor and his living expenses. (In fact, Heaviside stayed at Palazzo Ricasoli, presumably in separately rented quarters, and ate with the Coopers.) And the novelist probably expected that he now would have to pay the owner of the press as well, Molini having given no indication that

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he would do anything at his own risk. Moreover, the initially promising view Cooper took of the English compositor (he was “a good workman,” he had assured his wife—LJ 1:365) proved wrong. The novelist’s daughter remembered Heaviside as “an indifferent printer,” temperamental as well as slow, and added that he had to be packed off to Marseilles before the project was near being done. Apparently with some support from the librarian of Leopold II, the book-loving grand duke of Tuscany, the novel at last was put through the press by Molini using some other English-speaking workman (P&P 210).13 Molini produced several sets of “early sheets” (P&P 211) that Cooper conveyed via his Paris bankers to London and Philadelphia, as well as to Gosselin in Paris and (according to terms worked out by the novelist’s nephew) to the publishers Duncker and Humblot in Berlin, for whom the book was translated in 1829 by Dr. Gottfried Friedenberg.14 The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish was issued by Colburn in London on or around September 29 (see S&B 58; BAL 2:281), and somewhat later, it seems clear, by Molini in Florence. In the United States, Carey, Lea and Carey did not begin selling it until November 9 (S&B 58).15

Naples and Rome The Coopers had left Florence on July 31, 1829, long before the novel appeared anywhere. Having hit the coast at Leghorn, they there hired a lateen-rigged felucca, La Bella Genovese, for a planned passage south along the coast to Naples. Though of “a beautiful mould,” the vessel proved somewhat dubious, as indeed did its captain and crew. But Cooper, detouring to Elba so he could get a glimpse of Napoleon’s modest residence during his 1814 exile, mostly enjoyed the experience—especially the run down along the Roman Campagna on an August night under what he recalled as “the placid and thoughtful stars” (GI CE 83, 91).16 By dawn, the vessel had drawn even with the Pontine marshes, beyond which the coast rose steeply, allowing him to see “the volcanic peaks of Ischia.” Before long he glimpsed a conical mountain that, on closer inspection, proved to be Vesuvius, just visible across the low neck of Baiæ, inside which lay Naples proper. On the next day, Cooper beheld what from that moment became one of his favorite spots on earth—the ample Neapolitan bay, full of rich historical associations embracing “nearly all of known time” (GI CE 92–93). He loved Manhattan’s splendid maritime setting, but on scenic grounds alone Naples easily outran New York: ringed with imposing mountains and touched by the open sea, and with houses and churches and villas scaling the cliffs all around, it was bathed with an intense light that Cooper’s adopted hometown never knew (see LJ 1:379; GI CE 94–95).17 The Coopers took very pleasant rooms at an inn right on the water, then sought out their usual long-term lodgings. High prices drove them from Naples

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proper to Sorrento, at the great bay’s south edge, where on August 15 they managed to rent a cheap but extraordinary property—the Palazzo ditto del Tasso (Susan’s Italian version of the name—“the palace said to be Tasso’s”—his birthplace, that is). The literary associations of the house added to its allure, but the real attraction was its dramatic site atop a cliff directly above the sea. It had “a fine Terrace” where the Coopers walked in the evening as their children were “frolicking around us, enjoying the fresh air from the Mediterranean, or watching its blue waters dash up at the foot of the rock” (see LJ 380; GI CE 95, 108–12).18 In 1830, many months after he had left the Bay of Naples, Cooper wrote to Peter A. Jay that it was hard to “conceive a more picturesque residence” (LJ 1:425). Five years later still, after returning to the United States, he would reminisce for his old acquaintance John Whipple of Providence: “I was hanging over the balustrades of the terrace of an old house . . . one delightful evening in the month of Sept. 1829, when it occurred to me what pleasure it would give many of my American friends, could they stand where I then stood and see what I then saw.” He went on to list all the sites he had in mind, each of them full of classic associations: “Ischia, Procida, Mysenum, the Elysian Fields, Baiæ, Pausilippo, the tomb of Virgil or its site, . . . Parthenope or at least modern Naples, the Felice campagna, Vesuvius, and Pompeii, with the glorious expanse of water dotted with a hundred picturesque sails, and the mellow sky of Italy” (LJ 3:27). So taken was he with the spot that he put a lovely (though rather irrelevant) description of it into the mouth of the androgynous character “Seadrift” in The Water-Witch (1830), the novel he finished here: “Our abode was on the verge of the cliffs. In front lay the deep-blue water, and on its further shore was a line of objects such as accident or design rarely assembles in one view” (WW 2:62). As late as The Wing-and-Wing (1842), the Bay of Naples would provide Cooper with rich detail and a pervading sense of maritime beauty.19 Inland, the landscape gave lessons in geology—geology and fire—so that here, too, Italy helped shape Cooper’s future books. Vesuvius was quite active during this period, having last erupted as recently as 1822; indeed, a small eruption had occurred just the year before the Americans arrived. Not surprisingly, Cooper would recall that, from Naples or Sorrento even before he and William scaled the peak in October, he “often” had seen “red-hot stones . . . propelled upward” out of the crater (GI CE 151). During his actual ascent of the volcano, the effect was especially powerful once he crested the “ragged” edge of the outer cone and peered down inside. The base of the caldera, full of crevices venting plumes of smoke, was marked by “vivid streaks of brimstone [that] gave it wild, unnatural tints.” Off to one side rose a smaller cone, the “living, or true crater,” which regularly spewed rocks hundreds of feet into the air. A glimpse into the mouth of such a powerful ballistic device was so imposing that Cooper long

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recalled certain vivid details, like the hellish “streaks of sulphur” on the floor below him. And the ensemble was, he later recalled, “one of the most extraordinary” scenes he had ever witnessed. That impression built on and confirmed what he already had seen at “a sort of low crater” some miles away called the Solfatara. The sulfurous fumes arising there were notorious, as was the “hollow menacing sound” produced by stones thrown across its resonant surface, suggesting to Cooper how easily it might break, exposing the “mass of burning sulphur” beneath. In this heavenly country, hell seemed near. Small wonder that John Milton is thought to have drawn on his knowledge of Solfatara in framing his descriptions of the infernal regions (GI CE 150–51, 129).20 Such experience stocked Cooper’s memory with images and ideas that would recur to him almost twenty years later when he wrote his dystopian Pacific romance, The Crater (1847), in which earthquakes and volcanic action figure prominently. When he there described the “sulphur-tinged and unearthly hue” of the earth inside his imaginary crater, he was clearly thinking back to Solfatara and Vesuvius (CR 2:146). He had not consciously gathered materials for a specific literary project in 1829—the process went much deeper than that. What he discovered around the Bay of Naples, like what he had seen in the Swiss mountains, fundamentally shaped how he thereafter viewed nature. Even as he drew on details from Italy’s geologically potent sites repeatedly in setting the scene and inventing the action for his 1847 novel, he infused that book with general insights Italy had given him into the physical world and humanity’s place in it. In his Italian Gleanings, he reported a common remark about Pompeii—that it “stands on lava, which in itself covers another town,” adding, “if true, what a miserable figure human annals make!” (GI CE 106). That topographic situation would have no precise parallel in Cooper’s Pacific tale, but the same moral point would underpin everything in that book’s action. Other influences were to shape The Crater, as we shall see, but its first origins lay in Cooper’s experiences in southern Italy almost two decades earlier.21 The Americans might have lingered longer amid the instructive pleasures of Sorrento had not the “marrow-chilling” autumn winds, coming down from the mountains behind Tasso’s house, forced them out. On November 20, they rented for one last time a vessel they had used in various excursions around the bay, La Divina Providenza, and sailed to Naples for a brief final visit (GI CE 171–72). Already, while staying alone in that city during October, Cooper had laid further plans, hiring a coachman for the trip to their next stop, Rome. So at last, on an afternoon early in December (perhaps Tuesday the first), the family left on the 150-mile ride, much of it along the old Via Appia.22 The drive had many delights, but none better than the one delivered on the fifth day. Walking solo ahead of the carriage for a time, Cooper mounted a high point and saw, rising amid

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the “immense waste” of the Campagna, “the towers of modern Rome, & the pile of St. Peter’s, intermingled with the monuments of antiquity”—lines of broken aqueducts, small isolated towers, and, shouldering the Via Appia all the way to the city, a double row of house-like tombs where the ancient dead consorted with the passing traveler (LJ 1:425–26; compare GI CE 187–90).23 At last, the Americans passed under a final disjoined fragment of aqueduct and then “drew near the walls—the ancient unquestionable walls of Rome herself!” They entered through the gate of St. John (Porta San Giovanni) and, driving north across almost the entire city, pulled up at the Hôtel de Paris, near the Porta del Popolo. Cooper left almost immediately and walked with a guide to the nearby Vatican. Soon he was “standing at the foot of a vast square, with colonnades, on a gigantic scale, sweeping in half circles on each side of me, two of the most beautiful fountains I had ever seen throwing their waters in sheets down their sides between them, and the façade of St. Peter’s forming the background.” Entering the church proper and surveying its scope and detail, Cooper began to weep. He had brought his young son Paul with him, and Paul, not yet five years old but raised on an incessant diet of European wonders, clung tightly to the novelist’s leg as if he, too, had been “oppressed with the sense of the vastness of the place.” Paul “kept murmuring, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?—qu’est-ce que c’est?—Est-ce une église?’ ” That was the right way to begin a Roman residence (GI CE 189–92). Through his time there, Cooper liked attending vespers at St. Peter’s and took the whole family on Christmas, an experience that even Susan, usually on her guard where Catholicism was concerned, found delightful.24 The Coopers stayed at their hotel until they found “an indifferent appartment” (LJ 1:428) in a nearby street, the Via Ripetta. Its location gave some compensation for its condition. From it, the Americans could see both St. Peter’s and the famous Castello Sant’ Angelo—and, owing to an empty space immediately opposite, also had “a fine view of the Tiber,” some hundred yards away.25 Renting a horse of the renowned Chigi breed, Cooper soon began taking long afternoon excursions over the Campagna (often covered with snow during this second unusually cold Italian winter—see LJ 5:261) and around the circuit of the city walls (see LJ 1:426; GI CE 204).26 On most days, some companion went with him—ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte, Napoleon’s nephew, whom Cooper had encountered in Washington in 1826 and with whose family his own socialized during the stay in Rome; Lord William Russell, the English politician; painter and soon inventor Samuel F. B. Morse; Christian, baron von Bunsen, secretary of the Prussian envoy at the Vatican; the Swiss cleric and botanist Jean Étienne Duby; and, most notably, Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, who arrived in Italy in 1829 following his Russian exile (see GI CE 216, 315; WW HE xxi; LJ 3:374n1). Not infrequently, whether accompanied or alone, Cooper would ride

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for five or six hours. He thus managed to get “the place impressed on the mind” with such detail, he wrote Mary Jay in July, that he hoped the resulting mental map would prove “lasting” (LJ 1:426). One effect was that when Cooper remembered this period a decade later, he thought of Rome not as a jumbled collection of monuments and ruins but rather as a set of itineraries he had followed repeatedly on those rides. From the impressions gathered during them (and perhaps from having noticed that Mariano Vasi arranged his famous guidebook “in the form of an itinerary”), Cooper organized the Roman section in the Italian Gleanings by using two of his typical routes as imaginary circuits about the city. The first was a counterclockwise ride that, starting at the nearby Porta del Popolo, covered some ten miles in a wide sweep outside the city walls before it returned to the south end near the Porta San Sebastiano. Here Cooper discussed several sites clustered near or along the Via Appia, which he had frequently explored. The high points of the second imaginary itinerary, which set out northward but also returned to the city proper, included the Coliseum and the Forum (see GI CE 201–10, 215–18).27 Rome presented many lessons in the temporal layering of human life. Around Naples, Cooper had enjoyed the opportunity to mentally excavate the buried landscapes of the ancient world, an approach that Vesuvius and the partly unearthed cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum of course encouraged. In Rome, by contrast, there was almost too much accumulated surface for him to find pleasure (or even success) in a similarly vertical exercise. He settled instead for the city’s uneven present scene, with an odd glance here and there at details suggesting depth. From the Capitoline Hill, his second ideal itinerary thus descended “by the winding carriage road near the great stairs,” twisting about on the ground below until it approached the recently uncovered Forum of Trajan, at the center of which stood the extraordinary marble column, incised with bas reliefs, erected to mark that emperor’s accomplishments. Until Rome ’s French occupiers removed the houses that had been erected all around the column, and indeed dug away the accumulated earth that partly buried it, the monument had remained largely obscured. Cooper saw it in its freshened, partly restored condition (GI CE 222–23). Another similar discovery occurred when Cooper, emerging from a series of “narrow and crowded streets,” at last found himself in a public square where he suddenly uncovered a key structure of the classical city—the Pantheon. He thought the ancient temple ill-placed, so hemmed in by this busy modern quarter that visitors at times overlooked the building’s sublime circular form. In itself, he also found the building “a strange mixture of beauty and deformity”—for it had “a noble portico, with a fine row of columns,” but the tympanum of the pediment was simply “too heavy.” Worse yet, “Two little belfries peep out, like

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asses’ ears, at each side of the portico.” Once he went inside, however, the hypercritical American tourist found the Pantheon’s “simple and beautiful grandeur” completely disarming. He thought the conceit of the design “magnificent,” for the eye of a visitor inevitably found its way to the dome ’s oculus, through which it beheld the “blue void of infinite space.” This detail perfectly embodied the theological meaning of the structure. “Illimitable space,” Cooper concluded, “is the best prototype of eternity” (GI CE 224–25). It took some effort to sift through the temple’s outer difficulties and find that inner perfection. Cooper’s reflections on Italian social life reveal an analogous process. He announced it as a principle, given Italian habits and the large numbers of visitors in Rome, that few foreigners “see much of Italian society.” And he admitted that he personally knew too little of the subject “to say anything new about it, or even to speak very confidently on any of the old usages” (GI CE 230–31). For the most part, he sketched a series of random, mostly superficial observations. But he certainly saw enough to form strong opinions about Italy and Italians; almost twenty years later, he would unabashedly write: “I like the people of Italy. . . . They are full of feeling, and grace, and poetry, and a vast number are filled with a piety that their maligners would do well to imitate” (LJ 5:179).28 Such private pleasures were added to an array of more public ones, of which Rome had many. As the list of Cooper’s companions on his horseback rides will suggest, he and Susan hardly were alone while in Rome. Of special importance was his old friend Samuel F. B. Morse. Cooper had met Morse in Washington, D.C., early in 1825, and had associated with him closely in New York later that year and up to the point of the novelist’s departure for Europe. The artist was, for instance, an active member of the Bread and Cheese Lunch in 1826. Moreover, in 1829 Morse had spent some time in Cooperstown, where he produced several works, including View from Apple Hill, a landscape painting that took its title (and its literal point of view) from the former property of Cooper’s eldest brother, Richard. Once Morse arrived in Rome in February 1830 with architect Ithiel Town, he therefore brought fresh tidings from the heart of Cooper country. Indeed, Cooper’s nephew declared to his cousin Hannah, whose family still resided on the shores of Otsego, that Morse had shared with the novelist’s family “sketches of Cooperstown from your window; the mansion house, the lake, etc.,” all of which, William added, the Coopers “looked at with great interest.” And Morse did not just show pictures; Cooper’s wife was motivated to write Hannah’s mother from Rome in large part by the “accounts of Cooperstown given us by Mr. Morse.” Morse may well have started the Coopers thinking about returning to Otsego once they eventually went home to New York.29 The painter took Roman lodgings not far from the Coopers and soon was socializing with his old friend and his family. They all went to the moonlit

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Coliseum on Monday, March 1, and on March 6 and 8 Morse recorded in his diary visiting with the novelist. On the afternoon of March 15, a Monday, the two went to the Vatican library and museum, and that evening Morse was once again at the Coopers’ lodgings. They probably socialized on many other occasions, although Morse failed to record precisely when or how. (Despite the assertion of Cooper’s daughter that Cooper and Morse rode together on the Campagna, for instance, the diary fails to mention any such horseback rides— or even to take note of the Coopers’ departure for Venice on April 15.) Perhaps the artist, who was painting as well as visiting galleries and churches and taking hurried notes on what he saw, did not become as close to Cooper here as he would be later in Paris. Or perhaps he was just too busy to record all the occasions when their paths crossed in Rome. Some things, too, he may have wisely omitted on purpose. I think it very likely that Morse, whose anti-Catholic sentiments would become notorious in later years, was the culprit in an episode (recorded by Cooper but not Morse) when an unnamed friend accidentally—or perhaps maliciously—urinated on a public wall near a figure of the Madonna, then went off, leaving Cooper to deal with the tense aftermath among the local populace (see GI CE 233).30 The revealing high point of Cooper’s Roman period came toward the middle of February, when he and a group of other expatriates gathered “at the rooms [at] No. 39 Via del Corso” (not far from his Via Ripetta apartment) to discuss how they might mark the approaching anniversary of George Washington’s birth. Cooper was chosen chair of a five-person organizing committee. Other members included two of his old New York friends, merchants Joseph Grinnell and Peter Schermerhorn, along with James Dundas, a Philadelphia banker, and Benjamin A. Gould, who had served as principal of the Boston Latin School from 1814 to 1828. The group secured spacious accommodations for the celebration in the Villa Strozzi, once occupied by the Italian playwright Vittorio Alfieri, near the baths of Diocletian on the city’s far eastern side. One attendee soon wrote home that the “dinner was tastefully got up in elegant rooms,” and press reports indicate that, after dining, fifty or so American men and women danced in honor of the “Patriot Sage,” as the first president was called in Gould’s ode, composed for the occasion. Toasts honored not only Washington (and his mother), but also Columbus, Lafayette—and even President Jackson, suggesting a rare bipartisan spirit. Other toasts paid homage to the classical source of America’s institutions and values in Rome and Greece and touted the virtue of its citizens visiting Europe. Cooper was also personally honored when Philadelphia customs collector Jacob G. Morris toasted him as “worthy in Rome to preside among Americans.” Back home, one New York newspaper praised him (and, humorously, his political principles) by describing

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the vote electing Cooper to lead the event as “the first Republican ballot at Rome.” Another of the reported toasts that night similarly called the affair “the first Republican dinner at Rome since the days of the first Caesar.”31 This uncontroversial public reportage suggests that Cooper still occupied in Rome the position he had held at such affairs in New York before he left for Europe, or in Paris during the early years. Private accounts left by participants new to him, however, paint a less flattering image. Those accounts, indicating some holdover in Italy from reactions he had stirred up in London and the rumors they spawned even among Americans, show a further deterioration of Cooper’s relations with his homeland as his absence lengthened. James Cook Richmond, an eccentric young Harvard graduate who was on a long European tour, thus reported to his new English friend Henry Crabb Robinson that the author of The Spy had been in the chair for the event but “made no speech” and did not appear to be “an extraordinary man.”32 Another Yankee, Theodore Dwight Woolsey of New Haven, was surprised by Cooper’s personal kindness in Rome, but only because of negative views he had previously encountered: “Mr. C. is disposed to be very friendly towards me, while from his reputation I had expected to find him stiff and haughty. He has certainly disagreeable points of character; he is dogmatical and exasperated to such a degree against England that he cannot forebear venting his opinions even in the presence of Englishmen.” Years later, after both he and Cooper had returned home and the novelist’s very public troubles had set in, Woolsey darkened his Roman memories: “Cooper was an entertaining talker but utterly impracticable and so determined to have his own way as to disgust everyone.”33 Another attendee at the George Washington celebration, Elizabeth Cabot Kirkland, seconded these comments. Kirkland had already encountered Cooper at breakfast. At the dinner, she was seated “at his right hand . . . at his request,” and remarked that she found him “more courteous than when at breakfast.” She chilled this lukewarm praise, however, by adding, “Indeed I believe he was as agreeable as he knew how to be, but urbanity is not his forte.”34 Whatever the particular causes and nuances in such cases, it clearly is necessary to confront what by 1830 was beginning to emerge as the legend of Cooper’s “difficulty.” The comments just quoted drive home points Cooper himself had acknowledged in a letter he wrote to Mary Jay from Florence about a year earlier: “I was told yesterday that it is said at home, that I gave myself airs in England, and did not meet civilities, myself, as they should be met” (LJ 1:354). Who told Cooper that we do not know for sure—probably one of the Americans recently arrived in Florence; perhaps, indeed, Greenough, who had just come back from New England and with whom at the moment in question Cooper’s relations were deepening. However the rumor came to Cooper, it indicated that the difficulties

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he had experienced in England, and with the English generally, had risen to such a level that people who did not directly witness the tensions knew of them and were beginning to draw conclusions from them. Given Cooper’s secondary dislike for Yankees and the closeness of feeling during this period between New Englanders and the English, it seems likely that New England had provided the most fertile soil for such tales. He managed to have some friends chosen for the Washington’s Birthday committee, but even so it was attended by people such as the Kirklands and Woolsey and Richmond, Yankees with no prior ties to him, and they saw him in light of the things they had already heard.35 The Washington memorial and the whole Roman experience were a bit out of character for the man who had left busy London and Paris behind and taken to the mountains in the summer of 1828. For much of his time in Switzerland and Sorrento, and to a lesser extent at Florence in between, Cooper had become accustomed to more solitary enjoyments. Rome, which was crowded with Americans, altered the game. He spent some time among them, and among the even more numerous English visitors who suited his taste.36 He nonetheless correctly claimed to Charles Wilkes that “ill health, or rather prudence” kept him “very much out of society” in Rome (LJ 1:410). Despite the Washington’s Birthday event or his informal socializing, he did not have the exposure he had been accustomed to during his first two years abroad. The cause of his present hesitancy was partly temperamental, with some roots, perhaps, in the health issues he hinted at to Wilkes, and in his efforts to resolve them. It also had, though, political sources. As we saw in the previous chapter, his English visit had worn him down physically, and in some sense worn him out socially; but it had also shown him the extent to which worldly interests too often determined the judgments and values of people he met in what was termed “society.” Having so strongly championed American principles, Cooper received repeated abrasions among the English. When he started encountering Americans who seemed to have fallen under the spell of European systems and values, the upshot was more troubling. He spoke his mind increasingly to compatriots he chanced to encounter, seeking to disabuse them for their own sake and the country’s. That helps explain how he behaved toward relative strangers such as Thomas B. Johnson in Florence, whose values he might ascribe to regional or personal or party differences. When he found similar discordances among people with whom he had significant personal ties, however, the trouble struck closer to home. In Rome at the start of 1830 he thus encountered “two Rensselaers,” younger brothers of his boyhood friend Stephen Van Rensselaer IV. Once the pair went back to New York in 1831, he shared his reflections with Mary Jay: “They mean well, but made themselves remarked among their countrymen abroad”—meaning Cooper himself, we must assume—“by underrating every thing at home.” And

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he added that the older of the two, William Patterson Van Rensselaer, was “a downright grumbler” about American life (LJ 2:109). We shall see in chapter 12 what literary use Cooper made of these two young men when he engaged the Anti-Rent War, among whose targets was the Van Rensselaer estate. The reduced socializing in Rome had as much to do with Cooper’s growing political loneliness as with his stomach or his medicines or his supposed personal difficulty. Washington’s Birthday was an important exception for him because by gathering so many fellow citizens in Rome he could rally them, in at least this short-lived and superficial way, to the cause of America. Even so, that small public event (over which he presided without speaking or offering a toast) inadvertently exposed him to a growing circle of domestic critics whose America, clearly enough, was not his.

Old New York It would be some time before the full implications of this developing trouble unfolded, first in Paris and then in the United States. At present, though, Cooper’s literary work itself gave some indication of the difficulty, for his next novel, The Water-Witch, had oddly composite origins that, as with his previous one, suggested his increasingly tenuous ties to his homeland. Set in New York and New Jersey a generation after the 1664 English conquest of the Dutch colony, in that regard it certainly concerned a part of that homeland to which Cooper had strong ties. But, as noted in the previous chapter, the new novel’s core idea derived from Cooper’s recent trip through the Lowlands, rather than from any long-arrested intention that he had brought with him from home. His recognition of cultural remnants on the 1828 trip (as when he saw “a hundred things that recalled Albany and New York as they appeared in their palmy Dutch condition”) was so evocative that details culled then were to surface knowingly in the novel—as when the character Myndert Van Beverout speaks of passing “along the dykes of Leyden,” or when the book twice refers to “the boom-key of Rotterdam,” where the Coopers had disembarked from their ferry boat and where their hotel was located (GE CE 308; WW 1:10, 202; 2:69). Moreover, the novel’s European debts were multiple. As Cooper’s daughter Susan later claimed, his “sight of the Mediterranean” during his brief visit to Marseilles in March 1829 had helped turn his early thinking about the tenth book away from Dutch New York as a densely imagined urban setting and toward the sea (P&P 222–23).37 Cooper’s New York memories mattered for the novel once he got it under way, as we shall see, and many of them were water-borne, but a book set in early eighteenth-century Manhattan need not have been as nautical as The Water-Witch proved to be. Indeed, so dominant was this new

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Mediterranean influence that the urban focus Cooper set up at the start largely vanishes and never returns once his maritime intentions are revealed. So one might say that the book’s first impulse—a tale of Old New York, with the urban scene closely described—was submerged under its second one almost as soon as Cooper put pen to paper. Why else did he essentially abandon Lord Cornbury, the disgraced former governor, after having carefully introduced him in the streets of New York in the first chapter?38 It nonetheless is worth pausing over the book’s stillborn opening, in part because Cooper was evidently so charmed by the idea of Dutch New York that, not quite able to let go of it, he laid down his markers here and would revive and finish the effort in Satanstoe fourteen years later. How the novelist set up New Amsterdam reveals the pattern of loose cross-fertilization between what he remembered or reimagined of his home state and what he had quite recently seen in the Netherlands. For instance, Alderman Van Beverout’s stroll from his mansion on Broadway to the house owned by “the Patroon of Kinderhook,” Oloff Van Staats, on one of the side streets in the lower end of the town, maps early New York as Cooper might have become familiar with it through his own wanderings and the stories or illustrations he had encountered while living there. But as the two men proceed from there together, their walk seems to turn a corner and enter the Netherlandish scenes Cooper had more recently experienced. Suddenly, they are alongside a canal-like creek that penetrates Manhattan for a quarter mile, crowded on both its banks by high, angular, tightly packed buildings like the houses that “line a canal in the cities of Holland,” such as Cooper had seen in Amsterdam and elsewhere in 1828 (WW CE 25, 28).39 Having begun the new book in Florence with these initial onshore scenes, Cooper must have been eager to carry it forward. His daughter recalled, however, that “a touch of fever, brought on by exposure to the summer sun of Italy, prevented the progress of the work” (WW HE xii–xiii).40 He therefore carried only a slender manuscript with him on the voyage to Naples. The book itself confirms this point. As its recent editors note, “beginning in chapter 5, allusions to coastal Italy, both in the narration and the dialogue, gradually accumulate” until in the twenty-third chapter “Seadrift’s lengthy description of the view from the abode of her youth on the cliffs of Sorrento” introduces the prospect Cooper had from his study and terrace while at work on the book (WW CE xvi–xvii).41 There is little plausibility in this Mediterranean experience for a young woman of American ancestry and parentage. Its presence in The Water-Witch expresses instead, as in another sense the scattered Netherlandish references do, the author’s increasing alienation from his nominal setting. Cooper was not yet at the point where he could develop whole tales from his European experience,

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as he would in The Bravo, his very next book. But in The Water-Witch he essentially wrote America, as a complex of places and people and events, out of his system, albeit with no haste and much further expense of memory. The latter point is especially evident in an extended, highly detailed set of incidents he composed for the book’s latter part, with Seadrift’s remembered view from Sorrento literally before his eyes but New York very much alive on the page. During the episode in question, a sea chase filling chapters 28 to 32, the Royal Navy’s Coquette pursues, passes, but repeatedly fails to capture the eponymous Water-Witch. The chase, starting in the East River, runs from Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island up through Hell Gate and then extends into Long Island Sound. Because these were waters Cooper had once known with a sort of contingent immediacy, but had not seen or sailed for five years, he was relying here on what was very much a remembered sea.42 Everything about the chase reflects his intimate knowledge of the waters on both sides of Blackwell’s Island, as well as among the reefs and rocks stretching north from it and then, past Hallett’s Point in Queens, eastward between the dangers of Ward’s Island and the many impediments of the gate itself until, some distance past “the head-land of Throgmorton” (WW CE 339—that is, Throgs Neck), early nineteenth-century sailors at last would enter the relative safety of the sound. Because it is highly unlikely that Cooper could have refreshed his memory of this complex passage while in the vicinity of Naples, he had to act on deeply imprinted knowledge. He clearly knew the East River and Hell Gate passage so well, in other words, that he could invent twists in the plot by detailed reference to its actual features—as when he has Tom Tiller at the last minute barely avoid a dangerous rock and dart into the west channel around Blackwell’s Island, escaping the pursuing Coquette, which is forced into the east channel. After the two vessels emerge at the island’s upper end (their order now reversed by Tiller’s stratagem), Cooper manages the ensuing flight through Hell Gate and out Long Island Sound with exquisite skill, partly because he implicitly understood the course the ships follow. The episode resembles one of his forest chases but not in a derivative way, since the very texture of the action derives from the givens of the maritime scene. Action grows from remembered scenery. Even so, had Cooper written the book in New York with its actual scenes before him, the details in this episode would not have had, I think, such poignant sharpness. It was their recovery from the far reaches of space and the depths of Cooper’s memory that gave them their special force. Furthermore, Cooper could go only so far in this direction. The book, even as it owed so much to memory, is also full of rich invention. Its boldest sally is the creation of the “sea-green lady,” the figurehead (and guardian) of the smuggler’s brigantine. No such “lady,” one assumes, has ever adorned or ridden aboard a vessel—American or otherwise.

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For the figurehead is no figurehead, but rather a magically animated sculpture, an automaton of sorts, credited with the sibyl-like power of revealing the future via the mysterious book she holds in her hand. And she appears in other forms as well—as an image seemingly adrift on the waters during one chase, or as a costumed figure (the actually female Seadrift redressed as a woman for once) aboard the vessel in another scene. In fact, as the rationalist Ludlow surmises and Tom Tiller later confirms, the sea-green lady is a piece of “mummery,” a device for keeping the ignorant sailors on the vessel in check (WW CE 290, 294). She has no supernatural powers, much as the Water-Witch itself is no ghost ship but a material vessel of wood and canvas, elusive as it may be. The sea-green lady was not entirely, though, a piece of free invention on the novelist’s part. Here too his presence in Europe mattered. She may have been suggested to Cooper by one or more works of art he saw in Europe—some sibylline statue or painting, or perhaps a figure carved on the façade of one of the many Gothic churches he had seen prior to arriving in Italy.43 More importantly, there were literary sources here that Cooper mostly encountered while in Europe. Of special significance was the legend of the Flying Dutchman, which provided the foundation for the book’s plot, and thus lent the figurehead its peculiarly animated force. That legend, having passed by word of mouth among sailors and nonsailors alike for years, had been actively circulating in Romantic literary venues for some time before Richard Wagner chose to write his first opera, Der fliegende Holländer, on its basis in 1841. Walter Scott had referred in Rokeby (1813) to “that Phantom-Ship, whose form Shoots like a meteor through the Storm” (Canto II, Stanza xi), adding a note identifying the ship as the Flying Dutchman and further indicating that the vessel, doomed never to return to the Netherlands from Asia, perpetually circulated in the waters off the Cape of Good Hope.44 Cooper unquestionably knew Scott’s poem, from which he had drawn an epigraph for The Spy. Moreover, he probably knew the piece that proved the primary printed source on the legend for writers in the 1820s—that is, John Howison’s anonymously published tale “Vanderdecken’s Message Home; or, The Tenacity of Natural Affections,” which appeared in Blackwood’s Magazine in May 1821 and was quickly and widely reprinted in the United States. Washington Irving must have been building on Howison’s tale the next year when he had the eponymous hero of “Dolph Heyliger” in Bracebridge Hall (1822) pick up his “Storm-Ship” tale on a slow voyage up the Hudson.45 Cooper himself made reference to the Flying Dutchman in The Pilot, where Long Tom Coffin, though he admits he has never glimpsed the vessel, asserts that he has “seen them that have seen her, and spoken her too” (PIL 2:41). In The Red Rover, Cooper likewise referred to the legend by associating the Royal Caroline with the phantom ship (see RR 1:151). Then, in the scene in which the Royal Caroline is

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approached by a mysterious vessel that some of the men take to be a specter ship, Cooper had the real ship’s first mate, Edward Earing, tell of his own encounter with the Flying Dutchman when he “doubled the Cape in the year ’46” (RR 1:232). Such indications of Cooper’s interest in the legend might be read as signs that he wished to make even greater use of it. And in The Water-Witch he did just that. One further intervening source that appears to have given him hints on how to proceed was a spectacular theatrical version of the legend by Edward Fitzball, who by 1828 already had adapted both The Pilot and The Red Rover for the London stage. Fitzball’s Flying Dutchman melodrama, first mounted at the Adelphi Theatre late in 1826 and restaged in the capital and elsewhere in later years (as well as in New York, where a very popular version by William Dunlap opened in 1828), seems not to have been running during Cooper’s London season from the end of February through May 1828, and the script was not published until 1829.46 However, the work’s mixture of supernatural effects with a conflict between two suitors (a sailor and a dour Dutchman) for the hand of a heroine who has been raised by her guardian-uncle makes it likely that it somehow came to Cooper’s attention—for these details, although in some ways traditional in romance, are notably close to his own. It may even be that Cooper sought to preempt further theatrical depredations by Fitzball on his fiction by writing a book that imitated some of the standard features of the playwright’s melodramatic style. Doing so would constitute a kind of symbolic countertheft—and at the same time might allow Cooper himself to adapt The Water-Witch for the stage, as he once had tried to adapt The Pioneers. Hence, first of all, the importance of the Flying Dutchman myth to Cooper’s novel. His smugglers’ ship in the novel, we recall, is “a craft of mist, that skims the top of the seas like a sailing water-fowl,” and it persistently appears and disappears as if truly charmed, much as does Fitzball’s (and later Richard Wagner’s) Dutchman. Some characters in the novel even claim it is the “sprite of a vessel that was rifled and burnt by Kidd, in the Indian Ocean,” destroyed but nonetheless able to keep wandering about the seas “looking for its gold and the killed” (WW CE 39–40).47 It is a “fly-away,” like the Dutchman, and the characters crossing to Staten Island at the novel’s outset, stimulated by talk of it, urge Tom Tiller to tell the tale of “one of these devil’s flyers” he claims to have encountered in “the calm latitudes, under the burning sun” (WW CE 40). These details certainly suggest that Cooper was consciously drawing on Fitzball’s melodramatic manner in his third nautical tale. Since stage fare of the sort Fitzball produced relied heavily on musical accompaniments to the action, an even better indication of Cooper’s thinking here is the fact that he authored a song for the novel—“My Brigantine!” (plate 2). When Cooper furthermore had

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a “low air” on an ethereal flute sound (WW CE 176) as the makeshift curtain rises in Tiller’s cabin and Seadrift, in costume, is about to appear as the sea-green lady, or, a few pages earlier, had the same instrument and a vocal accompaniment mix with the very sounds of the sea in a seeming invocation of this “ocean deity” (WW CE 172), he was both paying tribute to The Tempest and demonstrating his familiarity with—indeed, he was incorporating—the conventions of contemporary popular theater. Cooper deepened the ties of his novel to those conventions when he deployed snatches of Shakespearean plays in other scenes where the sea-green lady figures. No doubt he considered some of these further texts as the verbal components of a potential musical score. Such innovations on his own novelistic style suggest, again, how important his present European context was for the further elaboration of his art. The events in the novel, not just such musical accompaniments, are similarly indebted to the popular melodramatic style of the period. In concluding the sea battle in which the Coquette, aided by Tiller and his men, manages to defeat a French ship, Cooper provides an eminently theatrical ending to the life of Ben Trysail. As the ship, afire belowdecks, nears its own end, the old sailor’s body is left propped against the mizzenmast. When the flames at last reach the vessel’s magazine, “a sheet of streaming fire” bursts upward, setting the heavens aglow— and sending Trysail’s seemingly reanimated body through the air with its arms “stretched upwards” until, sailing through “the centre of a flood of flame” and descending, it cuts the water within reach of Captain Ludlow (WW CE 392). This stunning pantomimic scene matches, in eerie effect, the one in Fitzball’s play in which the master of the ghost ship, Vanderdecken, “with a demoniac laugh, rises from the sea in blue fire, amidst violent thunder” while an image of his vessel looms in the sky behind him.48 This mélange of sources, experiences, and popular rivalries will suggest how The Water-Witch came into its imaginative being in Cooper’s mind from the early part of 1828 until the fall of 1829. The business of actually finishing such an ebullient tale proceeded in a surprisingly orderly fashion. Cooper had reached the middle of the book in September (see LJ 1:389); by November 5, he wrote Greenough from Sorrento that he was “nearly done”—he had “six chapters to write” (LJ 1:396). If his count in these matters was exact, at the latter point he must have been about to begin work on the book’s climactic battle. Things went on so swiftly with that beautifully rendered run of chapters that Cooper soon finished the manuscript, turning it over to his nephew, who completed his copy by that month’s end (see WW CE xvii). The new novel in manuscript form was part of the Coopers’ baggage on leaving Naples around December 1. Perhaps because, as Susan wrote her sister Caroline in January, church institutions in Rome were closed during “the

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solemnities of Christmas and New Year,”49 Cooper hurried to secure permission from the censors in the papal states for printing his new book in Rome. According to his daughter Susan’s recollection, he was soon seeking help from Italian acquaintances in the city, several of whom “very kindly interested themselves in [his] behalf.” “Some encouragement was given at first; the nature and character of the book were explained [to the censor], and the preliminary permission was granted.” A fresh copy of the novel’s opening chapters was produced and submitted to the censor’s office, seemingly as a formality. After many days passed without a reply, Cooper’s allies made inquiry, though without immediate result. “At length,” Susan reported, “came a very polite, very dignified, but slightly severe communication”: a passage on the second page of the book having been deemed “wholly unfit for publication,” doubts about the entire novel had arisen. It would have to be “rigidly revised” to ensure that no further errors were contained in it. The implicit suggestion that the whole manuscript would be gone through by the authorities, either before Cooper revised it or afterward (or both), opened for him a prospect of “constant annoyance” (P&P 230; see also WW HE xxii). He therefore quickly concluded that he could not publish the book in Rome, nor even just print it there. By December 30, Cooper accordingly asked Greenough to arrange for Molini to print it in Florence, as he had The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish. All he told Greenough was this: “I cannot print here— They have refused me the privilege” (LJ 1:399). A week later, Cooper explained more fully to Charles Wilkes that the “Roman Government” wouldn’t let him print the book there on account of this expression, which unfortunately occurs in the first Chapter. ‘And Rome, itself, is only to be traced by mutilated arches and fallen columns’ ” (LJ 1:400–401).50 Florence had its own problems on the question of censorship at the time, but Cooper had avoided them with his previous novel and had little concern regarding the present one.51 The real issue, however, arose from Molini. On January 7, 1830, Greenough reported to Cooper that the printer was “very ready to accept the business” but that his lack of suitable compositors would keep him from producing more than “two sheets” per week. Molini also expressed concern that the need to send proofs to Rome would cause additional delays.52 Cooper answered at the end of January that “two sheets a week will not answer my purpose at all” (LJ 1:402). He continued to correspond with Greenough regarding a second job for Molini, a proposed pamphlet (never published) answering criticisms published in the Edinburgh Review, but he soon became convinced that he must make other arrangements for The Water-Witch. Alternatives were not immediately apparent. Cooper’s wife at the start of January reported that the couple had been “very much disappointed, by the refusal of the Roman Government.” She was then hoping that Molini would

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undertake the job, since otherwise her husband would be “obliged to leave us, to print at Paris—which would separate us for three months at least.”53 This had been the backup plan for the previous book, cut short only by Cooper’s apparent luck in locating Molini’s former English compositor in Marseilles. With Molini’s new difficulties now in view, but also with Susan’s concerns clear to him, at the end of January the novelist told Greenough that he intended to “send the Manuscript to Paris, and get rid of the whole affair” (LJ 1:402). That was not to happen. For some time in Rome, Cooper’s older daughters and his nephew had been studying German “in preparation of going north,” and before long Cooper decided to pack up The Water-Witch and take his whole family in that direction with the expectation that he would find some means of producing the book in the German states. He had been actively connected with the Berlin firm of Duncker and Humblot ever since it had issued The Prairie in translation in 1827, and in due time it would also issue an authorized translation of The Water-Witch. But right now he planned to go to Dresden, not Berlin— even though when sharing that decision with Charles Wilkes on April 9 he had no idea which firm he might employ (see LJ 1:409). Once more, Cooper’s literary necessities dictated a venturesome shift of scene.54

Via Venice to Dresden Having left Rome on April 15, 1830, the Thursday after Easter (see GI CE 257, LJ 1:409), the Americans were to linger for more than three weeks in northern Italy, especially in Venice, before heading into the Austrian Alps. They went through Terni and Spoleto, and after that Foligno, then turned east over the Apennines toward the Adriatic. Susan, writing Ann Pomeroy from Paris eight months afterward, remembered that, though they were “sometimes very much fatigued, sometimes out of humour with the dirt or impositions,” they were “oftener enchanted with the beautiful scenery.”55 Her husband, his health still troubling him and his mind no doubt absorbed with the task of getting the new book into production, had little to say at the time or later about the experience. In most of the Adriatic towns, the travelers looked at “pictures, cathedrals, and ruins,” but Cooper would recall few details. After the route turned inland toward Bologna, with the mountains to the left and the great plain of Lombardy and the Po to the right, Cooper grew weary (as his Italian Gleanings would put it) with “towns of ten and twenty thousand souls.” There was no denying that “the country was beautiful,” he conceded, and in fact he called this whole trip “one of the pleasantest” the family had made in all of Europe. But the pleasures remained on the surface in his travel book; none had edge enough to cut deeper (GI CE 271–72).56

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Only when Austrian-held Venice was in prospect at the end of April did his interest revive. Leaving their carriage in storage at Mestre on the twenty-eighth, the Coopers took to a gondola that soon entered a broad channel “lined by palaces and noble houses” and leading directly into the S-shaped Grand Canal. As they moved along the latter, Cooper looked into the diverging lateral passages, spying “through the dark ravines of houses” a series of “bridges trodden constantly by foot-passengers” (GI CE 276–77). It was a magical scene for him as it has been for so many other visitors: even the inveterate traveler Mariana Starke enthused in her 1828 guidebook that “imagination can form no idea” of this “singular and beautiful city.”57 But the best image at the start was that of the Grand Canal, over which, beyond its tightest bend, spanned the single legendary bridge linking the two halves of the city, the Ponte di Rialto. As the gondola passed beneath its “high and pointed” arch, it entered the final part of the canal, beyond which opened a wider view of the port area near the island of Giudecca (GI CE 277). Amid so much that was new and enchanting, there was also a touch of familiarity. Not long after arriving, Cooper saw a second craft resting ahead, its gondolier lying on his oars as the passenger scanned the scene—it was Henry Cruger, the South Carolinian of New York ancestry whom Cooper knew from Manhattan and had just seen in Rome. Cruger, a lawyer who was destined to become the novelist’s close friend once both were back in the States, had preceded the Coopers here by a day or two and, expecting to see them soon, already had taken lodgings at an old palazzo on the Grand Canal converted into an inn called the White Lion (Leone Bianco). This hotel, which Murray in 1842 would call “an excellent house particularly well managed,” was the perfect place for the weary travelers. There the Coopers now followed Cruger (see GI CE 277–78).58 No sooner had they gone up to their rooms than the novelist “ran to a window.” He felt from the moment he had entered the city that he was “in the centre of a civilization entirely novel,” and the near immersion of the inn in the canal— a gondola was casually parked in the lobby, as one would be in the vestibule of Don Camillo Monforte’s modest Venetian dwelling in The Bravo (see BR CE 20)—confirmed the impression. So did what he saw and heard from the window, or rather saw but failed to hear. For a city the size of Venice, there was very little of the noise Cooper was accustomed to in New York or Paris or London or Rome. There was “not a wheel or hoof rattling on a pavement,” so that incidental sounds carried great distances. (Hence, in The Bravo, the “noiseless, suspicious, busy, mysterious, and yet stirring throngs” of the city—BR CE 212.) Moreover, Cooper concluded, “Everything was strange; though a sailor and accustomed to aquatic scenes, I have never before seen a city afloat.” He could hardly wait to get back outside, so right after dinner, with moonlight brightening

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the city, he joined Cruger and went off to see St. Mark’s Square. Cruger, who knew his way around, led Cooper on foot—a surprise to Cooper, who like most first-time visitors did not realize that networks of small-scale streets thread along and over the canals (GI CE 279). The “great Square of St. Mark” astounded Cooper, who admitted almost a decade later that no other urban scene had ever struck him “with so much surprise and pleasure.” The quaintness of the church, with its “oriental domes” and other “peculiar” ornament, made him feel “transported to a scene in the Arabian Nights.” Like the similarly exotic ducal palace just to its south, the church led Cooper to contemplate the days when Venice had been a great maritime power, its dominion extending to the eastern end of the Mediterranean. As he looked around, everything he saw had similar connections to the city’s long past. Here stood the giant’s stairs and there the campanile, while arching from the palace to the prison on the other side of the small canal known as Rio di Palazzo, was the infamous Bridge of Sighs. With the adjuncts of the soft moonlight, the quaint vessels in the port, the cool evening air, the Lido, “and the dark hearse-like gondolas gliding in every direction,” Venice at this moment was perfect: “Certainly,” Cooper confessed, “no other place ever struck my imagination so forcibly; and never before did I experience so much pleasure, from novel objects, in so short a time.” He was distracted somewhat by the modern military band playing in the square, for it intruded on the magical illusion, but he nonetheless spent an hour in real enjoyment. On getting back to the hotel, he spoke of it with such animation that his nephew rushed out to find St. Mark’s (GI CE 279–81). The Coopers were to spend slightly more than a week amid these delights, from the evening of April 28 to the morning of May 7 (see LJ 1:414). The novelist liked St. Mark’s so much that he went there every evening to enjoy “the music and the sports” (GI CE 286). It was here, in a fictional reprise of his first visit with Cruger, that he would open The Bravo, not written until he returned to Paris but inspired on the spot in Venice. Here, too, he would site much of that novel’s tense action, from celebrations to hushed interviews to the concluding execution. And near here in fact the Coopers, abandoning the White Lion, took private lodgings after a day or two (see GI CE 282). The record of what they did while in the city is sparse: Cooper kept no journal after leaving Naples, only one brief letter (written in French) survives from the Venetian stay, and in his Italian Gleanings he gave little detail of how he occupied his time. We know that he rented a gondola for the duration and put it to much use. He saw many paintings, especially those of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, whose best work he thought could be seen only in Venice. He especially liked Titian’s “Assumption of the Virgin,” an altarpiece notable for Mary’s red gown—Cooper described it as “one of the most gorgeous” of the painter’s works. He spent a good deal of time

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in churches, not praying but “picture-hunting” (he added: “and a queer thing it is to drive up to a noble portico in your gondola, to land and find yourself in one of the noblest edifices of Europe”). He particularly appreciated the statuary and the high relief carvings in some sanctuaries (GI CE 282–84).59 And yet, for reasons that probably had more to do with Cooper’s inner condition than the city itself, his ardor somehow was dampened even before he left. Aside from Cruger, Cooper knew no one there, and hardly stayed long enough to make new friends, a tough prospect in exclusive Venice in any case.60 Such factors gave the place a “monotonous and wearying” quality, and before long, the Gleanings reported, he was feeling that Venice “fatigues by its unceasing calm,” just the opposite of his first impression. The canals, the port, and St. Mark’s offered great variety, but, perversely enough, Cooper thought their effect made a visitor long “for further varieties.” So within eight days, while conceding that he couldn’t remember having been “so much struck with any other place on entering it,” Cooper had grown “tired” of it. Novelty might not be the best solace for a sunken spirit (GI CE 289).61 Early in the morning on May 7, a Friday, the Coopers returned to Mestre and set out on the road to Padua. Their route went inland to Vicenza, then west to the “pretty town” of Verona, a long distance from their starting point that morning (LJ 1:414). The next day, climbing toward the border with the southern Tyrol, then part of Austria proper, the travelers paused on the heights so Cooper could take one “last look at Italy.” He had never, he would later write, “quitted any country with one half the regret.” Italy’s “nature, its climate, its recollections, its people even, had been gradually gaining on my affections for near two years, and I felt that reluctance to separate, that one is apt to experience on quitting his own house.” In his travel book, Cooper would pause his narrative at just this point to emphasize that it was the Italians he liked, not just their country. He had gone there “with too many of the prejudices that had got abroad concerning the Italian character.” The spirit of condemnation he traced to the woeful modern history of Italy: “The whole country is virtually a conquered country—and men are seldom wronged without being abused” (GI CE 295). After so much time in Italy, Cooper had developed great empathy for the ordinary Italians he had met and observed everywhere. It was a country where, again according to the usual abuse heaped on it, bandits were rife. Cooper had entered it, in fact, with weapons at hand, fearing their murderous depredations (see GI CE 12–14). But all the alarms he had encountered were false. Italy, he concluded, produced no more violence of the sort the banditti were said to commit than England or France, and the comparison with some parts of the United States fell distinctly to Italy’s advantage: “the quasi duels or irregular combats of the south-west”— the lower Mississippi Valley, home by 1838 (when Cooper’s Italian Gleanings was

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published) of fighters renowned for their ferocity—caused the death of three times as many men as all the violence in Italy (GI CE 295–96). Cooper had found the Italian lower classes to be “unsophisticated, kind, and well-principled.” Ordinary Italians “are more gracious than the English, and more sincere than the French, and infinitely more refined than the Germans; or, it might be better to say, less obtuse and coarse.” Moreover, in cultural matters, the Italians had an impressive advantage: “In grace of mind, in a love, and even in a knowledge of the arts, a large portion of the common Italians are as much superior to the Anglo-Saxon race as civilization is superior to barbarism.” And yet, despite these human advantages, Italy remained divided into ten separate states. Judging by the potential of the people and the land itself, Cooper concluded that Italy was destined to be unified, as of course it would be once the nationalist spirit matured. On the other hand, in the regional and local enmities that made unification hard to achieve in Italy, Cooper later saw a lesson for the importance of maintaining “the bond of union” in his own homeland (GI CE 296–99). Although he wrote this analysis in 1838, it will be recalled that the Nullification Crisis had been a particularly hot issue during 1830, and in fact Cooper held discussions on the subject with South Carolinian Cruger in Rome and Dresden, perhaps in Venice as well (see LJ 1:421–23). When the novelist wrote about unity and disunity in Italy, he was probably recalling those discussions about what was happening at home then. After the lingering look back at Italy that Cooper inserted in his Gleanings, the rest of the story was brief. The travelers were entering the Alps again for the first time in nearly two years. It was after nightfall on May 8 before they got to Trent, nestled amid the mountains, where they stayed in a “semi-Swiss, semiGerman” inn, a pleasant reminder of their 1828 travels and a foretaste of what lay before them. By the tenth, climbing the “celebrated pass of the Brenner,” they were at such a high altitude that, when it began to be stormy, the rain turned to snow, and before long several inches covered the road. Two days earlier, Cooper recalled, they had been “eating cherries and strawberries at Verona!” (GI CE 300–301). Past the summit, the glacier-fed streams flowed northward, into the Danube’s watershed, and suddenly a turn in the road revealed a beautiful spread of high mountain scenery below them, with Innsbruck in its midst. The town, which reminded them all of Bern, provided a good place to wait out more snow over the next two days, with time to visit the imperial palace and the Hofkirche, and even to make a short excursion to the ancient, very wellpreserved Ambras Castle (see GI CE 302–3; LJ 1:414).62 But Innsbruck, delightful as it was, was merely a way station. So when they cleared out of their inn on the morning of May 12, they followed the road due north toward Munich, so determined to reach it without further stop that, undeterred by “very beautiful”

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views, they ran through the night, arriving in the Bavarian capital at nine in the morning on May 13 (LJ 1:414). Munich they liked from the start: “One of the handsomest cities we have seen,” the novelist later noted in his copy of Engelmann and Reichard’s travel guide (which he in fact purchased there at the time), adding that the newer parts of Munich resembled “an American town” (LJ 1:414).63 They lingered another two nights, especially enjoying Munich’s art collection—simply “superb,” it contained nearly a thousand paintings, many by such masters as Dürer, Raphael, Leonardo, Rubens, Van Dyck, Murillo, Andrea del Sarto, and Titian. They also visited the recently finished Royal Glyptothek, which displayed Bavarian king Ludwig I’s fine collection of ancient sculpture. There they saw the “beautiful” Ægina Marbles, statuary from the pediments of the temple of Athena Aphaia on the island of Ægina, near Athens (LJ 1:414). Representing figures from the Trojan War, these marbles had been excavated in 1811 and, before going on display in Munich, had been restored by Bertel Thorvaldsen, who supplied missing parts of the bodies. The completed figures were presented as they presumably had been arranged in their original positions in the temple ’s pediments.64 Leaving Munich on May 15, the Coopers made a series of stops across the next week until, at four in the afternoon on May 21, they at last entered Dresden. They took rooms (“clean, but neither very good nor cheap”) in the Hôtel de Pologne, but within a week moved to an apartment facing “the grand square” of the Altmarkt a short distance away (LJ 1:414–15).65 By July, Cooper was complaining to Peter Jay that he found Germany “tame” after the other places he and his family had stayed. By September, he would add for Charles Wilkes from Paris that Dresden had been not just tame but “very dull” (LJ 1:418, 2:8). It had the advantage of being inexpensive. The Coopers paid only forty dollars per month for the Dresden apartment, which the novelist informed Mary Jay was “the best town residence” they had yet had anywhere in Europe. By the time he wrote her, they had been in the Saxon capital two months, and, its dullness notwithstanding, they liked it so well that they expected to stay another three (LJ 1:428). The main reason for the Dresden trip, of course, was seeing to the production of The Water-Witch, and on that front Cooper had little to complain of. Soon after arriving and settling down he sought out a local bookselling firm, Walthersche Hofbuchhandlung, and by the end of May had signed a contract for printing the novel, which by that date had already commenced (see LJ 1:416). The firm, owned at this time by Johann Gottlieb Wagner, who had purchased it from Georg Moritz Walther in 1824, was to receive all rights for a continental edition of the book in English, in return for which it would pay to have it printed “as fast as can be conveniently done.” The firm was to give Cooper proof sheets

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to review and correct, after which the corrections would be incorporated into the text. As the printer (not mentioned in the contract, it was to be the firm Carl Christian Meinhold and Sons) corrected the type, it was to supply eight sets of perfected sheets for Cooper to use as he saw fit with other partners. Although these terms stemmed from those under which Cooper had operated since arriving in Paris four years earlier, the Dresden arrangements invoked special concerns.66 For one thing, Cooper reserved the right to set the publication date, not specified in the Walthersche contract, which simply guaranteed that the firm could bring out its edition in English for continental readers “as early as any other bookseller shall publish the same work in any other Country.” This vague clause was tricky given the ever greater distances over which Cooper was trying to carry on his literary business. In fact, the Germans completed their work speedily enough that printing was concluded by July 26 (see LJ 1:425), and Cooper dispatched a set of perfected proof sheets to Carey and Lea via Welles and Co. in Paris in time to make the packet boat that departed Le Havre on September 1 (see LJ 2:5, 8). The sheets arrived intact and Carey and Lea undertook to have the book set in type and stereotyped. Although without exceptional speed it was unlikely that Cooper’s target date for the book’s publication (October 15) could be met in Philadelphia, such a delay would not normally affect operations elsewhere, since American copyright did not depend on priority of publication.67 Colburn and Bentley cooperated with Cooper’s plan and met the target date, again without causing difficulty elsewhere. What did threaten to upset things instead was the fact that the Walthersche firm, with its own funds invested in the book, decided not to wait even for that date before issuing its Dresden edition—in violation of Cooper’s contract and in defiance of Colburn and Bentley’s expectation and British copyright principles. As early as the middle of September, Walther accordingly began distributing the book. Cooper, who had left Dresden for Paris in a rush on August 11 (as we shall see in the next chapter), could not have learned of this development on his own. He apparently discovered it only after his authorized German translators, Duncker and Humblot, wrote his nephew William on September 18 to indicate that it had been “very surprised by seeing that . . . Walther has published already the new novel.” According to the Berliners’ understanding, no copy of the book in English was to be published in Germany “before we have published our translation.” It therefore believed that Walther’s impatience had “broken our contract.” The risk to Duncker and Humblot was that any other would-be German translators of Cooper, having easy access to the Walther text, could beat the Berlin firm to the market. It therefore decided to rush the deadline, too, issuing its first two

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volumes on October 1 as a kind of placeholder in the book’s German-language market. The haste of Cooper’s newest partner in Dresden thus threatened the operations of two older ones, an indication that his Paris system, effective as it had proved in 1826–1828, was showing signs of strain as he attempted to adapt it to other far-flung locales. Moreover, Walthersche Hofbuchhandlung’s action did not just upset the system—it threatened to delay, if not reduce, the author’s profits. Duncker and Humblot’s September 18 letter thus asserted that the firm would not pay Cooper what it owed on its contract until it had established that no other German translation of the book had appeared before December 1 (S&B 234). By then, presumably, its own third volume would have hit the market and satisfied much of the initial demand in Germany. The Water-Witch thus sailed in 1830 on boisterous international waters. As a further indication of how Cooper’s system was being negatively affected by his shifting about, Carey and Lea, fearing it might not be able to publish the book until early the following year, postdated all copies of The Water-Witch “1831,” although at last the firm did manage to issue it in Philadelphia on December 18. Cooper’s friend Robert Walsh had written approvingly of the book more than a month earlier, having no doubt seen it through Carey and Lea or perhaps in a copy of the Colburn and Bentley edition surreptitiously imported from England (see CORR 1:195). Moreover, on November 26, Walsh’s National Gazette gave a longish excerpt including the last few paragraphs of the book’s third chapter and the whole of its fourth. This was reprinted elsewhere—for instance, in Washington’s Daily National Journal on December 3. Eight days later, the book not yet having appeared but a stage adaptation (apparently the one by Richard Penn Smith) being about to open “at the Chesnut Street Theatre,” the Philadelphia Ariel thought Cooper’s sales endangered: since the typical “novel reader” might be “content to skim the surface merely to ascertain the finale of the story,” the play potentially could upstage the book.68 But two weeks later, on Christmas Day, the Ariel could announce that “The rush for the Water Witch on Saturday last [12/18] was tremendous. The whole city thronged to the bookstores as if actuated by a common feeling of irrepressible anxiety to obtain a copy of a work so long announced and so much applauded beforehand, by the few who read it in advance of the public. A single bookseller in Fourth Street disposed of near 500!—and the publishers themselves no doubt sold three times the number in the same space of time. The whole edition has probably vanished from their shelves at the time we write.” At last the book about an early New York mystery ship, written in Italy and first printed in Germany, had reached readers on the western side of the Atlantic. Dresden was thus extraordinarily useful as Cooper sought to adapt to his always changing situation in Europe.69

C H A P T E R

F O U R

Imaginary Politics

B

arely had Cooper begun his work in Dresden before various political upheavals distracted and then engrossed his attention. On June 25, there, as in other German cities, a jubilee was staged to commemorate the presentation of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession to Emperor Charles V in 1530. Sited in the Altmarkt—right beneath the front windows of the Americans’ apartment—the celebration turned into a fight when an unidentified Catholic denounced the two Protestant reformers. Cooper watched the resulting furor with considerable interest. Dresden was mostly Protestant, but its ruling royal family was Catholic—“the court is catholic to [the point of] bigotry, while the people of Saxony are protestants,” was Cooper’s background comment in a letter to Peter A. Jay. The night after the jubilee, he added, “the grand square” became “an encampment” for government troops. Cooper heard the Protestants shout “death to the King [of Saxony], and long live the King of Prussia”—for the latter monarch, Friedrich Wilhelm III, was staunchly Lutheran (LJ 1:421, 2:8). Here, after the relative unanimity of Catholic Italy, Cooper was back among the contrasts and conflicts he had discovered in Switzerland in 1828.1

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Little more came of the Dresden skirmish. After Cooper returned to proofreading, however, news of a much more significant event reached him from Paris. Beginning on the twenty-seventh of July and ending on the thirtieth, an uprising known as the “Three Days of Glory” toppled the rightist government headed by Jules, prince de Polignac, who had been appointed by Charles X in August 1829.2 When Cooper, then in Sorrento, had first heard of the prince ’s ascent, he curtly queried his friend Robert R. Hunter, consul at Cowes, “Is Charles X mad?” As the novelist recognized, Polignac, who had been born at Versailles during his noble mother’s service as governess for Marie Antoinette ’s children, carried the taint of the ancien régime. Furthermore, he was an “émigré,” having lived most of his life abroad following his boyhood escape from the French Revolution. His first and second wives were Englishwomen, and Polignac himself was a thoroughgoing Anglophile with many ties among the rulers of France’s long-standing enemy. For Cooper these facts explained Polignac’s inefficacy as leader of the government. “Every Frenchman I see,” he wrote Hunter, “is enraged against England, under the impression, that Wellington was at the bottom of the change. The worst thing that can happen for the Polignac Administration, is to have the praise of the English press. It makes a Frenchman frantic to read it” (LJ 1:388; see also 410).3 It was not English meddling, however, that brought down Polignac, and indeed Charles X himself. The new government had taken over during a recess of the Chamber of Deputies, then under the opposition’s control. Between August 1829 and that body’s return the following March, Polignac pursued (in the words of historian David H. Pinkney) an “indecisive course in domestic affairs.” More ominously, over the late winter his government began preparing an invasion force in order to resolve festering issues between France and Algeria. As the deputies returned to Paris, that action, announced but not yet commenced, was condemned by the left-leaning press as a move meant to divert attention from the attack liberals expected on the Charter of 1814, the primary guarantee of the meager freedoms the French enjoyed.4 In the king’s address for the chamber’s opening, the opposition deputies heard a threat to dissolve it and arrange new elections. Undaunted, they nominated staunch oppositionists to leadership posts and on March 15 issued their reply, which defended the charter and the rights of the deputies and the people. The resulting impasse led to the body’s dissolution in May. Elections were scheduled for June and early July, with August 3 named as the date for the new deputies to be seated. Working under the direction of an association headed by the famous moderate academic and former interior minister François Guizot, Lafayette and other leading reformers successfully arranged the victory of old opposition members at the polls. The adventure in Algeria had turned out well

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for the government following the fall of Algiers, as news reaching Paris on July 9 indicated, but that success seemed irrelevant given the king’s reversals at home and the opposition’s rising strength.5 Street insurrections in Paris later that month began in response to the king’s preemptive promulgation on July 26 of his repressive Saint-Cloud Ordinances, which among other things suspended liberty of the press and dissolved the justelected chamber. Journalists defied the new restrictions on their papers, making government attempts to close still-active presses largely unsuccessful. Broader resistance arose so quickly that when Lafayette hurried from La Grange to Paris on July 27, he found numerous barricades already erected. On the next day, insurrectionists holding the Hôtel de Ville and Notre Dame displayed not the Bourbon fleur-de-lis but the revolutionary tricolor flag, banned in France since 1815. In various quarters of the city it was becoming evident that anger over the recent ordinances, bolstered by underlying social and economic grievances, was surprisingly strong. Crowds jammed rue St. Honoré, near Lafayette ’s Paris house, with copies of the new underground papers in their hands as they yelled out opposition slogans. That afternoon, government military forces in Paris under Marshal Auguste de Marmont encountered stiff resistance and were forced to retreat. Maneuvering continued through the night across Paris and at St. Cloud, where the king remained, and by the morning of July 29 barricades had multiplied so rapidly that most streets in the capital were closed. On that day (the critical one, Cooper rightly learned from reports reaching Dresden), Marshal Marmont abruptly ceased all offensive operations and withdrew his troops to positions immediately around the Louvre and the Tuileries. Aside from that area, most of the city was in the hands of what it now seemed fair to call the revolutionary party.6 The uprising thus far was succeeding, but that it had arisen in response to a crisis rather than through more deliberate political actions meant that it lacked a coherent ideological core as well as a central leadership and a clear agenda. Events got ahead of ideas, or rather stimulated a secondary contest over ideas— and interests. The fortunes of the renewed National Guard illuminate this point. That citizen army, disbanded by the king’s order in 1827, re-formed almost spontaneously across France at this critical time, and in Paris its members, many of whom retained their weapons, took to the streets against the government. But the guard, which would grow to over a million men by October, was composed largely of artisans and therefore did not embody the array of interests on the oppositionist side. It was popularly viewed as the standard-bearer of the old radicalism of 1789, but also (especially by the liberal bourgeoisie, which sought to take over and define the 1830 uprising for its own ends) as the mainstay of public order. As Patricia Pilbeam has explained, “In the July Revolution the

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liberal notables hastened to gain control of the Guard to contain popular unrest.”7 On the morning of July 29, Lafayette thus attended a meeting of those notables, including many fellow deputies, at the home of the liberal banker Jacques Laffitte. There he announced that he had been asked to take command of the guard, although by whom exactly was not clear. With the approval of the other deputies, the old general, installed at the Hôtel de Ville that afternoon, in effect assumed armed control of the capital.8 Because the king had little moral authority and no functioning military forces near Paris, opposition leaders gathered at the city hall on July 30 reportedly urged Lafayette to establish a new government. Lafayette indicated instead that he supported the claims of Louis-Philippe, duke of Orleans, head of the Bourbons’ cadet branch and the favorite of many liberals.9 Although the duke was reasonably close to his kinsman Charles X, he had sided with the opposition during the reign of their cousin Louis XVIII and furthermore had openly disapproved of many of the policies of the recent rightist governments, thereby attracting a popular following by 1830. His chance for further advancement came when Charles X, once it was clear he must abdicate in favor of his grandson, the duke of Bordeaux, designated Louis-Philippe as that boy’s regent. Always ambitious and manipulative, Louis-Philippe did not inform the deputies of the king’s wishes. Soon appointed lieutenant general of the kingdom, and named in the new charter approved by the delegates on August 7 as king of the French, Louis-Philippe appeared that same day with Lafayette on a balcony at the Orleanist residence, the Palais Royale. When the commander of the National Guard gave him a tricolor flag and embraced and kissed him, it was clear that the Three Days of Glory had led not to a new republic but rather to the crowning of yet another Bourbon monarch. Lafayette reportedly told Orleans at the Palais Royale, “You know . . . that I am a republican, and that I consider the constitution of the United States as the most perfect system that has ever existed.” The king-to-be agreed but added that the time was not right, to which Lafayette replied, “what the French people want at the present juncture, is a popular throne, surrounded by republican institutions.” Two days later, on August 9, the duke became Louis-Philippe I.10

Paris Revisited Once Cooper learned of the July Revolution, his deepening interest in European politics and the international cause of republicanism made him eager to return to Paris as soon as possible.11 The shift from Dresden was, though, full of uncertainty. It was not immediately clear whether Paris would be safe for him, let alone for his family. Before leaving by himself on August 11 for Leipzig, from

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which he planned to proceed to Frankfurt, he therefore had to arrange various contingencies for Susan and the children.12 Depending on conditions along his route, and at last in France, Cooper might return to Dresden and bring the rest along—perhaps directly to Paris, perhaps to some refuge in between. But it was also possible that under more favorable conditions Susan might move west on her own with the children. As Cooper departed Saxony in August, none of this was settled (see LJ 1:434–36; 2:5–10). Arriving in Frankfurt-on-Main on Sunday, the fifteenth (see LJ 2:144), and hearing there that France was quiet and promised to remain so (Louis-Philippe had been in power for almost a week), Cooper advanced to Mainz the next day, intending to make a quick reconnaissance trip to Paris before, if need be, returning to Frankfurt (see LJ 1:435).13 No such turnabout, though, would be required. The coach from Mainz delivered him at four in the morning on August 20 to a remarkably peaceful Paris, where he secured a hotel room as if nothing had happened in his absence (see LJ 2:5). Most of what he discovered as he went about the streets six hours later convinced him that his family would be perfectly safe in France: there was “great alarm” about a general European war but no real concern “for the interior tranquility of France,” he informed Susan the next day, telling her, too, that she and the children should come directly to Paris via Frankfurt. In the meantime, he began seeking out suitable family quarters and laying other plans. Right after arriving, he thus discovered that his daughters’ old teacher, Madame Kautz, was “nearly unoccupied” and hence (he thought) would be able to “give several hours a day to the children just now” (LJ 2:6).14 Things went smoothly once Susan arrived on September 4. Already, Cooper had abandoned his hotel and taken a good temporary apartment at 22 rue d’Aguesseau, two blocks or so from Lafayette’s town residence.15 Although this arrangement gave the Americans some semblance of their old, relatively settled life, various questions remained open. The most important concerned how long they were to remain in France—indeed, in Europe. From Dresden in July, Cooper had mentioned to Mary Jay that Susan wished to return home sometime in the fall of 1831, by which point they would have been abroad more than five years (see LJ 1:430; 2:18). When, at the start of the present winter, the Coopers again relocated (to 13 rue St. Florentin, a few blocks from the rue d’Aguesseau and near La Madeleine), their new lodgings were therefore also temporary. Their overall plans remained unclear.16 By the time the novelist decisively informed Greenough on March 14, 1831, “We shall not go home this year” (LJ 2:62), the largest question had been answered, but others lingered. Susan wanted to make do with some “cheap appartment” in Paris until that summer, when she hoped the family might return to Switzerland or perhaps visit the “coast of Normandy” (and her ancestral

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home, Caen) for relief from the capital’s heat (LJ 2:87).17 They would eventually make that second Swiss trip, and perhaps visited Normandy before leaving Europe, but in 1831 Cooper himself, enjoying large returns on his writings and no doubt tired from two years on the road, wanted to stay in Paris longer—and not in the cheap quarters Susan envisioned. At the start of April, the family therefore took a full year’s lease on yet other lodgings. Having called himself “an Old Parisian” in writing Charles Wilkes shortly after returning there in August 1830 (LJ 2:9), the novelist clearly meant to live like one. Now, at any rate, the Coopers were definitely ensconced in what proved to be their very best quarters while abroad.18 Even as Cooper adjusted to this welcome shift, he did not ignore what was happening around him. Although the July uprising had ended by the time he got to the capital, over the following months he pondered its meaning and consequences. Lafayette’s role especially interested him. On August 24, he had written Wilkes that Lafayette “is all in all, here—He almost holds the destiny of France in his single hand.” Enjoying “mutual confidence” with the new king, Lafayette told Cooper explicitly that Louis-Philippe was “far more democratical than his ministers” (LJ 2:7–8). In his journal on September 19, Cooper also noted that Lafayette, while aware of the pressure of the doctrinaires, was “determined to give an effectual check to Aristocracy.” Such assurances were only partly confirmed for Cooper that very night when the two men went to the court. Although they found the royal family wearing suitably simple costumes, it was apparent that those around the king deeply resented Lafayette because they feared he would curtail “their butterfly distinctions and their tinsel” (LJ 2:15–16).19 The next day, again in his journal, Cooper reported on a conversation he had with an old English acquaintance from Rome, the earl of Haddington, a “mild Tory” who was alarmed by what the French changes meant for Britain. It still seemed possible that France would adopt further reforms—perhaps the House of Peers would be made elective, and the electorate notably expanded. Vested interests in Britain, Cooper noted, typically countered demands for change there by using the boogeyman of the United States to terminate discussion. If, however, nearby France remained a monarchy but incorporated significant republican advances, Haddington’s “vulgar aristocratical cant” would be rendered ineffective (LJ 2:16–17; see also LJ 1:409). Cooper’s response to the French situation was not confined to his conversations or his private journal. Within days of arriving in Paris, he informed Peter A. Jay that he had just begun a new book, a novel whose scene was “in Italy” (LJ 2:14). The Bravo was indeed set in Venice, but neither it nor Italy at large was Cooper’s overt subject. Venice provided an object lesson and a suitably Gothic atmosphere, not an occasion for reflection on the sad state of Italian politics, a

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subject Cooper only minimally addressed at the time of his stay there or later. Nor, as has often been assumed, was The Bravo’s allegory of power relations in a corrupt republic aimed primarily at U.S. concerns, either current or prospective. The book would trigger Cooper’s fight with the Whig press at home and therefore would come to have an American application after the fact it did not have when it first appeared. That shift in its apparent valences was bolstered by the fact that Cooper’s compatriots were certainly part of his audience from the start. He thus claimed in his original preface that he had “endeavoured to give his countrymen in this book, a picture of the social system of one of the soi-disant republics of the other hemisphere”—he was interested in the “history of the progress of political liberty,” in other words, in a global perspective (BR CE 1). But in 1830–1831, when he wrote and published The Bravo in France, it was France, in the wake of its most recent revolution, that was of preeminent concern to him. He was also engaged at that time, as we shall soon see, with political turbulence in several other European countries, from the Lowlands to Poland, and to some extent that turbulence intensified his tone in The Bravo. But the French troubles came first and, happening as they did before his very eyes, were what really engaged him. He was especially concerned with the July Revolution, and specifically with the means by which those who controlled the levers of power in France commandeered that event, stopping the push for ameliorative political change and further consolidating their own advantage. In contemporary France, as in “republican” Venice, those in control operated behind the scenes. Only a genuine revolution that uncovered them and their deeds and returned real power to the people could introduce abiding republican reforms into France. The Bravo was part of Cooper’s continuing effort to effect such a revelation and such a shift in power relations. Hence he described it in an 1844 autobiographical fragment as “favoring popular rights” (LJ 4:461). He had written the book to support those rights and the linked view that any real republic derived its just authority from the people. There was, to be sure, a definite American slant to Cooper’s political reflections as he viewed contemporary events and began The Bravo. That was partly because, just at the time he was beginning the novel he was reading the recently issued four-volume edition of Thomas Jefferson’s Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies, which prompted his first systematic consideration of Jefferson’s intellectual and political legacy. Given his own situation and the book he had under way, the novelist was particularly interested in the influence Europe had exerted on Jefferson and his archrival, Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson viewed Hamilton’s political weaknesses as the result of a misguided admiration for European, particularly English, institutions. Echoing Jefferson’s own conclusion, Cooper wrote in his journal, “I have no doubt that Hamilton was, at heart, a

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monarchist.” For Cooper, Hamilton thereby became a stand-in for the Europhile Americans he had been encountering among the tourists of his own day. But at this point Cooper still remained reasonably sanguine about the essential health of American values. If Hamilton had gone to Europe and taken “a near view” of monarchical institutions and the sort of society they produced, Cooper believed, his admiration for them would have dissipated (LJ 2:32).20 Having come to Europe as a committed republican, Cooper had found his principles reinforced by the troubles and corruptions he discovered everywhere he turned. Not surprisingly, he saw in Jefferson’s French experience a similar reinforcement of republican principles in the face of a corrupt and, in the 1780s, literally bankrupt monarchy. Buoyed by these insights, in 1830 Cooper remained serenely confident about the superiority of those principles. “Most Americans who come to Europe now, get the same idea of the value of simpler forms as Jefferson entertained, because they see the uses to which ceremony is perverted in foreign nations” (LJ 2:33).21 Cooper’s withering portrait of aristocratic forms in The Bravo offered his American readers a substitute for the personal enlightenment he was convinced they would experience if they crossed the ocean themselves. The book was not a warning of disasters then impending at home—it was preventative rather than curative: “we should remember,” Cooper went on in discussing Jefferson’s experience, “that the most active poisons are, in certain cases, healthful remedies” (LJ 2:33). Homeopathic in nature, The Bravo celebrated the essential healthfulness of the republican institutions of the United States by reference to the nation’s European negative. Cooper read French affairs in their own right but also as they expressed American concerns. In this regard, he did in France what Margaret Fuller was to do in Italy from 1848 to 1850.22 Lafayette was the resident French example of the rightness of American principles, and Cooper, despite the complexities of his personal relationship with the marquis, eagerly supported him as such. On December 8, the novelist thus chaired and took a very active part in a “grand dinner” given in Lafayette’s honor by eighty Americans then in Paris. In the course of the evening Cooper betrayed a rare depth of emotion, considering both the public nature of the event and the delicacy of French politics at the moment. His first toast was to “Liberty and Order—the motto of freemen,” and while the second was to “The King of the French,” he quickly added to it a pointed republican reminder: “and [to] the source from which he derives his power.” Once it was time to toast the guest of honor, Cooper outdid himself. Having named the general’s services to the United States, to France, and to freedom itself, he proclaimed that even Lafayette’s enemies bestowed their admiration and respect on him. So did his American friends. But they did more: “Gentlemen, we love him,” Cooper warmly added, causing the assembly to drown him out with its “spontaneous and tremendous peal of

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applause.” Everyone then rose as if all “had but one soul and delivered nine such cheers as have rarely been heard within the walls of Paris.” When the thunder subsided, Cooper repeated the avowal of deep affection he and the others felt for America’s oldest friend—“Yes, gentlemen, and we have reasons to love him”— and again the assembly burst into loud applause.23 That love was based on Lafayette’s service to America during its own Revolution, a natural enough sentiment, and his embodiment of what Americans took to be American principles in France. Things were of course more complicated than any toast or dinner could indicate. It was challenging for Cooper and other Americans to recognize, for one thing, how different the French situation in 1830 was from that faced by the American colonies at the time of their War of Independence. French parties and interests differed profoundly from those in America. And France had a kind of double memory that America lacked: the Revolution of 1789 and its long train of blighted consequences shadowed any later political shifts in France, evoking a sense of historical apprehension rooted, as was true for some of those associated with Lafayette in 1830, in distrust of the people. Cooper’s initial failure to grasp such crucial distinctions resulted not from a lack of knowledge but rather from the distinctive context within which his own experience had unfolded. Nothing was easier for an American republican like Cooper to imagine than the rise of republicanism elsewhere. Even as he distinguished among distinct kinds of republics (as The Bravo reveals and The American Democrat would reiterate), he viewed republicanism as a political universal, not a contingent historical development. What transpired in France as Cooper kept working on The Bravo across the fall of 1830 and into the following spring deepened his sense of such transatlantic contrasts and altered his course in the novel. Lafayette lost command of the National Guard soon after the December 8 dinner because Louis-Philippe, convinced of the guard’s loyalty to the government and himself, no longer needed the marquis. Although Lafayette thought his hope for a real republic had a chance even if he did not remain in power, David Pinkney points out that his resignation (which anticipated dismissal) marked the end of the revolution, not a shift of tactics or timing. France was again a monarchy—constitutional, to be sure, but a monarchy nonetheless. Disabused, Lafayette soon told Cooper that he thought Louis-Philippe “the prince of dissimulators,” as Cooper would recall in responding to the uprisings across Europe in 1848 (LJ 5:316).24 One result of the 1830 break between Lafayette and Louis-Philippe was a less than generous attitude Cooper displayed toward Lafayette ’s failures. Once the glow of the public dinner had faded and Lafayette ’s resignation from the National Guard was official, Cooper began to feel that the marquis was unable to author or inspire fundamental change because he had been too deeply

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implicated in the inherited arrangements in France to effectively control or transform them. From late December of 1830 into the spring of 1831, Cooper confined his political ruminations to the pages of his novel. Then, in April, he offered this judgment to Wilkes: “That Lafayette has been out manoeuvered by the party which surrounds the King, I take to be beyond a doubt.” He found “no delusion” in Lafayette’s pragmatic idea of “republican institutions with a royal summit”—this was, in other words, a plausible hybrid political system. But, he continued for Wilkes, “I have been of opinion from the first that he should have laid his institutions and seated his King on them, and not attempt[ed] to spin a web of republican simplicity with a royal distaff—The tendency of the government, now, is certainly to aristocracy” (LJ 2:72–73). Across the summer, Cooper’s views of France’s prospects vacillated, in part because Lafayette’s withdrawal from affairs deprived Cooper of his previous access to inside information. In June, he shared with Benjamin Silliman his mildly resurgent optimism about the suitability of republican institutions for the country, adding that he viewed Louis-Philippe as “rather a weak than a bad man” and thought the push for more freedom unstoppable (“you are quite wrong in thinking France in danger of despotism,” his postscript reads), even though he thought it “impossible to foretel[l] what course events will take” (LJ 2:98, 101). A week later, he asserted to Peter A. Jay that he was beginning to “hope the French peerage will be destroyed,” adding, “I look upon the throne of Louis Philippe as very insecure” (LJ 2:107–8). But at the end of June darker views began to shadow his letters. “I think France far from settled,” he wrote journalist John S. Skinner (a good friend of Lafayette) on the twenty-sixth (LJ 2:112; see also 2:51). And, even as news of a treaty settling the claims of American merchants against the French government broke, signaling the king’s amenability to normal diplomatic processes, Cooper’s doubts about France’s internal stability resurfaced. He mentioned the treaty to Horatio Greenough on July 4, but, while assuring him that there was “no immediate cause of alarm” in France, he added that the revolution of the previous summer hardly was over. He shared similar views in a second July 4 letter (this one to Robert R. Hunter), balancing between his own ideological assurance and the inherent uncertainty of politics, perhaps especially French politics, at this time: “We are tranquil here, though not assured—I apprehend nothing, immediately, but I do not think things stable” (LJ 2:117–19).

The Polish Cause We may leave him in that uncertainty while we turn to another cause in which he took an interest as this very time, and which also affected his course in The Bravo. France was Cooper’s home at present, and hence what he observed there

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contributed centrally to the novel. But France was not the whole of Europe, and what had been happening elsewhere since 1830 also affected how Cooper developed, and especially how he ended, the book. Through his association with Lafayette, and then with his fellow American expatriates in France, Cooper joined in the relief of Polish exiles pouring into Paris following the collapse of a failed uprising against Russian tsar Nicholas. This revolt, which began with an action by military cadets in Warsaw at the end of November 1830, was the third and in some ways most ambitious of the European revolutions of that year. The Poles had suffered a great deal since 1789. In the words of historian Lloyd S. Kramer: “Poland’s revolt released the anger of a people who had been subjected to various forms of foreign control for nearly sixty years. The long history of this intervention included three partitions of Polish lands by Austria, Prussia, and Russia in the late eighteenth century, a ‘Duchy of Warsaw’ that the French established in the Napoleonic era, and a ‘Congress Kingdom’ that received some autonomy from the Congress of Vienna (1815) but remained in most respects a political fiefdom of the Russian Tsar.”25 Although Poland had its own constitution and parliament, and enjoyed considerable autonomy from 1815 to 1820, many Poles resented Russia from the outset and plotted the overthrow of the Congress Kingdom and the reinstatement of a truly independent nation. As Cooper wrote Peter A. Jay in September 1830, weeks before the Warsaw uprising, “Poland feels still like a Nation”—by which he meant that the Polish themselves were alive with national sentiment, something he had not perceived, for instance, in profoundly disunified Italy (LJ 2:11). Polish national sentiment had quickened across the previous few years: since the coronation of Nicholas in 1825, worsening conditions had stimulated further resentment and resistance. Yet foreign affairs, not domestic conditions, provided the real precipitant for the Warsaw uprising of 1830. Nicholas, fearful of French ambitions in the wake of the July Revolution, began preparing an army to send against France (and also against rebellious Belgium, to which we shall return). Toward that end, he intended to employ Polish as well as Russian troops. For Poland’s patriotic cadets, this final insult boosted the domestic revolt, resulting in the nationalists’ seizure of Warsaw by early December. The tsar’s regime was overturned, a provisional government was created, and early victories in the field promised a good outcome for Polish national ambitions. The uprising had not been handled with consummate military skill, and the political divisions among the cadets and their associates were notable, but for the time being the momentum was on their side.26 Word of the Warsaw uprising reached Paris on December 10, cheering French liberals even as it calmed recent fears of a “general war” that, as indicated earlier, Cooper shared. Poland’s fight against the tsar thus became a proxy

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battle for French sovereignty against the larger designs of Russia. As France ’s ally during the Napoleonic wars, Poland still enjoyed a special relation with that country. Already across the 1820s, many discontented Polish exiles had relocated to Paris, where their presence and activities helped lay the groundwork for later French support of the Polish rebels. Not surprisingly, Lafayette, friend of the Polish-American hero Tadeusz Ko´sciuszko, was in the forefront of that support. With such associates as Benjamin Constant, Marc Antoine Jullien, and Victor Hugo (all of whom Cooper knew or would come to know), the marquis had given warm support to displaced Polish intellectuals.27 And in January 1831, shortly after the Warsaw uprising began, some sixty Frenchmen joined together to form the Comité Franco-Polonais, which collected resources to use for the Polish cause. Its key contact was Leonard Chod´zko, the only Pole who, as Lafayette’s aide, was named in the committee’s membership list. In Paris since 1826, when he arrived as the secretary of Prince Michał Ogi´nski, Chod´zko had served as a proofreader of Polish texts for the printer J. Barbezat and by that means became connected to literary circles in the French capital. He also, with other exiles such as the former journalist Michał Podczaszy´nski, had, in the words of Mark Brown, “prepared articles for the liberal Revue Encyclopédique dealing with the progress of literary and scientific studies in Poland, published the first French edition of the works of the Polish Romantic poet, Adam Mickiewicz, and produced a revised edition of Malte-Brun[’s] . . . Tableau de la Pologne ancienne et moderne.” Cooper, who had socialized with Mickiewicz in Rome, would be introduced to Chod´zko through Lafayette once he had himself returned to Paris in August 1830.28 The French committee was modeled on bodies formed to support the earlier fight for Greek independence, and the American committee, in imitation of the French one, had its own links to that 1820s fight. At the annual Fourth of July celebration in 1831 at the Place Richelieu, the recently arrived New York lawyer and reformer Alvan Stewart, who had been active in raising funds for the Greeks while he resided in Otsego County and would later assume a leading role in the Abolitionist movement, rose to give a “short speech in favor of the Poles” that was greeted with “unbounded enthusiasm at the end of every paragraph” (as he confided in his diary the next afternoon). Stewart had just met Cooper, who, presiding at the July 4 meeting, sat directly across the table from him, in between Lafayette and U.S. minister William C. Rives. Following the speech, Stewart noted, everyone was asking about him, and soon, as he went on, the assembled throng “gave me a public toast for which I thanked them. It was then agreed to take up a subscription for Poland and memorialize the United States on the subject. I was appointed Secretary of the meeting. . . . Tomorrow at 8 P.M. we meet on this interesting subject.” Stewart went to breakfast with Cooper on July 5,

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then, as arranged, chaired that night’s initial meeting of the committee. There it was agreed “to issue a circular to the Americans in Paris for a general meeting” on Saturday, the ninth.29 Stewart opened that affair with another well-received speech, but as he already had purchased his return passage for the United States and was to leave Paris for Normandy on July 15, Cooper was “called to the chair” and Dr. James A. Washington, a young North Carolinian who later settled in New York City, was named secretary. Stewart went on to introduce “a string of resolutions which were passed” by the hundred-plus Americans present, after which Cooper “read an address for the American people, which was adopted.” Then a collection of money was taken up and the meeting was adjourned.30 Its key resolutions stated American sympathy for the Poles, proposed a wider subscription among Americans in Paris, called for an address to Americans at home to be prepared (and, with the meeting’s proceedings and a list of participants, printed for circulation there), and, finally, instructed Dr. Washington and two other participants to serve as a committee for receiving all funds, which were to be distributed through Lafayette (LJ 2:123n1). It is clear that the gathering was not dominated by Cooper’s immediate circle in Paris. Some of those present he knew well (including Henry Brevoort and Herman Thorn of New York), and he had quickly befriended Alvan Stewart for his Otsego connections. For the most part, however, the group was mixed and diverse. That Cooper was the obvious choice as chair bespoke his general fame as a writer (and a republican) among his fellow citizens. Cooper took the cause as his own. In the appeal to the American public that he drafted for the group, he applied his own political views to the critical situation of the Poles. Although he presented Poland as a “territory which has been brought, by violence, from the high condition of a state, to the dependent lot of a province,” he had no illusions about the country’s political past. Never had it been a republic as he understood and championed that form, and in common with all other European states Poland in fact still exhibited “the inherited defects of feudal opinions.” Yet Cooper chose to stress the country’s best claim to American sympathy: in the eyes of Russia and other aggressors its “crime . . . was too much liberty,” for even under the traditional Polish regime prior to 1795 the people were, Cooper went on, “among the freest of this hemisphere.” For that very reason, Poland had been calumniated as full of “faction and anarchy,” a standard slander against liberal regimes. On this front, Americans, subject to similar charges among the reactionary forces of modern Europe, ought to have been particularly sympathetic. If Thomas Paine in Common Sense declared that the cause of America was the cause of humanity, Cooper now declared that the Polish cause was the cause of America as well. To Americans back home, he

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continued, “Your great example is silently wearing away the foundations of despotism.” He spoke, too, of the “moral ascendency” claimed by his fellow citizens, to which they had a right only because, he reminded them, they were “the true repositories of the persecuted rights of human nature” (LJ 2:124–27). This was Paine’s 1776 argument applied to the very different circumstances of the 1830s. Small wonder that the American Polish Committee took shape during the fifty-fifth commemoration of July 4 in Paris. Cooper wanted American understanding but also American support. The two responses—identification with the Polish cause and a willingness to fund it—were of course related. “Your gold will assuage many griefs, heal many wounds, purchase much relief from suffering and sorrow,” Cooper told his fellow citizens, for, although he stressed that “sympathy is dearer than all,” he well knew that sympathy mattered because it would induce generosity (LJ 2:127).31 And that proved to be true. At the July 9 Paris meeting, the 114 U.S. citizens present, both male and female (Cooper would include a special appeal to American women in his address), contributed 6,300 francs. Once the address, printed in Paris for distribution to newspapers in the United States, arrived there and was widely republished, as it began to be early in September, local meetings started mobilizing republican sympathy by collecting money for dispatch to France and, ultimately, Poland.32 Cooper’s investment in the Polish cause, as we shall see later in this chapter, continued long after The Bravo appeared. More immediately, though, that novel itself became part of his response to the crisis. Poland was not Venice: the novel after all makes it clear that internal forces, not foreign troops, had destroyed the Sublime Republic of the Adriatic. In the atmosphere of post-Napoleonic Europe, however, Cooper also understood that Austria’s dominance over Venice (and the Veneto) suggested parallels to the present situation in Poland. And the highly visible public role in support of the Poles that Cooper had assumed before finishing work on the novel seems not only to have spurred him to complete it—it also provided inspiration for its unexpectedly grim ending. As he for the first time assumed a public political stance in support of republican institutions and selfdetermination, Cooper gave the book a shockingly consonant conclusion. It took him a long time to reach that point, and for a variety of reasons. He switched his production scheme yet again, deciding not to rely on Paris resources but rather to have Colburn and Bentley set and print the book in London, sending him proofs he could distribute to his other partners (see LJ 2:63–65). This slowed his progress somewhat, as did a new project proposed by the Londoners in March 1831, just when they also agreed to manage production of The Bravo: namely, that Cooper revise and write new introductions for his older books for inclusion in their new “Standard Novels” series, an undertaking that intruded on

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the time Cooper needed for finishing the Venetian tale.33 Other issues to which we need not give direct attention soon arose to cause further delays—they were vexing, but in an aesthetic sense they were minor and did not mar a novel of dark and lasting power, a novel that Cooper considered, as he insisted for Colburn and Bentley in his February letter, “the best book I have written” (LJ 2:185). Cooper’s high regard for the novel stemmed not only from its important subject but also from the fact that he completely rewrote The Bravo before finally sending copy to his publishers, something that, as far as we can tell, he had never done before. We know of his unusual double take on the novel because the relatively complete surviving manuscript of The Bravo, along with Mrs. Cooper’s amanuensis copy of a single chapter, exhibits so many differences from the book as published that Cooper must have prepared a revised script (either in his own hand or that of an amanuensis such as Susan) and sent that to Colburn and Bentley instead of either original, thereby causing delays of his own.34 The first version had been “about half written” as early as December 1, 1830, and Cooper then promised the firm that the complete manuscript would be “ready before the 1st June 1831” (LJ 2:42). He signed a contract with the Londoners in February, but thereafter, despite the December comment about the state of the novel, failed to forward any copy. Probably he already was having thoughts about rewriting it; in any case, he must have started doing so by early March.35 He inquired on March 8 or 9 when the Londoners “should like to publish ‘Bravo’ ” (LJ 2:57), as if he could send it when they wished, but then it took him five more weeks until the first volume copy was ready to send (LJ 2:69). As he went forward, revising his old books and rewriting his current one overlapped and conceivably interfered with each other (see LJ 2:85). But the internal dynamics of work on The Bravo clearly mattered more than any such competition. On April 13, as he at last was readying the rewritten first volume ’s amanuensis copy for dispatch “in a day or two” to London, Cooper remarked that the next would follow “soon after,” but then added, “Vol. IIId is not all written” (LJ 2:68). “Soon after” in the case of the second volume actually proved to be almost two full months, and even then, at the beginning of June, he shipped not all, but rather “nearly all of the manuscript of [the] second volume” (LJ 2:93). It is clear that, had the new novel been virtually half done in December 1830, it should not have taken another six or seven months to complete the remaining four or five chapters needed to make up the rest of the second English volume, as in fact it did.36 By early summer, the rewriting hit its stride, at least up to a point. On June 18, Cooper was able to forward “half ” of the “last volume” to London— presumably five chapters of the eventual eleven (LJ 2:102).37 On July 2, continuing to quicken his pace, he sent copy for chapters 6 through 9. In his cover

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letter then, he referred to the “two last chapters” as not yet done—on July 11, Colburn and Bentley therefore acknowledged that the material received was “deficient only the last two chapters” (LJ 2:115).38 This was where Cooper’s work stood just at the moment when the meeting on the Polish crisis occurred and he emerged as the public face and voice of the expatriate community. On July 27, when he packed up for London the corrected proofs for “the rest of vol. II,” he indicated that he had finally finished writing “the rest of Bravo,” adding that he expected to forward that material the following week, when the copying was completed (LJ 2:130). In fact, he dispatched it on August 8 (see LJ 2:132). Cooper’s uneven progress during this final phase stemmed from his resistance to the ending he finally gave to the story. Although considerable doubt as to whether Jacopo will actually be executed exists even up to the end (his beloved Gelsomina is convinced that he will be shown mercy), the final chapter Cooper shipped to London on August 8 abruptly and brutally resolved that uncertainty. At the very last minute, when the Carmelite monk Anselmo thinks that a “sign from the palace” promises Jacopo’s release, Gelsomina, uttering “a cry of delight,” turns “to throw herself upon the bosom of the reprieved.” But their hopes are false: “The axe glittered before her eyes, and the head of Jacopo rolled upon the stones, to meet her” (BR CE 357). That this startling conclusion gave Cooper difficulty is evident, I think, from the absence of the final chapter from the book’s surviving first manuscript. In that version, we find the thirtieth chapter in his hand and in his wife’s (the latter is the single example of the amanuensis copy mentioned earlier)—but no part whatever of the thirty-first. While it is theoretically possible that the latter was once present but went missing, I think its absence more likely indicates that Cooper was not yet sure how to end the book and therefore never drafted a first version of the conclusion. Rather, he produced that conclusion, along with the new version of the delayed penultimate chapter, only at the very last minute.39 Cooper’s difficulty with the book’s finale may have been one of the motives forcing him to go back over the earlier parts. It is even possible to imagine him entertaining the magical notion that rewriting the book might somehow yield a different ending—or a different insight into how to bring the book to its proper conclusion. The anomalous nature of the final chapter likewise marks its special interest. It is something of an add-on to the book, in the first place, in that it gives the third Bentley volume an odd number of chapters, one more than either of the first two volumes. Its foreshortened textual condition (it is only half the length of the more nearly typical penultimate chapter) furthermore suggests that it gave Cooper considerable conceptual difficulty. When he solved the problem, he did so with exceptional speed: Gelsomina’s hopeful turn suddenly is replaced by the rolling of Jacopo’s severed head toward her.

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An earlier shift in Cooper’s work on The Bravo likewise underscores the importance of his political context to how the book took—and altered—shape. Despite what I have already indicated about the crucial importance of France (and later Poland) to the novel’s episodes and emphases, the project had originated in Cooper’s quite enthusiastic first response to Venice and promised to assume a notably lighter tone. Barely had Cooper arrived in that city in the spring of 1830 before he was mentioning to his Paris publisher, Charles Gosselin, that he planned “to commence immediately another sea story,” which he expected to print in Dresden, like The Water-Witch (LJ 6:304; translation supplied). The Bravo in its present form might be called a sea story by a generous stretch of terms, since Venice, after all, had long been a profoundly maritime power. More to the point, however, the survival of a discarded fragment in which an actual sea voyage is narrated suggests that at the very beginning Cooper intended to use Venice as a base for marine operations in the book mentioned to Gosselin, tying it to his previous one, The Water-Witch, in quite revealing ways. The discarded maritime chapters in fact suggest that, as he wrote his way into the second volume of the new book, Cooper still was attempting to link his European location with the recollected scenes of his American life—and his American fiction. In the fragment, the book’s hero (Don Camillo Monforte) and its apparent villain (the Bravo, Jacopo Frontoni) decide to hire the sleek American vessel Eudora, a “fairy-like schooner,” in order to pursue the felucca of Stefano Milano, aboard which Don Camillo’s bride has been abducted. The American schooner, seemingly out of place in the early eighteenth-century Adriatic, is a smuggling vessel with evident ties to the eponymous Water-Witch of Cooper’s previous novel—itself a smuggling vessel that, as we know from the recited memories of those on board it, had been much in Italian waters during the years leading up to 1710–1711, the book’s nominal historical setting. Still feeding off the imaginative energy of his previous book, and accustomed as he clearly was to the habit of elaboration in his work generally, Cooper evidently was not quite done with the Skimmer, Seadrift (Eudora Van Beverout), Zephyr, and the other fanciful sea creatures of The Water-Witch. The Eudora, in the jettisoned fragment from The Bravo, is captained by an unnamed eighteen-yearold who, we learn, was born at sea and trained to a sailor’s life by the master of a brigantine, a master who even now lingers nearby in a consort ship. Clearly, the captain of the Eudora is “the boy Zephyr” from The Water-Witch, now “grown to near maturity.”40 We are not dealing here, I would argue, with a sudden swerve of Cooper’s muse at or indeed past the middle of The Bravo in the first manuscript version. Rather, we are uncovering an original intent that had been all-but-completely submerged by Cooper’s second plans once he found his real subject in Paris and

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laid that over his at first adventurous, more naive Venetian setting. That original notion partly reasserted itself (as the discarded chapters indicate) until it was submerged again by an author torn between his dark tale of political intrigue (his Paris book) and the lighter one he had first imagined (his Venice book), which presumably would have explored afresh the freer themes established by his tale of old New York. Cooper, absorbed by other concerns as he actually set about writing The Bravo in Paris, could not completely foreclose his original vision. Perhaps he yearned for a world in which all an American novelist had to do was invent entertaining tales like The Water-Witch. But when he found the original chapters 18 through 20 taking him too far afield from what he now thought of as his political duty, he went back to the end of chapter 17 and wrote fresh versions of the next two units and the beginning of a third even in the book’s initial draft. In them, he abandoned the “sea story” he had mentioned to Gosselin, eventually substituting exposition of a maritime interlude for detailed narration of it. Here was, in a nutshell, the process he was later to follow in rewriting the book across the period from March to July 1831.41 It thus was the series of political upheavals, beginning in Dresden and soon disturbing Paris and then Warsaw, that ill-suited the fantasies of the “sea-green lady” of The Water-Witch to what Cooper now felt compelled to address. He did not engage Paris directly, but Paris and what the July Revolution and its aftermath revealed about the nature of power and privilege in France—and in European (and human) society more generally—helped convert a Venetian tale that might have been all surface and exotic mystery into a fiction of trenchant political import. It is probably indicative of this context that the abortive turn toward Zephyr and the Eudora must have happened just around the time of Lafayette’s resignation from the command of the National Guard—as Cooper was nearly halfway done with the novel on December 1, and that resignation came later in the month. Exasperated by the dissembling of the king and the failure of Lafayette to overcome it in the interest of establishing a true republic in France, Cooper for a time may have abandoned his political purpose in the book and set sail, as it were, on the ocean of his private imaginings. But France and its troubles were not going away; to the contrary, the situation about which Cooper cared so much was worsening. He therefore sank the little fantasy and got back to business.

Sourcing a Political Fable Cooper might have engaged French politics more directly. He probably did not feel, though, that he could explore the play of power and privilege in Paris by, let us say, writing a novel in which Louis-Philippe and Lafayette or their thinly

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veiled substitutes were key actors in a contemporary story. By contrast, Venice as he had toured it briefly in 1830 lacked salience as a case-in-point for his larger argument. For one thing, the dangerous institutions that were to figure so prominently in The Bravo, especially the Council of Three, had ceased to function after the 1797 Napoleonic invasion of Venice. Venice as an independent republic no longer existed in 1830; it was, as Cooper was reminded in crossing borders throughout the old Veneto region, a subordinate part of the Austrian empire, lacking both independence and separate political identity. His choice of pre1797 Venice as the site of his tale allowed him to explore abuses that supposedly had plagued the old city-state as, still powerful and nominally free, it fell into decline. At the same time, enough of the physical infrastructure of the old city remained in 1830 for Cooper to lay his political fable, strictly historical in its details, over the contemporary landscape he had just experienced. The choice of an early eighteenth-century setting may have predated his political intent—it was consistent, after all, with this book’s tie to The Water-Witch—but as matters fell out, the coincidence was a useful one. The figure of the Bravo, an assassin reportedly used by the state or private individuals, suited Cooper’s new purpose exceptionally well. He owed the figure not just to his research into Venice per se once he resettled in Paris (he explicitly mentions having perused the large work of the Napoleonic scholar Pierre Daru, to whom we shall return), but more importantly to dim memories of earlier literary works that had employed it. The urtext here was Johann Heinrich Zschokke’s tale Abällino, der grosse Bandit (1793), which the author himself adapted for the stage. Zschokke, born in 1771, was a Prussian actor turned teacher who by the time of Cooper’s European residence had long held public offices in his adoptive Switzerland, where what one scholar long ago called his “strong democratic sympathies” were evident. His 1822 History of Switzerland for the Swiss (Des Schweizerlands Geschichte für das Schweizervolk, translated into French in 1823 and English in 1833 and reprinted in the United States from 1834 on) probably was available to Cooper during the composition of The Headsman (1833) and his Swiss Gleanings. It notably demystified the role of privilege among the cantons, certainly a key theme in the latter book.42 Abällino was a work of Zschokke’s youth, published before his mature political positions had emerged. In his Autobiography, he said it was based on “an old Venetian anecdote” worked up into an impromptu narrative during a storyfest among his fellow students at Frankfurt. The oral tale met with such applause, he further recalled, that he soon published it; two years later, in 1795, he turned the book into a play, setting in motion its long, successful career on the international stage.43 Zschokke’s “great bandit” was not quite Cooper’s Bravo. He was less political and more purely Gothic, and not nearly so tragic. Abällino in some

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iteration, though, certainly lay behind the American novel. Cooper had not read Abällino in either of its original German forms, but it had been adapted by Matthew G. (“Monk”) Lewis in a tale, first published in 1804, that was often reprinted in England (and, after 1809, in the United States) under a variety of titles, including The Bravo of Venice and Abaellino, the Bravo of Venice. In his earlier years, Cooper could easily have read this popular tale about a wronged man mistaken for an assassin, although he seems not to have consciously recalled it. When his novel was in press in May 1831, he wrote his old navy friend William B. Shubrick, “I find Monk Lewis had a story called ‘The Bravo of Venice,’ which may induce me to choose another title” (LJ 2:80). His choice of verb—“find”—was slippery: did he just learn of the Lewis title or just then recall it? Lewis, though, was not the only source through which Cooper could have discovered Zschokke’s plot. The first translation of Abällino from German into any other language had been achieved not by Lewis in England but by Cooper’s future friend, dramatist William Dunlap, in New York in 1800. And from the first production of Dunlap’s play there on February 11, 1801, it remained a staple of the American stage for two decades. Furthermore, the very word “Abaellino” came into wider use as the result of the play’s popularity. There was a well-known Boston privateer of that name during the War of 1812. The name also served as a general term for a thief, an indication that it was Dunlap’s play (accurately subtitled The Great Bandit), not Monk Lewis’s tale (or the 1805 play, Rugantino, or the Bravo of Venice, that Lewis derived from it) that held sway in the American market. Moreover, unlike many plays in the period, Dunlap’s Abællino, the Great Bandit: A Grand Dramatic Romance was published and republished across two decades.44 When Edward S. Gould in June 1832 attacked Cooper for the alleged weaknesses of The Bravo, part of his assault concerned the novel’s sources. Gould, to whom I return later in this chapter and again in the next, clearly was thinking there of Dunlap’s “old play of Abellino [sic],” which by 1832 he considered “an almost forgotten drama.”45 While Cooper, in responding to Gould in A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), disputed the specific charge, asserting that there was little “resemblance in motive, in character, in incident, and in all other points that form the true distinctions in cases of this sort, between Abællino and Jacopo,” his very denial proved his familiarity with the play (LTC 24). But the more immediate source for the novel, as Cooper admitted in his first preface, was “the well-known work of M. Daru” (BR CE 1)—a point he reiterated in his 1834 response to Gould, adding then, “on this score there is no pretension to originality” (LTC 24).46 Thereby hung, however, several tales. The historian in question, Pierre Daru, came readily to Cooper’s hand once he was back in Paris, as Daru’s multivolume Histoire de la République de Venise, written

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during the initial years of the Bourbon Restoration and first published in 1819, had gone into its third edition in 1826 and was widely available thereafter. Daru, whom Cooper met on several occasions in Paris (see GF CE 179, 185, 220), confirmed the supposed role of assassins in the political life of the Venetian republic. He also wrote at length on Venetian institutions, including the so-called Inquisition of State (also known as the Council of Three), concerning which he for the first time published a lengthy manuscript detailing its statutes, a manuscript he claimed to have found in the royal library in Paris. It was in Daru that Cooper also discovered an account of the pozzi and the piombi, the state prison cells located, respectively, in dank dungeons below the level of the canals and the stifling attics well above them. In those cells the authorities in Cooper’s novel confine Jacopo’s father—underwater in winter, on the sweltering top floor in summer.47 No such details could have come to the novelist from Dunlap or Lewis or Zschokke. Even so, Daru’s account was supplemented by personal experience. Cooper’s wife later recalled that while in Venice the family “descended into the Dungeons of the State Inquisition [and] saw their instruments of torture.”48 The details borrowed from Daru supported a worldview that, as it happened, ran against the grain of Cooper’s overt purpose in the book. Pierre Daru, whom historian John Pemble has described as one of Napoleon’s “most indefatigable and trusted (though not so trustworthy) civilian coadjutors,” wrote his history of Venice partly to defend the French conquest of 1797, a conquest that ended the city’s thousand-year-old political existence and soon conveyed control of the whole Veneto, with Napoleon’s connivance, to the Hapsburgs. Although before 1797 there was a tradition, outside Italy, of portraying Venice as a corrupt and fallen state, Daru intensified and politicized the moral image. Pemble summarizes the thrust of Daru’s narrative: “Emasculated by wealth and vice, dazzled by illusions of freedom and power, the Venetian patriciate, having usurped the rights of the Venetian people, were in their turn ensnared by the vilest despotism that the world had ever known—a despotism that completed their moral vitiation and made inevitable their ruin.” The republic’s fall was not the consequence, in Daru’s narrative, of French aggression and aggrandizement—it was the result of its own inner collapse. “It was Daru’s special claim,” Pemble continues, “that he exposed for the first time the inner workings of the old Venetian government.” His portrait of the city’s institutions and moral atrocities, volume after volume, made Napoleon seem almost the savior of the Venetian people.49 For a republican such as Cooper, this narrative of political oppression was hard to resist even given his lack of sympathy for Napoleon or his latter-day followers. But Cooper borrowed from it more than endorsed it. He was less interested than Daru in condemning Venice per se. Indeed, his target was aristocratic

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England and monarchical France. In the latter case, he thought both the Bourbon Restoration and its successor, the July Monarchy, exemplified the sort of political corruption and dissembling that Daru in turn had portrayed in Venice. Cooper had had no run-ins with the police in Venice or anywhere else in Italy; but on his own (see GF CE 251–52) and through Lafayette he knew that in France police spies everywhere shadowed the opposition, and he certainly was aware of the part that the notorious criminal Eugène François Vidocq, more recently a police agent, played in the political events both before and after July 1830 (see LJ 5:335). As I suggested earlier, the reason for the division in Cooper’s 1837 recollections of Venice—the bright entry and the subdued departure after only ten days—may well have been owing not to what happened to him in the city or some alteration in his feelings while there but rather to the later psychological need to justify how the novel he set in Venice was so different from the one he first imagined setting there. Such a turn of feeling would have been the counterpoint of the resurgence that brought the Zephyr fantasy into the heart of the dark tale of Jacopo. Venice as Daru portrayed it—rather than as Cooper had experienced it—suited the novelist’s evolving purpose for a book that had been first imagined in Venice as “another sea tale” but that, following the ills consequent on the July Revolution, became an allegory of French (and other) political realities. The irony in all of this was that Daru himself functioned, in his History of Venice, as a state agent whose scholarly efforts shored up the myths of postrevolutionary France as a rational, modernizing state that, but for its defeat by the marshaled forces of the Old Order, might have succeeded in sweeping away the remnants of social and political inequality all across Europe. Daru seems not to have been a partisan during the Bourbon Restoration; he remained a supporter of Napoleon’s legacy more than a Bonapartist or a temporizing office-seeker willing to use his pen to achieve some new position in France after Waterloo. But he was no republican, either, and his tirade against Venice, which included the use of fabricated documents and innumerable rhetorical exaggerations, certainly outraged the Venetians. On these grounds, he soon was being challenged by Count Domenico Tiepolo, an impoverished nobleman with lively historical interests. As an unapologetic supporter of the old aristocracy of the Venetian republic, Tiepolo carried out a long series of attacks on Daru’s history, which he denounced, in the words of Pemble, “as an extended exercise in French propaganda . . . designed to justify Napoleon’s aggression and treachery.” Among other things, Tiepolo claimed that Daru’s description of the pozzi and piombi “was melodramatic nonsense.” The former had been long out of use by 1797, he wrote, while the latter, having been converted into government offices by the 1820s, were demonstrably suitable for human habitation even in the dead of summer. Tiepolo may not have been right on these questions, but if Cooper had

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heard of his critiques it would have been harder to swallow Daru’s mythologizing without reflecting on Daru’s text itself as a political imposture—politics wearing the mask, so to speak, of history. More importantly, Tiepolo charged that Daru should have known that the supposed statutes governing the Inquisition of the State “were a forgery”—as appears to have been the case. Daru modestly amended the third edition of his history in 1826 to accommodate some of Tiepolo’s criticisms, although he rejected many of them, including that charge of forgery. In 1828, Tiepolo published an extensive exposé of the Histoire de la République de Venise; in 1831, the master of the “new history,” Leopold von Ranke, joined him in questioning the authenticity of the alleged statutes, and following the uprisings of 1848–1849, the rehabilitation of Venice ’s reputation accelerated. By the century’s close, the gloomy, Gothic atmosphere of Daru— and Cooper—was replaced by the sunnier, more charming, and aesthetically richer imagery of, among other foreign writers, Henry James. But the fact remains that Cooper, despite all his difficult tutelage in the twists of European political life, was using the myths of one set of his theoretical opponents to pillory another. In the process, as Venetians and Italians more generally were soon to point out, he slandered the city. For them it did not matter that Venice itself was not his target.50

Troubles Having entered into the political field as directly as he dared in The Bravo, Cooper found allied subjects almost wherever he looked. With that book out of his hands, in early September 1831 he and Susan took their son Paul and their youngest daughter, Fanny, with them on a three-week excursion into Belgium and the Rhine Valley. Political mattered there, too, for the Belgians, subordinated to the Dutch after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo, had recently asserted their independence. Their rising had caused a delayed Dutch invasion that left traces of violence along the Americans’ route. In Brussels, the novelist counted forty-six shells sticking “in the side of a single building of no great size” and ninety-three grape-shot “buried in one of its pilasters.” In the nearby park, trees had been shattered by artillery, while the two little cupids adorning the main gate had been sorely hurt—one having “altogether taken flight on the wings of a cannon-ball,” the other being “maimed and melancholy.” Even in their hotel room in Brussels the Coopers found the mirrors shattered, the wooden bedsteads shot through, and other furniture showing marks of “rude encounters” (HMR 1:vi).51 Politics faded for a time as, passing on through Louvain and Liège, they crossed into German territory and, having toured the great cathedral of

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Cologne, stayed the night of September 14 in that “mean, irregular, and not very strong” city (LJ 2:142–43n4; see also LJ 1:268n5). From there, they ascended the Rhine, passing to Coblenz (where they spent the novelist’s forty-second birthday) and then Mainz before finally pausing in Frankfurt-on-Main, where they spent the seventeenth and eighteenth while Susan, ill of late and tired from tending to the children during a recent siege of measles in Paris, rested (see LJ 2:143n4).52 Her condition was quite worrisome, especially while on the road. On the day they left for Heidelberg (September 19), they therefore had to pause again for “several hours,” as Cooper jotted later in a guidebook—“Mrs. Cooper being unwell” (LJ 2:143n4). A single night in Heidelberg did not restore her strength, so that they had to halt for a like period in Mannheim the next day. Resuming their course, with the aim of cresting the Haardt mountains and staying at Kaiserslautern, whence they could reenter France and soon be home, they were about to start their ascent of the foothills when Susan needed to stop yet again. Cooper believed the inns in this isolated area (near the small city of Bad Dürkheim) could not be trusted, but on the postilion’s advice they stopped at “the sign of the Ox,” on the Stadtplatz, which to his surprise was a perfect place for Susan to rest and for all of them to spend a more or less comfortable night (HMR 1:x–xi).53 Happily enough, this forced stop not only helped Susan recover but also gave her husband the subject of his next political novel. It was still early afternoon and, looking for something to occupy his time, Cooper asked about the ruins atop a ridge beyond Dürkheim. The innkeeper soon was unfolding the complex story of his little city, which had once been the official residence of the now diminished princes of Leiningen. Cooper at first assumed the ruins were those of Hartenburg, the old Leiningen castle, but they were instead the remains of the Benedictine Abbey of Limburg, which one of the Leiningens had destroyed during the Landshut War of Succession, an obscure conflict at the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the implied struggle between the secular prince and the Roman church at the time of Luther, Cooper found all he needed to set his mind working on the new book. With its struggle over power, The Heidenmauer was a natural follow-up to The Bravo (see HMR 1:xii–xiv). His curiosity aroused, the novelist arranged for the innkeeper to send for a guide, Christian Kinzel (actually Künzel), who soon joined Cooper and his son in the gorge leading to the sandstone abbey’s remains just off the Kaiserslautern road.54 They spent an hour there before, having glimpsed ruinous Hartenburg Castle, “still more massive than the remains of the Abbey” (HMR 1:xviii), they set out to explore two other nearby sites mentioned by the innkeeper—the Teufelsstein (Devil’s Rock) and the Heidenmauer (Heathen’s Wall). The latter, which was to provide the title for Cooper’s new book and figure in its action, is

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now thought to be of Celtic origin, but in Cooper’s time it was considered a Roman relic. According to the 1830 guidebook he had in his pocket and consulted during the climb, Alois W. Schreiber’s Traveller’s Guide to the Rhine, it had been built to contain the pagan hordes (hence the name), although legend held that it ironically provided Attila the Hun with a safe winter enclosure before he crossed the Rhine on his eventual way, as he thought, to sack Rome. The wall’s location high on the southeast slope of the mountain called the Kästenberg had certain familiar qualities to it. Lying “on an advanced spur of the mountain, a sort of salient bastion made by nature,” as Cooper described it, it must have resembled for him the high “platform of rock” he had imagined as the climactic setting in The Last of the Mohicans (HMR 1:xx; LOM CE 287).55 The “weather-worn” Teufelsstein had its own appeal. Rising above Attila’s supposed camp and adorned with curious markings, it had long figured in folktales. The guide had explained on the way there that the monks, needing supernatural aid in erecting their abbey, had recruited Satan’s help by hinting that the massive building would be a tavern. Disabused when the completed structure ’s bell rang for first prayers, Satan wanted to crash the big rock down onto the abbey, crushing the chapel and the monks at once. He failed at that and eventually left “this portion of the country in shame and disgrace,” although visitors to the Teufelsstein claimed to find signs of his presence in the various marks on it, including one that was taken to be the imprint of his tail. In Cooper’s new book, Satan and the Teufelsstein, like the Heidenmauer, were also to play important parts (HMR 1:xix–xx). From the top of the rock, Cooper enjoyed spectacular views reaching from Heidelberg to Darmstadt and Baden; he could see the cities of Mannheim, Speyer, and Worms, and “nameless villages” spread about an expansive landscape rich with “fertility and industry” (HMR 1:xx–xxi). As he reflected on the grand scene, it became something like a European substitute for his customary American landscapes, perhaps because the Mohicans analogy really had arisen in his own mind. The depth of history he could imagine led him to think of “the time when the country lay in forest, over which the hunter ranged at will, contending with the beast for the mastery of his savage domain” (HMR 1:xxi), another echo of his own best scenes. In fact, he was to imagine the new novel’s “forester,” Berchthold Hintermayer, as something of a European analog of Natty Bumppo. And he opened the novel with a scene in which Hintermayer and the rustic cowherd Gottlob Franck are revealed in a narrow wooded vale in the foothills above Duerckheim, much as Natty and Chingachgook are found along a stream in the third chapter of the 1826 novel. What Cooper mostly saw during his explorations of the Heidenmauer and its surroundings, however, was a condensation of European history, not a

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displacement of the American past. His thoughts embraced the spot’s dim original period (when the carvings on the Devil’s Rock may have been incised), then the Roman era, then the Dark Ages, but eventually settled on the conflict between monk and baron that, marking the rise of the modern era, would form his theme. Eventually, as these ideas drifted in Cooper’s mind, he and the other climbers descended to the town. Before long they were again at the Ox, where they ate dinner amid narrative forays into the legacy of Limburg and Hartenburg and the mysterious doings on top of the Kästenberg. Cooper attributed much of what was to follow in the book to this “convocation” in the inn and put Christian Künzel forward as his source. But in the end he called down on Künzel, “body and soul,” the protection of St. Benedict of Limburg against possible critics of the book: the story was the creation of the American traveler, not his guide (HMR 1:xxi–xxiii). The Coopers left Bad Dürkheim the next morning, September 21. Driving up the Jägerthal through the village of Hartenburg (both much mentioned in the novel) and on to Diemerstein, they at last arrived at Kaiserslautern, where they probably stayed that night. Crossing into France proved trickier than they had expected, since they had to avoid a five-day quarantine by taking a long detour through Saarbrucken and Trier to Luxembourg, finally crossing the French border at Longwy, near Verdun. They stopped again at Rheims and then, on September 27, drove hard “day and night,” as Susan wrote, “till we arrived happily to our dear Children, and found them thank God quite well” (see LJ 2:140–41, 152).56

“Some Old Ruins” While it surely would be wrong to think of The Heidenmauer as essentially complete in conception from the outset, it is evident that Cooper wrote his autobiographical “Introduction,” quoted at several points above, before launching into the tale proper, as if he saw the whole thing steadily from a very early point.57 Within two days of returning to Paris, in a letter to Charles Wilkes describing the recent trip, Cooper wrote: “I fell in with a bit of scenery, some old ruins, a multitude of traditions &c., in Rhenish Bavaria, that will cost me a book” (LJ 2:140).58 Two or three weeks later, Cooper wrote to Judith P. Rives, wife of the U.S. minister to France, asking her help in locating a book he thought would be of use in his work. He explained: “When in Germany the other day, a groupe of ruins that I met, so beset my fancy, that I must give vent to the impression in three volumes duo decimo, according to rule” (LJ 2:145).59 Shortly afterward, Cooper wrote to tell Charles Gosselin “Le nouvel ouvrage s’avance,” asking whether he would undertake having it printed in

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English, and by November 6 he had moved so rapidly not only on background research but also on the book’s composition that he wrote Carey and Lea, “I hasten to inform you that I shall put to press in a few days, a new tale to be called ‘The Heidenmaeur,’ pronounced, as any German will tell you, Hy-den-mou-er.” At this time he imagined a publication date of March 1832 (LJ 2:147–49). As usual, his prediction about timing was overly optimistic, but this early in the fall of 1831, with The Bravo only just appearing in London and not yet out in Philadelphia, Cooper clearly was already hard at work. And things went well enough by December 17 for him to inform Samuel F. B. Morse, in Paris at the time, that it was “half way through the press,” a point Morse publicized through a letter soon printed in American newspapers.60 Clearly it was a story that he had little trouble inventing. His lightly revised manuscript served as copy text for the compositors employed by Baudry’s Foreign Library, which was producing the Paris-in-English edition (instead of Gosselin) and therefore the proof sets Cooper would distribute to Colburn and Bentley and Carey and Lea, among his other partners (see LJ 2:256n1).61 His work progressed with considerable regularity until the end of May 1832, when he informed Carey and Lea, “I am now writing the last chapter” (LJ 2:254). The book appeared in London on July 19, and in Philadelphia as late as September 25 (S&B 73). Cooper had picked up the main outlines of his novel’s plot—the battle among castle, abbey, and town—from the tales Künzel and others had told in Bad Dürkheim, as well as from Schreiber’s guidebook and perhaps other published sources. But The Heidenmauer, while localized in the Palatinate, also had more dispersed roots in Cooper’s experience. For one thing, he imported from his Swiss wanderings in the summer of 1828 the powerful feelings that Einsiedeln had roused in him.62 After Leiningen’s forces have devastated the abbey, the count and his key allies (along with the chief Benedictines) abandon the Rhine Valley and undertake a pilgrimage to the peasant shrine in Schwyz, an improbable turn of events for which Cooper found no warrant whatsoever in his Bad Dürkheim sources. He explained to Colburn and Bentley that he had incorporated Einsiedeln into the novel because it allowed him to “fill up the picture of monkish life” (LJ 2:256). In other words, he made use of a modern Benedictine institution he personally knew in an effort to sharpen his portrait of an ancient one that no longer existed. Yet he also used Einsiedeln because it had affected him deeply, and the book in hand offered him a chance to explore its impact. He had jotted a few lines about the shrine in his Swiss journal, and these would be of use when he at last came to write about Einsiedeln in his Swiss Gleanings years later. But the latter book would draw, too, on what he had written about the shrine in The Heidenmauer. He did not just use Einsiedeln in the novel—he introduced the topic with an unusual personal aside: “We have visited this resort

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of Catholic devotion in that elevated region of hill and frost; have strolled, near the close of day, among its numerous and decorated chapels; have seen the barekneed peasant of the Black Forest, the swarthy Hungarian, the glittering-eyed Piedmontese, and the fair-haired German, the Tyrolese, and the Swiss, arrive, in groups, wearied and foot-sore; have watched them drinking with holy satisfaction at the several spouts, and, having followed them to the front of the altar, have wondered at the statue-like immovability with which they have remained kneeling, without changing their gaze from that of the unearthly looking image [of Mary] that seemed to engross their souls” (HMR 2:158–59). The core issue here was not how Cooper’s touristic fieldwork prepared him to write the novel, but rather how his own attitudes toward Catholicism were changing. One might assume that an American Protestant and republican would favor the forces destined to overturn the rule of the Roman church in Luther’s era, and in some ways Cooper does. The abbot of Limburg, Father Bonifacius, is a sensual, worldly man who almost bests Count Emich in a drinking bout (“the well-known debauch of Hartenburg”) meant to decide whether the nobleman must continue paying Limburg an annual tribute from his vineyards. Earlier, Cooper’s narrative has called Bonifacius, without irony, a “dignified churchman” and conceded that he possessed “extensive learning and strong intellectual qualities” (HMR 1:141, 109, 115). Yet as the abbot collapses after downing a prodigious amount of liquor, we see in him instead “an awful picture of the ferocity of human passions when brutalized by indulgence.” Cooper adds, clinically, “His eyes seemed starting from his head, his lips quivered, and his tongue refused its functions,” certainly a grim view of a man in whom the church has vested considerable authority. This portrait of spiritual bankruptcy and carnal indulgence in a churchman hardly is contrasted, however, to Cooper’s portrait of the character who opposes the power of the Roman church: Count Emich’s superiority to the abbot consists in his ability to remain semiconscious for slightly more time during the debauch, an ability Cooper attributes to his less acute mind and greater corporeality. Neither man is worthy of sympathy, let alone respect, and their causes are therefore utterly without appeal. At the end of the scene, Cooper writes, with a quasi-judicial formality, “In this manner did a noble of an illustrious and princely house, and a mitred prelate of the church, stand at bay, with little other consciousness of the existence of the nobler faculties of their being, than that connected with the common mercenary object which had induced this trial of endurance” (HMR 1:139–40). Both men act for their property interests, not for bettering the souls or liberating the minds of their fellows. It is perfectly clear that, in opposing the abbey, Emich does not seek to free his dependents or the inhabitants of the nearby town of Duerckheim from the chains of the Roman church. He certainly

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is no conscious agent of the coming Reformation. Although we read that “the open promulgation of the opinions of Luther” already has “brought into question so many of the practices of the prevailing Church,” Martin Luther’s vague, offstage position through the book keeps his theological arguments and their political implications well clear of Hartenburg (HMR 2:31). Here, too, although it would seem natural for an American Protestant to champion Luther, the reformer is virtually without effect and without followers in Duerckheim.63 The struggle in the book is between two worldly powers, not competing ideas or beliefs. Bonifacius, like Emich, is a ruler of a fiefdom, not a devout leader of a religious community. In a world where these men hold sway, neither religion nor politics receives much intellectual consideration. And neither the church nor the state can attract the fealty of the people. A part of Cooper’s purpose in the book nonetheless was to raise the opinions of his predominantly Protestant American audience about the nature of Roman Catholicism. Across its first part, Cooper coaxes his readers to vacate their skepticism (or indeed prejudices) on the subject of the Catholic Church. In this regard, as Gary Williams has argued, Cooper was taking on quite specifically the alarmed attitude of his good friend Morse, with whom he had visited many of the most splendid Catholic sites in Rome in 1830 but who showed narrowness there much as he later would when back in the United States.64 In anticipation of a need for moderate truth at home, Cooper insisted on giving his American readers an introduction to how Catholicism really operated in contemporary Europe. To defuse their anxiety, he first reassured them that there was small chance that Rome’s missionaries in the United States would effect the “return of the American nation to the opinions of their ancestors of the middle ages”—a grandiose intent he had heard Catholics discuss in Europe (HMR 1:149; see GI CE 232–33). He went on, furthermore, to express a nearly perfect confidence in the following proposition: “where one native Protestant becomes a Catholic in America, ten emigrant Catholics drop quietly into the ranks of the prevailing sects.” Although he regarded this outcome as inevitable, he counted it not as a victory for “his” party, but rather as a preventative solace for alarmed Protestants like Morse. Most alarmists, after all, were woefully ignorant about Catholics and Catholicism. Cooper therefore proceeded to describe at some length the Catholic mass, “a ceremony, that ninety-nine in a hundred of our [American] readers have never had, nor probably ever will have, an opportunity of witnessing.” Cooper criticized the hasty, businesslike performance of the officiating priest in the Limburg Abbey but emphasized the heavenly effect of the music preceding the mass proper, which even softens Count Emich’s heart. He likewise follows up the “sharp, angry, denunciatory” sermon by the narrowminded Father Johan with a loving address by saintly Father Arnolph, who

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almost makes Count Emich abandon his intention to attack the abbey (HMR 1:150–54). Yet the violent sacking of the abbey comes, exemplifying what Cooper in his “Introduction” describes as “the long and selfish strife, between antagonist principles,” a struggle that he pointedly adds “has not yet ceased”—he had personally seen one recent installment, minor to be sure, in the Altmarkt in Dresden a year or so earlier (HMR 1:xxi). The book offers something of a resolution through the Einsiedeln pilgrimage, during which the spiritual economy of the tale recovers some of its balance. Cooper introduces Einsiedeln partly through his own description, partly through a brief history of the shrine put into the mouth of Father Arnolph (see HMR 2:142–46), who accompanies Emich and the other pilgrims from the outset. Probably the novelist relied for this history on the widely cited Einsiedlische Chronik, most likely in the new version published in 1823.65 But in having his pilgrims approach nearer to the shrine, he drew on his own memories of the spot. The Duerckheim travelers thus proceed “in two lines, a form of approaching the convent of Einsiedeln that is still observed by thousands annually” (HMR 2:155; see LJ 1:325), and they stop at the famous fountain in front of the church, taking water from each of its fourteen spouts (see HMR 2:157), much as Cooper had witnessed actual pilgrims do in 1828 (see LJ 1:325; GS CE 168). To flesh out this section of the novel, Cooper used many other such details he had collected on the spot. These importations establish Cooper’s narrative authority, but they also introduce the theme of private atonement that Gary Williams has described as a key element in Cooper’s composition of the novel.66 His own penance had to do with the older American attitude toward the church of Rome that Cooper was modifying and even renouncing here. But it also had to do with the evolution of his view of religion at large. After the stay in Switzerland, Cooper had begun to incorporate some aspects of Catholic practice into his own religious life. For instance, his liking for the vesper service, which he frequently attended in 1829– 1830 at St. Peter’s (calling it “one of the great things of Rome”—LJ 1:403), probably explains why his pilgrims in The Heidenmauer arrive in Einsiedeln just in time to attend the same service there, a detail that did not derive from his Swiss experience in 1828 (see HMR 2:161). Even more venturesome is the novel’s final important scene at Einsiedeln, an early morning service that the pilgrims have been required to attend. Here, Cooper focuses attention on veneration of the figure of Mary, an aspect of Catholic practice that, like the mass, was particularly avoided and often excoriated by American Protestants (HMR 2:201–3). Although these religious issues were very close to the center of Cooper’s concern in the book, we also need to keep in mind that, writing in the wake of the uprisings of 1830–1831, he imported from them both a general engagement

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with political life and certain telling details. As to the latter point, his “Introduction,” written while his impressions of the Belgian troubles were very fresh, mentions what he had seen in Brussels—the damaged and destroyed cupids, for instance, in the park near his hotel. In the body of the novel, furthermore, Emich’s attack on Limburg produces analogous ruination—“Marble cherubs fell on every side, wings and limbs of angels separated from the trunks, and the grave and bearded visages of many an honored saint were doomed to endure contumely and fractures” (HMR 2:84–85). But the deeper effect of Cooper’s European experience on his conception of The Heidenmauer lay in the book’s trenchant critique of the rise of moneyed interests. Marius Bewley defined the book’s “brilliance” as springing from its “convincing economic analysis of the Reformation,” an analysis that predated those of Brooks Adams in The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) and R. H. Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926). It was not just a story of power insisting on its own continuance; it was as well a story of new forms of oppression arising from the new conditions of material life.67 Sir Walter Scott was an apologist for the continuance of power. Here in this “oldest” of his own tales to date, as Cooper confessed to Morse from Frankfurt-on-Main in August, he was consciously imitating Scott’s manner and matter, as he had not done in his earlier novels. But Cooper did not lend support to Scott’s loyalties. To the contrary, his purpose was “to show how differently a democrat and an aristocrat saw the same thing” (LJ 2:310). This was finally Cooper’s Europe, not Scott’s.

Freedom Cooper was very much aware of these issues as he worked on the new novel in Paris, since politics did not rest for art. Late in September 1831, the famed American supporter of Greek independence, Samuel Gridley Howe, returned to France with a charge from New York City’s activists to deliver their views to “the Constitutional Government of Poland.”68 The reformer, who already had established his liberal credentials with Lafayette by offering to help with the July Revolution the previous year, naturally joined the efforts of the other Americans now in Paris, and thus he was quickly brought into Cooper’s ken. Lafayette specifically mentioned Howe in an October 22 letter to the novelist, in which he asked Cooper (“as president of the last committee”) to convene a new one, including in his invitation both Howe and such of the other “new-arrived Americans” as Cooper thought proper.69 By the last day of October, that new committee had met and elected Howe its president. Cooper probably was thankful to be relieved of the task of employing his pen, needed now for The Heidenmauer, in drafting further public

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addresses on current affairs. But he remained very active nonetheless across the coming weeks. At the October 31 meeting, presided over by Howe, Cooper thus moved the formation of a subcommittee of five members to call on Lafayette for “any instructions he might have to communicate,” and was chosen to serve on that body, now officially calling itself “the American Polish Committee,” along with Howe, Morse, New York merchant Edward S. Gould (chosen secretary of the new committee), and “Dr. McDonald,” a shipboard friend of Gould’s. Cooper accepted. When, at the next meeting, he proposed that another subcommittee of three be formed to handle funds recently received from the United States, again he was chosen (along with Howe and Benjamin Curtis) and again he agreed to serve. Gould’s minutes of the weekly meetings across the fall and into the winter frequently record further motions from Cooper. Moreover, Cooper’s lodgings not only were the customary meeting place of the American Polish Committee but also, as N. P. Willis (himself then in Paris, too) recalled, served as “ ‘hospice de St. Bernard’ of the Polish refugees”—for at Cooper’s breakfast table “many a distinguished but impoverished Polish refugee ate his only meal for the twenty-four hours.” In remembering Howe ’s efforts a decade later, Willis would likewise recall Cooper’s “generosity to the Poles” and the “devotion of his time and talents to the cause.” As Cooper wrote about politics, he also acted politically.70 That was particularly true right after Christmas 1831, when Lafayette, Cooper, Morse, and Gould asked Howe, who was bound for Germany, to distribute funds and clothing along the Prussian frontier to refugees pouring out of Poland.71 He agreed but ran into troubles with his mission. First, he encountered the suspicion of Prussian officials, who ordered him away from the border; then, following his retreat in March 1832 to Berlin, he was arrested and thrown into jail. Cooper, who in Howe’s absence assumed temporary chairmanship of the committee, presided over meetings at which dire general news arrived—on February 22, Washington’s birthday, for instance, eleven members at Cooper’s home listened as Lafayette recounted “the atrocities committed upon the Polish refugees by the Prussians at Elbling & elsewhere,” and Leonard Chodz´ko, by now a regular at the American meetings, reported on the condition of the Polish troops in Galicia, as well as “the final annihilation of the nationality of Poland by Russia.”72 Then, on March 13, when word of Howe ’s plight reached Paris, Cooper and Morse immediately conferred with U.S. minister William C. Rives about diplomatic steps that could be taken with Prussia and Russia. Giving Rives a copy of the committee’s proceedings, which included the instructions given to Howe, Cooper urged that these materials be passed on to the Prussian minister so as to impress on him that “the Doctor’s mission was not political” but rather humanitarian.73 And he wrote to “Mr. VB”—Martin Van Buren, then hanging

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on in London after the Senate had rejected his appointment by President Jackson as U.S. minister to England—in an effort to bring quasi-official pressure to bear on the case.74 Cooper also conveyed to the committee further news, including what he occasionally heard from the imprisoned Howe himself. Lobbying Rives proved very effective. By April 6, partly as a result of pressure on the Prussian government by Rives, to whom Howe also wrote directly from prison, Howe had been released and managed to get back inside France.75 Finally, once Howe was again in Paris, Cooper wrote to express the official thanks of the committee: “We all took a lively interest in your movements while in Germany, and the prompt as well as firm manner in which you met and overcame difficulties has been properly appreciated” (LJ 2:255).76 Through his involvement in such efforts, Cooper gained further political insights that were also, at this particular time, literary. He saw close-up the inner workings of the very processes whose nature he was exploring in his series of European books, the second of which, The Heidenmauer, kept progressing over these very months. Howe emerged from prison without any serious damage, although that experience must have driven home to any of the pro-Polish Americans who associated with him in France, including Cooper, just what was at stake in the revolutions of the early 1830s—and in the longer arc of political change that, to their mind, had been begun in America in 1776. Howe had encountered raw power, power that had no need to account for itself. He might have been Cooper’s Bravo as he lamented in a letter he managed to write from jail, on scrounged paper with the remnant of an old pencil, “We have no ambassador here; I am in the hands of arbitrary men; I have served a cause which they detest; and my heart sinks at the thought of my strength wasting away in this miserable cell, and my health gradually giving way under the influence of the foul, unwholesome air I breathe.” Fiction had become fact.77 Learning of such things from Howe, on paper or in person, cannot have filled the author of The Bravo and presently The Heidenmauer with regrets about the political turn his fiction had taken. Indeed, it is not possible to understand the purport and intent of those two books (or his next, The Headsman, begun during his visit to Switzerland the following summer and fall) without reading them in the context of the public uses to which this U.S. citizen in Paris was now putting his pen.

C H A P T E R

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he lesson Cooper learned in his efforts on behalf of the Poles also applied to a French controversy that soon entangled him. Early in November 1831, Lafayette sent his American friend a recent issue of the Revue Britannique. That journal’s editor, Sébastien-Louis Saulnier, asserted through a series of highly selective calculations that (in Lafayette ’s summary) “the [A]merican Government is more expensive than that of France.” Lafayette, wishing to pare down Louis-Philippe ’s actually exorbitant expenses once the Chamber of Deputies began its budget deliberations, at first planned to answer Saulnier himself. All he wanted right then was for Cooper to forward “critical observations” on the article for his use in the chamber (CORR 1:245–46). Within two weeks, however, Lafayette suggested that Cooper, “in vindication of republican institutions,” ought to correct Saulnier’s erroneous assertions (LGL 3). Cooper would later say that he “had little disposition for the task”; indeed, in 1834 he would claim that at first he “respectfully but firmly declined” (GR CE 29; LTC 9). But Cooper thought Lafayette was Saulnier’s real target (see GR CE 29), and concern for the statesman’s welfare led him to compose a formal treatment of the issue that was published in English and French in the early winter of 1831–1832, as we shall see below. As the dispute

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ramified, Cooper also wrote several letters on the topic between late February and early May 1832 for Armand Carrel’s Le National.1 The subject was one Cooper had himself addressed in the past. His fictional Count in Notions of the Americans, observing that “a great deal is said in Europe concerning the economy of this Government”—meaning its lack of economy—went on to provide details of the actually modest outlays (Notions CE 422–34). And just the month before Lafayette first raised the matter, Cooper had tackled allied issues in his anonymous response (called simply “America”) to Capt. Basil Hall’s Travels in North America (1829) for Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, which he finished just before leaving Paris for the Rhine (see LJ 2:137). Some of Cooper’s strategies there anticipated those he soon used in the Saulnier debate. For one thing, Cooper addressed Hall’s factual mistakes as a way of diluting that retired Scots naval officer’s unflattering conclusions about the American republic. Most annoying to Cooper were the errors “in his statement of the cost of the United States Government,” especially the per capita cost for New York residents. Cooper was convinced that Hall significantly underestimated the state’s population and therefore overstated the citizen’s financial burden (“America” 303). In answering Hall, Cooper also paid close attention to the national debt and payments being made on it in the mid-1820s, which he would consider more fully at present. Although “America” did not directly compare the cost of America’s republican government with the corresponding expenses in Britain or France, the article clearly laid some informational (and, even more, emotional) groundwork for addressing the subject for Lafayette. Cooper’s arguments in Notions of the Americans, his essay on Hall’s Travels, and his series for Le National relied on detailed statistical considerations, but the actual cost of government did not constitute his primary interest. European assertions on that subject were meant, in his view, to deflect attention from first principles—was a monarchy or a republic better for a given people?—to secondary ones, an effort that Cooper understood as a dodge. And his own interest lay in that larger political question. On the other hand, he in fact believed that the French and British regimes were more expensive than the American republic. In writing Lafayette, he thus would claim that the U.S. government was “much the cheapest government known” (LGL 21). As a corollary to his other views, however, he held that its low cost should not form the primary reason for choosing a republic over a monarchy or an oligarchy; rather, low cost offered yet another proof of its political rightness. Politics came before economics. He was not out of step, though, with the general tone of recent European debates on such matters. The anti-American Quarterly Review printed a long notice of the Englishman William Faux’s Memorable Days in America (1823) that

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downplayed his positive reportage of the country, including his approving comments on the relatively low cost of the U.S. government. Almost immediately, a new Whig journal, the Westminster Review, replied that the Quarterly’s “blind malignity” to the United States stemmed from the embarrassment caused antirepublicans by its “economical and responsible government.” Before the Westminster was done, it was asserting that the civil government in Britain “costs very nearly twenty times the amount of the civil government in America . . . and yet America is, beyond all comparison, better governed than Great Britain and Ireland.”2 If this line of argument was part of the transatlantic background of Notions of the Americans, a later installment of it was to be penned by Alexis de Tocqueville in his chapter on the cost of government that opens, “Great efforts have been made in recent years to compare public expenditures in the United States with public expenditures in France,” and then adds, “Nothing has come of all this work.” Cooper was among the public figures who had made those “great efforts,” as Tocqueville surely knew.3 Once Lafayette called on him for a public discussion of the question, Cooper felt the need to sharpen his grasp of the relevant facts and figures. For producing the fugitive “observations” Lafayette initially asked for (as Cooper noted at the start of the published response he eventually wrote), he might have relied on his first reactions to the Revue Britannique article and the facts he had “at command.” When it came to writing a formal article of his own, however, “the difficulty of obtaining the necessary documents in Paris” put him in an awkward position (LGL 5–6). He returned now to some of the sources he had made brief use of in answering Basil Hall, sources he must have either bought at this point or borrowed anew from Hector Bossange’s well-stocked “French, English, and American Library” on rue Neuve St. Augustin, to which he subscribed across 1831.4 The chief ones were the 1831 issues of Edwin Williams’s New-York Annual Register (e.g., LGL 22, 30) and Peter Force’s National Calendar (e.g., LGL 7, 12).5 It is clear from Cooper’s further writings on the subject that he made extensive use of these, and also of other sources. None of his contributions to the Finance Controversy was systematic, but none was composed from ready opinions and easy facts Cooper already had at his “command.” He researched the subject. Between them, Williams and Force covered much of the statistical background of Cooper’s own state and the nation at large. With their books open before him as he wrote, he was ready for Lafayette ’s task, and he handled the subject well. Saulnier’s first article, nominally in the June issue of the Revue (although that issue probably did not appear until late October or early November), was a long and detailed analysis of the different governmental expenses of France and the United States.6 It soon was answered in the fifty-page

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Letter of J. Fenimore Cooper, to Gen. Lafayette, on the Expenditure of the United States of America. This was published by Baudry in December, apparently with Cooper’s connivance if not approval. And, probably the next month, it was translated and published by the bookseller Paulin (along with a brief cover letter by Lafayette, dated January 6, 1832, and a more extensive letter to Lafayette from Gen. Simon Bernard, dated December 13, 1831) as Le Général Lafayette à ses Collègues de la Chambre des Députés, which bore the date 1832 on its title page. Saulnier got more than he bargained for once Cooper entered the fray. The prefect-journalist made a show of having conducted original research on the matter of U.S. governmental expenses, no doubt to lend further weight to his argument, but he had, as Cooper noticed and exposed, cobbled together his facts. The statistical table of U.S. state expenditures in Saulnier’s second article, for instance, was presented as if compiled from fresh information provided by “plusieurs citoyens honorables des États-Unis” and was credited to specific sources that included state treasurers’ or comptrollers’ reports and a variety of U.S. newspapers. In fact it derived, Cooper showed in his second contribution to Le National on February 26, 1832, from the table of the very same information that Captain Hall, whom he had luckily reviewed for Colburn, gave in his third volume, crediting those same sources (LJ 2:195–97). For two small additional pieces of information, Saulnier drew (as he acknowledged) on a well-known Italian geographer, Adriano Balbi, then resident in Paris.7 As opposed to those “respectable American citizens” referred to by Saulnier, Cooper learned from a source he did not name that somebody within the U.S. diplomatic corps in France, secretly sympathetic to European values, “was busy for the other side” (GR CE 30).8 He may well have been right, especially since the dispute soon attracted the attention of some Americans who either did not act to support Cooper publicly despite their private assurances, such as U.S. minister William C. Rives, or who took Saulnier’s side against Cooper, such as John Levett (or Leavitt) Harris, long resident in St. Petersburg and soon to be named chargé d’affaires in Paris (see LJ 2:383). Levett Harris would seem to be a quite plausible collaborator for Saulnier. I will return to him later. Either with such guileful help or on his own, Saulnier pushed his analysis hard. Cooper’s first response in the Letter to Lafayette delved into the demographic and financial details of the present U.S. situation, both to set the record straight and to shift the terms of the comparison. Saulnier’s basic strategy was to magnify the apparent burden of governmental expenses in the United States by exploiting the layered complexities of the federal system, for which centralized France had no real parallel. Because the sole source of income for the U.S. government at the time was customs duties, there in effect was no direct federal tax. However, Saulnier held that state, county, and municipal imposts and

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obligations (such as militia service and annual labor on public roads) had to be considered in calculating the average citizen’s share of governmental outlays. Cooper’s strategy was to expose such sleights of hand and show that the French citizen in fact was more heavily burdened. Barely had the Lafayette letter been published in French before Saulnier answered it in his “Nouvelles Observations.” This piece, about ten pages longer than his first, was nominally published in the October 1831 issue of the Revue Britannique, though, like the letter, it obviously came out early in 1832.9 Cooper had not been mentioned by name, nor his previous writings on the subject referred to overtly, in Saulnier’s initial article. But now he became, along with Gen. Simon Bernard, the key opponent in what was slowly transformed from an intellectual debate with a hidden ideological agenda into an outright political fight. Saulnier at first used deferential language, calling Cooper “un heureux imitateur de Walter Scott” (a happy [or successful] follower of Walter Scott) and praising how Cooper had rejuvenated Scott’s somewhat tired cast of characters by placing them in new and attractive settings.10 Even so, given that the novelist’s statistics and political arguments would soon be dismissed in the Chamber of Deputies by Count Hippolyte François Jaubert’s remark that Cooper “was well known in the world as a writer of Romance” (LJ 2:188), Saulnier’s seemingly innocent praise still may have had a derogatory edge. Cooper, even in his letters in Le National, sought to keep the tone civil and respectful; the paper translated his statement of that aim as follows: “mon premier désir est de conduire ce débat avec courtoisie” (LJ 2:190).11 But he was to prove relentless not only in correcting facts but also in casting suspicion on their sources and the political spirit in which they had been adduced. He was aware, the very first Le National piece asserted, that, as “a stranger in France” who was dependent on French hospitality, he had no real right to enter into a political controversy touching vital French interests. Even so, he asserted that, as “un fait statistique est une propriété publique,” there was nothing wrong in correcting Saulnier’s facts publicly (LJ 2:189). He tempered his assertiveness owing to the difficulty of comparing American apples with French oranges, claiming that he tried to supply as much detail as he could so that French readers might draw the conclusions based on their own local knowledge. But he would neither avoid public disputes nor fall into silence.12 Saulnier did not let the matter rest even after the timeliness of the budget debate in the Chamber of Deputies had passed. The next issue of his journal, in April 1832, contained a defense of his previous publications on the topic, along with two letters—a brief one from Deputy François Delessert and a much longer one from the U.S. chargé d’affaires, John Levett Harris. Saulnier provided more statistics; he also claimed that both the current U.S. minister to France, William C. Rives, and the former one, Albert Gallatin, had privately assured

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him they agreed with his analysis. These claims vexed Cooper, particularly that involving Rives, with whom he was close enough personally that the two had contemplated going to England together in 1831 (see LJ 2:87). Writing William Dunlap in March, Cooper explained that the present prime minister of France, Casimir Périer, had himself quoted Rives as saying “that M. Saulnier was right; and M:M: Bernard, La Fayette, and Cooper wrong.” The novelist joked for his old friend: “Now it so happens that Mr. Rives never said any such thing and if he had, his opinion was not worth a button, for he knows about as much of Statistics as you do of Hindostanee” (LJ 2:238). Of course, Rives occupied a difficult position. Insofar as facts about the United States were involved, he certainly might intervene; but insofar as the real question concerned French politics, he had to be generally circumspect. Furthermore, having recently secured a yet unratified and unfunded treaty settling old U.S. claims against France, Rives had to avoid offending the French and thereby undoing all his hard work.13 Once Cooper had read Saulnier’s third Revue Britannique piece, he drafted a response noting that no letter from Rives on the topic had been produced, a fact he interpreted as meaning that Rives had made no public statement. He further implied that Saulnier was using Levett Harris as a kind of stand-in for Rives (and Gallatin): unable to produce statements by the highly placed officials he named, Saulnier trotted out a much lesser (and very controversial) figure who wrote exactly what Saulnier wished him to write. After Cooper’s revised and translated response had appeared in Le National on May 3, he confided in Rives that he had “just finished Harris, in two senses”—had finished dealing with his letter, but had also, he thought, shamed him into silence (LJ 2:252).14 Rives, though he had Cooper’s confidence in that instance, was a problem of his own. Cooper knew that in some circumstances Rives had supported himself and Lafayette (see LJ 4:201), but later, in his Gleanings in Europe: The Rhine, he expressed consternation at the fact that Rives had been cited by name in the public dispute as favoring the position of the French government, but had failed to publicly contradict that apparent misuse of his name and opinions (see GR CE 30). This was one of the reasons why, looking back on the experience in 1837, Cooper concluded of it all: “The private individual, like myself, who finds himself in collision with the agents of two governments, powerful as those of France and America, is pretty sure to get the worst of it” (GR CE 234). That was a prescient comment in several regards, as we shall see.15

“Cassio” Of Cooper’s various opponents in the Finance Controversy, Levett Harris was to hang on longest. That is because in Cooper’s view he may have figured in a

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somewhat later, notably more vicious dispute that gave Cooper’s final time in Europe a bitter taste, and indeed aftertaste. This one centrally involved Edward S. Gould, who had served with Cooper on the American Polish Committee but who, on returning home, wrote and published under the penname “Cassio” a personal attack on him in the guise of a belated review of The Bravo. Given the paucity of information available on Gould and the important consequences of his attack on Cooper, it will be useful to pause a bit over his backgrounds. Edward Sherman Gould had been born in Connecticut in 1805, the son of Judge James Gould, long the partner of Tapping Reeve in the latter man’s famous Litchfield law school, and, after 1820, its head. Unlike his father or three of his brothers, all of whom graduated from Yale, Edward Gould did not receive a college education; he appears to have been apprenticed early in life to a Manhattan merchant, and it was there that he made his mark.16 In addition to commercial pursuits, he had diverse literary interests throughout a long life, translating some titles from the French (including Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet and Le Père Goriot) and issuing his own sketches, tales, and even a play.17 Gould in his literary tastes was a thoroughgoing Anglophile who also published what one reviewer called a “very dogmatic” guide to English usage and repeatedly attacked lexicographer Noah Webster and his Americanist agenda with, that reviewer added, “the unrelenting spirit of a Spanish Inquisitor.”18 In politics, Gould’s views were authoritarian and top-down. On visiting Versailles, he bewailed the fact that Louis-Philippe had ordered every vestige of the Bourbon fleur-de-lis removed from the palace “at the bidding of the vile rabble,” which had taken umbrage at the ubiquitous royal symbol. Gould elsewhere, reflecting on the July Revolution, similarly spoke of the French masses as “always predisposed for havoc and mischief,” stressing how lucky it was that their betters foresaw the danger and directed events.19 Gould wound up on the American Polish Committee with Cooper following its reorganization in late October 1831, and for the next several months, until shortly before he left for home around the beginning of February, was in regular attendance at Cooper’s home for that body’s meetings.20 At some point in this brief interval, an ill-described incident occurred between the two that, in retrospect, Cooper saw as the source of Gould’s later animosity. Gould had done “the most offensively adulatory thing that was ever done to me,” Cooper recalled with what seems like intentional vagueness, “and at the same time, one of the most impudent.” These were Cooper’s words in a letter to the scientist James E. De Kay, penned shortly after Samuel F. B. Morse informed Cooper from New York in July 1833 that Gould—whom Morse also knew—was “Cassio.” At the time of Gould’s unspecified original offense, Cooper had reacted strongly, so strongly that from the vantage of 1833 he thought the

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“disgust” he had manifested “may have been the cause of dread Achilles’ wrath” (LJ 2:399–400). Exactly what Gould did has never been discovered, but it clearly excited strong feelings in Cooper, and his reaction in turn laid the groundwork for Gould’s eventual reprisal. Perhaps there was an edge to the young man’s “offensively adulatory” act, a threatening or aggressive note, maybe even a sense of emotional affront, as one much later, very indirect report suggests.21 Gould’s minutes as secretary for the American Polish Committee give not the slightest indication that he regarded Cooper askance after the incident. He kept his feelings packed away until, from a distance and with a mask, he could exact his revenge. His attack on The Bravo, although seemingly concerned with literary matters, was pointless on those grounds. Cooper’s thorough revision of the book prior to publication had tightened its plot and style and given it a sense of constricting circumstance that enhanced the narrative’s power and deepened his attack on repressive governments. Gould nonetheless began his review, published early in June 1832 in the New York American, with a snide dismissal of the book’s artistic unity and effect: “We have read the book as leisurely as novels require to be read, and yet, when the task is accomplished, we have forgotten the plot, we have forgotten the hero and heroine, we have even forgotten in what small portion of the work we were interested. We can recal[l], it is true, some ‘tracery’ of a preface, which appears to be ‘anything but to the purpose’— an occasional redundancy of moonlight—the name of Bravo—a few Italian interjections and masks—a few alarms—a few races and a few fainting fits, interspersed with formidable essays on political economy; but all those things we have seen before.” Even if one were to assume that all of these observations addressed real flaws in the novel, as they do not, the manner in which Gould made them was curious indeed. They were not intended to counsel Cooper on how he might improve his art in future; they were intended quite clearly to hurt him. Gould’s emphasis on Cooper’s diminished power as a writer, his secondrate status as compared to Scott, and his alleged plagiarism (from Dunlap and Monk Lewis) similarly represented an intent to wound the man who had been offended by Gould’s tribute, whatever that was. When Gould wrote, “There is no one thing more calculated to elicit contempt than the imbecile efforts of exhausted genius,” he was cutting Cooper down to size.22 At the same time, these thrusts left Cooper no obvious target should he wish to parry them. Gould relished disguise and used pseudonyms to hide from those he attacked, especially Cooper. In 1834, deploying a pseudonym borrowed from a recent tiff between New York City Whigs and Jacksonians, Gould thus parodied Cooper’s Letter to His Countrymen in a newspaper piece titled “The Man in the Claret-Coloured Coat to His Countrymen.” Furthermore, when in 1838 the novelist published his trenchant analysis of the moral character of

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Walter Scott, the Knickerbocker magazine allowed Gould to write an acerbic riposte over the signature of one of Scott’s characters, “Wambo.” Here again Gould’s method was to attack Cooper covertly rather than engage with his ideas. Gould opened that article in mid-thought, his own agenda foremost in his mind: “We believe this to be a sound principle of retributive justice, that an individual who fails fully to substantiate such charges of criminality as he voluntarily prefers and perseveringly argues against another, must be content to endure the penalty which he sought to inflict.” Dorothy Waples, who did not know that Gould had written this 1838 piece, rightly commented that it was “an unfair and quibbling retort which garbled Cooper’s arguments and cast slurs upon him.” Gould enjoyed jabbing Cooper whenever possible. Even in his short novel The SleepRider (1843), he reused a correction of Cooper’s Latin phrasing he had first noted in 1838.23 Cooper was convinced that there was some deep connection between the Finance Controversy and the “Cassio” review, but that seems unlikely. In the Bravo article, Gould made no reference to the controversy; only after Cooper himself asserted the linkage between the article and Saulnier’s statistical attack on American republicanism did Gould, in 1834, pick up on that theme.24 Cooper had other thoughts about how such a connection could have been forged. At one time, he suspected that Levett Harris had written the review, but he also entertained the possibility that it had been written in Paris by the French royalist Jean Nisard, an associate editor of the Journal des Débats (see LJ 2:377), and then translated for publication in the United States, where it would presumably damage Cooper’s reputation among his American followers and, at the same time, defuse the potential power of his political novel. Cooper was egged on in this view not only by Morse but also by his discovery that “Cassio” had used the Paris-in-English edition of The Bravo as the basis for his critique: for at one point “Cassio” refers to the book as containing “459 octavo pages,” a description that fits only Baudry’s version. Cooper took this to be a “stupid blunder” (LJ 2:377) by the supposed French opponents of himself and Lafayette who he then thought had produced the piece.25 Gould’s politics, as indicated above, were oddly consistent with those of Cooper’s foes in the budget business, and in fact he later would align himself with the Whig Party, from which most of those who attacked Cooper in the later 1830s and early 1840s also derived. It therefore is entirely conceivable that he and Levett Harris and other players in the Paris intrigues would have associated there. And yet the actual reason for his use of the Paris edition was simple, as Gould explained to the American a year or so later: “I bought the book in Paris, of Baudry’s edition, paid five francs for it, and have it now in my possession. Surely there was nothing very stupid in quoting the only edition I ever happened to meet with.”26

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Besieged In the months between Gould’s departure from Paris early in 1832 and his publication of the “Cassio” piece that June, Cooper had various other matters to absorb his attention. Although his family remained happy in its new Paris lodgings, as early as March he and Susan felt they should leave the city prior to the warm months, which always led to health problems (see LJ 2:165, 237, 242). Moreover, a new general threat—Asiatic cholera, from which twenty thousand Parisians would die later that year—soon materialized. As time passed and the family remained in the city, Paris was beginning to seem like a trap. None of the Coopers was affected by cholera, fortunately, even though (as the novelist admitted to Howe in April) “several cases . . . occurred in houses quite near” (LJ 2:244). The couple dealt with their own concerns by helping others. The novelist thus donated five hundred francs for orphans of cholera victims, while he and Susan became personally involved with one poor woman nearby who usually sold matches outside their building’s main door. “Mr. Cooper had her brought into the courtyard,” Susan wrote to Caroline, “and we took care of her.” Susan admitted to being “constantly anxious” about the general situation, with its “frightful” mortality (the match-seller died), but did not admit feeling “much fear” for her own family even though their “quarter of Paris was one of the most affected.”27 This being Paris, politics moved even among the dead, as Cooper soon discovered when cholera cut down both Prime Minister Casimir Périer and the opposition figure Gen. Maximilian Lamarque. Their contrasting funerals provided further proof of the king’s rightward tendencies and his people ’s eagerness for reform. Périer was connected to Lafayette by marriage, and the novelist admired his “many good qualities.” But he had sided against Cooper in the Finance Controversy; and, while heading up the government, he had occupied political ground increasingly distant from Lafayette. Once Périer died in May, the anxious monarchy sought to cover his unpopularity by creating a look of spontaneous public acclaim. Cooper walked the city that morning in order “to view the pomp.” There was “a display of troops and of the employés of the government,” he reminisced in his Gleanings several years later, “but little apparent sympathy on the part of the mass of the population” (GR CE 41). Very different was the scene three weeks later when, on June 5, Lamarque ’s funeral spontaneously brought out large throngs of antigovernment demonstrations, triggering a crisis. Cooper again went out to observe. Because of Lamarque’s military rank, the government provided an escort for his casket— aware, Cooper editorialized, that this concession “sanctioned the presence of so many more bayonets . . . at the command of the ministers.” He returned home

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after surveying the cynical preparations. Around five that afternoon, when running an errand near the Tuileries, he learned that a disturbance of some sort had occurred on the Boulevard des Italiens. At six-thirty, while he and his family were eating dinner, they heard a drum roll calling up the National Guard. Sent down to check the street, their servant, François Emery, came back with word that he had seen a guardsman pass by with a bloody wound in his head. Cooper again ventured out. This time, learning of a cavalry charge against citizens near the Place de la Bastille, he concluded that something serious was happening—not just a protest, but “the commencement of another revolution” (GR CE 41–45).28 Several times that evening, Cooper came back to reassure his family of his safety. Things were in fact risky. On his way home around midnight, Cooper and a guardsman on sentry duty suddenly came face to face, mutually jolted by the confrontation. Later, while near the Pont Neuf and the Pont des Arts, he found himself caught between groups of cuirassiers and armed rioters. Slipping aside as the troops rushed ahead, Cooper followed at their rear, using them for cover.29 The next day, June 6, he went out to learn more. The streets hardly were deserted; distant musket shots and occasional cannon fire could be heard, but this part of the city seemed safe. At the Place du Carousel, amid the Tuileries, the novelist encountered an English liberal who (as the two walked toward the evident scene of the action) was “loud in his complaints against the revolters” because he thought they would “retard the progress of liberty half a century, by their rashness” (GR CE 52–53). The two men kept talking as they proceeded north toward the Boulevard de Montmartre. After parting from the Englishman, Cooper continued toward the Porte St. Denis, where a skirmish was apparently occurring. He saw one or two wounded men retreating from there but then rightly concluded that the main confrontation was taking place down rue St. Martin near the Seine. So tough was the fighting that, as he listened to it, Cooper “did not deem it prudent” to go any farther in that direction (GR CE 53–54). Despite what was occurring on June 6, the cafes “were frequented as usual.” Paris was large, the revolt relatively small. Besides, the city had a capacity for swallowing these periodic efforts at reform with seeming equanimity. Having wandered around picking up further bits of news, Cooper turned toward home. He was coming back over the river on the Pont Royal around four in the afternoon when he encountered Samuel F. B. Morse and another American, perhaps artist R. W. Habersham, Morse’s roommate at the time—and, like Morse and Cooper, a member of the American Polish Committee. As the three strolled along the quays toward the current fighting, the dense crowds surprised them. Soon actual gunfire rang out so close that, with the Parisians, they ran halfway across the Pont Neuf, thick with citizens and troops. From there they looked

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upstream, along the right bank past the Île de la Cité. The center of the fierce clash was now only a few blocks away, but then within an hour a hush fell over Paris. In the cloister of St. Merri, a core of diehard republicans had heroically withstood a much larger force until, under withering cannon fire, the uprising was crushed (GR CE 54–55). The next morning, Cooper went to the Louvre to find Morse. Later, each man walked on his own to the center of the failed resistance to survey the results. Having looked over the damage, Morse went to the morgue, where survivors were hoping to identify and claim the bodies. There were fifty corpses, he estimated, stripped naked. Most had multiple wounds, including a fifteen-year-old boy with “two ball holes in his breast.” Morse singled out the corpse of an elderly man with “a most frightful hole in his forehead directly between the eyes”—“the expression of his face was horrible; his mouth wide open as if in the act of screaming, and his eyes staring.” He could take no more and left. Cooper’s memories in his Gleanings, diluted by the time that elapsed before he wrote them down, were less clinical. Clearly, though, he saw the same kinds of detail. In addition, he heard it “whispered that agents of the police were present to watch the countenances and actions of the spectators, with a view to detect the disaffected.” In Paris, even the corpses were under surveillance (GR CE 57).30 Staying on in the city into the summer of 1832 let Cooper observe closely this smaller version of the uprising he had missed two years earlier. And the city, revivifying his sense of what was at stake across Europe, kept yielding fresh revelations. Shortly before his family would finally leave Paris for its second visit to Switzerland, Cooper, bowing once more to pressure from Lafayette, agreed to preside over the city’s annual July Fourth celebration. With recent events in mind, Cooper joked that this year all the celebrants might “be shot for sedition . . . if we drunk liberal toasts”—toasts, that is, like those Cooper had offered at the December 1830 dinner for Lafayette (GR CE 70). No literal shots were fired, but something untoward—something not well-documented—did occur. In his Rhine Gleanings, Cooper wrote that the mysterious event demonstrated the susceptibility of Americans “to common and inconsiderate impulses, let the motive be right or wrong”—for, he concluded, personal character had become of a markedly “low estimate” among his fellow citizens. As a result of this development, Cooper, probably recalling the earlier incident with Gould, vowed “never to be present” at another such Independence Day celebration (GR CE 75).31 Cooper’s editors suggest with some plausibility that the offense involved an uncritical reference to the recent fête welcoming his fellow writer, sometime friend, and literary rival Washington Irving home to New York (GR CE 266). But the issue, if such it was, went well beyond literature. Cooper happily

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applauded Irving’s accomplishments. “I have never had any quarrel with Mr. Irving,” he wrote sincerely in 1842 when recalling this period, “and give him full credit as a writer” (LJ 4:306). Even then, though, he remembered his hesitations in 1832, which were in essence political. Cooper felt Irving had exhibited bad judgment in writing for the conservative, anti-American Quarterly Review, then edited by John G. Lockhart, while simultaneously serving as U.S. chargé d’affaires in London. He also was offended that Irving (like Scott but unlike Cooper) appeared to have published positive reviews of his own writings— especially one of The Conquest of Granada in the selfsame Quarterly in May 1830. Probably he saw Irving’s actions, insofar as he understood them, as roughly parallel to those of much worse figures like Levett Harris, another chargé who in Cooper’s view had sided with the enemies of republican America. From this perspective, those who had welcomed Irving home were celebrating their own foe.32 Morse explored Cooper’s intense feelings in a letter to his brothers two weeks later: “Cooper is very little understood I believe by our good people. He has a bold, original, independent mind, thoroughly American, he loves his country, and her principles most ardently. He knows the hollowness of all the despotic systems of Europe, and especially is he thoroughly conversant with the heartless, false, selfish system of Gr. Britain, the perfect antipodes of our own. He fearlessly supports American principles, in the face of all Europe, and braves the obloquy and intrigues against him of all the European powers. . . . I admire exceedingly his proud assertion of the rank of an American (I speak in a political point of view,) for I know no reason why an American should not take rank and assert it too above any of the artificial distinctions that Europe has made.” Morse went on about Cooper in this manner for more than two packed pages. Then, knowing that his brothers made a habit of publishing parts of his letters in their newspaper, he added an emphatic second thought in the margin: “I happened to mention to Cooper that I had written home and said something about him. He at once insisted that nothing personal should appear. So I have broken the seal [of this letter] just to say[,] publish the sentiments I have given as those of your correspondent but leave out all that relates to Mr. Cooper personally.” In case his brothers missed the point, Morse drew lines across the sheets, adding, “All that I have crossed with a pencil you will not publish.” They followed his instructions.33 With the July 4 dinner done and Cooper’s political disillusionment with his homeland therefore at its highest point yet, he hastened to break off his further Paris engagements. On the eighteenth, the very day Morse wrote his brothers, the Coopers left Paris for a long taste of liberty in the Lowlands, Germany, and Switzerland. They went first to still troubled Brussels, where they spent five

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days seeing new things and reviewing old ones. They also socialized there with the British diplomat and artist William Gore Ouseley and his American wife, Maria Van Ness—partly owing to previous ties (Maria was of Hudson Valley stock, and the Coopers had attended her sister’s wedding to James J. Roosevelt in Paris the year before), partly because Ouseley, having served for several years as a British attaché at Washington, had just recently published his fair-minded Remarks on the Statistics and Political Institutions of the United States, which cited and largely supported Cooper’s arguments in the Finance Controversy (see LJ 2:110–11, 282).34 From Brussels the Coopers went to Liège, where they spent several days in mandatory quarantine before departing on July 30 for two full weeks of rest at Spa, mostly to help Susan regain her strength after long bouts of ill health stretching back to the Rhine trip of the previous year.35 Finally, long after the novelist had become bored with the sameness of the routine there (he confided in his journal that he was beginning to “tire of good mutton and bad wine”—LJ 2:298), the family passed via Aachen to Cologne, where they saw the cathedral again before departing on August 15 for Nonnenwerth, a long, thinly populated island in the midst of the Rhine. There they stayed in a charming, recently secularized Benedictine convent, from which Cooper wrote Morse a long, humorous, Liebfraumilch-lubricated letter (see LJ 2:301–5). Nonnenwerth provided a perfect break from the recent trials on the road, which included an unreliable carriage often in need of repair, delays caused by cholera quarantines, and the tedium of overly healthful Spa. With its insulated, charmed site, the convent may also have helped relieve Cooper of the dark memories he had carried with him all the way from Paris. But the Americans could stay on the holy island only that one night; and on Thursday, August 16, with “the Rhine glittering” between its islands, they went back to the shore and pursued their route south through several busy cities before making a return visit to Frankfurt-on-Main (LJ 2:303).36 Before long, the family passed from Germany into Switzerland, discovering some new sights but mostly revisiting favorite ones from four years earlier. They thus went east along the Zürichersee to Rapperschwyl (where some of them had stayed in 1828), crossed over from there into Schwyz, and, climbing the steep hills, eventually came late one night to the pilgrim site at Einsiedeln. The crowds were absent the next day, perhaps owing to the cholera scare, so the church and public areas of the abbey were deserted when Cooper showed them to his family. By himself, the novelist, who had made such important use of the abbey church in The Heidenmauer, went behind the scenes, visiting the cloisters and cells and the substantial library, where he was amused by the reflection that a “recent publication”—his own novel, barely a month on the market—might someday rest on its shelves (GR CE 150–51).

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They proceeded south from the shrine, by carriage or boat, on what amounted to a farewell tour of various familiar sites until, on August 30, they rode up the Lauterbrunnental, where Cooper found the wispy Staubbach even more impressive than four years earlier, when he had ranked it second to the “Cattskill leap when full of water” (LJ 1:275). Via Grindelwald and Neuhaus and Thun they spent the long next day backtracking to Bern, and from that city on September 1 they crossed the Aar and walked to La Lorraine, their pleasant headquarters in 1828. At first the farm dogs barked at the big crowd of apparent strangers, but when Cooper began speaking, the dog called Turk recognized his voice “and came up wagging his tail.” Turk’s master, Ludwig G. Walther, was away, but Walther’s wife was there, happy to see them all. After spending some pleasant time reminiscing, the Coopers bid Frau Walther farewell and went aboard the ferry as the dogs stood on the shore, “looking back at us, like old acquaintances.” Perhaps the prominence given to two big canines (Nettuno and Uberto) in Cooper’s next novel, The Headsman, owed something to this longlived familiarity, so pleasantly reiterated during the return to La Lorraine (LJ 2:320–21). Back in Bern, Cooper encountered Ludwig Walther in the streets and then, later at dinner, the two men discussed the liberalizations in the canton and the resurgent pressures of the old ruling class, very recently evident. Soon after coming down from the Brünig Pass to Brienz on another leg of this trip, Cooper had heard that a counterrevolutionary plot had been afoot in Bern (see GR CE 158). When he discussed it with Walther, the staunch burgher and militiaman expressed regret about the losses suffered by “the old authorities” when “the new powers” took over in Bern and elsewhere in Switzerland following France ’s influential July Revolution. Although Walther “agreed with most” of Cooper’s opinions—Cooper of course supported the recent changes and urged philosophical reflection on the true nature of political power—Walther’s doubts may have provided one source for the reactionary character of Peter Hofmeister, the Bernese burgher who as bailiff governs dependent Vevey in The Headsman. Cooper genuinely liked Walther, but observing that man’s tendency to view things in light of “private jealousies and private distrusts” drove home the point that even decent citizens had difficulty looking with lofty disinterest on public affairs (LJ 2:321). In his Rhine Gleanings, Cooper would remember the discussion well: “the worthy member of the Bürgherschaft lamented the changes, in a manner becoming his own opinions, while I rejoiced in them, in a manner becoming mine.” Cooper told Walther “that the old system in his country savoured too much of the policy of giving the milk of two cows to one calf, and that he must remember it was a system that made very bad as well as very good veal, whereas for ordinary purposes it was better to have the same quantity of

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merely good veal” (GR CE 160–61). That homely figure was a perfect defense of democracy: exclusive systems might yield finer results, but they also produced less happiness and justice for humanity at large. The Coopers went over to La Lorraine to see Mrs. Walther and her children again on Sunday, September 2, and then early the next day left the canton for good, following the route they had traveled late in 1828 on their way to Florence. Toward the middle of the “glorious afternoon” of September 4, as they came for the second time to the high prospect above Vevey, they discovered the genial arc of Lake Geneva below them, providing “as fine a view as possible” (LJ 2:327).37 Once having gone down to Vevey, they scouted out lodgings in its vicinity for some time before taking a month’s rental of a modest townhouse with the suitably Voltairean name of Mon Repos. It was “quite near the banks of the lake” on rue de la Madeleine, as Susan soon wrote her sister Martha. Once more, temporarily, the Americans paused (see GR CE 169–70).38

“A Swiss Tale” On September 8, Cooper rented a small boat and “engaged an old boatman,” Jean Descloux, who thereafter rowed him “an hour or two almost every evening along shore.” Notable for his “homebred, upright commonsense,” the man was a republican, like his employer, and may have been responsible not just for acquainting Cooper with the lake but also for discussing with him the historical period when the present Canton of Vaud was a dependent “province of Berne,” an important point in Cooper’s new book (LJ 2:330; HMN 1:iv–vi). It also was from Descloux that Cooper learned at least some of what he gleaned in Vevey about the wine festival, the Fête des Vignerons, which was to form the ritualized center of that book’s action. Descloux “dwelt on the glories” of that festival, asserting that “it would be a high stroke of state policy, to get up a new fête of this kind as speedily as possible” (HMN 1:vii). The festival occurred very irregularly—most recently in 1819, thirteen years before Cooper visited the town. Descloux’s suggestion was prescient, for it was to be held again in 1833, as he may already have known. How Cooper learned of its details we shall explore at a later point. The book took root very early in Cooper’s imagination. Two days before he hired Descloux and began to hear him speak of things like the fête, Cooper wrote in his journal, “I have determined now I am here to commence a Swiss tale” (LJ 2:330). The intention was not vague, as four days later he finished nearly half the first chapter before he ate his midday dinner and then, as had already become his habit, went out on the lake for his ride with the boatman. By his birthday on the fifteenth, writing and boating had become reciprocal habits,

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like riding his horse about Rome or going to the Louvre each day to see what Morse was up to there once his own work was finished (see LJ 2:331–32).39 Susan and some of the children went on the lake, too, at least on occasion. For Paul, Cooper made a toy sailboat that the boy, now eight-and-a-half, took along “on our water excursions,” as Susan reported to Martha. Copying his father’s love of the water, Paul copied his politics as well. He hadn’t named the little boat yet, Susan went on, for he was torn between honoring his homeland and honoring Switzerland: his choices so far were narrowed down to “General Jackson, the Constitution, and Guillaume Tell.” From his father’s perspective, all those choices played on allied themes (LJ 2:332).40 Politics were to matter, too, in the book Cooper had begun so quickly. He was, he wrote Morse on September 21, “caught by local things here”—the lake, but perhaps already the idea of the wine festival, as well (LJ 2:337). Although imagination outpaced actual composition, on September 25 the novelist set off with William Cox, an old American friend whose family the Coopers had also socialized with in Florence, for a trip up to the Great St. Bernard Pass (see LJ 2:338–41). The letter to Morse the previous week had hinted that the pass and its hospice also might “be worked up in the way of romance” (LJ 2:337). That indeed would be the case, since The Headsman, like its predecessor, ends with a pilgrimage, in this case to the Great St. Bernard Abbey. On October 1, when the vintage above Vevey already may have begun, Cooper and Cox likewise climbed the hillside there to visit Chateau Blonay, which would provide a setting early in the book (see LJ 2:341).41 The immediate inspiration Cooper took from his new surroundings demonstrates the enduring power of place over his imagination.42 There were, to be sure, other influences over The Headsman—literary, historical, anecdotal, personal—as for most of his books. The decision to focus the book on the peculiar fate visited on the family of Bern’s hereditary executioner points toward some possible sources. One wonders, in particular, whether Cooper had read “The Headsman: A Tale of Doom,” adapted (from a German tale) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s friend and Highgate neighbor, merchant Joseph Hardman, who published it anonymously in Blackwood’s in February 1830. Hardman’s source, the Danish-German Laurits Kruse’s “Das Verhängnis” (“Destiny”), may possibly have come to Cooper’s attention as well: it initially appeared in Hamburg in 1828, the year his family first explored German-speaking territories. Hardman’s story hinges on the intergenerational angst of its headsman’s peculiar situation, much as Cooper’s novel does, but beyond that similarity there is little overlap.43 Perhaps more pertinent was a humorous sketch, “Hereditary Honours,” appearing (just two months before Cooper began the book) in Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, a journal with which the novelist was, of

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course, quite familiar. “Hereditary honours are, certainly, the most rational of human devices,” that sketch begins. They rest, after all, on the “excellent idea” that an individual’s virtues might be “propagated . . . to the most distant posterity.” In the story proper, a maiden becomes enamored of a worthy young man whose ancestors for four hundred years, fittingly enough, have “enjoyed their honours—not a break in their lineage.” But of course those honors, like the ones in Cooper’s book, are a kind of curse. When the maiden finds the youth busy at his duties in the town square, she exclaims in disbelief, “My lover! My lover!,” only to hear a bystander quip, “My eye! that’s the Hereditary Hangman!” As if to drive home the thematic point of the sketch, an English lord who also happens to be watching the spectacle adds his own response, “Hereditary Hangman!—what a burlesque on the Peerage!”—to which the narrator adds, “Is it a burlesque truly, or is the one about as wise as the other?”44 This was, in essence, exactly the point Cooper’s novel would make. He was there intent on critiquing hereditary rank in all its forms. Every instance of it entailed a curse, if not on the heir then on humanity at large.45 Other reading of a quite local kind clearly did lie behind the story. Cooper’s eldest daughter suggested that he had studied Vevey’s past while there, and that seems certain (see P&P 267). The most pertinent sources concerned or emanated from the organization then known as the Abbaye des Vignerons, which held the wine festival. Because the Abbaye did not sponsor a fête in 1832, and the previous one had occurred in 1819, Cooper of course cannot have observed the event firsthand.46 He therefore had to rely on other people who had witnessed it or on some form of documentary record. Presumably Jean Descloux knew the festival well enough to give him some idea of it. Yet unless by “old boatman” Cooper meant to refer literally to Descloux’s age rather than nautical experience, there can have been only one festival during the boatman’s adulthood— for the second most recent one had taken place as long ago as 1797. And, whatever hints the boatman provided, Cooper’s lengthy renderings of festival events in The Headsman cannot have been based solely on his hearsay.47 As it happens, a booklet about the 1819 celebration, Description de la Fête des Vignerons, célébrée à Vevey, le 5 Aoust [sic] 1819 (plate 3), no doubt still readily available in Vevey in 1832, offered Cooper all the detail he needed. That he was aware of it is suggested, first, by the fact that he created its fictional counterpart. When Peter Hofmeister asks that Adelheid de Willading look in “the written order they have given us” to determine who is playing Silenus (the Greek god of drunkenness) in the procession, she replies that is not possible, “since the characters, and not the names of the actors, appear in the lists” (HMN 1:251). The Description from 1819 describes the characters, but indeed does not name the players.

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Some of Cooper’s information also came from the booklet’s text—for instance, his description of how, very early in the morning, a corps of halberdiers enters the town square and secures it in advance from ordinary traffic by placing sentinels around the perimeter (see HMN 1:224). Likewise, Cooper’s handling of a preliminary ceremony honoring two vine-dressers derives from the account in the Description (see HMN 1:237–38), and it also seems likely that he found his own version of the cowherd’s song, or Ranz des Vaches, there.48 An even richer source of information and inspiration for Cooper lay in the many excellent figures presented in the eight foldout engravings in the Description. For instance, none of his many details regarding the appearance of Silenus could have come from the text of the Description, whereas its image of that figure provides most if not all of them—among others, “the half-empty skin at his side, the vacant laugh, the foolish eye, the lolling tongue, the bloated lip, and the idiotic countenance” (HMN 1:249). More clearly, the two youths who carry a large cluster of grapes are barely mentioned in the Description but are shown among the engravings, with a legend (“le grappe du Chanann”) that explains Cooper’s explicit assertion that the cluster of grapes “was intended to represent the fruit brought from Canaan by the messengers of Joshua” (HMN 1:249). In other instances, Cooper seems to have flipped back and forth between text and image. In giving details about the procession accompanying Bacchus, he thus writes of the lesser figures who lead a ram to its slaughter, “there came three officials of the sacrifice, one leading a goat with gilded horns, while the two others bore the knife and the hatchet” (HMN 1:248). There is no way to tell from the image that the animal’s horns are gilded, a fact conveyed, however, by the Description. Similarly, the text insists that there are three attendants, while the image shows only two. On the other hand, Cooper’s “knife” had to come from the image, which shows it—not from the text, where only the axe is mentioned (the first of the attendants leads the ram, while the third carries a basin for receiving the victim’s blood; see HMN 1:248; plates 4–5).49 Cooper’s close reliance on the Description and its illustrations shows how thoroughly he “worked up” the festival, which in the novel concludes with a key event for his political plot—that is, the refusal of Jacques Colis to wed Christine, daughter of the Headsman (Balthazar), once her social taint is revealed. There is, of course, picturesque value to the festival. Its presence in Cooper’s fiction represents his susceptibility to the romantic impulse that brought all kinds of folk practices and local cultural occasions into poetry, drama, and fiction during his period. Yet it is also important to note how much of a documentarian Cooper is in this part of the book. He could have faked details of the novel’s festival, or glancingly mentioned a few obvious ones picked up from Descloux, but instead he chose to study the actual fête. In only one major detail did he violate the

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historical record, placing the festival in his novel in the autumn—the season when he had visited Vevey in 1828 and in which he came back, slightly earlier, in 1832. The real event always takes place in August. Cooper’s research on the festival was impressive. But so in its own way was his fieldwork, in particular during his four-day Great St. Bernard trek with William Cox. From the journal he kept on the trip, Cooper borrowed details about the St. Bernard dogs he had encountered at the monastery, the monks he had met while there, and the lay and look of the land. Most of all, however, Cooper brought into the book the grim sights glimpsed in the various mortuary structures he had explored, one on the ascent and two others near the monastic buildings at the pass. The first such structure stood near a refuge that Cooper and Cox reached at sunset on the day of their climb. Cooper described it at the time as “a dead-house, or an open vault” where bodies found on the mountain were placed prior to being claimed for burial elsewhere. The Americans learned from their guide that some remains lingered for long periods in the vaults: “There was one body in it, much decayed, or rather dried, in a mummified state. It had been found two years before, on a rock near by, and was known to have been that of an Italian mason, who had passed the St—Bernard . . . in quest of work, and who had perished on his return” (LJ 2:339; see GR CE 207–8).50 In The Headsman, the dead-houses serve a thematic purpose, emphasizing the fragility of life and the ugliness of death—appropriate for a novel concerned with an executioner’s fate. But they also have a plot function. One of the supposedly dead bodies in the vault is very much alive (it is the Headsman’s supposed son, Sigismund), while another (his sister’s sometime fiancé, Jacques Colis) proves to be not so much stored as hidden there by those who have murdered him.51

Farewells However much of the new book Cooper researched and thought through during the Swiss holiday, he would not work on it in earnest until after his family’s return to Paris. They left Vevey on October 4, taking the steamboat to Geneva, then driving on through Ferney toward Dijon. Ultimately, they headed to Rozay-enBrie for a brief overnight stay with Lafayette and his family at La Grange. Cooper caught up on American newspapers in the general’s library, and the two men talked, inevitably, about politics, especially about the Nullification Crisis in the United States. The travelers left about noon the next day for what proved a long ride to Paris, arriving back home on rue St. Dominique at eight that night, October 11. Thus ended their last extensive journey on the Continent (see GR CE 246–59). The next day, Cooper wrote Colburn and Bentley to inform them that he had decided “to throw off at a heat, in readiness for the next season ‘The

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Headsman of Berne’ ”—adding that the book embodied “an idea that has seized me with such force, that there is no resisting it” (LJ 2:353–54). This was the first the English firm had heard of the project, with which Cooper was to be “nearly half through” by the following January and “about two thirds” by the end of March 1833 (LJ 2:368, 376). By the latter point, the prospect of finishing it began to have special significance, as Cooper was now thinking that The Headsman would be his farewell effort—“for the pen and I,” he confided to Greenough in January, “have quarrelled” (LJ 2:368). He wrote to Carey and Lea to offer that firm this last novel in late April or early May, adding in a valetudinarian tone, “I do not wish to retire with any parade, like that of a petted author.” He promised not to make an issue of his retirement within The Headsman itself, but did not object to the firm’s announcing “that this tale will close the series. Some such as this—‘C & L. will shortly put to press, The Headsman, the last of the series of Tales, by the author of the Spy, &c &c’ ” (LJ 6:319–20). As he explained to Greenough at length in June, he found himself “the object of constant attacks in the American papers, and chiefly I believe because I have defended American principles and their action, in foreign countries” (LJ 2:383). Herein lay the first hint of the war with the press that would erupt after Cooper’s homecoming. It was not something that arose because of his return to the United States; rather, it already had begun by 1832–1833 and would reach its most intense phase in 1837–1838.52 As a consequence of this emerging determination about his career, Cooper’s daily work on The Headsman exacted an unusual emotional toll. Shortly after he returned to New York in 1833, he thus would confess to his old Rhode Island friend John Whipple that he never “did anything with the disgust and reluctance that I felt while at work on the Headsman, and I can not conceive of a consideration that would induce me to tax my feelings in the same way again” (LJ 3:28).53 Those emotions stemmed in part from the press attacks, mentioned to Greenough and also to Whipple in the present letter, attacks that had been aimed at him ever since the Finance Controversy and Gould’s publication of his “Cassio” review of The Bravo. He did not mind criticism of his books as such, he went on for Whipple, “but when critical acumen degenerates into personal hostility, when parties are formed, and calumnies are resorted to as the agents of reviewers it is time for me to stop” (LJ 3:28). Yet we may suspect that something deeper was at work here too. Partly, no doubt, Cooper felt that defending American principles as this third of his European novels again did was pointless as long as he was attacked at home for doing so. More privately, the feeling may have had to do with the fact that Cooper had pushed himself to write with heroic intensity across the past dozen or so years, and the emotional stress of it all was such that the public criticism of his political stance and political writings seems to have

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released some internal catch mechanism, allowing a spring to unwind with frightful rapidity. When reiterating his decision for Greenough in June, just before leaving for London with most of the “last novel” in his bags, Cooper suggested as much: “The quill and I are divorced, and you cannot conceive the degree of freedom I could almost say of happiness I feel, at having got my neck out of the halter. I could write forever—or as long as God pleased—for a nation that was a nation—but Heaven help us! Mr. Greenough, we are but indifferent gentlemen at the best. The tales are done. There are a few half finished manuscripts on other subjects to finish, and I turn sailor again—or something else—” (LJ 2:384). Literature was a bad marriage, a death sentence. Had he not been on edge for so long, aside from the public arguments now raging, he might have persisted. But the arguments gave him an out for what he secretly wished he could do anyway. Except, of course, that he could not give it up. There were three reasons. First, he could not afford to stop writing, as would become clear once he was back in the United States, and even before the Panic of 1837 that deracinated so many parts of the economy, including literature. Second, writing had become too ingrained a part of his psychic economy. He relied on being able to marry himself to that quill, morning after morning, wherever he was, be it at Angevine or in Manhattan’s City Hotel, or any one of a dozen French lodgings—even on the road through Switzerland, in Florence, on the cliffs at Sorrento. Language was his medium of exchange with the world, but it was also a way of being in the world, a means through which he explored who he was, what he saw, felt, thought—and imagined. Finally, he could not give it up because his public, both the part that had come to despise or at least dispute with him and the part that kept admiring him even through the next several years and beyond, needed him. He was a fixture of the national imaginary and of the American political firmament. He could not divorce the quill because the country would not consent. It had claims on him. Cooper and the United States would fight each other for a long time. But eventually, when he returned first to the country and then to his American themes, they would settle down on new terms for the final, rich (though hardly quiet) decade of his career. Cooper’s Letter to His Countrymen effected a trial separation, not a divorce, and, in the 1840s, reconciliation, and indeed a new kind of triumph, would follow. However Cooper felt about his homeland in 1832, already he and Susan had decided to go back there as soon as possible. In November, when writing William Dunlap with news about his success in getting Colburn and Bentley to publish the playwright’s History of the American Theatre, Cooper announced that he was returning home “next season,” in either June or October. Considerations about the family’s living arrangements once the return happened soon arose. Neither

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Susan’s resources nor Cooper’s own would allow them to set up a house in New York City, especially now that the thought of abandoning literature was beginning to harden in his mind (“the book on which I am now employed,” he also told Dunlap, “will probably be the last”). For emotional and financial reasons alike, Cooper also mentioned to Dunlap the possibility of moving to the country, for the city was a “heartless . . . affair” as well as a costly one (LJ 2:360).54 His country fantasy already had some history to it. Having asked his nephew Richard from Belgium in August to determine whether the old family mansion in Cooperstown was available for purchase (see LJ 2:296), Cooper had heard sometime in the fall that its owner since the forced sales of the early 1820s, William H. Averell, would sell—though for a price that Cooper, having reflected on the matter for some months, at last decided he was unable or unwilling to pay, at least sight unseen. He wished to reassemble the whole of the grounds as he remembered them, perhaps even expand them somewhat. That, too, would cost a good deal. Between the outlay for the mansion and the cost of the additional land, Cooper estimated that he would have to spend “near $10,000 cash”—far too much. He was content to wait until he could visit, aware that Averell might change his mind or sell the mansion to someone else in the meantime. Even so, he asked Richard to check into the status of those adjoining properties, listing them with such specificity that his interest in the envisioned homecoming clearly was substantial. Eventually, as we shall see, he managed to buy the abandoned house and make it his home (LJ 2:374–75).55 While imagining what future he, the soon to be ex-writer, might build for himself once his family returned to their homeland, Cooper kept up his authorial duties. He soon decided that, as with The Bravo, he would have The Headsman printed in London, and might visit there himself for the purpose. By June his plans were firm (see LJ 2:376, 383). He was to travel with his landlord on rue St. Dominque (A. de Villermont, by now a close friend and Cooper’s supplier of wine), along with a New Orleans merchant whom he had met in Belgium (Joseph Fowler) and a Polish friend and ally (Gen. Louis Paç), with whom the other three, leaving Paris on Saturday, June 15, caught up near Dieppe the following day (see LJ 2:385–86).56 The road trip was good fun, a release from the public and private tensions to which Cooper had been subject of late. Traveling from Rouen through “a good deal of rain,” Cooper and Fowler played games with each other, sticking their heads out opposite windows “in extasies with the country.” During one of their stops, Fowler came up to Cooper, “screwed his face in all fashions, and swore a Louisianian oath, that nothing in its way could equal” (LJ 2:386). The fun resumed after the travelers arrived in Brighton, where Cooper was surprised to learn that the coach destined to take them to London was called the “Red Rover.” He assumed that had more to do with “some fancied

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fitness between Roving and travelling” than with the “popularity” of his eighth book. But the coach lived up to its name, passing so rapidly through the Surrey Hills that in five hours flat Cooper and his fellow travelers had entered London. And his modest disclaimer about its lineage is belied by the fact that in 1831 this “Red Rover” had run a famous road race with a second coach named “WaterWitch.” At a time when Cooper was pretty firmly decided that he would write no more novels, this was a nice proof of his effect on the world via two sea stories he had published within the past five years (LJ 2:387–88).57 Once in London, business came to the fore. On his first full day, Wednesday, June 19, Cooper went to New Burlington Street to call on Richard Bentley. The publisher was so preoccupied that, bound off on some immediate errand elsewhere in his busy premises, he brusquely sent his famous client to wait in another room. Cooper would not stay, but when he came back in the afternoon the two got on very well during what was, in fact, their very first personal encounter. Noting in his journal that they had reached agreement on The Headsman, Cooper added with some satisfaction, “He gave me my price; and we begin to print immediately, to publish in September” (LJ 2:388–89).58 That negotiation concluded, Cooper went to Samuel Rogers’s familiar house in St. James Place, where he had spent so many hours in 1828. Having recently informed an American friend then in Liverpool that he soon intended to “leave Europe . . . forever,” the visit to Rogers’s represented a kind of farewell.59 Cooper followed out that same impulse elsewhere in the city. Also on the nineteenth, he called on Princess Charlotte Bonaparte with a letter from Lafayette. When her father Joseph, comte de Survilliers, himself came in, Cooper (who had known him in New Jersey years earlier) regarded him closely: he was “older and fatter, with a very Bonaparte face.” He added in his journal, “We conversed a little on politicks,” obviously including recent events in France (LJ 2:389). A few days later he dined with Survilliers and a goodly group of other Bonaparte leftovers: Joseph’s brother Lucien, the Prince of Canino; Lucien’s daughters, the Princess Charlotte Gabrielli and Lady Christine Stuart; and Lady Décrés, the niece of Joseph’s wife, Julie Clary. Also in attendance was the Virginia cosmopolite Francis P. Corbin, resident in Paris during the period and a friend of Cooper from this point on if not earlier. It was a “simple but good” dinner, attended by six or eight servants “in perfectly plain dresses,” for the family was still adjusting downward from the giddy imperial elevation to which it once had been accustomed (LJ 2:392). The novelist quickly reestablished his accustomed work rhythms in London, laboring on The Headsman in the morning and then going about town in the afternoon and evening. His rambles brought him into contact with various acquaintances, many of them American. Cooper found Henry Champlin, master

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of the ship on which the novelist and his family had crossed to England in 1826, at the New England Coffee House, on Threadneedle Street in Cornhill. (He went there to catch up on American newspapers, to which, his recent comments to Greenough suggest, he was especially attentive at this time. He must still have been looking for more rough criticism or follow-ups to the “Cassio” attack.) Wandering among the Inns of Court another day, Cooper ran into an old Otsego friend, John Cox Morris, whose sister had been married to Cooper’s brother Isaac, and after that happy discovery spent much time with him in various pursuits (LJ 2:391–95).60 Completely by chance, he also stumbled across James Stevenson, whom Cooper had known in Albany even before he entered Thomas Ellison’s school there in 1801. A lawyer and mayor of his hometown in the mid1820s, Stevenson was another lucky find in London, and, like Morris, a very welcome foretaste of the home to which Cooper was soon to return (LJ 2:393). He met so many people, who introduced him to others, that at times he put off his literary labors to go with them to art galleries or the zoological gardens or the House of Commons. But finally, on Tuesday, July 2, by which point he probably was receiving large packages of proof sheets, he went back to his worktable with the serious intent of finishing as soon as possible. Certainly he gave up journal-keeping that day and thereafter made only a single stand-alone entry, for Friday, July 19, when he noted paying a second visit to the Commons. Once he caught up with his proofreading, probably just a week later, as he alerted Bentley (see LJ 2:396),61 he knew his work would soon end. He must have left the English capital soon after, since by August 6 he had been back in France long enough to have worked over the sheets of The Headsman once more, picking up several errors, one in the very last pages of the book, the others clustered in the “Introduction,” where Bentley’s compositors apparently had forgotten to correct the standing type. These difficulties, about which he immediately wrote Carey and Lea so they could attend to them (see LJ 6:322–23), were, though, minor issues for a book produced under the emotional, political, and practical challenges Cooper faced in 1833.62 After reuniting with his family on rue St. Dominique in August, Cooper had a great deal to do. Looking ahead to New York, he wrote his old friend James E. De Kay on August 10 to ask him to rent a city house for the family— “in a genteel but a quiet street, somewhere up town I suppose.” Manhattan had changed considerably since Cooper last lived there, and all the newspapers he read and private letters he received from people like De Kay since 1826 could not completely prepare him for its growth. He supplied details of the family’s needs and means, even asking De Kay, once he had found and secured the place, to have several of the rooms newly carpeted. The Coopers were “packing up” already, he added, and would go to London the following week for a brief stay,

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after which, “on or about the first of October,” they would depart for the United States. In point of fact, it would be Samuel F. B. Morse who rented the house for Cooper, but he may have had De Kay’s help in doing so (LJ 2:398–400). While he still lingered in Paris, Cooper undertook many local leavetakings. He sent a brief letter to Anglican bishop Matthew H. T. Luscombe, who presided at the Temple de l’Oratoire, near the Louvre, where the Coopers had attended Anglican services while in Paris (see LJ 2:405). And he took leave of Lafayette in a letter that noted Albert Gallatin’s recent, helpful contribution to the Finance Controversy, a development of which Lafayette had just informed him. Cooper in turn shared with Lafayette recent New York news confirming similar things about Minister Rives—who, Cooper happily wrote, “openly and warmly espoused my views.” He was summing up and refining the old arguments, but also incubating the ideas—or rather the markedly bitter feelings— that he would express in A Letter to His Countrymen once he returned home (LJ 2:401–4). One last bit of business may have helped direct the Coopers’ route as they readied themselves to leave Paris for good and head to Le Havre. For a long time, Susan Cooper had hoped to visit her ancestral French home of Caen, in Normandy. Now was the last chance, and apparently the family managed to do so, although the evidence is incomplete and sketchy. The best piece involves a request Cooper received in 1848 from his wife ’s nephew, Edward Floyd DeLancey: “Will you give me an account of your visit to Caen & [St.] Valerie, and what you found out there.” In replying, Cooper simply wrote that the request called for “too long an answer to be given now” (LJ 5:294).63 As far as we know, Cooper never wrote out that long answer; perhaps he gave it viva voce at some later time, but his brief response pretty strongly implied that the Americans had actually made that “visit.” Some further support comes from the fact that in the last letter Cooper and his family collectively wrote from Paris, addressed to a pair of Parisian neighbors then in Falaise, Calvados (quite close to Caen, as both were to Le Havre), they stated that they might have a reunion with the couple before they departed for England (see LJ 2:408).64 Leaving Paris on August 16, the seven Coopers and their four servants (and their French cat, Cocquelicot) made their way to Le Havre, with or without the Caen detour, and from there they passed by steamboat to Southampton (SFC “Adventures,” 943).65 From the latter city, with which they were familiar from 1826, they traveled by coach to Hyde Park Corner, where Cooper had arranged for a servant (probably “Little Smith” from the 1828 visit) to meet them (see LJ 2:410). They were in the English capital by September 5, probably earlier, for on that date Cooper “went with Mrs. C. and all the children to see Westminster hall.” Between then and the tenth, he had begun and finished revising three of

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his novels—The Water-Witch, The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, and The Red Rover—for Bentley’s ongoing Standard Novels series (LJ 2:408–9). By the sixteenth, their further plans were firm enough for Cooper to purchase passage on the packet boat Samson for all eleven members of his party (see LJ 2:410).66 That vessel, a companion of the Hudson on the now combined Black X–Red Swallowtail Line, was two years old and sizable and had been constructed by one of the old stalwarts of the New York shipbuilders, Christian Bergh. The master of the ship since 1833, Daniel Chadwick, had been in the packet business from the outset—indeed, had commanded as early as 1818—and would still be in command of a vessel in 1850. He hailed from Lyme, Connecticut, and was as well-known as Henry Champlin.67 Cooper’s daughter recalled that the family sailed on “the first of October . . . on the voyage across the ocean” (SFC “Adventures,” 943), apparently at odds with her father’s final note to Richard Bentley, which indicated that they were due to sail from “the dock on Saturday morning”—that is, September 28. The discrepancy disappears when one takes into account the fact that the Samson would not be really under way across the Atlantic until it had sailed down the Thames and around the jutting landmass of Kent and stopped in Portsmouth, whence it would depart England on October 1, as Cooper had informed Caroline DeLancey in his letter of September 16 (LJ 2:410–11). In Homeward Bound (1838), Cooper’s fictional version of the family’s homecoming, the characters board the Montauk, “the packet of the 1st of October,” in London and head downriver. The motive for boarding then and there, we are told, is that Edward Effingham “had determined to make his daughter familiar with the peculiar odours of the vessel in smooth water, as a protection against sea-sickness.” The characters therefore have three days to settle their stomachs before the Montauk comes “to an anchor off Portsmouth,” where the other passengers board (HB 1:18–19). We can assume that some such motive also operated in the Coopers’ case, perhaps especially in view of the relative inexperience of most of the travelers at sea. Certainly it is possible that some or all of the family members took the coach back to Southampton and boarded the ship there. But the letter to Caroline just referred to says they planned to board in London (“in order to avoid the expense and fatigue of a journey by land”—LJ 2:411), so we may assume they did so. However they all got to the vicinity of Portsmouth, though, by October 1 they were there and ready to sail, much like the Effinghams. The crossing was relatively uneventful—certainly when compared with that of the Effinghams, whose packet, under chase by a naval vessel intent on enforcing an arrest warrant against a steerage passenger, is blown by persistent northwest winds down the coasts of France and Portugal until it encounters even more serious dangers off Africa. There must have been some adverse

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weather in 1833, however, if we are to believe Susan Cooper’s story about how poor Cocquelicot came under suspicion from the sailors (“Sailors hate a cat,” of course) when headwinds or calms beset the vessel. “On one occasion,” she wrote, “the sailors were seated on deck, during a dead calm, . . . mending old sails,” when the cat, having escaped from the cabin, bounded onto the middle of the canvas on which they were at work. Once the sailors turned on him, he ran aloft into the rigging, only to be preserved by a young American sailor who took pity on him. Susan’s larger point remains: the crossing occupied “a long month,” for the vessel left Portsmouth on October 1 and did not arrive off Sandy Hook until November 5, although then it quickly made its way up to the city (SFC “Adventures,” 943–44).68 The ship carried many more people than had the Hudson in 1826.69 There were, to begin with, thirty-one passengers in the cabins, including the Coopers and their four servants (and another servant, Englishman James Mott, evidently employed by another passenger). Among those in the cabins was Boston merchant Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Jr., long resident in London, and his wife, the former Jane Frances Dumaresq. They and the Coopers, who had some ties in common, became reasonably well-acquainted aboard the Samson and kept up contact for years afterward.70 Another passenger was the witty Presbyterian minister Samuel Hanson Cox, an ex-Quaker born in New Jersey, with whom it is fairly clear that the Coopers also had some exchange. As late as 1851, in his last letter home from New York City, the novelist mentioned him familiarly, like an old acquaintance (LJ 6:264). An abolitionist in 1833, by midcentury Cox would be notorious for his conservative speeches on slavery and race, having famously tangled in 1846 with Frederick Douglass. I shall have more to say about Cox and Cooper’s views of him in chapter 15.71 The most fascinating of Cooper’s encounters on the Samson involved one of the sixty-five steerage passengers. All of them, representing an array of ages and skills, were English emigrants intent on making new lives for themselves in the United States. They included a wireworker, a jeweler, a dressmaker, several shoemakers, a butcher, two tailors, various laborers, two gentlemen, and a lady. Mostly they seem to have been intending to take up residence in New York City—it was, after all, an odd time of the year for rural folk to arrive in the States. Only three of them (a man aged fifty-eight who appears to have been migrating alone and a pair of brothers in their thirties, one married and the other single) were listed on the passenger list as farmers. Sometime during the crossing, as the novelist’s eldest daughter later reported, Cooper encountered one of these men on deck and learned a bit of his own family’s history. Incredibly enough, the Englishman had in his hands a book by Cooper’s own father—the only one he ever wrote, A Guide in the Wilderness, which had been rather

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obscurely published in Dublin in 1810, the year after William Cooper’s death. Given the venue where it appeared and the fact that it was written during young James Cooper’s absence on his merchant voyage, it is not surprising that this was probably the first time the novelist had ever seen the book, or perhaps even heard of it (see PIO HE xiii). If, as seems most likely, the passenger holding it was one of the two younger men—either Henry or John Grace—then Judge Cooper’s advice to immigrants may have done them good, as by 1850, both were farming profitably in Steuben County, New York. Although it is tempting to conjure up what talk may have passed between the author of The Pioneers and these two English farmers bound for the interior of his own home state, the mere chance of the encounter is rich enough to suffice. As the ends of Cooper’s life touched there in mid-ocean, he was almost home before he knew it.72

C H A P T E R

S I X

Rough Homecoming

W

ell before the Samson arrived in New York in 1833, Caroline DeLancey had seen to everything at the house Samuel F. B. Morse had rented for the Coopers at No. 4 Carroll Place. In the letter she left for the novelist at the City Hotel’s bar, as instructed (see LJ 2:410), she gave him the address and told him she would go there herself after learning of the ship’s arrival: that way she could have fires started to warm the place and then, as she wrote, stay “to welcome you all to your Native Land.” There was a backup plan—the Coopers could get the key at Cally’s present lodgings (at 68 White Street, just off Broadway some blocks south) and go up to Carroll Place and let themselves in. But apparently that wasn’t necessary, since Cally, on receiving word that the ship had come in, rushed to open the rented house and was waiting there when the Coopers arrived, prompting a warm reunion. Over the next few days, the returned travelers began adjusting to their quarters (located on a recently developed block of Bleecker Street), but also to a city and nation substantially altered since 1826. Some of the changes, as they found quickly, were personally troubling. Invited as a guest to a public dinner held on November 9 to honor Cmdre. Isaac Chauncey, who was leaving his command at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the romancer-turned-political-activist saw several people

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he had known years before. Among them was wine fancier Dominick Lynch, who had crossed to England with the Coopers in 1826, sung songs on the Hudson with the novelist, and then gone to the theater with him in London. But beyond Chauncey and Lynch, Cooper found that his old acquaintances presented an almost universally cold front. Former mayor (and member of Cooper’s Bread and Cheese Lunch) Philip Hone, who presided at the event, suggests why. Four days earlier, when Hone had noted in his diary that Cooper had arrived on the Samson, he added that he thought most of the novelist’s recent writings were unworthy of his earlier fame. Small wonder that Cooper left the dinner early (see GR CE 215–16). Soon after that, a long list of other friends intent on undoing the damage asked Cooper to name the date for a reception officially welcoming him home. But the Chauncey affair had made him wary. Thanking them for their stated approval of his “manly defense” of American institutions while abroad, he explained that “a short but severe indisposition” forced him to turn them down (CORR 1:327; LJ 3:13–14).1 Thereafter, he had other things to keep him busy. At the close of the month, he was well enough to go to Philadelphia for several days to take care of various pieces of business—patching up his relations with Susan’s brother William (who had held out a welcome through Peter A. Jay) as well as dining with old friends Henry C. Carey and Robert Walsh.2 Soon he passed on to Baltimore with another old friend, James D. P. Ogden. There they picked up William B. Shubrick, Cooper’s most unshakeable ally, and proceeded to Washington, where at noon on December 11 the novelist called on President Jackson. Although there is no official record of what took place in the White House, it is likely that Cooper wanted to relay to Jackson in person, not on paper, the observations he had gathered in France—perhaps he spoke, too, about the absurdity of the rascal Levett Harris’s brief appointment as U.S. chargé in Paris. If he took the trouble to go to Washington to avoid writing Jackson on such topics, he (like the president) also was at pains not to record what the two discussed. Cooper wrote less to his wife about Old Hickory than about the condition of the federal capital (“much improved”) and especially the novel transportation means, established during his time abroad, that took him there (“the rail-roads are delightful”—LJ 3:20; see also GF CE 170, 288). From Cooper’s defense of Jackson in his letters to the press during 1835 and 1836, though, it is clear that the two men saw eyeto-eye on various important issues and got on personally. Cooper was never, though, just a Jackson man. He was back at Carroll Place well before Christmas, ready to turn to two last writing projects. The first involved a satire eventually called The Monikins that he had been talking about (and working on) for some time and that would finally come out almost two years later. When he picked it up again in Manhattan

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over the winter, Cooper had hopes he could finish it quickly, thus tying up loose ends and exiting his literary career; then, as if turning a symbolic page in his life, he would take his family on a long summer tour upstate (see LJ 3:33, 35). Neither the book nor that trip would materialize right then, however, in part because Cooper’s second writing project intervened. This one would be issued by John Wiley in New York in June 1834 as A Letter to His Countrymen. The impulse to get that 116-page booklet written just now seems to have arisen while Cooper was in Philadelphia in December 1833 on his way to Washington. At that time, scanning the newspapers as always of late, he noticed that the New York American had just reprinted the original “Cassio” attack, along with Edward S. Gould’s translation of a French article from the Journal des Débats that Cooper had declared (erroneously, as he now knew) was the source of the “Cassio” piece (see LJ 2:377). Gould’s refusal to let that error or the larger fight die caused Cooper to publish a brief letter in Walsh’s semiweekly Philadelphia paper on December 5 declaring that, although he had felt “a natural reluctance to embitter the first moments of my return after so long an absence, by a dispute in the public papers,” Gould’s “revival of the matter” now left him “no choice.” He therefore reluctantly promised that he would break his silence once he got back to New York (LJ 3:17). He wrote his answer to his critics even as he also worked on The Monikins. Dating A Letter to His Countrymen is nonetheless somewhat tricky because, after it was initially conveyed to Wiley early in 1834, its typesetting, printing, and release were delayed owing to the general upheaval in the U.S. economy at that time. The interruption allowed for various significant alterations and additions in the text proper, and for the introduction of an entirely new “Postscript” addressing the delay and including more new matter. The resulting textual complexity need not concern us in detail here.3 More important is the diffuse array of topics Cooper took up in the work’s final form. A Letter to His Countrymen falls naturally into ten parts. The first four focus directly on the Finance Controversy and on reaction to The Bravo, especially Gould’s 1832 article (LTC 1–36). The next two give Cooper’s detailed response to a pair of related articles published in other New York papers in 1833 (one connected with The Bravo, the other with The Heidenmauer).4 As loose background for this series of interconnected topics, the Letter next takes up the issue of Americans’ deference to foreign opinion (LTC 51–59), to which Cooper would return at the end of the booklet (LTC 90–100); in between, he spoke of U.S. constitutional principles (LTC 59–70) and their bearing on two issues of particular importance to him and, at the time he wrote, to Americans at large. Those issues concerned diplomatic appointments, a topic he linked explicitly to Levett Harris’s June 1833 appointment as chargé (LTC 70–74), and President Jackson’s trouble with Congress over the Second

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Bank of the United States (LTC 74–90).5 Overall, the Letter was as much a sourcebook of Cooper’s recent public fights and views as a coherent statement of enduring principles. It was an anthology more than an argument. The most electrifying moment of the Letter for Cooper’s “Countrymen” came during his discussion of foreign opinion at the end of the booklet, when he declared his intent to abandon his career, first giving his halting, half-reluctant reasons for doing so: “The American who wishes to illustrate and enforce the peculiar principles of his own country, by the agency of polite literature, will, for a long time to come, I fear, find that his constituency, as to all purposes of distinctive thought, is still too much under the influence of foreign theories, to receive him with favor. It is under this conviction that I lay aside the pen” (LTC 98). With this avowal about to become public in June, Cooper undertook— though alone, without his family—his planned summer trip upstate. He had given up one identity and now began seeking out the traces of an older one by means of what proved, happily, to be an emotionally rich tour of Otsego. Leaving Manhattan by steamboat on June 11 and spending that night in Albany, he transferred there to the railroad, which dropped him in Schenectady on the twelfth. Once he arrived later that day in Canajoharie, the family’s old jumpingoff place in the Mohawk Valley, he recovered a great deal from very far back in his past. There had been a solitary tavern here when he last visited “sixteen years since,” but now, with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 (the canal was another transportation marvel he had never seen before this trip), a whole “village of some six or eight hundred souls” had sprung up around it. It wasn’t such new marvels that grabbed his attention, though, but the remnants that dotted the scene, things “redolent of youth”—his youth. “I have been up the ravine to the old Frey house,” he wrote Susan that night, adding, “I enjoyed this walk exceedingly.” It triggered a flood of memories, starting with a vision, almost, of “my noble looking, warm-hearted, witty father, with his deep laugh, sweet voice and fine rich eye, as he used to light his way, with his anecdote and fun.” That rush of very good feelings forced open the gates of the seemingly foreclosed past, letting other figures back into his consciousness. One was Hendrick Frey, ancient associate of Judge Cooper and model for Major Fritz Hartmann in The Pioneers—“Old Frey with his little black peepers, pipe, hearty laugh, broken English, and warm welcome,” as he now came back to life in the letter to Susan. And another recovered figure was James Cooper, for such was his simple name the last time he was here in 1817 or 1818. Up that ravine near Frey’s, he spoke to “an old Dutchman” who told him that most of Frey’s family (like most of his own) was long dead. The sadness gathered until the man asked who Cooper was: when the novelist replied “I am from Otsego—a Cooper of Cooperstown,” he received a heartening response, “Ah—you are a Cooper!” (LJ 3:41–42).

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Indeed he was. Since the Otsego trip was intended as an emotional homecoming, it was already a success before Cooper, the last man of his generation to bear the family name, left Canajoharie early on June 13 for the long uphill pull to Cherry Valley, where he boarded a stage that, by five that afternoon, brought him back home, really home, for the first time in nearly two decades. He passed his sister Ann Pomeroy’s stone house on the way to his intended hotel, seeing her windows ablaze with light and she herself standing in the door as a further sign of welcome. Things went well with her and the rest of the family here— nephew Richard and his wife, Mary Storrs, and their two young children, as well as Isaac’s widow, Mary Morris Cooper, to whom he gave some money to help with her expenses, the second of several recent gifts out of his own pocket (see LJ 3:43–44).6 Coming home was about taking up family responsibilities. Cooper also had come to Otsego, after all, to settle various other kinds of business. He took a trip south to Binghamton on June 17 to meet with his old friend Mason Whiting, an attorney who had performed many services for the family in earlier decades (see JFC:EY 199–201). He had written a now unlocated letter to Whiting on February 5 to inquire about remaining Cooper properties in Broome County, particularly remnants from the old “Manor of Feronia.” By the end of May, Whiting had determined that at least three old mortgages in his hands required immediate attention, and once Cooper was on the ground in Binghamton the following month, the two sorted out that matter, after which Cooper made a list of properties (and their values) based on Whiting’s papers. Some of the land had been lost in forced sales or transfers years before; some was presently in squatters’ hands. The remainder was worth an estimated $4,000, no small sum but a mere fraction of the estate’s original value. Cooper finished in Binghamton on June 22, then visited another old friend, attorney James Clapp, in the Chenango County town of Oxford. On Sunday the twenty-third he came back into Otsego for a reunion with Jacob Morris and his clan at Butternuts (see LJ 3:45).7 The chief piece of business Cooper wished to conduct during this homecoming concerned another old family property, Otsego Hall. Now vacant and rather ruinous (“more dilapidated than I expected” is how Cooper described it for Susan right after he saw it—LJ 3:43), it was still owned by William H. Averell, the attorney who had purchased the Pomeroy decree in 1823 as well as other claims against Judge Cooper’s estate and bought up as many remaining family properties as he could, colluding for that purpose with Thomas Bridgen and Cooper’s sister Ann and her husband (see JFC:EY 327–34).8 Young Richard Cooper had already set up the terms for a final agreement with Averell, but Averell’s absence from Cooperstown when the novelist first arrived put the question of Otsego Hall off until after Binghamton. Once the issue was joined,

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Averell, with whom Cooper had not been personally acquainted before, happily proved “very anxious to compromise” (LJ 3:45). Cooper’s plan was not just to buy back the family mansion, for which Averell held a sheriff ’s deed, but also to satisfy all of Averell’s demands against William Cooper’s estate. The lawyer asked double what Cooper expected for the mansion, but the judge ’s son felt he could and would meet the demand—he very much wanted that house. He promised to return “in a few weeks” and close the deal, after which he and his wife and children (whom he hoped to bring along then) could remain to enjoy the fine air of Otsego—air that was “quite Swissish,” “quite equal to Spa,” as he informed Susan in writing her now (LJ 3:44–46). After about a month or six weeks back in New York City, on Monday August 18 Cooper took his whole family to Otsego and by month’s end had reached a formal agreement with Averell for Otsego Hall, which the two signed on the twenty-eighth. Cooper was to pay $3,500 by that date a year later, but was to take immediate possession. In about a month’s time, Cooper made a first payment to Averell of $1,000.9 More negotiations would follow. On September 1, the Monday following the Hall’s transfer, the two men resolved a pair of issues. Averell relinquished any claim against the estate and Judge Cooper’s heirs beyond the total of about $13,000 that the two agreed was owed, the largest part of it for the bitter Pomeroy decree. Eager for definite closure, Averell furthermore did not demand cash payment for that amount but took title from Cooper to the modest remainder of Judge Cooper’s New York State properties—the Feronia parcels plus a stray piece in Cayuga County. When the sum promised Averell for Otsego Hall is taken into account, the lawyer received approximately two-thirds of his claim against the estate. For the Cooper family at large, this was a saving, but the more important outcome was that the Cooper heirs hereafter could own property in their own name, even property derived from the family estate, without fear of legal action from Averell.10 Otsego Hall was securely in Cooper’s hands now, making him legally, not just sentimentally, a “Cooper of Cooperstown.” After all the uprootings and wanderings of the past twenty-five years, at last his family was to have its first permanent home. The mansion had been mostly vacant since 1821, though, so they could not occupy it yet. In addition to necessary repairs, Cooper intended a thorough remodeling that, with Samuel F. B. Morse ’s counsel, would dress up the Federal mansion with Gothic details such as castellated parapets (plate 6).11 By October 1834, when the Coopers returned to New York City, a new roof and the accompanying structural changes had been completed, but many of the interior changes would occur only over future months and indeed years. From New York City in June 1835, Cooper thus sent elaborate instructions through his nephew for the workmen busily plastering and painting the interior as well as

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hanging doors and installing new windows, adding that the family, expecting to arrive for their second Cooperstown stay soon, could put up at a village inn for a few days before moving into the house. Even after taking up temporary residence in it during their visit over that second summer (they would not relocate permanently until May 1836), they were prepared to shift from “room to room,” dodging the painters (LJ 3:159–60). Although the house was tightened and brought up to date during all these renovations, not all the changes proved successful. The gutters jammed with ice the first winter, for instance, and the roof leaked into the attic during the second (see LJ 3:204).12 In Home as Found (1838), Cooper would have a skeptical Edward Effingham question his cousin John, owner of the old family Temple mansion (now called the “Wigwam”) about his improvements on the structure: for instance, was he “sure that yonder castellated roof . . . is quite suited to the deep snows of these mountains?” John whistles and tries to “look unconcerned, for he well knew that the very first winter had demonstrated the unsuitableness of his plans for such a climate” (HAF 1:145). Coming home was tricky on many fronts.13

Controversialist The time the Coopers spent in Otsego in 1834 seems to have been pleasantly rewarding. When they all returned to Manhattan in late October or early November, the ex-novelist, as he was coming to think of himself, had a good deal to occupy him aside from the still evolving plans for the old mansion. For one thing, his June Letter, intended to set the record straight on a number of fronts and allow Cooper to withdraw from the public eye, had stirred up old and new opponents across the country. By fall, Cooper could take advantage of a new opportunity to address them on a variety of social and political topics. His old friend and defrocked midshipman William Leggett, now a boisterous Jacksonian Democrat, had taken over operation of the New York Evening Post on William Cullen Bryant’s departure for Europe over the summer. Praising A Letter to His Countrymen in the paper in June as “truly, and in the best sense, an American work, American in the independence of its tone, in the strong love of country which it breathes, and the profound regard evinced by its author for our national institutions in their original purity and strength,” Leggett made clear his own and the paper’s support for Cooper.14 The substitute editor also provided Cooper a new field of action late that fall by publishing the first of more than two dozen letters from Cooper, a series that would continue until mid-1836. Cooper had originally hoped to place what became A Letter to His Countrymen in a newspaper. Now, as Leggett generously opened the pages of the Evening Post to him, he had ample means to comment on various unfolding events.

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Cooper’s “A. B. C.” letters, as they are known from his alphabetical signature, covered several issues, but two dominated. The first concerned France ’s failure to fund the treaty obligating it to reimburse U.S. merchants for shipping losses during the Napoleonic era. Because the reparations treaty had been negotiated during William C. Rives’s service as the U.S. minister in Paris, as noted in the previous chapter, Cooper knew a good deal about it. In the course of discussing the topic now, he commented on the background of French behavior by drawing on his Parisian experience, especially following the July Revolution. For instance, he argued that the only reason France had compromised on the treaty with the United States in 1831 was that, being in a relatively weak position then, it was courting American favor as a possible hedge against renewed European warfare. Following Louis-Philippe’s solidification of his control over the government in 1832, actually implementing the treaty mattered much less to the French government (see LJ 3:196). The treaty business continued to occupy Cooper’s attention in fully twenty of the thirty or so A. B. C. letters. He had no quarrel with the people of France, only their government. “I am friendly to France, but I love my own country,” he wrote. He believed that the interests of the United States were “the same in a multitude of important points” with those of France, but he could not “condescend to buy her friendship by a sacrifice of honour” (LJ 3:69). Before the peaceful resolution of the dispute, Cooper increasingly thought that retaliation or outright military action might be necessary. The prospect did not distress him. The United States, he pointed out, might seize the two remaining French islands in the West Indies (Martinique and Guadeloupe), and in the same letter, provocatively headed “Non-Intercourse, Reprisals, or War?,” he let it be known that he was by no means opposed to the third alternative (LJ 3:186–87, 182).15 And a later short letter that was headed “shall we arm?” gave a strong positive answer to its titular question (LJ 3:189). Fortunately, France soon afterward decided to fund the treaty, ending the stalemate and depriving Cooper of his bellicose subject. The second large issue in the letters concerned the sometimes bitter conflict between Andrew Jackson and congressional Whigs. In handling this topic, Cooper wrote passionately not just about the personalities or political interests involved but more importantly about the implicated constitutional questions, which he handled with considerable insight. He supported Jackson in this fight, and did so in part because, like the editor of the Evening Post, he remained allied with the Democrats. More importantly, he supported Jackson because Jackson was, in his view, on the right side of the constitutional argument.16 Cooper engaged other topics in the letters, among them slavery. This is an issue on which he had much to say over his life, although he never addressed it

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frontally and conclusively in a single text. What we discover here must therefore be weighed, as I will suggest at various later points, against his subsequent views. In August 1835, while Cooper was staying in Otsego, an anonymous letter appeared in the Freeman’s Journal on the “subject of the existence of Slavery in the District of Columbia,” which the writer correctly described as attracting “great interest” at the time. (Congress in 1835 was flooded with petitions urging that slavery and the slave trade be eliminated from Washington.) Because this article took a position on the subject similar to that expressed in a longer A. B. C. letter published during Cooper’s visit to New York City the following month, James F. Beard tentatively (but I think fairly) attributed the Freeman’s Journal item to Cooper. The writer of the latter item held that, while Congress clearly had the right to legislate for the District of Columbia—and on the subject of slavery as much as any other—it could not consider slavery as a matter of abstract principle but only as it directly affected district residents. Southerners might wish slavery to be sustained and Northerners might wish to see it curtailed, but neither sectional group should carry weight with Congress in regard to federal territory. The only point was whether “the interests of this District call for relief against slavery”—if they did, then “this relief should be granted.” The proper way to proceed would be to have the “People of the District . . . decide for themselves through their own ballot-boxes. If they say yes, give them the necessary legislation; if they say no, the matter should, for a time at least, be deemed settled” (LJ 3:163–64). In his first A. B. C. letter, published on September 17, Cooper similarly asserted, “all political power ought to be used for the particular benefit of those whose interests are immediately subject to its influence” (LJ 3:167). There, too, he wrote rather acerbically about abolitionists (“sin-eradicators”—LJ 3:170), but his position was not based on his own views for or against slavery or the Abolitionist movement. To the contrary, the two letters in effect extended his constitutional arguments into this new area. If Congress polled the district’s residents and found that the residents wanted slavery to be ended, he happily concluded, “I would abolish slavery.” He was sure that Southerners would oppose such a vote, but he added that Congress should simply ignore Southern threats to secede (LJ 3:171). Cooper’s 1827 article in the Revue Encyclopédique and his discussion of the matter the following year in Notions of the Americans had made it clear that he regarded slavery as an evil institution and happily noted that several states had abolished slavery since the Revolution. Notions furthermore added that prejudices against blacks seemed on the wane where their freedom had been achieved (see Notions CE 475–76).17 In his introduction of African American characters in his early novels, he had anachronistically portrayed even those in slavery by reference to the positive (though moderate) changes in civil

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condition and social life that were evident in New York during his youth and early adulthood (see JFC:EY 576–78n29). Cooper may well have been influenced to take up this topic again in 1835 by the radicalization of his old friend Leggett, for the editor was among those who, in the view of Jonathan H. Earle, applied Jacksonian equal rights arguments to blacks, free or slave. Cooper had not reached that point yet, but within a few years would extend those arguments to include individuals of all races, as we shall see in chapter 9. In reflecting on such topics at this time, Cooper was experimenting with a new public stance and voice—albeit anonymously.18 He acted in his own person on an allied issue when, over the following winter, he served as foreman of a federal grand jury impaneled in Manhattan. Its charge was to consider the actions of a group of mariners suspected of violating U.S. prohibitions against the slave trade. Their ship, the San Nicholas, had arrived in New York waters late in November 1835 and docked off Catharine Street in the East River. Its master planned to leave port soon after but was prevented when the river froze. Sometime in early February, Manhattan apothecary Thomas Ritter learned from two of the vessel’s sailors who repeatedly visited his shop that “their destination was Africa, for a cargo of Slaves.” On the basis of Ritter’s sworn affidavit, the district attorney and several officials from the U.S. Customs House visited the vessel on February 10 and examined it and the crew. They found that the vessel “had on board twenty-five cases of muskets, five hundred kegs of [gun]powder, and a cargo of calicoes and other articles such as are generally used on the African coast.” Another paper added, “her general appearance was that of a slaver.”19 Following the onboard investigation, the captain of the vessel, Angel Calsamilia, was held on a sizable bail and two of his crew were jailed. More detailed information about the vessel’s unusually heavy armaments (“muskets, pistols, cutlasses, a large quantity of powder, and ammunition”) and its possession of equipment typically employed in slavers (“gratings for hatches” as well as several large water tanks and other “requisites”) led Judge Samuel R. Betts of the U.S. Circuit Court to order the seizure of five other crew members (three Italians, a Frenchman, and a Spaniard). Within a short time thereafter, the rest of the fifteen men in the original crew were likewise detained. At the subsequent hearing, the prominent lawyer David B. Ogden represented the accused, admitting they were bound for Africa but insisting they were “going on . . . a lawful voyage.” The district attorney, William B. Price, countered that his own observations made it clear “that the parties were morally guilty.” Next followed testimony from a dockside worker who had visited the vessel as well as from two customs officers, the apothecary, and a medical doctor who had spoken to some of the crew about their captain’s plans. Finally, there came forward a mariner named William O. Farsin, who claimed

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much experience along the African coast. (He had been “an officer of a vessel that took slaves as passengers from one part of the coast to another,” a statement that seems sanitized to say the least.) Farsin had examined the San Nicholas and seen the captain and crew, some of whom he may have recognized from previous encounters. He had “often seen slave ships on the coast of Africa,” he testified, including “Portuguese vessels fitted up exactly as this is.”20 Late in February, the district attorney convened the grand jury, and Cooper, who was staying in the city for the winter (he was then writing his series for Bryant’s paper on the French reparations), assumed leadership of it. In writing about slavery several years earlier, Cooper had made the point that under federal law the illicit importation of slaves into the country was declared “to be piracy,” potentially a capital crime at the time.21 The grand jury, having digested the evidence presented to it, concluded that the San Nicholas indeed was involved in the slave trade. It therefore found one “true bill” against Captain Calsamilia and another against the man who must have been his first mate, Domingo Joseph Dos Santos. Before the two could be seized, however, the vessel had been cleared from port on Tuesday, March 1, for reasons not entirely clear in the surviving records, and fled the jurisdiction.22 For the purpose of retrieving those men and the vessel, the deputy U.S. marshal in the city and the assistant district attorney took two other officers and, chartering a steamboat, set out in pursuit. In Cooper’s late novel Jack Tier (which drew on the 1836 case), the steam cutter pursuing Captain Spike proves unable to catch up with his vessel, the suspicious rig-shifting Molly Swash. In the 1836 incident, the government also seems not to have prevailed. In a follow-up, Cooper’s grand jury considered the case against the two seamen (Andrew Ghionio and John Batiste Brachie), still in custody in New York, who had told apothecary Ritter about the plans to sail to Africa and then the West Indies. Bills were also returned against them, and late in March they were tried, but in this case the jury—on strict instructions from Judge Betts as to the law—acquitted them.23 Cooper had performed his civic duty, in the process gaining fresh insight not only into the principles of human rights but also into the law’s at times blunted operation. In his naval history a few years later, he would describe the “poor Africans” brought to Jamestown in 1619 as most likely kidnapped from their homes—“victims of perfidy.” And he would applaud the fact that in 1645 “the people of Boston” had caused those responsible for landing the first slaves there to be “arraigned” and the slaves “to be restored to their native country at the public expense” (HN 1:65). Surely his grand jury experience had made him more willing to take up the issue three years later. And the memory was longlived. In his final novel, The Ways of the Hour (1850), Cooper would mention his having served as foreman in the San Nicholas case.

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“Monnikins” When Cooper declared “I lay aside my pen,” the most immediate exception was a tale about a fantastic voyage to the south polar regions, The Monikins, the original notion for which long predated that public vow. He had first mentioned “Monnekin” in a June 1832 letter to Colburn and Bentley, when it was already “getting on famously” (LJ 2:258), and he discussed it with Morse in Paris before his family’s Swiss trip later that same year. But then his steam temporarily dissipated in favor of other ventures, most immediately The Headsman.24 Once that novel neared completion in Paris the next spring (1833), he wrote his Philadelphia publishers about his plan to give up writing, but only after he had finished The Monikins—for he liked it and wanted to complete it, but he also needed what it might earn him (LJ 6:320). In its substance and sources, the book might be understood, first, as something of a Swiss novel, akin in that regard to The Headsman. Certainly the importance of ice to the book’s southward voyage grew out of Cooper’s various recent experiences of Switzerland’s glacial terrain.25 To take the most obvious case, the “Introduction” thus employs, from Cooper’s birthday trip of 1828, the episode in which he crossed the Furka and Grimsel passes on September 17. Having mounted the former and begun his descent, Cooper paused at a spot in the trail to admire the Rhone glacier. He was enjoying the seemingly polar solitude and sublimity when, as he would write in his Swiss Gleanings the year after publishing The Monikins, the “tinkling” of a horseshoe against a stone aroused him “from a trance of contemplation.” Soon a line of mounted English travelers came into view, shattering the quiet and stimulating a few mean thoughts (as Cooper himself admitted) about the restless English, who, seemingly omnipresent on the Continent, left no spot untouched. After a forced exchange of pleasantries, the intruders proceeded up to the Furka while Cooper went on his way toward the Grimsel, after crossing which he stayed for the night in the hospice on the farther downslope (GS CE 217–19).26 This encounter provided not only a suitable Alpine analog for the Antarctic adventures in the later parts of The Monikins but also the book’s outermost package: for, as its “Introduction” recounts, in 1828 Sir John Goldencalf and his wife Anna are said to have chanced on a man identified only as “the Author of the Spy” in the Alps, although in the Grimsel rather than the Furka.27 After this American writer happened to save Lady Anna’s life when she slipped on the precipitous trail, Goldencalf inquired whether he might be visiting Geneva that summer: “Within a month.” “Your address?” “Hotel de l’Ecu.”

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“You shall hear from me.—Adieu.” We parted, he, his lovely wife and his guides descending to the Rhone, while I pursued my way to the Hospice of the Grimsel. (MON 1:x). In the novel’s “Introduction,” the “Author of the Spy” receives at the named hotel a package containing a diamond ring from Anna to memorialize his heroic deed, along with Goldencalf ’s narrative of his voyage with “Capt. Noah Poke of Stonington, Connecticut” (MON 1:xi).28 Goldencalf had wished to share this story with the world but feared that if it appeared in Britain it might reflect badly on himself. The chance encounter with the famous American author suggested a lucky expedient: “the distance of America from my place of residence,” Goldencalf reasons in his cover note, “will completely save me from ridicule.” As readers discover, it was during the voyage with Poke that Goldencalf, under the guidance of four sapient monkeys purchased in Paris, reportedly visited the Monikin nations of Leaphigh and Leaplow, his experience there forming the substance of Cooper’s allegory.29 With their human capacities, those monkeys most likely came to Cooper from diffuse reading. For instance, the pioneering fantastic voyage by Danish writer Ludvig Holberg, Niels Klim’s Underground Adventures (1741)—a British translation of which appeared in 1828, when Cooper was visiting London—could have provided inspiration and some details (among Holberg’s episodes, after all, is one in which his subterranean explorer encounters a nation of intelligent apes). Other possible textual models, however, abound. The eccentric eighteenth-century Scots linguist James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, had set Europeans thinking about their own evolutionary kinship with other hominids by his treatment of figures such as “Peter the Wild Boy” and the orangutan, which he called “the Man of the Woods” and about whose vocal abilities he speculated at length.30 Partly under Monboddo’s influence, such primates often served as teasing stand-ins for humankind across Cooper’s era. In Thomas Love Peacock’s Melincourt (1817), for instance, a character named Sir Oran Haut-Ton runs for a seat in Parliament. Humorous children’s narratives also featured them, as did Nathaniel Ogle ’s Memoirs of Monkeys (1825), which contains short anecdotes of different monkeys notable for their humanlike behavior. Furthermore, works of popular science dwelled on the subject of monkeys (the second volume of William Jardine ’s ambitious “Naturalist’s Library,” published in 1833, was devoted exclusively to them), while even a figure of Baron Georges Cuvier’s stature expanded on the subject at some length in the second edition of his La Régne Animal, published in Paris in 1829–1830, when he and Cooper became acquainted there (see LJ 2:15).31 And of course nonhuman primates had an impressive presence in the expanding

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three-dimensional text of the Romantic zoo. One wonders whether Cooper, when he toured the London Zoological Gardens during his 1833 trip to the city (see LJ 3:395), paused to read the monkeys as they in turn read him. If he did so, it may even be that his ideas for the book, which had already begun to take shape, sent him there on research.32 There were, too, many important cross-connections between The Monikins as it evolved and Cooper’s other literary projects and political interests. Probably the mindless debates in Paris about the comparative expenses of different governments confirmed and even expanded his satirical purpose. The book proper opens in Paris, the Monikins are encountered there, and there, too, Goldencalf and Poke lay the plans for their voyage. The book also features an extended discussion of the French reparations treaty, which the “Great Sachem of Leaplow” (President Jackson) has negotiated but which the government of Leapthrough (France) refuses to fund (MON 2:176–77). Elsewhere, there is a slap at Levett Harris: when Leaplow’s minister in Leaphigh plans to accompany Goldencalf and Poke to his homeland, the only person he can find to serve as his chargé is a “Leaphighized Leaplower,” a man as eager as Levett Harris (in Cooper’s view) to “abandon republicanism” in order to succeed in aristocratic societies abroad (MON 2:105–8). In yet another episode, the discussion of what sort of Leaphigh goods can be expected to sell well in Leaplow—all sorts of books, especially those that put down Leaplow’s culture and institutions—is of a piece with Cooper’s recent critique of American deference to European opinions (see MON 2:111–15, 124, 164). The United States at large is among the book’s main targets, as we discover when “General-Commodore-Judge-Colonel People ’s Friend,” Leaplow’s minister to Leaphigh, with proto-American verve declares his homeland “a great and a glorious republic” (MON 2:27–28). Cooper’s repeated targeting of political principles (as in calling the Leaplow constitution its “Great and Sacred National Allegory”—MON 2:155), political parties (the “Horizontals” versus the “Perpendiculars”—and of course the “Tangents”—MON 2:120–23), and electioneering (via his parodies of political handbills—see MON 2:136–37) clearly grew from his dissatisfaction with the idiocies he encountered after his return to the States. His glimpses of life in the city of Bivouac, from its highstooped, garishly painted row houses to its parochially venerated “Wide path”—Broadway—spoof New York City and its pretensions as Cooper amply discovered them in 1833–1834 (MON 2:144–49). More importantly, the book’s overt thesis—“money is a bad foundation for power”—represents Cooper’s first coherent statement of his new antioligarchic values (MON 2:215). Goldencalf assumes that a ruler with a stake in his constituents’ affairs will take a proper interest in their well-being, but Cooper clearly

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sets up that premise merely to discredit it. It is surprising for the son of a Federalist landlord to pen the statement that “the philanthropy which is dependent on buying land by the square mile, and selling it by the square foot, is stench in the nostrils of the just,” but by 1835 Cooper had no doubt that the “social stake” theory of government was a self-serving mystification (MON 2:243).33 The Monikins thus initiated his attack on the newly formed and named Whigs even as it made clear his continuing belief in the broad principles of the Democratic Party. Such ties to Cooper’s recent and current concerns suggest how writing The Monikins organized his pent-up antagonisms, giving him a creative vent for feelings that received discursive expression not only in his controversial French pieces of 1831–1832 but also in A Letter to His Countrymen of 1834 and the A. B. C. letters that followed. This synergy had its limits. The Monikins came to light by fits and starts, and even when almost about to appear, it was subject to jarring alterations. The first consequence was the shifting schedule Cooper outlined for the book at various times. Having reached tentative terms with Bentley in London during the summer 1833 visit, he estimated, just before leaving for the United States that fall, that it would “be ready for June next” (LJ 2:411).34 Delays arising from the return home having forced him to lay it aside, he picked it up again in February 1834 and then revised his estimate (for the Careys) to September or October (see LJ 3:30). Come November of that year, the book still was not done and he then told Bentley he would “have vol’s I & II before March and vol-III before June, God willing” (LJ 3:60). As it happened, though, Cooper was not ready to send the first sheets to Bentley until early April 1835 (see LJ 3:143), and the final ones, in part owing to last-minute changes meant to address Bentley’s concerns about the book’s plot, were not dispatched until five or six weeks later (see LJ 3:152). Those adjustments, as we shall see later, produced significant anomalies between the Bentley and Carey versions of the novel. The book at last appeared in London on July 4, 1835, and followed in Philadelphia on July 9 (S&B 81; BAL 2:286).35 The process by which the book was produced in the United States, yielding the proof sheets Cooper sent Bentley in April and May, was highly irregular in its own regard. We might assume that The Monikins, as the first work of fiction Cooper wrote on returning from Europe, benefited from the old arrangements he had made with his Philadelphia publishers in the mid-1820s and had relied on long-distance ever since. In fact, however, its production was improvised and interrupted, demonstrating that Cooper’s homecoming presented him with challenges as an author even as he was publicly declaring that he would soon cease to be one. The first proof of those challenges is the fact that most of the compositorial work and stereotyping was done at Cooper’s expense in New York,

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not at Carey’s in Philadelphia. This is not a point that has been made before— quite the contrary—so we should consider it in some detail. The usual indicators in the book’s American edition are straightforward but misleading. The published volumes do not identify who printed or stereotyped the book, but do name Carey, Lea and Blanchard as the publishers, Philadelphia as the place of publication, and the eastern district of Pennsylvania as the place where copyright was entered, also by Carey.36 Spiller and Blackburn, on the basis of these formulaic details, described the American edition as “probably printed first” in Philadelphia (S&B 81). “Probably” was a good qualifier, however, for Cooper’s various actions and comments suggest a different scenario: that at the outset he had the work set in type in New York, then corrected the proofs, had stereotype plates made from the corrected standing type, and seemingly intended to print and publish the book there, too. All of this he did at his own expense, and the first proofs dispatched to England were of this origin. It was clear to Cooper when he began to plan work on the novel shortly after returning to the United States that some such strategy would be necessary. He had at this time no pending contract with Carey, to begin with, and that firm probably had no expectation that he would retract his statement about ending his “series of Tales” with The Headsman. In first urging Carey to buy The Monikins in February 1834, Cooper was therefore opening negotiations afresh with the firm, and he was very explicit about his intentions, even mentioning what he would do if Carey passed: “I have determined to finish the ‘Monnikins’ and put it to press so as to be ready for publication by Sept—or Oct. Are you disposed to buy?—an edition, or the copy right, as you please. Should you decline I shall probably print at my own risk, through John Wiley. . . . [M]y only reason for settling the matter is simply to know whether I can begin printing here, or not. Should I publish through Wiley, I shall begin befor[e] I quit town; but if you purchase, of course the printing will be subject to your orders” (LJ 3:30). In response, the Philadelphia firm first asked Cooper practical questions about the novel that indicated its preliminary interest (“What is the size of Monnikins? & what is your price?”), but when it quickly switched topics (to Andrew Jackson and his bank policy) and made dire comments about the generally low value of literary wares at the moment, Cooper probably understood that Wiley, who at this time was already handling A Letter to His Countrymen, was his better recourse. He therefore had to feel his way forward in a manner he had not been accustomed to since the very start of his career more than a decade earlier, when in fact Wiley’s father had become his agent for The Spy and his next books.37 In November 1834, having informed Bentley that the book would be “speedily sent to press” (and made his predictions about the likely shipments in March

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and June), Cooper again turned to Carey (LJ 3:60). In this instance, we lack his own letter, but Carey’s response makes it pretty clear that the discussion began— and ended—in roughly the same way as in February. Cooper was not offering to sell the book outright and have the firm see to its production; rather, he wished to wholesale copies through Carey, copies he surely thought Wiley would produce for the author. Carey again balked, but not before having given Cooper a lesson in the current economics of the trade, evidently because his offered price for those wholesale copies was too high. Because the shifting conditions of book production would profoundly affect Cooper from this point to the end of his life, the details here are important. Cooper must have named a wholesale price of $1.50 per copy, assuming Carey could sell the book for $2.00 and make a profit. The firm stressed, however, that the usual retail price for American works of this sort was now $1.50 at most and that the wholesale price it would have to offer its own clients in the South could be no higher than $1.30, meaning Cooper’s price to Carey would have to be lower still in order for the firm to make anything.38 Nothing immediately came of Cooper’s new approach to Carey. Through much of the period when the book was being physically produced (late March through May 1835), Cooper was sending proofs to Bentley, as already indicated.39 At this time, Cooper said nothing to or about Carey, and it is clear that he still had no arrangement with that firm, not even an understanding that it would buy wholesale copies of the book. Its exclusion from the business, as well as from what Cooper said to Bentley at this time and in future letters, meant that the book’s production was continuing to take place in New York. “I am obliged to send rough sheets, as the work is stereotyping here,” Cooper added in his April 6 letter to Bentley. He wrote that letter in Manhattan, and by “stereotyping here” he can only have meant that the book was indeed being manufactured in New York (LJ 3:144).40 Yet even this late The Monikins, centered on a fantastic voyage, underwent one of its own before seeing the light of day. As April led into May, some shift in production away from New York in fact seems to have occurred, so the “here” at the end was different from the “here” at the start. On April 14, Cooper confirmed for Bentley that by the packet boat leaving on the sixteenth he would send a duplicate of the first English volume and “nearly four chapters of vol II.” He also promised then that the packet of April 24 would carry “the remainder of vol—II, with duplicates &c”—duplicates, apparently, of all that would have been sent up to and including that date. And he went on to add that “each packet in succession” thereafter (they went very frequently at this period) would “take some of the sheets, until the work is finished” (LJ 3:148–49). Cooper made the April 16 deadline but not that of the twenty-fourth. The material promised for the latter packet went instead in duplicate shipments

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dispatched on May 1 (see LJ 3:150). The delay of the April 24 shipment may have resulted from incipient changes in the book’s production. Certainly a second delay that occurred right after that shipment was actually sent derived directly from those changes. In the latter case, Cooper wrote Bentley on May 5 that the sheets for the novel’s third English volume (that is, the rest of the book) would be sent to him “by the 16th of this month” (LJ 3:152). In point of fact, Cooper was not able to dispatch complete sets of those sheets until the very end of May (see LJ 3:155). Why? A month earlier, when Cooper had promised to send Bentley the first of these ultimately delayed shipments, he reopened his discussions with Carey, leading (by the second week of May) to the Philadelphia firm’s purchase not only of Cooper’s copyright but also of the stereotype plates so far produced for him in New York. Furthermore, once that deal was made, Carey, Lea and Blanchard decided to shift production of the book’s remainder (the final third—Bentley’s last volume) to Philadelphia, where they had it set and, after sending Cooper proofs and receiving them back from New York with his corrections, had the standing type altered and cast into plates. We have scant documentation of these shifts, but they are borne out by surrounding facts and by the material evidence of the book itself. Suffice it to say that on May 11, Henry C. Carey sent a letter that, acknowledging Cooper’s (now unlocated) one of May 9, contained three financial notes for unspecified amounts finalizing the “arrangement” the two parties had made for a book, a book that in Carey’s view would “not be out much under a month . . . certainly not . . . before the 1st June . . . [or] a few days after.” The agreement itself does not appear to survive, and Carey did not name the book, but it was clearly The Monikins.41 Up to this point, Cooper had been experimenting with self-publishing possibilities that he would exploit more actively after his return to full-time authorship in the 1840s, as we shall see later. With the transfer of The Monikins to Carey, however, the experiment was temporarily suspended. In the meantime, that transfer did contribute to the anomalies in the book’s transatlantic versions already referred to, as the forthcoming text in the Cooper Edition will show. The cause evidently derived from delays Cooper experienced in forwarding to London the materials now being generated beyond his immediate ken in Philadelphia.42 Regardless of the particular content of the resulting variants, or the reasons for them, their greater significance lies in what they reveal about how the production system Cooper had developed in Europe had come to an end— and how he had yet to create its substitute in the United States. Complicated by the personal turmoil of his homecoming and his stated resolve to write no more novels, the management of The Monikins gave him a foretaste of what selfpublication might demand, an important lesson for the next stages of his career. And it forced him to work out with his old U.S. partners the preliminary terms

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of a new relationship. The Monikins is no easy story to read if one comes to it thinking of Cooper as a romancer of the imponderable forest and mysterious but actual sea. It was also no easy book for Cooper to bring to an end and see through the press. In its production as in its subject, it exemplified the difficulty of his homecoming.

Opportunity As work on The Monikins concluded, Cooper turned to other literary projects that, while also honoring his 1834 pledge, could occupy his pen and perhaps produce some income. The second point remained a prime consideration. Much as the need for money had spurred Cooper’s original venture into authorship in 1820, in the mid-1830s he once again turned to his pen for support. The story in this instance had two essential parts. Cooper had made a good deal of literary money during his final European years. Once back in New York in 1833, he decided to invest this “loose cash”—perhaps as much as $10,000 or $15,000—to provide much-needed income for his family. He temporarily placed most of it in New York bank stocks but found the returns slim and the stock itself hard to redeem at a time of looming financial uncertainty (LJ 3:8, 32).43 He turned next to more substantial but potentially riskier investments in commodities and real estate. For his first major venture, baled cotton from the slave states for the English market, he teamed up with an old New York friend, merchant James D. P. Ogden, and Ogden’s Liverpool partner, Nicholas Roskell.44 Cooper and Ogden first discussed a cotton deal during their joint trip to Washington in December 1833 (see LJ 3:19–20). By the following May their first joint purchase was on its way from Mobile to Liverpool, and from then to the year’s end they partnered on three others.45 Cooper thought the cargoes achieved somewhat better prices than average American consignments of the time— Ogden summarized those yields for him—and he may have been right. But that was not saying much, for the market was unstable and prices generally were trending downward. So Cooper’s returns, while not bad given those conditions or the actual amount of hard money he had put into the venture, probably fell short of what he and Ogden had hoped for.46 When the two men persisted, partnering on more shipments in 1835, they definitely lost money. By late August that year, Ogden thus informed Cooper: “Cotton at Liverpool, I am sorry to say, does not look as well as I could wish, or had expected.” He still thought that things might improve, though not enough “to make any profit on our shipments”—indeed, “a trifling loss” might result. At some later time, Cooper’s daughter Susan accordingly wrote on the back of an 1839 Ogden letter: “They had business relations in cotton—not successful to my father.”47

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Although Cooper lost financially on the venture, he gained other things from the dealings with Ogden. For one thing, Ogden’s firm would usefully pass manuscripts and proofs to Richard Bentley as Cooper renewed his literary career during the later 1830s. Even in the case of The Monikins, Cooper thus sent several 1835 shipments via Roskell (see LJ 3:143, 149). Ogden also became Cooper’s informal banker, a discounter of financial instruments whose willingness to accept notes and other valuable paper from Cooper (including drafts against Bentley) smoothed out the novelist’s irregular economic life. Again, he began serving this function with regard to The Monikins. Cooper thus alerted Bentley in April 1835: “I shall draw on you to-morrow . . . in favor of Roskell, Ogden & Co. Liverpool” (LJ 3:149). For years to come, Cooper would rely on this channel for dealing with Bentley in both matters. This was another aspect of how, once back in the United States, he had to establish new patterns for managing his far-flung literary business. Even before the cotton scheme ended, Cooper entered into another speculation in which he soon involved Ogden. When conveying his bad news about Liverpool prices in August 1835, Ogden touched on the new undertaking: “I hear . . . you are high in spirit & confidence, respecting your land purchases at Chicago.”48 This matter proved to be quite involved. While on his June 1834 visit back to Cooperstown (during which he agreed to repurchase the family mansion), Cooper happened to meet an enthusiastic dealer in Western lands named Horace Hawkins Comstock. Recently married to Sarah Sabina Cooper, one of Isaac and Mary Ann Cooper’s daughters, Comstock initially struck Cooper as “a respectable young man” (LJ 3:44), and, long after their dealings had turned sour, Cooper seems never to have lost all faith in him. Born in nearby Laurens township around 1807, Comstock had acquired an interest as early as 1831 in lands in Kalamazoo County, Michigan Territory, where he named one township after himself and another after the Cooper family.49 Soon Comstock persuaded his wife’s uncle to invest in the West himself. On May 7, 1835, Cooper forwarded a $6,000 letter of credit from the City Bank of New York and agreed that Comstock should have full power (as the happy speculator’s reply would put it) “to invest . . . entirely at my discretion.” Before Comstock could go forward, however, various secondary issues remained to be settled. The two men were equal partners in the speculation, but because Comstock at present had no ready cash, the $6,000 letter of credit Cooper forwarded represented their entire working capital. The partnership was thus mostly theoretical. Moreover, aware of the risks thereby posed to himself, Cooper had limited his personal exposure by recruiting two other men as equal though temporary partners, each of whom followed Cooper’s lead in securing the bank’s letter by giving it a personal note: New York banker Gorham A.

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Worth and Cooper’s recent partner in the cotton business James D. P. Ogden. Once mutually committed, the three New Yorkers agreed that Comstock would secure his agreed-upon interest in the venture by means of a lien on the lots once he had purchased them. In a trust document executed with Worth and Ogden once the bank letter was sent to Comstock, Cooper furthermore pledged to account for Comstock’s funds when they were received, as well as “the proceeds of the remaining half of said Lands whenever sold.” Before long, Cooper would buy out both Worth and Ogden, relieving them of interest in or concern over the lands, but in the interim the two New Yorkers had provided him crucial leverage (see LJ 5:234).50 With these arrangements made, the Midwestern deal at last could go forward. Cooper must have learned of the outcome of the Chicago sale firsthand from Comstock, who visited Cooperstown in June or July of 1835. When the young man returned home to Michigan, he sent a further update indicating that real estate in the West was “growing in value especially in Chicago.”51 Nevertheless, by fall Cooper was feeling anxious about the venture. In an unlocated letter of October 5, he pressed Comstock to buy him out, largely because (as Comstock soon summarized Cooper’s letter) “cotton is falling.” Although for Cooper’s sake Comstock was “sorry to hear” this news about the commercial arrangement Cooper had with Ogden, he urged his wife ’s uncle to persist in their own joint venture. He cited several reasons. First, although Comstock assured Cooper, “I have no objections to the purchase of your property had I the spare funds,” now (and in his long future dealings with Cooper) he had no spare money. He also was reluctant to have Cooper sell out to someone else, as Cooper hinted he might, since that would leave Comstock with an unknown third party as his partner, and one to whom he probably would have no kinship ties. Furthermore, the sale price Cooper mentioned with regard to that outside purchaser seemed too low to Comstock. If Cooper could wait until spring, Comstock therefore wrote, he pledged that he himself would buy out Cooper: “I am certain and correct in my estimate of the property and again repeat hold on.”52 Answering early in November 1835, Cooper rejected that counsel, insisting that Comstock take over the venture. The upshot hardly proved as simple as he imagined. Comstock had given promises of sizable (and quick) profits. Cooper therefore expected Comstock not only to refund his investment but also to redeem those promises. Although he was in a weak position both financially and morally, Comstock complied—at least on paper. He wrote, “I will take your interest in our purchase at the sum you propose ($8,500).” Because he could not, however, pay that amount as soon as Cooper wished, he outlined a plan whereby he would make restitution via four installments spread across the next two years,

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with 7 percent annual interest added. Perhaps sensing that Cooper might balk at this plan, Comstock offered to serve in the interim as a maker or endorser of a note of up to $5,000 if Cooper was in a tight place financially—a pretty empty reassurance.53 The two negotiated further refinements across the next month. Cooper would not give Comstock two years, only fifteen months. And even then, because of the need to include interest for the amount of time already passed, he increased the total amount due to $8,650. Comstock broke down this amount as follows when he accepted the terms: “the original investment of $6000—Profit $2,500 and interest $150.” Even as he conveyed the appropriate instruments to Cooper to execute this agreement, Comstock informed him in March 1836, “The land fever is still increasing and I do not know when it will end.” Irrepressibly, despite the brief career of the partnership, Comstock now added that if Cooper and his friends could put together $25,000 in new funds, he could “do better for you this season than last.” Just before Christmas, he had specified that he could double fresh investments in twelve months.54 Cooper had no interest in new offers, as the boastful Comstock might have known. Indeed, the novelist probably wished he could himself affirm what the character Ben Boden in his Michigan novel The Oak Openings (1848) would— namely, that he had “kept clear of the whirlwind of speculation” (OO 2:226). Cooper knew the dangers of speculation from the history of his own family. Now that Comstock had agreed to take back the Chicago lands and refund Cooper’s investment, with profit and interest, he was destined to commence a fresh education on the subject. No doubt things looked brighter as 1835 ended and the new year started, for Comstock gave him the four notes, dated January 1, 1836, and payable at the agreed intervals (six, nine, twelve, and fifteen months). If all went as promised, Cooper would recover his investment and receive the profit and interest on it by April 1, 1837. But nothing in connection to Horace Comstock went as promised. When Cooper died in 1851, the speculator remained in his debt, as we shall see in chapter 14. That was regrettable, but if Cooper had stuck by the deal back in 1835, it is likely that he never would have received anything back from Comstock. At least his withdrawal then salvaged something of the original investment.

Reinventing Europe Once Ogden gave Cooper the bad news about cotton at the end of August 1835, and Cooper in turn began the process of withdrawing from the Comstock arrangement, he was pondering how exactly to make a living. One long-planned literary venture involved narratives of his European travels. As early as his 1828

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London stay, he mentioned his prospective continental tour with Gouverneur M. Wilkins to Carey, Lea and Carey, adding: “I have many journals in store for you. . . . At my return there will be a book for America . . . the first of a series written especially for my own Countrymen” (LJ 1:258).55 Even though he soon gave up the continental tour, Cooper began keeping a journal on arriving in Rotterdam and thereafter persisted, resuming it when leaving Paris for Switzerland that July and keeping it with few breaks across the summer and into the fall, when his family arrived in Italy. A large gap left Florence essentially unrecorded, but once the family quit there for Naples in July 1829 Cooper started up again and did not stop until early that October. After that point, there are no surviving entries until a brief period (ten days in September 1830) following Cooper’s return to Paris from Dresden. Then a long run tracks the 1832 trip through the Rhine Valley and Switzerland and most of the stay in Vevey. Finally, brief treatment is given to Cooper’s solitary London trip of 1833 and his family’s London stay, en route to the United States, later that year. After Cooper arrived in New York and unpacked what he called “the trunks containing my papers” (LJ 3:15), he gained access to all these records. The question of their literary value came up as early as February 1834, when Carey and Lea, responding to his first query about The Monikins, also remarked that “the other books” Cooper mentioned would not, in the current financial climate, have much market value.56 Perhaps that discouraging view kept him from considering the project more seriously for some months. Not until April 1835, when writing Bentley as he finally supervised production of The Monikins, did Cooper mention a fresh intention to produce “two or three vol. of travels”—to cover “England, France, Germany, Switzerland &c, during seven years—Holland— Belgium &c” (LJ 3:149). Two weeks later, Cooper asked Bentley to send him “an offer for the Travels” (LJ 3:150), and in May he described his expansive vision for the books: “I think I shall bring them out in single octavo” volumes “a little larger than Mr. Rush’s”—that is, former U.S. minister Richard Rush’s sizable memoir A Residence at the Court of London (LJ 3:155).57 Early on, Cooper was thinking of sequencing the books in roughly chronological fashion (see LJ 3:156), but by the fall of 1835 he had abandoned that notion and decided to start with a single large book covering his two Swiss visits—probably because his Swiss journals were the richest. His initial word on the altered plan, in a September letter to Bentley, implied he had begun writing the narrative some months earlier: “I have been passing the summer in the country, and have been occupied, first, in repairing an old house, secondly, in arranging my journal through Switzerland in 1828, and in 1832, for the press.” That was, I think, an exaggeration. Work on Otsego Hall had eaten up much of his time since early July; besides, the real catalyst for Cooper’s return to his writing

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desk was Ogden’s discouraging August news about cotton, received fewer than three weeks before he offered Bentley the Swiss book at a somewhat higher price than Bentley had mentioned the previous May and then added, with telling urgency, “As it is important I should know your determination, permit [me] to request an answer as soon as convenient” (LJ 3:171–72). Cooper desired prompt assurance that money would be forthcoming.58 His urgency and his desire to increase the project’s yield both suggest his intention to print the book at his own expense for the American market, ultimately defraying his costs via Bentley’s payments. At the moment he wrote Bentley in September, he after all had no American contract for the book, yet assured him it would “be put in the hands of the printers, about the 1st November,” soon enough for Bentley to have the complete text (that is, in proofs) “by 1st April, or sooner” (LJ 3:171).59 Pending Bentley’s answer, the financial picture was unclear enough that Cooper did not proceed with writing the book, let alone printing it, regardless of how certain he sounded in naming those self-imposed deadlines. Instead, exaggerating the facts about the book’s current state, he bided his time from mid-September to early November, long enough under normal circumstances for him to receive an answer from London; much of this period, he was shuttling between Manhattan and Otsego and not writing anything at all.60 In a prompt answer written on October 15, which must have arrived in New York around the middle of the following month, Bentley accepted Cooper’s new terms. In an unfortunate turn of events, however, Cooper did not actually receive that letter until the following spring.61 Bentley’s apparent silence as autumn advanced probably increased Cooper’s reluctance to forge ahead before he had identified backup means for paying for the suspended project. He of course could rely on Bentley’s previous agreement to pay for the book, and once he sent off proof sheets to him he might draw against Bentley in New York and assign the draft to his printer. But, facing so much uncertainty at this time, he apparently wanted some backup. Contemplating the possibilities, Cooper must soon have decided to forge a fresh cross-connection between the different compartments of his financial life. Much as he had paid for his very first novel, Precaution, with his whaling proceeds in 1820, it now occurred to him that the recent land deal with Horace H. Comstock might be the solution—if he could revoke it. The timing certainly points to this convergence. Cooper’s early October request that Comstock buy him out, mentioned earlier, was motivated not just by concern about the Western land market (or cotton prices in Liverpool) but also—perhaps principally—by Cooper’s desire to line up resources to fund his latest book project. That the speculator at first pushed back led Cooper to write

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him his second letter early in November, probably right after he and his family were settled in New York for the winter and he failed to find Bentley’s expected answer. Now Cooper insisted on the buyout with Comstock, and Comstock agreed in principle to Cooper’s terms. It felt good to Cooper to be out of the land deal, at least on paper, but Comstock, lacking cash and relying on the four notes mentioned earlier, could not bail him out on the Swiss book if need be.62 Now it was that Cooper finally began talking to Carey, Lea and Blanchard, who after negotiations about its format (which would set the model for the rest of the travels), indeed bought the book, relieving Cooper of any up-front expenses on it.63 After some back-andforth, it was decided that the narratives would appear in the same essential physical form as Cooper’s novels. The immediate upshot was that the original omnibus Swiss account was to be divided into the two parts (like all the eventual books, “each complete in itself ”) that would appear in Philadelphia as Sketches of Switzerland and Sketches of Switzerland. Part Second. As early as December 9, the firm called for “copy as soon as possible.”64 We shall return later to the difficulties that arose over the winter of 1835– 1836 as Cooper and Carey implemented their contract, difficulties that reflected the larger strategic adjustments both had to make as they began dealing with each other in ways to which neither was, surprisingly, accustomed. For now, we need to follow out the overall implications for the travel book venture that grew from their late 1835 deal. With the Swiss narratives defined afresh, Cooper had a new model for thinking about what he was to turn to after they were finished. The coverage and breaks between the books and their sequencing would shift about as Cooper wrote the actual volumes from 1835 to 1837. Once finished, though, the series had wide scope, narrating his experience abroad from the moment the Hudson left New York on June 1, 1826, up to the end of the Vevey stay in October 1832. There nonetheless were notable gaps: Cooper never wrote an account of the brief first visit to the Lowlands in 1828; he covered the return to Paris after the July Revolution in 1830 only through a few retrospective comments; he did not narrate the 1831 visits to Belgium and the Rhine Valley; and he largely avoided the time spent in Paris between those visits and the rambling 1832 trip that eventually led the family to Vevey. These holes generally copy those in his journals, although in fact two of the Gleanings, those on England and France, cover periods of time for which no journals are known to have been kept (or if kept do not survive), while the Rotterdam journal of 1828 had no real counterpart in the published travels. As mentioned earlier, he had various plans to cover some of these other periods but in the end did not carry them out.65 Although the journals were invaluable for Cooper as he wrote his narratives, he hardly just “arranged” them for publishing, as he told Bentley he had

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been doing in 1836. For one thing, even where the journals existed, they were often very sketchy—they prompted fresh memories as much as embodied original thoughts and feelings. And they were hardly his only sources. All the books relied in some manner on other items he had brought home. In those “trunks” unpacked in New York were bills, receipts, and correspondence received while Cooper was abroad, as well as many souvenir items, including prints that, along with some correspondence and many calling cards, were later mounted on large folding screens that survive to this day.66 There also were source materials awaiting Cooper back home that he probably drew on. At some point, Susan Cooper reclaimed from her sisters the many letters she had sent them between 1826 and 1833. If she took them back earlier than later, the repatriated Americans may have spent time together going over the long sequence of facts and feelings Susan had shared from Paris, London, Switzerland, and Italy, thus supplementing and stimulating Cooper’s own memories.67 Those epistolary prompts had important formal, not just informational, value. A casual reader of the travel books gains the impression that each contains a collection of letters Cooper wrote on the spot and sent to a variety of named (and unnamed) recipients over his years abroad. But, as he did not just “arrange” his journals, he also did not just copy actual letters. Indeed, no originals of any of the Gleanings letters are known to exist. Cooper certainly had written various important sequences home to a handful of close friends, especially Peter and Mary Jay and William B. Shubrick, and in them he adopted the pose of an American sending quasi-official reports home, a pose he to some extent resumed when writing the travel books (see, for a sample, Cooper’s October 1826 letter to Mary Jay—LJ 1:158–64). Some of these sequences, especially those to the Jays, he also may have had a chance to read over after coming home. But these real letters, even as they may parallel the contents of the fictional letters in the Gleanings, were not close enough in wording or idea to prove that Cooper used them directly in making his books.68 The travel books grew from common impulses but had different rhetorical emphases and narrative shapes. All the letters in the first Swiss book are addressed to a single unnamed correspondent—arguably cloned from Cooper’s nephew Richard.69 By the time he wrote the third travel book, the one on France, Cooper had decided to use multiple recipients, all of them real people and all of them explicitly named. The twenty-three letters are directed to nine individuals: Richard F. Cooper receives the most (seven), followed by James E. De Kay (four), Cooper’s sister Ann Pomeroy (three), and so on. As in Notions of the Americans, individual correspondents receive letters concerning their own interests or social positions and employments. Naturalist De Kay is addressed on scientific and intellectual topics, whereas the first letter (recounting the voyage

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to England) is aimed at Cooper’s old navy friend Shubrick, and “Capt. M. Perry, U.S.N.” is the recipient of the one in which Cooper narrates his 1827 circumambulation of Paris with “our old friend” Capt. Ichabod Chauncey. This parsing of topics no doubt helped Cooper focus his treatment of an array of different issues. England followed the same basic strategy, identifying thirteen actual people as the interspersed recipients of the twenty-eight letters. Here again we find both a tendency for subject to suit recipient and a resulting discontinuity in narrative.70 By the time Cooper wrote the last travel book, that on Italy, he had largely abandoned this sort of pretense. It is arranged as a series of letters to different recipients, but none of them is named. The complex texture of the travel books in these regards was matched by the halting means by which they, like The Monikins, were printed and published. Although Cooper had returned to his old Philadelphia partners for that novel, he and Carey had many adjustments to make, ironically enough, now that they were dealing directly with each other rather than relying on intermediaries. Because this point is important but hardly obvious, it is necessary to briefly review their past dealings. During Cooper’s time abroad, his American publishers had been used to having his texts set afresh from printed copy produced by his various European partners, many of whom Cooper dealt with directly. When the firm took over The Monikins, it received not proofs but plates for the earlier portion of the novel, an advance of sorts over the usual European pattern, since it would not have to pay to have that portion set in type. With regard to the book’s final portion, however, Carey for the very first time in its dealings with Cooper had to supervise the conversion of his manuscript to print. Furthermore, once the firm signed the Swiss contract, it was about to do the same thing for the entire manuscript of a Cooper book. At this point, as a result, author and publisher were entering a new phase in their relationship: never in their ten years of working together, in fact, had they collaborated so closely. While that sounds like a good development, as the partners went forward several key problems arose. The first one concerned the physical distance between Cooper and the workshops where his manuscripts were being set in type and reproduced. During his time abroad, in fact, Cooper almost always had overseen production of his books in the places where the work was done—even if that meant he had to travel considerable distances—from Rome to Dresden, for instance, for The Water-Witch, and, earlier, from Florence to Marseilles and then back to Florence for The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish. When he tried, in the case of The Bravo, to have Colburn and Bentley handle the project for him long distance, the result, as I remarked in the fourth chapter, was tedious and uncertain. For his next book, The Heidenmauer, he therefore took the surprising step of employing Baudry to set his text and provide him revised sheets for his

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English and American partners. When it came time for Cooper to decide on his production method for the last novel issued in Europe, The Headsman, he reverted to his English publisher (now Bentley, on his own), handling the early stages by long distance but then, as indicated in the previous chapter, traveling to London so as to be near the printer. Physical closeness always mattered. Heretofore, Carey and Lea had not had to deal directly with these difficulties since, as noted above, the firm always worked from corrected copy Cooper forwarded from Europe. Once it purchased Sketches of Switzerland in 1835 and became centrally involved in producing his text, however, it bore the brunt of problems it had previously been spared. If this book and soon other ones were to be printed in Philadelphia while Cooper split his time between Manhattan and Cooperstown, how exactly were the parties to the relevant contracts to arrange for the time-sensitive exchanges that were the essence of their dealings? The history of the five travel books eventually issued between 1836 and 1838 is a series of halting answers to that stubborn question. Moreover, other problems resulting from the firm’s newly direct relation to Cooper cropped up even with the initial Swiss book. The first involved the pace of production. Once the firm started receiving manuscript copy in December 1835, things moved fairly slowly, mostly because Cooper could not keep up with the expectations of Carey and its printers (see GS CE xxxiii). On February 9, Carey indeed wrote Cooper, “We are nearly out of copy[,] the first part of Letter XIV being the last we have—Pray forward more that we may not be stopt” (the fourteenth letter ended the first volume). Nine days later, Carey tried to hurry Cooper once more by telling him that the printer, having increased his crew, could rush the job to an end if copy came to hand. Adding to the overall syncopation was the fact that at least one shipment was lost in the mail.71 If Cooper was lax, however, the system he and Carey were evolving was itself loose and insufficiently articulated, and both sides had to discover how to stabilize and improve it. In the past, Cooper had tended to supply Carey with thick batches of copy, a volume or at least half a volume of proofs at a time, so that the firm had become used to setting his books in a relatively quick, though discontinuous, fashion.72 That rhythm was broken now less by Cooper’s inattention or laxity than by the fact that he was writing the book as the firm’s printers were at work, shipping small batches of manuscript copy rather than packets of more legible sheets, and at the same time reading proof. This set of constraints threw the firm off its pace. Moreover, the awkwardness in that regard was extended to Cooper’s English partner, although the latter issue need not concern us in detail here.73 Looking back on this experience, Henry C. Carey urged Cooper to help ensure that the future travel books were more efficiently handled: “They can be

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done in a very short time if you will place yourself in the neighbourhood of the stereotype founder.”74 Cooper got the point and from then on mostly read proof in Philadelphia. Having completed his manuscript for the second book in Otsego by June 1836, he thus packed it up and went south. Although when he began his work in Philadelphia on July 5 he intended to complete only the first volume and then go home, handling the remainder by mail, the Carey firm’s use of three printers to produce different parts of the text simultaneously allowed him to finish the whole book before departing the city on July 20 (see LJ 3:223–35). This accomplishment also simplified Cooper’s dealings with Bentley. From New York on his way home, he dispatched “an entire copy of part IId Switzerland” to London, adding that the book was due out in Philadelphia “before September” (LJ 3:221).75 Bentley, receiving all his copy text in a single batch, easily completed his work in time to publish the book almost three weeks before Carey, Lea and Blanchard: the book came out in London (as A Residence in France; with an Excursion up the Rhine, and a Second Visit to Switzerland) on September 15–16, and in Philadelphia (as Sketches of Switzerland. . . . Part Second) on October 6–8, 1836.76 This greater efficiency mostly carried over to the later books. Cooper began reading copy for the French Gleanings in Otsego in October, when the second Swiss narrative was just appearing in the United States, then went to Philadelphia and finished the job so quickly that by November 20 he once again could dispatch a complete set of perfected proofs to Bentley—soon enough for the book to appear in London in late January 1837, followed in Philadelphia a few weeks later (see LJ 3:240, 248–49).77 For the English Gleanings, a communications breakdown caused by an extended illness Bentley suffered at this time forced some adjustments on Cooper (see LJ 3:249, 257–60).78 But the overall production process worked basically the same way. Cooper began reading proof at home before going to Philadelphia late in January; he then interrupted work there and went home pending word from Bentley. When he decided he could no longer keep Carey waiting, he headed south once more in early April to complete the task. By then, fortunately, Bentley’s late response had arrived. Having already sent slightly more than half of the perfected sheets to London early in March, Cooper sent the rest on April 14 (see LJ 3:251–61, passim). Under normal circumstances, this syncopation would have given Bentley insufficient time to preserve his rights, but Carey’s decision to keep the book off the market because of very slow economic conditions still allowed Bentley to precede Carey (see GE CE xxix, xxxix n38). In fact, the English edition appeared on May 29, 1837, followed by the American on September 7 (S&B 91; BAL 2:288). So many weeks had passed since Cooper learned anything of the book from the Americans that, writing them about other matters on September 8, he added a final taunting line:

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“What the deuce have you done with England?—Burnt it?” (LJ 3:289). The firm’s answer, drafted on September 13, fibbed a bit at his expense: “It has been out for three weeks past & many of the papers have been regularly attacking it or rather its author.”79 Cooper wrote his Italian Gleanings, the final segment of his travels, while the English book was inching its way to market in Philadelphia. In this case, the production process was significantly altered because of Carey’s continuing economic concerns. How Cooper adjusted to this change shows how vulnerable his career remained and how difficult identifying or employing fresh options could prove. He had initially mentioned Italy as a possible topic in November 1836, a month after he had briefly seen Horatio Greenough in New York, and there can be little doubt that the Italian reminiscences in which the two old friends indulged sparked Cooper’s interest in writing about the European country he had loved best.80 The book was “under way” at the beginning of March 1837 and “nearly done” on the fourteenth of that April, prompting Cooper to inform Bentley that it would be “ready to be sent about the last of June”—sent, that is, in sheets he then expected Carey to provide (LJ 3:258, 261–62). Shipments to England were delayed, however, because Cooper’s pace slowed somewhat but more importantly because, owing to the panic following the cessation of precious metal payments by New York banks on May 10, the literary market was soon deeply upset. In the same June letter in which the Careys spoke haltingly about when exactly they would issue England, they also begged off the new book.81 Cooper had just offered it to the firm in a now unlocated letter that he must have sent from Cooperstown when, with the complete or nearly complete manuscript in hand, he headed to New York to await the firm’s reply. Hardly oblivious to the economic crisis, he probably suspected the Careys might withdraw; he therefore told them in advance that in such a case he would proceed on his own.82 Once the firm in fact withdrew (see LJ 3:266), Cooper may have considered for a moment the self-publishing alternatives that remained—the ones he had used in whole or part with A Letter to His Countrymen and The Monikins and contemplated for the first Sketches of Switzerland. But then another possibility arose, as he updated the Philadelphians in September: “I found things so bad in NewYork that I did not print Italy, but sent the manuscript to Bentley, who is to return me the sheets, as the book goes through the press” (LJ 3:289). That update made the decision seem like a simple one, but it was impelled by many worries—financial worries most of all—and was fruitful of all the difficulties that spatial attenuation typically created for Cooper’s literary business, even between New York and Philadelphia. The money worries were extreme. Cooper’s stage ride out of Otsego in June set the mood when “three broken New-York merchants” who also were on the coach shared their “terrible

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histories” with him (LJ 3:267). Once in Manhattan, Cooper sensed his own vulnerability on learning that his friend and sometime partner Ogden had just faced the near collapse of his Liverpool operation with Roskell (LJ 3:266)—a disaster that would have affected Cooper, too, since Ogden still held a $2,000 Horace H. Comstock note on which Cooper was first endorser.83 When Carey refused to purchase the Italian travel book, Cooper probably concluded that he could not afford to handle it on his own. He therefore converted a potential liability into an asset. Once he had sent the manuscript to Bentley, for one thing, he could immediately make a £200 draft on the Londoner, as his next letter to Susan indicated: “I shall not print but send my manuscript, and draw against that. By this arrang[e]ment, I shall get on”—that is, financially—“for a month or six weeks, and receive back the sheets from England” (LJ 3:266).84 When Cooper shipped the manuscript to Bentley on July 6, the letter accompanying it mentioned a little contrivance that was to haunt the project: “I beg you will send me back the sheets of this book, as soon as it is printed—This would be a favor, as I might still reprint from it, here,”—that is, in New York— “for such is the state of things, the Messrs Carey dare not publish just yet. Have the goodness to direct it to the care of Wiley & Co, Booksellers, New-York.” At the end of the letter, Cooper stressed that Bentley should use “a careful reader” for the proofs (LJ 3:269). Early in September, before receiving any of Bentley’s sheets, Cooper again broached the subject with Carey (in the letter that asked whether England had been “burnt”) and, explaining the alternative production system and arguing that the “entire series” of the five travel books formed “a complete work,” asked the firm to let him know “immediately” whether it now would take on Italy. The Philadelphians remained reluctant in view of the present economy (and the falling sales record of the travel books generally): “the success of your last eight volumes, we are sorry to say, presents us with no inducement to go on.” But at last they gave in. “If you are anxious it should come from the same press as the others, we would be willing to print 750 copies & if it should produce any profit divide it between us” (LJ 3:289).85 This arrangement was less than ideal, but at least it meant that the Italian Gleanings would appear on both sides of the ocean, and with little direct expense on Cooper’s part. Coordinating the two editions, though, proved very challenging. Bentley’s sheets were slow in arriving, and when Cooper finally received the first batch in November 1837, he hurriedly sent them on to Philadelphia without scrutinizing them, inadvertently setting the stage for a series of disappointing discoveries. On examining the American re-setting (probably while visiting Philadelphia in December), he found, as he later recalled for the Careys, “the most extraordinary errors,” including the substitution of “’North’ . . . for ‘South,’ and ‘right’ for ‘left’ ” (LJ 6:325; see also 3:303).86 In January 1838, he

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wrote Bentley: “Italy is de pis en pis. It is to say the truth full of misprints” (LJ 3:306). So concerned was he, the Cooper Edition concludes, that he must have recalled the sheets from Carey’s printer and “treated them as uncorrected proof ” for the American edition. As new sheets arrived from Bentley, he preemptively corrected them before forwarding them. He also apparently took the opportunity to slightly revise the style here and there. Even so, there is no evidence that he in turn proofed Carey’s version of Italy before it was issued (GI CE 332– 34).87 It was an ignominious end to the travel books series, especially given the often charming aspect of Italy itself; and it marked an awkward midpoint in Cooper’s attempt to work out with Carey and his other partners—and indeed with himself—some efficient and accurate means for producing his new books now that he had come home. But now that he had finished writing about his European years he could look forward, albeit with mixed feelings, to resuming his American life.88

C H A P T E R

S E V E N

Public Versus Private

M

uch of what Cooper wrote after forswearing fiction in 1834 took a personal turn. That point held most clearly for the travel books. They narrated more than seven years of his life abroad, and did so in a peculiarly inward way, allowing him to explore his present ideas and emotions while seeming to reproduce a straightforward epistolary account of the past. His writings in 1838 and 1839 embodied the same complex impulse with regard to a variety of other topics. All of them—his treatise on American democracy, his brief history of Cooperstown, his pair of Home novels, even his ambitious naval history—kept him writing for the public even when, in the case of the paired novels, doing so contradicted his announced intention to abandon fiction. Yet all this prose also exhibited a strong personal drive. Cooper’s subject throughout was the isolation of his felt position, from which his recovery would be very gradual and never complete. Even once he returned, in The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, to the seemingly familiar territory of his first, brightly successful decade, the alienation persisted. Those books effected his recovery of old ground but could not erase all that had removed him from it during the 1830s.

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Two of the books published in 1838, just as Italy was appearing, came out in Cooperstown, as none of Cooper’s earlier books had. That venue was a further mark of the unsettled publishing market, but also of Cooper’s uncertain, isolated place in it. The publishers of these items, brothers Henry and Elihu Phinney, were ambitious businessmen well-known for their stereotyped edition of the King James Bible and their innovative marketing methods. But they hardly could compete with New York or Philadelphia houses. Cooper knew the Phinneys well, but he turned to them, clearly enough, because he had few other options for the works in question.1 The two Phinney productions were The American Democrat, or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America, which appeared in April, and The Chronicles of Cooperstown, so obscure that the exact moment of publication remains uncertain.2 The first of them, a textbook of American political truths—“a small work, a sort of Social Manual, suited to America” (LJ 3:298–99)—did have at least a tentative link to broader contexts. Although as written it came to express Cooper’s personal convictions about U.S. political and social prospects, subjects to which he had willingly devoted considerable attention over much of the 1830s, it in fact had been suggested to Cooper by a young educational reformer named John Orville Taylor, who in the spring of 1837 asked him to write a “School Book” on American principles for a series he had recently launched. Cooper took up the challenge and by early September, having “just finished” the manuscript, took it on an impending visit to New York and Philadelphia. He looked for Taylor in Albany and, failing to find him there, wrote Susan that he expected to see him in New York (LJ 3:289–90). Perhaps the two met and could not reach terms; James F. Beard thought the compensation offered Cooper was too low (see LJ 3:290n4). All we know is that, having returned to Otsego at the end of September, Cooper informed Shubrick on October 2: “The book goes to press in this immortal village” (LJ 3:295). He must have acted quickly to have made such a definite arrangement with the Phinneys within a week. Having written the book, he seemed determined to issue it through his own improvised means.3 Although negotiations with Taylor fizzled, he not only had primed Cooper to write the book in the first place, but also helped shape its substance and nature. For one thing, the scope of Cooper’s 1838 handbook was precisely within the range of what Taylor typically published. He promised the public that all the proposed contributions to his series would be “small, elementary works”—John McVickar’s First Lessons in Political Economy (1837), the closest to Cooper’s in content, filled slightly more than a hundred pages.4 In pushing Cooper to imagine writing for a new kind of audience, Taylor also opened publishing prospects that would serve Cooper well across the 1840s, when his works and their venues

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were more varied than they had been during the 1820s and 1830s. In an even more direct way, Taylor provided a precedent that Cooper would recall when, in 1841, he entertained the idea of reissuing his naval history in a one-volume abridgement similarly aimed at common school audiences, as we shall see in chapter 11. Taylor was, as it happened, to be at least tangentially involved in that instance, too. The reformer’s original plan conceivably would have given The American Democrat wide influence. By contrast, the Phinneys did not offer Cooper much of an audience, even though he indeed paid the firm to stereotype the book as well as set it in type.5 In New York City the month after it appeared, he wrote Susan that the treatise was “getting a name.” James K. Paulding told him “it was one of the best books that he knew, the best on its subjects,” although the more conservative Paulding also informed Cooper, as the letter to Susan went on, that “he objected to some of my opinions.” When, however, Cooper added that he thought the book “sooner or later . . . will make its way,” he was being overly optimistic. He stayed in the city a bit longer to dispose of copies he was expecting from the Phinneys, but on his next trip to Manhattan in July he faced the truth: “Democrat sells slowly”—only about five hundred copies having been marketed (LJ 3:326, 334).6 It did receive a fair and lengthy treatment in the new journal run and mostly written by Orestes Brownson, the Boston Quarterly Review, but that was a Jacksonian venture and Brownson clearly wished to support his fellow Democrat. He praised Cooper for having had “the moral courage to approve and defend some of the measures of General Jackson’s administration,” measures the Whig-heavy literary community, in Brownson’s view, had generally attacked. Cooper was, Brownson continued, “willing to be known as a democrat,” and added that “the literary man, not ashamed to be called a democrat, in this democratic country, deserves to be held in more than ordinary consideration.” That praise was good for Cooper personally, and potentially a boost to sales. But where would a reader moved by the Quarterly Review find a copy of the book in Boston? No advertisements for it appear to survive in newspapers there. Indeed, the only advertisements I have found were run by a book dealer in Charleston, South Carolina, over several weeks that summer. In New York, the best that the literary establishment managed, perhaps under Paulding’s influence, was a brief though still positive notice in the Whiggish Knickerbocker.7 John O. Taylor’s aborted influence to one side, the book’s origins in an ideological sense lay in the controversies of Paris and what Cooper thought they revealed not just about the systematic differences between European and U.S. politics but also about the evident confusion of Americans on that topic. From Vevey in August 1832, Cooper had written Morse: “The humiliation comes from home. It is biting to find that accident has given me a country which has not

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manliness and pride to maintain its own opinions, while it is overflowing with conceit.” At that time he could add, “never mind all this,” but he soon articulated for Morse what would become his key purpose in the 1838 volume: “One of these days, Mr. Morse, I shall write a few plain truths about these gentry, calling men and things by their right names, and they will scarcely know themselves, though every one else will see the likeness” (LJ 2:310, 315). In the latter passage, Cooper was referring specifically to the Finance Controversy—the “gentry” were the Americans, diplomats, and newspaper publishers alike, who did not stand up for American principles during that public argument. But one can also see here the first stirrings of the purpose that would animate The American Democrat. That book is remarkably devoid of vague ideological posturing. When Cooper wrote that he might have called the book “something like ‘Anti-Cant’ ” (except that the compound was his own coinage and therefore was arguably obscure at this time), he was stressing his insistence on naming things correctly (AD 7). Throughout, he stripped away the conventional evasions of ordinary political discourse. He had attempted doing that for Europe in The Bravo; now he was intent on doing it for his homeland in The American Democrat. The book in that regard represented a salutary correction of Cooper’s own exuberant mood in Notions of the Americans—and in some of his early fiction. The former work spoke of the “extravagance of anticipation” that material and perhaps moral progress in the United States rendered “absolutely necessary” (Notions 1:125). The American Democrat, written a mere decade later, dispensed with such emotional jingoism. As John P. McWilliams once described the contrast between the two books, “there is a decided change from eulogy to fault finding”—“An ecstatic hymn has been replaced by troubled praise.”8 While this approach seems especially relevant to Cooper’s new self-assigned role as America’s truth-teller, however, the book grew as much from the European debates of 1830–1833 as from those in which he became involved once back in the United States. Cooper thus began it with a general discussion “On Government,” by the second page of which we encounter themes familiar in his work since early in the decade: “A republick is a government in which the pervading acknowledged principle is the right of the community as opposed to the right of the sovereign.” And soon he was contrasting a real republic with such nominal governments as those of his old stand-ins—“Poland, Venice, Genoa,” and of course Napoleonic France (AD 10). In the next section, more specifically “On Republicks,” Venice again appeared, and in a guise familiar to the reader of The Bravo (and of Pierre Daru): “The republick of Venice was an hereditary aristocracy. . . . In Venice, such was the jealousy and tyranny of the state, that a secret council existed, with an authority that was almost despotick” (AD 16). Cooper had aimed at that target years earlier, but since his return from Europe

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he was finding the American republic in sore need of analogous correction. It was the function of his 1838 book to move his own nation into the position of his theoretical bull’s-eye, where the arrow at last was shot home. In Notions of the Americans, republicanism as a political creed hardly enters into the Count’s commentary. The term “republic” itself recurs throughout his letters, but as a relatively pragmatic descriptor for the United States, a convenient variant for “union” or “nation” rather than an exactly defined political concept. The second volume thus opens: “I write you from the little capital of this great republic” (Notions 2:3). The troubles in France that began with the July Revolution redefined for Cooper the fundamental political reality (and urgency) of this and allied terms. The American Democrat thus recapitulates Cooper’s basic observation that it is wrong to call the French people free in their present political state, since their consent to the installation of Louis-Philippe as head of state was merely technical (see AD 55). He could have made that comment in 1831—and did so via the indirections of The Bravo—but in 1838 he raised the same concern with regard to the United States. Taking advantage of the fact that his absence from home gave him new eyes—like the Count in Notions of the Americans, Cooper is now something of “a foreigner in his own country” (AD 6)—the great mythmaker of the 1820s now stripped the country bare of its own presumptions. Is “this great republic” republican in every sense? The answer is an unequivocal “no.” “The rights and liberties of the citizen, in a great degree, depend on the political institutions of the several states, and not on those of the Union,” Cooper reminds us. He then adds that those states may have an established religion, may censor the press, may restrict the right of free speech, and may impose on their citizens “most of the political and civil restraints . . . that are imposed under any other form of government” (AD 22–23). To be sure, the federal Constitution requires that each state have “a republican form of government”; however, in practice all that means is that “no monarchy, therefore, can exist in this country.” This is cold comfort, since “a republican form of government is not necessarily a free government. Aristocracies are oftener republicks than any thing else, and they have been among the most oppressive governments the world has ever known” (AD 25–26). Cooper’s experience in Europe had taught him subtler lessons. Now he was applying them at home with a vengeance. Of course he still favored republicanism as a creed. He just wanted to make sure that people did not confuse words with things, especially in a matter as important as political rights. Again and again he pared away extraneous details to come closer to the core of how things actually were. He did so in a literary style unlike any he had employed before, except perhaps in some of the arguments he had published in France or in the A. B. C. letters of 1834–1836. On the

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subject of slavery, he was noticeably less inclined to invoke optimistic sentiments of the sort that he had expressed in the later 1820s even as he remained concerned about it in both moral and political terms. He had treated the topic from a melioristic perspective in Notions of the Americans, as noted earlier, conceding the obvious conflict between American principles and American practice but noting such improvements as the various emancipatory laws of the North and what he called the general increase in “liberal sentiments towards the blacks . . . in the southern States.” He answered theoretical objections to slavery by gesturing as well toward the overriding realities of U.S. social and economic life—“life as it actually exists, in its practical aspects and influences” (Notions 2:274, 259). In 1828, slavery did not compromise American principles in Cooper’s mind. It was an exception to those principles, but an exception that was gradually disappearing on its own. That was, in essence, a view indigenous to the middle states, and most particularly New York, where the emancipation law of 1799 had gradually liberated slaves according to a schedule that left none in the state by 1827, the year before Cooper narrated his imaginary European Count’s visit.9 In The American Democrat, Cooper treated the subject less as a matter of principle than as a contested subject for which he imagined no easy solutions. A case in point concerns the special instance of the District of Columbia, on which, it will be recalled, Cooper had published one of his A. B. C. letters in 1835. In that document and the related Freeman’s Journal letter, he considered both Northern and Southern concerns but in the end reached his conclusion, in keeping with the constitution, that Congress should be guided by the will of the people of the district itself (see LJ 3:163–64, 167–71). Now, however, in a brief chapter titled “On Slavery in the District of Columbia,” Cooper gave more weight to Southern views. He still asserted that “all legislation that is especially intended for the District, should keep the interests of the District alone in view, subject to the great reasons for which this territory was formed, and to the general principles of morality.” But in Cooper’s larger argument, “morality” yields to “reasons”: for he is now concerned with the right of a “slave-holder” to visit the nation’s capital and to bring his “body servants” with him—“without incurring any unpleasant risks of their loss merely to satisfy the abstract notions of right of the citizens of the non-slaveholding states.” He adds that, should the residents of the district wish to abolish slavery there, then their political will might arguably take precedence over that of the slaveholders, but even on this ground he is less assertive than he had been earlier (AD 178). It is possible to argue that on this issue Cooper was once more being pragmatic, eschewing abstractions in favor of decided realities. He clearly disliked abolitionists in part because their position involved “little more than a question

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of abstract principles,” whereas that of the slaveholder rested on “a question of the highest practical importance.” A Northerner opposed to slavery would lose nothing by its abolition, and gain a moral victory; if the abolition of slavery were “mis-managed,” however, the white Southerner by contrast might find “the order of his social organization” entirely subverted (AD 178). Even as he temporarily expressed these pragmatic concerns, which he would later abandon, Cooper took a more somber view of slavery’s effects on the republic, concluding that it was an “impolitic and vicious institution” insofar as it encouraged the slaveholder to exercise his “uncontrolled will” while enforcing “abject submission” on the slave (AD 174). Cooper clearly was struggling to reconcile the practice with his political ideals. At this time, he at least was far from doctrinaire. Taking the platform in the Otsego County Courthouse during an 1838 visit by Gerrit Smith, he thus opposed that celebrated abolitionist, but in so thoughtful a manner that Smith himself wrote a letter to a Cooperstown paper praising Cooper’s “argument, eloquence, candor, knowledge, delicacy, and refinement,” adding that the novelist “made an impression on my memory and my heart, never to be forgotten.” If Cooper opposed abolition at this time, he did not do so in a recriminatory fashion; he addressed the topic of slavery as the critical matter all thoughtful Americans knew it had become by 1838, even as they differed on their views of how to deal with it.10 A decade later, having recovered some of his old pliancy, he would withdraw much of his sympathy for the hypothetical Southerner of The American Democrat, making it clear that he saw in slavery a profound threat to American principles and indeed the federal union, as we shall see in chapter 15. Cooper’s self-publication of The American Democrat through the Phinneys, itself a symptom of his isolation in 1838, no doubt protected him from the negative effects that wider circulation and notice would have caused. The other volume the Otsego firm handled for him that same year was more aptly placed. Half the size of the also slender political primer, The Chronicles of Cooperstown made no pretense of appealing to (or instructing) the nation, except on the matter of local attachments, and that in the most local way. In this regard, and in its modestly celebratory tone, the work’s deepest truth was the fact of the author’s enjoyment of a place once loved and lost but finally regained. The personal memories Cooper had carried with him about the world and now at last brought home gave one proof of that truth. Another came from the obvious point that, long-lived as those memories were, the book never could have been written had Cooper remained outside Otsego. Without his recovery of the family archive (i.e., the “private documents . . . in possession of the Cooper family”—COC 3), for instance, he could not have constructed the history of the old Croghan grant, and his father’s acquisition of it, that he gave early in the book (see COC 6–8,

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13–18).11 His return home also gained him access to the Otsego courthouse, where he could mine a wealth of legal documents. And his friendliness with the Phinneys, sons of the village’s first newspaperman, opened the morgue of the now defunct Otsego Herald, allowing him to make specific references to various of its issues (see COC 44, 54). From his eleventh year until he bought and began restoring Otsego Hall in his forty-fifth, there were many gaps in his own recollections. Some could be filled in by his old attorney, Robert Campbell, who had a long memory and had retained possession of at least some of the family documents. Others could be covered by Cooper’s sister Ann and her family or his nephew Richard, and by old friends still in the village. Many could be filled by the Herald and indeed by the Phinneys. So private was The Chronicles of Cooperstown that we do not know precisely when it was published (it had no reviews in the established outlets, was not, as far as I have discovered, advertised in the metropolitan press—indeed, it also bore no copyright notice); nor do we know when Cooper started or finished writing it. It is likely that, given the nature of his necessary work with the resources just described, it was the product of several years of discontinuous labor carried out while Cooper was supervising the not unrelated job of restoring Otsego Hall. Perhaps, though, he had been sparked to begin the book as a specific project by his leisurely trip through the vicinity of Burlington, New Jersey, in early July 1836, while on his way to read proof in Philadelphia for the second Swiss travel book. Temporarily avoiding the delays he expected to encounter in Philadelphia owing to the impending Independence Day celebrations, Cooper lingered long enough in his birthplace (which he had not visited for close to four decades) to describe it to Susan as “a delightful place, far handsomer, and better built than I had fancied.” He located not only the house where he had been born but also two others associated with his family. He talked with one old man, now blind, who had been William Cooper’s next-door neighbor, and another, “a respectable-looking old quaker,” who on hearing the judge’s full name responded, “Not of Otsego!,” then proceeded to claim kinship with the author himself (though via the Fenimores, not the Coopers). By such means Cooper’s return visit was made especially full. As had happened in Canajoharie two years before, touring scenes from his past uncovered rich traces of his being—not as “the Author of the Spy” but rather as a person with other, perhaps deeper, identities altogether (LJ 3:226). Here was another kind of homecoming, one that deepened his reflection on his roots. In The Chronicles of Cooperstown, he would firmly ground his narrative of the New York village (and county) on the activities of “William Cooper and Andrew Craig, of the city of Burlington, in the state of New Jersey,” and would tell in some detail the backstory about George Croghan, William Franklin, and the Burlington Company (COC 7–8, 13–18; see also JFC:EY, 6–8).12

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Contrary to what one might expect, especially given the value Cooper placed on reoccupying his father’s mansion, the small history he published in 1838 did not glorify William Cooper’s actions in opening up Otsego to European settlement. Indeed, Cooper reduced his father’s 1785 first view of the lake to a pretty flat summary that lacks the mythic overtones of The Pioneers: “Judge Cooper has been often heard to say, that, on that occasion, he was compelled to climb a sapling, in order to obtain this view, and while in the tree, he saw a deer descend to the lake and drink of its waters, near Otsego Rock” (COC 8). In the novel, Marmaduke Temple speaks more eloquently by far: “I left my party, the morning of my arrival, near the farms of the Cherry Valley, and, following a deer-path, rode to the summit of the mountain, that I have since called Mount Vision; for the sight that there met my eyes seemed to me as the deceptions of a dream. . . . I mounted a tree, and sat for an hour looking on the silent wilderness. Not an opening was to be seen in the boundless forest, except where the lake lay, like a mirror of glass. . . . [W]hile in my situation on the branch of the beech, I saw a bear, with her cubs, descend to the shore to drink” (PIO CE 235). In 1838, in a more muted, historical mode, Judge Cooper’s son dispensed with the poetic trimmings: The Chronicles of Cooperstown was less an act of filiopietism than a statement of the historian’s local attachments, which arose now from his own efforts, not through any inheritance from Judge Cooper.13 On the other hand, some history was left out. Although Cooper had much he might have written against his neighbors on the shore of the stunning lake in 1838, he was happy to praise the place that his hard work as a writer had allowed him to give wider fame—the same hard work that also, in a quite literal sense, had allowed him to reclaim it.

America as Found Nowhere does The Chronicles of Cooperstown so much as mention the spot along Otsego Lake known as Three Mile Point, let alone the controversy about it and the lawsuits to which that controversy gave rise. Whether Cooper positively chose to ignore the topic we do not know, but it is clear that his words on the village in 1838 were happier than those he had used in The Pioneers for the quasifictional Templeton. The same cannot be said for how Cooper represented the village in a pair of novels that, begun in the summer of 1837 (when he was already writing The American Democrat and doubtless thinking about and probably working quietly on The Chronicles of Cooperstown), noisily announced the novelist’s return to his customary occupation. The idea for what became Homeward Bound and Home as Found derived from his literal homecoming to the United States and to Otsego. But underlying the pair was the same autobiographical impulse that

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had led Cooper to write and publish his five travel books from 1836 to 1838. Fittingly, the projects overlapped. In the cover letter for the last shipment of his manuscript for Italy to Bentley in July 1837, Cooper revealed the current drift of his thoughts: “A freak has got into my head to write a novel, again, . . . something like ‘Templeton in 1837’ ” (LJ 3:269). That October, he confidentially informed Shubrick of his “secret”: “My plan is laid, and the book is already one sixth written. I think it will be done in November—I shall call it ‘Homeward Bound, or the things that are.’ One volume on board a London Packet, another at Templeton. It is a regular novel, and half sea half shore” (LJ 3:295). By Cooper’s original target date of November, “Homeward Bound or Afloat and Ashore” (as he was then calling what he still envisioned as a single novel in two volumes) had been sold to Richard Bentley for much more than Italy had brought the author. It was then only “half done,” as Cooper updated Shubrick, but its first volume had been dispatched to Bentley, who was to print it directly from a fair copy of the manuscript (LJ 3:298–99).14 Cooper reached an agreement in Philadelphia at the start of December with Carey, Lea and Blanchard, to whom he then delivered a portion of the manuscript, either the original or another copy. Because the Philadelphians, in writing out for him their terms, added that they preferred to work from Bentley’s proofs, Cooper soon wrote Bentley from New York City: “You will much oblige me by sending the sheets of this book, by half-volumes as they are struck off . . . to [the] care of John Wiley, Bookseller, New-York—I attach a good deal of importance to this arrang[e]ment.” The unhappy procedure resorted to for Italy, though just now beginning to reveal its distressing results, was thus to be used again (LJ 3:302).15 Cooper had informed Bentley in October 1837 that two volumes of the new book would be set “at sea, the third at the Templeton of the Pioneers, at the present day” (LJ 3:298). When the second volume was ready to ship six weeks later, however, he shared a confession about the novel: “In advancing, I find it necessary to make it nearly all sea, so that I wish you to omit the title ‘Afloat and Ashore’ ” (LJ 3:302). By January, the sea action had completely eroded the landward part, forcing Cooper to announce, apologetically, that he was already at work on an unplanned sequel, then called “At Home” (or “some such name”). Knowing in advance that Bentley in general did not like sequels, Cooper offered to take less for this one, an idea that obviously mollified the Londoner (LJ 3:305–7).16 Cooper plunged right into its composition, having enough matter for the first two of Bentley’s volumes ready to be dispatched, in an amanuensis copy, by May 15; by the third week of July the rest was ready to go as well (see LJ 3:324, 332). Bentley issued the first book in London on May 14, 1838; the Careys did not bring out their edition until sometime between the very end of July and the second week of August.17

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Almost as soon as the latter edition appeared, it started selling so well that the Philadelphia firm reset the book and stereotyped it. Cooper exacted additional money for this step, but more importantly he insisted that the plates be paid for by the Philadelphians and eventually become his property, a key innovation for his future career.18 The brisk sales of the project’s first part also made Lea and Blanchard, as the firm now was called, eager to purchase the second. When it agreed to Cooper’s terms for stereotyping Homeward Bound, it offered to buy Home as Found, which it intended to stereotype from the outset through the Philadelphia craftsman John Fagan (henceforth an important Cooper ally), printing an initial run of four thousand copies. At first, the firm thought it would be best to once again set its edition from the Bentley proofs, but the difficulties with both Italy and Homeward Bound, as well as the desire to get the new book to market as soon as possible, soon forced a change of plan.19 This shift of method resulted in Lea and Blanchard’s jumping the gun on Bentley. Its edition appeared in Philadelphia on November 15, whereas Bentley’s (titled Eve Effingham) came out on the twenty-eighth (S&B 100). Within just six months, Cooper had thus published two big novels, violating his pledge in Letter to His Countrymen just four years before with energetic overkill.20 In their close succession and what soon proved to be their controversial nature, the twin books brought Cooper back immediately to public attention. But they also transacted private business, and not just in their fictionalization of Cooper’s homecoming with his family in 1833. The private element in Home as Found in particular went much deeper, all the way back to the novelist’s childhood. When Cooper’s father wrote his will in May 1808 (see JFC:EY 327, 568– 69n65), he sorted out and distributed a great deal of property. Dozens of Otsego farms were named and divided up; tracts in several New York counties that included tens of thousands of acres were listed. Amid this array of landed wealth, oddly enough at first sight, two particular pieces of very small compass received special notice. These were Myrtle Grove (or Three Mile Point) and Shad Cam, two favorite fishing and recreation points on Otsego Lake. Wishing to memorialize both his own and his wife’s names and the pleasant family recollections attached to these shore points, William Cooper left them to all his heirs in common for the near future but specified that in 1850 they were to be signed over to the youngest descendants who then bore the names, respectively, of William and Elizabeth Cooper. Hence the commonness of those given names among the couple’s many descendants.21 Over the early 1820s, the series of disastrous forced sales that tore from the judge’s heirs most of the big family tracts (and even the modest Otsego farms) also took away Myrtle Grove. Few of the lost lands were redeemed for the family during the grace period allowed by New York law. The only significant

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redemptions, those that George and Ann Pomeroy indulged in, soon funneled the lands in question to William H. Averell, as attorney Robert Campbell explained to Cooper in 1823, and did so without satisfying Averell’s legal claims against the estate. That was a sour pill indeed.22 But it must also have been the Pomeroys who redeemed Myrtle Grove after its initial sale to George Hyde Clarke (who independently had acquired Shad Cam in 1818), and this parcel they held onto instead of passing it to Averell. According to the novelist, it was “redeemed from the sale of 1821, on account of the heirs, with the sole intention of restoring it to the estate to which it had so long belonged” (LJ 3:279).23 Myrtle Grove was a very fondly remembered place among the Coopers. When young William Cooper was at Princeton in 1801, he addressed to brother Isaac a long verse letter full of witty observations about life at Nassau Hall but paused to recall fondly the time he and his kin had spent at the spot: “Much do I long to be at myrtle grove / To be, to talk, to live with those I love.”24 Some of the same affection is seen in an August 1837 letter from the novelist to the Freeman’s Journal in which he recalled seeing the children of his extended family “sporting in the shades of Myrtle Grove,” spoke feelingly of the still legible names and initials carved on the old trees there, and reached back, too, to the recollected scenes of his own “boyhood” on the lake and its shores (LJ 3:278). This spot, more than Otsego Hall, occupied the center of Cooper’s emotional landscape. Small wonder that, as we shall see in chapter 16, he asked to be taken there on his last carriage ride shortly before his death in 1851. Laced as Cooper’s recollections of his large family inevitably were with the pain of so many losses, the memories clustering around Myrtle Grove in the later 1830s were especially poignant. And the losses, as he recently had learned, might not be entirely a matter of history. Largely owing to the family’s long absence from Otsego, and the fact that even in Judge Cooper’s day the public was free to use the two fishing points on the lake as long as it did no damage and did not interfere with the family’s enjoyment of them, a general view had developed that Myrtle Grove in particular was public property. Barely had Cooper relocated his family to Otsego in the mid-1830s before that view reasserted itself with special force. Had the resulting conflict developed at a time when the novelist’s dealings with his nation rested on more secure ground, probably the whole thing would have passed away amicably. But in 1837 his strained relations with the country did not promote happy outcomes. Among the depredations that he charged against the anonymous public was the destruction of the fishing houses Judge Cooper and his children had erected and used at Myrtle Grove. In that same August letter to the Freeman’s Journal quoted above, Cooper told the story. The first fishing house, built in 1801 when William Cooper initially cleared the point of underbrush, had been “pulled to pieces by trespassers,” and the second

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(also built at Judge Cooper’s orders) had been “burned,” apparently sometime in the 1820s. Probably it was George Pomeroy who allowed the public at that time to erect a third such structure—“under the impression,” Cooper wrote, that the public “might be disposed to respect a thing which it had itself constructed” (LJ 3:277, 280).25 Ironically, however, Pomeroy’s generosity had strengthened the public’s impression about its right to Three Mile Point. The one plausible legal basis for such a view, the principle of adverse possession, in fact had little bearing. Insofar as the public had been using the spot for thirty-six years with the agreement of the rightful owners, the public’s use would not qualify as adverse in the legal sense—that is, it could not be based on “nonpermissive” use, to cite a key legal principle.26 By contrast, Cooper saw himself not as a greedy private owner eager to exclude the public as a matter of mere privilege but rather as the executor of his father’s estate who had obligations to a host of younger relatives. In protecting family rights, he felt that he was carrying out a solemn duty. He probably also was concerned with his legal liability as executor, as he had been two decades earlier (see JFC:EY 312–34). Should he not protect the property, the other heirs of William Cooper who had a claim on it but no direct power over it might sue him. And his feelings on the subject were also colored by other, larger issues. The public against which he battled in Cooperstown on this quite particular question was a stand-in for the public with which he had temporarily declared himself done in 1834. Furthermore, the dispute gave a specific shape to the battle for the principles of republicanism Cooper had waged across the early 1830s in Paris. The material violation of his family’s rights by some in Cooperstown gave him the ideal proxy for his self-righteous anger. The family principle itself had deep personal and political uses. The fuse to the subsequent explosion was ignited in July 1837 by vandals who recently did “great injury” to a Myrtle Grove tree closely associated with Judge Cooper’s memory. Showing considerable self-restraint at first, Cooper had prepared an initial statement to insert in the Freeman’s Journal reminding the public that “the point was private property” and cautioning it “against injuring the trees” there (LJ 3:271). When word of the planned notice spread around the village, arousing considerable discontent, Cooper canceled it and prepared a sterner one: “The public is warned against trespassing on the three mile point, it being the intention of the subscriber rigidly to enforce the title of the estate of which he is the representative to the same. The public has not, nor has it ever had, any right to the same, beyond what has been conceded by the liberality of the owners.”27 As news of this new notice (itself not yet published) spread through the village on July 22, some residents called an emergency meeting at Lewis’s Inn. Their handbill, run off immediately and widely distributed,

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declared the meeting’s defiant purpose: “to meet, and defend against the arrogant pretensions of one James Fenimore Cooper, claiming title to ‘Three Mile Point,’ and denying to the citizens, the right of using the same, as they have been accustomed to from time immemorial, without being indebted to the liberality of any one man, whether native or foreigner” (LJ 3:272). Primed by this language, the meeting approved a set of stern resolutions. Their effect was not felt immediately because the secretary elected there, although instructed to publish them in the local press, refused to do so. Instead, he shared them with Cooper, to whom he must have had some lingering attachment. (Another person present at the meeting, Cooper boasted to Shubrick, “admitted to me that its statements were false, its proceedings illegal, indecent and outrageous”—LJ 3:287.) Perhaps, as James F. Beard thought, the affair might have cooled down had nothing more been published (see LJ 3:272). But at a time when the press in general laced genuine news stories with highly biased opinion, and when political posturing was rampant, the small Otsego dispute provided newspaper editors a seemingly irresistible excuse for engaging in bigger fights against the already unpopular Cooper. For his part, Cooper was so profoundly uncertain of his place in the country and his personal and cultural identity that he took the bait of the editors and the local public and fought back vigorously. The first step came on August 2, when Elias P. Pellet of the nearby Chenango Telegraph summarized the July 22 resolutions in his paper, adding comments on Cooper that were—and were intended to be—offensive to him. Those at the meeting had expressed their “perfect contempt” for Cooper’s truthful claim that his family had always owned Myrtle Grove but had allowed the public to use it. Asserting furthermore that his “language and conduct” in regard to the issue had made him personally “odious to a greater portion” of Cooperstown’s citizens, they voted to defy his effective closure of the grove and, hitting him closer to home, recommended that the local library “remove all books, of which Cooper is the author,” from its holdings (LJ 3:285n1). This local rejection of Cooper and his art diluted the emotional effect of his long-delayed return to his boyhood home. The Chenango editor, who was ignorant of the private resonance Three Mile Point had for Cooper, or the deep longings that had stimulated his homecoming, saw the land in question merely as land, and land, at that, “of no earthly use whatever for grass or tillage.” And he saw the public disagreement over the Point as completely the result of Cooper’s supposedly haughty attitude. Having “drawn down upon his head [the] universal contempt” of Europeans, as Pellet saw it, Cooper was now alienating his neighbors.28 Soon Pellet’s editorializing spread to other papers. On August 12, Thurlow Weed reprinted much of Pellet’s piece in his Albany Evening Journal; two days later

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the new editor and part owner of the Otsego Republican, Andrew M. Barber, followed suit with a full reprinting. Cooper on August 16 wrote and submitted to the Freeman’s Journal his first letter (giving the history of the two parcels of land on the lake), in the process commenting very briefly on “certain journals” that had “paraded” the “indecent and illegal” proceedings of July 22 (LJ 3:276). As the actual resolutions from the meeting at Lewis’s Inn had not yet been published in full, Cooper himself published them on August 28 in the Freeman’s Journal, with a taunting epigraph, spoken by the populist rebel Jack Cade in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2: “There shall be in England, seven half-penny loafs sold for a penny; the two [three] hooped pot shall have ten hoops; and I will make it felony to drink small beer. All the realm shall be in common, and in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass” (LJ 3:285n1). The full ramifications of the battle over Three Mile Point reached into the courts of New York, a topic taken up in the next chapter. More pertinently for the present discussion, the fight touched the second of the Home novels, in which Cooper introduced a thinly veiled fictional version of it. In both of the Effingham books, he made use of many personal details. As the Effingham family’s passage back to the United States begins on the Montauk in Homeward Bound, it thus promises to copy closely the experience of the novelist’s own family in the fall of 1833. To be sure, the middle of the novel veers away from the track of the Samson, leading the characters along a path of wild fabulation that owed far more to Isaac Riley and other American mariners held captive in Africa in the early nineteenth century than to the homeward passage of the Coopers. But in the end the real trip of the Samson and the fabricated one of the Montauk converge, and the Effinghams arrive in New York at last in a manner rather like the Coopers: “Happy is the man who arrives on the coast of New York, with the wind at the southward, in the month of November” begins the novel’s thirty-second chapter (HB 2:239). Soon, in the opening chapters of the book’s sequel, the experience of the Coopers in the city would provide many further parallels. In Home as Found, Cooper carried his autobiographical impulse to its logical—or rather illogical—conclusion. It is a curious book in its bearing on the author. Not only does it revisit, as he and his family had been doing, the literal territory of his (and its) past. It moreover so interlaces that territory with its fictional proxy from The Pioneers that it is at times hard to untangle the two. Cooper’s critics sensed the resulting vulnerability almost immediately, taking delight in pointing out the similarity between Edward Effingham and Fenimore Cooper. The author was accordingly forced to argue, tirelessly and tiresomely, for the distinctness of the imaginary and autobiographical realms, of course proving by his denials that the critics were largely correct. Nowhere is the confusion more evident than in his

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introduction of Three Mile Point, and the contemporary controversy about it, into the fiction. “Yonder is the spot where we have so long been accustomed to resort for Pic-Nics,” says Eve Effingham to a family party out for a row on the lake in the novel’s fourteenth chapter. The place as Cooper goes on to describe it is a combination of family shrine and combat zone. Eve thus is gesturing toward “a lovely place, that was beautifully shaded by old oaks, and on which stood a rude house”— a rude house, Cooper hastens to add, breaking the charm of her description, “that was much dilapidated, and indeed injured, by the hands of man.” We might have expected a scene evoking a satisfying pastoral episode from the fictional-familial past, especially since this very chapter gives much attention to lingering memories about Natty Bumppo. But we are to have no night fishing scene reminiscent of the heart of The Pioneers and its magical lessons. Cooper was not yet ready to recover his own best imaginings. Instead, he has John Effingham taunt his kinswoman Eve: “I suppose you flatter yourself with being the heiress of that desirable retreat?” Of course she so flatters herself, even though she hastens to add that she hopes her inheritance of it from her father will take place at “a very distant” time. Her awkward self-effacement to one side, John soon reveals that this actually contested piece of ground is unlikely to descend to her or any other heir without a fight. She is to learn from him “that there is a power that threatens to rise up and dispute your claim.” For, he goes on, “The public—the all-powerful, omnipotent, over-ruling, law-making, law-breaking public—has a passing caprice to possess itself of your beloved Point” (HAF 1:228–29). When she tells her father of this threat soon after the boat trip ends, he tries to discover the basis for the public’s claim on a place “identified with all his early feelings and recollections”—“if there were a foot of land on earth, to which he was more attached than to all others, next to his immediate residence, it was this” (HAF 1:230). Cooper, who had left himself out of The Pioneers except in the most shielded and indirect ways, did not feel an analogous hesitancy in the case of Home as Found. For Edward Effingham’s “early feelings and recollections” are indeed Cooper’s. Moreover, Effingham proceeds to pen the very trespassing notice Cooper did in 1837, handing it to Aristabulus Bragg to insert in the local newspaper the next day (see HAF 1:232). Even before the notice appears, as in Cooper’s case, word of it arouses public resentment, as Bragg is quick to inform Effingham. A discussion ensues based on the exact points at issue in the case of Myrtle Grove (for instance, we learn that the principle of adverse possession is not applicable, as Judge Temple also generously allowed the public to use the picnic grounds). As the two men continue to discuss the public’s claims and the family’s rights, Effingham produces his “late father’s will,” summarizing its provisions in a manner that makes it roughly parallel to Judge Cooper’s. Home as Found thus becomes a fictional cousin of The Chronicles of Cooperstown (HAF 1:233–36).

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Of course Effingham is soon informed of a handbill in circulation that calls a meeting of the public that night “to resist his arrogant claim to the disputed property.” Again Cooper follows the plot of his own life. To be sure, in the case of Templeton, as Bragg blurts out, “there is an awful excitement! Some have even spoken of Lynching!”—a prospect Cooper had not faced, although the Cooperstown resolution demanding the removal of his books from the Cooperstown library must have seemed, at the time, like a rough parallel (HAF 1:238). The exaggeration certainly does not diminish the literalistic effect of the author’s fabulation here. Indeed, although Cooper refuses to directly present the public meeting in the novel, his very next chapter contains Bragg’s summary of it (it parallels that in Cooperstown, of course), and Cooper’s epigraph for that chapter is the same snatch of Jack Cade’s self-serving speech from Henry VI, Part 2 (ending “in Cheapside shall my palfrey go to grass”) that Cooper himself had employed in 1837 (HAF 2:3).

The “Immortal” History Cooper’s boldness in caricaturing the United States in the Home novels would lead to wholesale attacks in the press, as would his otherwise contrasting project of the decade’s end: the naval history that, ever since early in his career, he had intended to write. In a September 1825 letter to Shubrick, he was already calling it “immortal,” probably meaning that it could make Shubrick and his colleagues immortal if Cooper wished it to, but also admitting that the project had been of long standing even then.29 Although James F. Beard called this “the earliest known reference to Cooper’s intention of writing a naval history” (LJ 1:121n5), that is not quite right. I suspect that Cooper had become interested in the project while writing his article about Thomas Clark’s Naval History of the United States (1814) for his friend Charles K. Gardner in 1821. That contribution was not really a review of Clark but rather a piece of naval history by Cooper—his own account of the second war with Britain hung on the peg of Clark. Here Cooper was already exercising his historical impulses. Those drove, too, most of the other pieces identified as Cooper’s in Gardner’s journal, the Literary and Scientific Repository, all but two of which concerned things maritime. Furthermore, it was just at this time that John Paul Jones, a figure of paramount importance for the early navy, attracted renewed interest in Cooper’s New York circles (see JFC:EY 407–8). Talk about Jones (and his newly recovered papers, which Cooper examined at the time) can only have deepened Cooper’s budding interest in naval records and naval history. He began his first, and fictional, foray into the subject when he started work on what would become The Pilot in the spring of 1823. That novel, published at the very end of the same year, was only

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a preliminary token of his commitment to the subject. Perhaps even by this time he had decided privately that when time allowed he would give the navy a fuller, and nonfictional, treatment. He may have made a public statement on the project during the dinner his naval friends gave him in New York City on July 29, 1824, since within six months word of it began to circulate in the press, and soon private offers of aid started coming to Cooper himself.30 Cooper maintained his interest up to and beyond his departure for Europe in 1826. At the farewell banquet that May, he publicly confirmed that he had “long and seriously reflected” on his debt to the navy and its history, and led those present to believe that he would carry on with the project while abroad (LJ 1:140). But that would prove very difficult indeed. When he reassured Shubrick from Paris four years later that he had “not forgotten the Naval History,” adding that he was devoting much thought to the current and future state of the service, he had to admit that he had been slowed considerably in his project by “the impossibility of finding Documents here” (LJ 2:26). Five years later still, in November 1835, Shubrick queried him: “How comes on the History of the Navy?” Cooper said nothing on this topic in answering Shubrick, probably because even then, a full two years after his homecoming, the history was not really “coming on” at all, for, as we have seen, he was very busy with other things (LJ 3:180).31 When he finally turned to the history in 1837, he at first imagined that the actual writing would be done quickly, telling Bentley in April, as he was finishing Italy, that he thought the “Naval History” would be ready “by autumn” (LJ 3:262). Cooper was wrong in this estimate and in later ones. Perhaps the Three Mile Point troubles, rising in the summer of 1837, slowed his efforts or dampened his enthusiasm. In any case, at the end of that year he put off the completion date for Bentley until the following March. But then in July 1838, not yet having sent proofs or manuscripts to London, he wrote that he might “publish the Naval Book separately, a volume at a time,” as he had first thought he might publish the travels, adding that the first volume might not ship until October 1 (LJ 3:302, 333). At the latter time, however, he sent Bentley no such volume but rather an explanation for yet another delay: “the desire to make it good, will keep it back a few weeks longer” (LJ 3:338). As it happened, not until February 1839 was he in a position to have the first volume relayed (apparently in sheets) to James De Peyster Ogden for shipping via his Liverpool partner Nicholas Roskell. The package was accompanied by a letter from Cooper to Bentley promising volume 2 by March (see LJ 3:367–69).32 Actually researching and writing the narrative caused these various delays. Cooper told Bentley that he heavily revised the first volume after writing it, and the surviving autograph manuscript, which served as printer’s copy for the

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American edition, is full of alterations, evidence of the care with which Cooper worked and reworked what was for him an unusual kind of writing.33 In doing so, he refined the style, but he more importantly corrected facts and added new matter, including short biographical notices on a variety of naval officers (see LJ 4:312). In the later part of May 1839, right after its publication, he somewhat flippantly explained his historical principles to an Albany acquaintance: “I knew too much to swallow all the stuff that has been in circulation, and have purified the accounts of battles, from a vast deal of exaggerated nonsense” (LJ 3:378). But this sort of purification had required much hard work, forcing Cooper to admit when he was in the midst of producing a later naval work, “the difficulty of collecting a mass of minute facts is most discouraging” (LJ 4:312). His information on naval history came from a complex of sources, the first of them being his own memory. In addition to what he had witnessed (such as the bringing of the captured HMS Macedonian into New York waters in 1812— see JFC:EY 169–70) or read about in the contemporary press (such as the Battle of Lake Erie the following year), the sometime midshipman also possessed a storehouse of naval anecdotes derived from his own commanders and other officers. To state the two most obvious cases, he clearly relied on tales gleaned from Melancthon T. Woolsey during his service at Oswego in 1808–1809 and from James Lawrence while on the Wasp thereafter. From such kinsmen as his cousin Benjamin (and perhaps his uncle James, who had served on a privateer during the Revolution), Cooper picked up other tales. Moreover, his navy ties during the postwar years gave him exceptional access to personal testimony and gossip from men whose naval experience both predated and postdated his own. From Richard Dale, the Revolutionary War officer who had served under John Paul Jones on the Bonhomme Richard and whose life Cooper would include in his collection of naval biographies in the 1840s (discussed in chapter 10), he clearly learned much (see JFC:EY 403–4). Cooper’s relations with Dale, who died the year before the novelist went to France, provide a concrete reminder of how long Cooper had been personally interested in, and had collected information about, naval history. He wanted to know about particular episodes or campaigns for their own sake—or to satisfy his private curiosity, not just because he envisioned what eventually became his History of the Navy of the United States.34 Opportunities for research abounded before Cooper went to Europe. But even while abroad from 1826 to 1833 he had regular contact with naval officers posted in the Mediterranean or on short visits to England and the Continent as well as with other individuals who provided continuing opportunities to discuss the navy’s past and present. When, for example, he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge sparred about naval matters in 1828 (see GE CE 125–26), their tiff was a notable instance of the sort of naval

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conversations in which we can be sure Cooper frequently engaged while abroad. The early part of Cooper’s life had been a great naval age, and it was hard to avoid the surviving officers and men on either side of the Atlantic. Hulks, of timber but also of flesh and bone, littered the modern landscape, and Cooper had no wish to ignore them.35 Yet it remains true that Cooper needed more than the casual or even active accretion of anecdotes if he were to write a formal history. He had to rely on research in the usual sense. Some of it came to him secondhand from his New York friend, Bread and Cheese Lunch member James E. De Kay, who, prior to his prominent career as a naturalist, had been intimately connected with ships and the sea. De Kay provided Cooper with “many notes” on naval subjects, as Cooper acknowledged in his preface, although nowhere in the book proper did he cite them directly (HN 1:ix). Perhaps De Kay was the author of the extensive register of private vessels active in American conflicts from 1758 through the War of 1812 that is included among Cooper’s papers. It bears no signature or other mark of who produced it. But in 1837, De Kay wrote Cooper: “Many years since (in the palmy days of the Historical [Society]), I amused myself with collecting from our [news]papers every thing in relation to our marine that I could find. . . . Many of these things are curious and would figure (duly craving pardon) in the introduction to your proposed work.” De Kay asked Cooper to “peruse these notes & make whatever use of them” he saw fit. He also implored Cooper to give fair treatment to John Paul Jones, whose “hands first raised the stars & stripes over these waves,” a point Cooper made in his later sketch of Jones (see LDANO 2:17) as well as the naval history (see HN 1:102–3).36 Eventually, Cooper also undertook his own archival research. An 1837 trip he planned to take to Philadelphia and Washington was put off until the following March, but even then proved very short. Perhaps he was able to consult at that time “some of the big wigs of the Navy” (LJ 3:299) that he had jokingly informed Shubrick in November 1837 he hoped to speak with, but if so the exchanges must have been sorely constrained by time (see LJ 3:294–95, 314).37 Cooper returned to Philadelphia in July 1838, spending three or four days there (see LJ 3:334), enough time, apparently, to begin recording naval history details in a small leather-bound notebook. The initial entry, headed “Commodore [Charles] Stewart. July 1838,” may indicate that during the visit Cooper spoke with Stewart, then commandant of the navy yard on the Delaware. He took down facts from Stewart (or perhaps some published source) about, among other topics, the destruction of the stranded Philadelphia off Tripoli in 1804 by men partly under Stewart’s command. Cooper probably used that same notebook over an extended period, adding more topics and at times expanding on previous ones as new information came to him.38

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He was back in Philadelphia again from September 20 to around October 3, 1838, tending to a variety of matters but mindful of the naval history as well. This was the time, for instance, when he informed Bentley that, although the book was “advancing fast,” his “desire to make it good” would delay him (LJ 3:338). But not until the end of 1838 was Cooper at last able to undertake the extended research trips he had long been planning. In November, he passed through New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore and on to Washington, where he arrived on the fifteenth. Even that first day, he reported to his wife that he was “gleaning away, with great success” and had “the promise of much more.” James Barron (who had been wounded when the Leopard broadsided the Chesapeake in 1806) was then in the District of Columbia, as were David Porter and Isaac Chauncey, who together could answer innumerable questions (LJ 3:349). Probably the trip was quite fruitful. In Cooper’s notebook of facts about naval history, there is one entry that may well derive from this visit. Headed “Books at Washington,” it details how “Gun boat No. 7, Lt. B. J. Ogilvie, sailed May 14, 1805 but springing his mast, put back for repairs, sailed again 20th June, and never heard of afterward.” In the naval history, this entry reappeared almost verbatim (see HN 2:84).39 It may also have been now that Cooper studied the “documents on file at Washington” to which he would refer in his 1842 dismemberment of British naval historian William James in an American journal (“ER,” pt. 2:537).40 Fruitful as this visit appears to have been, though, it was long only by comparison with his various earlier ones: Cooper passed back through New York City on November 22 and by the twenty-fourth had returned to Cooperstown, just nine days after his first arrival at Washington (see LJ 3:350–53). The most ample opportunity for research came during a much-anticipated visit (covering all of the winter of 1838–1839 and then some) that Cooper and his wife and their four daughters made to Philadelphia, arriving there on December 3 and not leaving until mid-April. This was the time when Cooper claimed that “the discovery of new authorities” made him rewrite the history’s “early part”—notwithstanding, as he explained on December 18, the fact that he had “the printers on my heels” (LJ 3:361). We know something about those “authorities” and how Cooper employed them. For one thing, he now wrote John Quincy Adams to ask for his help on a variety of questions pertaining to the Revolutionary navy (see LJ 3:361–62). Moreover, he made use of the Library Company of Philadelphia and relied on its librarian, John Jay Smith (the grandnephew of the old Cooper family ally Richard Smith), who recalled that Cooper was a frequent visitor to the institution (see LJ 3:365n5). Probably Smith helped him locate government records and statistical data. Perhaps more importantly, through Smith Cooper made contact with local historian John F. Watson, author of the Annals of Philadelphia (1830). Watson, who incidentally was a cousin of

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John Paul Jones’s associate Nathaniel Fanning, sent Cooper early in January 1839 a substantial document covering a variety of topics. It contained, first, a selection of naval reports transcribed from the Pennsylvania Evening Post from 1775 through 1778. It also included a long, touching narrative about the efforts of Watson’s kinswoman Mary Fanning Hibbs to secure compensation from Congress for the loss of her father, naval hero Joshua Fanning, in the explosion of the Randolph off Barbados in March 1778. In another entry, Watson also directed Cooper toward sources on the sufferings of those confined on the British prison ships in New York during the war—reminding him of the narrative of Thomas Andros, The Old Jersey Captive (1833), as well as Philip Freneau’s The British Prison Ship: A Poem (1781). Finally, Watson added to the document a transcription of an article he had published in 1834 called “Officers of the Revolutionary Navy”; supplied Cooper with many details about the early navy, only some of which Cooper already had collected; and referred Cooper to his Annals of Philadelphia for an account of the Alliance, the American-built frigate that, sailing under the French officer Landais in 1779 had returned Lafayette to France and then formed part of John Paul Jones’s fleet.41 Cooper replied thankfully to Watson for this wealth of material, although he pointed out that he had already found much of the information himself, and that other bits came too late to be useful, as they belonged in parts of the history already in production. Cooper nonetheless asked Watson particular follow-ups, prompting him to prepare an undated supplement especially concerned with the Alliance (see LJ 3:364–65).42 During this long Philadelphia stay, Cooper also consulted with Cmdre. Isaac Chauncey, who in January sent him a “chart of Tripoli” from Washington, and with James K. Paulding, now navy secretary, who caused a search to be made in naval archives for a particular letter Cooper thought Oliver H. Perry had sent to Washington. Although Paulding could not produce that document, he promised his continuing help. In response to a somewhat earlier inquiry from Cooper, statesman Albert Gallatin provided information about the Revolutionary War officer James Nicholson, Gallatin’s father-in-law.43 As Cooper relied on these individuals and the sources to which they directed him, he found so much information that, even before his narrative appeared in Philadelphia, he reached the conclusion that there would have to be “a third volume to the history,” which he expected to publish later (LJ 3:373). That third volume never really materialized (posthumous editions do, however, contain various extensions of coverage), but barely had the first two volumes appeared in 1839 before a revised edition of them was in the works, to appear with corrections and some additions in 1840. Further revisions followed in the 1847 edition issued in Cooperstown. In his attack on William James in 1842, Cooper used

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some fresh information solicited from naval friends for the purpose of bolstering his own account of the Battle of Plattsburgh Bay but did not introduce those documents in any revision of the naval history per se (see “ER,” pt. 1:420–21).44 The colonial and Revolutionary parts of the story presented the most serious historiographical challenges for Cooper. For the colonial period, he relied on standard sources, including the first two volumes of George Bancroft’s History of the United States, issued in 1834 and 1837, although Cooper seems to have used the 1838 revision of the former volume (see HN 1:65).45 He also used John Winthrop’s Journal (see HN 1:49–50), doubtless in the first complete published version, prepared by James Savage and issued in Boston in 1825–1826. Both these works he probably consulted at the Library Company. Cooper also cited Benjamin Trumbull’s figures for the number of vessels in Connecticut at several periods (see HN 1:48, 60, 63) from his History of Connecticut, likewise in the Library Company’s holdings. In his preface, Cooper furthermore indicated his indebtedness to the “accurate and useful matter” contained in “the Naval Chronicle of Mr. Goldsborough,” long the navy’s chief clerk and now secretary of its board of commissioners (HN 1:ix). This work the Library Company also held.46 When he turned to the Revolutionary War and then the War of 1812, Cooper had more numerous printed sources. For the career of John Paul Jones, for instance, he probably relied on an 1825 book he had helped get published, navy registrar John H. Sherburne’s collection of documents, based on the trove that New York auctioneer George A. Ward had spotted in a bakery window soon after reading Cooper’s The Pilot (see JFC:EY 431–32).47 The interest Cooper took in such figures as Jones led to his decision, as he expanded and revised the manuscript of the first edition, to add “short biographical notices” of the captain of the Bonhomme Richard and a variety of other individuals. These longish footnotes had “formed no part of the original design,” Cooper confessed in 1842 to naval officer George H. Preble, but were inserted “somewhat hurriedly, as the book went through the press” (LJ 4:312). For Jones, at least, there was a wealth of material on which Cooper could draw (see HN 1:209–12n). In other instances, however, he was hard-pressed for accurate information. The note about Edward Preble (see HN 140–41), as Cooper explained to that man’s nephew in 1842, “was taken principally from a flow[e]ry and worthless book, that contains some six or eight other sketches,” the sort of popular compilation that oozed from the American press during the period following the War of 1812 (LJ 4:312). For the note on Richard Somers, which began with the acknowledgment that very little was “known of Capt. Somers, beyond his professional career” (HN 2:75n), Cooper relied on some details he gathered from one of the officer’s siblings, who, however, gave him very incomplete information (see LJ 4:312).

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In a variety of circumstances, Cooper made use of William Bainbridge ’s “private journal,” parts of which had been published in Niles’ Weekly Register in 1812 (HN 2:53n, 55n, 67n, 72n). He also drew on more readily accessible publications, including Jared Sparks’s great collection of the Diplomatic Correspondence (1818) of the Revolutionary years, probably in the Library Company’s copy of the 1829 edition.48 Abel Bowen’s 1816 compilation, The Naval Monument, which printed such contemporary items as extracts from ships’ logs, was available in a more recent edition, and it is evident that Cooper had recourse to it. For instance, his account of McDonough’s 1814 Plattsburgh triumph shows ample use of documents from Bowen, although Cooper corrected Bowen by reference to other, unnamed sources as well (see HN 2:429n).49 In regard to one particular engagement in the War of 1812, Oliver H. Perry’s victory over a British fleet in the Battle of Lake Erie, Cooper’s later controversies on the subject were to reveal more details about how he researched the topic and came to shape his narrative of it. In 1843, Cooper explained that his account of the battle “was written after a long and critical examination of all the evidence I could obtain” (BLE 10). That evidence included what Cmdre. Jesse D. Elliott, Perry’s second-in-command in 1813 (and a key figure in the later controversies), called a “huge package” of documents given to Cooper by Oliver H. Perry’s brother, Matthew C. Perry. The younger Perry, whom Cooper had known in New York prior to his European trip (and to whom, it will be recalled, he addressed one of the fictional letters in his French travel book), came to the historian in Philadelphia, probably during the final long visit of 1838–1839, and “asked him if he wanted materials to describe the Battle of Lake Erie.” When Cooper said he did, Perry gave (or more likely sent) him the materials, and then later inquired whether he needed anything else. Cooper, who clearly had gone through much of what Perry already had given him, replied that he needed the documents that presented Elliott’s side of the long-running controversy. This was not the answer Perry hoped for, and it would lead to Cooper’s own involvement in the acrimonious Perry-Elliott fight.50 Cooper’s desire to find the truth and record it in this one instance suggests his general care as a historian. Although Matthew C. Perry and his associates felt that the naval history sided with Elliott, in fact Cooper had approached the episode favoring Perry, its long-honored hero, over Elliott, on whom much suspicion had been cast from 1813 on and whom Cooper did not know well personally. He thus wrote in 1843, “My feelings, so far as I had any, when I sat down to write the history were on the Perry side of the question” (BLE 105). But once he had reviewed the materials, he came to a more nuanced conclusion. In the process, he was lobbied by Perry’s backers, who sought to persuade him that Elliott deserved no credit and much blame. In particular, “attempts were made

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to convince the writer of the superiority of the Perry witnesses, and of their greater claims to credibility.” Cooper was skeptical of such arguments. One of those witnesses was described as a man due exceptional “respect,” but when Cooper asked about his character among his own naval friends (including “officers . . . unfriendly to Com. Elliott”), he discovered that the individual in question “was believed to be one of the weakest men in the navy” (BLE 110). These anecdotes are particularly revealing for the Perry-Elliott controversy, a subject taken up in chapter 10. But they also offer insight into the way Cooper as naval historian navigated through much of his evidence, and how he sought to adjudicate among competing sources, including personal sources. He did not wish to avoid controversy but also did not seek to create it; the naval history was not the product of the same pen as the A. B. C. letters except in the most literal sense. Looking back on the Lake Erie business shortly after the history was published, Cooper thus reassured a friend: “I have told the fight of Lake Erie fairly, and can make good my case.” Why should a historian engage with the “petty quarrels” of the original actors in such a fight? Besides, he went on, letters and affidavits dating from “ten years after the affair” were “so contradictory” that it was often impossible “to make head or tail” of their evidentiary value. “Depend on it, my account will hold water. It was written with great caution” (LJ 3:386). Aside from this troubling case, the naval historian nonetheless did lock horns at times with other old adversaries. Certainly in narrating specific parts of the Revolution and especially the War of 1812, he attacked Britain and British policy. He could not have written a naval history in the later 1830s that was not in this sense partisan. But his partiality extended beyond the details of individual engagements. The Revolution as a whole allowed him to celebrate and justify American independence, a subject dear to his heart after seven years of suffering attacks from conservative Britons while he lingered abroad. And the War of 1812 allowed him to broadside Britain one more time for the most vexing example of England’s imperial attitude, the policy of impressment, for which Cooper had no tolerance whatever (see HN 1:280–82). In his account of the run-up to the second war, and of its first months, Cooper took evident satisfaction in narrating British defeats, as if American naval successes stemmed from the grave injustice visited on American sailors by British press gangs, and as if his own narrative broadsides replicated those of the successful American vessels at the time. His long account of the defeat of the Little Belt by the President in 1811, still a touchy subject in 1839, exemplified his moral vision and his historical method (see HN 2:119–28). In this last instance we can trace the evolution of Cooper’s practice as a naval historian. He had heard of that encounter while staying in Cooperstown

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during the summer of 1812 (see JFC:EY 160–61). He learned more in New York directly from John Rodgers, who had captained the President in 1811 and who had been Cooper’s first commanding officer during the midshipman’s posting at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1808—and in later years his friend (see HN 1:170n). There furthermore survives in Cooper’s papers at Yale a thick set of copies from the letter book of Rodgers while serving on the President in 1811.51 The Little Belt incident was therefore something with which Cooper had long been utterly familiar, at least from the American perspective, but about which he also had gathered fresh information while working on his history. Moreover, he already had used the episode in a literal battle of his own with British opinion. He had gone out of his way to insert a brief reference to the encounter in his 1821 review of Thomas Clark’s naval history (see ECE 16). And it had come up in a very personal manner during his London stay in 1828, when he found that Samuel T. Coleridge bore a grudge against Rodgers on account of the Little Belt attack. Having argued it out with the poet then, Cooper was defending Rodgers and American honor as well as himself when he wrote about the dispute in his English Gleanings. He also was inscribing a trial run there for what the History of the Navy would say on it. It nonetheless is true that for the most part Cooper attempted to restrain his political energies in the naval history. An instance is in his treatment of the famous Battle of Plattsburgh. If one examines not his earlier writings on the subject (for instance, it is mentioned briefly in the 1821 review of Clark—see ECE 16–17), but rather his later ones, it is perfectly clear that he had thoroughly dissected the major British narrative of the battle, contained in William James’s Naval Occurrences (1817), prior to writing his History of the Navy. In his long 1842 response to the Edinburgh Review’s essay on James’s history and his own, Cooper would completely discredit James in a number of cases, of which the Battle of Plattsburgh is an especially notable one. Although the naval history rarely refers openly to James, it is certain that James’s book was before Cooper as he wrote his own narrative of that and other battles. Cooper was obviously thinking of James when he wrote: “The Saratoga was twice [set] on fire by hot shot thrown from the Confiance, her spanker having been nearly consumed. This fact has been denied, or the shot attributed to the batteries on shore; but never by any respectable authority” (HN 2:441, emphasis added). In his two-part attack on the Edinburgh Review, Cooper would discuss and dismiss James’s attempts to explain away the use of hot shot by the Confiance by just these means (see “ER,” pt. 1:422–25). What is interesting in this instance, however, is how carefully Cooper sought to submerge his partisan feelings in the naval history. He reached the same conclusions, but without revealing the same personal animus that would be evident in 1842.

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In the naval history, Cooper usually downplayed his at times heated political judgments about his fellow citizens. Usually, but not always: in an especially barbed passage about the War of 1812, Cooper accused “the wealthier portion of the American people” of having “seldom been true to the nation, in conflicts of opinion with Great Britain.” He was not speaking merely of sentiment, damning as the comment would have been on that front alone. He was speaking of the failure of wealthy Americans to invest in government securities, thereby depressing their value and making it hard for “all the public servants,” including naval officers such as Chauncey, to carry out their essential labors (HN 2:451). This particular swipe would seem to have been aimed at the Whigs of 1839 as much as at the wealthy Federalists of 1812–1815—and at the pro-European Americans, the “Leaphighized Leaplowers” (as he called them in The Monikins), with whom Cooper had long scuffled. Virtually absent from the history, nonetheless, is the sort of vituperation Cooper had been hurling at his own countrymen in other 1830s texts. That is partly because he knew he was writing a book that might cast a long shadow and he wanted it to be as devoid of partisanship as possible. Moreover, he had little need to lambast the failures of the public in a work meant to canonize the navy’s officer corps. It is as if by 1839 the latter coterie constituted an ideal company of republican patriots to which Cooper now imagined himself mystically bound. This was the antidote to the poison that had stung Cooper in Paris and that was stinging him now in the United States. Naval officers, long-suffering patriots as he viewed them to be, buoyed his spirits and allowed him to pour into the narrative of their accomplishments the complaint he had against his homeland. This was a utopian effort in many regards, if not a quixotic one. Cooper could hardly have been ignorant of the defects of character or at least behavior in the naval officers of his own era. The penchant for dueling and public fights among his contemporaries was the most obvious instance. Cooper took his own set of dueling pistols to his posting in Oswego in 1808, and his street fight with Ambrose L. Jordan in Cooperstown in 1815 underscored the extent to which he had internalized the code of the officer corps (see JFC:EY 125–28, 191–92). As he aged, however, Cooper’s sense of the moral issues at stake in such affairs of honor became more complex. In his slightly later biographical sketch of the famous naval officer Richard Somers, he described that man’s behavior in a particular series of duels early in his career but could not easily assess the episode. Clearly he was impressed by Somers’s endurance: he fought three challengers in a single day, was wounded in the first two duels, and fought the third while “seated on the ground, sustained by his friend [Stephen] Decatur,” who had offered, without avail, to fight the last two opponents in his stead. It was not enmity that made Somers persist, or ambition. He fought purely for the honor of the thing. All this

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was admirable, especially in young officers seeking to establish the proper esprit in a young navy. But, and here one senses the mature naval historian’s judgment, Cooper nonetheless thought it wrong to suppose that moral injuries could be answered through violence. From the perspective of the late 1830s and early 1840s, the naval heroics of the century’s first years had begun to seem a bit opaque, even inscrutable (LDANO 1:119–20). Cooper’s distinction on this point, while not overly fine, certainly mattered to him in his own affairs. When he suffered what he took to be the moral injuries of a corrupt press during the 1830s and early 1840s, as we shall see in the next chapter, Cooper did not enter the newspaper offices in question and start punching out the help, as James Lawrence had defiantly done in New York City in 1807 (see JFC:EY 125). Nor did he fluff up his verbal bouts by deploying the language of dueling. He went to court, where he won legal (and often moral) victories based on his own persuasively marshaled arguments. One might conclude that Cooper had learned how to sublimate the habits of dead earnest combativeness he had observed and perhaps absorbed in his own brief exposure to Lawrence and the other young fighters of the early navy. Journalist Jacob Frank, in his commentary on Lawrence’s office invasion of September 1807, asked what redress he ought to seek if the threats made against him were carried out. His solution was also Cooper’s in his battles with the offending editors: “men in a state of civilized society, are bound to seek redress of their grievances by the laws.”52 The naval history by and large upheld that same conclusion, and Cooper in defending it would, too.

C H A P T E R

E I G H T

Libels on Libels

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or several years starting in the late 1830s, Cooper was involved in a lively, much publicized series of court duels with members of the Whig press. As indicated in the previous chapter, the troubles began when a small upstate paper published a short, caustic article about Three Mile Point in August 1837. Cooper filed libel suits the next month against that paper’s editor and against an editor in Cooperstown who reprinted the piece there. (As late as 1840, he sued a third editor, in Albany, for also having reprinted and commented on the original article.) Reference to the Three Mile Point dispute in Home as Found brought further press assaults—and fresh suits filed in 1839 and 1840 against two Manhattan editors. Also in 1840, Cooper sued a third Manhattan newspaperman for very personal attacks he published on the naval history’s treatment of the Battle of Lake Erie. Cooper brought yet other suits at various times against two more editors for their comments on court actions already in progress. Altogether, he pursued sixteen separate actions against eight different newspapermen. Six were sued for civil libel, one for criminal libel, and one for both. In several instances, individuals were sued several times: Thurlow Weed of Albany, Cooper’s most prominent opponent, thus was the target of five suits.

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There was much overlap in the conduct of the cases. When Cooper won his first victory in May 1839 (this was in the suit against the Cooperstown editor), he had two actions about to go forward against the editor who first published the Three Mile Point article. Those were canceled the following February when that man suddenly died, but at that moment Cooper had actions of various kinds pending against several other editors. One of those cases was resolved the next year and several more in 1842 and 1843, but the last two, originating as late as 1842, remained open until 1845. The process was thus tedious and complex, and it absorbed a great deal of Cooper’s energy (he fought some of the cases in court himself ), but his overall record in the matter was impressive. Of the fourteen cases brought to conclusion, he won six outright, received default judgments in three others, won one via formal arbitration, secured two retractions, and received a split decision in a hearing on another. In only the one remaining case did the man he sued win acquittal. In addition to achieving so many victories at the bar, Cooper also gained some positive public notice, especially for his impressive performance in the 1842 arbitration case on the Battle of Lake Erie. As we shall see, though, courtroom successes did not always bring him acclaim. And in the end, an 1845 ruling in the New York State Supreme Court effectively undercut the legal grounds on which he had proceeded, giving newspapers more leeway in the future.1 Incomplete documentation makes it difficult to follow each of the cases in exhaustive detail. Besides, the patterns uniting all of them matter more than the specifics of the individual cases. In what follows, I trace out those patterns and assess the effect of the entire episode on Cooper and his career by focusing on the most distinctive of the fights. To set up the general issues and show how he and his opponents tended to handle them, I briefly consider Cooper’s dealings with two editors: the minor Cooperstown figure Andrew M. Barber (who lost to Cooper in 1839 but did not pay the required damages until 1841), and the prominent New Yorker James W. Webb, against whom Cooper secured a pair of criminal indictments in 1839 (on the first of which Webb was eventually acquitted, soon after which he retracted the second offensive article). I next turn to in-depth analyses of the most complex and revealing cases—the five suits against the influential Whig Thurlow Weed, of the Albany Evening Journal, between 1840 and 1842; and the two actions that pitted Cooper against his old friend William L. Stone of the New York Commercial Advertiser, which started in 1840 and were not resolved until 1845, a year after Stone ’s death. Modern readers accustomed to all sorts of online and print attacks on celebrities, including authors and artists, should not assume that the articles targeting Cooper, although substantively milder by comparison to today’s counterparts, represented business-as-usual in his period. Certainly libelous publications and

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lawsuits meant to punish those responsible for them were not unheard of then. But the assault on Cooper, especially insofar as it was coordinated among several different players who pooled their resources, was unusual in its scope and intensity. And the range and vigor of his response were likewise unusual for the period. No other American literary figure of the time suffered such attacks or mounted such a counteroffensive. The first thing to note in his case is that the entire battle was a political fight motivated by Cooper’s prominence as a Democrat. Although he and several of the editors had once been on the same side politically, by the later 1830s all the editors were Whigs, some very active Whigs at that. Once Cooper clashed with his neighbors over the Otsego Lake picnic ground, the Whigs saw that issue as a good means of pillorying Cooper for his widely known Jacksonian affiliations.2 A second point is that personal ties among the editors bolstered their political ones, while the fact that some also knew Cooper—or at least Cooperstown—with varying degrees of closeness, allowed them to draw on bits of knowledge (for instance, about Cooper’s family background) that gave their attacks particular edge. Stone, Cooper’s last opponent, had furthermore been the novelist’s enthusiastic supporter in the 1820s. Their later falling out was an especially unfortunate turn of events. Politics to one side, the Three Mile Point controversy proved to be a plausible fuse for the larger dispute. Once Elias P. Pellet of nearby Norwich brought the question to an audience outside Otsego in his Whig paper, the Chenango Telegraph, on August 2, 1837, things quickly generalized.3 On August 12 came the first embellished reprinting of Pellet’s piece, in Thurlow Weed’s Albany Evening Journal. Two days later, the new editor and part owner of Cooperstown’s Otsego Republican, a very recently arrived twenty-seven-year-old Whig named Andrew M. Barber, picked it up as well, also adding his own comments to Pellet’s. When Cooper published his recollections of Myrtle Grove and Shad Cam in the Freeman’s Journal two days later still, and disdainfully mentioned the reports of the July 22 public meeting that had also appeared in the press, he was indicating that he was unlikely to ignore such attacks in the future (see LJ 3:276). Cooper at that time gave the Otsego Republican particular mention (see LJ 3:281). Barber was the nearest target geographically, but his prominence was also owing to three other factors. First, Pellet had called on Barber to break editorial silence on the subject in Cooperstown, giving Barber’s republication of Pellet’s piece an odor of collusion that Cooper certainly would not have liked. Moreover, Barber’s additions to Pellet’s story offered an ill-informed history of Three Mile Point; he held that the citizens had loved, valued, and protected it over the years, thus making it “almost synonymous with public property”—a mendacious conclusion also certain to displease Cooper, especially given Barber’s utter lack of local knowledge.4 Most importantly, Barber exemplified

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the tendency of the contemporary press to endlessly reprint various items, which likewise concerned Cooper. It might have been possible for him to ignore a single obscure libel that did not carry far beyond its home (as with Pellet’s original piece) or dismiss it as an ill-informed but not necessarily harmful squib. But its reprinting across the region, and perhaps the country at large, would be intolerable. If this last was Cooper’s special concern, it does seem that his strategy succeeded: with few (though important) exceptions, the items targeted in his later lawsuits were not significantly reprinted elsewhere. The suit against Barber for reprinting Pellet’s original piece was the first that Cooper actively pursued and brought to a conclusion. Cooper viewed the July 22 gathering that Pellet discussed as having denied his family’s legal right to Three Mile Point in order to claim the property for the public at large. In his August 16 letter to the Freeman’s Journal, he thus described the meeting as “an indecent and illegal attempt to overshadow law by intimidation.” The same letter gave a long, accurate, and largely dispassionate account of the property’s history that bore out his main point about its ownership (LJ 3:277). The latter narrative provided full justification for his two public notices, prepared the previous month, that (as seen in the previous chapter) had spurred the meeting in the first place. The initial notice, the one he withdrew before it actually could be issued in the paper, directly asserted his family’s private ownership of the Point and asked the public not to harm the trees growing there. In the second notice, the one that did appear in the Freeman’s Journal, Cooper more assertively warned the public against trespassing on the Point, adding: “The public has not, nor has it ever had, any right to the same, beyond what had been conceded by the liberality of the owners” (LJ 3:271). Those attending the July 22 meeting of course had every right to think otherwise, and even to speak their minds on the matter in public. They might, for instance, deny that Cooper’s family, despite his statements to the contrary, actually owned the land in question. Doing so carried the implication that Cooper had lied, however, a point that might be viewed as impugning his honesty and thus slandering him. Under current law, slander could indeed be charged against a person who knowingly spoke harmful falsehoods against another person in public, but slander suits, being difficult to win, were few and generally unproductive for plaintiffs, as historian Norman L. Rosenberg has indicated in his study of the larger topic. In the English-speaking world across Cooper’s life, by contrast, modern libel law was newly emergent, and as political parties formed in the United States and the newspaper press rapidly expanded from the 1790s on, instances of libel and prosecutions (either civil or criminal) for libel became increasingly important elements in partisan warfare. The singular strength of libel prosecutions as compared to those for slander was that, since libel suits focused on published statements or assertions, evidence of libel in an era of exploding print culture was obvious.5

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In Cooper’s case, once the Chenango and Cooperstown newspapers published their stories (or rather editorials) about the July 22 meeting, repeating the claim of Three Mile Point’s public ownership and therefore disputing Cooper’s statements about his family’s right to it, the mere fact of publication set the grounds for legal action versus both papers. Cooper regarded Barber’s summary of the July 22 resolutions in particular as containing a direct libel on his character, since Barber asserted that the will left by Cooper’s father had reserved the Point to the “use and benefit” of Cooperstown’s inhabitants as a group. The novelist having already asserted (correctly) that his father instead had bequeathed the property to his family at large (even as he allowed the public to use it), Barber essentially was calling Cooper a liar. Cooper first had his nephew (and lawyer) Richard demand a retraction from Barber, as well as from Barber’s business partner, Stephen G. Holroyd. Barber printed Richard’s demand in his next issue, asserting that he had intended no libel and that he would correct his errors if the novelist could point them out. Unsatisfied by this response, in September 1837 Cooper filed a civil suit against Barber, along with another against Pellet as the original offender.6 He did not press those suits, however, until Home as Found, with its account of the Three Mile Point business, began the second phase of the press fight late the following year. An attack on that novel in James Watson Webb’s Manhattan paper in November 1838, targeting Cooper’s personal character as well as his literary work, no doubt drove home to him the seriousness and potential cost of the whole matter. Webb had a reputation as a combative man. He had already been involved in several public fights and duels and in 1842 would be convicted of violating a New York anti-dueling law that forbade residents to leave the state in order to fight a duel elsewhere (in Webb’s case, the duel was with a member of Congress). Webb’s abrasive personality comes across clearly in the opening of the Home as Found review: “We may in truth say, that we have never read an American Book with the same feelings of regret, pity, contempt, and anger as the last work of Mr. cooper; and never have we entered upon so disagreeable a task as reviewing this publication of a countryman, who, forgetful of the kindness with which his earlier works were received, and unmindful of his duty to his native land, has basely and meanly devoted his talents to catering for the gross appetite which unfortunately exists in Europe, for every thing calculated to bring the customs, manners, and habits of Americans into disrepute.” The personal offensiveness of Webb’s review is remarkable. Not only did he assert that Cooper had betrayed the American republic to its foreign enemies; he furthermore claimed that Cooper’s “leading purposes . . . were, first, to create a market for his works in England, in imitation of other hireling writers; secondly, to give vent to his spleen against his countrymen for not hailing his return as

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they did that of washington irving; and thirdly, to produce the impression abroad that he is the descendent of a long line of noble ancestors, and in point of antiquity of family, not only far above his countrymen, but the equal of the noblest blood in England.” All in all, Webb concluded, Cooper evinced a “base desire to make money by traducing his native country.” In this extremely personal attack, Webb also dragged in whatever derogatory things he might say about Cooper’s parents, both of them long dead. Seeking to deprive Cooper of the pretentions to aristocratic blood that Webb falsely found in Home as Found, he thus announced: “Mr. C. is the son of a highly respectable wheel-wright of New Jersey, who has frequently been heard to declare that he was proud of his occupation and only regretted that while he labored at it, he was unable to manufacture as good wagons as his brothers in the trade. He, at least, had no false pride, and little dreamt that his son would ever lay claim to be descended from a noble English family instead of a respectable hard-working Jersey mechanic.” Webb himself had not arrived in Cooperstown until 1813, four years after Judge Cooper’s death, so he cannot have heard such things from the novelist’s father directly. But he clearly had heard tell of the sometime wheelwright’s past from Otsego residents who had known him and heard him “lighten the way, with his anecdote and fun” (to recall the terms of the novelist’s vision of him in Canajoharie in 1834—LJ 3:41—discussed in chapter 6). In later articles, as Cooper’s war with the press intensified, Webb progressively demoted William Cooper. By 1841, he had become “a highly respectable but coarse and uneducated waggon-maker.” In the same article, Webb, who was now making swipes at Cooper’s mother, sarcastically described her as “the daughter of a notorious Huckster woman, who for a quarter of a century was known in the Philadelphia Market as the very best pedlar of green vegetables in that best of Markets.”7 Cooper, chancing to be in New York on November 22, 1839, the day Webb’s initial attack on Home as Found (and himself and his father) appeared, drafted a quick reply there for William Cullen Bryant’s Evening Post. Webb’s “pretended review,” he asserted, contained “a series of libellous falsehoods of a personal nature” (LJ 3:350). He was especially offended by the assertion that he had written Home as Found to curry favor, and thus make money, in Europe. But what surely injured Cooper most there was the complete, no doubt willful, misunderstanding of how hard he had labored to represent and defend the American republic via both his works and his deeds while abroad. Four years later, Cooper would narrate this episode in the following way: “Mr. Webb’s grossest libel on me, is for saying I have written a book abusive of my own country, with a view to make it sell in England. The gist of the libel is in the motive. It is not easy to conceive a more atrocious charge against a literary man. . . . I shall never basely abandon the rights of an author to condemn or stigmatize whatever he

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may conceive merits reprobation in society, whether it happen to be indigenous or not; but I defy any man to show a line in Home as Found that might not have been written by one who has the best interests of America uppermost in his mind” (LJ 4:241). Back in 1838, understandably, Cooper had felt immediate “indignation” at Webb, as he admitted in writing Bryant a second letter two days later, right after returning to Cooperstown. By that time, Cooper already had instructed his nephew to begin legal action against Webb (LJ 3:352). Having taken Webb’s attacks as a foretaste of what he now thought would be a general assault by the Whig press, Cooper began his counteroffensive immediately by reviving the original 1837 suits against Pellet and Barber. As noted above, Pellet’s death early in 1840 meant that the action against him was dropped without resolution. By that point, Barber had already been found guilty in a May 1839 jury trial at Fonda, in nearby Montgomery County, presided over by Judge John Willard of New York’s Fourth Circuit. Barber, found to have libeled Cooper not by anything he had written himself but rather by merely republishing Pellet’s article, deemed libelous in itself, was assessed damages in the amount of $400. The common practice of reprinting thus proved costly.8 Beforehand, Cooper’s victory had not looked like a sure thing, in large part because of the politically charged atmosphere in which he thought the matter would proceed. He confided to an acquaintance that his opponents had used the “most disgraceful means . . . to obtain a verdict, agents having been employed, as we have been told, to talk against me out of doors.” Cooper was obviously gratified, however, with the actual public reaction after the trial: “farmers came up and spoke to me, utter strangers, confessing that they had been prejudiced by the libel, and expressing their sense of the wrong that had been done.” During the proceedings, Barber’s counsel, Joshua A. Spencer of Utica, disingenuously claimed that the newspaperman, far from seeking to injure Cooper, had been trying to vindicate him “against the libel of the Chenango man.” This “ruse,” as Cooper called it, did not change the verdict but did have the effect of lessening the damages (LJ 3:377–78).9 When Barber later sought a new trial by appealing to the New York Supreme Court (functioning at that time as an appellate body), Cooper’s victory and his damage award were both sustained. It took some time, nonetheless, for the novelist to receive payment, as will be evident later.10 As it was Webb’s attack on Home as Found that determined Cooper to renew his action against Barber and see it to its end, once that end came the novelist turned toward Webb himself. The flamboyant Webb was the first editor outside the immediate Cooperstown area against whom Cooper took legal action, securing criminal libel charges against him in February 1839 and again in June.11 Action on the Webb indictments was much delayed. The original trial began on September 9, 1839, before three judges in the circuit court at Cooperstown. One

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of the editor’s various lawyers was William H. Averell, from whom in 1835 the novelist had bought back Otsego Hall, as we saw in chapter 6. Averell, as it happened, was also related to Webb by marriage, and he now used tactical moves of questionable legality to help his kinsman postpone the action brought at Cooper’s insistence and almost secure a change of venue.12 When the two cases were about to be tried in the same court a year later, a new, even more questionable difficulty delayed the proceedings. On August 29 and September 5, 1840, Park Benjamin of the New York Evening Signal and the weekly New World (himself already a target of a minor libel suit filed that spring) published an attack titled “Fenimore Cooper’s Libels on America and Americans.” This ostensible twopart review of the Home novels, much belated, not only was written in whole or in part by Webb but also, in a stunning and illegal effort to poison the jury pool in Webb’s upcoming criminal trial, was mailed to most of the forty-eight individuals on the current list of Otsego petit jurors.13 There is some disagreement between the Webb/Benjamin account of this 1840 session, the basis of my narrative here, and that sent by Cooper to his son Paul the day of the proceedings. The upshot, however, is evident: both indictments were forwarded to New York’s Supreme Court of Judicature, which ordered a change of venue, as Cooper himself now wished (see LJ 4:68–71).14 It was not until November 1841 that the issue was joined again, this time in Fonda, where the Barber trial had also taken place. On Cooper’s arrival there on Monday, November 15, he was expecting to carry on part of the prosecution himself, a plan (not unusual at the time) to which the court had previously agreed, but when the defense now objected he was not allowed to proceed (see LJ 4:197–98, 214). Instead, his nephew, who along with Otsego attorney Samuel Bowne served as what Webb’s paper called “Counsel for the People,” bore the brunt of the criminal case against the editor. The prosecution was opposed by Cooper’s old adversary, Ambrose Jordan, whom Webb had hired as counsel and who, after admitting Webb’s authorship of the 1838 reviews of Home as Found, spent eleven hours across two days reading both Home novels aloud, reportedly from cover to cover, interspersing comments that to his mind bore on Webb’s defense. Richard Cooper answered with his own long readings from his uncle ’s works (see LJ 4:191, 194).15 In at last charging the jury, Judge Willard emphasized several points. Under New York criminal law, his role was tightly circumscribed: the jury being empowered to interpret “both the Law and the Facts,” Willard was forbidden from attempting to interfere with its proceedings. However, he could and did “explain the Law of Libel.” (“A libel,” he asserted, “is a censorious publication intended to hold up to ridicule or to defame the party libelled.”) He likewise emphasized that certain libels were privileged, specifically book reviews in

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which “the writer or publisher confines his strictures to the author without reflecting upon the private character of the man.” It was Webb’s contention that his review of the Home novels was privileged in just this sense, the judge explained, and he acknowledged that the public had an interest in guaranteeing the press such freedom. A newspaper might be erroneous in its portrayal of a book, even harshly so, and still be within its rights. If, however, an editor under the pretense of attacking a book or its author (as author), maliciously attacked the private individual, he was guilty of libel. If we are to believe Webb’s report of Willard’s statement, on which I base my summary of the judge ’s charge to the jury, Willard provided thoughtful and candid counsel, explaining issues of law without seeking to steer the jury’s deliberations.16 Once the jury finally began deliberating early on Friday afternoon (November 19), it proved to be deadlocked. Cooper learned that two Whig jurymen were for conviction, along with three Democratic or independent jurors. When they reported their dilemma to Willard at seven that night, he sent them back, but at half past nine they reemerged with the same outcome. The foreman reported (contrary to what Cooper had heard) that eleven members had favored acquittal from the outset, but that the twelfth man, a Mr. Lansing (whom Cooper learned was an in-law of his old Yale friend Jacob Sutherland), “would never consent,” as Cooper put it, “that a man should be acquitted in so clear a case” (LJ 4:191–92). Webb’s own trial report quoted the foreman as adding that Lansing “was a very obstinate fellow and would not agree if we were kept out two weeks.”17 What of the other eleven? Cooper had the clear impression that Webb and his associates had “worked” them. Indeed, he said later that Webb entertained some jury members in his room with champagne following the trial’s abortive end (see LJ 4:246, 353). Webb expressed the hope that “Mr. Cooper . . . will now abandon the further prosecution of the indictment,” but Cooper was not about to do so. At the second trial on this indictment, conducted at Fonda a year and a half later (in May 1843), the jury again deadlocked and was discharged. When the case came up a third time at the Fonda circuit meeting the following November, however, the twelve jurors agreed, finding Webb not guilty—the only such verdict among the sixteen cases Cooper filed.18 The lengthy fight with Webb illustrates the general strategy of the Whig editors. They delayed Cooper when they could not beat him, and they tagteamed him, as Park Benjamin’s collusion with Webb proves. Furthermore, the overlap in the various cases provided editors extra ammunition for their own ongoing battles. This second issue may be demonstrated through a brief consideration of the long-delayed resolution of the original suit against Andrew Barber. Although his trial had taken place in May 1839, as indicated earlier, the defendant’s unsuccessful appeal delayed the final outcome for a further year.

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Not until July 25, 1840, as a result, was Cooper’s original judgment against Barber perfected, signaling that he could seek to secure his award. It was February 1841 before Cooper at last collected any money from the editor, however, and then not the amount the jury had awarded him but only barely enough to cover his costs. Cooper’s resourceful opponents hardly allowed him to enjoy even this partial victory. For one thing, after Cooper received his costs, Barber and his allies accused the novelist of heartlessly exacting his due from the supposedly penniless newspaperman. Having been forced to at last give up a small amount of what he owed, Barber went so far as to claim that what he viewed as Cooper’s persecution of him had pushed him out of business. In a piece of pure Whig propaganda that Barber published in Webb’s paper early in 1841, after he had made his partial payment, he asserted that Cooper’s victory had forced him to sell his press and types in July 1840. This was nonsense, however, as Cooper had not sought payment at that time. According to the novelist, the July sale was pressed instead by Barber’s financial backers—other Whigs who were also his political allies—once they learned that Cooper was in a position to eventually obtain execution on Barber. Moreover, in addition to making no attempt to pay Cooper’s damages with the proceeds of the July sale, Barber wrote Cooper on the thirteenth of that month, a week or so before the sale, to see whether the novelist would settle for payment of the costs of his suit (or, better yet, no payment at all) if Barber retracted his libels. Although Cooper would not give up recovery of his costs, through his nephew he informed Barber that he indeed would settle for that amount if Barber’s retraction was satisfactory. Barber, however, failed to accept or even reply to Cooper’s offer. The following November, Barber lost editorial control of the Otsego Republican and, he would later claim, devoted all his attention to settling his business accounts. But again he made no attempt to pay Cooper what he owed. Nor did Cooper seek payment at that time.19 It nonetheless was during this period that Barber began voicing his complaints about Cooper’s supposedly cruel mistreatment. Early in 1841, while mounting a successful campaign to win short-lived appointment as Cooperstown postmaster from President William Henry Harrison’s incoming Whig administration, Barber was claiming that he deserved the post because he had been, as Cooper summarized the story on hearing of it, “the victim of my oppression.” Incensed by Barber’s lie, and the fact that to date he had neither received nor asked for one cent from Barber, Cooper at last decided to claim his award by obtaining an execution on the Barber verdict in the first week of February 1841.20 Having heard that the supposedly impecunious Barber in fact had sufficient cash on hand to pay the costs of the suit (amounting to about $150), Cooper arranged for the Otsego sheriff, Henry Jones, to pry open his trunk and seize it (see LJ

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4:117). Barber, inserting two letters in Webb’s Morning Courier and New York Enquirer early in March 1841, soon began to complain very publicly about the confiscation. In the second of these, addressed to Cooper directly, Barber wallowed in self-pity. At one point, he thus gave an accounting of the pitiful objects he still retained after Cooper’s depredations: “one pair of pocket combs; one [pair] of shoe brushes, with box of blacking; one hair brush; [and an] almanac for 1840” (by now, a year out of date, one notes), along with two politically significant items: “one miniature log cabin, 1 1/2 by 2 feet,” and “a likeness of ‘Old Tip,’ ” Whig icons that by their transient fragility suggest the partisan nature of Barber’s complaints. Cooper acerbically concluded, in the letter to Bryant’s Evening Post in which he answered Barber: “from the fact that Mr. Barber exhibits a log cabin and a likeness of ‘old Tip,’ in his inventory, I infer that his letters are written in the expectation that they will aid him in the attempt to be made post master.” The story was over, except for the final message Cooper sent his wife about his sometime opponent: “Barber is annihilated, and my letter has brushed off that mosquitoe. Every body says that—every body but the editors who raised a clamor the other way” (LJ 4:129, 133).21

The Coopering of Thurlow Weed It is clear that those editors more or less colluded with one another out of professional and political solidarity and personal ties, and that in commenting on other cases they took advantage of every opportunity to attack Cooper. In several instances such commentary gave rise to fresh suits. This was particularly true in the case of Thurlow Weed, with whom Cooper’s fight was long and complex, but especially colorful. So closely connected were the various editors and the actions against them that, on the occasion in November 1841 when the first criminal indictment against Webb was finally tried in Fonda, the court also carried forward Cooper’s first civil suit against Weed. That suit derived from the fact that the Albany editor had reprinted Pellet’s article from the Chenango Telegraph in August 1837 and, six days later, Barber’s comments on it, to which he prefaced an abrasive paragraph of his own. Weed, asserting that Cooper already was “pretty generally despised abroad,” added that Cooper’s “act of meanness” with regard to Three Mile Point had brought down on himself the “contempt” and “scorn” of his neighbors.22 This bit of editorializing in the guise of reportage no doubt stung Cooper at the time, but not until early 1840 did he actively begin moving against Weed. At that time, he had his nephew ask for retractions, and when Weed refused, Cooper commenced legal proceedings (see LJ 4:4). Here, too, as with Webb, progress was halting. Although Cooper agreed the following

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February to allow Weed more time to prepare his case, when the trial was set to go forward at Fonda in May 1841, Weed gained a postponement until November by telling the judge that he had forgotten to prepare for it (see LJ 4:117, 153n3). Finally, six months later still, Weed stated that he was ready to proceed. When his case and Webb’s were called within an hour of the court’s opening at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, November 15, however, neither Weed nor his lawyer was present. The novelist explained to his son that another attorney, Charles Sacia of nearby Canajoharie, “appeared for Mr. Weed to say that his counsel would certainly arrive” on the next train, “that Mr. Weed’s daughter was very ill,” but that he promised to come up with his attorney. “Under the circumstances,” Cooper added for Paul, “I consented to wait till next day” (LJ 4:191). Yet Weed was again absent the following morning. The editor’s much later Autobiography explained that, just as he was about to board the Fonda train on Tuesday with his counsel, he received “a hurried message” informing him that his daughter’s “illness had suddenly assumed an alarming aspect.” Weed sent an explanatory note to Webb, then in Fonda, and Webb arranged for Sacia to again ask the court for a delay, promising that the plaintiff would arrive as soon as his daughter’s condition allowed.23 Judge Willard, growing suspicious, asked Sacia whether he would swear out an affidavit affirming the truthfulness of the note from Weed he claimed to have seen that day. When Sacia refused to do so, Willard instructed the jury to find Weed guilty by default, as it did, awarding Cooper $400 in damages (see LJ 4:200–201, 372). The Whig press, following up on its methods in the Barber case, professed great outrage over Cooper’s alleged callousness in the face of Weed’s family crisis. But Weed would have had no delay whatever had it not been for Cooper. As the novelist explained in a letter to the Albany Argus at the time: “When the case was called [on Monday], we merely said we were ready, and when the statement was made that Mr. Weed was detained by the indisposition of a child, the court distinctly refused to grant a delay on such a plea presented in such a manner.—My counsel were opposed to the delay, believing the whole to be a trick. An appeal was then made personally to myself, and I consented to a delay until the cars should arrive on the following day, in direct opposition to the advice of my counsel, openly expressed in court, and at a moment when the judge said that this delay entirely rested with myself.” Cooper stated that he and Sacia explicitly understood that the novelist was to have his default ruling on Tuesday “unless someone should appear to defend the suit” for Weed. When no one did so after the second train had arrived from Albany that day, Cooper moved the cause. Sacia asked for another delay, but Willard would not grant the request “without the consent” of both parties.” Cooper went on, “I then stated, I left the matter with the court, and that I had no faith in the excuses” (LJ 4:200–201).24

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Years later, Weed wrote that the newspaper press “commented severely upon Mr. Cooper’s conduct in taking advantage of my constrained absence,” but he was being disingenuous at best.25 For one thing, Weed played a major role in stimulating and disseminating the more severe of the press’s comments. Soon after the judge’s ruling, he thus “reprinted” an on-the-spot account of the November trial from Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune asserting that, when Weed failed to appear on the first morning, Charles Sacia had appealed “to Mr. Cooper’s humanity” in the hope of gaining a delay. Of course, the article went on, such an appeal was “unavailing”—only Judge Willard’s intervention, it claimed, allowed the case to be continued to Tuesday. Referring to the default award Cooper received at the trial, the Tribune’s correspondent added: “The value of Mr. Cooper’s character, therefore, has been judicially ascertained. It is worth exactly four hundred dollars.” Although Greeley had indeed published this harsh new attack in his paper, in fact Weed himself had written it once he finally arrived at Fonda (some hours after the default ruling in his case) and then sent it to Greeley for publication, as Greeley acknowledged in his Autobiography. Weed, who certainly knew that a delay had been arranged for on Monday with Cooper’s generous consent (Sacia had written him to that effect), chose instead to spread the fresh libel that Cooper was unfeeling and lacking in humanity. In reprinting his covert Tribune article in his own Evening Journal, Weed piled on further lies in several new paragraphs describing Cooper as having given up his profitless career of “book making” in favor of exacting “legal black-mail” from journalists. If Weed was afraid that these new assaults on Cooper’s character might bring new suits, he did not show it; indeed, he taunted that Cooper “may again prosecute us if he wants, and thinks he can obtain $400 more.”26 Cooper soon obliged Weed by filing a new suit for the insertion of the expanded Tribune article in Weed’s paper. This suit, slated for trial in Ballston (near Saratoga) in December 1842, was settled out of court when, at the last minute, Weed agreed to retract his libelous statements. But the retraction came at the end of a year during which the Albany editor had remained a fruitful source of fresh provocations. Starting at the end of 1841, right after the Fonda trial, he regularly reprinted other papers’ attacks on Cooper, many of which repeated and indeed embellished the false charge of Cooper’s inhumanity that Weed himself had fabricated in his Fonda report. The editor exhibited extraordinary zeal in carrying out his nefarious purpose. The day after reprinting James W. Webb’s long report of his own November 1841 trial at Fonda, Weed chose an article concerning the default verdict against himself from William L. Stone ’s Commercial Advertiser. Titled “Liberty of the Press and Libel Suits,” this piece falsely claimed that Cooper, though informed of the plight of Weed’s daughter, had adamantly refused to delay the proceedings. The following day, Weed

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reprinted a similar article from Benjamin’s New World that, with Benjamin’s typical venom, paid racist tribute to Cooper’s literary art: Sacia “appealed to Mr. Cooper’s humanity,” Benjamin wrote, “but he might as well have appealed to the reddest of the Great Novelist’s Indians, when the war paint was on him, and the scalps of the palefaces hung reeking at his belt. . . . What cared the author of ‘Home as Found’ that his enemy stood watching over the bed of his suffering child—that his heart was pained to bursting—and his brows wet with the dew of anguish? Could the life of a child be weighed against a libel upon the Most Illustrious Novelist of America?” Day by day, the recirculation of such malicious articles via Weed’s paper continued. Mostly Cooper ignored them, although on their basis he did file several more libel suits against Weed by midDecember (see LJ 4:216).27 In addition, when Weed reprinted from the Oneida Whig on December 3, 1841, an article that pointedly claimed Cooper had beaten Weed in “circumstances . . . such as no gentleman—no man possessing the feelings of common humanity would have availed himself [of],” the novelist responded with the last of his suits. The editor of that Utica paper, Rufus R. Northway, received a visit from a deputy sheriff of Oneida County on December 17 announcing that he, too, had been sued for libel.28 Weed at one point titled his anti-Cooper reprints “Effinghamania” but soon adopted the more colorful heading of “Cooperage,” which Horace Greeley later, and more famously, employed. By the middle of January 1842, Weed was speaking of “the cooperage department” as a regular feature of his paper: on January 19, to give a particularly notable example, he gathered together under this heading excerpts from some ten other papers. So well known was this element of the Albany Evening Journal at the time, with its suggestion that Cooper was not a literary figure but rather a barrel maker, that other editors gleefully deployed it, crediting Weed for its coinage. It also was picked up, for a time at least, by the general public. A circus performer doing stand-up routines in Albany just before Christmas 1841 brought this humorous complaint from Weed: “If that chap in spotted jacket and trowsers at the Amphitheatre don’t stop perpetrating his conundrums about me and Mr. Cooper, that ‘mild and handsome’ gentleman will be down upon him with the but-end [sic] of a libel suit! The man who has ‘invoked the vengeance of the law’ against the Press, won’t suffer a ‘Clown’ to keep asking the People ‘Why the Editor of the Evening Journal is like an unfinished barrel?’ ” The answer, of course, was that Weed hadn’t yet been fully Coopered.29 Eventually, he would be. In the spring of 1842 came the first in a series of victories by which the novelist repeatedly punished Weed for his libelous reprintings. In April, at the circuit court in Cooperstown, the editor was judged culpable for taking up an “item of ‘Public Opinion’ in the Louisville Journal”

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that portrayed Cooper as having drawn down “upon himself a liberal share of the public odium and contempt.”30 Weed also lost in a second trial over a trio of pieces published in his paper early in December 1841: an article from the Ithaca Chronicle commenting on the Fonda trials (and repeating the inhumanity charge); another from Greeley’s Tribune respecting the libel suit Cooper had filed for the Tribune’s publication of Weed’s anonymous Fonda report; and a third in which Weed excerpted, from the preface of C. Edwards Lester’s recent English travel book, a derogatory anecdote regarding Cooper, who was said to have angrily turned away from his door in Cooperstown a subscription agent for Lester’s book.31 Cooper won his three April 1842 suits against Weed, although he received only small damages. In May, the retrial of the 1841 Fonda suit produced similar results; Cooper’s victory was vindicated afresh, but he suffered a reduction of the original award. The following September, in Cooperstown, Weed was tried yet again—this time for reprinting two of the first “Cooperage” articles. One was a piece from the Buffalo Commercial Advertiser commenting on James W. Webb’s account of his own part in the Fonda trial. “If the account in the ‘Courier and Enquirer’ is true,” the Buffalo editor asserted in the sentence Cooper singled out as libelously reprinted by Weed, “Mr. Cooper has exhibited a want of manhood and feeling alike disgraceful to him as a man and gentleman.” The other reprint for which Weed was sued was Benjamin’s “scalps of the palefaces” attack in the New World, which, itself inspired by Weed’s anonymous trial report in the Tribune, Weed had reprinted in the same issue of his own paper as the Buffalo libel. Cooper won another $200 from Weed at this trial.32 Altogether, Cooper had beaten Weed five times so far. Furthermore, by Weed’s own count at the end of 1842, the novelist had two more suits pending against him, while Richard Cooper was about to proceed with a third, and yet others seemed likely.33 Eager to forestall yet more adverse outcomes, in particular from a suit pending right then at the Saratoga circuit court meeting at Ballston, Weed proposed binding arbitration to Cooper, a process in which the novelist and another editor, William L. Stone, had engaged earlier in 1842, as we shall see. Weed named three possible arbiters, all of them New Yorkers: Judge Greene C. Bronson of the New York Supreme Court, who had ruled against Andrew M. Barber in the latter’s appeal; Whig politician John Young, presently in Congress and a future New York governor; and Eliphalet Nott, legendary president of Union College and a sometime teacher in Otsego County. Weed apparently envisioned a formal process of arbitration, but Cooper, probably feeling he had nothing to negotiate with a man he had beaten so often, had no interest in that. Instead, he let it be known that he would accept a sweeping retraction from Weed in return for ceasing the Saratoga suit and abandoning any others then in contemplation.

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Furthermore, Cooper named as his agent in the matter the respected jurist and former congressman Daniel Cady of Johnstown, New York, who was instructed to decide on the “nature of the reparation” Cooper was to receive from Weed. Because the Ballston case stemmed from Weed’s November 22, 1841, reprinting of his own anonymous article from the Tribune, with its added comments on Cooper’s supposedly heartless behavior during the Fonda trial, Cady instructed Weed to include that article and his additions to it in the article containing his retraction. In the retraction proper, dictated to him by Cady, Weed explained: “The above article having been published in the Albany Evening Journal of the 22d November 1841, on a review of the matter and a better knowledge of the facts, I feel it to be my duty to withdraw the injurious imputations it contains on the character of Mr. Cooper. It is my wish that this retraction be as broad as the charges.” There followed another paragraph in which Weed, again at Cady’s instance, extended the retraction to cover “various other articles reflecting on Mr. Cooper’s character,” by which he referred to the many “Effinghamania” and “Cooperage” reprints with which he had filled his paper across the end of 1841 and the beginning of 1842. Weed, in language clearly meant to satisfy Cooper, avowed that he felt it “due to that gentleman to withdraw every charge that injuriously affects his standing in [the] community.”34

Arbitration The interconnections among the Whig editors and their suits forged important social and institutional patterns in the larger controversy. So did the earlier links between Cooper and various of his opponents. He did not know all the editors personally. For instance, before leaving for France in 1826 Cooper had not known Park Benjamin because he was twenty years Cooper’s junior and, like Barber and Pellet and Horace Greeley, would enter the public sphere only during Cooper’s absence. The other major targets of Cooper’s lawsuits were somewhat older, and he had known all of them to a lesser or greater degree prior to 1826. Oddly, all of them had passed time in Cooperstown. Their involvement in the lawsuits, while rooted in the political conflicts of the mid- and later 1830s, stemmed in part from this fact. They knew or knew about Cooper and his family, and they knew Three Mile Point as something other than a venue figuring in a press dispute—none of them, for instance, would have made the kinds of mistakes Horace Greeley did as to the nature and location of the point.35 They also knew many former and current residents of Otsego. James W. Webb, tied to the town by marriage as well, especially saw himself as defending the character of the local residents from unfair criticism. The conflict between Cooper and his fellow townspeople thus was of personal interest to Webb and, less immediately,

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to Weed and Stone as well. Had chance not given the three editors this biographical link, it seems likely that they would not have teamed up quite so vigorously against the novelist. The argument started when a couple of rural papers pilloried Cooper for what he did and said locally and then escalated because Albany or Manhattan editors who had connections to that community, not just to the Whig Party, joined the fray. That said, Cooper did not know two of these men, Weed and Webb, with anything like familiarity. When Webb wrote in his 1838 review of the Home novels, “We know Mr. Cooper well,” Cooper promptly and somewhat stuffily replied: “The editor of the Courier & Enquirer writes as if we were well acquainted. This I deny; he is my junior, and I knew him slightly when a boy, and slightly when a young man. I do not think that I have spoken to him, on five different occasions, in fifteen years” (LJ 3:351).36 Webb, who was the youngest of the three editors in question (he had been born in 1802, Weed five years before that, and Stone in 1792), made no direct answer to this denial. But another Whig editor who was closely allied with him, Constans Freeman Daniels of the NewYork Gazette and General Advertiser, reported in 1838 that “the only time he ever met Mr. cooper was at his table [i.e., Webb’s table] in company with Chanceller [sic] [James] kent, washington irving, [Fitz-Greene] hallack [sic], and other distinguished citizens, who were invited to meet [Cooper] after his return from Europe on a day designated by himself!” So Webb’s lawyer, Joshua A. Spencer, summarized Freeman’s story during the trial leading to Webb’s 1843 acquittal in Fonda, in an effort to prove that Webb had liked Cooper and respected his accomplishments and therefore could not be suspected of harboring ill will toward him. At Spencer’s introduction of the anecdote during the trial, according to Webb’s account, Cooper “was seen instantly to whisper with his counsel Mr. bowne.” On addressing the jury, Bowne asserted on Cooper’s authority that Spencer was wrong—that, owing to Webb’s “abuse of him while in Europe, he had refused to recognize or hold intercourse with [Webb] on his return!” Cooper appears to have said nothing in response to this 1843 version of the anecdote, but the story itself no doubt explains why, just after Daniels’s claim originally appeared in print, he was contemplating a libel suit against “a man by the name of Daniels” (LJ 3:381).37 His dealings with Webb to one side, it is true that Cooper had been well-acquainted prior to 1826 with the final key editor he sued, William L. Stone. And this fact complicated the progress and resolution of the legal issues between them. Born in the Hudson Valley town of New Paltz, though of New England stock (most of Cooper’s opponents were of Yankee derivation, a fact he must have known), Stone had been close enough to Cooper by the time of the latter’s departure for Europe that the two expected to carry on their relationship long

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distance. Stone agreed to send copies of his own and other New York papers to Cooper in Paris, while Cooper was to write reports from Paris for Stone ’s Commercial Advertiser. Cooper thus promised in an early note from France that he would send Stone “things worth having,” adding “and do you send me papers—papers—papers” (LJ 1:198n).38 But if the two men were on good terms when Cooper left and for some time after he established himself abroad, before Cooper returned home Stone was already attacking his old friend. Cooper saw and took umbrage at a piece in the Commercial Advertiser of February 1, 1833, that criticized him for meddling in French affairs. Indeed, when Cooper first saw it he thought it “much more worthy of attention than the pitiful affair” of Gould-as-Cassio’s assault on The Bravo (discussed in chapter 5) and believed it written by his nemesis from the Finance Controversy, Levett Harris (LJ 2:378).39 On returning to New York, Cooper was to feature the article in A Letter to His Countrymen, reprinting it in that pamphlet’s Appendix B and offering an elaborate commentary on it in the body of his book (see LTC 45–51, 111–13). Also in that book, he called into question Stone’s “consistency and sincerity” (LTC 49). This earlier argument with Stone provides the clearest evidence of the bearing of the Finance Controversy on Cooper’s general fight with the Whig editors. Stone’s falling away from Cooper was more notable because he had such strong Otsego ties. His father, a Presbyterian minister and early associate (and kinsman) of the legendary Rev. Daniel Nash of Cooperstown, moved to central New York in 1793 and four years later was residing in the western part of Otsego. When young William Stone was sixteen or seventeen years old, he became an apprentice at the Cooperstown Federalist. Within a few years he had impressed editor John H. Prentiss so much that he was sent to the Mohawk Valley to help run another paper Prentiss had purchased. Soon Stone became editor and part owner of that paper, the Herkimer American, which he ran with the help of another ex-apprentice in Prentiss’s Cooperstown shop—none other than Thurlow Weed. After selling his interest in the Herkimer paper, Stone ran newspapers in Hudson, Albany, and then Hartford before, in the spring of 1821, he became editor and part owner of the New York Commercial Advertiser. This remained his position until he died in 1844.40 Even after all these relocations, Stone retained strong Otsego memories. In 1829, returning there during a trip to Niagara, he wrote in his diary, “Cooperstown was the favorite spot of my boyhood.” He then registered the sad decline in the fortunes of the larger Cooper clan but consoled himself with the reflection that “my friend James F. Cooper, . . . now residing in Florence,” had overcome the catastrophe triumphantly and now held “a proud name among the distinguished writers of the age.”41 Stone’s Otsego background probably had made him especially attractive to Cooper when the two men wound up in New York City

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together from 1822 on. That Stone was a strong supporter of DeWitt Clinton, like Cooper, no doubt added to their mutual admiration. If politics helped link them, however, politics would also drive them apart. In the 1828 presidential race Stone supported John Quincy Adams rather than Andrew Jackson, and on “the removal of the deposits by Jackson, in 1834” he followed Adams into the new Whig Party. That issue may have marked the point past which reconciliation became impossible for Cooper and Stone.42 Their specific fight began, as indicated above, when Stone appeared to take sides against Cooper at the tail end of the Finance Controversy earlier in the decade. In an April 1833 letter to Samuel F. B. Morse that was published in the Albany Daily Advertiser that June, Cooper directly criticized Stone for what he viewed as the attack on himself in February (see LJ 2:376–81). Stone did not initiate further hostilities for some time, perhaps for the very reason that he once had known Cooper so well. When he reentered the ring, however, he did so vigorously. In the wake of Cooper’s victory over Barber in May 1839, Stone thus began a campaign to collect an “Effingham Libel Fund” from other editors in order to defray Cooper’s court awards and soon was being nominated by colleagues as its treasurer. According to the New-York Gazette, the novelist was incensed by Stone’s proposal: “Mr. Cooper, the gentleman who is pretty generally designated by the press as ‘The handsome Mr. Effingham,’ has given it as his opinion that the proposal to raise a fund for the purpose of paying off the damages he may sustain by the Newspaper libels, is itself an indictable offense, and it may be so—very likely, indeed, to be so, since his valuable opinion has been given—we take this opportunity to implore his clemency.” By that August, Stone responded to Cooper’s warning, admitting that he had initiated the drive and pretending to be frightened of “Mr. Effingham’s” threats.43 When Cooper sued Stone, it was not for the Effingham Libel Fund, however, but rather for articles on his naval history that ran in the Commercial Advertiser on June 8, 11, 14, and 19 in 1839 and were reprinted in Stone’s semiweekly New-York Spectator from June 13 to June 20 (see LJ 3:405n1 and BLE 11). The series, written by William A. Duer, then president of Columbia College, was focused, as noted in the previous chapter, on a single discrete but not minor episode in the history— namely, the 1813 Battle of Lake Erie. Although a decided American victory, that battle had given rise to a heated controversy that by no means had been forgotten by 1839. In chapter 10, I devote more attention to the Battle of Lake Erie and that controversy, which engulfed Cooper well beyond the limits of the legal fight with Stone. For the present, however, we may consider the Stone-Duer-Cooper tangle in its own terms. Cooper responded to Duer’s articles in a June 25 letter to John H. Prentiss for the Freeman’s Journal, stating his intent: “These articles contain calumnies of

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a personal nature, and nearly affecting my character as an historian, and a man of integrity, that can only be properly met elsewhere”—that is, in court (LJ 3:399).44 Stone soon had the message. He announced in August that Cooper was hinting at a civil suit; he also had heard that Cooper, “in his street and travelling conversations,” was threatening to ask for sizable damages. Moreover, Stone had “learned in a round-about way that the estimable Mr. Cooper” was also thinking of pressing for a criminal indictment for Stone ’s proposed libel fund. Stone replied sarcastically, “Oh don’t, Mr. Effingham—don’t fix us in that way.”45 Despite his eagerness to grapple with Stone, it took Cooper nearly a year from the appearance of Duer’s articles until he actually proceeded. The delay may have been part of his larger strategy. Certainly Stone did not like waiting for the fight: James F. Beard thus notes, “When Cooper delayed notice of the case . . . from July 1839 to April 1840, the editor was indignant” (LJ 4:4).46 Some preliminary steps were taken in the Stone case in the spring and summer of the latter year. In July, Stone entered a demurrer at a hearing in Utica, the purpose being to cause a dismissal of the case. Because he did not succeed, the matter progressed to the New York Supreme Court at its Albany session in November.47 Cooper’s original declaration had singled out two particular parts of Duer’s long series in the Commercial Advertiser as especially libelous: the whole of the first article, published on June 8, 1839 (and written at least in part by Stone), and most of the final paragraph of the last article of June 19. The former piece declared that Cooper had downplayed the heroism of Oliver H. Perry in the Battle of Lake Erie in order to boost the reputation of his secondin-command, Jesse D. Elliott, with whom Perry and then, following that officer’s death in 1820, Perry’s many vociferous supporters had sustained a long, bitter argument. The June 8 article further proclaimed that Cooper had become “utterly regardless of justice and propriety as a man.” The one published on June 19, calling Cooper “his own worst enemy,” accused him of having put forward “partial and deceptive representations” in lieu of a full and complete history of the battle in question.48 In his surviving report of the November session, Judge Esek Cowen held that the Commercial Advertiser had imputed to Cooper a variety of despicable traits: “a disregard of justice and propriety, an insensibility to his obligations as a historian, the infatuation of vanity, the madness of passion, and low and paltry purposes.” While Cowen observed that the June 8 article’s “slander [was] somewhat diluted, by being mixed up with a small portion of what may perhaps be legitimate commentary” on Cooper’s history, he forcefully concluded that its “defamatory matter” clearly met “the definition of a libel upon a private person.”49 In regard to the other passage singled out in Cooper’s declaration, this court’s ruling similarly confirmed his complaint. That passage, calling Cooper

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“his own worst enemy,” claimed he had done “his friend” Elliott no favor by resuscitating a controversy that had been all but forgotten for nearly two decades: “After the lapse of eighteen years he has thought proper to revive the memory of events which, for the reputation and interest of that friend, should have been buried in oblivion—and after a whole generation nearly has passed away, and many of the witnesses of the transaction have gone with it, he has deliberately penned an account of it, intended for posterity, from the statements of Captain Elliott and the evidence of his witnesses, and quoted in their support the official encomiums of Com. Perry, without affording the least hint or intimation to the readers of his history that the former had been falsified, and the latter retracted.” Although Duer’s contention that the Perry-Elliott controversy had long lain dormant was a gross distortion, Cooper did not specifically object to this point. Rather, his complaint centered on Duer’s characterization of his history as “partial and deceptive” on the subject of Lake Erie. As Cowen summarized the court’s opinion, Duer represented Cooper “as deliberately penning an untrue account of the battle.” While conceding that the libel in this count was “less extended and less loaded with epithets than the first,” the court found it “sufficiently obvious.”50 The court thus supported Cooper’s views, noting that he correctly “complained that he had been personally slandered, under the pretense of reviewing his works.” Obviously, the point at which a negative review of a book became a personal attack on its author could be difficult to determine. Stone ’s counsel had attempted to persuade the court that the Commercial Advertiser’s “criticism [was] fair and just,” that it “reflected upon the plaintiff ’s character no farther than it was truly presented by his works,” and that Stone was “justifiable even though he had ridiculed the plaintiff.” The court refused to rule on whether that particular argument went too far. Cowen conceded that an author who had made himself ridiculous might justifiably be ridiculed by the press. But he also noted that Stone in his demurrer had admitted having “falsely and maliciously” assailed Cooper. The judgment continued, “It is difficult to read the articles as set forth in the counts without seeing at once that they are direct and undisguised attacks upon the moral character of the plaintiff by name.”51 Although finding for Cooper in this hearing, the New York Supreme Court allowed Stone to pay the costs and enter a formal plea on the charges, after which the suit would proceed to jury trial. But Stone had no interest in this possibility. His attorneys, recognizing that the Commercial Advertiser libels “were so gross,” had feared to involve a jury from the outset and had resorted to the demurrer largely because it allowed a direct appeal to the bench. If they could win that way, so be it; otherwise, they probably would not win at all.52 Having no way to proceed in court without incurring a pretty clear loss, Stone therefore was eager to

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find some other resolution—namely, through extralegal arbitration. Although it is often asserted that Cooper first suggested that recourse, a year or so afterward he said, quite directly, “The proposition to arbitrate, came from Mr. Stone.” Each man was to select one arbitrator on his own, after which they were to choose a mutually acceptable third. In the document just quoted, Cooper wrote, “There was some delay in selecting the arbitrators, as I felt it was unwise, as well as improper, to choose any near personal friend of my own, and my acquaintance goes very little beyond friends. At length Mr. Stone selected Mr. [Samuel A.] Foot, to whom I had no objection, and I chose Mr. [Samuel] Stevens.” Both these men were attorneys—Foot in New York, Stevens in Albany. For the third pick, Stone’s counsel suggested another Manhattanite, attorney Daniel A. Lord. Cooper, cognizant of Lord’s high professional standing but ignorant of him otherwise, consulted his longtime friend Peter A. Jay. On Jay’s strong recommendation, Cooper agreed and the panel was set. Its members, Cooper added, were all Whigs, a point he found reassuring because “a decision of three Whigs would be more creditable to me, than a decision of a court divided in politics.”53 According to Foot, the arbitrators’ public hearing took place in the U.S. courtroom in New York’s City Hall. Attended by an “audience of ladies and gentlemen,” it occupied several days in the middle of May 1842. Cooper, fresh from fighting Thurlow Weed in the retrial of the original Fonda suit from the previous November, took an active role by his nephew’s side. He wrote his wife on the fourteenth, before the hearing commenced, that he felt “great confidence in the power of truth.” When the arbitration opened late on the afternoon of Monday, May 16, Cooper delivered a two-hour speech. Following him came one of his lawyers, William W. Campbell of Cherry Valley, who (after “some witnesses” called by the Cooper team) began his summary. Campbell finished with that on Wednesday, after which Richard Cooper took up issues of the law, only to be cut short by the arbitrators, a sign (thought Richard’s uncle) that they agreed with his general take on the matter. Expatriate Canadian Marshall S. Bidwell, then living in New York City, opened for Stone at eight on Wednesday night and spoke again on Thursday (“about five hours, in all”). The naval historian then began his closing argument, finishing after ten o’clock. Having occupied about two hours then, he resumed again on Friday afternoon, speaking for another six hours (LJ 4:289–90). The whole affair was highly dramatic. Cooper thought that the audience, small in size early in the week owing to the lack of initial press reports, grew in size over the subsequent days. Once he had given his opening argument, which he thought “took” pretty well, word of the proceeding must have spread through the city. The result was that “many attended in expectation,” as Cooper soon wrote his wife, “of hearing my summing up.” Nor was the audience that day

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composed simply of anonymous individuals. On Thursday, “numbers of Duer’s friends appeared,” Cooper continued, along with “some twenty of my most active enemies.” Among that choice group was his old sparring partner from Otsego, Ambrose L. Jordan. That man “took a seat directly opposite to me,” Cooper informed Susan, “and for three hours, his eyes were riveted on Bidwell. When I rose, he was within six feet of me. For half an hour I could see that his eyes were fastened on my countenance, then his head dropped and for an hour it was concealed. He could stand it no longer, got up, and went out.” As to Stone— his “countenance changed, became gloomy, Duer went out, and I had not spoken the two hours, before all that set vanished.” Having argued many of his opponents out of the court on Thursday, Cooper returned on Friday to find “a throng” of people there to listen to him. “I now spoke six hours,” he told Susan, “and all that time, the most profound silence prevailed. I do not believe a soul left the room. When I closed there was a burst of applause that the constables silenced, and a hundred persons crowded round me, two thirds of whom were strangers” (LJ 4:290–91). Cooper had refought the battle in what clearly was a very skilled performance. Proclaimed the weekly publication Brother Jonathan a few days later: “Mr. C. argued his own case, and in so doing showed a clear knowledge of naval tactics and history, and a degree of legal knowledge, and tact in bringing it to bear, which very much astonished those who had considered him as a mere novelist.”54 The young writer and critic Henry T. Tuckerman was among the audience. He had met Cooper once, but hardly knew him well. Nor was he immune to rumors that had been circulating against Cooper since the late 1820s. He nevertheless found the closing argument an astonishing feat. Recognizing that Cooper had a tough job, given the personal nature of the alleged libel and the fact that Perry “had long been one of the most cherished of American victors,” he perhaps expected that Cooper would stumble. But Cooper did not. Tuckerman continued: “We could not but admire the self-possession, coolness, and vigor with which the author . . . played the lawyer. Almost alone in his opinion,—the tide of public sentiment against his theory of the battle, and the popular sympathy wholly with the received traditions of that memorable day,—he stood collected, dignified, uncompromising; examined witnesses, quoted authorities, argued nautical and naval precedents, with a force and facility which would have done credit to an experienced barrister.” Tuckerman found in the closing argument ample evidence of Cooper’s “self-esteem,” even “dogmatism,” traits for which Cooper was being pilloried in the press. But such things were intimately mixed with the skill at invention and narration that had made him such a successful author, as Tuckerman noticed: “when he described a battle, and illustrated his views by diagrams, it was like a chapter in one of his own sea-tales, so minute, graphic,

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and spirited was the picture he drew. The dogmatism was more than compensated by the picturesqueness of the scene; his self-complacency was exceeded by his wonderful ability. He quoted Cooper’s ‘Naval History’ as if it were Blackstone; he indulged in reminiscences; he made digressions, and told anecdotes; he spoke of the manoeuvres of the vessels, of the shifting of the wind, of the course of the fight, like one whose life had been passed on the quarter-deck.”55 Cooper had rarely made public presentations across the first three decades of his career. There had been some after-dinner speeches and a handful of other occasional presentations. And of course he had appeared recently in various of the libel trials, at times before sizable audiences. But the Stone arbitration hearing represented the single most important public speech in his life to that point, and it clearly was a smash hit. Not only did it wow young Tuckerman and the throng that applauded and rushed forward—it also clearly dispirited and sank the enemies who had gathered to stare Cooper down into failure, to unnerve him and then celebrate his loss. The way Ambrose Jordan averted his gaze, hung his head, and then left in seeming despair; the way Stone himself turned grim; the departure of Duer and his ilk—all this was also evidence of Cooper’s stunning success. More than mere success, however, was at issue for Cooper, more even than the principles he rightly fought to maintain. From a seeming pariah, the celebrated novelist had assumed a new public persona in a profound effort at reinvention. Hence the fan mail Cooper received in the summer of 1844 from the radical Pennsylvania novelist and newspaperman George Lippard, who wrote in part: “For three or four years, I have seen you, engaged in a hand-tohand fight with the bravoes of the press, I have seen you attacked with all the low abuse and vile billingsgate of these paragraphical-blackguards who strut and fume along the kennel of New York Literature, and for one man, I wished to record my testimony on the side of decency and intellect.” The letter accompanied a copy of Lippard’s recent Revolutionary War novel, Herbert Tracy, or the Legend of the Black Rangers, which he had dedicated to Cooper.56 That tribute came some time after the arbitration but probably stemmed in part from Cooper’s widely publicized performance at the hearing. In 1842, Cooper’s stunning speeches certainly affected the outcome. Foot reported, “We made our award on the 16th of June,” three weeks or so after the weeklong hearing ended. The arbitrators agreed that Cooper was entitled to the verdict and therefore the predetermined award. They furthermore held that his account of the Battle of Lake Erie in the naval history “was written in a spirit of impartiality and justice.” And they concluded that because Duer had not “fulfilled the obligations of a reviewer,” his articles in Stone’s Commercial Advertiser were “untrue in several particulars.” Foot, the arbitrator chosen by Stone, did not completely agree with Stevens and Lord on the last point. He also disagreed substantially

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with two other conclusions they reached: namely, that Cooper “had faithfully fulfilled his obligations as a historian” and that his “narrative of the Battle of Lake Erie was true in its essential facts.” On the first of these points, Foot explained: “I am convinced by the evidence that the plaintiff intended to discharge those obligations, but am of [the] opinion that, from error in judgment or some other cause not impeaching the purity of his intent, he has failed to do so in one point.” He did not accept Cooper’s conclusions as to the conduct of Elliott and also thought Cooper should have mentioned the criticism Elliott had received for his conduct. Foot concluded, “I can freely add that this is the only particular in which it appears to me that [Cooper] has failed to fulfill the high trust which he assumed when he undertook to write the history of the navy of his country.” Finally, Foot said that Cooper’s narrative gave an “erroneous impression that Captain Elliott’s conduct in the battle met with universal approbation.”57 At the time the arbitrators reached their decision, Cooper, back in Otsego, received advance word from future Whig congressman and New York governor Hamilton Fish, who sent him a quick summary with a note: “I have this moment received the award in the suit against Stone. I have barely time to run my eyes over it, and to say that they decide eight points, every one of them in your favor” (CORR 2:475).58 On June 19, before he had seen the award proper, Cooper in turn quickly shared these sketchy details with Elliott (see LJ 4:294). Later in the month, when he was back in New York City, he picked up more intelligence on the subject and then read the actual document in the version Stone published in his own paper. Writing his wife from Manhattan before going on to Philadelphia, Cooper gave her the short verdict: “The arbitration has been a clear triumph.” He also shared gossip. He had seen Daniel Lord earlier that day—“and he says Foot—entre nous—is a fool. His published opinions are any thing but forcible, or elaborate. I can drive a coach and six through them, but they seem to have made no impression” (LJ 4:296–97).59 That night, having finally digested the full document, Cooper wrote a letter to Bryant for the Evening Post. In the editorial matter Stone added to the award as printed in his paper was an offer—or more like a challenge—from William A. Duer. Evidently distressed by being called a liar (in effect) by the arbitrators, the president of Columbia College (now Columbia University) wanted the dispute revived and sent back for adjudication in the courts, with a jury to decide the issue. If Cooper would agree to vacate the arbitration award and accept this challenge, Duer would guarantee to pay him double should the jury find for Cooper (see LJ 4:298–300). Cooper had been waiting for the Stone matter to reach its long-delayed end so that he could turn to other tasks connected with the reception of the History of the Navy. His response to the Edinburgh Review for its comparison of his own history with William James’s Naval Occurrences had just

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come out, in two parts, in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review. The other separate items he imagined writing (which would eventually aggregate into The Battle of Lake Erie) might never get produced were he to be bogged down yet again in the Commercial Advertiser business. Furthermore, Cooper was piqued. Duer had accused the arbitration panel of having given him the decision because of its collective ignorance of nautical matters. On this issue Cooper was direct: “the argument is absurd, advanced by the party it is.” He went on to point to confusions on the part of the reviewer about the most basic nautical issues. But he also may have been hinting at Duer’s speckled career at sea forty years earlier.60 In any case, Cooper wanted nothing of the man’s idea (LJ 4:299). In dealing with it in Bryant’s paper, he was careful to distinguish Stone as Duer’s messenger from Stone in his own right. Stone himself had tried to put distance between himself and the message by how he introduced it: “We did not intend to say another word about the decision of the arbitrators in our controversy with Mr. Cooper; nor is it without reluctance that we now advert to it again.” Having conveyed Duer’s double-or-nothing challenge, Stone similarly backed away from it, for “no consideration” would induce him to go through the “trouble and vexation” again.61

“A Cooper’stown Boy” Although nothing came of Duer’s proposition, within a few weeks a new suit sent Stone back to court with Cooper. The editor had sixty days (until August 16, 1842) before he had to pay Cooper for the costs associated with the original action and the arbitration. Before then, however, a dispute arose about whether Cooper had prematurely demanded the money, as a story printed by Greeley claimed. Cooper denied that report, but Stone, believing it to be true, published this note in the New-York Spectator on July 6: “Mr. J. Fenimore Cooper need not be so very fidgetty [sic] in his anxiety to finger the cash to be paid by us toward his support. It will be forthcoming on the last day allowed by the award; but we are not disposed to allow him to put it into Wall street for shaving purposes before that period. Wait patiently. There will be no locksmith necessary to get at the ‘ready’ ”—a sarcastic reference to Andrew Barber’s complaint, mentioned earlier, that Cooper had caused the Otsego sheriff to break open his trunk in search of money to pay his overdue judgment.62 Cooper took offense at Stone’s language and filed a new complaint against him at the July 1842 term of the New York Supreme Court in Utica for what he saw as these fresh libels on his character. By the time a hearing was held in Albany the following January, Stone had filed another demurrer, and the legal back-and-forth began, to drag on for some years.63 At the time of the initial

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hearing, Judge Esek Cowen agreed with Cooper that Stone ’s use of the term “shaving” was libelous in itself: “To shave, with money, imports, in common parlance, the lending it on usury, or making unfair purchases with it; in short, availing one’s self of others’ wants, to obtain an advantage, and make an unconscientious profit. To shave is, in one sense, ‘to strip, to oppress, by extortion, to fleece.’ ”64 On the “locksmith” reference, which was to cast longer shadows in the case, Cowen apparently was less decisive—“apparently,” because Cowen died in February 1843, shortly after the January procedure, and left only notes on his findings rather than a complete report, so his opinion must be inferred. Those notes were later incorporated in the judgment the court issued that July, in Cooper’s favor. When on August 23 the inquest of damages was held (as the court ordered) before a jury called by the Otsego sheriff, the total awarded Cooper was slightly more than $300, about 15 percent of his asking.65 That October, Stone filed a writ of error with Judge Philo Gridley, seeking to have the judgment overturned. This put Cooper’s collection of damages on hold and sent the two men and their attorneys back to court. Under New York procedures at the time, the case was to be reviewed by the Court for the Correction of Errors, which consisted of the chancellor of New York State (Reuben H. Walworth), the justices of the state supreme court, the president of the state senate (i.e., the lieutenant governor), and the complete body of senators, then set at thirty-two. Gridley issued a stay of execution on Cooper’s judgment, meaning that he could not collect the damages and costs that had recently been determined on the second suit. Stone’s writ of error did not specify any particular mistake in the case as handled by the supreme court in 1842–1843—it did not, for instance, express concern about the ambiguity in Cowen’s opinion on the “locksmith” business. Instead, Stone asserted that in general there was “a manifest error” in the judgment given to Cooper. In a filing on November 10, he reaffirmed, consistent with his demurrer, that Cooper’s amended “declaration . . . and the matters therein contained, are not sufficient in order for the said James Fennimore [sic] Cooper, to have or maintain his aforesaid action thereof, against the said William L. Stone.” He also claimed that another error arose from the fact that “by the [supreme court’s] record . . . it appears, that the judgment . . . was given for James Fennimore Cooper, . . . whereas by the law of the land, the said judgment ought to have been given for the said William L. Stone.” This general, largely formulaic statement by Stone’s attorneys was answered by Richard Cooper’s equally general and formulaic response to the court on November 20: there was “no error, either in record or proceedings aforesaid, or in giving judgment aforesaid.” Richard asked the court to affirm that judgment in all its particulars.66 The record of proceedings on Stone’s new suit is thin. The routine November filing and response occasioned no action in the court. The printed

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“Case” issued in 1844 by Utica printer Isaac S. Clark (then owner of the Utica Democrat) obviously was prepared for the consideration of Stone’s writ by the Court for the Correction of Errors, suggesting that he and Cooper expected action at some point that year.67 In May, Richard F. Cooper sent to Stone’s attorneys a notice of his intent to bring on the argument at the next term of the court on June 3. But it does not appear that it was considered at that time, owing apparently to some misunderstanding between the sides, and after that August (when Stone, aged fifty-two, unexpectedly died at Saratoga), the matter still hung fire.68 Although not automatically dismissed, absent his family’s concurrence it could not proceed. Early in 1845, as it remained in limbo, Cooper reportedly began “pressing the collection in [the] case of the libel suit”—the second suit, concerning which the writ of error had been made out by Stone. In order to do that, Cooper could seek to have the stay on his payment lifted by the New York Supreme Court or move to have the trial on errors revived and brought to an end. In March 1845, before he had gone ahead with either step, Cooper received a letter from the editor’s widow inquiring about his intentions. Having heard that he was “again pressing the collection” of the 1843 judgment (despite earlier assurances from her friends that her husband’s death meant the claim “would not have been revived”), Susannah Stone thought that sharing with Cooper the painful details of her present situation might cause him to desist. Her husband having died intestate and deeply burdened with old debts, she was indeed in desperate straits. She had already put their heavily mortgaged house up for sale and after much effort had secured the agreement of Stone ’s former partner, Francis Hall, to pay $15,000 for Stone’s share of their newspaper—provided Stone’s estate “assumed the Cooper case” (CORR 2:537–38). That provision, accepted by her lawyer without her direct approval, troubled Mrs. Stone emotionally. To persuade Cooper to drop the matter and thus spare her suffering, she vividly described her husband’s early fondness for Cooper. “I have a letter from Mr. Stone,” she confessed, “written after making you a little visit in the country [in 1822], while I was absent from the city, in which he describes . . . your reading parts of the MS. of one of your novels, [on] making maple sugar.” Writing her of that experience, she went on, Stone had broken out into “the most enthusiastick expressions of delight, at the bright prospects of literary fame opening before his friend, who was a Cooper’stown boy” (CORR 2:539). She added that she had other letters, ones (now lost) that Cooper had sent from Europe in which he had testified to the deep ties the two men had once enjoyed. She did not quote from them or send them to the novelist; but she went on about how her husband, recently expressing his pain at Cooper’s apparent hatred for him, had told her that “if Mr. Cooper knew all the truth” his “enmity” would evaporate. The editor had gone on for his wife: “For . . . you

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know how proud I used to be of him, how I used to boast of his talents, before our little ‘Den,’ and in my paper, and in conversation and every way.” This touching testimony, however, could not overcome the effect of more recent dealings between the two men. Stone had also told his wife that he had done “everything a Christian man could do to settle the dispute” with Cooper, but that was simply not so, and Cooper knew it (CORR 2:539–40). Cooper probably felt especially bitter about Stone because the Duer reviews of the naval history had done incalculable damage to that work’s sales and to the emotional meaning that long-contemplated project held for its author, who had sought to pay homage to his naval friends and colleagues, dead and alive, and defend the navy’s general honor against the world. It did little good for Stone, in his last year, to emphasize for his wife (and now she to Cooper a year later) that he once had used his newspaper to praise Cooper and to bring “his books into notice from pure love to them and their author.” William Duer had canceled that old truth with his new lies, lies in which Stone had joined, publishing them to the world and then defending them as true (CORR 2:540).69 In addition to the effect of the Duer reviews on the History of the Navy, it is likely that Stone’s more recent trespasses—perhaps especially the “shaving” remark, which cast the novelist together with those men of Wall Street from whom he usually imagined himself quite distant—stiffened Cooper’s resolve. Too much had happened since Stone’s visit to Angevine in the winter of 1821– 1822 to hear his fellow “Cooper’stown boy” read him passages from The Pioneers about how the quickening spring made the maple sap flow and sent the energetic people of Templeton out into the woods. The past was now as dead as the feelings Mrs. Stone apparently could not revive in that book’s author (whom she addressed in her letter, plaintively, as “J. Fenimore Cooper, Author of The Pioneers, etc.”). This sad outcome was one cost of Cooper’s reinvention of himself during the rough course of the libel trials. When his nephew Richard wrote from New York City in June 1845 to report that his “case with Stone stands at No. 11” on the calendar of the Court for the Correction of Errors, Cooper thereafter took steps to ensure it would be heard. Richard had spoken about the matter with Joshua A. Spencer, Stone’s sometime attorney, and Spencer had expressed the opinion that “the case cannot be argued until Stone’s representatives are made parties.” If, as it seemed to Richard from what he knew of Mrs. Stone’s letter to his uncle, she had been made sole executrix of her husband’s estate, then “she must be called in to prosecute the writ of error.” Had Cooper informed her in his now unlocated response to her March letter that he intended to proceed? Just to be sure, Richard instructed Cooper to make out an affidavit (he supplied sample language) and send it to him immediately. Cooper, drafting what was required as soon as he got Richard’s letter and the sample affidavit, declared that, on receiving a letter from

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Mrs. Stone “some months since,” he had answered her at the address she gave, stating to her that it was “his intention to proceed with this cause [and] to let the argument . . . take the customary course, unless the judgment already obtained were satisfied.” Cooper on the same day had a fair copy of this statement prepared, signed it himself, and had it countersigned by the Otsego County clerk. This he sent posthaste to Richard, with a note (unpublished) that ran as follows: “I presume I can say no more. I do not remember stating expressly in my letter to Mrs. Stone that the argument would be called up in term, though that was the general drift of my reply. She wanted to be released, and I refused; of course, the argument would rest with herself, as the cause would go on, or end, as she might decide. No great harm can be done by the delay, and they will have to pay more costs. Spencer can have no confidence in his writ of error, if he wish[es for a] delay.”70 Spencer had no need to worry; nor did Mrs. Stone. Cooper surely understood that, if the writ was withdrawn and the suit dropped, Mrs. Stone would be liable to pay the 1843 award. If the suit proceeded, however, she had a chance of winning, meaning that she would be relieved of the obligation. And that, surprisingly enough, is exactly what happened. On June 9, 1845, Stone vs. Cooper was at last “passed without prejudice” during a session of the Court for the Correction of Errors in Albany, meaning that it was ready to be considered. Four days later Marshall S. Bidwell presented Mrs. Stone’s argument before Lt. Gov. Addison Gardiner (a Democrat and noted lawyer and judge in his own right), Chancellor Reuben H. Walworth, and twenty-three senators, sufficient for a quorum. Richard F. Cooper began his argument for his uncle and carried it over on June 14, when, on his finishing, the “case was concluded,” though without a decision.71 Not until the end of the year did that come down. Cooper was very quiet about the pending issue during the intervening months, and when word reached him he remained silent for yet another month. Only incidentally, in a February 1, 1846, letter to Shubrick, did he at last comment on it: “The newspapers will tell you the court of errors has given them a triumph, as respects the law of libel. This is their usual ignorance, or usual lying. The decision does not touch the principles of the law at all, even if any body did respect our Court of Errors, which is shortly to be struck out of existence, by common consent.” The body in question, which would be eliminated in the new state constitution this very year, was a political body rather than a genuine branch of the judiciary, and Cooper’s use of its popular shorthand name stressed for him, as no doubt for the public at large, the sort of blundering injustice of which the body at times was capable—it was indeed a court of errors, their “correction” be damned. In the present case, as Cooper summarized the matter for Shubrick, “All that has been decided is that our declaration wanted a certain technicality, which we shall supply and sue the other partner”—that is, Francis Hall (LJ 5:120).

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Chancellor Walworth wrote (or at least signed) the court’s opinion. He agreed with Judge Cowen’s sense that the “vague statements and representations” in Cooper’s declaration with regard to the “locksmith” reference were insufficient to establish a clear libel on Cooper’s character. Had Cooper wished to make the connection convincing, he should have told the full story of the execution on the Barber judgment. He could not assume that either the public or the court would as a matter of course link Stone’s “locksmith” to that story. The comment about Stone’s payment on the arbitration award as money intended “for the plaintiff ’s support” (which had also galled Cooper) likewise was neither libelous in itself nor sufficiently linked in Cooper’s declaration to the specifics of the arbitration process. The court could consider only information actively presented to itself: “Although we may have heard from the public papers, or otherwise, what was the real subject in controversy before the arbitrators, and that the reputation of the plaintiff as a correct and impartial naval historian was triumphantly sustained by their decision, we cannot as a court take judicial notice of the fact, nor look beyond this record [of the 1843 supreme court judgment] for the purpose of ascertaining the nature and meaning of this part of the alleged libel.” If Cooper’s point was that Stone “intended by this publication to induce the public to believe that the plaintiff was in the habit of instituting and prosecuting libel suits for the mere purpose of obtaining money,” Walworth’s opinion continued, then Cooper should have given more detail about the controversy and the resulting arbitration. The chancellor did not conclude that such information would have converted Stone’s statements into libels, since absent that information he had no obligation (or right) to make that determination. All he knew was that these two parts of Stone’s article were “not libellous per se.”72 On the “shaving” reference Walworth was similarly unmoved by Cooper’s declaration or indeed Judge Cowen’s supreme court verdict, which had on linguistic and contextual information found it to be libelous in itself. “The word shave certainly is sometimes used,” Walworth wrote, “to denote the act of obtaining the property of another by oppression and extortion; that is by taking an inequitable and unconscientious advantage of his situation to fleece or strip him of his property.” But he found nothing in Stone’s short article “from which it could be fairly inferred that the [plaintiff] meant to charge, or to induce the public to believe that the [defendant] had been guilty of such extortion and oppression.” Had the jurist found such elements, he would not “hesitate to pronounce the publication libellous.” Instead, he averred that the “natural sense” of the word in question was quite innocent: “For the word shave is also used to denote the buying of existing notes and other securities for money at a discount beyond the nominal amount of the debt and interest due or to become due on such notes and securities. And this court has decided [in other cases] that shaving of that description is a legitimate

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and legal business, and does not come either within the letter or spirit of the usury laws. . . . And certainly it cannot be libellous per se to charge that a citizen has actually been engaged in a business which the highest judicial tribunal in the state has declared to be neither improper nor illegal; and which is not considered by the public, either as dishonest or disreputable.” Judge Cowen, citing Noah Webster and Samuel Johnson as arbiters on the language, had found no such wiggle room in their dictionaries. But the Court for the Correction of Errors ruled otherwise: “I think the court below erred in giving to the language of the [plaintiff ’s] publication an unnatural and odious meaning, not warranted by the term shaving in the connection in which it was used.” Fifteen senators voted with Walworth to reverse the judgment; five to affirm it. It therefore was reversed.73 Once he did respond to this outcome, Cooper expressed his outrage. “The Chancellor has given a singular opinion,” the novelist wrote Shubrick in the letter cited earlier. “He says, in substance, that it does not bring a man into discredit by accusing him of being a shaver, because the brokers of Wall Street [include] acts that are legal in their definition of shaving. This is saying that the brokers of Wall Street can pervert the English language at their own pleasure.” Dictionaries were clear on the term, and men in general understood shaving to be extortion and thought extortion “discreditable” (LJ 5:120). Stone had admitted his libelous intent when, in a halfhearted retraction in his paper on July 21, 1843, he sought to explain his “shaving” remark as “mere badinage.”74 Although that retraction had also not been placed before the Court for the Correction of Errors, it clearly indicated that Stone had not used the term in its “legal” sense, for if he had there would have been no need for a retraction. Cooper, recalling Stone’s explanation now more than two years later, wrote Shubrick additionally: “Stone admitted, publicly in his paper, that he had no reason to suppose I had ever been guilty of any transaction to justify a charge that he endeavoured to explain away as a joke! Yet, the public is willing to uphold such rascals. This Stone, moreover, though vulgar, and malicious and false, was a Saint compared to half the New York editors, who are certainly the worst in the country” (LJ 5:120; see also RED 1:187; 2:41–42). Disillusioned as he was, Cooper was billed for costs by the attorneys for that one “Saint’s” widow and promptly paid her.75 He was working on The Redskins when the verdict came down, and it found its way pretty directly into that book. Of course this third Littlepage tale, set in the present, could accommodate such references easily. When Uncle Ro and his nephew Hugh are discussing the limited choices the great landowning family of the Van Rensselaers would have if they lost the fight and had to sell out to their tenants, Hugh adds, caustically: “they would sell the Manor-House, and Beverwyck, for taverns; and then any one might live in them who would pay the principal sum of the cost of a dinner; bag their dollars, and proceed forthwith to

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Wall street, and commence the shaving of notes—that occupation having been decided, as I see by the late arrivals [i.e., the news], to be highly honourable and praiseworthy” (RED 1:39).76 Later in the novel, Cooper has Hugh and Ro speak much more directly about the Court of Errors (“that mongrel assembly”) and a recent “decision, in a libel suit, at which the [legal] profession sneers”—that is, Cooper ads. Stone—and then allows them to go on at greater length about Wall Street shavers (RED 1:186). If first Stone and now the courts took such shabby fictions as gospel truth, Cooper could bring a work of fiction to a halt as he imported into it the details of a recent legal case that he lost.

Consequences James F. Beard concluded that the defeats the novelist suffered in his final suits with both Horace Greeley and William L. Stone’s executrix in 1845–1846 “told Cooper that his ‘crusade against the press’ had failed” (LJ 4:284).77 If the personal finale of the libel suits for Cooper was thus characterized by emotional deflation, the public outcome was of debatable importance. Certainly the editors—the ones sued and the ones who escaped—did not persist in pillorying Cooper or unfairly panning his books once he had had his many days in court. He did not win every case, and for the most part he did not inflict serious financial harm on the defendants. But he had made his point. Aside from the legal impasse at the end of the juggernaut, there were other reasons for the cooling down of his passion on the subject of the press. As Cooper resumed his career as a fiction writer, especially with the new Leather-Stocking novels in 1840–1841, he was for a time at least less overtly controversial. The Anti-Rent crisis to which The Redskins was so closely tied would call him back into controversies sure to provoke outrage (or at least intense criticism), but the line he drew in the sand in the period from 1839 to 1845 proved deep and fairly durable as far as direct attack on him or his books was concerned. Regarding the legal consequences of the trials, there is considerable uncertainty, much of it stemming from the 1845 hearing in the second Greeley case. In 1987, the lawyer-historian Richard Scheidenhelm claimed that the libel suits Cooper filed had “helped facilitate the defense of truth as justification to civil defamation actions in New York.”78 This is a modest claim of consequences, and a fairly technical one at that, as I will discuss in a moment. First, it will be useful to contrast it with some earlier, more sweeping claims. Local historian Ralph Birdsall, whose Story of Cooperstown (1917) is a good book for its time, offered an instance in writing, “The libel law of New York State was made, to a great extent, by the Fenimore Cooper cases.”79 This is a gross exaggeration. The law as a matter of statute in New York was on the books from very early in the nineteenth

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century and of course derived in its outline and many of its specifics from English precedent. James Grossman, himself a lawyer and author of a biography of Cooper, properly asserted in 1954: “It has sometimes been suggested that Cooper significantly influenced the libel law of New York, but this seems to me doubtful. On the whole he used the law of libel as he found it and left it ultimately much as it had been before he used it.” Although two of Cooper’s suits—the second against Greeley and the original 1840 one against Stone—are among the many cases cited in older reference books on libel law, they are not prominent and those books do not suggest that the cases significantly altered the law.80 Another exaggerated view in fact gives the Cooper suits credit for an element that was an integral part of the law long before he sued his first editor— namely, the principle that in libel suits the truth is a defense. I would emphasize first that this principle, well-established in English and U.S. law (although it operated differently in civil and criminal cases), was not really in dispute at the time. If an editor could prove that a libelous statement (that is, one tending to weaken someone’s reputation or character) were true, then it was justified, and that was the end of it. Justification was available to defendants, however, under only specific circumstances. Under common law pleading rules then in effect, the editors Cooper sued could plead the general issue or could admit they had made the disputed claims and then attempt to justify those claims as true.81 The former plea was simpler in some regards. Because it amounted to a denial of all charges, it required Cooper to prove each charge that was essential to his general accusation of libelous publication or speech. In most instances, on the other hand, a defendant using this plea of the general issue was barred from attempting to argue that his statements about the plaintiff were in fact true—that is, that the accusations in the publication were justified. If he wished to engage in these exculpatory arguments, he usually needed to admit the accusations, “plead justification,” and then proceed to prove his points in a manner commensurate with, or “as broad as,” the plaintiff ’s claims. If an editor condemned Cooper as a coward, for instance, his justification would have to establish not that Cooper had committed a single arguably cowardly act, but that a general pattern of cowardice permeated and defined his character. In the event that justification was to be attempted, furthermore, the defendant’s counsel would have to disclose to the plaintiff in advance what specific acts on the plaintiff ’s part would be used to substantiate the alleged libel. The legal principle of discovery required timely notice. By a witticism during the December 1842 trial on his first suit against Horace Greeley, Cooper neatly distinguished pleading the general issue from the use of justification. Speaking of the tendency of all the Whig editors to apply the phrase “the handsome Mr. Effingham” in mockery of him (Weed had used it in his anonymous Fonda report, for instance), Cooper turned to the plain-visaged

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Greeley and joked that if he pronounced Greeley “not handsome” and was sued for libel, “he should not plead the General Issue, but Justify.” Greeley graciously commented in his report of the trial: “That was a neat hit, and well planted. We can tell him, however, that if the Court should rule as hard against him as it does against Editors when they undertake to justify, he would find it difficult to get in the testimony to establish a matter even so plain as our plainness.”82 When Ethel R. Outland was completing her thesis at the University of Wisconsin on the “The ‘Effingham’ Libels on Cooper” in the 1920s, she enlisted the advice of a young attorney from her current hometown, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. That attorney, Benjamin DeWayne Silliman, reviewed her materials and, on the broader question of the influence of these cases on New York law, stated: “While the rule is now clearly established that truth is a complete defense to a civil action for libel it was not so well understood at the time of Cooper’s suits, and the relation of his litigation to this doctrine may be said to be its first effect on the law of libel.” Silliman did his best to trace out judicial procedure before, during, and after the Cooper trials, but in the end (as his “may be said” indicates) he was unable to untangle the matter.83 Richard Scheidenhelm in fact sees the New York State Supreme Court’s decision in the 1845 hearing on Cooper’s second Greeley suit as significant in that it broke the stalemate over justification, which had reared its head as early as Cooper vs. Barber in 1841. In regard to the Greeley case, Scheidenhelm asserts, the court “established the idea of public opinion as a fact subject to proof in a courtroom like any other fact.” What especially mattered in this argument was the nature of Greeley’s supposed libel. In November 1841, Greeley had commented on Cooper’s published announcement that he would be suing Greeley and his partner, Thomas McElrath, for the anonymous report of Weed’s recent trial in Fonda published in the Tribune. Part of his commentary would become the basis of a second libel suit Cooper filed slightly more than a year later. The offensive passage ran as follows: “There is one comfort to sustain us, under this terrible dispensation. Mr. Cooper will have to bring his action to trial somewhere. He will not like to bring it in NewYork, for we are known here, nor in Otsego, for he is known there.”84 In the eventual hearing on this suit, Cooper’s nephew argued that Greeley’s statement amounted to a libelous claim that the novelist was “in bad repute” in his home county. Former New York governor William H. Seward, Greeley’s attorney, stated in his special plea at the hearing “that the plaintiff at the time of the publication, and long before, resided in the County of Otsego, and was known to many citizens of that county; and being so known had acquired and then had ‘the reputation of a proud, captious, censorious, arbitrary, dogmatical, malicious, illiberal, revengeful, and litigious man, wherefore the said man was in bad repute in the said county of Otsego.’ ” It is important to note that Seward merely asserted that such was

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Cooper’s reputation in Otsego; he did not present evidence to support his claim. The court nonetheless accepted his statement as a sufficient justification of the truth of Greeley’s supposed libel, thereby resolving the previous impasse.85 Scheidenhelm additionally argues that when David Dudley Field and two colleagues oversaw the revision of the New York Code of Procedure at the end of that decade, they accommodated this shift of understanding, allowing future defendants to more adequately appeal to and establish the truth of their matter through changes to “the law of special pleading.”86 Inadvertently, what proved to be Cooper’s last libel suit provided any potential future libelers and defendants with a plausible evasion of responsibility. While the solution proved useful in the courts in general, for Cooper it must have delivered a warning that, having gained all he had gained in the trials to date, he could expect rougher treatment in any further ones. Besides, knowing how the press had sought not only to mold but also to manipulate public opinion (as with Park Benjamin’s delivery of copies of the New World to Otsego jurors in 1840), it cannot have pleased Cooper to contemplate a legal landscape in which “reporting” public opinion— without needing to prove true anything one represented as public opinion— constituted a triumph of mere assertion over truth. “They Say,” the term Cooper used for a chapter title in The American Democrat, had become the law of the land. He therefore turned to other things. Even in the earlier cases decided in Cooper’s favor, victory of course had not been complete for him either in the courtroom or beyond it. The suits allowed him to defend his personal character, his artistic freedom, and his accuracy as a naval historian, and they energized him as he once more resumed his career as a novelist. But the fights also tended to energize his opponents, as well as unify the Whig press more generally. And the negative outcomes tended to be long lived. The bad press that was to plague Cooper through the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond, for one thing, may be traced in no small way to the lingering effects of the court fights. That a very young Samuel L. Clemens began his journalistic career working in the printing trades in New York City in the early 1850s, when the bitter memories of Cooper’s victories were very much alive in Manhattan, may well have exposed the future author of “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” to his first taste of the bile he would himself secrete with such devilish humor in that 1895 attack. We might say that the overall story here is of a string of victories that enabled a final defeat.87 And yet it is important to temper that conclusion by reference to the larger motives that brought Cooper into the courtroom, as well as to the more general effects of the process on his art. He had personal reasons to be outraged by the lies of the editors and publishers whom he sued because those lies were meant to hurt his reputation and, once he returned to writing fiction in 1838, they therefore

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threatened his professional livelihood. But he willingly fought his particular opponents because he also thought that behavior like theirs posed wider dangers to the republic. Having enjoyed relatively good press before his European sojourn, Cooper had little cause for alarm about newspapers until he became the target of the Whig editors between 1837 and 1839. Discussing the press in Notions of the Americans a decade earlier, he had stressed the informational role of newspapers in a democracy—their usefulness in “imparting facts.” He admitted that American editors occasionally did attack private individuals, but, asserting that “actions for injuries done by the press” were “astonishingly rare,” he concluded that the press in its self-restraint offered proof of “the general tone of decency which predominates in this nation” (Notions 2:102–6). He hardly could have penned such an idealistic analysis after his own troubles with the press began. In The American Democrat of 1838, so concerned was he with the potential dangers of the press that he likened it to fire—“an excellent servant, but a terrible master.” His formulations here completely reversed those he penned barely a decade earlier. In its section “On the Press,” The American Democrat thus asserted that newspapers guilty of misleading their readers “as regards facts, characters, or principles” willfully corrupted public opinion, doing serious injury to society and the state. And, clearly with an eye toward his own pending recourse to the courts, the book proposed that newspaper editors convicted of libel be forced to publish the judgments against themselves in their papers “for a series of weeks, or months, or even years,” so that “the antidote [may] accompany the poison” (AD 124–26). It is obvious that the language of the newspapers in their personal attacks on Cooper was in no sense “decent,” to use his term from Notions of the Americans. Tame as it may seem by comparison to our own debased twenty-first-century practice, it required, in Cooper’s eyes, the “antidote” of his own principled opposition. And yet, as a novelist even now resuming his craft, he also showed a sort of literary fascination with his opponents that has not often been remarked. The author who had invented Natty Bumppo in 1823 as a visionary spokesman for the natural world, Native American rights, and personal honor obviously conceived of character (both literary and personal) in idealistic terms. The best figures in the early novels, whatever their social positions, are selflessly devoted to a larger cause beyond themselves. Beginning with Cooper’s European trilogy, written as his political disappointments with reform in France and elsewhere deepened, Cooper brought his upright characters (such as Jacopo in The Bravo) into deadly contact with opposing figures who, motivated by complete self-interest, at times prove more than their match. When he discovered compatriots abroad who acted out of similarly self-interested motives, including Levett Harris and Edward S. Gould in Paris, he at first recoiled; then, on returning to the United States, he very soon declared he would not write for a public that, to judge by such men, seemed

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willing to reward the most wicked behavior. But Cooper could not stay out of the fray for two reasons: first, because his principles demanded that he stand up for what he believed was right personally and socially, and second, because he in fact was intrigued by the new breed of public actors in politics and the press. Much as he despised them, he had no wish to wrap himself up in self-righteous silence and avoid them. Instead, he engaged them in newspapers friendly to himself (Bryant’s Evening Post, the Cooperstown Freeman’s Journal, and the Albany Argus) and in his own nonfiction books of the later 1830s. Then he met them in the courts. Then, finally, he exposed them in his fiction. As he began to reoccupy his imaginary America from the Home novels on, he populated it with an array of unprincipled types who gave the landscape of his later fiction an increasingly realistic look. Cooper’s engagement with his opponents in the libel suits (and with the Michigan speculators he was likewise to sue in the 1840s, as we will see in chapter 14) emerged from his defense of his personal rights and principles, but it also served and, I would argue, was in part motivated by his broader artistic interests. Going to court in various New York venues or in Detroit was fieldwork for fiction. The self-serving figures who inhabit his later novels, making those books different in emphasis if not in kind from his earlier ones, constitute one of Cooper’s chief gains from both of those legal contests and their surrounding social and political contexts. These figures compose an impressive rogues’ gallery of the novelist’s least wholesome contemporaries: in creating the greedy scalp-hunters Tom Hutter and Harry March in The Deerslayer, the Indian-garbed Anti-Rent tenants in the Littlepage series (or indeed their selfish latter-day landlords), or the cold-blooded smuggler Stephen Spike in Jack Tier—all of whom we shall meet in later chapters—Cooper was presenting his society with daguerreotypes of what he was seeing all around him. He went to court in part to ensure that he could portray such actors dead to rights in his books. In this sense, the lawsuits were a resounding success: he won some money from the editors, but most of all they richly funded his art.

C H A P T E R

N I N E

A Legacy Reclaimed

B

y the time Cooper resumed writing fiction in 1838, the most recent of his Leather-Stocking Tales, The Prairie, lay more than a decade in his past. Yet Natty Bumppo had never left his mind for long, and once he returned permanently to Otsego as both resident and writer, the old hunter exerted a more insistent hold on his imagination. In Home as Found, the Effinghams recall Natty as they pause on the Vision and take in the view below (see HAF 1:140). Although John Effingham laments that “the days of the ‘Leather-stockings’ have passed away,” in fact a ghostly Natty still claims water and woods. The old “Commodore,” himself a kind of lake spirit who spends his days fishing, deeply admires Natty and finds him living on in Otsego’s mysterious echo, which “repeats every thing we say, in mockery of our invasion of the woods” (HAF 1:218, 223). If anyone really heard that haunting echo in the late 1830s, though, it was Cooper himself, who revived Natty first in The Pathfinder (1840), which placed him on Lake Ontario during the same war as The Last of the Mohicans, and then, with especially stunning effect, returned him as a young man to Otsego in The Deerslayer (1841). Impressively, Cooper wrote both books at the time when he was busy with the libel suits we have just examined. In one regard, they constituted a

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kind of personal sanctuary from that very public business. And yet, as suggested at the end of the previous chapter, they also drew in subtle ways on the social lessons Cooper derived from his court fights. Furthermore, they initiated a reformation of Cooper’s public image, tarnished by those same fights. As such, the final Leather-Stocking Tales laid the groundwork for his notably active third decade, when he wrote fully half of all his novels. The novelist had first proposed The Pathfinder in an early 1831 letter to Henry Colburn as a story, loosely based on Cooper’s naval memories, to be set along “Lake Ontario, with scenes on the Great Lakes” (LJ 2:53). Colburn and his new partner and successor Richard Bentley quickly accepted the proposal, but then the book languished for several years as Cooper turned to other projects—the European trilogy first of all. It finally was Bentley who spurred Cooper to revive the idea when, responding in April 1839 to the novelist’s proposal for what eventually became an eighteenth-century English naval tale called The Two Admirals (1842), the Londoner expressed his preference for a “naval story on your own inland Seas.”1 In June, abandoning The Two Admirals for the time being, Cooper wrote Bentley: “Your idea has been followed, and I have got to work on a nauticolake-savage romance—The scene is on Lake Ontario, the Niagara river, the cataract &c &c &c” (LJ 3:393). Although he did not there mention Natty Bumppo, Cooper must already have decided to include him; certainly Leather-Stocking and Chingachgook both enter late in the novel’s first chapter. As completed, however, the book would hardly just reprise the 1820s Leather-Stocking Tales. Most importantly, Cooper’s decision to infuse an adventure tale with the domestic concerns typical of contemporary love plots forced an unaccustomed role on the hunter. Not only in this book but in The Deerslayer, too, Natty is not the stoic, sexless figure of the first three books but rather a man of flesh and blood. He will not succeed with Mabel Dunham, and at last will not wish to succeed with Judith Hutter. But that he is in the game in both novels gives him a more social existence than in the three earlier books, a strong effect particularly in The Deerslayer, which initiates his solitary career in the woods.2 Nothing in Cooper’s earliest comments on The Pathfinder points toward this intimate blending of literary formulas. Having begun with adventure as the core idea, he hoped to vivify his memories of “the cataract” from his 1809 visit there (see JFC:EY 119–22) by going to Niagara again, if possible, even if doing so slowed his work on the novel. Hence he added for Bentley in June: “I have some idea of visiting the falls of Niagara, which are about three days journey from me, or I should get through sooner”—with the book, that is (LJ 3:393). When, by that fall, a trip proved infeasible, Cooper foreshortened the plot’s physical action. He still would have the Scud sail as far as the Niagara River in the book as finished, but he would not bring the characters upstream to the falls, perhaps because he

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lacked a good personal grasp of their present state.3 Omitting the clearly climactic scene he meant to set there (like that he had imagined for the end of The Spy) apparently left Cooper feeling that he ought to add some other grand event to the story, something more impressive than the storm that assaults the Scud while it is under Uncle Cap’s command. By November, when The Pathfinder was far along and Cooper finally informed Bentley that the publisher’s “old acquaintance the Leatherstocking” would appear in it, he added that Natty would “fully maintain his own, though in an entirely new point of view” (LJ 3:443). Love was a late, largely improvised substitute, an “entirely new” alternative for the wartime hostilities he originally had imagined for the book’s westernmost setting. As a kind of spatial compensation, Cooper also added other settings he had not mentioned to Bentley in June, such as the Thousand Islands, and throughout the book he relied more than usual on personal memories dredged up from deep in his past. As I have indicated in The Early Years, this is therefore a book of special resonance in its relationship to Cooper’s navy years (see JFC:EY 111–19).4 Yet something more lay behind the importation of those memories than Cooper’s wish to create a sufficiently impressive background for Natty-inlove or embellish a plot lacking its originally intended crisis. Even when linked most impressively to the green forest or the blue lake or the evocative line of distinction between them that Cooper emphasizes (see JFC:EY 112; PF CE 109), his recollections sprang from a never avowed wish to memorialize his old commander from Oswego, Melancthon T. Woolsey, who had died in the late spring of 1838 after a notable naval career. When a Manhattan newspaper remarked in May of that year that few individuals left behind “a wider circle of mourning friends” than Woolsey, it might have been speaking of Cooper in particular. For when Cooper revived the long-suspended Ontario project in 1839, it was not Bentley that spurred him on but rather some submerged emotional impulse to honor Woolsey by re-creating the long-gone world into which he had led young Cooper. With the naval history undergoing substantial revisions for a second edition even as Cooper worked on The Pathfinder, the recently departed Woolsey must have been an especially evocative symbol for the shrinking inner circle of old naval associates to whose spirit Cooper had officially dedicated that “imperfect record” of their “services, privations, hazards and sufferings” (HN 1:v).5 Despite his busyness in 1839, Cooper kept up his pace on the novel, another sign, perhaps, that the personal reasons for exploring his recollections were strong. As early as August 11, he was producing “three chapters a week” and drawing close to what he called “weeping time,” a flippant comment about the book’s denouement that may have covered Cooper’s own feelings (LJ 3:421). By early October, the book was “in press” (LJ 3:430) and so far along that Cooper then shipped “about half ” of the proof sheets to London (LJ 3:433). Progress

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on the work, though, was hardly regular. Not only did Cooper confide to his wife from Philadelphia on October 19 that the second volume was “not yet written” (LJ 3:437)—three weeks later he would inform Bentley that Lea and Blanchard, owing to “the state of the money market,” had stopped printing the novel altogether, meaning that the Americans would not issue it until February or March. This was actually good news for Bentley, who was worried that the Philadelphians might precede him. In order to provide Bentley a further cushion, Cooper was prepared to send him manuscript for the remainder of the book by the end of the month, whatever the American situation proved to be. Ideally, he of course hoped he could persuade Lea and Blanchard to “strike off the rest” so he also could send proofs. That would save Bentley money and produce an English version of the novel closer to the American (LJ 3:443).6 As things progressed, no major problems emerged. On November 21, Cooper wrote Lea and Blanchard from Otsego that he would soon be in Philadelphia: “I wish to finish Pathfinder, with the minimum of delay. . . . I trust you will be ready for me, with Pathfinder, the day after I arrive” (LJ 3:447). That he did not actually get to Philadelphia until December 16 gave them extra time. And when, two days later, he resumed work on the novel, he wasn’t checking fresh proofs but rather reading over and probably revising his own manuscript (and, he wrote Susan, thinking “pretty well of it”), though he still had not yet written the crucial last three chapters. The second volume of the novel by December 22 or 23 was about “a third printed,” and by Christmas, when he wrote her yet again, it was half done (LJ 3:450, 454).7 It was not a time for quick progress, with all the holidays as well as the workers’ “blue days after every festival” (LJ 3:454), and the new year found Cooper still in Philadelphia. He wrote Bentley from there on January 4, 1840, to let him know that at long last he was ready to ship copy for the rest of the novel. Lea and Blanchard would not publish the book “before the middle of March,” Cooper added, “or until the ice leaves our rivers; perhaps not until near April” (LJ 4:5). This was a very good prediction. The American edition appeared on March 14; Bentley had published it in London on February 24 or 25 (PF CE xxiv n20; S&B 107).8

Columbus It was Bentley who suggested the follow-up to The Pathfinder—Mercedes of Castile (1840)—which Cooper undertook before expanding yet again on the saga of his forest hero. Based on the first voyage of Christopher Columbus, the second 1840 novel made for a strange interlude in his completion of the Leather-Stocking series. But the subject was in the air during the 1830s. Bentley’s impulse may have sprung, for instance, from the fact that he recently had published the popular

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English edition of what would be one of Cooper’s sources for the new novel, William H. Prescott’s History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837). And Cooper, who rarely acted on such unprompted suggestions from Bentley or other publishers, proved unusually receptive to this one, partly because his thoughts were tending in the same direction. In telling Bentley, “I like the idea of Columbus” in October 1839, Cooper immediately added, “which is a subject I have thought of, and which I feel a disposition to undertake” (LJ 3:433).9 Primed by having read Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus soon after he returned to the United States in 1833 and Prescott’s “capital work” (LJ 3:443) a year after publishing the Home novels, Cooper expressed high hopes for the novel, at first promising Bentley he would have it finished in time for a June 1840 London publication date (LJ 3:434).10 His desire to write “a book of some character” soon caused him to push that date farther into the future (see LJ 4:6).11 The upshot was that by the end of March Cooper had composed only the first of Bentley’s three volumes (see LJ 4:27), and not until mid-May did he even sign a contract with Lea and Blanchard for the American edition, a contract that furthermore did not call for the manuscript to be ready for the printer until “early in September next.”12 At the start of June, he sent Bentley positive news (“We go to press in a few days”) and promised that he would soon start sending proof sheets, although, as it happened, intense activity with the libel suits slowed work on the novel. By early August only “about one third” of it had been printed in Philadelphia, and on the twenty-ninth Cooper wrote Bentley that he had just sent him “not quite half ” of the book in proof sheets (LJ 4:53, 61).13 Early in October, Cooper apparently thought he could finish the novel during a focused period of effort in Philadelphia. He hoped that Shubrick, now commanding the Macedonian at New York, might be able to ferry him part of the way, as that vessel was due to sail soon for Norfolk, from which point Cooper could backtrack largely by water to Philadelphia. When the novelist arrived in New York on the tenth of the month, however, he found that Shubrick expected to be delayed. He wrote Susan right away that his plans for a cruise were scuttled and that he would proceed to Philadelphia overland “and commence work immediately” there. Cooper nonetheless went on board the frigate that day, Saturday, “to make a feast on chowder,” and during their meal Shubrick persuaded him to return to the Macedonian on Monday (the twelfth) and stay aboard, meaning that the Philadelphia visit would be postponed (LJ 4:89–91).14 Cooper rejoined Shubrick on Monday, and the Macedonian stayed at anchor most of the week following, so that not until Thursday, October 15, did Cooper send Susan a letter written “Off the Battery,” certain she would be surprised by his about-face. Through all of this apparent delay, he had been as busy with Mercedes on land and ship as he could have been in Philadelphia, maybe more so:

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“I have revised my manuscript,” he told her, “and am now finishing the book afloat,” a fitting circumstance (LJ 4:90–91). The ship only slowly left New York waters—on the seventeenth, it was anchored near Sandy Hook—but the dalliance actually enhanced Cooper’s efficient labor: “I work on Mercedes in the morning, take a row with the Commodore afterwards, and have been ashore once every day.” The Macedonian finally dropped down the bay on Saturday and passed outside Sandy Hook on Sunday, October 18 (LJ 4:92–93). The frigate entered Chesapeake Bay about sunset the following Thursday, October 22, anchoring at Lynnhaven that night and then making for Norfolk and the navy yard there. Cooper at last parted from Shubrick on Sunday and climbed aboard “the Baltimore Steamer” for a run up the bay that day. Not until dinnertime on Monday the twenty-sixth, more than two weeks after leaving Otsego, was he settled in Philadelphia. Work remained the center of his attention, but despite all his recent effort (and his October 28 prediction to Susan, “I shall be home next week”—LJ 4:96), “an unlucky mistake with the manuscript”—of what precise kind we do not know—made him remain in Philadelphia until Monday November 9. He finally reached New York the next day, a full month after he had first arrived there. From Manhattan, he sent off the rest of the book’s proofs to Bentley, urging the London publisher to rush ahead (LJ 4:99–102). At last, Lea and Blanchard brought the book out on November 24; Bentley followed on December 5 (S&B 110).15 In addition to what we might loosely call the fieldwork he did on the Macedonian, Cooper performed a fair amount of research for this historical novel. Aside from the Prescott and Irving narratives, he acknowledged using a less recent work that in its American edition was called Personal Narrative of the First Voyage of Columbus to America. This slim volume had been issued in 1827 by the Boston newspaperman and popular writer Samuel Kettell, better known today for his three-volume Specimens of American Poetry (1829). The Personal Narrative represented the first complete English translation of a manuscript discovered in Spanish archives in the 1790s and initially printed by naval officer and scholar Martín Fernández de Navarrete in the inaugural volume of his famous gathering of exploration materials, the Coléccion de los Viages y Descubrimientos, published in Madrid in 1825. The manuscript was not the actual journal Columbus kept in 1492–1493, but rather a digest of that lost original produced in the 1530s by the activist and historian Bartolomé de las Casas.16 Cooper seems never to have owned a copy of Kettell’s book. I suspect he consulted it during various visits to Philadelphia, where he could have found it in his usual research library at this time, the Library Company. He used the book either alongside Irving or instead of him, and in such a way that it confirms my suspicion about where he enjoyed access to it. Kettell was most useful for the

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details he provided about the voyage proper, about which Irving was less precise. A small but telling pattern provides insight here. For most of the voyage between Thursday, August 2, 1492 (MC 1:193—chapter 13), and Friday, October 5 (MC 2:63—chapter 2:5), just prior to the arrival at San Salvador, Cooper typically named the day of the week and gave the date when narrating specific events. In Kettell’s text, based as it was on a digest of Columbus’s journal, each entry begins with that information. Irving certainly gives calendar cues, but more sparely and usually without naming particular days of the week. Cooper’s practice in the account of the voyage west from Palos therefore resembles Kettell’s more than it does Irving’s. If, as seems likely, Cooper had Kettell open on the desk as he wrote, then through Kettell he enjoyed easy access to the 1492 calendar. It is worth noting, however, that after the October 5, 1492, reference in Cooper’s text, he specifies dates and days far less often, even though in the parallel sections Kettell kept up the same detailed practice. This vaguer pattern also held true in the chapters in volume 2 where the Kettell narrative might have proved important for Cooper. Such shifts of narrative habit tell us something about the actual process by which Cooper used Kettell. He conceivably drafted the earlier narrative in Philadelphia between May 12 and 18 (or so) with Kettell before him. Then, with his narrative nearing the moment when Columbus arrived in the Indies, but his own time in Philadelphia running short, he must have taken hurried notes from Kettell for the remainder of the westward voyage as well as the return to Spain—copying a few specifics that struck him, but not, for the most part, calendar citations. Once back home in Otsego for the summer (except for interruptions caused by the often intruding libel suits), he continued working on the more improvised part of the story, the part concerning the three months or so Columbus spent amid the islands before returning to Spain. Perhaps significantly, the handful of dates specified in Cooper’s narrative of the return voyage all also occur in Irving. And, like Irving, Cooper does not here specify days of the week—with one exception, Saturday, March 2, which as it happens is so identified by Irving as well. The inference may therefore be drawn that Cooper completed his narrative of the marine parts of his novel without Kettell at hand but with Irving’s History open on his desk in Cooperstown.17 Whenever and wherever Cooper may have used Kettell, his reliance on the Personal Narrative has attracted some negative comments from the few critics who have written about Mercedes of Castile. One of them concludes that the close reliance on Kettell made the book “source-bound,” tied to the day-by-day record Las Casas digested from Columbus’s original journal.18 Another argues that Cooper’s delay in finishing the book may have been caused by his “recognition of the logstyle sameness” that the voyage narrative assumed because of his reliance on Kettell.19 While it is true that Cooper’s chronological specificity gives the novel an

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unusually literal sense of timing, these two critics are also thinking of other issues. Both think the primary difficulty with Mercedes of Castile was not the level of detail per se but rather the fact that with such a well-known story Cooper had little imaginative leeway. This problem was exacerbated by the direct, detailed, concrete nature of Cooper’s primary source, but was not created by it. This argument, plausible enough on the surface, is finally ahistorical. A modern reader may find Columbus all-too-familiar as a subject. That was hardly the case, however, in 1830s North America. As historian John P. Larner rightly pointed out at the time of the Columbian quincentennial in 1992, it was only after Irving brought out his biography in 1827, little more than a decade before Cooper published his novel, that the historical Columbus “entered the consciousness of educated Americans.” Furthermore, although he had been known as a symbol of the age of discovery to earlier generations of Americans, Columbus had not yet assumed the powerful meanings he was to acquire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For the post-Revolutionary generation, his emerging historical and symbolic importance reflected a widespread attempt to separate the new nation from its English roots. Claudia L. Bushman, reversing the usual formula, thus has argued that “America discovered Columbus” as an historical figure only once the country needed to find or make a fresh origin narrative for itself. And even so, it would be several decades after the Revolution before the slowly opening archives of Europe provided new textual support for the historical knowledge Americans now required. Of the four voyages, the first and most important was the most thinly documented prior to Navarrete ’s discovery. To cite one example, in William Robertson’s popular History of America (1777) the ocean crossing of 1492 occupied only slightly more than six pages.20 In Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus (1787), closely indebted to Robertson, exploration hardly could be the hero’s role: instead, Columbus is invoked at the end of his career, not its beginning, and is poetically consoled for his final sufferings by a vision not of San Salvador but rather of the emergent North American republic of Barlow’s own day.21 That is suitably epic, but it is also true that Barlow, had he wished to write a thickly plotted chronicle of Columbus’s first voyage, would have been source-poor rather than source-bound. Even when Barlow revised and expanded his epic into the Columbiad in 1807, its hero remained a figure of vision and consolation rather than action, in part because specifying all he did still was an elusive task. At the time Cooper undertook his novel, the publication of the Las Casas digest was recent enough that it was still news. When Navarrete ’s initial volumes appeared, the North American Review singled out that digest as “a literary curiosity of great intrinsic interest”—of so much interest, in fact, that the Review translated parts of it independently of the not-yet-published Kettell

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version.22 When that version appeared, it was recognized as making available to American readers a remarkable and hitherto unknown document. “We look upon this work as one of the most interesting that has been issued by the American press in many years,” wrote a reviewer in another journal. “Whether we consider it as a curiosity; as the long lost production of a genius, dear to us as a nation; or as a matter of history, it is equally valuable.”23 At the same time, this precious Personal Narrative had such limited circulation (it was not stereotyped and no subsequent printings seem to have been made across the nineteenth century) that it still was not widely known or available when Cooper wrote his novel. The latter therefore was not a tired recapitulation of a long-known story, but rather an early indication of American responses to the new place Columbus was just then assuming. The very first historical novel written about Columbus in English, Mercedes of Castile does not travel a well-navigated route but rather opens a prospect that, if not literally new, had all kinds of new meaning. Given all this, one still may feel, as do the modern critics referred to earlier, that Cooper failed to find the right way to develop the book’s topic. His basic approach was standard among historical novels, including his own earlier ones: he created lesser figures to accompany the high personages (Columbus, but also Ferdinand and Isabella) who were the givens of the story. Having decided early on in this instance that he would have to make a place for a love plot among the details of the Columbian venture (he appeasingly wrote Bentley in November 1839, “There must be a love story, of course”—LJ 3:444), near the outset he thus introduced an imaginary Spanish knight of wandering propensities, Don Luis de Bobadilla. Luis is in love with the also fictional title character, Maria Mercedes de Valverde, whose guardian, Beatriz, happens to be Luis’s aunt. How Cooper linked his fictional hero and heroine to the historical plot shows some ingenuity. Kinswoman of the one and guardian of the other, Beatriz de Bobadilla herself was no invention. Rather, the historical Beatriz was a close companion of Queen Isabella and was briefly mentioned as such by Irving and Prescott, both of whom stressed her role in persuading Isabella to back Columbus.24 With the voyage approved, adventure-loving Luis, who has been to sea before as a kind of rover, joins Columbus out of a desire to burnish his reputation and thereby prove himself worthy of Mercedes. By this action, he gives the grand enterprise a human face, although at first his identity is masked—for his aunt insists, without really explaining herself, that Luis assume another man’s name, and a “real” one at that. Here Cooper rather nicely exploits an obscure fact. There was a high-born Spaniard on Columbus’s first voyage by the name of Pedro (or Pero) Gutierrez, whom Irving described as a “gentleman of the king’s bed chamber” and Kettell’s text called “groom of the king’s wardrobe.”25 Although Gutierrez was reportedly called upon by Columbus to witness the first

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sighting of land in the West Indies, he otherwise played no major role in the voyage. Aware of the man’s historical obscurity, Cooper elaborated on the few known details by a deft pretense. As in so many of his stories (especially his sea stories, most recently with the character of Seadrift/Eudora Van Beverout in The Water-Witch), he had one character enter the action in the guise of another. In Mercedes of Castile, Luis ships as Gutierrez. Why? Not to hide his participation from the queen, who fully knows and approves of it. What he conceals instead are the private motives that have won over Isabella to the venture. Mercedes has tirelessly lobbied the queen and essentially gained her assent, but she has not done so because she believes in Columbus or his plan. She instead trusts that, if the plan succeeds, Luis will be able to prove his mettle and thereby win her hand. In Cooper’s novel we thus learn that the 1492 voyage, which would prove of such significance for world history, resulted not from careful planning and sage argumentation, or even just dumb luck, but rather from the sudden urgency of two young lovers’ hearts. This is in one sense a tired device, but it finally succeeds because it exploits a weak point in the actual record (that is, the obscurity surrounding Pedro Gutierrez) to humorously revise a vastly consequential historical event: the reader is informed that a lovelorn young noblewoman, in a short, last-minute conversation, persuaded Isabella to approve a plan that had languished for the many years during which its visionary proposer wandered from court to court. Luis is not merely inserted into the grand plot of Columbian discovery the way the title character of Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln is inserted into Revolutionary Boston. Lincoln for the most part just observes history, whereas Luis is, through his tie to Mercedes and hers to Isabella, its uncanny motive power. Although Isabella may not know it, Luis is the reason she decides to call Columbus back and at last give him the support he has long sought. When Luis, lingering near the court in order to learn the outcome of his lover’s appeal, is chosen as the messenger to take word of the queen’s decision to Columbus, it is both convenient and ironically apt (see MC 1:132–36). The archness continues. Luis de Bobadilla plays a key role in the whole Columbian venture, often serving as the figure in whom Columbus confides his thoughts and feelings—like the historical figure Pedro Gutierrez, the fictional Luis thus is called on to confirm the sighting of land late on October 11 and the following morning (see MC 2:81–83). Moreover, once the voyagers arrive on Hayti in December, Luis assumes an even more active role. Having behaved himself well up to this point, he can no longer resist the call of adventure. With a cacique named Mattinao and the book’s old “sea-dog,” Sancho Mundo (MC 1:220), in tow, he secretly sets off upriver for the island’s interior. Then ensue events unmentioned in the journal of Columbus, as a result of which, we are told, they have “escaped the prying eyes of the various historians who have

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subsequently collected so much from that pregnant document” (MC 2:94). One may perhaps conclude, as suggested earlier, that Cooper wrote this part of the novel without Kettell’s version of the “document” before him. Here he ceased to be “source-bound” in the least. But here, too, he allowed his romantic plot to unfold itself most fully. Insofar as Mercedes of Castile represents a playful experiment in how to write historical fiction, this is its most interesting part. Once Luis has arrived at the paradisal center of Mattinao’s territory, in what seems like a prototype for Melville’s Nukuheva in Typee six years later, he is introduced to Ozema, the book’s Fayaway—a young female whose “freedom from restraint, native graces, and wild luxuriance” are clearly appealing to Luis (MC 2:100). Of course there is trouble in this paradise, but it is trouble born of misunderstanding rather than guile or even just desire. Named after a river mentioned by Irving, the beautiful maiden comes to believe that Luis is to be her husband. So Cooper is back on the familiar ground of The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish here, although in the end it is the Indian maid who, taken back to Spain in order to protect her from an arranged marriage to the cacique Guacanagari, will die as her illusion collapses. Once the poor Ozema perishes, Luis and Mercedes are at last wed.26

Returns Contemplating the faraway first voyage of Columbus had its usefulness as Cooper wrote his next book, The Deerslayer. He set it in the most familiar terrain, terrain in which he then was living and over which he then was fighting, terrain where he had spent more time than anywhere else on earth despite the various holes in his emotional and legal possession of it. And yet the book, once the narrator has reminded the reader that even American space is involved in history, opens with an extraordinary scene that seems redolent of Creation itself, a scene in which “voices were heard calling to each other, in the depths of a forest” just as two men, emerging into a chance clearing, soon catch sight of “the lake, itself ” (DS CE 17). It is the nearest thing to a Columbian moment Cooper ever managed, and it came to life in denial of all he himself knew of this place and the world at large in 1841. Finding it necessitated radical erasures as much as or more than recoveries. Cooper worked and wedged his feet, as Thoreau might have said, down through Otsego Hall and its once again well-tended grounds; down through the Cooperstown whose history he had traced in his Chronicles three years earlier; down through the partly imaginary, partly described territories of The Pioneers and Home as Found alike; down through farms and fields, including those that in 1840 occupied the spaces where Cooper and his wife had erected their now ruinous

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stone house in 1813–1817 and buried their first daughter in a still-unmarked grave; down through New York and the whole United States to boot—down and down again until the mind could rest on something more real and enduring than all the things Cooper had known in the vicinity of Otsego since his very earliest years, so many of them lost or altered or effectively forgotten now. Land did not last, the often-dispossessed Cooper might have said—only vision, only art did, only nature as their solace and source. So he also worked down through the picnic grounds on Three Mile Point, and the family fishing camp, too, with his father’s initials carved on the old tree there, until all that was left was the Huron encampment under great oaks that resemble “tall, straight, rustic columns,” with a crown of “dense and rich foliage” far above (DS CE 282). The campfire in the little clearing at the Point’s center sends its glow upward into the trees, opening the forest with a kind of aesthetic, even religious propriety, illuminating “the arches of the forest” and shedding the light of “hundreds of tapers” on the camp. As Natty, on a mission at that moment to rescue Wah-ta!-Wah, paddles his canoe around the point, he almost comes into the rays spreading sidewise out over the water. Although he pauses so as to avoid the Hurons’ notice, he soon is lost in the first of those contemplative moments that will mark his long active life in the woods. Cooper explains: “untutored as he was in the learning of the world, and simple as he ever showed himself, . . . he was a man of strong, native, poetical feeling. He loved the woods for their freshness, their sublime solitudes, their vastness, and the impress that they every where bore of the divine hand of their creator” (DS CE 278–79). The Deerslayer thus put down on paper the earliest fantasies Cooper himself had had on the lake and along its shores—fantasies that no doubt had filled the imaginary landscape of his boyhood with Indians and hunters, canoes and arks, perhaps even a fantastic hut on stilts in what everyone knew was the green lake’s shallowest point. Natty’s contemplations had been—still were—his own. The libel suits and their political context nonetheless helped determine this tale’s natural and emotional landscape and also helped set its themes. For one thing, the trouble over Cooper’s character as a man and artist made the theme of reputation a critical part of this socially dense tale of the early forest. Judith Hutter, a woman of obvious sexual appeal, sharp intelligence, and keen worldly insights and ability, has the two flaws Natty attributes to her—a beauty so great that it proves a liability (by attracting the likes of the English officer Warley), but also a vanity equally great and equally injurious. Yet she is the victim, too, of mean-spirited gossip. The rumors of her supposed or actual misbehavior comprise an issue to which Cooper’s own feelings about the slanders and libels heaped on him in recent years would have made him sensitive. As Tom Hutter is dying, Harry March speaks to Judith about the old man’s character. “I’ll not

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deny that hard stories were in circulation consarning Floating Tom, but who is there that does n’t get a scratch, when an inimy holds the rake? There ’s them that say hard things of me; and even you, beauty as you be, do n’t always escape.” When first captured by the Hurons and showered with abuse by an old woman (“Dog—skunk—wood-chuck—mink—hedge-hog—pig—toad—spider— yengee”—DS CE 293), Natty bears her attacks but refuses to repay her in kind. In first drafting that scene, Cooper tellingly compared her “impotent attempts to arouse” Natty to the vituperative assaults of a “scurrulous [sic] newspaper” on “a gentleman in our own state of society” (DS CE 363, xxix).27 Judith Hutter as a woman of ill report may have come to Cooper in part from an old story circulating in the period about the seduction and abandonment of a young Albany woman by a British officer. Anne Macvicar Grant, who had spent her girlhood in and around that city, included a muted version in Memoirs of an American Lady, the book on which Cooper had drawn in some fashion for The Pathfinder and would use much more actively for Satanstoe. The handsome and worldly officer, unnamed in Grant, was lodged in the house of a “wealthy, and somewhat vain and shallow” merchant who, of course, “had an only daughter.” The latter, “young, lively, bold, conceited and exceedingly well looking,” fell for the colonel’s charms and, when orders arrived for him to leave the city, became his lover. She had no doubt he would come back and take her as his wife, but he had not the least intention of doing so. The girl’s father, now alarmed about the situation, followed the army on its way north, beseeching the officer to return and marry her. In exchange, he promised to sign over most of his wealth. But the colonel was “heir to a considerable fortune in his own country,” Grant wrote, and so was not to be moved by such a lure. Besides, she added, he was a callous, selfcentered, calculating man: “inwardly despising” the young woman, “whom he had not considered from the first as estimable, he was not to be soothed or bribed into compliance.” The refusal condemned the young woman to a kind of social death like that visited on Judith Hutter in Cooper’s book. “The dejected father returned disconsolate; and the astonishment and horror this altogether novel occurrence occasioned in the town, was not to be described. Of such a circumstance there was no existing precedent; half the city were related to the fair culprit, for penitent she could hardly be called.” Although Cooper kept the affair between Judith Hutter and Captain Warley offstage, even giving a hazy account of the officer’s later situation, the essential outline of Judith’s nature and “crime,” and her victimization by those who gossip about her, closely resembles what he could have read in Grant. And it is possible that he heard the story viva voce, too, an eventuality that would have made his emphasis on rumor and reputation all the more pertinent in handling Judith in the novel. We know from other sources that the story was still circulating in the Mohawk Valley just when Cooper was at work on the novel.28

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There were other sources and analogs for the book, too. It has long been acknowledged that it arose in part from the visual source of Glimmerglass itself, which had become available to Cooper only after returning to his father’s village in the mid-1830s. Of course he could as easily have remembered it from New York City or Paris (or anywhere else), as he had relied on his Ontario memories in writing The Pathfinder. But the new book’s visual generation was more concrete and specific and immediate: Cooper’s present ravishment by the lake both recalled ancient loss and overcame it. The recovery was a matter of real estate as well as vision. Apparently as early as 1835, before permanently relocating his family to Cooperstown, the novelist had begun purchasing property on the hillside bordering the eastern shore of the lake, where over the next several years he established the hobby farm known as “The Châlet.” Cooper soon moved the property’s rough house, originally up on the ridge, to a site under a ledge of rock and proceeded to clear what eventually became a meadow, known today as Star Field and prominently visible on the hillside diagonally opposite the site of Fenimore Farm.29 That clearing yielded sublime lake views, and Cooper’s frequent trips back and forth between village and farm divulged Otsego’s full array of moods and conditions. Those visual treats, according to Cooper’s eldest daughter, were of critical importance in suggesting the new novel to him. One evening in 1840, while she and her father were returning to Otsego Hall from the farm, they paused at a point near the present Lakewood Cemetery as the lake ’s whole glimmering surface opened before them. Cooper, who had been singing a political song (a Whig song at that!) as they drove, fell silent and, when the horse slowed to a walk, looked intently across the water. He was seeing something not really there—not a boat on the lake or a farm across the way, but rather some inward vision of the deep past, much as he had seen his father and old Frey during his walk at Canajoharie. When he had mused on that visionary scene for a moment, he spoke up: “I must write one more book, dearie, about our little lake!” (DS HE xxxiii; P&P 322). The moral suggestiveness of The Châlet’s location for Cooper is reflected in the novel proper when Natty Bumppo exclaims, “An open spot on a mountain side, where a wide look can be had at the heavens and the ’arth, is a most judicious place for a man to get a just idee of the power of the Manitou, and of his own littleness” (DS CE 456). The Deerslayer captured what Cooper saw of the lake on his regular shuttles along it. But the book also was in dialogue with the earlier Leather-Stocking Tales and, more importantly, with the ways in which the public had taken the hero of those books to itself. Cooper seems to have thought about it strategically—as part of something larger—from the start. When sending Bentley the final shipment for Mercedes of Castile in November 1840, he wrote

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that he was ready to make a proposal for his next book: “It will contain the early life of Leatherstocking,” the only period needed “to fill up his career.” Although he added that the new book was “not yet named,” Natty was central to it from the very start (LJ 4:102). By the following January, when the project was nearly half done, Cooper could already see the larger patterns in Natty’s “career”: “In the last book he is called the Pathfinder, and was in love: in this he is called the Deerslayer, and is beloved.” This was a kind of cumulative structure the series had not had in its rather haphazard first phase. Now, as he imagined its seeming completion—he would have second thoughts on that soon, tentatively thinking of a sixth installment—he explained to Bentley the sequence of the five separate novels: “The order of the books, as regards time will be, this book, Mohicans, Pathfinder, Pioneers, Prairie.” He was still not decided on a title for the present work but already preferred something like the final one: “The Deerslayer, or a Legend of the Glimmerglass” (LJ 4:112). That the last two books in the series were named after their evident hero is one mark of Cooper’s growing sense of the hunter’s importance to the larger effort. The Pioneers as a title includes Natty only ironically: virtually against his own protest, he is called “the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent” (PIO CE 456). In the other two novels of the 1820s, Natty is pushed to the side in terms of either the other characters (he is not really one of the Mohicans, let alone the last of them) or the setting (the prairie is hardly his native ground, but rather a place of exile). When Cooper returned to the series as a series at the end of the 1830s, he more unequivocally claimed it for his hero. That the two final titles were his own coinages represents the degree to which Cooper was consciously mythologizing here. And that Natty’s new sobriquets are active compounds is just right, for these books show him to be nothing if not active.30 Making the discrete books into a positive series was mostly a matter of reverse engineering. As Cooper wrote each new tale, he backtracked, picking up and filling out other aspects of Natty’s life. This pattern first becomes notable in The Prairie, and especially in its later portion; that part was written in Paris, significantly enough, for it was in Paris, not New York, that Cooper first made written reference to the series as such. Whereas The Last of the Mohicans only modestly employed memories that had already surfaced in The Pioneers (the “Dieskau” motif, for instance), thereby attaching a new plot to prior hints, in The Prairie Natty indulges in a kind of summative mood, bringing up episodes dating from both of the earlier novels—earlier in this case both in order of publication and in terms of the character’s experience. Plot details from The Last of the Mohicans in particular resurface: “There was that accu[r]sed Huron from the upper lakes, that I knocked from his perch, among the rocks in the hills, back of

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the Hori—” (PR Bos 1:176); “I once made a forced march, and went through a great deal of jeopardy, with a companion who never opened his mouth but to sing” (that is, Davey Gamut; PR Bos 2:183); “What, did he tell you of the imp behind the log—and of the miserable devil who went over the fall—or of the wretch in the tree?” (PR Bos 2:248). Other memories in The Prairie reach back to The Pioneers, dimmer now in Cooper’s own recollection and certainly not in his baggage on arriving in Paris (although copies could be found in France if need be). To begin with, the whole situation of the third Leather-Stocking novel is in a sense dependent on the close of the first one. And specific linkages are established as well: “I have come into these plains to escape the sound of the axe; for here surely the chopper”—the generic chopper, but also Billy Kirby—“can never follow” (PR Bos 1:252–53); “Do you call this a fire! If you had seen, what I have witnessed in the Eastern hills, when mighty mountains were like the furnace of a smith, you would have known what it was to fear the flames and to be thankful that you were spared!” (PR Bos 2:283). Furthermore, there are memories that, while they have no particular connection to either of the earlier books, fill in the spaces in the newly emerging series. Some update the reader on what Natty has been doing since leaving Otsego: “I followed mad Anthony [Wayne], one season, through the beeches” (PR Bos 1:127); “Lord, man, if you should once get fairly beset by a brood of grizzly bears, as happened to Hector and I, at the great falls of the Miss[ouri]—” (PR Bos 2:179). Others reach back to his youth (“I was born on the sea-shore” [PR Bos 1:33]) or gesture toward the years in between 1757 and 1793 (“The time has been when I followed the deer in the mountains of the Delaware and Hudson and took the beaver on the streams of the upper lakes, in the same season. . . . The dam of Hector . . . was then a pup, and apt to open on the game the moment she struck the scent” [PR Bos 1:156]). At the same time that this texture of memories binds the third novel to the first and second, it is worth noting that in no important ways did Cooper salt the 1820s archive with inventions that might be of obvious use should he some day write about Natty’s early or intervening years.31 In 1827, he thought of the series as “complete.” The summative mood that shapes so many of Natty’s speeches in this third book was fitting insofar as his life itself would be finished, biographically and literarily, by the end of Hector Bossange’s third volume. In these ways, all the same, the third Leather-Stocking Tale gave the novelist tutelage on how to extend the saga once he decided to add to it again in the 1840s. The process was not entirely untroubled. His work on The Deerslayer was relatively efficient (from his first inklings along the lakeshore to the novel’s appearance, only about a year elapsed), but it was hampered by a telling hesitation. Cooper’s original preface indicates that several times he had been “tempted to

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burn his manuscript, and to turn to some other subject.” He worried about the book’s reception, particularly because carrying “the same character through five works” might tax the public’s patience. (Bentley had not eased this concern by writing Cooper in January 1841 about his fears that, “like most sequels,” it would be thought inferior.) On the other hand, Cooper was aware that the positive reception of the previous books had obliged him, so to speak, to give “some account of [Natty’s] younger days” (DS CE 1).32 A chance communication from an English reader, reaching Cooper just when he was plagued by doubt, confirmed his hunches. Inscribed “England, April [1841],” it praised the other Indian tales and asked Cooper to write “more novels about Indians, and the Scout, such as about various exploits alluded to by the Scout, and”—this must have been especially pleasing to Cooper—“about his Prior Career.”33 Cooper wrote The Deerslayer partly to satisfy such fans but also to engage some of the ways in which his works were being read—and used—in recent years. The second intent is best understood through briefly exploring Natty Bumppo’s persistence in the popular mind across the decade leading up to The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer. Despite the seeming finality of The Prairie, readers hardly treated Natty as a ghost of the literary past with no bearing on their own experience. To the contrary, Leather-Stocking lived on as a common figure in the culture. His name was often adopted for any local man who was of sufficient age and oddity to qualify for it—and who in some instances was proposed as the prototype of Cooper’s fictional character. Such a link was of course commonly forged between the literary character and his most famous real counterpart, Daniel Boone: one paper in 1834, fully a dozen years after Boone ’s demise, called him “in life and death a veritable ‘Leatherstocking,’ ” while another termed him in his early years “an embryo Leather-Stocking, Trapper, and Scout.” But Boone was simply one of several frontier figures who in the popular imagination coalesced with Cooper’s fictional hero.34 Aside from such particular adoptions and linkages, there was also a tendency to use “Leather-Stocking” as a general term for woodsmen, much as any hunter in Tennessee reportedly was referred to as “a Boone” by the 1820s.35 Even Cooper indulged in this same usage, a sign that he was comfortably familiar with it. In Home as Found he thus had John Effingham lament, as noted earlier, “Alas! . . . the days of the ‘Leather-stockings’ have passed away” (HAF 1:218). The same year, in Chronicles of Cooperstown, Cooper used the formula when he termed Otsego hunter David Shipman “the ‘Leather Stocking’ of the region” (COC 26). Writers of brief magazine and newspaper items also began adopting Leather-Stocking as a nom de plume, like the man who, having observed an impressive rifle drill near the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 1836, composed a short descant on the importance of that particular weapon to America’s military

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victories in the Revolution, the early Indian Wars, and the War of 1812. A Virginia writer seeking to encourage gun competitions borrowed the name in penning a long, exacting disquisition on the construction and use of the best rifles. And a shooting association formed in Macon, Georgia, early in the 1840s chose “The Leather Stocking Club” as its official name, although that did not prevent a reported loss to its Savannah counterparts.36 Such adoptions of Leather-Stocking were mostly innocent or indeed commendatory. They bespoke the degree to which this character from the three-novel series, and to a lesser degree his companions Chingachgook and Uncas, had become figures in the popular imagination. If not literally real, they were compelling enough that individuals could be forgiven for mistaking them for real. At an 1835 meeting of the recently founded Improved Order of Red Men in Baltimore, toasts were thus made not only to a handful of specific Indian leaders but also to Uncas, Chingachgook, and Leather-Stocking—even to Magua.37 Insofar as this particular organization played an elaborate game of impersonation, and was nothing if not dramatic in its own rituals and costumes, such a melding of fictive and historical personages was to be expected. But in these and other instances the appropriation of Leather-Stocking and his fellows began to run against the grain of the original. It was to this shift that The Deerslayer in particular represented a response. The novel not only finished the series of books—it clarified Cooper’s views and enacted them with unmistakable conviction. Cooper was responding in particular to a pair of writers who appropriated and transfigured Leather-Stocking. The first, Charles Fenno Hoffman, modeled his “sturdy hunter” Balt in Greyslaer: A Romance of the Mohawk (1840) partly on Natty.38 Yet the differences between the two hunters are pronounced—and significant. Balt is not the hero of the book, for one thing, nor even a hunter in any real sense; rather, he is the mentor of the book’s real hero, Max Greyslaer, and a guide for that young upper-class patriot and his cohort in the difficult territory of Tryon County, New York, at the start of the Revolution. Balt is in this manner a kind of sidekick rather than a person in his own right. One need only contrast Natty’s relationship to Oliver Edwards with Balt’s relationship to Greyslaer to understand the different social schematics in the two writers. There are other contrasts between Balt and Bumppo. They involve not so much the raw skill of the two men as the attitudes with which they are armed. As if he is intended to correct Natty Bumppo on the question of Indian nature, Balt is an unabashed Indian hater who sees no chance for civilizing Native Americans or coexisting with them. Early in the book, Balt draws a bead with his gun on a shadowy figure in the dark woods, then calls out, “Come in, ye varmint, come in, ye lurching mouser from old Nick’s pantry, ye poisoned scum of the devil’s copper cauldron; come in, ye scouting redskin, or [my gun] shall blow a hole

Plate 2.  “Cathedral, Antwerp” (OnzeLieve-Vrouwekathedraal). In William Boyce, The Belgian Traveller, Being a Complete Guide through Belgium and Holland, or the Kingdom of the United Netherlands. 0th ed. London: Samuel Leigh, 2178; facing p. 776. Boyce’s popular post-Napoleonic guide was first published in London in 2120, just when the Continent again became accessible to British tourists. The Coopers acquired their copy of a later edition, probably the one used here, in London in 2171 as they readied themselves for their return to France through the Lowlands. Susan Cooper wrote her daughters at the end of May: “Wm [Cooper’s nephew William Y. Cooper] has been groaning over the long walks he has had, after the Ministers of France, and the Netherlands, to arrange the Passports—and is just now consoling himself with looking at the Belgian Traveller, and biting his nails.” Boyce’s guide, like others the Coopers used in Europe, helped not only to explain the sights they saw and enjoyed but also directed them to those sights in the first place—as with the great Antwerp Cathedral, notable for its very high single tower. In the condensed journal of his first visit to Antwerp in June 2171, Cooper simply noted, “Cathedral, tower, Rubens, Sculpture in wood.” The last phrase referred to the renowned pieces carved by various woodworkers (such as Pieter Verbruggen, mentioned by Boyce), including the cathedral’s magnificent pulpit. Boyce also mentioned and praised the pair of altarpieces by Rubens to which Cooper referred: “The Elevation of the Cross” (2925; originally in St. Walburga Church) and “The Descent from the Cross” (2922–2927). The novelist had seen other artworks in The Hague and Amsterdam especially, but Antwerp elicited the most response. He thus went to a “Picture gallery” there, by which he no doubt referred to the museum then located in an old convent, where (as Boyce indicates) Cooper could have seen what in his journal he called Rubens’s “study of the descent from the cross.” When Cooper and his family returned to the city in the midst of political upheavals in 2137, among the first places he went was the cathedral, whereupon he happily recorded that “the two Ruben’s [sic]” were “cased up, and . . . literally bomb proof, in preparation for an attack,” a topic he would return to in his Gleanings (LJ 7:786). Completed as part of a Catholic resurgence in the southern Lowlands after the Spanish conquest in 2010, the altarpieces focused on the crucifixion—and thus reinforced, for a population catechized in Dutch Calvinism over the previous generation, the central importance of the Eucharist to the Roman church. Later in 2171, Protestant Cooper would begin to open his mind and feelings to Catholic ritual, and the shift seems to have begun as he contemplated this magnificent building and its asso­ ciated artworks in Antwerp. (Collection of the author.)

Plate 7.  “My Brigantine! The Words from Cooper’s Novel The Water Witch, the Music by George Herbert Rodwell.” E[dward] S. Mesier, 71 Wall St. [New York], ca. 2132. Almost from the start of Cooper’s career, his works were adapted for stage performance not only in the United States but also abroad. Cooper’s friend Charles Powell Clinch made a stage version of The Spy shortly after that book appeared in 2172, a version so successful that it was still being performed in the United States after Cooper’s death thirty years later. Clinch told playwright and theater manager William Dunlap that Cooper, evidently seeing an opportunity for extending his still uncertain income from his books, produced his own adaptation of his next novel, The Pioneers. By the time he arrived in Europe, Cooper had learned of the most dazzling of the early stage versions of his fiction—the pair the British playwright Edward Fitzball made of The Pilot (one true to Cooper’s plot, the other a parodic inversion, with the British as the victors), which played at London’s Adelphi Theatre. Since music was a key element in productions at the Adelphi and other popular (or “minor”) theaters, which were restricted by law from mounting regular dialogue-only drama, songs were an integral part of the fare. (Fitzball, who liked nautical settings and plots, also mounted an early version of the Flying Dutchman legend, complete with music.) In writing The Water-Witch, Cooper drew on the conventions of the musical stage, perhaps hoping that he might have some hand in adapting the new book for theaters like the Adelphi. One element of the plan was the song “My Brigantine!,” which is sung, to guitar accompaniment, as a tribute to the seagreen lady. An adaptation of The Water-Witch by William B. Bernard had a short run at the Adelphi late in 2135. British composer George H. B. Rodwell, who often worked with Fitzball (he wrote music for The Flying Dutchman and before that for The Pilot), wrote a tune for Cooper’s words for use in that production. The song, shown here on a piece of New York sheet music from around 2132, proved long-lived; as late as 2652 it was set as a work for chorus by the DutchAmerican composer Louis Victor Saar. (Collection of the author.)

Plate 3.  Description de la Fête de Vignerons, célébrée à Vevey, Le 5 Aoust [sic] 1819. Vevey: Chez Lœrtscher et Fils, [2126], cover. For the irregular Fêtes de Vignerons, or festivals of the vinedressers, held in the Swiss city of Vevey, in Canton Vaud, guidebooks to the processions and players such as this one have often been essential. When the Coopers first went down the hillsides above Vevey on their way to Florence in 2171, they found crowds of people gathering the late vintage and carrying fruit-filled baskets to wagons and thence to the big tubs in the town’s streets by Lake Geneva. Passing a man with a load atop his head, their coachman Caspar reached out and grabbed a bunch of grapes, telling Cooper over his shoulder, “They are good now, Monsieur, but they will be better tout de suit”—once reborn as wine. “We seemed to have entered an entirely new country since reaching the brow of the hill,” Cooper later wrote, a landscape of “plenty and merriment.” For him, though, Caspar’s “tout de suit” would involve a decidedly literary harvest. The family returned to Vevey in September 2137 to spend not quite a month in a house near the shore of Lake Geneva, and there Cooper began to plan The Headsman, in which the Fête de Vignerons would provide a vital piece of action. (Collection of the author.)

Plate 4.  Description de la Fête de Vignerons, célébrée à Vevey, Le 5 Aoust [sic] 1819. Vevey: Chez Lœrtscher et Fils, [2126], foldout 0 (detail of Silenus and Le Grappe de Chanaan). Cooper did not observe the Vevey wine festival in 2171; nor would he see it in 2137. (In fact, it had last been held in 2126 and would not return until 2134.) While in Vevey on his second visit, he must have sought out and acquired the Lœrstchers’ detailed guide. Comparison of his prose with the text and the folding plates of the guide makes it clear that he combined elements from both in his descriptions. Regarding the role of Silenus, the Greek god of drunkenness, Cooper could find the following in the guidebook: “Silène, nourricier de Bacchus, monté sur un âne et servi par deux nêgres” (“Silenus, the nourisher of Bacchus, [enters,] mounted on a donkey and attended by two blacks”). Although it shows Silenus falling off his long-eared mount and steadied by two men on foot, the plate contains no obvious clue as to the latters’ race. Cooper’s term for them (“two blackamoors”) clearly derived from the guidebook’s text, not the image, even though the image provided many details (unnoticed in the text) that Cooper also emphasized in the novel, as indicated in my discussion in chapter 0. Similarly, the two “youths . . . bearing on a pole a cluster of grapes that nearly descended to the ground, . . . which was intended to represent the fruit brought from Canaan,” as the novel informs us, are referred to in passing in the guidebook text only as “deux Vignerons.” Again, Cooper’s detail derived from the foldout plate. (Collection of the author.)

Plate 0.  Description de la Fête de Vignerons, célébrée à Vevey, Le 5 Aoust [sic] 1819. Vevey: Chez Lœrtscher et Fils, [2126], foldout 8 (Les Sacrificateurs). In The Headsman, Cooper’s treatment of the “officials of the sacrifice” who accompany Bacchus offers a particularly good example of his composite use of the 2126 guidebook. In the latter’s text, he could find the following description of the “Trois Sacrificaeurs”: “l’un conduisant la victime (un boue aux cornes doreés); le second portant la hâche du sacrifice, et le troisième le bassin”—“the first leading the victim (a ram with gilded horns); the second carrying the sacrificial axe, and the third the basin.” Cooper clearly relied on this passage for some details (that there were three officials, not the two in the plate; and especially that the ram’s horns were gilded, a detail lacking in the foldout). Only the plate, however, could provide other essentials—that one man carried a knife, unmentioned in the guidebook, while the third bore the hatchet, not a basin in which to collect the victim’s blood. In these and similar instances, Cooper might have invented such details, but instead he carefully reconstructed them from the pamphlet documenting the most recent version of Vevey’s fête de Vignerons. (Collection of the author.)

Plate 9.  “Otsego Hall, Cooperstown N.Y.” Engraving by H. B. Hall after a daguerreotype, 2107. In Homes of American Authors; Comprising Anecdotal, Personal, and Descriptive Sketches, by Various Writers. New York: D. Appleton and Co., 2108; facing p. 753. Cooper’s father had started building his Cooperstown mansion in 2869 in order to appease his wife Elizabeth, who disliked the frontier village and the family’s original wood house there and preferred decamping to New Jersey for the winter, taking young James and his brother Samuel with her. Work on the elegant brick substitute dragged on until the fall of 2861, when Mrs. Cooper, again in New Jersey, threatened to remain there for good; and James and Samuel (who missed their wild “haunts” along Otsego Lake) then rebelled against her, forcing a family crisis. Judge Cooper resolved the impasse by having the old house cleaned up and returning the trio there for the winter—but redoubling his efforts to finish the new one, which was ready the following June. Modeled on the Van Rensselaer manor house just north of Albany’s city limits, the Cooper mansion had a large symmetrical plan and rich classical details that made it an astonishing structure for the frontier zone at the time. Whatever statement it made about the family, though, was soon muted by the deaths of Cooper’s parents and four older brothers between 2156 and 2126, and the accompanying collapse of the family fortune. The building fell out of the hands of the Coopers by 2172 and for the next fourteen years sat unoccupied as its once-splendid grounds became overgrown and strewn with lumber and trash. Once the novelist repurchased the property in 2134, he had it (as he recalled in his anonymous 2131 history of the village) “extensively repaired, and a good deal altered.” This engraving, produced from a daguerreotype his children commissioned shortly after his death, shows the Gothic façade designed by his good friend, the artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. (Collection of the author.)

Plate 8.  “S.E. View of Albany, from Greenbush Ferry.” Drawn by J. W. Barber, engraved by Sherman and Smith, New York. In John W. Barber and Henry Howe, Historical Collections of the State of New York. New York: S. Tuttle for Barber and Howe, 2147; facing p. 44. Albany, an old Dutch city spread down a sharply sloping hillside near the head of navigation on the Hudson River, was to figure as a setting in several of Cooper’s novels in the 2145s, largely because it had been an important setting in his life. From Paris in 2132, answering a letter from the minister of the city’s Second Presbyterian Church, Cooper burst into a bright page-long recollection: “The name of Albany . . . at the head of your letter, gave me pleasure—To me Albany has always been a place of agreeable and friendly recollections—It was the only outlet we had, in my childhood, to the world, and many a merry week have I passed there with boys of my own age, while my father . . . waited for the opening of the river to go south. Those boys are now, like myself, men or in their graves. . . . Still later, Albany was, to me, a town of excellent social feeling and friendly connexions, I could not visit my own County without passing it, and I always entered it with pleasure, and left it with regret. . . . Albany is a name I love for a multitude of associations that are connected with my earliest years.” Not until he wrote Satanstoe in 2140, though, was Cooper able to take imaginative possession of the city in his fiction. Too many other bad feelings, ones he did not mention in 2132, had also clustered about the place to make that effort easy. (Collection of the author.)

Plate 1.  James Fenimore Cooper. By Charles L. Elliott (after Brady), engraved by W. E. Marshall. In Pages and Pictures, from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, with Notes by Susan Fenimore Cooper. New York: W. A. Townsend and Co., 2192; frontispiece. Mathew Brady called on Cooper in New York City in September 2105 to ask him to sit before his camera. “I recollect being much perplexed to know how to get Fenimore Cooper,” he later wrote. “That, of course, was in the day of daguerreotyping. I never had an excess of confidence, and perhaps my diffidence helped me out with genuine men. Mr. Cooper had quarreled with his publishers, and a celebrated daguerreotyper, [Howard] Chilton, I think, one of my contemporaries, made the mistake of speaking about the subject of irritation. It was reported that Cooper had jumped from the chair and refused to sit. After that daguerreotypers were afraid of him. I ventured in at . . . his hotel, corner of Park place. He came out in his morning gown and asked me to excuse him till he had dismissed a caller. I told him what I had come for. Said he: ‘How far from here is your gallery?’ ‘Only two blocks.’ He went right along, stayed two hours, had half a dozen sittings, and Charles Elliott painted from it the portrait of Cooper for his publishers, Stringer & Townsend.” Brady produced several plates (Cooper told his wife five), only one of which survives today. The image reproduced here is an engraving by William E. Marshall after the oil-on-canvas portrait Charles Loring Elliott produced from another of the original Brady plates. Brady gave a third of the plates to sculptor Horatio Greenough as the basis for his planned memorial bust of Cooper.

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through ye.” He is prevented from shooting by Max Greyslaer and his friend Derrick De Roos, who tell Balt that the Indian in question is their particular friend and ally, “the noble Oneida Teondetha.” Balt is unimpressed. “Bah! only an Oneida,” he responds, lowering his weapon. He cannot refrain, though, from telling the two young men, “when you know as much of the woods as old Balt, you’ll larn that the less one has to do with an Injun the better. Let every man stick to his colour, is my motto.” Soon he refuses to join Greyslaer and the others in a scout: “Balt don’t go scouting with an Injun in the party.” His gun, he continues, “doesn’t know much difference atwixt one copper face and another, and she ’d be jist as like as not, in a dark swamp, to mistake that sleek chap for one of [the Mohawk Loyalist] Brant’s people, and go off of herself.” By the end of the story, Balt actually comes to accept Teondetha because the Oneida has proved his worth. But he is angry at himself for this lapse from what remains his “only foible, if so it may be called,” as Hoffman writes—namely, “that he could not abide a Redskin.” If Balt is a hunter in the book, this is the beast he hunts. “It’s the nature of them,” Balt says about Indians, “dogs eating dogs.”39 A copy of Hoffman’s novel survives from the Cooper library. Greyslaer appeared in New York City in July 1840, just about the time that Susan Cooper recalled her father making his promise about writing a new book set on Otsego Lake. Whether or not the notion for that new tale arose in direct response to Hoffman’s, it seems clear that once Cooper began Deerslayer he shaped it by reference to Greyslaer, which with its nearby settings, suggestively similar title, and various connections to Cooper’s earlier writings was something of a challenge to him.40 Balt is represented not in Bumppo, but rather in Harry March and Tom Hutter, whose hatred of “Indians” (Cooper refuses to use “Injuns,” Balt’s preferred slur), deeper and more depraved, is meant to contrast with LeatherStocking’s eloquent defense of the humanity of even his enemies. March and Hutter hate Indians; moreover, they worsen their moral stature by killing them not just out of hatred but also out of a desire for the blood money Indian scalps can fetch in the corrupt imperial market. In the first discussion Harry and Natty have in the book about Indians, Harry asserts a debased scale of racial worth: white men are highest, followed by blacks (who are “put to live in the neighbourhood of the white man, as tolerable, and fit to be made use of ”), and then by red men, placed last because they are only “half human.” Natty does not accept this scheme, instead countering, “God made all three alike, Hurry.” When March retorts, “Alike! Do you call a nigger like a white man, or me like an Indian?,” Natty expands on his own view: “God made us all, white, black, and red, and, no doubt, had his own wise intentions in colouring us differently. Still, he made us, in the main, much the same in feelin’s; though, I’ll not deny that he gave each race its gifts” (DS 1:49–50). When the

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two hunters resume this discussion a few pages later, Natty says, “I look upon the red-men to be quite as human as we are ourselves, Hurry.” In this view he is supported not only by the consistency and clarity of his own statements but also by the author’s unequivocal interventions. Cooper wants it to be utterly apparent to his readers that Harry is a racist—“one of those theorists who believed in the inferiority of all of the human race, who were not white.” Furthermore, Cooper restates his own conclusions in terms of political theory, not just moral sentiment or sympathy, noting that March’s “conscience accused him of sundry lawless acts against the Indians, and he had found it an exceedingly easy mode of quieting it, by putting the whole family of red-men, incontinently, without the category of human rights” (DS 1:55). Indian hating covered slaughter.41 When Harry instinctively shoots at the shore after hearing an Indian cry out, he casually kills a young woman—an “act of unthinking cruelty,” writes Cooper, that bears out his racial views (DS CE 321). There is to be vengeance for the deed. Once the two scalp-hunters return to Hutter’s seemingly secure Muskrat Castle, only to be overpowered there, March manages to escape, but Hutter does not. Judith, coming back to the Castle after the Mingoes have abandoned it, finds her stepfather seated in a corner of the inner room, his shoulders supported by the angled walls and his head slumped over on his chest. Hetty, who has seen him sooner, tells Judith he is drunk, a fair guess in his case, but that is not so. Cooper has Judith lift the cap off his head to reveal the reality that the narrative describes with clinical exactitude: “the quivering and raw flesh, the bared veins and muscles, and all the other disgusting signs of mortality, as they are revealed by tearing away the skin, showed he had been scalped” (DS CE 354). He is still alive, but barely so (he has been stabbed as well as scalped), and will soon die. Cooper’s purpose here is to shock his readers for moral rather than sensational purposes. In a book where so much talk of scalps is thrown about, Tom Hutter’s fate—and more so, Cooper’s close attention to his physical condition—is a slap of reality. Furthermore, if white men and red men share a common humanity, as Natty has asserted in his discussion with March, it makes no difference who is scalped. The result is a bloody outrage on “human rights.” The sight of Hutter is finally enough to convince March that he should abandon the purpose that has brought him to Otsego. “Poor Tom!,” he says. “That scalp business has n’t turned out at all profitable, and I’ve pretty much concluded to give it up; and to follow a less bloody calling” (DS CE 362).42 That Cooper grounded March and Hutter partly on such characters as Charles Fenno Hoffman’s woodsman Balt seems clear. He was not just returning to Bumppo—he was refurbishing him by stating in clearer (and perhaps higher) form the values defining Bumppo even in the first novels. And there was another recent book with a debased hunter far more disturbing than Balt (or March and

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Hutter combined), a book to which Cooper also was responding in The Deerslayer. This was Nick of the Woods (1837), by the Philadelphia physician (and Whig) Robert Montgomery Bird, a friend and associate of Hoffman. The equivalent of Balt here is the horse thief known as “Roaring Ralph” Stackpole, introduced by Bird as an authentic type of the Kentucky frontier. The colorful but largely harmless Stackpole, however, held little interest for Cooper. Instead, he was drawn toward a hunter with the first name Nathan, as if in conscious reference to Natty Bumppo—and a last name, Slaughter, that captures both his violent deeds and his moral corruption. Bird attempts to explain Nathan Slaughter’s frightful violence as the result of his trusting Quaker soul. Earlier in his life, the guileless frontiersman had welcomed a group of Shawnee warriors into his home, only to be repaid by the murder of his wife and children. Nearly killed himself as well, Nathan was left with his head sorely wounded and (in a foretaste of Tom Hutter’s fate) his scalp partly removed. He continues to spout pious Quaker doctrine through much of the book, but violates it to exact revenge by killing and scalping any Indian he encounters.43 That Cooper was consciously responding to the bloody devastation of Bird’s hunter, who wanders the forest instilling terror in the Indians and then killing them and carving the sign of the cross in their chests, is made evident by a distinction Bumppo draws at the outset of the book. In Cooper’s novels, the killing of even a deer, never an inherently innocent act, has a moral dimension. For all life, if not precisely holy, almost always has positive concrete value in Cooper. When March shoots at “a noble buck,” his impulsive act disturbs the primeval silence of the lake. Echoes of his gun roll off the mountains, “seeming to awaken the sleeping thunders of the woods”: the woods indeed appear to condemn his offhand violence. Bumppo similarly objects: “They call me Deerslayer, I’ll own, and perhaps I desarve the name, in the way of understanding the creatur’s habits, as well as for the sartainty in the aim, but they can’t accuse me of killing an animal when there is no occasion for the meat, or the skin. I may be a slayer, it’s true, but I’m no slaughterer” (DS CE 56–57). This is for Cooper an important distinction that serves to distance his hunter from Bird’s, consciously I think, thereby reclaiming this important piece of Cooper’s literary territory from yet another imitator—an imitator who even more than Hoffman debased what he copied. Perhaps in some sense, Cooper was mounting a defense of Natty akin to the defenses of his own character and accomplishments that he was even then putting forward in the courts. For Natty was himself being libeled in such books as Nick of the Woods. The emphasis in Cooper’s tales is on the ethical capacity of the hunter (and warrior), his need to gauge each act of violence according to the ends it serves. Whereas Nathan Slaughter kills because he cannot keep from killing, Natty

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often keeps from killing out of a moral repugnance at the mere idea of the act. In this sense, D. H. Lawrence was mischaracterizing Natty in concluding that he embodied “the essential American soul . . . hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”44 The scene in which he kills his first human victim demonstrates how much he differs from a figure such as Nathan Slaughter. That it is like a seduction, a kind of dance, as readers often notice, and ends with Bumppo ministering to the dying man (rather than carving a mark on his chest or tearing off his scalp) bespeaks the moral vision that Cooper argues for. In the preface to the first edition of Nick of the Woods, Bird clearly challenged Cooper and others who, like Cooper, saw nobility—and humanity—in Indian character. Aware that he might be called on to apologize for the dark “hues” in which he had painted his Indians, Bird confessed that he had never thought of “the North American savage” as “the gallant and heroic personage he seems to others.”45 Accepting as fact the white propaganda that Indian warriors killed and scalped innocent women and children, Bird was incapable either of understanding his role in perpetuating that propaganda or of plumbing the political purposes it was meant to serve. Bird was a man on whom the ferocity of racist justification, more and more violent as the 1830s progressed, was lost. Cooper’s use of the term “redskin” in his 1820s novels had been innocent—adopted, as Ives Goddard suggests, from Indian self-description—but by the time Hoffman and Bird were writing, it had become a piece of racist tagging. When Hoffman used the term in Greyslaer, it already had lost the sense of natural poetry it was meant to have when Cooper first adopted it—it called attention to the Indian’s racialized otherness, not his closeness to nature.46 Bird adduced Cooper in mounting his own self-justifications long past his book’s original publication. In the revised edition of Nick of the Woods that appeared two years after Cooper’s death, Bird pointedly argued that this novel had been written to counter the romanticizing effect of the first of the LeatherStocking Tales and allied romantic works. “At the time period ‘Nick of the Woods’ was written,” Bird declared, “the genius of Chateaubriand and of our own Cooper (not to speak of Marmontel before them) had thrown a poetical illusion over the Indian character; and the red men were presented—almost stereotyped in the popular mind—as the embodiments of grand and tender sentiment—a new style of the beau-ideal—brave, gentle, loving, refined, honorable, romantic personages—nature’s nobles, the chivalry of the forest.” To the contrary, Bird went on, “such conceptions as Atala and Uncas are beautiful unrealities and fictions merely, as imaginary and contrary to nature as the shepherd swains of the old pastoral school of rhyme and romance. . . . The Indian is doubtless a gentleman; but he is a gentleman who wears a very dirty shirt, and lives a very miserable life, having nothing to employ him or keep him alive

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except the pleasures of the chase and of the scalp-hunt—which we dignify with the name of war.”47 Bird went on to deny the charge (articulated by the British novelist W. Harrison Ainsworth, among others) that his own portrait of the Indians in his novel, which amply supports his “dirty shirt” theory, was intended to justify the widespread antipathy white Americans felt toward the Indians in his own day. That was a hard charge to prove false. To be sure, Nick of the Woods has more complexity than appears on the surface: neither Nathan Slaughter nor the other “white Indians” such as Abel Doe and Roland Forrester’s nemesis in the tale, Braxley, can be explained only as the reactive victims of Indian violence. Whatever the cause of their animosity, they own it in a moral sense. Even with this complexity in his plot, however, in no essential way does Bird understand Indian violence as political in origin or purpose, as the reflex of peoples threatened with imminent annihilation. Bird, himself of Quaker background, may not have intended to stir up passions among his fellow Euro-Americans, but he clearly did not work to calm them, either. Vernon L. Parrington said it well when he remarked in 1927 that Bird’s “warriors are dirty drunken louts, filled with an unquenchable blood-lust, whom the frontiersman kills with as little compunction as he would kill a rattlesnake.”48 The otherwise respectable Kentucky settler in Bird’s novel, Colonel Bruce, is speaking for the author when he calls Indians “red Niggurs,” a term echoed by Roaring Ralph Stackpole.49 Indians are objects: at one point, they are “ready cut and dried for killing,” like seasoned firewood; at another, their dead bodies are “meat of [Slaughter’s] killing,” branded with his cross so as to claim ownership of the carcass. Their speeches are not eloquent but repetitious; their songs are not poetry but noise, indistinguishable for the most part from the howlings of the dogs that share their camps and, seemingly, their nature.50 When the otherwise innocuous Stackpole sits astride an Indian sinking in a muddy stream, beating him with his fists so hard that he crushes his skull, thereby murdering him before he can drown, he keeps up a verbal pummeling that is part and parcel of Bird’s brief against Indians in general, calling him “you niggur-in-law to old Sattan . . . you ‘tarnal half-imp.” Earlier, he has unleashed another verbal assault: “you bald-head, smoke-dried, punkin-eating, red-skins! you half-niggurs! you ’coon whelps! you snakes! you varmints!”51 If white renegades on the border (including, of course, Nathan Slaughter) scalp their native victims, according to Bird it is because Indians started it: “Brutality ever begets brutality; and magnanimity of arms can be only exercised in the case of a magnanimous foe. With such, the wildest and fiercest rover of the frontier becomes a generous, and even humane enemy.” We may doubt it.52 Such figures as Stackpole, Nathan Slaughter, and Balt the Hunter, emerging in the 1830s as stereotypes of the Indian-hating frontiersman, drew on the

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popularity of Cooper’s Leather-Stocking but undercut the moral message Natty was meant to bear. Coming out just at the time that Cooper’s troubles with the press were beginning, Nick of the Woods and Greyslaer were not coincidentally Whig products, as Cooper probably understood. Like the Whig appropriation of David Crockett, either in his 1834 autobiography or the later, profoundly racist almanacs issued in his name, Hoffman’s and especially Bird’s use of the hunter as a figure of white American expansion—Indian-hating in this sense was an implement of empire—bespoke the interests not so much of ordinary white settlers (let alone their nature) but rather those of the urban capitalists who stood to benefit from land sales and increased commercial activity.53 It also represented the general Whig strategy of co-opting the ordinary citizen whenever doing so could be made to suit the purposes of the would-be ruling elite. Cooper set Natty apart from the “pioneers”—and, contrary to what some critics have claimed, did not give him the values of those individuals whom Natty uneasily served (the Effinghams, for instance) but rather his own profoundly separate understanding.54 Like Harvey Birch, he is a commoner with a mind of his own, an ordinary hero, Jacksonian in essence rather than Whiggish. Something of what happened to Crockett—that is, his transformation from hunter to public figure and then to servant of political purposes arguably not his own—was threatened for the fictional Bumppo as well. Crockett was dead and could not speak back; but Natty’s creator was very much alive and, in The Deerslayer, cleansed his best invention of the cultural and political accretions that now burdened him. And Cooper brought him back to the pristine bluegreen lake where, in 1823, he had first introduced him to the world.

New Terms Even as The Deerslayer marked a return to earlier modes but engaged current issues, the book’s production represented profound alterations in how Cooper was henceforth to operate. Writing it, even with the doubts mentioned above, was the easy part. Cooper’s lakeshore epiphany occurred in the summer, perhaps late summer, of 1840, just when he was working on the last part of Mercedes of Castile. Although his daughter also recalled that he began work on the new book within a few days, that seems unlikely, for he had plenty of other things to occupy his pen and his attention at the time. (In August, he wrote Shubrick, “my time is very limited. . . . I never had so much to do, in so short a time”—LJ 4:52.) But he may well have been keen to begin as soon as he could because the book he imagined probably struck him as not only personally interesting but also commercially promising. As to that second point, it was in May of that year, when he was in Philadelphia on what I have suggested was, among other things,

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a research trip for the Columbus book, that Cooper learned Lea and Blanchard had sold nearly four thousand copies of Pathfinder since February: “It has great success, in the worst of times,” he wrote his wife (LJ 4:34). That discovery in itself may have predisposed the novelist to regard Otsego Lake with special attention later that season. In November Cooper mentioned his “next book” as something already conceived, and by January 1841 he was predicting that all the Philadelphia sheets would have reached Bentley by April, meaning that June 1 was a reasonable English publication date (see LJ 4:113). As usual, intervening delays elongated his hopeful calendar. Not until the middle of May, for one thing, had Cooper received “near a hundred pages” in proof from Lea and Blanchard, prompting him to update Bentley: “the first half will be sent to you at the close of this month.” The rest would follow more expeditiously, he promised, as he intended to go to Philadelphia “and attend to the printing in person.” From Bentley’s perspective, the slowdown was not worrisome; indeed, he already had informed Cooper that political turmoil caused by the pending British elections made him wish to put off the book until September (LJ 4:153–54).55 As it happened, Lea and Blanchard themselves were hoping to delay publication until late August or even September, with the hope that good publicity from England might aid their sales. Cooper was able to send the first half of the Lea and Blanchard proofs to Bentley in mid-June and a complete set two weeks later, with a duplicate set by the Liverpool packet as insurance for Bentley’s timely receipt of what would provide him (although Cooper again conveyed the original manuscript to him) with his copy text for the British edition (see LJ 4:156, 162–63). When Cooper returned to Philadelphia at the end of August to see a one-volume abridgement of the naval history through the press, he found that Lea and Blanchard had just issued The Deerslayer—actually, on August 27. Bentley’s edition followed on September 7, an unusual though not unexampled reversal (see S&B 113).56 More involved than writing the book and getting it to the public was the process by which Cooper negotiated terms with his publishers. Since The Deerslayer provided something of a watershed in this regard, we need to attend to the details closely. Bentley came first. Still mindful of the Londoner’s losses on the naval history, Cooper asserted in January 1841, “I am willing to put this book at £500—with leave to draw, at 90 days sight, as each volume is finished, for £150, until the sheets and manuscript are sent, when I shall draw for the last £200.” At the same time, Cooper informed Bentley that he had already presented the first draft for £150. This communication began a long and, in terms of its effects on future dealings between the two men and on important changes in how Cooper managed his literary career, a highly significant negotiation. Unbeknownst to Cooper, Bentley earlier in January had written to say that, in

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view of his lack of profits from the American’s recent books, he would pay no more than £300 total for Deerslayer, a minimal rise over Pathfinder but much less than Cooper wanted and expected. In writing to Cooper on March 5, Bentley acknowledged the £150 draft but reiterated that his best offer remained £300. When, the next day, he received Cooper’s January letter, he repeated that message, adding that if the offer was unacceptable to Cooper, they might proceed with Deerslayer on shares (LJ 4:112).57 When Cooper received both new letters in April, he took note of the rising disagreement—he drew on Bentley immediately, though for only £100, then in his reply he indicated that, unless the two could come closer, the £200 difference would likely “raise a serious difficulty as to future books.” But, like Bentley, he tried to be conciliatory, reducing his draw by £50 and indicating that he would present no further drafts unless and until the two reached mutually acceptable terms. He regarded Bentley’s acceptance of his first draft as committing him to publish Deerslayer through the London house but awaited further word as to the actual arrangement they would follow (LJ 4:147). Bentley did not budge when he replied at April’s end. He had accepted the £150 first draft and now the second one for £100 simply out of general regard for Cooper. But he did not consider that Cooper was bound by those payments to continue an arrangement that struck the novelist as inadequate. Cooper had not accepted or even spoken of Bentley’s offer to proceed on shares, so now Bentley wrote that, if Cooper wished, he would turn over the copies so far printed to “any other publisher” with whom Cooper reached better terms.58 Before receiving this latest communication, Cooper pulled back, conceding Bentley’s price for the time being but warning that if Bentley did not meet his own demand, he was “not to be surprised or hurt” if Cooper sent his “next work to another house.” He was, though, still conciliatory at the end of this May 14, 1841, letter: “If we are to part, I wish to part with kind feelings, and shall add that, the diminution of prices excepted, in all respects the connection has been satisfactory to me” (LJ 4:153–54). When he wrote back late in June, Bentley more forcefully reminded the novelist that times were tough and that his profits on Cooper’s new works since 1832 had been less than a third of what he had paid to purchase the English rights to them (placing the latter amount at £4,850), certainly a low margin. Still, to smooth things over, he added that if Deerslayer did well, he was prepared to split the profits with the author—the £300 already drawn serving as an earnest of Cooper’s eventual share.59 Cooper, assuming that Bentley had the complete proofs and manuscript in his hands by July 10, wrote the publisher again at that point. He had read over the series of letters Bentley had sent since winter on the subject of their financial dealings. Cognizant of what Bentley had proposed in April about essentially

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publishing on shares, he went ahead and drew another £200 at five months from Bentley. (The odd fifty pounds he left out, conceding he owed Bentley that amount based on negotiations on earlier books.) Allowing the extra months before Bentley would have to pay the draft did two things: it left Cooper with his principles intact even as it gave Bentley sufficient time (until the end of October, Cooper added) to see whether the book would indeed earn enough to cover the £450 Cooper was insisting on. If it did not, Cooper promised to repay the difference. Bentley did not object to this arrangement, noting (“for the sake of clearness in the accounts”) that the extra money Cooper had drawn was “on account of future transactions” (see LJ 4:163–64).60 Although Cooper might have read this last point as indicating Bentley’s acceptance of most of his original price, Bentley later indicated that he had regarded the extra £200 as an advance on future books, not on future sales of Deerslayer. When, however, the novel did well and Bentley printed another five hundred copies, he allowed half of that last amount to be counted as Cooper’s pay for the reprint.61 The two maintained their relationship, imperfect as their terms and understandings were, because it suited both of them to do so. With Lea and Blanchard, the terms were quite different. There the publishers’ discontent stemmed from the poor sales of Mercedes of Castile, of which the American firm had sold fewer than half of its four thousand copies by February 1841, ten weeks after publication.62 As with Bentley, the alterations in Cooper’s dealings with the Philadelphia firm were to have significant future consequences and thus need to be noted here. Cooper was able to secure a reasonably good contract in this instance, but only by combining the new novel with an extension of rights for ten earlier books. The firm was to give him $2,500, in three notes payable from April to June 1842, for three years’ exclusive rights to The Deerslayer (called “Natty Bumpo [sic] or the first war path” in the contract), as well as to The Pathfinder, Mercedes, the Home novels, The Spy, The Pioneers, Precaution, Mohicans, The Pilot, and Lionel Lincoln, the clock for its rights to them to begin at the time The Deerslayer was published. In addition, Lea and Blanchard agreed to pay him forty cents each for all copies of the new novel beyond the first five thousand and to give him free copies of all books they published during the period of the contract.63 With considerable irony, the novel that provided a moral and aesthetic crown for the single most significant group of books Cooper ever wrote was also the material vehicle that began a profound shift in how all his later novels saw the light of day.

C H A P T E R

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Piecework and Patchwork

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ven as Cooper revived and completed the Leather-Stocking series, he extended his old interest in the sea. From Homeward Bound in 1838 to the double novel Afloat and Ashore in 1844, he published fifteen books and large pamphlets. Of these, all but Home as Found, The Deerslayer, and Wyandotté had some significant engagement with the sea (or the “Inland Sea” of Ontario)—and each of those exceptions had Otsego Lake at or near its center. Why this watery obsession? One explanation is that many of these works incorporated loosely autobiographical backward glances, as we have seen was the case with The Pathfinder, and most paths through Cooper’s past, like those Ishmael speaks of at the start of Moby-Dick, inevitably led him waterward. That was true not only in obvious ways—as with Ned Myers, or the use of Cooper’s Italian experiences in Wing and Wing—but also in more subtle ones. Even the decidedly public naval history opened up several personal channels. In researching it, Cooper deepened ties to naval figures with whom he had served, while several of the brief naval biographies Cooper wrote in the early 1840s as a follow-up to the history also had prominent personal elements.1 Owing to the stimulus all these works provided to his memory, in 1844 Cooper set about writing an autobiographical fiction—the two-part Afloat and

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Ashore—in which, acknowledging that he had foresworn the sea in any practical sense in 1811, he was able to craft a fantasy of what might have been if he had stayed the course back then. Cooper led up to that speculative autobiography with yet other nautical texts. The first, The Two Admirals, came right after The Deerslayer, and like it and The Pathfinder (and indeed like Afloat and Ashore, too) it mixed both land and water. Setting the first volume on shore in England and the second afloat on the English Channel, Cooper gave this book a double plot, balancing the unlikely success of an American claimant to a Devon estate against the grander failure of Charles Edward Stuart’s 1745 attempt to retake the English throne. Various strands link these two actions. The American heir, Wycherly Wychecombe, happens to be a Royal Navy officer; he therefore helps defeat the French fleet supporting the attempted coup. Similarly, the two admirals of the book’s title, Oakes and Bluewater, spend most of the first volume stranded on the English coast, alternately weighing the various claims to the Devon property and the Stuart Pretender’s to the crown. In both the domestic and political spheres, issues centered on legitimacy and illegitimacy are the primary movers of the book, as Donald Ringe noted (see TA CE xxi). This neat plot had not come easily to Cooper. He had long been intrigued with the possibility of writing a naval story centered on fleets, rather than the single ships deployed in his earlier books. But he could not attempt such a work without abandoning American materials, for the U.S. Navy had never put fleets to sea. On the other hand, making use of the obvious alternative—the Royal Navy, rich in both fleets and admirals—had its own difficulties for an American writer, especially one who happened to be a former naval officer. Cooper’s daughter Susan simplified the conflict by stressing his solution (pushing his story back in time far enough that it predated the Revolution, “a period when the two countries were but one”—TA HE x), but that solution was long in coming. As early as 1831, Cooper was tempted by the commercial prospects of writing a British naval romance but reluctantly abandoned the idea: “I can get £3000 for a nautical tale that shall celebrate English skill to-morrow,” he wrote Carey and Lea in a fit of temporary alienation, “—but I will not prostitute my pen—.” He protested a bit too much, probably because the aesthetic rewards were as alluring as the financial: “Give me English Naval History for my subject, and they shall see such a . . . Marine Romance as they never yet dreamt of. Remember how much I forego, by abstaining from the use of such materials as fleets, victories, historical characters and all the etcet[e]ra of their annals” (LJ 2:169). The idea lay dormant for a decade, and when Cooper at last decided to write what became The Two Admirals, he intended not to celebrate British “victories” or win British gold, but rather to deal with decidedly American issues.

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Having made certain claims in the History of the Navy—specifically about the usefulness of fleets for national defense (and for supporting and developing the officer corps)—he wished to give those claims imaginative force by showing fleets in action as his earlier fiction had not allowed (see HN 1:xii–xxxiii).2 He remained reluctant in 1839 to engage Royal Navy history directly lest his main point—the usefulness of fleets for the maturing U.S. Navy—might be upstaged by what he had recently conceded, in his English Gleanings, was Britain’s “teeming and glorious naval history” (GE CE 124). One solution to the quandary he toyed with for a time was writing a sea story devoid of human characters and therefore freed from issues of national rivalry—a pure tale of ships in action. For various reasons, however, Cooper (and especially his publishers) found that idea unpromising. He first proposed to Richard Bentley in February 1839 a sea tale focused on ships that had “no animal life about them,” but when Bentley dodged by pushing instead for “a naval story on your own inland Seas,” Cooper soon set about writing The Pathfinder, as we have seen (LJ 3:369).3 In June 1841, with that book and Mercedes of Castile published and The Deerslayer soon to appear, Cooper again toyed with writing a story that was “all ships and no men” (LJ 4:162). Within three weeks, though, he backed away from that notion because (as he explained to Bentley) it had “no favor with you publishers.” Cooper therefore informed Bentley that he intended to produce what he now termed “an ordinary tale” (LJ 4:164).4 So he settled on a Royal Navy story in which several narrative and thematic choices solved the problem that worried him. There was plenty of action to draw on from the Royal Navy’s recent, most “glorious” era, and Cooper in fact would do just that in his next book, The Wing-and-Wing. Here, by contrast, he set the story in the tamer 1740s (the same decade, coincidentally, just explored in The Deerslayer) and completely invented both Oakes and Bluewater and the rather minor double engagement they have with their also imaginary French counterpart, Vervillin. Cooper thereby focused the plot on fleet action as a strategic question rather than on the stature or accomplishments of actual naval leaders or the details of specific battles.5 Furthermore, by emphasizing the lifelong friendship between his admirals, he upstaged the naval story with a more broadly human one. Susan Cooper plausibly suggested that this relationship reflected the one her father had long enjoyed with William B. Shubrick, a notion that certainly points to the personal substratum of the book, as well as its American purposes (see TA HE xiv). On the surface, though, the friendship in The Two Admirals was based on that which tied Lord Nelson to his fellow admiral Cuthbert Collingwood. The characters of both men, as revealed in their correspondence (which Cooper had read, appropriately enough, while on the brief 1840 cruise with Shubrick on the

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Macedonian—see LJ 4:93), supplied various details for his fictional portraits. The touching deathbed farewell in the novel (“Kiss me, Oakes,” says Bluewater to his friend—TA CE 442) similarly echoed the words Nelson uttered at Trafalgar to his subordinate, Captain Thomas Hardy.6 These borrowings show the degree to which Cooper used actual British naval history even as he purposefully reshaped it. He did not canonize the British hero Nelson by writing a novel about, say, Nelson’s signal victory at the Battle of the Nile or his fatal, but equally triumphant, fight at Trafalgar. Rather, he cannibalized Nelson’s personal traits and naval deeds for the sake of filling in his imaginary account of Bluewater and Oakes. Because part of his critique of the U.S. Navy concerned the undue competition among its officers, showing the deep personal friendship of his two admirals likewise had its domestic applications. In addition to the already noted links between the novel’s two volumes and the plot’s two parts, there are others that are quite pertinent to the naval theme. In his introduction to the History of the Navy, Cooper had found fault with the squeamishness that afflicted U.S. naval leaders on the subject of British influence. A republican navy of course had to differ from its royal counterpart. But the most distinctive contrast then in existence was the much shorter promotion ladder in the U.S. Navy, which completely dispensed with every rank above that of captain. The Royal Navy, by contrast, had nine further steps above captain, not to mention the honors, both military and civil, bestowed on British officers such as Lord Nelson.7 Cooper found it laudable that U.S. naval authorities, in framing their own scheme, had selected that part of the British system which “did not conflict with popular institutions.” Yet the American arrangement was now proving “unsuited to our state of society, to policy, and to the actual wants of the navy.” In particular, the short ladder reduced chances for advancement and dampened motives for superior performance (HN 1:xxi–xxiii). His specific remedy, already alluded to, involved building bigger ships, arranging them in fleets, and putting them under the command of admirals roughly parallel to the U.S. Army’s fuller array of general officers (see HN 1:xxv). Cooper also wanted to solve the attitudinal problems underlying the navy’s weaknesses. Americans needed to figure out how to balance a broad (and proper) suspicion of social rank as Britain exhibited it against the essential need for professional rank even in republican institutions (see HN 1:xxvii). An admiral was not a duke, in other words: those charged with carrying out public business held rank not as a mark of personal distinction or inherited privilege (though that rank might well affect personal reputation and social standing) but rather as a merit-based register of relative position among fellow officers and the comparative burden of their own responsibility. Although social rank might be useful, too, its basis was not merit but rather tradition, or worse yet, mere chance.

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Even as Cooper designed The Two Admirals to make American readers indirectly comfortable with the new navy he was imagining over these years, he also wanted to stress this distinction between professional and social rank. To do that, he put the property plot of the book into a fruitful tension with the naval one. At the outset, the narrative carefully describes the peculiar circumstances surrounding eighty-four-year-old Sir Wycherly Wychecombe, current holder of a baronetcy dating to the reign of James I and owner of a sizable estate centered on Wychecombe Hall (see TA 1:15). The baronet’s comfortable share of social rank and worldly wealth is not without its problems, the main one being his lack of an heir. Neither he nor any of his four younger brothers appear to have married. Two of the four died young in England, while a third reportedly was lost in the wreck of a naval vessel in American waters fifty years before. Under normal circumstances, the fourth one, noted jurist Thomas Wychecombe (called “Baron Wychecombe” owing to his judicial position), would have inherited.8 Shortly before the story opens, however, Thomas has predeceased the baronet, so that this branch of Wychecombes may die out with Sir Wycherly: “Not a female inheritor, even, or a male inheritor through females, could be traced; and it had become imperative on Sir Wycherly to make a will, lest the property should go off, the Lord knew where; or what was worse, it should escheat”— that is, revert to the Crown (TA 1:17). A flashback in the first chapter, recounting the brothers’ final discussion some weeks before the jurist’s death, further complicates the story. It is common knowledge that Thomas had three sons out of wedlock with his housekeeper, Martha Dodd. Ordinarily, those children could have no more legal claim on Sir Wycherly’s property than on their father’s. The eldest of them, however, has widely hinted that his parents were secretly wed before his birth, which, if true, would make him legitimate—and, after his father’s death, heir to his uncle ’s estate and the baronetcy as well. To be sure, the jurist in his final illness insists that no such marriage ever occurred, and, in what becomes a stock phrase in the book, denounces young Tom as a “filius nullius” (TA 1:19)—a bastard, literally “nobody’s son.” As such, Tom is barred from inheriting under the estate ’s entail, which requires the heir be a legitimate, lineal descendant of its first holder (see TA 1:17). In creating this seeming impasse in the novel’s first plot, Cooper relied on William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1774), referred to at several points in the book. When speaking of the “rights and incapacities” of a figure such as Tom Wychecombe, Blackstone asserts, “The rights are very few, being only such as he can acquire; for he can inherit nothing, being looked upon as the son of nobody; and sometimes called filius nullius, sometimes filius populi ”— “the people’s son,” another term for bastard.9 Knowing all this, and contemplating

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the inevitable loss of property to the Crown, Baron Wychecombe advises his brother to make a will naming as heir a distant relative, Sir Reginald Wychecombe, who, while legitimate, also lacks standing under the entail. Sir Wycherly dislikes that comparative stranger and, having mistakenly warm feelings for young Tom, instead picks him as heir. Illegitimate and without legal standing as Tom is, this move promises to make his fortune. The baronet, compounding his folly, subsequently gives his will to Tom for sake keeping (see TA 1:27).10 Before Sir Wycherly dies, he fortunately sees through Tom’s manipulations and, affirming his brother’s better judgment, decides to accept Sir Reginald as heir. Through an involved series of twists, however, the American officer with whom Wycherly shares his name (and who by chance is on shore recuperating from a wound) is revealed as the eldest son of the baronet’s brother Gregory, the one supposedly lost at sea years before. In fact, Gregory had run off to Virginia, married, and had a family. The young American sailor therefore proves to be the legitimate, previously unsuspected heir of both title and estate. Taking possession of the keys of Wychecombe Hall at the end of the book’s first volume, the seeming outsider is suddenly and decidedly inside English society. This elaborate parody of property dramas in heavily stratified English society bears out Susan Cooper’s point about the essential unity of colonies and mother country, but more importantly bolsters her father’s naval argument.11 Royal Navy practices and values as portrayed here offer useful guidance for reforms in the U.S. Navy. Yet the book as a whole makes it clear that the English colonies and their successor nation have no need for the sort of nonsense displayed by the Wychecombe family in its internal conflicts and confusions. Cooper’s distinction between professional rank as a matter of national policy and personal rank as a matter of social custom could not be clearer. Of course it is wryly appropriate to his argument that a capable American (and naval officer) eventually proves to be the one heir to whom the Devon estate and the baronetcy can legitimately pass. If confined to the resident personnel, the lottery might have a less hopeful outcome, as the now rejected (and ejected) Tom demonstrates.12

Change of Venue Cooper’s concern with property in The Two Admirals anticipated the emerging challenges of his own literary economy. Here again the details are diagnostic of the larger trouble. Cooper offered the book to Bentley in July 1841 for a total price of £500—he was, he added, “reducing the price to the times” (LJ 4:164). Even so, Bentley did not think that reduction big enough. He therefore wished to price the book according to the total number he would be able to sell (and

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therefore print)—“if 1000, £300; if 1500, £500.”13 Cooper acceded to this demand because he needed the money (as he told Bentley when alerting him that he was drawing early against the book). Bentley thereafter seemed to hedge on their deal, and as no contract survives it is impossible to determine exactly what the final terms were. That in itself betokened the coming alterations in Cooper’s customary arrangements. Changes were soon to come with Lea and Blanchard, too, although Cooper’s negotiations with that firm in September 1841 went somewhat more smoothly (see LJ 4:177–78).14 On the seventh of December, Cooper indicated to Shubrick that he had been hard at work on the new novel, which was then “about two thirds written and one third printed” (LJ 4:204).15 He returned to Philadelphia by the end of January 1842 with the completed manuscript, ready to finish production, only to find Lea and Blanchard so concerned about the sluggish market that only three thousand copies were to be printed (see LJ 4:231). Although that decision would not affect his earnings, it surely did not increase his confidence. He nonetheless kept up his own pace. Once Lea and Blanchard’s stereotyper and printer finished their work shortly after February 5, Cooper left Philadelphia for Manhattan with the whole manuscript and the rest of the sheets in his baggage (see LJ 4:230). On the eleventh, he informed Bentley that all of the book’s manuscript (meant to bolster the British copyright) and the sheets for the second American volume were being dispatched, with duplicate sheets going via another vessel (see LJ 4:246). With that, the book was out of his hands. Bentley would issue it on March 10, 1842, followed by the Philadelphians on April 22 (S&B 116).16 Sluggish market or not, Cooper already was busy with two new projects. While in Philadelphia in February, he learned that his new abridged edition of the naval history (a subject to which I return briefly in the next chapter) seemed to be selling well despite the general market slowdown. It occurred to him that the original history also might provide the nucleus of yet another project. In its full form, the history contained nineteen “short biographical notices . . . introduced somewhat hurriedly, as the book went through the press,” as Cooper soon explained to a correspondent (LJ 4:312).17 When the narrative was abridged, these were all cut. Cooper now had the insight, hastily shared with his wife from Philadelphia in March, that he might base “a new book of Naval Biographies” on the rejected materials. For this purpose, he suddenly decided to delay his return home in order to consult the necessary “authorities” (LJ 4:250). He understood that he could not just collect and reprint the original notes, even if he revised them significantly. For one thing, they were seriously lacking in both historical coherence and evenness of treatment. Their quite varied subjects ranged from the seventeenth-century mariner and politician Sir William

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Phipps (see HN 1:51–52) to the contemporary shipwright Henry Eckford (see HN 2:449–50), whom Cooper had known at Oswego. Furthermore, some notes were very brief, like those of George Parker (see HN 2:257) and William Burrows (see HN 2:259–60), while even the longest ones had conspicuous holes that would have to be filled in to produce a uniform series. By September, Cooper not surprisingly had concluded that “the difficulty of collecting a mass of minute facts is most discouraging.” He shared that insight with a correspondent, Midshipman George Preble, whose uncle (Cmdre. Edward Preble) had figured prominently in the History of the Navy and was among the intended subjects of the new series. Cooper wrote young Preble that he had many unanswered questions about the commodore’s “birth, family, and early career”— even about the disease, then also unknown, that had caused his death. As if bringing up those particular issues refreshed for Cooper the larger troubles he faced, he also shared with George Preble his frustrations with regard to Richard Somers, the subject of his first, almost finished sketch. He had relied on that man’s sister, then living in Philadelphia, for a list of their siblings, only to find out that she had completely forgotten about one of them (see LJ 4:312–13).18 Actually researching and writing the eventual set of ten sketches, only five of which derived from the naval history notes, was a complicated and drawn-out affair. Among the entirely new subjects, the most consequential was Oliver Hazard Perry. Although figuring broadly in the naval history, Perry had garnered no biographical note there. His inclusion in the sketches stemmed partly from his obvious standing in the service. But it also reflected the growing centrality of Perry and his career to Cooper, especially as the libel suits stemming from the Perry-Elliott business climaxed at this very time—in May 1842, when Cooper delivered his spectacular oral narrative of the Battle of Lake Erie before a packed Manhattan courtroom, as we saw in chapter 8. Soon Perry would also be a prime subject in Cooper’s longish pamphlet The Battle of Lake Erie, his written answer to various critics on the topic. That pamphlet was very much in Cooper’s mind when he sat down to pen the two-part narrative of Perry late in 1842 and then saw it through the press in May and June 1843, right before the pamphlet’s publication in July. The temporal convergence of these allied texts masked a sharp contrast in their means of dissemination. The Lake Erie pamphlet, as we shall see in more detail later, was issued at Cooper’s expense by the Cooperstown firm of Henry and Elihu Phinney and was personally marketed by Cooper himself without much hope of profit.19 By contrast, the Perry segments, like other sketches Cooper began writing in 1842, appeared in the pages of the very popular Graham’s Magazine, guaranteeing wide exposure and, for Cooper, lucrative returns. Cooper’s “new book of Naval Biographies,” the phrasing he used when

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telling his wife of the idea in March 1842 (LJ 4:250), appeared instead as the first in a series of periodical contributions marking a new phase of his career.20 How Cooper transformed himself into what Graham’s proudly called one of its “Principal Contributors” (along with William Cullen Bryant, Richard H. Dana, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and others) is itself an important story.21 This change in outlet for Cooper’s work first of all made financial sense. Facing the diminishing returns that soon would lead him to experiment with different book-publishing arrangements for his fiction, Cooper was right to think seriously about the periodical press as a possible venue. He had of course turned to journals and newspapers in the past. But his earlier efforts almost always had served some immediate, noncommercial purpose. In the early 1820s, he thus had helped his old friend Charles K. Gardner by contributing to that man’s new Literary and Scientific Repository. And he had used newspapers to communicate with specific audiences at various times, as through his contributions to Armand Carrel’s Le National on the Finance Controversy in France in 1832, or the A. B. C. letters on the question of French reparations (and related topics) in the Evening Post from 1834 to 1836. In some instances, as with those two, Cooper published extensive groups of related items. But he had not done any of this writing with the prior assumption that the texts in hand were to form part of his “regular” output, and he never aggregated them in book form. All of them were occasional in two senses—tied to a specific occasion, but also intermittent in their larger nature. Nor does Cooper seem to have made much, if any, money on those publications. Even though he was facing significant financial challenges in 1842, as the faltering negotiations with Bentley over The Two Admirals indicate, his engagement with Graham’s Magazine did not result from prior calculation on his part. Rather, it stemmed from a simple change in his lodging habits in Philadelphia, the city in which George Rex Graham operated. While visiting Philadelphia from 1836 to 1841, Cooper made a habit of staying at the Mansion House Hotel, on South Third near Spruce Street. That centrally located establishment, run by Joseph Head, was convenient to Cooper’s usual routes as he went about his literary business in what was, after all, the publishing hub of the contemporary city.22 Furthermore, Cooper was impressed by this establishment’s quality. Having first stayed there in December 1833, on his trip south to Washington right after returning from Europe, in his French Gleanings he would praise Head’s hotel (along with Barnum’s in Baltimore and Gadsby’s in Washington) as able to “compete with a very high class of European inns” (GF CE 170n; see also LJ 3:20). Ever since, he had preferred the Mansion House to any other Philadelphia hotel, and the more he stayed there, the deeper his attachment to it and its manager became.

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When financial exigencies forced Head and his business associates to close the Mansion House early in the fall of 1841, Cooper therefore found himself literally dislodged. Now that he needed to pay increasingly close attention to his active literary career, he was visiting Philadelphia more and more, and amid all the other changes of the early 1840s Head’s hotel represented pleasant familiarity. The impending loss of his niche there understandably bothered Cooper. That September, spending his last days in the Mansion House, he wistfully wrote his wife: “I am the only person left at Heads. He keeps me out of charity, but the furniture is actually selling to day. We are scattered to the four winds, and I think my visits to Philadelphia are ended. My next book will be printed through the post office” (LJ 4:174).23 Almost two months later, Cooper reiterated the same point for William B. Shubrick: “I have been reluctant to go to P—, on account of Head’s having broken up.” And he asked, in a not entirely self-mocking manner, “Now, where should I lay my head?” (LJ 4:204). During a visit to the city in June 1842, Cooper began staying at the brand new Franklin House, on Chestnut at Franklin Place, which he continued to use until the Mansion House temporarily reopened, with the financial backing of Cooper and others, the following year (LJ 4:300, 397).24 It was at his new lodgings that Cooper happened to meet the anthologist Rufus W. Griswold, whose best-known book, Poets and Poetry of America (1842), had just been issued the month before by Carey and Hart. That book, which survives in a first edition personally inscribed by Cooper, may already have been in his library; soon it became his steady resource as he sought out snatches of American verse to use as epigraphs in his novels.25 Griswold had previously been ensconced in New York City, where he had worked with some of Cooper’s opponents in the libel suits—Park Benjamin and Horace Greeley, for two—but he had been hired as editor of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in May 1842, the month before Cooper first stayed at the Franklin House. Griswold, now shuttling between the two cities, had left his family in Manhattan and, until he could find a house in Philadelphia, was, like Cooper, on the prowl for good temporary accommodations. Cooper in fact would accompany him “on a walk in search of a dwelling house” there in the fall.26 Griswold must have recognized Cooper’s well-known face and figure in the public spaces at the Franklin House and engaged him in a polite conversation about their expectable common interests.27 Quickly, though, the chance meeting effected the deal by which the naval biographies began appearing in Graham’s that fall. Cooper, having come up with that idea for his book of naval biographies in March, had been working at it ever since as time allowed. Once back in New York in May 1842 to attend to legal business, he felt he had made enough headway that for the first time he mentioned the project to a publisher, namely

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Richard Bentley: “I have a new biographical Naval Work in progress, which I will also send you in sheets. I hardly think you will publish it, after the bad success with the History, but you may do so, scot free, if you please. At all events, some of the biographies, all of which will be shortish, might serve you in the way of your magazines”—for, say, Bentley’s Miscellany, where the publisher had reprinted the death scene from chapter 7 of The Deerslayer the previous September (LJ 4:292; S&B 201). The key point here, the insight that the sketches might be suitable for periodical publication, resurfaced in Cooper’s talk with Griswold the following month. Although few of the details of their original discussion are documented, Griswold hinted to Boston publisher James Fields on July 10, not two weeks after the Philadelphia meeting, that “Cooper, Longfellow, Bryant” would soon appear side-by-side in Graham’s.28 Griswold began his “Editor’s Table” column for August by proudly announcing the fact: “It affords us great pleasure to state that the publisher of this magazine has entered into engagements with james fenimore cooper, the most popular of our country’s authors, by which we shall be enabled to present in every number, after that for September, an article from his pen.” When he added that “Mr. cooper has never before been connected with any periodical,” he meant that no other magazine had ever named him a regular contributor or paid him to be one.29 For his own part, Cooper had already written Griswold from Cooperstown with curt news of exactly what his first contribution would be: “Somers is ready.” He also provided details about how he would get copy to Philadelphia, how Graham’s should return the proofs to him, and which officer—that is, William Bainbridge—he would cover in the second installment (LJ 4:301). The opening thus made for Cooper in Graham’s was to prove extensive and lucrative. On a steep rise in circulation and income at this moment, Graham’s paid its contributors unusually well—and promptly. Frank Luther Mott indicated in his standard account of American magazines that, while Graham had “no fixed rate,” his usual payments ranged “from four to twelve dollars a page for prose . . . with much more to his most famous contributors.” Mott went on, “The Graham page, which became a kind of standard of measurement, was a very large one, containing about a thousand words. Thus Graham’s payment for a five-thousand word article was from twenty to sixty dollars”—or, again, from four to twelve dollars per page.30 Cooper’s contributions bear out the comment on the size of the page. In the case of the Somers sketch, which ran to thirteen pages, the first full double-column page of text contained a total of slightly more than eleven hundred words (“Somers” 158). Cooper’s payment for this sketch, using Mott’s figures, thus should have been at least sixty dollars. And probably Cooper’s rate was higher still.31

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The Somers sketch appeared in the October Graham’s, duly followed by those of Bainbridge and Richard Dale in November and December, respectively. The two-part Perry sketch, finished in July but held back across the fall while Cooper waited for its five battle diagrams to be completed (see LJ 4:322), might have been next.32 But once everything with the Perry text was ready, a new, even more significant, agreement between Cooper and Graham’s Magazine caused a fresh delay. In September, Cooper had written Richard Bentley on the subject: “A thought flashed on my mind the other day, for a short magazine story, and I think I shall write it. It will be called ‘The Auto-Biography of a Pocket Handkerchief.’ ” Cooper asked Bentley whether he would like “such a thing” for his Miscellany and, if so, what he would pay for it and how it should be forwarded (LJ 4:315). Less than a week after writing Bentley, Cooper signed an agreement with Graham for the serialized tale, which was to contain from two to four parts of twelve to sixteen pages each, to be paid for at the high rate of ten dollars per page. It was to be ready to start running by February 1843 and, while Graham was publishing its parts (in fact it appeared from January to April 1843), the two agreed to delay “certain naval biographies already contracted for”—hence the retention of the Perry sketches until May and June. Cooper summarized the news for his wife: “I have sold the Autobiography to Graham, 50 pages for $500” (LJ 4:316). As formatted in Graham’s, in fact it occupied almost exactly that much space.33 The adventures undergone by the handkerchief that narrates this first magazine tale by Cooper resemble those endured by the central objects in other “It Narratives,” such as Charles Johnstone’s very popular Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea (which, first published in 1760, survives in a 1783 edition in Cooper’s library).34 The narrators in these works are sometimes common, even lowly objects, but Cooper’s handkerchief is a highly ornamented luxury good produced in Paris and imported to New York. It is used in the story not as ordinary handkerchiefs are but rather as the focus for the social views and economic expectations of the people through whose possession it passes and who use it (as one scholar humorously remarked) “more for show than for blow.”35 Gendered female, this unconventional narrator has had an intriguing past. Ultimately derived from a freight of Connecticut flaxseed plundered at sea by a French privateer during the Napoleonic Wars—a reminder of the reparations controversy on which Cooper had separately written—her ancestors have long been cultivated in fields “in the neighborhood of Evreux,” some thirty miles south of Rouen. In the narrator’s particular case, she resulted from a crop that, after harvesting and processing, was converted into a bolt of fine cambric cloth somewhere in Picardie before being sent to market in Paris (“Autobiography” 2, 5).

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As the story goes on, the unadorned piece of fabric is acquired at great sacrifice by an innocent young woman whose noble grandmother has lost her royal pension in the wake of the July Revolution. In order to eke out a living, Adrienne must labor long hours in a millinery factory where she is rudely exploited. She of course longs for more, both spiritually and financially. Slowly, in her small bits of private time, she uses antique lace to convert the plain linen square into a marvel of decorative beauty that, while testifying to her personal skill and therefore worth, also offers Adrienne some chance for profit. That a beautiful item emerges from this life of woe is part of Cooper’s point. So is the added observation that Adrienne, when her grandmother dies, loses control of the object she has so carefully crafted because she lacks any other means of paying for a funeral. Here and there in the narrative Cooper clearly drew details from his time in France. He had not, as far as we know, visited the ancient Norman town of Evreux, where the young flax plant grew. But he had passed through such textile towns of Valenciennes and Cambrai, and from there proceeded south across Picardie, on returning from the London trip of 1828 (see LJ 1:268). Four years later he had largely reversed that route during the family’s tour of the Lowlands, Germany, and Switzerland (see LJ 2:276–77). From Paris, Cooper also garnered many hints for the “Autobiography.” When the young narrator, stored in a case in the city prior to her purchase by Adrienne, hears “ominous sounds in the streets” and then “the roar of distant artillery,” Cooper creates her shuttered sense of the July Revolution (an event he himself, rushing back from Dresden, had just missed) by relying on his own close observations of the June uprising in 1832. He was not intent on engaging either event at length—“After all,” reminisces the narrator, who has been sequestered in a locked trunk for the duration, “it is not so very disagreeable to be pocket-handkerchiefs in a revolution.” But the “Autobiography” nonetheless is one part of Cooper’s long, complex response to French politics. The otherwise identical pieces of fabric stored with the narrator are thus arranged into “coté droit” and “coté gauche,” though in the tumult they become so mixed that the distinction disappears, surely a sign of Cooper’s dismissive attitude toward mere political labels as opposed to principles. And the narrator’s necessary ignorance of what has happened in 1830 merely reinforces that same point: “The Bourbons were again dethroned,” she remarks, “and another Bourbon seated in their place” (“Autobiography” 8). That indeed, in Cooper’s view, was about all one might say about the Three Days of Glory. Another resurgence of Cooper’s French memories in the “Autobiography” concerns the young woman named Désirée. She is a commissionnaire, that is, a self-employed agent like the very efficient one, also named Désirée, whom the Coopers had encountered on landing at Le Havre in July 1826 (see GF CE

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48–49). The one in the story is also efficient, but hardly so benign. The narrator assures us at the start of the tale’s third part that Désirée is not “unusually mercenary” for someone in her calling (“Autobiography” 89), but in fact she has kept careful track of Adrienne’s progress on the linen square, hoping all along to profit from the seamstress’s artful labor. When Adrienne ’s grandmother dies, placing her in a vulnerable emotional and financial position, Désirée pounces. With what seems like the utmost of serviceability, Désirée offers to buy the handkerchief, providing the needed funeral funds—but she pays only forty-five francs for it, a low price given that the linen material itself cost Adrienne more than half that amount. Later the commissionnaire returns with word that she tried to keep costs low but spent almost all the money on the funeral. Bereft of her grandmother and the handkerchief, Adrienne has only a few francs left to support herself. She therefore must go back to the exploitative millinery factory (see “Autobiography” 16–18). In what Cooper clearly intends as a critique of the market’s effect on both art and honest labor, not to mention the human soul, opportunistic Désirée more than doubles her investment by reselling the handkerchief for a hundred francs. Moreover, Cooper extends this critique onto U.S. soil. The handkerchief ’s purchaser is an American merchant about to depart for New York who pockets the artifact and smuggles it back home. There it is acquired by a seemingly wealthy man for his daughter, Eudosia Halfacre, who is seduced partly by its beauty but mostly by its absurdly high price. Henry Halfacre is, appropriately, a “speculator in town lots—a profession that was, just then, in high repute in the city of New York.” He owns “several hundred lots on the island of Manhattan,” as well as “one hundred and twenty-three in the city of Brooklyn” and “nearly as many in Williamsburg.” His reach is so vast that he also possesses “large undivided interests in Milwaukee, Chicago, Rock River, Moonville, and other similar places” as well as “a considerable part of a place called Coney Island” (“Autobiography” 94). At this point in the story, Cooper drew on another personal experience—his bruising entanglement with Midwestern land speculators, tracing back to 1835 and still causing him expense and uncertainty at the time he wrote the “Autobiography.” Horace Hawkins Comstock, the kinsman who had primarily entangled Cooper, as we shall see at length in chapter 14, was probably one model for Halfacre. Another was Sidney Ketchum, who partly manipulated Comstock and partly inveigled him and wound up devouring many men’s funds, Cooper’s included. Eudosia’s father is certainly a self-made man, like Comstock and Ketchum, “a man of what are called energy and enterprise.” What this actually means Cooper makes clear: “In other words, he had a spirit for running in debt, and never shrunk from jeoparding property that, in truth, belonged to his creditors” (“Autobiography” 94). Owing to the slippery nature of Halfacre’s business

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affairs, and the monetary crisis triggered by the battle between President Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle over the U.S. Bank, the fortune on which Eudosia relies for fulfilling her every whim soon evaporates. France and the United States were surprisingly close to each other in Cooper’s satiric imagination.36

Italian Memories “The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief,” with its biting commentary on the new habits induced by market competition, deserved to be more broadly read than it was. Probably the lack of an authorized book version in the United States kept it out of the spotlight—certainly it was not widely reviewed. Yet its placement in Graham’s nonetheless had a salutary effect on Cooper’s career. He revived the naval biography series immediately after the novella ended in April, with the double narratives of first Oliver H. Perry and then John Paul Jones. In the offing then were another six intermittent installments and a full-length novel, “Islets of the Gulf,” which were to keep Cooper active on the Graham’s roster, as we shall see later, through the start of 1848. First, though, came many other books in the traditional two- or threevolume format. By the time the handkerchief story started running, in fact, yet another novel had appeared. This was The Wing-and-Wing, Cooper’s second sea tale of 1842. In it, as I noted in discussing The Two Admirals, he again made use of the Royal Navy—indeed, of Lord Nelson as well. Cooper’s choice of a singularly unflattering episode from Nelson’s life (on which more later) intensified his attempt to keep American readers from overvaluing the English marine, or English institutions at large, but most of all the story had decidedly personal meanings for Cooper. That was in large measure the result of its setting in the coastal waters of Italy, especially near Naples. Cooper knew that coast very well owing to his long Italian stay, and his residual feelings for Italy remained intense.37 He had left that country looking over his shoulder—the first time his wife had known him to do so (see GI CE 295). It was “the only region of the earth,” he confessed to Horatio Greenough in 1836, “that I truly love,” an astonishing admission for someone who loved not only the United States and New York but more particularly Otsego, where after long absence and much pain he had happily relocated (LJ 3:233). Perhaps Cooper’s best expression of his attachment to Italy had come even while he remained in Europe. From Paris in 1833, he had written Greenough: “Italy, master Horace[,] haunts my dreams and clings to my ribs like another wife. The fact is, I do often wish myself on your side, not of the Alps, for that would not satisfy me, but of the Appenines [sic], the naked, down-like, shadowy Appenines” (LJ 2:371). Italy was not just a good place—it was a lover, another self.

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The thick, musing layer of adjectives Cooper piled atop those Italian hills in 1833 gave a foretaste of The Wing-and-Wing. Brimming with gorgeous coastal descriptions, from its first page the book explores this “most delightful region of the known earth,” a “world apart” whose “delights” linger in the mind like “visions of a glorious past” (W&W 1:7). Long absent from Italy by the time he wrote the novel, Cooper devoted whole pages to reviving and luxuriating in his Italian recollections. Again and again we find the book’s action overlaid with, even delayed by, lush descriptive passages. “It was now night; but a starry, calm, voluptuous evening,” Cooper writes at one point (W&W 1:39). At another, he speaks of the Mediterranean as “a sea whose blue vies with the darkest depths of the void of space” (W&W 1:69), and then again of “the blue void above and the bluer sea below” (W&W 2:55), as if Cooper meant the book’s very first sentence—“The charms of the Tyrrhenian Sea have been sung since the days of Homer” (W&W 1:7)—to invoke, not just mention, the ancient poet. Cooper’s epic feelings for his scene required heroic descriptive powers. The Wing-and-Wing maps many of Cooper’s favorite Italian places. It links together, in a freshly invented plot, the stations of his own itinerary, from Leghorn to Amalfi and on to Paestum, and finally to Sorrento and its environs. The action starts at the north and proceeds south, copying the passage of the Coopers’ chartered vessel, La Bella Genovese, in the summer of 1829. It is the Bay of Naples, which Cooper especially loved, that frames much of the description and receives the richest praise—and there, too, the book’s action reaches its climax. Vesuvius at night flashes like “heat-lightning,” Cooper writes, while he renders the sweep of the bay’s perimeter to similarly poetic effect: behind Castel a Mare, the moonlight daubs the “ragged mountain-tops” and “the whole range of the nearer coast,” while the dimmer background flickers with “the faint glimmerings of a thousand lights, that were appearing and disappearing, like stars eclipsed, on the other side of the broad sheet of placid water” (W&W 2:136). Such effects of light and darkness decorate many of the book’s scenes. Into this novel, Cooper seems to have poured the surplus of feeling that he had not found room for (or energy for) in his Italian Gleanings. The novel made up for that book’s blunted, at times garbled condition. It also did penance for the grim allegory of The Bravo. Yet the 1842 novel is not just pretty; it is grim in its own way. The blue Mediterranean frames warfare, after all, prompting an early concession from Cooper: “the bosom of this vast expanse has mirrored more violence, has witnessed more scenes of slaughter, and heard more shouts of victory, between the days of Agamemnon and Nelson, than all the rest of the dominions of Neptune together” (W&W 1:8). In this story, the conflicts are small-scale—there are no echoes of the Nile or Trafalgar, let alone Ilium—and not particularly bloody.

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Yet they induce a chill out of all proportion to their scope or historical consequence. First, near the middle of the book, comes the execution of the antiroyalist patriot Francesco Caraccioli—on the orders of Nelson but at the prompting of Nelson’s vain mistress, Emma Hamilton, who seeks to please the Neapolitan crown. The heroic old man, a victim of cynical injustice, dies in the unavailing presence of his innocent, pious granddaughter, Ghita, who proves the special focus of the worst events in The Wing-and-Wing. In the fight at the end of the tale she suffers a second heavy loss when her lover, the privateer Raoul Yvard, is shot—almost incidentally—by British lieutenant Archie McBean. As Ghita’s initiation into evil deepens, the incidents themselves seem to diminish in scale and emphasis. The Caraccioli execution has taken up a whole chapter (see W&W 1:204–19), whereas Yvard’s death, although he lingers long enough for Ghita to tend to him as ineffectually as she had to her kinsman, basically occupies a single flat sentence: “As for Raoul, . . . a musket-ball, fired by the hands of McBean, traversed his body” (W&W 2:181). That single verb, “traversed,” captures the antiheroic, anti-Homeric nature of this book’s action.38 And yet Cooper’s new nautical realism, shared with other writers like the younger Dana, managed to sharpen and brighten even this tarnished world.39 Here, too, personal memory funded his own efforts. Among all his sea tales to date (aside from Homeward Bound, a special case in various ways), The Wingand-Wing was the only one set within Cooper’s own lifetime, an innovation soon copied in a series of others. Owing to this shift and his own experience on the Stirling, he now could write with a new solidity about the seas—and ships— he himself had known. Henceforth he could be more alert to nautical details than earlier, certainly more alert than he had been in his most recent pirate romance, The Water-Witch. The latter book revealed Cooper’s extraordinary grasp of the waters around Manhattan, but, set almost a century earlier than The Wing-and-Wing, it showed a weaker feel for the technical details appropriate to vessels of that time. Before 1842, Cooper was perpetually wary of blundering in such matters. His first preface to The Pilot thus admitted that “some old seaman” might well find “anachronisms in marine usages, or mechanical improvements” in that book. This statement was an apology for positive errors, but Cooper’s working solution to the challenge was to avoid describing “the customs of a particular age” and portray instead scenes belonging “only to the ocean.” He could evade the pitfalls of history by attending instead to the presumed universals of maritime space, thereby suggesting broad truths about those who lived and worked in it (PIL CE 3). In The Red Rover he again did not vouch for the exactness with which he handled technical changes over time. He therefore begged that any “keen-eyed critic of the ocean [who] should happen to detect a rope rove through the wrong leading-block, or a term spelt in such a manner as

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to destroy its true sound,” would blame the lubberly typesetter, not the author (RR CE 5). Hedging his bets in these ways let Cooper claim nautical mastery even while rarely having to demonstrate it. He went after general effects: very few specific ropes or blocks or other parts of the vessels’ equipment in The Red Rover were in fact named as exactly as their counterparts would be in The Wing-andWing. Here is a typical passage from the earlier book describing how Harry Wilder regards the Rover as that vessel prepares to leave Newport: “Not a sail, or a yard was out of its place . . . nor was there a single rope wanting, amid the hundreds which interlaced the blue sky that formed the background of the picture” (RR CE 124). Wilder himself might be able to tell that all the ropes are there, and each in its proper place, but the reader is left with just that image of lacework against the sky, an aesthetic impression rather than a maritime fact. The sea was present to Cooper in the strength of his own feelings rather than his nautical knowledge. Because the action of The Wing-and-Wing takes place in 1799, Cooper could craft detailed descriptions by drawing on what he himself knew about the habits and gear of the Napoleonic era. We can sense a new precision here, for instance, in Cooper’s calling countless parts of vessels and their rigging by their proper names, often to the bemusement of his readers and without any seeming narrative purpose. At one point, Raoul Yvard directs his privateer’s men “to hand him the rope-end of the shank-painter,” which he then fastens “to the cable by a jamming hitch” (W&W 1:172). We similarly read of the British frigate Proserpine: “Her fore-course was hauled up, and the spanker was brailed; then the royals were clewed up, and furled; the top-gallant-sails followed; and presently the Proserpine was reduced to her three topsails and jib” (W&W 2:7).40 To some extent these demonstrations of Cooper’s own seaworthiness were intended for his old messmates, particularly William B. Shubrick (who nevertheless wrote Cooper to correct him in two other details in the 1842 novel, prompting Cooper to reply, “For once, your criticism is right”—LJ 4:327). But at the same time they marked the author’s successful recovery of parts of his past that remained surprisingly fresh and available. No doubt part of the reason was his research for the History of the Navy, which had renewed some of his old memories and given him much new information. Another part of Cooper’s past mattered in crucial ways here—his merchant voyage on the Stirling in 1806–1807, which had given him a close view of Napoleonic Europe. Certain nautical details in the novel derived, for instance, from Cooper’s early experiences along Europe’s Atlantic shore. One notes, first, how carefully Cooper distinguished the distinctive look and rig of Raoul Yvard’s privateer (a three-masted Atlantic “lugger”) from those of “the xebeque, the

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felucca, the polacre, and the bombarda,” Mediterranean types much more familiar to his Italian characters, as to Cooper himself during his late 1820s visits to Leghorn and other Italian ports (W&W 1:9; see GI CE 32). Yvard’s vessel in turn gave the 1842 novel its title. The lugger was named for the lugsails it carried and the lugs (or top yards) by which they were attached to the mast. Because of the sails’ shape and especially the lug’s off-center attachment, it was also possible to deploy the lugsails “wing-and-wing” (leaning far out over opposite sides of the vessel, perpendicular or nearly so to the keel), in which case the lugger’s characteristic differences would be obvious to a trained eye. The Mediterranean vessels that Cooper distinguished from the lugger in The Wing-and-Wing used various other rigs, including square or lateen sails, so that the privateer’s evident strangeness immediately puts the Italian characters on alert at this time of an all-consuming war. To see this ship in this place at this time is to know what may well follow.41 Cooper probably had seen few if any luggers while staying in Italy. Yet this old type of craft was well-known to him from his time on the inshore waters of the European Atlantic, including the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay. Glancing references to it running across his literary career make it clear that he had grasped and well recalled its features. Even toward the end of his very first novel, Precaution, there is a brief nautical section in which Admiral Peter Howell’s fleet, returning from the West Indies after Yorktown, pauses in the Bay of Plymouth. Wary of “Jonathan,” who has “grown very saucy,” Howell tells his signal lieutenant to have several smaller warships tarry offshore until the transports have offloaded their troops—for the pilot has told him “the channel is full of luggers” (PRE 2:219), presumably meaning French or Franco-American privateers.42 In Cooper’s third book, The Pioneers, Royal Navy veteran Benjamin Penguillan mentions that he once spent “six months aboard a Garnsey lugger”—which was, of course, a Biscay vessel (the anecdote is recalled, nicely enough, in the chapter that takes as its epigraph the chorus from “The Bay of Biscay”—see PIO CE 172, 169). This vessel type, redolent of Cooper’s own time in those very waters, remained a fixture of his nautical memories. In a minor early episode in The Two Admirals, we thus hear of another Biscay lugger, Le Voltigeuse, that young Wycherly Wychecombe has flushed out of “the roads of Groix,” off Lorient (TA CE 47). Furthermore, Cooper had, according to his grandnephew Pomeroy Keese, “rigged up a small skiff, with a lug sail,” with which he ran about Otsego Lake during this period as a miniature memento “of early Mediterranean days.” The skiff made material the yearning of his memory toward his youthful adventures.43 Among the various other topics that had lodged in Cooper’s mind during his time on the Stirling and resurfaced in The Wing-and-Wing, none was more

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important than the practice of impressment. Long before 1812, the forcible taking of men off technically neutral ships had thrust many American seamen into the Napoleonic conflict. Especially vulnerable were the many foreign-born sailors, including Britons, manning the rapidly expanded U.S. merchant marine at this time. Cooper tended to ignore the Royal Navy deserters who took refuge on U.S.-owned vessels. For him, impressment was about the violation of American rights on the high seas. His experience with it in 1806–1807 immediately outraged him (or so he recalled) and deepened his patriotic sentiments once the War of 1812 came.44 Lingering resentments caused him to discuss the topic with surprising warmth three decades later in the naval history and to treat the most outrageous consequence of the practice, the unprovoked June 1807 broadsiding of the Chesapeake, in great and indignant detail (see HN 2:127–32, 94–115). Moreover, the topic figured in Charles S. M. Phillipps’s attack on his naval history in the Edinburgh Review in April 1840 and in Cooper’s long responses to that attack in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in May and June 1842, precisely when he was in the midst of The Wing-and-Wing. That novel gave impressment greater power than it had in the naval history partly because of the recent naval engagement in the two magazines, but also because here it entered into and helped shape the novel’s plot, much as fleet action had shaped that of The Two Admirals. Cooper poured his Anglophobic feelings, implausibly enough, into his Italian novel. He did so at the level of discourse (see W&W 2:48) but also, as just noted, through the plot. The book’s most sharply etched character, the lone Yankee sailor Ithuel Bolt, is obviously out of place in the European war; he is where he is because he has been forcibly inserted into that war by British presumption and violence. The unlikable Bolt is no handsome sailor or ideal republican. He expresses Cooper’s durable enmity for the narrow-minded Yankees repeatedly pilloried in his books, from Hiram Doolittle in The Pioneers to the asyet-uninvented Newcomes in the Littlepage novels. In this regard, “law-honest” Bolt is a masterpiece of provincial shiftiness. Just the person “to declaim the loudest against the roguery of the rest of mankind,” he would readily betray his commander’s ship to the Italians for cash except that he thinks the Italians the greatest rogues in the world—and furthermore regards their allies, the English, with a hatred so deep that it necessarily keeps him loyal to Yvard (W&W 1:65–66). Yet otherwise the book pays Bolt his due. “Unnurtured, and, in many respects, unprincipled as he was,” Cooper writes, “he had his clear conceptions of the injustice of which he had been one, among thousands of other victims.” So hopeless was Bolt’s situation during his imprisonment on HMS Proserpine that he sometimes contemplated blowing up that vessel, killing his oppressors and himself at once. In the ordinary light of day, he might seem to be a “mercenary

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and selfish” man, but while a prisoner his circumstances called forth from him a kind of desperate redemption (W&W 1:72). This trait is something that even the pious Ghita, Yvard’s lover, recognizes in Bolt: “although she little liked either his character or his appearance, she had often been obliged to smile at the narrative of the deceptions he practiced on the English, and of the thousand low inventions he had devised to do them injury” (W&W 1:43).45 Ithuel Bolt and the themes he introduces were fundamental to Cooper’s plans for the novel. When sending the last of the slowly evolved Two Admirals to Richard Bentley in mid-February 1842, Cooper alerted him, “I am at work again, and shall be ready by midsummer, with something new” (LJ 4:247). When, ten weeks later, he informed Lea and Blanchard that the new book would be “called ‘Le Feu-Follet, or the Wing and Wing,’ ” he added a brief précis to which Bolt was integral: “Time 1799—scene Mediter[r]anean—actors principally English, French and Italians—though there is one American sailor” (LJ 4:289). The odd coupling of the atheistic French master Yvard and his dour latter-day Puritan counterpart Bolt nicely suggests how the novel had been fertilized from the crossing of two sets of Cooper’s memories—those from his Italian visit with those from his voyage on the Stirling.46 The book progressed quickly. Shortly after his May 1842 letter to Lea and Blanchard, Cooper wrote Bentley to share roughly the same information about the novel (“The principal actors are English, French and Italian. One American”)—and to add an extra bit: “I rather like it myself ” (LJ 4:292). He probably hoped the enthusiasm would be contagious, but Bentley’s July 8 response proved cautious. He had three concerns. The Two Admirals had done so poorly in Britain that he had a surplus of unsold copies. Moreover, he did not think the new title as given in Cooper’s letter of May 27 (“Le Feu-Follet; or the Wing And Wing”) was “taking,” perhaps part of the reason why Cooper later reversed its components. Most seriously, however, Bentley correctly concluded (“from the period and place” Cooper had chosen for the book) that it would focus on an episode in Horatio Nelson’s naval career that would be “likely to excite unpleasant feelings in the English reader.” Bentley therefore wanted to employ a sliding scale like that he had proposed for the previous novel.47 Cooper had finished much of his work on the novel by the latter part of September, when, responding from New York to Bentley, he indicated that it was “nearly printed” and that he was dispatching “more than half the sheets” then, along with the relevant manuscript (LJ 4:314–15). Writing his wife from Philadelphia a week later, he told her he had finished all but the last three chapters, which he would write once he returned home (see LJ 4:316). His plans must have changed, however, because as he lingered in Philadelphia on what he had told Bentley was his last trip of the year (see LJ 4:315), he in fact completed two

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of those chapters by October 2 and could report that half of the second volume had been printed. Evidently he finished the final chapter in Philadelphia as well and wrapped up his duties there by around Wednesday, October 5 (see LJ 4:319). The novel appeared in London (as The Jack O’Lantern; (Le Feu Folett;) or, the Privateer) on or slightly before November 23 (S&B 119; BAL 2:293).48 Lea and Blanchard’s arrangement differed considerably from Bentley’s but also from those they had previously offered Cooper, for here, too, more changes were forthcoming. Whereas from the time of The Monikins to this point the Philadelphia firm had paid for stereotyping his books (when they were stereotyped), now for the first time Cooper assumed that cost. He thus hired the industrious John Fagan, whom he in a sense inherited from Lea and Blanchard, to set his manuscript in type and make the plates (see W&W 1:2). The latter he loaned to the publishers, who in return for their payment to him would have the right to print up to ten thousand copies. If the demand exceeded that number, the firm agreed to reprint the book in groups of a thousand copies and would pay him an additional per-copy rate for them. Should the firm sell all ten thousand initial copies before the end of three years but decline to print any more, then its limited rights to the book would revert to Cooper. Because Lea and Blanchard were to sell the book for only fifty cents per set, a radically low price, they would need to handle very large quantities to pay Cooper, defray their costs, and still make a profit.49 This second 1842 book inaugurated a new scheme that not only altered the economics of Cooper’s career but also ended his relationship with the Philadelphia house. The firm promoted him generally in advertising printed in the first edition of The Wing-and-Wing, but that novel itself, as Cooper noted for his wife from Philadelphia in January 1843, had “only done so so.” The critical reception was good, and Cooper himself reported that some twelve thousand copies had been distributed, but even so he was disappointed: “I consider the experiment”—his term for the new arrangement with Lea and Blanchard—“a failure, though we may sell five thousand more.” On returning home, he explained to his son Paul, then at college, “Next time, I shall make a better bargain.” As we shall see in due time, he certainly tried to do that (LJ 4:339, 349).

The New Battle of Lake Erie As book prices fell, Cooper’s literary activity increased and his time became less and less his own. He practiced in these years a kind of patchwork aesthetic, shifting about among several roughly contemporaneous projects. The Wing-andWing thus came out shortly before the “Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief ” started its four-month run in Graham’s. And, even as the last installment of the

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“Autobiography” appeared in the magazine’s April issue, its author was already in the midst of several other ventures. The two-part narrative of Perry’s life appeared in the magazine next, as noted earlier, followed by that of John Paul Jones in July and August. Although having more pieces in production at any one time meant more income, keeping different items flowing without interruption could be challenging. The proofs of the second installment of the Perry sketch, for instance, were sent to Cooperstown in the middle of March but not returned as of April 3, when a worried Griswold inquired from Philadelphia what had happened to them.50 Cooper must have brought the corrected Perry proofs with him when he left home for Philadelphia late in March 1843 (see LJ 4:382), for Griswold did not have to delay the article. He probably brought the manuscript of the Jones sketch as well, since the editor would need that soon in order to meet the planned schedule. Cooper had been accustomed to dealing with competing projects before, but never to this extent, and things would become only more hectic as time passed. Fortunately, although he remained under contract with Graham’s, he soon had a seven-month break from its pages. Once the second part of “John Paul Jones” appeared late in the summer, he therefore could focus his energies on other endeavors.51 One of them was a new piece of the Lake Erie puzzle, which absorbed much time and attention. It will be recalled from the discussion of the libel suits in chapter 8 that William A. Duer’s 1839 articles in Stone ’s Commercial Advertiser attacked the naval history’s relatively brief account of the Battle of Lake Erie (HN 2:385–406). That September 1813 engagement near West Sister Island, north of Sandusky, had pitted a strongly armed U.S. fleet under Oliver H. Perry against a somewhat weaker British one under Robert H. Barclay. Following the U.S. victory, Perry had praised his subordinate, Jesse D. Elliott, for his “characteristic bravery and judgment” (LDANO 2:209n), a seemingly straightforward statement.52 Things about the battle soon caused concern, however, and eventually a long-lived and bitter controversy arose. The most important issue was the fact that Perry’s brig, the Lawrence, had borne the brunt of the British guns for more than two hours, during which very little damage was suffered by any of the other American vessels, including Elliott’s brig, the Niagara, which stayed largely out of harm’s way. Perry’s management of his flotilla had set up this situation. Anticipating the use of a relatively tight line-of-battle formation (a first in U.S. naval warfare), he had ordered all commanders to keep their proper places in line and engage only their assigned British targets. Perry’s ship was originally near the center of the line, while Elliott’s was in the leading position at its west end. As the engagement neared and it seemed likely that Elliott would

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come under British fire first, Perry pulled alongside the Niagara and ordered Elliott back to the third position, behind both the Lawrence and the smaller Caledonia. Having sailed out ahead of the line, Perry soon came under fire from the enemy guns. Elliott, in technical agreement with his orders, kept his new position instead of coming forward to assist Perry. Finally, when the Lawrence was virtually a wreck and the Niagara was finally engaging the British, Perry abandoned his ship (which soon afterward surrendered to the British) and, coming to Elliott’s brig by boat, took it over and proceeded to run down on Barclay. He battered the British ships with the relatively intact power of the Niagara and secured a quick, surprising victory. No completely satisfactory explanation for this odd turn of events has ever been offered. Much later concern focused on why Elliott had so long delayed engaging the enemy, but Perry, despite his heroic persistence and eventual triumph, was also to blame. Naval historian David C. Skaggs, who has written the best modern biography of Perry, presents the following analysis: “Perry’s alteration of his formation may be criticized on two grounds. First, he reduced his ability to direct the battle from the center by taking a position in the van. . . . Second, by placing the slow-sailing Caledonia between his two brigs, Perry slightly reduced his ability to control the Niagara and the latter’s ability to closely follow the flagship if the Caledonia lagged behind. At this critical juncture Perry placed an extraordinary amount of responsibility on his subordinates’ abilities to carry out his less than fully articulated battle plans while he plunged into the heat of the fight.” Skaggs adds that Perry’s rush to engage the British resulted in the smaller and slower vessels in his squadron falling behind the larger, faster ones, a critical factor since his sloops and schooners carried the majority of his long guns. The rush also put further strain on Perry’s relations with Elliott, whom he had denied a chance of glory by shuffling him farther back in the line.53 That Perry achieved victory in the face of impending disaster boosted his claim to glory even as it lowered Elliott’s standing. In 1815, when British press reports surrounding Robert H. Barclay’s court-martial further clouded Elliott’s reputation, Elliott requested that a court of inquiry formally review his behavior. The latter body found him technically blameless, but suspicions lingered, fed in part by Perry’s widely rumored disaffection from him. When Perry returned from service in the U.S. Mediterranean squadron in 1818, Elliott demanded explanations for reports that Perry had spoken ill of his behavior to other officers in recent years. After Perry acknowledged that he had not hidden his contempt for Elliott, Elliott challenged Perry to a duel. Perry refused, answering instead with formal charges laid before the navy in August 1818.54 Perry’s official reversal of his 1813 praise cast Elliott into deeper disrepute but also raised questions about Perry’s own motives. Even though the navy

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chose not to pursue Perry’s charges, and Perry’s death while on a mission to South America in 1819 made the point moot, the larger issue would not go away. Prior to departing, Perry had given copies of his anti-Elliott documents to his kinsman Benjamin Hazard, asking him to convey them to Stephen Decatur, Perry’s good friend.55 When Decatur in turn died at the hands of James Barron in an 1820 duel for which Decatur’s widow not implausibly blamed Elliott (Barron’s associate and second), she attempted to smear Elliott by publishing the Perry materials as an anonymous twenty-two-page pamphlet.56 As Skaggs notes, she thus made overtly public the largely private claims previously circulating against Elliott. He responded angrily in the newspapers, prompting Matthew C. Perry to demand that he supply the exculpatory documents he said he had in his possession. When Elliott did so, Perry published a pamphlet of his own in New York, presenting further depositions from his brother’s side of the story.57 Cooper had avoided any entanglement in that dispute at the time. His involvement with it two decades later was owing to several factors, some personal, others political. While he had not known Oliver Perry, he did know his brother Matthew fairly well in New York during the 1820s.58 By contrast, he did not know Elliott at all well—and he furthermore must have known, then and later, that repeated suspicion of Elliott’s motives and character had been aroused by his behavior.59 There were, however, political countercurrents that made Cooper’s predisposition on the matter more complex. In the 1830s, Elliott, a Democrat, became a target of heated attacks by the Anti-Jacksonians and then the Whigs. When President Jackson appointed him to run the Charlestown Navy Yard in 1833, Elliott, stationed in the heart of their common political enemy’s country, put on a brave Democratic front. As restoration of the USS Constitution proceeded at the yard the following year, he commissioned a tenfoot-tall likeness of Old Hickory as its new figurehead. Not surprisingly, that provocative act attracted such negative publicity in Boston that a mischievous young man rowed out to the warship and, beheading Jackson, made off with the trophy. The newly organized Whigs were quickly blamed for the deed, and were in any case jubilant that the image of the man they thought of as rankly unconstitutional in his behavior had been removed, barnacle-like, from Old Ironsides.60 This nasty political fight renewed the campaign against Elliott for his oftenquestioned role in the Battle of Lake Erie. Now it was, in 1834, that M. C. Perry brought out his enlarged edition of Susan Decatur’s earlier collection of documents and charges. It was countered the next year by Russell Jarvis’s Biographical Notice of Com. Jesse D. Elliott, which reviewed the Lake Erie business and gave a history of the Jackson figurehead episode. Although as staunchly partisan on Elliott’s behalf as the Perryites who attacked Elliott, Jarvis documented both

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sides of the controversy, as the 1821 and 1834 volumes did not. (Because it thus included Oliver Perry’s charges against Elliott, Cooper would find the Jarvis volume a convenient source for original documents on the battle and the subsequent dispute—see BLE 80.) On the other hand, Jarvis also put forward Elliott’s boldest claims to the importance of his role in the Battle of Lake Erie. Through the Biographical Notice, Elliott contended that he had engaged the enemy ships before Perry came aboard the Niagara, thereby preventing the utter defeat that seemed about to follow on Perry’s abandonment of the disabled Lawrence. Cooper was hardly gullible on that subject, or the larger controversy. In a letter to Shubrick a month after the naval history appeared, he made clear his sophisticated private view of Lake Erie. Although Elliott had been ordered to keep the station he occupied in the American line, he might have abandoned it sooner had he possessed more initiative; at the same time, it was technically his commander’s responsibility to call him into the fray if he did not enter on his own, and in any event Elliott had at last made for the enemy once he believed that his commander was no longer able to fight. Skaggs, whose admiration for Cooper’s naval history as a whole is evident, thought that Cooper could have presented a very strong case for this nuanced interpretation in that work had he been as honest there as in the Shubrick letter.61 Be that as it may, Cooper’s decision not to engage the controversy directly in the naval history, but rather to focus his narrative on the most stunning naval victory in the nation’s short life, probably appeared to offer him protection from the still bitter arguments on either side. But it did not. His opponents, characterized by Cooper in 1843 as “the Perry faction” (BLE 22), may be sorted into three somewhat more diverse but still interlocking groups. The first was composed of Perry’s kin, starting with his brother Matthew and including as well Matthew’s brother-in-law Alexander Slidell Mackenzie (who had also associated closely with Oliver H. Perry between 1815 and 1817) and Mackenzie’s uncle, William A. Duer. The second group was made up of New Englanders eager to defend regional honor, such as Rhode Island politician (and also remote Perry kinsman) Tristam Burges, whose 1836 speech commemorating the battle droned on about the sturdy sons of Newport and, when published in 1839 in response to the naval history, took a gratuitous swipe at Cooper. Finally, the third group included Whigs opposed to the staunchly Jacksonian Elliott on political grounds as much as personal ones, a group that not coincidentally also included all the individuals just named.62 As with the two other major issues that nominally caused Cooper’s libel suits—the Three Mile Point controversy and the Home novels—attacks on Cooper’s treatment of the Battle of Lake Erie exploited a substantive disagreement because it allowed his opponents to indulge in the politics of personal vilification.

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Although the Perry-Elliott business was toxic enough to have caused Cooper trouble with the press even in the absence of the libel suits, it is clear that the latter made things worse. Apparently convinced that someone who had made so many enemies among the Whigs could not possibly treat the Lake Erie matter fairly, Cooper’s opponents were lying in wait for him even before the naval history appeared. Indeed, they apprehensively attempted to intervene as he worked on the history. When Cooper let it be known that he would welcome information on any relevant topics, M. C. Perry called on him to offer materials specifically on the Battle of Lake Erie.63 Cooper gladly accepted. When, however, Perry returned some time later and asked whether “Mr. C. wanted any thing more” (as Jesse D. Elliott later narrated the encounter), Cooper replied: “Yes, the papers explanatory in the case of Capt. Elliott; yours are all of a controverted character. I must seek for truth—find and record it.” Perry then asked, “Do you think you will mention the name of Comm. Elliott with respect?” On Cooper’s saying, “Most assuredly,” Perry shot back, “Then your book will be attacked.” Herein lay the start of the campaign against the history. The decision to attack it preceded its actual appearance.64 Cooper’s 1843 Battle of Lake Erie gave his delayed answer to three particular attackers—Burges, Mackenzie, and Duer. Although not technically first in the attacks, Burges was first in line in Cooper’s response. The Rhode Islander’s booklet Battle of Lake Erie, with Notices of Commodore Elliott’s Conduct in that Engagement, published four to five months after the naval history (that is, early in the fall of 1839), was later described by Cooper as “an old and atrociously silly lecture . . . to which a new and injurious note reflecting on myself is appended.” Only in that note and perhaps one or two other passages did Burges even refer to Cooper’s account, and vaguely at that, as “a late publication, purporting to be a Naval History.”65 Cooper took some offense at Burges’s “purporting” (in 1840, he misremembered the politician as having called his book “a pretended history”—LJ 4:24; emphasis added). He also would recall Burges’s further accusation that the naval history revealed “a strange obliquity of purpose, or of understanding,” in equating Perry’s heroism with Elliott’s when both men exposed themselves in small boats in the heat of the battle.66 Insofar as “obliquity of purpose” implied that Cooper was acting as a partisan of Elliott, narrating the battle so as to raise Elliott’s profile and lower Perry’s, the phrase clearly smarted. As we shall see in the next chapter, Cooper was to use it in his last published attack on Mackenzie following the latter’s court martial for executing three supposed mutineers on the USS Somers.67 Cooper exposed and corrected many technical errors committed by Burges, several of which magnified Perry’s role in the lead-up to the Erie affair (see BLE 12–13). He was also irked by the Rhode Islander’s Yankee pride, which led to the

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false claim that the men who had built the American ships on Erie were from New England, whereas they actually had come from New York and Philadelphia (see BLE 13–14; compare LJ 4:20).68 Such historical errors to one side, it was Burges’s partisanship as a Perryite that especially bothered Cooper, for it threatened to warp the whole narrative of the battle, not just misstate details. This was especially true of a phrase in Burges’s narrative that Mackenzie was to copy the following year. The expression arose in Burges’s attempt to explain how Perry had later diluted and finally withdrawn his 1813 praise for Elliott’s behavior. Even if justified, that reversal created an impression of ethical weakness on Perry’s part. In Cooper’s view, the Perry partisans usually explained his general praise for Elliott (“In this action he evinced his characteristic bravery and judgment,” etc.) as resulting from a wish “to shield Capt. Elliott” from negative criticisms circulating afloat and ashore even in 1813 (BLE 22).69 Burges outdid his allies by claiming that Perry had intentionally laced his first praise with covert clues to Elliott’s unworthy conduct. He advanced this argument by deconstructing the earliest language Perry had used in speaking of Elliott’s part in the battle: “At half past 2, the wind springing up, Captain Elliott was enabled to bring his vessel, the Niagara, gallantly into close action.”70 Positive as it seemed, this assertion had created a tough problem for Perry’s supporters, who (in Cooper’s analysis) contended “that Elliott did not bring the Niagara into action at all.” Burges ingeniously rewrote the sense of Perry’s sentence: “Here [Perry] saved Elliott, by a benevolent ambiguity. He says ‘at half past two, the wind springing up, Captain Elliot [sic] was enabled to bring his vessel, the Niagara, gallantly into close action.’ He was enabled, he could say; he could not say he did bring the Niagara into close action. For every man in the fleet knew that this was done by Perry himself. The public might infer, that Elliot, when he was enabled to bring, did in fact, bring the Niagara gallantly into close action; and Elliot was willing it should be so left in this ambiguity.”71 Cooper, outraged by such sophistry (which he had already noted in his 1840 draft critique of Burges—see LJ 4:22–23), pointed to Perry’s use of the same locution with regard to other officers who had never come under suspicion: “’The Ariel, Lt. Packet, and Scorpion, Sailing Master Champlin, were enabled to get early into the action, and were of great service.’ Here ‘enabled’ is unequivocally used in direct connection with performance, and without any ‘benevolent ambiguity.’ ” Cooper knew that “any man of ordinary honesty, or ordinary intellect,” would not need to be told this. His only reason for discussing it was his wish to indicate “the moral caliber of the men with whom I have had to contend” (BLE 24; emphasis in original). At this point, Burges (and Mackenzie, who followed him in this matter) must have been indistinguishable for Cooper from newspapermen like Barber, Webb, Weed, and company.72

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Cooper turned next to Alexander S. Mackenzie, who anonymously reviewed the naval history for the North American Review in October 1839 and then took on Cooper more extensively the next year in his biography of Perry. Mackenzie thus was thrown together with Burges and especially Duer as a target of Cooper’s counterattack. But it would be wrong to give the impression that Cooper’s opponents on this issue, however linked politically and by their Perry attachments, formed a uniform personal front against him. Cooper distinguished among them, never undertaking legal action against the North American Review for publishing Mackenzie’s review even as he lumped Duer together with Stone and sued Stone for publishing Duer’s reviews. For his part, Mackenzie entered the fray with some restraint. His long review gave Cooper a good deal of praise for both his research and his writing: “Mr. Cooper has made a valuable addition to the history of the country,” the review opened, and it ended with Mackenzie ’s ringing endorsement of Cooper’s recommendations for strengthening the navy. In between, although he critiqued Cooper’s style, Mackenzie stressed that the history displayed the virtues of “liberality, talent, and ingenuity,” adding that the “narratives of battles are almost always nervous [i.e., energetic] and striking, and the criticisms, which accompany them, generally just and discriminating.”73 Cooper appreciated Mackenzie’s diplomatic tone, noting in 1840 that his North American Review article was “better” than Burges’s book (LJ 4:48). On the subject of Erie, however, Mackenzie hardly was fair. He paradoxically claimed that Cooper had shown partiality toward England in his general narration of the War of 1812: Cooper’s “unwillingness to claim too much credit for our triumphs in this brilliant, though unequal struggle” proved to Mackenzie ’s satisfaction the counterintuitive Whig claim that Cooper (attacked a few years previously for his bitter criticisms of England) was now a thoroughgoing Anglophile. In Mackenzie’s view, this shift of allegiance impelled Cooper to tarnish U.S. achievements in the War of 1812. But in this view Cooper’s treatment of Oliver H. Perry, while it served that larger purpose, also bespoke his special animus against Perry and his attachment to Elliott. Despite Mackenzie ’s seeming restraint on this issue, too (“The controversy, which [Cooper] thus brings up, is not of our seeking”), there soon followed a detailed critique of the subject as Cooper treated it in the History of the Navy. Having given it so much attention, Mackenzie at last concluded by introducing a quotation from Cooper’s narrative: “The moral of Mr. Cooper’s account of the battle of Lake Erie, seems to be summed up in the following words: ‘For his conduct, in this battle, Captain Perry received a gold medal from Congress. Captain Elliott also received a gold medal.’ ”74 Even this was relatively mild, to be sure, by comparison to other Perryite criticisms of Cooper. And Mackenzie’s two-volume biography of Perry of 1840,

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although produced specifically to counter Cooper, also did not belabor his supposed errors or advocacy for Elliott.75 Only after Cooper published his two-part Perry sketch and then followed it up immediately with his Battle of Lake Erie, issued through the Phinneys in Cooperstown in July 1843, did Mackenzie at last take special notice of what Cooper had there said about and against Perry and himself. The fifth edition of his own Perry biography, published that November, thus introduced a quite aggressive appendix that excoriated the “special pleading, sophistry, and venomous abuse” he discovered in Cooper’s Battle of Lake Erie. This fresh attack no doubt reflected the fact that Cooper’s booklet repeatedly (and unfairly, I think) exploited the Somers mutiny case as a means of casting doubt on Mackenzie’s character and therefore his worth as a naval writer.76 Mackenzie’s ire also may have been stoked by the fact that Cooper’s booklet gave him more attention than Burges and Duer combined. That was partly because Mackenzie, as a navy man and a literary figure of some note, was the most formidable of Cooper’s three opponents—“an antagonist worthy of an old sailor,” as Cooper put it (BLE 48); partly, too, because Cooper handled problems he found in the other two by means of their recurrence in Mackenzie (see BLE 27, 48).77 The longest discussion of the “enabled” business in the Battle of Lake Erie thus comes in the section on Mackenzie (see BLE 63–73, passim), not that on Burges, who of course had first dreamt it up. As a result, it appears that the fault in that regard was more heavily Mackenzie’s than the Rhode Islander’s, a point Cooper may well have endorsed because, after all, a seaman such as Mackenzie should have known better than a landsman like Burges in such matters. (Cooper thus wrote at one point: “he [Mackenzie] adopts Mr. Burges’s theory of the ‘enabled.’ This is enough, of itself, to make any man a Master of Arts, in absurdity”—BLE 72.) Mackenzie certainly looked like Cooper’s prime target as of 1843. Under attack in other quarters, Mackenzie struck back. William A. Duer, Cooper’s third target in his 1843 booklet, had entered the field against Cooper’s naval history sooner and more vehemently than Burges or Mackenzie, and his personal tone made answering him imperative. Presumably, Stone had invited Duer to write the multipart review. That Duer had himself been a midshipman during the quasi-war with France helps explain his interest in the question.78 So does the fact that for this Whig as for others, whatever the truth of Jesse D. Elliott’s behavior in 1813 or since, that famous old Democrat and prominent Jacksonian made a useful target at a time when party strife was rampant. Moreover, Duer was Mackenzie’s uncle by marriage (and, having served as one of Thomas Bridgen’s attorneys when Bridgen had sued Cooper two decades earlier, was personally involved in the story in even more intimate ways—see JFC:EY 324). He had many motives for pushing back against Cooper’s shoves, and Cooper had many reasons to shove in the first place.

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Across several issues of Stone’s papers, the daily Commercial Advertiser and the semiweekly New-York Spectator, Duer ignored most of the naval history, focusing on Lake Erie. This disproportion prompted Cooper to comment that, instead of using “Cooper’s Naval History” for the title of his piece, publisher Stone should have used “The Battle of Lake Erie” (BLE 33–34). The introductory article in the series, written partly by Stone (see LJ 4:57; BLE 32), makes it plain why the scope was so narrow: “We had heard it rumored that the Naval History of the United States was to contain, if not a vindication of the conduct of Captain Elliot [sic] . . . at all events a much more favorable view of it than had been presented to the public by his commanding officer.”79 Duer charged Cooper with being “utterly regardless of justice and propriety as a man” and “insensitive to his obligations and responsibility as a historian.” The naval history, in its treatment of the Perry-Elliott dispute, circulated a “partial and deceptive” narrative: in other words, as historian, Cooper had falsified the record. The brief introductory article on June 8 called Elliott “a political partisan—an official sycophant,” and accused Cooper of “degrad[ing] the name and object of history” by supporting Elliott’s battle narrative. Duer closed by promising to make his case with “documents . . . to be found on the files of the Navy Department.” In the second, more substantive article two days later, he summarized Cooper’s narrative of the battle, seeking to demonstrate its partiality to Elliott. Not until the third and fourth articles, first published on June 14 and 19, did the Commercial Advertiser actually produce any of the promised documentation. And, as it turned out, nothing cited there came directly from naval archives. It all derived, as one might suspect, from M. C. Perry’s recent pamphlet.80 Moreover, in several key instances Duer dishonestly misquoted his authorities. Cooper pointed out in his Lake Erie booklet that much of what he might have written against Duer in 1843 had already been handled in the various legal sessions on the Stone libel suit. He nonetheless went into considerable detail, especially about questions that focused on Duer’s ethical character. Cooper boiled his concerns down to five general points. The Duer series was (1) unfair in spirit, (2) uninformed about maritime and naval matters, (3) lacking in rigor on questions of truth, (4) inconsistent in handling Duer’s own authorities, and (5) deceptive or at least sloppy in matters of fact (BLE 31). What bothered Cooper most was Duer’s slipperiness. He “foully misquotes me,” Cooper asserted, adducing as proof a passage taken from one of the naval history’s notes about Perry’s and Elliott’s use of boats. Duer erased significant portions of Cooper’s prose without giving the least indication he had cut out parts that, Cooper added, would have significantly complicated Duer’s argument but that, by their absence, distorted Cooper’s (BLE 40).81 Duer did similar things in

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omitting crucial phrases or whole sentences when quoting his own authorities, usually to the same effect. For instance, he deleted portions of a quotation from Daniel Turner. The commander of the Caledonia had written (in Cooper’s italicized and capitalized quotation from him), “It was the general opinion of the American officers, and expressed with much indignation, that Capt. Elliott did not do his duty in the battle; inasmuch as he did not bring his vessel, as soon as he might have done, into close action, which circumstance only, made the result of the battle for a short time doubtful.” Duer cut this whole sentence from the center of his longer quotation from Turner—without indicating the elision. Why? Because “every syllable of it, told in favor of his theory, but the words, ‘as soon as he might have done,’ and they flatly contradict it” (BLE 43). Although Cooper cited other offenses on Duer’s part, the worst were his various silent elisions, which could not have been accidental and which always distorted testimony (or Cooper’s prose) in the direction of Duer’s own prior conclusions. Because Duer was not the editor or publisher of Stone’s paper, only the writer of the review, he could not be sued under current libel laws. No matter, for in The Battle of Lake Erie, Cooper had his say on Duer, leaving his character in the dark shadow cast by his own deeds.

A Border Story After publishing The Wing-and-Wing in November 1842, Cooper fell unusually quiet about his next novel, Wyandotté, or the Hutted Knoll (1843), until he was well along with it. The shifting conditions under which he now operated were partly responsible. Having worked hard to reestablish his relationship with Carey, Lea and Blanchard since his homecoming in 1833, by the early 1840s Cooper was discovering that market forces were straining and soon would disrupt it. His experiment with paying John Fagan to stereotype The Wing-andWing, and then leasing the plates to Lea and Blanchard, may have led him to keep the next novel close to his chest until he figured out how he would dispose of it. Perhaps he imagined switching publishers, or publishing the book himself, as he was doing even now with The Battle of Lake Erie (and as he would do with the first part of Afloat and Ashore in 1844). If the 1843 book were to be his own property, or at least not Lea and Blanchard’s, it might be prudent to keep quiet about it. The manner in which he reached terms with his customary publishers showed the effect of such changes. By late March, Cooper was far enough along with the book, not yet mentioned to Lea and Blanchard or Richard Bentley, to take a significant part of the manuscript with him to New York and Philadelphia. From New York, he wrote Bentley with two related bits of news: that he had just

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drawn against the Londoner and that he did so because he had a new novel, which he very briefly described, that was going “to press this week” (LJ 4:382). He then went off to Philadelphia, where he delivered the first part of his manuscript to Fagan; after that, apparently still not having spoken to Lea and Blanchard, he traveled back to New York and soon returned to Cooperstown.82 Thus far he was copying the Wing-and-Wing pattern—that is, he might selfpublish or lease the plates to some as-yet-undecided American firm. As late as early June, when Cooper returned to New York and Philadelphia with more of the manuscript, he still had not decided what he would do with the book in the United States. He thus announced to Bentley that he would ship “all the stereotypers can give me, by next packet,” adding that the British firm might “rely on no publication, here, until plenty of time is given you” (LJ 4:386). On arriving in Philadelphia and at last broaching the subject with Lea and Blanchard, Cooper finally reached an agreement that closely copied the one for Wing-and-Wing. Perhaps bowing to pressure from Cooper, the firm upped its payment, in exchange for which he was to loan it the stereotype plates. Because it would be free to produce up to twelve thousand copies of the book over a three-year period, the per-copy payment equaled what the Wing-and-Wing contract allowed; in this instance, however, the firm was to give Cooper ten cents each (up from seven-and-a-half cents) for copies above the contractual limit, again agreeing to release more copies to the market in groups of no fewer than a thousand each.83 With regard to Richard Bentley, the terms were worked out via correspondence between author and publisher. When announcing his first draft against Bentley in April 1843, Cooper promised not to draw again until he could send the whole work to London. Bentley replied shortly that, given the lackluster performance of Two Admirals and Wing-and-Wing, he could not afford what Cooper wanted, although he happily accepted the first draft. Before Bentley’s letter reached Cooper (or the whole proof set was actually ready to ship), Cooper made his planned second draft. The Londoner in time accepted this second draft, too, but credited most of it against future works.84 Cooper described Wyandotté for Bentley as “a border story, treated differently from its predecessors.” The primary difference was that it was set (as Cooper went on) at the commencement of the American Revolution, an event he had avoided in all his earlier frontier novels (LJ 4:382). Wyandotté not only includes the war; it makes a striking thematic use of it. When a retired British army officer named Hugh Willoughby brings his wife Wilhelmina and their children Robert and Beulah (along with an adopted daughter, Maud Meredith) to a land patent he has secured in a seemingly undisturbed part of central New York, we may expect a story of settled peace. Things go well for a time, but once the Revolution starts, the hopeful settlement is besieged by disguised rebel forces

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and their Indian allies and eventually, on Captain Willoughby’s death, is abandoned. The fundamental myths of the American past as Cooper himself had established them in the 1820s—border settlement and political emergence— thus seem fatally opposed to each other here. It is as if Cooper’s novel took its cue from St. Jean de Crèvecoeur’s fractured idyll in Letters from an American Farmer rather than from some combination of The Pioneers and The Spy.85 This sort of clash was very much a New York phenomenon, as the novelist well knew: for “the border warfare” of his home state was, in James H. Pickering’s words, “an integral part” of Otsego’s heritage during Cooper’s youth. Various local incidents may have guided his development of the plot. For instance, one fruitful piece of lore concerned a relatively obscure September 1778 attack by Oneida and Tuscarora allies against Loyalists in a “portion of Unadilla and the area just to the northeast called the Butternuts.” Because the latter spot is, after all, the site of the Willoughbys’ fictional “Beaver Manor,” the idea for the attack in Wyandotté was arguably triggered by that historical event.86 Other details and characters came from other local incidents. Cooper refers at the start of the book to the best known of them, the November 1778 assault on nearby Cherry Valley (see WY CE 8). Although in that instance the attackers were of Loyalist sympathy and their victims pro-American, Cherry Valley was rich in stories—stories Cooper clearly used in constructing much of his plot. And yet he did not merely fictionalize the 1778 attack; he borrowed details from it but employed them to explore a very different matter. To appreciate this point, we need to note that the violent crisis in the novel, while it occurs during the early days of the Revolution, has little to do with the politics of that war. Hugh Willoughby debates the American situation with the local Anglican priest and former chaplain, the Reverend Jedediah Woods, while the Yankee troublemaker Joel Strides invokes political principles when he arrests young Robert Willoughby and tries to paint his father, increasingly sympathetic to the American cause, as in fact a Loyalist. Yet it is greed for Willoughby’s land, not patriotism, that actually motivates Strides and his fellow Yankee rebels.87 Likewise, when Captain Willoughby is killed as he and his old Tuscarora retainer Saucy Nick, or Wyandotté, seek to free Robert from the attackers, it is not the Revolution that is to blame but rather the vexed personal bond between the retired British officer and the warrior and scout, whom he has used in various ways for many years. This cross-cultural relationship is no update of Natty Bumppo’s brotherhood with Chingachgook. Emotionally obtuse in his dealings with Nick, Willoughby has bluntly insisted on managing him by means of the whip—worse yet, he beats Nick verbally with constant reminders of that fact. As the two try to free Robert, the officer makes the fatal mistake of mentioning the old beatings yet again, causing the long-suffering victim of his abuse to

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incontinently stab him in the heart. One can scarcely conceive a more apt instance of colonial injuries repaid with Indian vengeance. In this grim update, the sober and enraged Tuscarora warrior enacts what a drunken Chingachgook can only utter—and that barely—in the Bold Dragoon tavern in The Pioneers. In Wyandotté, the general case against the white man stems from a quite literal piece of bad treatment, man to man, and it is settled by the same close means. The intensely personal nature of Nick’s revenge may suggest that the book had no roots in public history more broadly defined. I think that is wrong. Shortly before the 1778 attack on Cherry Valley, the frontier missionary, interpreter, and spy James Dean had been forewarned of it by a friendly Oneida warrior named Loghtaudye. When Gen. Peter Gansevoort passed on Dean’s information from Fort Stanwix to Col. Ichabod Alden, who commanded Continental troops in Cherry Valley, Alden scoffed at the possibility. Under his advice, residents shunned the fort and stayed in their homes the night before the attack, with devastating results. This story, which Cooper may have heard about in Albany from Gansevoort’s descendants or read in the appendix to the first volume of William L. Stone’s Life of Brant, was useful less for its details (the mock attack in Wyandotté is qualitatively different from that on Cherry Valley) than for the Indian who had alerted Dean to the impending attack. For Loghtaudye, who also went by the English name Nicholas Sharp, was popularly known among the whites of frontier New York as Saucy Nick.88 This was indeed the historical figure after whom Cooper fashioned the title character of his book, in the process converting the political into the personal. Other tales circulating in central New York at the time, as the Cooper Edition indicates (see WY CE xxii–xxiii), contributed to his portrait of Nick and the development of the book’s plot. One, first told by local historian Pomroy Jones in 1838, was of special importance. This concerned a conflict that occurred in 1787 when a group of Oneidas out collecting valuable ginseng roots were accused of stealing and slaughtering a local farmer’s steer. Eventually, “the celebrated Saucy Nick” was found to have the animal’s hide and bell in his pack, although he obstinately denied the crime. At this, an angry settler named Lemuel Cook struck him smartly with a cane. The Oneidas, eager to maintain good relations with Cook’s people, sat down and negotiated an agreement whereby they promised to pay for the missing animal. Nick alone remained apart “in sullen silence” during the negotiations, the pain of Cook’s blow “still smarting, still rankling and festering in his bosom.” Jones continued: “When the rest left the house, he went with them without uttering a word, but inwardly vowing revenge, as might be seen by the close observer, in the snake-like glance of [his] eye towards Cook.” Twice thereafter, Nick violently attacked Cook, at last forcing the Yankee migrant to sell his farm and move back to New England. Jones

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concluded that Nick was a living embodiment of a common observation about Indians: “the savage never forgave a real or supposed injury or insult, but carried his resentment to his grave.”89 Here was one essential part of the background to Cooper’s novel. The threatened beating that rouses Nick’s ire in Jones’s anecdote is a suggestive detail, especially with that anecdote’s stress on Nick’s inability to forgive a “real or supposed injury or insult” (compare this to Cooper’s last, and more charitable, line in the novel: “[Nick] never forgot a favor, or forgave an injury”—WY CE 375).90 Cooper did not follow the anecdote closely, borrowing only its gross outlines. He was thinking about much larger issues in the book, both historically and morally. New York was in this sense but a local version of the worldwide landscape of colonialism that increasingly interested Cooper in the 1840s. Geoffrey Sanborn has thus argued, in his illuminating book on the debts Cooper and Melville owed to specific Maori figures, that Nick’s revenge (like Magua’s before him) had its roots in the warrior-sailor Te Ara’s vengeance for a particularly humiliating beating he had suffered on a passage from New Zealand to Australia in 1809. Absent proof that Cooper definitely knew one or more of the British sources for this episode, we may still concur with Sanborn that Cooper’s fictional accounts of vengeance in the woods of North America had a global resonance—that is, he understood the local situation to have deep ties to the fate of colonized peoples everywhere.91 Probably his nearest referents were North American, for by Cooper’s time the trope of Indian resentment of corporal punishment was almost a cliché. But for an author whose geographical coverage was soon, in Afloat and Ashore, The Crater, and The Sea-Lions, to expand dramatically in scope, Sanborn’s Maori examples would not have been irrelevant at all—and could well have been consciously present to him. This is one reason, conceivably, why Cooper’s use of the Saucy Nick anecdotes was loose and inventive rather than literalistic, and why both border settlement and the Revolution are motifs in the book rather than its main focus.92 Nick’s character, deriving in part from a mix of public sources, also can be traced back to the crucial matter of The Deerslayer—not the attempt to revive and reverse-engineer Natty Bumppo there but rather the intent on Cooper’s part to meet and counter the Indian-hating element in contemporary American discourse. Nick is, to be sure, no match for Chingachgook or Uncas as those figures appear in an earlier book like The Last of the Mohicans. He is not an heroic Indian embodying cultural ideals Cooper credited to Indian life generally: honesty, courage, closeness to nature, patient endurance. Yet Nick is no mere Magua, either. Even if he does share Magua’s desire for revenge against a white officer who has physically abused him in the past, Nick acts on that desire impulsively, and against his better nature, whereas Magua plots against Colonel Munro

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by planning and carrying out attacks on his defenseless daughters. In Wyandotté, Nick by contrast cherishes Captain Willoughby’s wife and children, even after he has taken his revenge on Willoughby himself; he has a gentle and generous side to his nature utterly lacking in Magua. It therefore should not be easy to misread him as a savagist figure. He commits murder, not slaughter, and for reasons we understand even if we condemn the act.93 Cooper invented Nick and Magua out of stock motifs, but how he differentiated them from those motifs is illuminating. Nick in his long-standing hurt at the hands of Captain Willoughby represents the injured dignity of the Native American. He represents as well that figure’s spiritual capacity. In the postscript to the present novel, Cooper portrays Nick, now converted to Christianity, as remorseful for the murder of Willoughby. The convert, rechristened as Nicholas, does not quite grasp the full implications of his faith. He instructs the Reverend Jedediah Woods to reveal his murder of Captain Willoughby to Robert and Maud Willoughby during their visit back to the valley, and when the truth is known he stands abashed, ready for the punishment he urges Robert to inflict. He blurts out, “Strike—Nick kill cap’in—Major kill Nick.” Torn between “his sense of Indian justice, and submission to the tenets of his new and imperfectly comprehended faith,” Nick is not sure how to negotiate the conflicting impulses he feels. Robert of course is upset, but instead of acting on his anger, he forgives the perpetrator (WY CE 373). This stagey resolution enacts an important value Cooper had also expressed in The Deerslayer. We recall Hurry Harry’s careless disregard for his Indian victims and the upbraiding that his deeds and attitude bring him from Wah-ta!-Wah (“What for you shoot? . . . Blood come after blood!” [DS 2:56]), whose outrage Cooper fully endorses. The discourse on human rights in that novel is continued here through Cooper’s focus on the suffering caused by Captain Willoughby to Nick/Wyandotté/Nicholas. Nick did wrong to kill Willoughby, but his wrong was motivated by just feelings. Although he has not quite realized his spiritual potential by the book’s end, the portrait Cooper paints of him is radically different from one painted of the historical Saucy Nick in yet another, later source. His family, according to an 1874 local history, “were of bad blood” and marked by “cruel dispositions and ferocious temper.” That writer went on to claim that Saucy Nick was Cooper’s model for Wyandotté, as he doubtless was. But he was a model remodeled. His story was no longer one of brute vengeance but rather of civilized injustice and, eventually, Indian remorse.94

C H A P T E R

E L E V E N

At Sea

I

n January 1843, while already at work on Wyandotté, Cooper received a letter that would soon turn his interest from inland New York back to the sea. Its author was Edward R. Myers, cabin boy on the merchant ship Stirling during Cooper’s first transatlantic voyage in 1806–1807. Only thirteen years old back then, “Ned” had spent the rest of his active life afloat, suffering reversals in war and peace that had left him a broken fifty-year-old alcoholic. Retired and now spiritually awakened (and temporarily on the wagon), he had been living for the past two years at the Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a recently opened charitable enclave on Staten Island.1 Once, years before, he and Cooper had come across each other again—this was in New York waters in 1809, when Cooper, then in his midshipman’s gear, recognized the Stirling off the Battery and briefly came aboard (see NM CE 37).2 After that, however, time and space (and differences in social status) had increasingly divided them. A reunion did not happen immediately in 1843. Cooper corresponded with Ned and with their old captain, John Johnston of Maine, across the winter. When he next left Otsego (for a brief visit to Philadelphia, where he would set Fagan to work on Wyandotté ), he sent Ned a note as he passed through New York, asking him to call at the Globe Hotel in a few days, when he expected to

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be back there (see LJ 4:382–83). Ned, eager to see Cooper, crossed from Staten Island to Manhattan several times in the interim to check at the hotel. On his last visit, as he was “hobbling up Broad Way, to go to the Globe again,” he recognized William C. Bolton, his old commander at Pensacola (and a naval comrade of the novelist) walking down “arm in arm with a stranger.” Ned recalled the upshot: “I saluted the Commodore, who nodded his head to me, and this induced the stranger to look round. Presently I heard ‘Ned,’ in a voice that I knew immediately, though I had not heard it in thirty four years. It was my old ship mate” (NM CE 215). Cooper could not have invented a happier coincidence. When he returned to Manhattan and Philadelphia again early in June (once more to deal with Wyandotté ), Cooper persuaded Ned to accompany him back to Otsego for what proved a long and productive visit, resulting in Ned Myers (see NM CE 215; LJ 4:392). Writing the book together was not, I think, part of the original plan. Ned himself later claimed that it evolved out of the talks he and Cooper had once they had settled in at Cooperstown. While the two sailed about Otsego Lake, he kept sharing anecdotes about his life afloat until, one day, Cooper “suggested it might prove interesting to publish them” (NM CE 216). On July 18, after the two had spent at least a month together, Cooper addressed Bentley: “Since I wrote you I have made great progress in a new book, of entirely new character. It will be called ‘Ned Myers; or the life of a tar’ ” (LJ 4:391).3 The most important effect of collaborating with Ned was that it helped Cooper reframe his whole practice, not just write one book. In the immediate wake of their work together he would publish five tales written in the first person, a narrative technique he had never yet used in his novels. That said, though, not everything about their joint venture was new. Cooper was continuing to bring out his naval sketches at this time; the two on John Paul Jones appeared in Graham’s while he and Ned were busy together. Their book surely owed something to the biographical trend marking a good deal of Cooper’s recent work— he told Bentley, after all, “This is real biography,” emphasizing the point (LJ 4:391). But the aim here was both lower and broader. Myers was no officer, and his life was not to be explained in terms of the great engagements for which both Oliver H. Perry and Jones were still known. Nor was Ned Myers primarily a contribution to naval history. Ned’s story was that of a maritime everyman, told from his own perspective. The collaboration with Myers proceeded so quickly that by July the narrative was perhaps half done.4 We can determine something about how the two men worked on it. For the first three chapters, the story was theirs in common. Not only had Cooper been on the Stirling—he had befriended Ned there, and Ned had told him at that time a good deal about his youthful adventures in Canada and New York, which the book freshly rehearses. Even though Cooper

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had not yet written down any account of the Stirling voyage, he had been thinking back over that experience in writing his two most recent sea tales, The Two Admirals and The Wing-and-Wing, as suggested earlier. And in at least one instance we also know that he had rehearsed his maritime recollections privately with others.5 For the next six chapters, detailing Ned’s further voyages in the ship they shared and his service during the War of 1812, Cooper was similarly a real coauthor: not only was he familiar with the Stirling and its captain and some of its crew—he was intimately knowledgeable about that war, which had occupied much of his attention in the naval history and, more recently, in his fights over the Battle of Lake Erie, which were very much on his mind right now.6 The episodes recounted in chapters 10–11 of Ned Myers, while less accessible to Cooper, were relatively straightforward. As Cooper contemplated Ned’s later, more diffuse experiences, however, the difficulty of keeping track of the details must have seemed daunting. How could Cooper maintain narrative control? More to the point, how could Ned? The seaman had a lively way about him, narrating his adventures “with great simplicity and truth,” as Cooper told Bentley (LJ 4:392). But as those adventures multiplied and ranged more widely over the globe, the need to organize Ned’s memories probably became apparent to Cooper. Although in the book Ned would describe Cooper as “the gentleman who has written out this account of my career, from my verbal narrative of the facts,” it is clear that they had more than Ned’s “verbal narrative” to go on (NM CE 215). Cooper could and did cross-check some details with other sources. In 1850, he thus asserted to a member of Congress that, as to Ned’s service on Lake Ontario during the War of 1812, he had “the facts from eye-witnesses, as well as from his [Ned’s] commander, the late Comm. Chauncey” (LJ 6:112). One of the “eye-witnesses” may have been Jesse D. Elliott, who had also been under Chauncey on Ontario before he joined Perry on Erie, and who furthermore served in Charleston during the Nullification Crisis, as did Ned (see HN 2:330). Moreover, Cooper had based his extensive narrative of Chauncey’s Great Lakes service in the naval history (see HN 2:327–423) on what Chauncey, who had died in 1840, had told him, as well as on various other sources. In this case, as a result, Cooper knew in advance something about the context of Ned’s lake service. He in fact would revise the naval history in light of what Ned told him, but he could evaluate what Ned said in part because he already had written extensively on the subject of Ontario.7 Not all of Cooper’s previous knowledge confirmed Ned’s stories. He would describe Myers in the book’s preface as “a man of quick apprehension, considerable knowledge, and of singularly shrewd comments” and would recall his strong impressions of Ned from their time on the Stirling. Yet he would also assert in the preface that in “a few instances” he had “interposed his own greater

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knowledge of the world, between Ned’s more limited experience and the narrative.” Although “this has been done cautiously, and only in cases in which there can be little doubt that the narrator has been deceived by appearances, or misled by ignorance,” the point even as Cooper limited it was an important one (NM CE 2). In recording a story of Ned’s about a terrible gale that sent his ship, the Coromandel, into Gibraltar, Cooper thus corrected Ned by citing the opinions of a “friend, who was then American consul at Gibraltar, and an old navy officer” (NM CE 150).8 Perhaps most tellingly, when the book tells how Ned found a dead British officer on the battlefield near Fort George, in the Niagara campaign of 1813, Cooper adds a long footnote speculating, on the basis of his memories and subsequent research, that it may actually have been Ned’s long-lost father. That possibility nicely contrasts Ned’s embedded consciousness with Cooper’s seemingly omniscient knowledge (see NM CE 53–54).9 The pair relied on other kinds of information as well. Late in the book, Cooper tells of Ned’s last return to New York, adding a summary footnote in which he attempts to total up the number of vessels on which Ned served across his life. When he there states, “I find, in looking over his papers and accounts, that Ned, exclusively of all the prison ships, transports, and vessels in which he made passages, has belonged regularly to seventy two different crafts!” (NM CE 212), we naturally wonder what those “papers and accounts” were and how they affected the process as the old friends talked and wrote. It turns out that Ned’s life hardly was as undocumented as we may think. For one thing, years before he had contacted Cooper, a letter of advice from him to his nephew that contained a good deal of information on Ned’s nautical career had been published, as Ellie Stedall has discovered, in the Sailor’s Magazine.10 Ned may well have shared this “account” with Cooper once they met and started their work. Moreover, despite the common image of the early sailor as a fugitive figure with few ties to the land or its institutions, and often barely literate, in fact the average “Jack Tar” was substantially more able to write than Ned and was increasingly written about by others. It is entirely possible that Ned had documents from at least some of his voyages (shipping articles, for instance) and that he and Cooper searched for other records in the Customs Collector’s office, where such things as shipping articles were usually stored, when they visited New York together in July.11 At a minimum, we know for a fact that the two worked from a summary of the latter half of Ned’s adventures (from his release from British hands in March 1815 to his acceptance at the Sailors’ Snug Harbor in 1840) that survives today in the Cooper papers at Yale. It seems to have been dictated to some amanuensis by Ned, whose voice and viewpoint it clearly expresses. But it may also record details that had been checked against some documentary records. For instance, in its treatment of Ned’s passage to Savannah in the William Taylor late in 1838,

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and from Savannah to Rotterdam in the Hope thereafter, it corrects the erroneous statements in the Sailor’s Magazine about where Ned left the first vessel and where he boarded the second. It is this intervening document that Ned Myers in turn follows, not the published letter or the memories it tentatively embodied.12 Comparison of the outline with Cooper’s book shows that it did indeed shape the later chapters. For one thing, the sequence of vessels is virtually the same in both. And the few differences themselves are revealing. One concerns a newly constructed ship Ned briefly joined in Calcutta, the Hopping Castle, which he had to flee when it burned to the waterline before properly sailing (see NM CE 122). In the summary, Ned at first skipped that episode altogether, but an interlinear insertion at the proper narrative point adds, “ship that was burnt . . . Hoppin[g] Castle.” Because this insertion is in Cooper’s hand, we know he had access to the summary, a point confirmed by its survival among his papers.13 Yet if the hand was his, the mind directing it was Ned’s, a nice miniature of the book itself. I therefore agree with Hugh Egan when he calls the summary “the Ur-text for the latter half of Ned Myers.” I also agree with his view that the “highly condensed, itinerant quality” of the book in the post-1815 years may have derived from the dual effects of the written outline (as opposed to Ned’s more sauntering oral delivery for the pre-1815 part) and the fact that, with the exception of some naval matters, Cooper knew less and less about much of Ned’s later experience and its various contexts (NM CE xxxvi–xxxvii).14 There may also have been limits to what Ned wished to divulge or withhold. Myra C. Glenn has discovered, for example, that his time as a British prisoner during the War of 1812 was less than two months, not the ten he recalled for Cooper. In that instance, a wish to exaggerate his sufferings (or hide actions of doubtful patriotic value, such as serving his captors) may explain the discrepancy, instead of simple bad memory. But bad memory is evident at other points, too.15 The remarkable fact about Ned Myers nonetheless is that it came to be, and in such a coherent and effective form. If I am right about how far the two friends had progressed by the time of their July trip to New York City—that is, to around the ninth chapter out of the book’s final total of nineteen—then they must have finished the rest of it by early September. In keeping with his recent practice, Cooper chose to have John Fagan set the manuscript and produce plates. Apparently the former process began almost as soon as he arrived in Philadelphia (Friday, September 8), as by the following Tuesday he informed Susan, “Ned Myers has reached fifty pages, and will be done soon” (LJ 4:401).16 Cooper did not sign an agreement with Fagan for another week, but the reason for the delay appears to have been trouble not with the stereotyper but rather with Lea and Blanchard, who were initially reluctant about his project. When he next wrote Susan, on September 17, he told her the firm would not

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meet his terms, meaning that once again he faced the possibility of having to print (and publish) a new book himself. When he added “in which case I must wait for the book to be completed” (LJ 4:409), Cooper did not mean that he had yet to finish writing it, but rather that, if Cooper were producing the book himself, he would have to see Fagan’s work through to the end—a point confirmed by his earlier comment that the stereotyping would “be done soon.” In expectation that he indeed might have to follow this plan, Cooper already had had Fagan prepare for him, a day earlier, an “Estimate for 5000 copies ‘Ned Myers’ ”— meaning an estimate of what it would cost to print, sew, and bind the single volume.17 Cooper persisted in this plan a bit longer but would not have to bear the actual production costs or worry about distribution and sales. On September 22, he informed his daughter Susan that the book had been completely “printed”— that is, Fagan had finished setting and correcting the type and making the plates, but no actual copies had been produced (LJ 4:411). He repeated this information to his wife that same day and added in both letters that he expected to leave Philadelphia immediately for New York. For his wife he also added that he finally had signed an agreement to publish Ned Myers with Carey and Hart (a company owned by Edward L. Carey and Abraham Hart and housed in the same building as Carey, Lea and Blanchard—which latter firm, evidently through an internal transfer, actually was to publish the book after all). Although he required that the book not be published in the United States prior to November 1 so it would not interfere with sales abroad, Cooper did allow the Philadelphians the option of selling some copies of their edition in foreign markets if they so wished. According to Robert E. Spiller and Philip C. Blackburn, the book came out in Philadelphia on November 9, three days after Richard Bentley published the London edition (S&B 128).18 Discussions with Bentley had begun well before those with the American firm but hardly proceeded more smoothly. When mentioning the book to Bentley in July, Cooper predicted that it would eventually “make two volumes as large as a novel” (that is, a regular American novel, as he clarified later) and asserted that he would “expect the price of a novel for it.” He therefore informed Bentley, “I now draw on you for £100, as against this book.” Recognizing that he was acting in a somewhat peremptory manner, however, Cooper at the same time reassured Bentley that, should the book not please him once the “first package of sheets” arrived in London (“say six weeks hence”), he would be free to hand the project over to an agent named by Cooper and receive his money back (LJ 4:392; see LJ 4:440). The time schedule Cooper sketched at that point was optimistic. It was almost two months before the book went to press, although once production began it was completed very quickly. Probably because of

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these syncopations, and the fact that Cooper was still unsure what he was doing with the book in the United States until he made his deal with Carey and Hart, he decided not to break the shipment to Bentley in two. Instead, he waited until returning to New York from Philadelphia on or around September 25 and then dispatched one complete set of sheets by that day’s sailing packet and readied a duplicate to leave by steamship on October 1. As a result, Bentley would get the book later than promised, but all at once (see LJ 4:415). In the letter informing Bentley of these shipments, Cooper furthermore announced that he had set his price for Ned Myers at £300 and that he was drawing on Bentley for the remaining £200 at ninety days, in this instance quite consequential details. That total was lower than Cooper had expected earlier, for the book had proved shorter than he had originally imagined. Even so, since Bentley had not yet contracted for the project or even reviewed the book proper, Cooper’s hurried proceeding put the Londoner in something of a bind. He knew that if he did not publish it or make other arrangements for an English edition, Cooper would have to make good out of his own pocket for the money already drawn. In a narrow sense that would be Cooper’s fault, but Bentley was probably more interested in keeping good relations with Cooper than pushing back at him on principle. The easiest solution would be to shift the book to one of the agents Cooper had tentatively named in July—either John Wiley’s partner, George P. Putnam, then in London, or Col. Thomas Aspinwall, longtime U.S. consul there. Cooper’s plan was for Bentley to be reimbursed by the agent he picked and for that agent to place the book in other hands for English publication. However, because Putnam had left London by October and Aspinwall refused to act on Cooper’s instructions, Bentley had to proceed on his own. He chose to refuse Cooper’s £200 draft, creating an annoying little crisis, but decided to issue a small edition of the book (750 copies), two-thirds of the profits from which he promised would go to Cooper.19 When Cooper heard of these decisions early in 1844, he wrote Bentley to protest the small size of the edition, which he thought a blunder in light of the high sales Ned Myers was achieving in the United States: “Thousands and thousands of copies have already sold in this country. . . . It needs a cheap edition to make returns of such a book. This I trust you will not neglect.” Going further, Cooper drew a general conclusion from Bentley’s particular manner of handling the second draft Cooper had made on the basis of Ned Myers. He was reluctant to break off his ties to Bentley but stressed that unless he was offered fixed prices for future works, he would have to do so (LJ 4:440–41). He wanted to return to the old arrangement, whereby he sold a title to Bentley up front for a set amount payable via a dated series of drafts. Bentley instead had come to favor graduated arrangements that guaranteed Cooper a relatively small initial payment for a

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book, increasing the author’s yield only as more copies sold. This had been his proceeding with The Two Admirals and The Wing-and-Wing. Cooper’s reluctance to break with Bentley’s firm derived from the fact that they had been doing business together for more than a decade and a half (since Cooper’s first contract with Henry Colburn for The Prairie in 1827). He decided to proceed with the next book after Ned Myers along the lines Bentley had insisted on of late, but he made it clear that thereafter, unless they renegotiated their terms, they would have to part company. (Such a renegotiation in fact would happen, though not for some time.) As to the cheap edition of Ned Myers, Bentley, who had actually printed a thousand copies of his original version before the type was distributed (not just 750), reported in a February 1844 letter that he had disposed of somewhat more than half that total, or 530 copies. When Cooper raised the question again in April, Bentley answered that he had sold no more copies of the original edition since his February report (see LJ 4:456).20

Outcomes The book’s yield had larger than normal implications, since Cooper shared its profits with Ned—perhaps, one source asserts, he gave Ned all the profits. This arrangement raises the larger question of Cooper’s bearing on Ned both inside and outside the book. Hester Blum has remarked recently that his relation with Ned was not co-equal—that Cooper’s “devotion to social and economic hierarchies” in the tumultuous world of 1840s politics was “reinforced within Ned Myers itself.” This view rests on larger assumptions about Cooper’s political stance that are out of date and of doubtful veracity. It also misses the give-andtake, sketched above, by which the two old shipmates actually produced their book. More to the point, it overlooks completely Cooper’s continuing personal relationship with Ned long after the book appeared.21 Cooper hardly just sent Ned on his way in the fall of 1843, once he had no more commercial use for his story. He visited with Ned repeatedly when in New York, intervened actively in Ned’s quest for an enhanced navy pension, explored employment opportunities for him in the Philadelphia and New York navy yards, took in his stepdaughter at Otsego Hall to help prepare her for her future working life, and, once Ned sickened and was approaching death, visited him and helped settle his affairs. Some of this story is evident in surviving correspondence, but much of it is not. Once assembled, the various pieces suggest an enduring tie of considerable depth and offer suggestive insights into Cooper’s actual political values and personal character. In the fall of 1843, when Ned returned from Cooperstown to his charitable quarters at the Sailors’ Snug Harbor, a relatively secure and peaceful future

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apparently lay before him. He had given up the sea—and alcohol—and had found religion.22 With the profits from the book he now also had some cash at his disposal. He therefore decided to venture on a new, untried chapter in his life, initiating a series of changes that would make Cooper’s continuing aid and interest particularly welcome. The process began when, just after Ned Myers appeared, the lifelong bachelor took the extraordinary step of marrying. In joining himself to his bride (a sailor’s widow named Robinson), he inherited responsibility for at least two stepchildren needing shelter and support. By January 1845, moreover, the couple would have a daughter of their own (see LJ 4:448; 5:13–14).23 At this time, Ned had few viable economic prospects. His wife probably had been receiving pension payments based on her first husband’s naval service, but these hardly can have sufficed for the new family, which, given the fact that married seamen were not welcome at the Harbor, needed to find new accommodations. The couple also needed to locate a source of funds to pay their continuing rent and other household expenses. Here Ned faced large challenges. On the few occasions in his long career when he spent time on land, he mostly used temporary sailor’s lodgings; he furthermore knew precious little about onshore labor or its usual terms. But he did have some resources. In 1838, he had won a navy pension of his own based on an injury he sustained during his recent Florida service on the frigate Constellation. Because the payments ceased after he returned to active work as a merchant seaman on the William Taylor later that same year, and thereafter sailed to Rotterdam on the Hope, his first recourse in 1844 was to petition for reinstatement.24 At the same time, he began a much more ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful campaign to secure an enlarged pension (and considerable arrearages) because of injuries he suffered on Lake Ontario three decades earlier. In both these efforts Ned relied on Cooper’s advice and assistance. In late December 1843, Leonard Lewis, an old seaman who had served with Myers on the Scourge during the second war with Britain and now lived in New York, wrote Cooper to ask his help in securing Ned “his back Pension.” Lewis, with whom Ned was then staying, offered to do what he could, too, but assumed that Cooper, being “acquainted with the manner of proceeding,” might prove more useful. Having learned from Ned that he expected to see Cooper soon in New York, Lewis gave the novelist his own address should the novelist wish to see him personally too.25 Neither Lewis nor Myers needed to wait long. In early January 1844, when he first learned of Ned’s marriage, Cooper conferred with him on the pension matter in New York, a discussion continued as they traveled together to Philadelphia. The novelist, writing Susan from Manhattan, informed her, “Every thing has turned out well,” indicating that he and Ned had done more than talk—that they collected

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relevant papers and perhaps spoke with other useful parties as well (Cooper thus added that Ned was carrying “the necessary documents” with him from New York). Although the novelist stayed in Philadelphia while Ned proceeded to Washington at this time, Cooper passed him on to William B. Shubrick in Washington for further help (LJ 4:443). Ned soon reported to Cooper that Shubrick had treated him “with the greatest kindness.” During this visit, the seaman also met with Rep. Hamilton Fish of New York City, Cooper’s longtime friend (and at this time, housemate of the Shubricks) and happily reported that the congressman was “doing all . . . in his power for me.” Materials that Fish gathered from Ned’s original pension file (through the intervention of several naval officers) were forwarded by him to Rep. Jacob Brinkerhoff of Ohio, chair of the House Committee on Invalid Pensions (see LJ 3:241; 4:429–31).26 While the effort for an expanded pension ground on, Ned was eager to recruit Cooper’s aid with regard to another possible resource—civilian employment with the navy. Also during his Washington trip, Ned had secured letters to President John Tyler from several naval officers of his acquaintance, including Cmdre. William C. Bolton, under whom he served at Pensacola (and in whose company, it will be recalled, he had found Cooper in New York City in April 1843). Ned, expansive with his future visions, went to the White House and laid these letters in person before Tyler, who obliged the seaman with a recommendation of his own to Capt. Silas H. Stringham, commandant of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, another old Cooper friend. Ned copied the text of this recommendation into his letter to Cooper, then asked a favor: “Because you are so well acquainted with Capt Stringham will you be so kind as to write to him, to give me a masters-mate birth [sic] in the yard, or on board of the receiving ship.” We have no record that Cooper directly complied, perhaps because he already had given Ned a letter of recommendation, a letter Ned informed the novelist he would show Stringham when he went to Brooklyn.27 Ned’s first position at the yard, assumed shortly after he returned from Washington, was as a laborer on a gunner’s crew. This provided some income, though hardly enough to support his “innocent wife and [her] helpless children,” as Ned termed them when he wrote Cooper again in August 1844. He therefore asked the novelist to write Jesse D. Elliott, then commandant at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, about possible openings there.28 Again, there is no record that Cooper immediately complied with the request, although he visited Philadelphia later that month and probably spoke to Elliott in person (see LJ 4:470). That fall, in what seems like a follow-up, Cooper sent a now unlocated letter to Ned, still working in Brooklyn, asking whether (as Ned put it in his January reply) they had “done anything” for him. Ned answered, “They have done nothing,” and added that nothing would come of his efforts until he went

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to Washington again. He saw no point in doing that, though, until after James K. Polk’s inauguration the following March. Worries were piling up as he continued his hard labor, when he could get it, for “less than one shilling per day”— that is, twelve-and-a-half cents. He and his wife had had their daughter and were staying in the second of various rented quarters on Staten Island. They were living very much on the edge. Ned commuted to the navy yard when there was work for him there.29 Cooper may have taken up the question of expanded responsibilities for Ned when, in May 1845, he met in Washington with fellow Democrat George Bancroft, recently appointed Polk’s navy secretary. Certainly we know that Cooper, who had gone to the capital to attend the wedding of Shubrick’s daughter Mary on May 8, had time to accompany Bancroft on a walk around Robert Mills’s relatively new treasury building. The full request came, though, in a letter Cooper sent Bancroft in June from back in Otsego. He began by describing his “little book” (Ned Myers) as chronicling “the real career of an old shipmate of mine . . . a man who is deserving of some rewards for his sufferings and conduct in the last war.” Summarizing Ned’s stints in the navy and the merchant marine, Cooper mentioned the sailor’s lack of success in securing the larger pension to which his Ontario service on the Scourge in 1813 seemingly entitled him. Having recently spoken to Elliott again, most likely while passing through Philadelphia on the Washington trip, Cooper now thought he had a solution for Ned’s problem. Learning from Elliott about his difficulty in securing the two senior (or “passed”) midshipmen to which the receiving vessel at the Philadelphia Navy Yard was entitled, Cooper imagined Ned would be an ideal substitute for the relatively unglamorous post. He waxed enthusiastic for Bancroft: “Now, Ned is certainly just the man for a place of that nature. . . . Sober, moral, religious, steady, and perfectly familiar with ships and seamen” as Ned was, Cooper did not “know where a better selection could be made for such a situation. Permit me to recommend him earnestly to your attention, if any opening of the sort exists, either at Philadelphia, or elsewhere.” Cooper added that the circulation of Ned Myers had made Ned’s sufferings and present impoverished condition widely known among “the common men” in the service. Doing something for Ned, he implied, made political sense for the Democrats. In a last pitch along the same lines, Cooper urged Bancroft to read the book if he hadn’t already, for it could give the secretary “some notion of a common sailor’s career.” This letter makes it clear, in the other details it gives about the terms of Ned’s current employment, that Cooper had been in recent contact with him: “He is at present working hard in the gunner’s crew, at New York, on a dollar a day when he works.” Ned found the labor “hard,” Cooper then reiterated; considering the pay, it was “close work” (LJ 5:36–37).30

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Bancroft replied the following month. Although he found Ned’s case “more difficult” than another that Cooper had brought to his attention (regarding a naval lieutenant for whom the novelist and his friend Shubrick were also lobbying at the time), the secretary assured Cooper he was “turning [it] over” in his mind and hoped he could do something.31 It was obviously not easy for Bancroft to act in such a matter, whatever Cooper’s and Elliott’s wishes might be, and evidently he did not. When Cooper saw Ned (“grumbling and laughing, as usual”) that fall in New York, he reported to Susan, “He thinks he has been neglected by the government, and I think so too” (LJ 5:102). And yet, although the Navy Department offered no immediate help in 1845, things gradually improved over the next year or so. Ned informed Cooper in July 1846 that Stringham had given him a substantial raise at his job in the gunner’s crew. Evidently the work was more steady now, too, allowing Ned and his family to move over to Brooklyn, where they took a house on Carlton Avenue near Nassau Street, close to the yard. Cooper may have had something to do with this improvement.32 Having failed to win a disability pension based on his War of 1812 service, in 1848 Ned began a new effort to win support through a special act of Congress, a not uncommon recourse at the time. A private bill that would pension him at the rate of eight dollars per month for the rest of his life—plus pay up front an arrearage of between $1,000 and $1,250 (see LJ 5:406; 6:6)—was introduced in the House in January 1848 by Ned’s representative, Brooklyn Democrat Henry C. Murphy. That was a good sign, although within a few months Murphy was warning Ned that the bill had been tabled, and, because of a heated argument that followed between Murphy and Connecticut Whig James Dixon, it would be unlikely to proceed until the next Congress convened in December.33 A glimmer of hope for earlier action did come a short time later when, on April 26, Ned’s bill (H.R. 438) was reported from the Committee on Naval Affairs by Virginia Democrat Thomas H. Bayly. Read twice and then committed to the whole House, the bill was “made the order of the day for tomorrow,” but it lost its momentum (perhaps owing to Representative Dixon’s renewed opposition) and, true to Murphy’s prediction, was not considered again until the lame duck session in January 1849. At that time, at last, it was passed and sent to the Senate. Once there, it went to the Committee on Naval Affairs, which considered it and “reported it without amendment” on February 23, another hopeful sign. Ten months earlier, Ned had written Cooper, “I never intend to give up the Ship let it be Whig or Democrat Administration.” The ship, however, was about to give him up: despite its early success, H.R. 438 appears to have died in the Senate shortly before the newly elected Congress (and president) assumed office in March. That the new president was to be Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate, not the Democrats’ Lewis Cass, perhaps made the failure in the Senate

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irrelevant. Ned had assured Cooper in a July 1848 letter that his own fortunes on this matter were linked with the name of his now famous former shipmate. Whigs in Congress like James Dixon—or Horace Greeley, Cooper’s old enemy, who was elected to the House by a special election in December 1848—were not likely to support Ned under those circumstances.34 In the wake of that early 1849 failure, Ned’s fate began to thicken around him. There were other pieces of very bad luck. Late the previous fall, he and his wife had had another child, but “young Ned,” Cooper reported home, “died at eight weeks old”—of whooping cough, as the census enumerator would record in June 1850.35 Despite the rise in wages that Cooper helped Ned secure in the latter year and his hopes for the new pension and especially the promised arrearage, the old sailor was crushed by the loss of his son and, as Congress failed to approve H.R. 438, grew increasingly concerned for the welfare of the Myers clan at large, including not only his own daughter Lucy, now almost four years old, but also his stepchildren, among them a young girl named Martha. When Cooper was staying at the Globe Hotel late in February 1849, Ned came over from Brooklyn to see him and plead that Martha, “near fourteen,” be sent to Otsego Hall as an unpaid servant so that she might learn how to perform domestic work. Ned praised her “to the skies,” Cooper wrote Susan, and promised to bring her over to the hotel the following Sunday, although Cooper was quick to add for Susan that he had informed Ned the decision would be hers, not his (LJ 5:406). Come Sunday, Cooper could send a second, encouraging report to his wife: “she is a nice girl, accustomed to hard work, as her hands prove, with an excellent countenance, and a happy smile.” Ned promised to travel to Cooperstown with her soon, but a slight change of plans in May meant that Cooper himself arranged for her travel. Apparently she met Mrs. Cooper’s approval, for she stayed several months in the Cooper household, well into (perhaps past) the fall of 1849 (LJ 6:6, 35–36, 76). This was probably a good opening for Martha, but over that summer, Ned, now seriously ill, was drinking heavily again. Cooper first learned of the fresh trouble while staying at the Globe early in October 1849 to prepare for an expected (but soon postponed) trip to Michigan on the land business with Horace H. Comstock, a topic taken up in chapter 14. Writing Shubrick from Manhattan to share naval gossip, he added new intelligence from Brooklyn: “I am sorry to say our friend Ned Myers has fallen astern. He is now on his back, in consequence of a debauch.” The problem wasn’t just that Ned was drunk, or on a binge; instead, long-term alcoholism had undermined his health completely, and the latest bouts had brought things to a crisis. Cooper’s first source on the subject was probably an acquaintance of Ned’s, Francis Blancard, the Globe ’s manager. But when Cooper added for Shubrick, “I have the cause of his disease from the

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doctor,” he in fact was referring to a visit he had recently paid to Ned’s home in Brooklyn (LJ 6:73–74, 91). Apparently Cooper had not been there before. As he now made his way through the unfamiliar streets just south of the navy yard, he stopped a young stranger near the foot of Carlton Avenue to ask him whether he “happened to know of a man named Ned Myers who lived somewhere in the vicinity.” Cooper had accosted just the right man. Andrew Otterson not only knew Myers, unlikely as that was, but was then serving as his physician. As soon as Cooper learned that, he asked whether he had ever read any books by “Cooper,” and when Otterson answered in the affirmative, Cooper said, “Well, young man, I am Cooper, and Ned Myers is the hero of ‘Life before the Mast.’ ” Otterson, telling the anecdote more than forty years later, recalled that he then led Cooper to “the lowly home of Myers,” where he witnessed “a most affectionate meeting between two who had, as boys, sailed the seas together, the great novelist and the poor sailor, who was even then on his death bed.”36 Cooper returned to Carlton Avenue by himself several times as Ned’s condition worsened. He spent Sunday, October 21, “in attending to poor Ned Myers” (as he informed his daughter Susan). Cooper added, no doubt drawing on information Dr. Otterson had given him some days earlier, that Ned was “on his death-bed, beyond a doubt, with enlargement of the heart, and dropsy”— i.e., edema—“as a consequence.” Cooper went back to Brooklyn again the next day. This time, he took down Ned’s will as Ned dictated it “and had it duly signed, an act of great importance to the family.” Ned was alert enough to insist that first his wife and then “her children” should have the use of his property after his death. Cooper was impressed when, asking Ned whether “he wished any distinction” made in favor of his own daughter Lucy, the sailor “strenuously opposed.” His acceptance of his stepchildren was genuinely moving. “I was quite touched when he asked me to break his state to Martha tenderly,” Cooper went on for his own daughter, instructing Susan, “This you will do, and the sooner the better.” The novelist, lingering in New York for other reasons, may have gone back to Brooklyn one last time to see Ned before the sailor died late in October (LJ 6:76).37 On his next visit to Manhattan in December, Cooper learned that Ned’s widow was evidently depressed, “doing nothing,” as Cooper reported to his wife after a fresh call at Carlton Avenue. Though he gave her a little money, he let her know that he could not do that with any regularity (LJ 6:91). Yet he had no intention of breaking his ties to her. Early in the new year, he wrote to Daniel S. Dickinson of New York, a Binghamton Democrat then in the U.S. Senate, summarizing the action in the House on Ned’s bill and noting that the Senate had failed to complete it early in 1849. Asking Dickinson for his “good offices in

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this matter,” Cooper added that the senator might show the present letter to such acquaintances of the novelist in the upper house as John C. Calhoun, William H. Seward, his kinsman James Cooper, and Lewis Cass (LJ 6:112). Dickinson soon answered that, having read and enjoyed Ned Myers, he indeed would “interest [himself] in the case.” Despite that cooperative and promising response, though, little came of the new effort. Later in 1850, James Otterson, a young lawyer of Philadelphia (and probably the brother of Ned’s physician), wrote the commissioner of pensions in an attempt to revive Ned’s claim on the assumption that any arrearage due at his death on the War of 1812 injury would remain payable to his widow. Otterson had received various papers on the case from her. But it is possible that she acted on the advice of Cooper, who had made the same point to Senator Dickinson about Ned—namely, that “the arrears of his pension is all he had to bequeath” (LJ 6:113). Aside from that, there was the book he and Ned had made together, a book that paid honest tribute to its now-dead “hero’s” storm-tossed life.38

Mutiny When Graham’s Magazine was about to publish Cooper’s naval sketch of Richard Somers in the fall of 1842, the “beautiful little brig” (“Somers” 170) just named in that officer’s honor (the second such in the navy’s history) set off on a voyage that would have a troubling and violent conclusion, a conclusion Cooper would learn about just before he first reconnected with his old friend Ned Myers.39 The Somers story continued to unfold over the early part of 1843 and was still echoing in the press and the public mind while Myers and Cooper went about Otsego Lake in the novelist’s lugger reminiscing about the youthful voyage they soon decided to memorialize in their book. Eventually, once Ned was gone from Cooperstown and the sailor’s memoir was out, Cooper would turn his attention to the court-martial to which the Somers cruise had led. Published in 1844, his “Elaborate Review” of the matter would display in yet another format and in response to another occasion Cooper’s deep concern just at this time with things maritime—especially with the fate of ordinary sailors. What gave the new issue even greater prominence was Alexander Slidell Mackenzie’s centrality to it. Having run its shakedown cruise to Puerto Rico and back in the summer of 1842 under his command, the Somers returned to Brooklyn to be fitted out and manned with young naval apprentices for its first real service, also under Mackenzie—a training voyage to the northwest coast of Africa. It left New York on September 13 with an officer complement that, under the strong influence of Mackenzie’s brother-in-law, navy yard commandant Matthew C. Perry, included several inexperienced Perry and Mackenzie kinsmen. Cooper

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therefore would comment that the Somers had been “sent to sea with too much of the character of a family yacht, to come within the usual category of a regular cruiser” (“Review” 286). That was less a snide remark than a shrewd analytical point, as we shall see.40 The most notable figure on the voyage was none of the Perry/Mackenzie group, though, but rather an eighteen-year-old failed collegian from New York named Philip Spencer, an acting midshipman whom Mackenzie would hang from the yardarm on the way back from Africa, along with two alleged coconspirators in what Mackenzie claimed was a mutiny plot. Spencer was a poor candidate for officer and indeed for mutineer. He had spent three years—as a freshman—at Geneva College before being withdrawn in April 1841 and sent east to Schenectady for a very brief stint at Union. Thereafter he ran away and signed up as a hand on a whaler due to sail from Nantucket. Only a last-minute plea from his father informing him that a midshipman’s warrant awaited him in New York persuaded Spencer to reluctantly give up on the Pacific cruise. When he arrived in Brooklyn, his uncle, Capt. William Spencer of the navy, took him to the receiving ship at the yard, the North Carolina, on which Philip spent the next several months.41 Not every family with an unsuccessful collegian on its hands could manage to get him a midshipman’s warrant on such short notice. The fact that Spencer’s uncle was a senior naval officer surely helped. Much more significant, however, was the fact that his father, John Canfield Spencer, a Whig lawyer who had held statewide offices in New York during the later 1830s, had just become secretary of war in President John Tyler’s administration and clearly put pressure on his fellow cabinet officer at the Navy Department, Virginian Abel P. Upshur. Not surprisingly, Philip Spencer almost immediately squandered this fresh chance. Befriended at the Brooklyn yard by Passed Midshipman William Craney, who let Spencer use his cabin, the boy put Craney at risk by stowing contraband liquor there. When confronted about this violation of yard rules, Spencer verbally and physically attacked his benefactor, and when Craney attempted to put Spencer on report for his misdeeds, he was rebuffed by his superiors, who appeared to be shielding the war secretary’s son. Spencer’s only punishment was his transfer to the John Adams, soon to sail to Brazil. Once in Rio, the misfit became embroiled in other drunken episodes and fights both on board ship and on shore. When, having acknowledged his failings, he tried to resign from the service, Cmdre. Charles Morris, in command of the U.S. Navy’s Brazil Station, referred the case to Secretary Upshur and ordered Spencer back to the United States. Upshur also refused to accept Spencer’s resignation. Within two weeks of his return in July 1842, he was told to report to M. C. Perry in Brooklyn and once there went aboard the Somers.42

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In addition to his taste for alcohol, Philip Spencer had a very active imagination. Under different conditions, he might well have become a successful spinner of adventure tales, like a certain other failed collegian who had entered the navy some decades earlier with his prominent father’s help. But Spencer did not have Cooper’s luck, or the underlying sense of reality that helped make Cooper’s tales a source of pride and profit rather than of social confusion and, finally, personal disaster. Spencer did not write his outlandish stories but instead—or so it seemed to many—tried to act them out. According to a member of the Somers crew, Purser’s Steward James W. Wales, Spencer intended to foment a mutiny and, once having gained control of the speedy brig, kill most of those aboard before turning pirate with a picked handful. On the evening of November 25, 1842, as the Somers made progress on its homeward course from West Africa to the Virgin Islands, Spencer reportedly had shared these fantastic plans with Wales in an effort to recruit him. Wales feigned interest but later claimed he wanted nothing to do with Spencer’s plot. Fearing for his safety, Wales delayed for some hours before divulging the story, through Purser Horace M. Heiskell, to Lieut. Guert Gansevoort, who in turn conveyed it to Mackenzie. The captain was at first skeptical. But, as he sifted through the various bits of fractured narrative and surmise that made their way to him, he concluded that the plot was real. The next day he therefore had Spencer seized and placed in irons. Thereafter, Gansevoort discovered in Spencer’s locker a pair of curious documents, written out in a collegian’s Greek alphabet, that gave the names of presumed co-conspirators and specified their parts in the pending action. This development seemed to flesh out Wales’s story (even though his name was among the four marked “Certain” in one of the documents, as if indicating that he had had some earlier involvement with, or at least exposure to, the plot). Furthermore, when rising wind snapped the main topgallant mast on Sunday afternoon, and some of the men named in the Greek lists went aloft, the officers began to think (or so they later asserted) that the seeming accident was a sly contrivance intended to set the mutiny in action. The men aloft ostensibly were at work on repairs—in other words, doing their duty—but to the officers the gathering up there out of earshot appeared menacing. That night, Mackenzie ’s rising concerns prompted him to arrest two of Spencer’s supposed accomplices (Boatswain’s Mate Samuel Cromwell and Seaman Elisha Small) when they came down from the masthead. He did so despite the fact that only one of them, Elisha Small, had been named in the lists.43 Arresting them made good sense to Mackenzie, situated as he then was. The primary difficulty was that, despite the discovered documents, it proved hard to figure out who exactly was in on the plot, or whether there was any real plot in the first place. In the event of mutiny actually breaking out, of course any

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commander had the right—the duty—to suppress it, killing or capturing the perpetrators and restoring order to his vessel. Mutiny was not confined to such overt acts; the Articles of War also proscribed “making mutinous statements,” and at the Somers court-martial the judge advocate, who otherwise took a dim view of Captain Mackenzie’s actions, nonetheless agreed with that officer’s attorney that the intent to mutiny was itself a crime subject to the same potential punishments. Yet no one on the Somers had declared that intent in overt and undeniable ways. All Mackenzie had were reports from other parties, meaning that at sea his options were limited. If he believed that the reported statements of Spencer or others rose to the level of mutiny under the Articles of War, he had the authority to secure and confine them until they could be returned to the United States. There a pair of judicial bodies could review the events. First a court of inquiry, its function roughly equivalent to a grand jury, would weigh the evidence and testimony and establish what had occurred and who among those on board might be culpable. Then a court-martial, if one were called, would receive charges against the responsible parties, hear testimony and review evidence, and finally assess guilt and determine punishment. The Articles of War allowed for the execution of arrested mutineers only on their condemnation by such judicial panels. Proceedings of this sort were routine enough on land, but outside the confines of the country courts-martial could be held only under specific circumstances. For instance, no commander of a single vessel such as Mackenzie had legal authority to conduct a court-martial at sea or in a foreign port. Aside from the president or the navy secretary, at this time only the commander of a squadron could authorize such a body, and there were no other U.S. ships near the Somers. Yet Mackenzie, undaunted by doubts about the ambiguous nature of the alleged mutiny or the restrictions on his authority just described, soon collected his officers—that is, that family circle on his “yacht”— into a council and asked that body to advise him on how he might proceed. With its eventual connivance, Mackenzie ordered all three prisoners to be executed.44

Reports and Reactions Whatever else the executions accomplished, they certainly suppressed vocal discontent aboard the Somers. After stopping at St. Thomas, the brig headed north, returning to the Brooklyn Navy Yard on the cold night of Wednesday, December 14, 1842 (oddly enough, just the moment at which The Wing-and-Wing, with Horatio Nelson’s hanging of Caraccioli almost literally at its center, was freshly on the market). Mackenzie made his required reports to the ranking officers on shore (M. C. Perry, still in charge at the yard, and Jacob Jones, who commanded the New York station); on the very night the ship dropped anchor, he also sent

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Perry’s son Oliver to Washington with an account of the mutiny for Secretary Upshur. Otherwise, the vessel remained shrouded in mystery. Few if any men were allowed ashore, and no one was permitted to visit the Somers. Not surprisingly under these circumstances, no newspapers carried immediate bulletins of the extraordinary events that had occurred on the vessel over the past three weeks.45 The slowness with which the news broke was striking. Cooper’s case is indicative of the general pattern. He had been very busy during December with the final libel trial of Thurlow Weed at Ballston. On the very day the Somers anchored off Wallabout Bay, in fact, the Albany newspaperman had issued his retraction—and at the same time confounded it, prompting the novelist’s parting shots about the supposed sickness of the editor’s family in 1841 (see LJ 4:324–27). Word of the alleged mutiny and executions came ashore so slowly that neither Weed’s incomplete contrition nor Cooper’s calling of his bluff was upstaged by it. On Thursday, December 15, the New-York Spectator in fact routinely noted the vessel’s return. Two days later still, Weed’s own paper in Albany reprinted a report from James W. Webb’s Courier and Enquirer ending with the premature assurance that the brig’s “officers and men were in excellent health.” In actuality, things were even worse at that point than already indicated. Four other men had been held in confinement on board since before the executions, and on arriving in New York Mackenzie had ordered another eight arrested; all twelve were removed in chains to the North Carolina on the fifteenth, but this event also passed without immediate notice. Meanwhile, he and his close group of officers remained in control of the shuttered brig—and of the men and boys aboard, among whom were any remaining conspirators and all witnesses of what had happened on the Somers between November 25 and the present.46 Not until Saturday, December 17, did the Spectator, acknowledging the inadequacy of its previous story, add a second report. The truth, having been concealed for several days, was gaudily embellished when first divulged, so that Cooper would later call the early reports “exaggerated and false” (“Review” 264). The Spectator, headlining its story “Mutiny—Extraordinary Developments,” claimed that, soon after the Somers left the African coast, “a mutiny broke out, headed by Passed Midshipman Spencer,” who here was said to have seduced “some forty or fifty of the crew” into joining him. “A smaller number, including the apprentices”—the vessel’s youngest trainees—“remained faithful to the officers, and after a short but severe conflict the mutineers were overpowered and put in irons.” The paper added, also in error, that “a court-martial” was held aboard the vessel that night, with the result that Spencer and two others “were found guilty and sentenced to death, which sentence was carried into execution the next morning by hanging at the yard arm.”47

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Such inaccuracies help explain why Cooper, no friend of Mackenzie, at first approved of his actions, changing his views only as the fuller story emerged. The shift in his understanding occurred during a three-week-long trip right after New Year’s Day 1843—just when Ned Myers, coincidentally, first wrote him— that took him through Albany and Manhattan to Philadelphia. By the time he got to the last city, he had seen, heard, and read enough that he no longer approved of Mackenzie’s actions. Yet he was slow to avow the shift. Apparently he was talking to friends about his doubts by the time he got back to Manhattan on his way home: on January 23, Webb’s Courier and Enquirer ran a report that Cooper, “now in our city,” was calling Mackenzie ’s execution of the three men “cold blooded murder” and was “promising to write a review of the Somers case which will ‘annihilate Mackenzie.’ ” Cooper, answering Webb in William Cullen Bryant’s Evening Post eleven days later—he had returned home in the interim— acknowledged that there had been “a grave collision” between Mackenzie and himself as “historians” but said he did not recall making any such comments about the Somers matter. Ignoring the chance to now say something publicly on the subject, Cooper was very cagey: “As I have no intention to publish what I do think, or may have said of Capt. Mackenzie’s course, in the late unhappy transaction, I do not feel called on to publish what I do not think, or may not have said about it.” The most he would do was hint at his evolving position: “I will add only, that my opinion has undergone a material change, with the change of testimony” (LJ 4:354–55).48 The “testimony” in question, derived from the court of inquiry conducted on board the North Carolina at the Brooklyn yard from December 28 through January 19, was appearing piecemeal (and in distorted versions) in the public press. The crucial bit for Cooper, as he indicated to his wife in a letter from Albany as early as January 4, was the “report” that Mackenzie had “sent to Washington”—not the brief one carried by O. H. Perry on December 14 but a lengthy narrative dispatched to Secretary Upshur five days later—a document (Cooper added) “considered to be the work of a man scarcely compos mentis.” His own view of it was severe. It was “miserable,” a “medley of folly, conceit, illegality, feebleness, and fanaticism”—moreover, because Mackenzie had “actually got in one of the prayers he read to his crew,” it was sanctimonious as well. This December 19 narrative, which had been submitted to the court of inquiry on its third day, was published in a quite inaccurate form in various papers, among them Weed’s Albany Evening Journal of January 4, the very night Cooper wrote his wife from that city. This was without doubt the moment at which, first reading the item in that form, Cooper found his views begin to alter (LJ 4:337).49 Across the rest of January, other things Cooper picked up on his trip solidified his emerging convictions. After leaving Albany, he stayed in Manhattan for

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long enough to cross the East River and go “alongside of the Somers” to see with his own eyes the “fatal” yard “at which Phil was swinging little more than a month since.” Evidently while in Brooklyn, he also sampled the pervasively skeptical opinions at the navy yard: “I am told the old officers shake their heads” (LJ 4:340).50 In Philadelphia, everybody was talking about the “affair,” and Mackenzie’s prospects looked “worse and worse” (LJ 4:339). While in the latter city, Cooper also confided in another military man—Jesse D. Elliott—his views of Mackenzie’s guilt. As we shall see later, Elliott soon passed on to acquaintances in Washington the news that the two de facto allies in the Lake Erie battle both condemned Mackenzie’s recent actions. Cooper was especially concerned about the fate of the executed boatswain’s mate, Samuel Cromwell, against whom (as he confided to Shubrick in February) there was “certainly nothing like substantial proof.” Not only was Cromwell unnamed in the Greek lists; he furthermore denied any complicity in the supposed plot, and Spencer twice exonerated him. But, Cooper added, “in this state of things, he is executed.” Especially in light of such worrying facts, Cooper dismissed out of hand the notion that sustaining “the discipline of the navy” required men in the service (such as Shubrick) to close ranks and support all of Mackenzie’s actions. Important as discipline was for the navy, to be effective it had to be just. Cooper asked whether men on other navy ships would submit to confinement in the future “if they believed themselves liable to be hanged without a trial.” His answer was eloquent because morally powerful: “I think not. You make men desperate, by resorting to such desperate expedients. Had there been an actual outbreak, the case might have been different—but there can be no security if officers are to be sustained in hanging men, under the influence of a panic.” The latter term was a very strong word in this context, but Cooper meant it in its full signification. Even the manner in which Cromwell was seized (Gansevoort pointed a revolver at him as he came down from the maintop, and the gun accidentally discharged) set Cooper’s moral teeth on edge. That indeed suggested panic. He brought up a name he rarely mentioned, a name he and Shubrick had revered ever since their service together under James Lawrence on the Wasp in 1809–1810: “Would Lawrence have done this—found it necessary to point a cocked pistol at a single unarmed man under such circumstances, on a quarter-deck covered with officers”? Cooper moreover thought the wrongs continued after the brig arrived in New York waters. It was evident that “the Department has favored Mackenzie.” Why else would he have been “left in command of the brig, containing all the witnesses,” once it got back to Brooklyn? “Every officer should have been taken out of her the instant she arrived, or the men transferred beyond their influence.” Instead, Mackenzie had written a “letter” to the department (the narrative of December 19, 1842) in which he

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asked “for promotion, for two thirds of his witnesses! The world cannot show a [parallel] to such stupidity, or such corruption. The letter is damnable” (LJ 4:358, 360–62). It took Shubrick three weeks to receive, digest, and answer Cooper’s broadside. By that point, he had indeed seen Mackenzie ’s December 19 narrative, which he, too, thought damning. He also had been persuaded by Cooper that, absent overt acts of mutiny—and with the ringleaders in irons and his own petty officers and some of the crew otherwise backing him—Mackenzie could have suppressed any actual uprising. The executions, in other words, were patently unnecessary. And yet, organization man as Shubrick perforce was (at least by contrast with his friend), he found it hard to reject outright the “the full and decisive opinion, in [Mackenzie’s] favor, of the court of inquiry,” for it was made up of men (Capt. Charles Stewart, who presided, plus Cmdre. Jacob Jones and Cmdre. A. J. Dallas) in whose judgment and intelligence Shubrick had “great confidence.” Nor was his relationship with those judges the only thing holding back his growing doubts about Mackenzie. Command at sea was difficult even under the best conditions, and a ship’s master was always weighed down, emotionally and morally, by the irremediable isolation of his position. Knowing these things as a commander himself, Shubrick was unwilling to rush to judgment. And there may also have been a sense of futility in his reluctance, for he thought that the court-martial would copy the verdict of the court of inquiry.51 Once Cooper received Shubrick’s delayed response, with its hedging about the service, he answered, again stressing poor Cromwell’s special injustice: “What a miserable business this of the Somers has turned out to be. If I were on the Court, I would ask but one question. Did Mackenzie ask Cromwell to explain the circumstances, that seemed to tell against him?” The answer was obvious. Cooper therefore added, “to hang a man on circumstantial evidence, however strong, without asking him if he could explain those circumstances, when he was for thirty hours within thirty feet, shows that Mr. Mackenzie is a very fearful sort of Judge!” (LJ 4:378; emphasis in original).52 Like Shubrick, however, Cooper thought the court-martial now sitting would likely acquit; indeed, he believed four of the twelve judges would vote for acquittal even if Mackenzie confessed. This pragmatic view did not dilute his distress—part institutional, part moral— at the case. He believed that the confinement of the witnesses on the brig under their own officers, along with the manner in which the court of inquiry had been conducted (for instance, the failure to question Mackenzie during it), had “injured the navy deeply.” Its appropriations would surely suffer in Congress. And his own favorite project for introducing admirals into the U.S. Navy was clearly hopeless “unless a war intervene” (LJ 4:379). But most of all it was the

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honor of the service that was sullied, first on the Somers and then on the North Carolina. Some ideal company of heroes the navy would be if Mackenzie belonged to it and his colleagues approved or at least accepted his actions. The court-martial began considering the case on the North Carolina within days of the official word from the court of inquiry—that is, on February 1, 1843. It reportedly was rushed at Mackenzie’s insistence in order to blunt efforts by John C. Spencer and Samuel Cromwell’s widow to have civilian authorities charge him with murder. Certainly it is true that, while Secretary Uphsur could have ordered the fresh proceeding on his own, in fact Mackenzie wrote him before the inquiry findings were divulged to request that a court-martial be ordered. A further benefit of this next step was that, if Mackenzie was acquitted on all charges by a panel of naval officers—who might be presumed to be more favorable to him than a civilian jury—the principle of double jeopardy would protect him from any criminal proceedings. The court of inquiry conveyed no such protection.53 Whatever covert forces were at play here, one practical result of the rush, Cooper eventually concluded after digesting the trial record, was that “the judge advocate was not prepared to open when the court martial convened” (“Review” 273). Upshur had asked the civilian Baltimore lawyer William H. Norris to assume that post in a letter drafted as recently as January 25. Norris accepted but was himself very concerned about the press of events. In his first statement to the court he complained that he had not had sufficient time to review the case. He therefore hoped that the government would allow a delay so that he could catch up, but it provided no such delay. Another initial difficulty was the fact that Norris, having perforce left his own law books behind in Baltimore, lacked access to an adequate legal library. And he had no real chance to interview potential witnesses in advance, something Mackenzie and his allies had been doing ever since James W. Wales first divulged Spencer’s statements to him two months earlier.54 The court-martial’s opening sessions, from Wednesday, February 1, to Saturday, February 4, gave Norris some time to organize his planned approach. Finally, on the sixth, he called as his first witness Midshipman Charles W. Hays. Over the next four days a series of other witnesses followed, the most important being Purser’s Steward Wales, who held forth from the sixth to the ninth and was recalled on the tenth. On the latter day, Purser Horace M. Heiskell (to whom Wales had first reported Spencer’s confidential conversation) briefly took the stand. He would be recalled twice for longer stints, on March 6–7 (when he presented the minutes he had kept during the officers’ council) and again on March 9, but on his first appearance he was questioned only about Wales. He was soon followed by Lieut. Guert Gansevoort, who began testifying on the tenth and,

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with a brief stand-down on the fifteenth, finished on February 16 (he would also be recalled a second time on February 23 and a final time on March 13). Of the entire 244 pages of the printed trial record, Gansevoort’s testimony on his three separate stints took up 34 pages, or about 14 percent. Because Mackenzie did not take the stand, his first lieutenant therefore was the most significant witness of all.55 The court adjourned on April 1, 1843, and its findings (already reached by the judges on March 28) began to be circulated in the press on April 11. Mackenzie had been officially cleared of all charges and specifications, and President Tyler confirmed and carried that judgment into effect, thereby reinstating Mackenzie to his position in the navy if not quite to his earlier reputation.56 Guert Gansevoort’s testimony was crucial in ways that were less than apparent at the time of the trial. There is a plausible and highly significant backstory here. It was not published until some forty-five years later, when Thurlow Weed, who knew the Albany Gansevoorts quite well, recalled a visit he paid to Guert’s cousin, Hunn, also a naval officer, in Philadelphia during December 1842, the month the Somers had returned from its African voyage. By this point, as Weed recalled, Hunn Gansevoort had spoken with his cousin during the latter’s passage through Philadelphia to Washington.57 According to Weed’s somewhat foggy recollection, Hunn had told him a stunning tale about the officers’ council on the Somers. Guert had run the council and, after the testimony from the witnesses had been completed, had gone up on deck to inform Mackenzie that the officers had not been sufficiently convinced of the prisoners’ guilt to recommend execution. Mackenzie then instructed Gansevoort to return to the wardroom and reexamine the witnesses. Gansevoort did so but returned on deck a second time with the same essential report. This time, the commander told Gansevoort that it was his “duty to impress these views” on the council and to bring its members around to the proper conclusion. Gansevoort went back down and at last succeeded. This was on December 1, the day of the executions.58 The day after Hunn Gansevoort had met with Thurlow Weed, as Weed further recalled, the young officer had sailed on the Grampus, which was lost with all hands in March 1843, the month during which the court-martial was sitting. There was, however, a follow-up. Weed met with Guert Gansevoort himself the following summer in Boston, where the lieutenant was then serving on the Ohio. The editor invited Gansevoort to have dinner with him at the Tremont House, and during the meal their talk inevitably turned to the loss of the Grampus. Weed happened to mention that during what he thought were Hunn’s last hours ashore he had dined with the officer, after which they had spent many hours gossiping over whiskey punch. The effect of this revelation on Guert Gansevoort was electrifying, Weed recalled: “The lieutenant, with evident surprise, asked, with emphasis, ‘Did he tell you that I spent the previous night with

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him?’ I answered in the affirmative. He asked, ‘What else did he tell you?’ I replied, with equal emphasis, ‘He told me all that you said to him about the trial of Spencer.’ Whereupon he looked thoughtfully a moment, then drank off his champagne, seized or raised the bottle, again filled his glass and emptied it, and, without further remark, left the table.”59 The implication of this buried story is clear: Mackenzie had decided to execute the three prisoners in advance and had insisted his officers support him even when it became repeatedly evident that they did not share his view of the three men’s guilt. The Articles of War and the guarantee of due process notwithstanding, the commander and his officers quickly proceeded to bind and hood Spencer, Cromwell, and Small and then ordered three subsets of the crew to haul them aloft on ropes (or “whips”) tightened around their necks, ropes that ran through blocks affixed to the yardarm above. The crew, in other words, played a very active role in the executions, for which reason Mackenzie gave orders to his officers to “cut down whoever should let go the whip with even one hand, or fail to haul on it when ordered.”60

Reviewing Mackenzie Cooper’s active involvement in the Somers matter began with his connections to the Spencer family. The novelist and John C. Spencer, both sons of prominent upstate judges and politicians, had common affiliations stretching back to their early adulthoods. The secretary of war had followed his father, Ambrose Spencer (“one of the most distinguished jurists New York has ever produced,” as Cooper would call him—“Review” 263), into the law and public life, serving as a Democratic Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1817 to 1819. In the latter year, just before Cooper campaigned for DeWitt Clinton in his reelection campaign as governor (see JFC:EY 244–47), John C. Spencer was the Clintonian candidate for New York’s vacant U.S. Senate seat.61 More recently, Cooper had dealings with Spencer through their mutual involvement in the Episcopal Church. When, in 1838, the novelist was working to help secure the bishopric of the new diocese of Western New York for his brother-in-law, Spencer lent his strong backing to DeLancey, who won (see LJ 3:339–40). Conceivably, Spencer’s dispatch of his youngest son to Geneva that fall was yet another mark of his support for the Western Diocese, its new leader, and its small college. By that time, Cooper and Spencer were on different sides politically because of the latter’s shift to the Whig Party in the 1830s.62 Cooper apparently bore Spencer no ill will on merely partisan grounds. What temporarily divided the two old associates was an 1841 dispute that was literary in nature. It concerned

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the abridged edition of Cooper’s naval history. The trouble began when the unnamed New York bookseller (evidently Harper and Brothers) to whom Cooper offered that new version of the book soon let it be known that Spencer, in his capacity as the state’s superintendent of common schools, would have to approve the title if, as the bookseller wished, it was to be placed in the Harpers’ School District Library, issued under the state ’s patronage.63 Although such a placement might be profitable for Cooper, he balked at the interference and withdrew from the negotiations before Spencer could give his opinion. Assuming the financial risk himself, Cooper instead had the book set, stereotyped, and printed before at last selling the sheets to a Philadelphia firm that also specialized in school books but was free from government supervision. Once Cooper learned that Spencer had belatedly rejected his book as “controversial on the subject of the Battle of Lake Erie” (even though Spencer had approved Mackenzie ’s avowedly controversial Life of Perry), he doubtless felt satisfied with his own alternative (LJ 4:187). Spencer’s decision nonetheless restoked Cooper’s anger on the Lake Erie matter, which was still proceeding through the courts. In commenting in the abridgement’s brief preface about the “powerful and combined attempt . . . to injure both the book and the writer, in connexion with his account of the Battle of Lake Erie” (HN 1841 iii), Cooper clearly portrayed Spencer as an ally of the Perry-Mackenzie faction. That December, having rehearsed the story privately for Shubrick, Cooper warned his old friend that Spencer was “a precious fellow, as they will find out at Washington”—where the politician had been in charge of the War Department since October (LJ 4:206).64 From these chance comments, one might predict that the Cooper-Spencer rift would not quickly close. And yet the two old associates eventually reconciled, and the means, surprisingly enough, was their common foe Mackenzie. When Cooper visited Philadelphia in January 1843 and spoke with Jesse D. Elliott on the Somers matter, the two found themselves in essential agreement, a point that Elliott in turn soon shared with Gen. Daniel Parker, “Mr. Spencer’s right hand man in the War Department”—that is, chief clerk there. Parker then described to Secretary Spencer the compatible views of Cooper and Elliott on “the tragedy of the Somers” and must also have passed on concerns Elliott voiced about Cooper’s trouble with the Harper textbook library. In answering Elliott, Parker certainly hastened to clarify Spencer’s role in that separate matter. While superintendent of common schools, Spencer determined the general fields covered in the Harper series but left the choice of particular books to a committee “composed of literary and scientific gentlemen well known for their good taste and correct judgement.” That committee, not Spencer, had picked Mackenzie’s Perry—indeed, Spencer now admitted through Parker that he had not even read the book. (He had been “gratified” by the committee’s action but that was

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because he wanted biographies of famous Americans given prominent place in the series, not because he agreed with Mackenzie’s political posture or sided with the Perrys.) Elliott surely was pleased to hear all this. But Parker’s letter also must have reassured Cooper, especially given one added point—namely, that it had been the 1842 arbitration case with William L. Stone, Cooper’s performance in it, and his resulting victory—that had “completely changed” Spencer’s opinion of Elliott’s merits. In defeating Stone, Cooper had thus bolstered Elliott’s reputation and laid the foundation for his own rapprochement with Spencer.65 Their reconciliation led to Cooper’s public involvement in the Somers business. Ever since word of the court-martial’s outcome had broken in April 1843, public interest in the trial had remained high enough to warrant publishing its proceedings. As in the case of the court of inquiry, the resulting book was not an official government publication but rather a speculative venture by a private firm. There were, however, critical differences between the two items. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley and his partner Thomas McElrath had issued the earlier fifty-page volume, compiling it from reports that had appeared in their own paper, not from the official naval record. Although it included testimony from various witnesses, the Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry gave pride of place to “Com. Mackenzie’s Narrative” (the December 19 account), perhaps one reason why members of Spencer’s circle considered the Proceedings to have been prepared by Mackenzie himself. Aside from any possible partiality in its handling of the inquiry, the Proceedings was an uneven production, as is evident from how it treated the December 19 document, which was pieced together from different sources without adequate collation or explanation. The Proceedings in fact presented a version of Mackenzie’s statement that existed in that form nowhere else, not even in the Tribune, and the Tribune in any case had presented only what the paper’s reporter had been able to capture as he sat and listened and took it down by hand.66 Mackenzie’s court-martial was given press coverage quite different from that accorded the court of inquiry. Although newspaper stories appeared at daily intervals during its sessions, these were somewhat more spotty, often condensing or commenting on the proceedings rather than attempting to transcribe the public sessions in full. And no newspaper or book publisher saw fit to supply the public with a trial record compiled from the daily stories, divergent and inaccurate as those were. Greeley and McElrath themselves, so keen to dispatch a reporter to the court of inquiry sessions, publish that man’s daily reports, and then aggregate the separate accounts into the pamphlet they issued almost immediately, did not pay nearly as much attention to the court-martial. At the very start, they conveyed their assumptions on the matter: “We understand that the evidence taken by the Court of Inquiry in the case of the Somers Mutiny is by law valid

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testimony in the trial by Court Martial, and it will undoubtedly constitute the great mass of the evidence that will be taken by that Court. This we have already published in extenso in a neat pamphlet; whatever other points of interest arise will be noted in their order.”67 Those “points of interest” were the things that struck their attention as the second proceedings went forward. The ideal of coverage, in other words, yielded to the provision of scattered impressions. And the latter usually were presented not as partial verbatim transcripts but rather as narrative summaries, and quite condensed ones at that. For instance, in its very brief report on the February 3 session, the Tribune relayed to the public the substance of a series of statements made by the judge advocate but did so without several of the details that would appear in the generally very accurate court-martial Proceedings to which Cooper’s “Review” would be appended.68 Because the Tribune regularly condensed the sessions and omitted many items from its coverage, once the trial was over Greeley and McElrath of course could not assemble another “neat pamphlet” as they had for the court of inquiry. Nor did any other newspaper editor or book publisher seize the opportunity the Tribune proprietors thus left available. This was one reason why Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial in the Case of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie did not appear until July 1844, some sixteen months after the court had adjourned. It attained greater accuracy owing to the delay, for it was no hasty compilation of individual newspaper accounts about whose status there might be varied doubts. Even so, it was a somewhat awkward amalgam of three separate parts: a full assemblage of the daily minutes of the trial drawn from the official navy record; an “Appendix” consisting of two preliminary documents, plus the court’s official findings and a review of the relevant law by Judge Advocate Norris; and, finally, the closely reasoned, eighty-pagelong “Elaborate Review” of the trial by “James Fennimore Cooper” (as the title page spelled his name).69 How this book came to be, and how Cooper became involved in it, are two intriguing questions. The presence of the official transcript of the court’s public sessions—with rich examination and cross-examination of the many witnesses, for instance—means that some person with access to the Navy Department files must have supplied that part. In at least one instance, a footnote signed “Ed.” would seem to indicate that some such figure, evidently outside the court itself but privy to its archive, had readied the material for the press.70 Another indication of its derivation from verified naval sources is the fact that Mackenzie ’s just-discussed December 19 narrative appears here in a version differing repeatedly and complexly from the one (or actually ones) given in press coverage of the court of inquiry and then in Greeley and McElrath’s unofficial Court of Inquiry pamphlet—but agreeing in almost every detail with the version in the court of inquiry records.

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Although he cannot have known anything in detail about such radical differences, Cooper was aware of instability in the available records. That issue became especially important for him as he reflected on the two judicial bodies and his own judgment on the Somers episode late in 1842 and early in 1843. His reflections on these issues were important in part because it became evident to him, even while the court-martial was still meeting and before he knew of plans for publishing its record, that he would have something to say—that is, to write and publish—about the trial. In order to do so, he would need access to reliable documentary sources. The January report in Webb’s paper about Cooper’s intention to write on the matter, a report Cooper disputed, may well have reflected a purpose he nonetheless had avowed, at least privately, that early. Certainly on March 25, after testimony had ended and the court-martial judges were reviewing it so they could begin their deliberations,71 Cooper informed Shubrick that he would wait “for the record,” after which he intended “to give the whole proceedings a close and searching review.” Although this statement might be construed to mean simply that he would read the record carefully once it became available, his further statement to his friend points to a more active— and public—intent: “Mackenzie deserves exposure,” Cooper asserted, “and he shall get it.” The dating here is significant. Cooper added for Shubrick that he had reached this resolve “within the last few days” (LJ 4:379), which means he had been following the trial closely, insofar as its spotty coverage in the press allowed, and had already decided he must intervene. He probably was thinking of writing a new piece similar in character and size to The Battle of Lake Erie, which, it will be recalled, he postponed publishing until July 1843, by which point the court-martial had long since exonerated Mackenzie.72 By this point in his career, Cooper was used to grappling with other people’s texts, dissecting them logically and verbally in pursuit of various kinds of truth. Certainly he had done that most recently with Mackenzie and the others in the Lake Erie booklet. In this instance, he probably expected to proceed much as in that one: that is, after the publication of the court-martial record in some form, he could digest the text and key his comments to its various points, as well as to the book’s pagination. But that waiting game was obviated by a series of new developments that gave him access, through John C. Spencer and his circle, to the relevant documents in their prepublication form. Henry Morris, son of Cmdre. Richard V. Morris as well as the son-in-law of Spencer, was the key figure here. During the time that Spencer held cabinet posts in the Tyler administration, Morris was also his aide and confidante (while the Mackenzie court-martial was still meeting, Spencer left the War Department to take over the Treasury, where he—and Morris—remained until May 1844).73 Morris and Spencer had collaborated in

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handling the many issues to which the Somers executions gave rise, and often it was Morris who took the lead. He and Cooper spoke in New York City, probably in September 1843, at which point Cooper mentioned his plan to write something about the court-martial and, in response to Morris’s request, told him he had “no objection to its being used by us”—that is, Morris and Spencer. Writing the novelist in October to confirm this arrangement and to let Cooper know that he had arranged for Henry G. Langley of New York to print the court-martial record, Morris now suggested that it made sense to “attach the Review to the Record.” To encourage Cooper to persist in his plans, Morris relayed the view of his “friends” (including Spencer most of all, we may be sure) that Cooper was “the only person in the country who possesses the peculiar information, knowledge and ability to place before the public in a strong and distinct light that horrid affair.” The business about the Harper library having by now faded, Cooper was clearly open to the Morris-Spencer plan.74 Morris provided fresh encouragement when he replied to a now unlocated letter from Cooper two weeks later. At this very moment, Langley was already producing the court-martial Proceedings, clearly based on materials Morris had forwarded from Washington, as the Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial reproduces the official transcript on file in the Navy Department.75 Cooper had just confirmed his plans for the “Review” and asked Morris for a transcript of the proceedings. Morris complied by sending Cooper ninety pages of Langley’s proofs, promising the rest would be “forwarded as fast as possible.”76 For the most part, the flow of Langley’s proofs to Cooper continued over the next weeks, allowing him to key his arguments and references to the pages in the first part of the book. For instance, in speaking of Philip Spencer’s Greek papers, Cooper writes: “When Captain Mackenzie arrested Mr. Spencer, . . . a paper was subsequently discovered in a razor-case. A fac-simile is to be found in the record, pp. 129, 130” (“Review” 278). Another set of court-martial documents also affected how Cooper understood and wrote about the case. Bearing neither signature nor attribution, these were produced by Judge Advocate William H. Norris as commentaries on the text of the Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, which he likewise saw in the proofs of the Langley edition. The five interconnected documents survive in the Cooper papers at Yale, along with copies of three related letters dating from December 1843. Hugh Egan, the first scholar to explore these items in detail and discuss their bearing on Cooper’s “Elaborate Review,” concluded that they had been forwarded to Cooper through an unknown third party, perhaps publisher Henry G. Langley.77 It is now pretty clear, however, that Spencer and Morris arranged for the documents to be forwarded to Cooper and may well have induced Norris to write them in the first case. Presumably they directed that

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Norris, like Cooper, should receive a set of the Langley proofs. And they seem to have arranged as well for Norris to write down his commentaries and for them to be passed on to Cooper, using for both purposes a man with longstanding ties to Cooper as well as Spencer—that is, lawyer John Lorimer Graham, most recently New York City’s postmaster. Writing to Cooper in December 1843, on the heels of the two letters Cooper had received from Henry Morris, Graham described his close bond to Spencer (inherited in part from the friendly relations between their fathers) and added that he took “a deep interest in the tragical affair of the Somers.”78 Cooper and Graham had been associated in New York politics (they were both sometimes Clintonians, like Spencer) and through their mutual interest in the American Bible Society. Moreover, Graham had married Emily Clason, daughter of a prominent Manhattan merchant and sister of the wife of William Cooper, the novelist’s brother.79 In the letter already quoted, Graham expressed the satisfaction he felt when Spencer told him that Cooper would prepare the “Elaborate Review.” And he did more. While in Baltimore over the previous summer—surely not a coincidental trip, but part of the Spencer-Morris-Norris collaborative—Graham had visited at the judge advocate’s home. Norris spoke about the court-martial testimony “with such force and effect” that Graham made him promise to produce a written version of his analysis. Come fall, Graham (surely having conferred with Spencer and Morris in the meantime), asked Norris to go over the proofs of the Langley volume “with a view to the correction of errors.” Having shared all this with Cooper, Graham apologized for his presumption in sending the novelist, without warning, a copy of the “Notes” Norris had produced. No apology was needed, since Cooper welcomed the documents and clearly made use of them.80

Necessity Relying on the Langley proofs as well as these other resources, and on his own legal knowledge and moral judgment, Cooper crafted what lawyer James Grossman called “a masterpiece of quiet sanity”—not an ad hominem attack on his supposed archrival Mackenzie but, as Hugh Egan adds, an “intricate, conditional, cerebral” argument.81 Giving a summary of the events on the Somers, he analyzed those “exaggerated and false” news reports that spread ashore during the first days and traced to their various sources—“political animosity, mercantile cupidity, and personal interests”—the continued attachment of some portions of the press and public to the proposition that Mackenzie was blameless in the matter (“Review” 264–65). Yet Cooper did not hurry to assert the opposite. Indeed, his general fairness to Mackenzie is notable—as notable as his nuanced

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independence from the Spencer-Morris-Norris circle. Cooper went out of his way to mark his disagreement with his friend Richard H. Dana’s mariner-lawyer son, who supported Mackenzie out of what Cooper thought a kind of literary solidarity (see “Review” 276). But he also distanced himself from John C. Spencer by concluding that the secretary’s son “actually intended all that is imputed to him” (“Review” 324). What engaged Cooper’s attention most fully in the “Elaborate Review” was not the obvious rights or wrongs of the case but rather the inherent ambiguities of the shipboard events and the verbal and legal knots to which they gave rise across the winter of 1842–1843. For a novelist who had recently reflected on the effect of gossip on Judith Hutter in The Deerslayer, and on his own reputation as a man and author, the shadowy regions of the Somers case were alluring for aesthetic as well as moral and legal reasons. The same perception guided Cooper’s further musings on young Spencer. He knew of “persons, good judges of evidence too, experienced members of the bar,” who doubted that “Phil” had “any serious design of a mutiny.” He found their view “far more plausible” than most of what Mackenzie had to say. They thought that Spencer had been toying with Wales (“his Greek paper was prepared for the purpose”) and, judging his tale about seizing the brig and turning pirate to be improbable on its face, they credited it to the liquor Spencer surreptitiously obtained for himself and shared with a few of his supposed recruits. Cooper patiently entertained these possibilities but in the end thought “the Greek paper” a flimsy piece of fiction: “too meager for mystification,” it would have been crafted in a “more terrific” form (here the novelist is speaking as a skilled maker of such things) had it been intended solely to play upon the credulity of Elisha Small and others. Could Spencer have carried out such a scheme as he proposed? Probably not. Yet that did not mean he was innocent. “We believe, therefore, a plot existed in the mind of this young man, quite likely with as much of imagination in it, as of reality, but still a plot” (“Review” 328). That he was a poor plotter did not lessen his moral culpability. The “reality” of it all showed, for instance, in Spencer’s recruitment of Small. Not everything charged against the two men was true, but Cooper indeed thought that together they had “engaged in a seeming plot” similar to the one that Wales reported and Mackenzie and Gansevoort and the other officers accepted as true (“Review” 299). On the other hand, such guilt hardly justified Mackenzie’s executions. In Cooper’s view, the commander had failed miserably in his duty to guarantee to all on board his ship, including Spencer and Small, their constitutional right not to be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” (“Review” 294). “America is a country of equal rights,” Cooper had written earlier, “in which person and property are justly protected without reference to station or wealth.” The laws were designed for

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the protection of “the meanest citizen”—the state was “his agent,” not “his tyrant.” Yet in the instance of the Somers, “an officer of that state has used the authority he wields in the name of the state to take the lives of three of his subordinates without a trial—by his own account of the matter, without a hearing— without any overt act of mutiny, violence, or of resistance even in the gasp of death.” While the rising pitch of these assertions seemed to promise a wholesale denunciation of Mackenzie, however, Cooper drew back, briefly giving the officer his due by conceding that he might “be right.” But Cooper immediately added an essential rider to that point: if Mackenzie wished to persuade others of his rectitude, he had to “show, in the clearest manner, the necessity which alone can justify so grave a step” (“Review” 266). This was not a naval matter; insofar as it involved rights specified by the founding documents of the United States, “the great calamity that has befallen us” constituted “a deep reproach” to “the justice and principles” of the country (“Review” 279). For, “If the name of an American citizen can not be a warranty that life will not be taken without the accusation, hearing, and condemnation, required by the law, of what use are our boasted rights?” Cooper imagined the “whole nation” demanding what justification Mackenzie had “for sending three of our number into eternity with so brief notice, by means of our own military force; for using that which we intended as an instrument of shielding the American on the high seas as an instrument of his destruction.” Although Americans might be willing (like Cooper) to admit that shipboard circumstances could have warranted Mackenzie’s “extraordinary” departure from national principles, still they expected him to offer “the clearest proof ” in the matter: “we wait for it impatiently, prepared to hold you to a most rigid responsibility, and yet prepared to do you ample justice” (“Review” 266).82 Cooper’s references to “necessity” and “justification” engaged an argument crucial to Mackenzie’s defense and to the law of the case as Judge Advocate Norris outlined it for the court. Mackenzie knew that he had no legal authority to act as he did, since the Articles of War protected the constitutional rights of even mutineers by insisting that due process—specifically, a court-martial—be allowed them. But he sought to defend his actions by claiming that, “under the existing circumstances” on the Somers, his execution of the three prisoners “was demanded by duty and justified by necessity.” And he therefore pleaded not guilty. Norris similarly conceded that the commander of a single ship who faces severe challenges such as mutiny may be “thrown for his court and code on necessity, the last power which the law authorizes.”83 Cooper took this argument as a given of the case and yet was aware of and agreed with a crucial stipulation articulated by Norris: “The jurisdiction of necessity is always exercised at the hazard of its administrator. To [validate] his decisions, he must show by legal

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evidence the guilt and degree of criminality of each and all who suffered by his sentence.”84 Cooper understood this point in precisely legal terms: “It is the height of weakness to set up anything but an overruling necessity, as the justification of Captain Mackenzie’s course.” Either it was the necessary product of his right of “selfdefence”—or it was a “crime” pure and simple—or it sprang from Mackenzie’s “grave misunderstanding of his situation, of his duties, and of the danger.” Here Boatswain’s Mate Samuel Cromwell’s fate was a test case: “Thousands, who are not disposed to think ill of Captain Mackenzie, think he was too precipitate in the case of Cromwell at least, and seamen must long have misgivings of their fate, when circumstances throw distrust on them, while they remember that at least one American seaman, died protesting his innocence, executed without a hearing, and without an overt act of mutiny” (“Review” 331). Necessity as a justification would have required something more than this in Cromwell’s case—if not those of Spencer and Small as well.85 Although this twist of the argument seemed about to position Mackenzie once again in Cooper’s sights, the review in fact took another unexpected turn. Cooper had less interest in determining Mackenzie ’s legal or moral guilt than in understanding how this man with whom he had tangled in so many ways over the past three years had come to do what he admitted doing. Here Cooper’s finesse became especially notable. At the bottom of the case, he thought, was not Spencer’s fantasy or his plot or how they affected the situation on the Somers in objective terms, but rather what he called Mackenzie ’s “obliquity of mind” (“Review” 267). Cooper used “obliquity” as the term was defined by Webster in 1828—“irregularity; deviation from ordinary rules”—but he surely did not get it from the dictionary. He probably picked it up instead from Tristam Burges, that other foe in the Lake Erie business, who in his 1839 pamphlet, it will be recalled, taunted that Cooper had himself displayed “a strange obliquity of purpose, or of understanding,” in his handling of the comparative risk Perry and Elliott faced in their separate boat runs during the 1813 battle.86 Cooper had just published his answer to Burges (and Duer and Mackenzie) a few months before writing the “Elaborate Review,” and the sting of the Rhode Islander’s accusation kept “obliquity” alive in his memory until it occurred to him to use it for describing—and probing—Mackenzie’s character. “We have had some occasions for understanding the mind of Captain Mackenzie,” he added with nice understatement, “and we ascribe more to its peculiarities, perhaps, than total strangers and severe judges might be disposed to yield” (“Review” 338). And in what did Mackenzie’s mental peculiarities consist? If Philip Spencer, confusing his fantasies with his actual situation and failing to understand how little he might in fact be able to accomplish on the brig, had too fertile an

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imagination, Mackenzie had a compensating tendency to cling to his first impressions, reading later events as bolstering what he already believed. He tended to act “under his convictions, rather than under the authority of evidence” (“Review” 279). When the main topgallant mast was snapped, for instance, the commander interpreted the gathering of so many of the alleged conspirators at the masthead as “confirmation of the dangerous character of the mutiny.” A man of a more skeptical mind might have concluded instead, as Cooper went on, that there was “nothing surprising” in Cromwell’s presence up there in a vessel with the peculiar crew of the Somers: as boatswain’s mate, he had almost a duty to be there on a ship manned with so many apprentices, and an adept commander might well expect him to be there. But that was not the extent of Mackenzie ’s false thinking. Had Cromwell remained below, Cooper continued, no doubt Mackenzie would have concluded that he did so in order to cover mutinous acts on deck under the confusion aloft (“Review” 282). If Spencer had a “mania,” as the young man admitted to Lieutenant Gansevoort in a rare moment of self-awareness shortly before his death, Mackenzie did too.87 And yet Cooper had no wish here or elsewhere to flatten Mackenzie into a mere psychological case. His point was not that the commander made up the mutiny out of the thin hints of Spencer’s melodramatic posturing. In The American Democrat, published five years before, Cooper had promulgated a kind of positivistic credo, and had he written the “Elaborate Review” immediately after that book, he arguably would have been more concerned with facts pure and simple than he was to be by 1843. At the latter time, he was less assured about facts and less worried about the doubts he now saw surrounding and shadowing them. If he was willing to see Spencer as guilty of thinking mutiny though not quite committing it, he was willing to cut Mackenzie considerable slack—far more than Spencer’s father or the judge advocate did. Mackenzie did not have to prove that a mutiny existed, Cooper claimed, or was about to be carried out. He was only “bound to show that such a case was presented to him, as justified him in believing in all the facts”—and, further, that he had “allowed the accused every opportunity of defence” that he thought they could be granted under the conditions. Cooper continued, “The reader will see our issue does not turn on the literal facts of the case, but on the manner in which these facts, real or supposed, were presented to Captain Mackenzie” (“Review” 274; emphasis in original). Even the failure to confront Cromwell with the accusations against him might not prove Mackenzie’s legal blame. If the shortcut to that man’s execution appeared necessary to Mackenzie given his concern for the safety of the ship and the rest of its complement, the captain might be justified.88 While clearly intrigued by the psychological dimensions of the case, Cooper did not ignore the traces of collusion visible even in the public record of

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the Mackenzie court-martial. He thought the junior officers—all of whom would perforce share in Mackenzie’s guilt if he were indeed guilty—were free of any “malice . . . against those executed.” He therefore dismissed the idea that any “interested motive” would be found to explain their behavior. And yet he expressed the view that the junior officers revealed a peculiar solidity if not quite solidarity in their testimony. Some of them, “in testifying to the danger, use expressions like this: ‘I thought so then, and I think so now’; thus identifying their present impressions . . . with their impressions at sea, when subject to all the risks” (“Review” 285–86). Cooper discovered the same solidarity in their views of Cromwell’s guilt, and of the other men confined on the Somers and then at the navy yard after it returned—men who had “not even been tried, unquestionably because they can not be convicted.” In analyzing this worrying pattern among the junior officers, Cooper also had recourse to nuanced explanations. He did not condemn them, but rested on a point of moral balance: it was “unwise to consider them as totally disinterested. Their own characters, as men of prudence, clear-sightedness, and moral firmness, are unavoidably connected with the issue.” In noting that all the officers had agreed with Mackenzie on “the necessity for the executions,” he pointed to the unusual closeness of the ties among the officers on this virtual “family yacht”—this was the point in his text when he used that illuminating term. And he paused over the related point of their very young age: “of the five sea-officers who signed the opinion in favor of the executions,” four were barely of age—old enough to help put down an uprising physically, but still so young that they were “questionable counselors, in a case of this fearful magnitude.” Even so, had the “question of life and death” been referred to the officers’ council “as a naked proposition to be decided by the unbiased judgments of its members,” Cooper had more faith in their individual judgments than he did in the actual process discernible in the various records of the case. Here he was coming very close to the truth of the matter as Thurlow Weed claimed it had been divulged to him by Hunn Gansevoort. It was clear to Cooper that the “necessity of executing Spencer, Cromwell, and Small” had been discussed among the officers two days before the council first met. “The interval was abundantly sufficient to give a bias to the opinion of the quarter-deck, most especially when that quarter-deck was principally occupied by very young men, and to have caused the council to arrive at a foregone conclusion” (“Review” 286–87). Had Cooper been privy to the Gansevoort anecdote, it no doubt would have confirmed this view and utterly altered his conclusions about Mackenzie. For if the commander had manufactured the seeming consensus that at last emerged from the officers’ council—and over the clear objections of some of its members—then no argument about necessity would hold. To be sure, that some

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(perhaps all) of the councilors struggled against that “foregone conclusion” would suggest that they were old enough and fair enough to reach an opinion other than that seemingly forced on them by their commander. But that Guert Gansevoort caved in and then was able to effect what Mackenzie wanted in fact confirms Cooper’s insight about the green inexperience of the bulk of the sea officers on the cruise. Had the novelist’s relations with Thurlow Weed not been so obsessively absorbed (on both sides) in the comparatively inconsequential arguments that they engaged in as partisans of their time and place, Cooper could have heard the story Weed obviously wished to share. And had he heard it, his “Elaborate Review” would not have been as nuanced as he in fact made it. Indeed, he might well have found a way to get the story to Spencer, Morris, and Norris during the court-martial—thereby affecting a proceeding in which, as things actually played out, he could intervene only by textual means and after the fact. Was Cooper, as Norris thought, bending over backward to ensure that his own “foregone conclusions” about Mackenzie did not influence his analysis of the case?89 Perhaps. In that event, however, one can only wonder again how Weed’s story might have changed Cooper’s approach to the subject. It is not inconceivable that he would have felt fully justified in seeking to “grind M’Kenzie to powder” (as he reportedly told Catharine M. Sedgwick in June 1843 that he wished to do with The Battle of Lake Erie). Instead, he let the man rest, there in the pages of the “Elaborate Review,” amid the moral shadows that cast their own kind of damnation.90

C H A P T E R

T W E L V E

Coming on Shore

C

ooper’s “Elaborate Review” served the navy and the nation, but also its author. Mackenzie and his young officer-kin were immediately responsible for the executions and their aftermath, but public discussion of the case traced Philip Spencer’s swashbuckling fantasies to the pirate stories he had habitually consumed.1 An anonymous December 20 letter from Washington to James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, excoriating “the miserable trash that the country is daily deluged with in the shape of romantic adventures of pirates, banditti, exploits of celebrated highwaymen, freebooters, &c,” accused Cooper himself of having done “an incalculable amount of mischief ” via The Red Rover and The Water-Witch (even the just-issued Wingand-Wing). “Magnifying a thief and a murderer into a hero, and throwing a halo of romance around him,” the writer went on, “is not the best way to improve the morals of the rising generation.”2 Within two weeks, Lyman Beecher delivered a sermon tracing Spencer’s “love of hair-brained [sic] adventure” to his “habit of reading pernicious books”—including “the piratical tales of Marryatt [sic], Trelawney, and Cooper.”3 A December letter to Charles King’s New York American from Virginia Whig and former speaker of the House Robert M. T. Hunter attacked the same three authors, but especially

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singled out Cooper’s pirate stories for their effects “on the minds of such vicious youngsters” as Spencer.4 Cooper learned of this criticism as it emerged. While in Philadelphia in January 1843 (on the trip during which he kept picking up new pieces of the unfolding Somers story), he sat down to write a sketch of his career for Rufus W. Griswold. Remarking on the “brilliant success” enjoyed by The Red Rover on its first publication, Cooper added, “What is a little remarkable, certain critics praised it to the skies, who have since attributed to it, the mutiny of the Somers!” (LJ 4:343).5 Accusations of this sort may well have tempered Cooper’s maritime art, bolstering his turn toward more realistic portrayals of oceanic life. His very next sea tale, the two-part Afloat and Ashore, was not devoid of far-flung episodes, but it hardly invited poisonous misreadings like those of Philip Spencer. The focus in its sections “afloat” was on the experience of young Americans growing up at sea; the addition of the “ashore” theme gave those characters a landed interest in social life. The book’s hero retired from his maritime adventures to a more ordinary life as a happily married man firmly ensconced in the landscape where he had grown up. Nothing of that sort had happened, of course, to the heroes of Cooper’s pirate stories—or to Philip Spencer.6 Already under way by the start of 1844, Afloat and Ashore stemmed most immediately from the also realistic Ned Myers. A fictional autobiography of a young Hudson Valley native named Miles Wallingford who goes to sea at age seventeen (as Cooper had), but who, before his final homecoming, sails fully around the globe, suffering various reverses in war and peace (as Ned Myers had), the new novel mixed episodes from the lives of the two old shipmates. Cooper first mentioned the fresh project when, sending off complete copy for Ned Myers to Richard Bentley late in September 1843, he simply stated, “I shall have a new book in the Spring” (LJ 4:415). Early in January 1844, by which point he had written half or slightly more of the initial Wallingford story (and also had just recently finished with the Somers matter), he linked it directly to Ned Myers: “This work . . . contains the adventures of a young sailor, something in Ned’s way, but, is a pure fiction, has a love Story of interest, and embraces the experience of a sea-life, as it existed near fifty years since. Time, during the war between America and France, in 1798, and scenes Madagascar, North West Coast of America and the islands of the Pacific, with adventures with the natives” (LJ 4:441). It is worth noting that this description said nothing of the story’s landward elements. At this point, Cooper had not yet decided to extend the narrative (then simply called “Miles Wallingford”—LJ 4:428, 441) and thereby tame its more daring implications.7 In mid-March, after he had begun reviewing proofs, Cooper offhandedly announced the change to stereotyper John Fagan: “The new book will make four

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volumes, though I shall publish in two parts, or two at a time” (LJ 4:446). The next month, when attempting to rationalize the extension to Bentley, he essentially made up a story: “When I got about half through with this book”—that is, at the point where Wallingford leaves the American Northwest for the open Pacific—“I found I could not complete my subject, or work up the dénouement, without dividing the book into two parts” (LJ 4:455). The analogous change with the Home novels in 1838, as noted in chapter 7, mostly derived from poor planning and a mere excess of narrative energy.8 Although the same might be said here, something else was also involved. Cooper’s fictional return to his personal roots in the five novels he published between 1844 and 1846, I will argue later, unearthed feelings and concerns that caused him to linger for an extended period in the deeply significant Hudson Valley.9 Even as Afloat and Ashore allowed him to explore his past, its publishing arrangements pushed him into the uncertain future. He had not been happy with Bentley’s insistence on graduated ad valorem prices for his recent books, so when offering the first part of this new work in January he added a significant warning: “I have a great reluctance to break off old connections, but, after the tale now in progress, ours must cease, unless I recieve [sic] specific sums for my writings.” For the time being, he drew against Bentley for £200 and promised to submit a second, equal draft “when the last sheets go forward”—unless Bentley objected in the interval (LJ 4:440–41). Bentley mostly surrendered, answering on February 18 with details clarifying the ad valorem plan but adding, “I . . . am willing to credit your account £350 for Miles Wallingford out-and-out[,] the number to be printed being left to me.” Although Cooper had won his point, Bentley slightly scaled back the price.10 Things were also reaching a critical point with Lea and Blanchard. During an early 1844 trip downstate, Cooper learned from Manhattan booksellers that he had been “giving Lea & Blanchard from $1500 to $2000 a year” owing to slippage in his arrangements with them (LJ 4:443). He did not mean that the firm had been holding back his contractual due on recent books; he meant that his generosity with older books he still owned but had let the Philadelphians reprint for free was costing him significant income, especially now that the firm’s upfront payments for his new works were reduced. This insight led him, once he arrived in Philadelphia on the present trip, to alert Lea and Blanchard to his new intentions. When the three-year contractual sales period for The Deerslayer ended (on August 27, 1844), Cooper now reaffirmed, their free access to ten older books also would end then. Having declared to his wife from New York, “I am afraid all booksellers are rascals,” he added, “In future, I act for myself.” He began to do so first of all by reclaiming literary property to which he had surrendered his rights (LJ 4:443).11

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A second recourse was to take as complete control as possible, in the general economic climate of the time, of Afloat and Ashore. While next in Philadelphia that April, he offered Lea and Blanchard a deal that was notably better for him than the ones they had agreed to for either The Wing-and-Wing or Wyandotté. The firm, conceding to Cooper that it “could not see how [he] could well write for less,” nonetheless politely declined his proposal. Almost immediately, Cooper made the same offer to another (unnamed) publisher. He was willing to divide the profits if need be, he confessed, but was otherwise firm: “I have made all my calculations, and shall not lower my terms.” This publisher also declined. Undaunted, Cooper forged ahead on his own (LJ 4:447–48).12 For that purpose, he relied on a variety of partners, especially the stalwart Fagan. He also made arrangements with booksellers such as Carey and Hart in Philadelphia, plus Wiley and Putnam and Burgess and Stringer in New York, to carry the title themselves and, where appropriate, wholesale it more widely. And Cooper handled some smaller sales himself. In late May 1844, while in Philadelphia seeing to final production details, he informed his wife of his modest success in this last regard: “I have sold a few hundred copies, and am moving in the matter, as fast as I can” (LJ 4:457). While there would be resistance in the trade to his unorthodox proceedings, as he hinted to Shubrick (see LJ 4:463) and as Fagan confirmed for him, he made very good headway. Overall, he could reflect that he had done well at a time of new challenges and uncertainties.13

Worries Enormous changes were transforming American publishing precisely when Cooper, leaving Lea and Blanchard, improvised the means by which Afloat and Ashore appeared in the market. Since 1839, when mammoth story papers came on the market, pressure to lower the price of fiction in book format had become intense. Those oversize newspaper extras, in effect magazines, serialized novels or published them in a single issue but were distributed via the mail at low newspaper rates.14 As the price for fiction in book form trended lower to compete with this innovation, attention to price as an element of book marketing became pronounced. Lea and Blanchard typically did not affix retail prices to Cooper’s books physically before they published The Two Admirals, and price usually was unmentioned in booksellers’ advertisements and in reviews. Cooper’s name and his fame sold the books, at least in theory. With that 1842 sea novel, however, the firm for the first time began experimenting with alternate strategies meant to compete with the new outlets. A month before the April 1842 publication date of The Two Admirals, the Philadelphians authorized the small Boston publishing house of Saxton and Pierce to issue a “cheap and uniform edition . . . in twenty

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weekly No’s, of ‘Cooper’s Sea Tales,’ ” including “his new story . . . not yet published.” By June, the Bostonians were also trumpeting their serial edition of “Leather Stocking Tales, by Cooper . . . in the same style as ‘Sea Tales.’ ” These versions of Cooper’s books were less of a departure from previous practice (or a brazen infringement on Cooper’s and Lea and Blanchard’s rights) than may appear at first glance. Saxton and Pierce’s “numbers,” at least for the sea tales project, were in fact sheets from higher-priced Lea and Blanchard editions.15 That was one way for Cooper’s customary publishers to acknowledge (and perhaps profit from) the powerful trend toward cheap publishing without directly imitating it. But Lea and Blanchard could not, or at any rate did not, hold out much longer. With the next Cooper book, The Wing-and-Wing, issued in November of the same year as the Saxton and Pierce sets, the Philadelphians themselves adopted the paperback format in which the cheap books increasingly appeared at the time. Because such books had printed covers (another innovation), publishers had the chance to run advertising on the front and back. Lea and Blanchard, by printing the book’s price on the front cover and promoting its cheap versions of Cooper’s books on the back, made creative use of this fresh opportunity. It will also be recalled that in this instance Cooper himself paid for Fagan’s stereotype plates, thereby relieving the publishers of part of the production costs.16 In the face of these changes in how The Wing-and-Wing looked and how it had been produced, Cooper cannot have missed the obvious conclusion about his own future. Two years later, after he had defaulted to the older arrangements with Lea and Blanchard for Ned Myers and Wyandotté, he made his break from the firm by once more handling a book (that first part of Afloat and Ashore) on his own. In the process, he discovered a new business relationship that would henceforth shape his management of new and old works alike. Among the Manhattan firms that sold large quantities of the first part of Afloat and Ashore was Burgess and Stringer (see LJ 4:466–67). This relatively young concern would not last long in the form in which Cooper first encountered its principals, Wesley F. Burgess and James Stringer. But the company clearly exemplified the period’s new bookselling modes, and Cooper’s de facto turn toward it for the work’s first part, and then more decisively for the second, demonstrated both his savvy and his ability to adapt creatively to changing conditions. Whereas Isaac Lea and William Blanchard had deep roots in book publishing as longtime associates in a firm founded in 1785 by Mathew Carey, the New Yorkers were late arrivals. Wesley F. Burgess, born in Virginia in 1810, had become active in Philadelphia in the early 1840s, first by himself and then with the merchant, news-dealer, and eventually publisher George B. Zieber (or Zeiber—he used both spellings), who is best known for issuing the first edition

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of George Lippard’s sensational Quaker City in 1844.17 In 1841, Burgess ran modest solo advertisements in Philadelphia indicating that he stocked newspapers, including story papers. By November 1842, after he and Zieber had joined forces, they ran a joint advertisement boasting that they carried “a larger assortment of Cheap Reading than can be found at any other establishment in the United States.” Among the other items they handled during their short partnership were inexpensive versions of Cooper titles for the Pennsylvania market: in December 1842, the partners thus advertised The Two Admirals at “25 Cents a vol.,” surely the cheap version Lea and Blanchard had promoted on the covers of the recently issued Wing-and-Wing. The next year, initiating an alliance of the sort that was very common during these years, Lea and Blanchard itself issued several of its “weekly parts” of Cooper novels “for Burges [sic] & Zeiber,” who joined in this venture with several other listed publishers, including Burgess’s future Manhattan partner, James Stringer.18 Burgess apparently moved to New York City late in 1842 or early in 1843, perhaps while still technically allied with Zieber, and formed his new firm with Stringer and, soon, William A. Townsend.19 While some of the details are murky, the course the new firm took is clear. Burgess, who retained his Philadelphia connections, had considerable experience with cheap books, story papers, and the periodical market in general. James Stringer brought to the business some local knowledge (although born in England, he had been in New York City for a decade or more), along with experience of his own in the periodical market (in 1838, for instance, he had become an agent for Godey’s Lady’s Book and other magazines).20 The third partner, Townsend, the only native New Yorker in the company, is said to have founded, around 1837, the “Editors’ Express” service—a company that, in these last years before the coming of Morse’s telegraph, promised speedy delivery of correspondents’ Washington reports to New York papers.21 He thus had some experience in the news business; having worked for several years as a conductor for street railroads in Philadelphia and New Brunswick, he also had expertise in transport, a key element of cheap—partly because fast—publishing. When Townsend’s addition to Burgess and Stringer was formally announced in the press late in 1843, N. P. Willis therefore speculated that Townsend would “have charge of the travelling part of the business.”22 On Burgess’s departure from the firm in 1848, it assumed the name of Stringer and Townsend (and as such published Cooper’s Sea Lions the following year). The two remaining principals worked together through the next decade, until Stringer’s retirement in 1858 left the firm as “W. A. Townsend and Co.,” which for decades remained active in New York publishing. At the time of his death in 1899, Townsend was one of the few long-lived survivors from the turbulent publishing world of the 1840s.23

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Cooper owed his first link with these men to Lea and Blanchard’s decision to market his novels via both the Philadelphia and New York firms in 1843. The next year, when he dealt directly with Burgess and Stringer for the first part of Afloat and Ashore, the firm’s ability to sell so many copies on its own account surely impressed him. How Burgess and Stringer became involved in publishing the book’s second part, though, was hardly a straightforward matter. Part two was set and stereotyped by John Fagan, to whom Cooper wrote from Cooperstown on July 11, “Miles is most done. I shall want to put [the] first volume to press as soon as it is stereotyped, and I wish you to look about you for paper, &c., to finish like the other part” (LJ 4:466).24 Fagan also was involved, from his plant in Philadelphia, in managing the book’s distribution. Here the details are revealing. In a now unlocated letter of September 29, Cooper instructed Fagan how the shipments were to be handled, prompting the stereotyper to have the binders send seven boxes to New York, three of them (containing fifteen hundred copies) “Marked B&S.”25 Whereas the book as marketed elsewhere bore the imprint “philadelphia: published by the author,” this shipment no doubt contained the copies that had been specially prepared for Cooper’s emerging partner, for the book also survives with a variant imprint— “New York: | Published by the Author | And for sale by | Burgess & Stringer | 222 Broadway | 1844.” The two surviving states of the book themselves reflect how Cooper adopted the new publishing practices that were depressing his income even as they offered or seemed to offer him fresh opportunities.26 Having broken with Lea and Blanchard, Cooper had adjusted to those new practices; he was still writing books, and his books continued to sell. To be sure, he still insisted on asking more per copy than the norm during this period. In an 1844 opinion piece titled “More New Books!,” a Charleston bookseller listed a great many titles, making sure to give the price for each item: “the Rose of Tistelon, at 12 1/2; Barney O’Rierdon, at 25; Coningsby, by D’Israeli, 25.” When he came to the latest Cooper title, he made a cautionary tale out of it: “Cooper has put up his ‘Afloat and Ashore’ to 75 cents, in consequence of the falling off in the trade, and publishes it himself! Old prices will return, if readers do not patronize, with liberality, the efforts to keep books at their present low prices.”27 Cooper, resisting such “efforts,” set his price for part two high enough to evoke such comments—but not too high that it seriously hurt sales or his earnings. Not even the good results in this instance, however, encouraged him to produce further titles on his own. In early March 1845, he therefore happily signed a contract naming Burgess and Stringer as the publisher for his next book, Satanstoe, and also began transferring to that firm the republishing rights he had started recovering from Lea and Blanchard the previous fall. The New Yorkers now became his official publishers.28

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While things shifted productively for Cooper once the second part of Afloat and Ashore was out, the economic uncertainties he faced while writing it helped convert the four-volume tale into a long meditation on the impermanence of economic status and social identity—of its author’s most of all. The 1844 novel’s debts to Cooper’s experience are large and in many ways obvious. Wallingford’s voyage to England, for instance, relied heavily on the stories Cooper had told in his English Gleanings and had worked up with Ned Myers just the year before (see JFC:EY 81–94). Naval themes in the novel, from the concern with impressment to the attack of HMS Leander on the USS Chesapeake (of which the book gives a fictional prequel—see A&A CE 2:160–69; JFC:EY 103–8) likewise show the use to which Cooper here put his personal memories.29 Everywhere Miles goes in European waters, he encounters the tensions and aggressions that led up to the American declaration of war in 1812, tensions that Cooper and Myers had witnessed on the Stirling together and that Cooper on his own, as a young naval officer and then a jealous observer of international affairs, had followed closely in New York. In this sense, the book is Cooper’s imaginative history of his own times, and especially of how it felt to be a young man (and naval officer) at a moment when the terrible events unfolding in Europe were threatening, but had not yet spilled over onto, the United States. The 1803 voyage of the Dawn in particular paints a portrait of the rather fragile postcolonial world in which Cooper grew up. In giving Wallingford a maritime career far more extensive than his own, Cooper was fantasizing about what might have been had he not quit the sea when he did. The fictional sailor thus ventures farther than his creator, encounters (and survives) greater risks, and at last comes home a hero. What more might Cooper dream up as a daring alternative to his own onshore life? Yet something beyond simple wish-fulfillment was also at work here. This other aspect of the story, which involves Wallingford’s supposed disappearance at sea and the subsequent (but ultimately reversed) loss of his family’s home, Clawbonny, voiced hidden but recurrent worries Cooper had about his identity and prospects well beyond the matter of his stillborn maritime career. In particular, it drew on the challenges he had faced as his own family’s fortune collapsed in the years from 1817 to 1822, challenges that he had mastered by reinventing himself as a writer but that now were resurgent in the very different circumstances of the 1840s. He did not overtly raise the bigger issues that were again stalking him. Instead, the old worries, revived by the financial and artistic challenges of the present decade, surfaced on their own as he chose to set this story (and soon the Littlepage series, which extended the hidden personal agenda from Afloat and Ashore) in what was decidedly the scenery of his own early life. Writing these books in such profusion (ten volumes in two years) gave

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him a way to manage the resurgent anxieties even as doing so reaffirmed the literary identity he had crafted two decades before as his answer to his early adulthood’s many losses. This line of analysis, if fully developed, could unfold a long, complex story. The very short version of it is this: Thomas Bridgen, the Albany lawyer who brought down the Cooper family estate by tricking its last executor into a deceitful settlement in 1821, haunted Cooper’s memories of this part of his own experience and geography, and the five Hudson Valley books in common worked to exorcise that particular ghost. I have speculated elsewhere that Bridgen and Cooper did not first encounter each other because of the troubles that entangled their fathers’ estates in the years after 1815—rather, they met under much happier circumstances in Albany when Cooper and his brother Samuel were sent to school there in 1801–1802. Bridgen, though born in Manhattan in 1786 or 1787 to an Anglo-American physician and his Dutch-American wife, Catharine Ten Eyck, was absorbed into and raised by her large family when, following her death around 1800, his father turned him and his sisters over to the Ten Eycks in Albany. A few years older than Cooper, Bridgen–Ten Eyck fits well the profile one might imagine as lying behind the character of Guert Ten Eyck, the risky but at last expelled prankster of Satanstoe with whom the younger Corny Littlepage cavorts on the streets of Albany and the ice-covered Hudson (see JFC:EY 303, 620–21n2). Here, too, autobiographical traces permeate the fiction. By the time Cooper wrote that first Littlepage novel, I think he had worked through some of Bridgen’s grimmer associations and hence could recover the innocent memories that give such buoyancy to the Albany section of Satanstoe. Precisely at the midpoint of the double Wallingford tale, he managed to bring the action to the threshold of that city. And he there gave one of his many bright descriptions of the place: “Then Albany came into the view, leaning against its sharp acclivity, and spreading over the extensive bottom land. . . . [I]t was then, as now, one of the most picturesque-looking places in America” (A&A CE 2:15; plate 7). But at this point he was not ready to imaginatively repossess that scene. Instead, he suddenly sent Miles and Moses Marble and their associates back down the river on the young man’s sloop.30 It is significant, however, that they drop anchor at a spot just south of the city with which Bridgen and his Albany kin had exceptionally deep connections. This was the obscure Hudson Valley site of Coeymans, to which Cooper had no known ties but which he repeatedly and quite particularly returned to in Afloat and Ashore, Satanstoe, and The Chainbearer.31 Bridgen’s mother in fact owned land there, as did many of her relatives, who as a group had pretty much taken over the old Coeymans Patent by intermarrying with the descendants of its original owner, Barent Pieterse Coeymans. To cite one single example: Bridgen’s aging great uncle Andries Ten

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Eyck lived in one of the old Coeymans houses there at the time Cooper was being schooled in Albany. I suspect that Cooper and Thomas Bridgen–Ten Eyck visited the patent together on a jaunt—perhaps a jaunt in a sleigh coursing down the frozen Hudson, to read backward not only from Satanstoe but also from Cooper’s chatty 1817 letter to Bridgen about the prospect of taking a similar sleigh ride together as they sought to work out their families’ financial dispute. And I suspect, finally, that the young Otsego schoolboy there met, or at least heard about, the old man on whom he later modeled the Chainbearer, Andries Coejemans, as Cooper spelled the character’s name, in the second Littlepage book. The evidence on this matter, while almost completely circumstantial, is strong and persistent. Coeymans, the source of the Chainbearer’s family name in the second Littlepage novel, is also the location in Satanstoe where the adventurous ride on the frozen Hudson arranged for by Guert Ten Eyck turns terrifying when the ice suddenly breaks up. It is furthermore the place where the seeming orphan Moses Marble is reunited with his long-lost mother right after the turnaround at Albany in Afloat and Ashore. Marble immediately proceeds to rescue her from the scheming lawyer who is seeking to dispossess her of her farm.32 The troubles that Marble faces and resolves at Coeymans are echoed in the succeeding episode in Afloat and Ashore, during which Miles himself endures his own property crisis. Soon after returning from the upriver trip, Miles, wishing to embark on a European trading voyage, mortgages Clawbonny to his cousin Jack and purchases freight with the proceeds. All goes well for a time, but eventually his ship sinks, and Miles, seemingly lost at sea, is reported dead. When he eventually manages to return to New York via Philadelphia, he finds that in his absence his cousin Jack has died and Clawbonny has been purchased by Jack’s executor, a distant kinsman named Thomas Daggett. Miles has not died, but he nonetheless has been dispossessed. Further complications develop, suggesting to Miles that he has fallen so far in status that he is now nothing more than a seaman—like, of course, the propertyless Ned Myers.33 But this being a romantic fiction rather than life, Miles manages to handily recover his old identity and the property that anchors it. He also manages to marry Lucy Hardinge and settle down with her at Clawbonny for the rest of a long happy existence that culminates in his writing of his life story. In that last regard, too, Miles was something of his maker’s secret double.

Anti-Rent The three interconnected Littlepage tales (1845–1846) carried forward Cooper’s exploration of his personal past from Afloat and Ashore even as they represented his most complex fictional engagement with any contemporary public issue, an

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issue that also was focused on property and social identity—the so-called AntiRent War. This protest by farmers on New York’s largest estates began with skirmishes in Albany County in 1839, quieted down after a year or two, and then became widespread and—in a few well-publicized incidents—violent, across 1844 and 1845.34 The protesters’ original concern focused on the “leasehold in fee,” a peculiar form of land tenure then common on the enormous Van Rensselaer Manor, Rensselaerswyck, straddling the Hudson River around Albany. Under its terms, virtual ownership of manor land was transferred to farmers in exchange for yearly rents in kind and service. Although they had never paid a purchase price for their farms, these so-called tenants could pass the leases to their heirs or sell them (and the improvements on the farms) to purchasers of their choice, distinguishing features of fee simple land ownership. But in the case of a sale, they were required to give the lord of the manor a stated portion of the proceeds. Furthermore, these quarter sale fees, like the annual rents, traveled with the land, obligating new tenants in perpetuity. To ensure the receipt of those payments, the landlord had certain remedies specified in the contract, including the right to reenter the premises and, where necessary, sell the farm and any improvements. The landlord also retained control over all mill sites and minerals. He might, for instance, build a dam that flooded a farmer’s pastures, in which case the farmer had no right to counter its construction or any legal means of recovering damages.35 Anti-Renters argued that these terms bound them in quasi-feudal subordination. While that view seemed plausible to many observers, the situation was actually quite complicated. Making new arrangements of this sort (technically called “subinfeudation”) had been outlawed in England as long ago as 1290 by the statute Quia Emptores, which, halting the proliferation of lesser holders on English lands, prevented further elaboration of feudal relations and obligations. Yet the manorial practices described above, first introduced into the Hudson Valley by the Dutch in the late 1620s in order to stimulate emigration, had been tacitly continued after the English conquest. Indeed, English authorities expanded on the Dutch model through their own grants to Robert Livingston, Caleb Heathcote, and Stephen Van Cortlandt, among others. Some of the new manorial lords sold farms outright or rented them to tenants at will, who could be evicted on short notice. But most leased land to farmers for a specified period of years or for the term of the two or three “lives” named in the lease (the farmer and one or two relatives, often children, for instance). Under both of these instruments, lessees might have an option to renew their original leases; but doing so required the landlord’s consent, lacking which the farmer’s improvements would revert to the landlord’s control. There were sufficient difficulties with these other sorts of land tenure that in the 1840s farmers eventually protested against them as well as the typical

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Rensselaerswyck arrangement. But it was the latter that sparked the Anti-Rent War, and for good reason. Farmers on Van Rensselaer lands occupied an extreme, virtually unique economic and social position that posed many theoretical and practical challenges for them and for the relatively new American political order. Despite vocal concern about those challenges, however, they were neither met nor mastered during the Anti-Rent War. In the end, many landlords sold their vast holdings to their tenants or others, vacating their traditional roles and leaving the fundamental institutional issues unresolved. Following repeated failures in the courts and the legislature during the period from 1839 to 1865, as Charles W. McCurdy has stressed, “New York State became the world’s only common law jurisdiction in which rent-charge covenants ran with the land forever.” Today, some parcels in rural areas, and even in recent suburban developments, continue under the traditional rent obligations. The Anti-Rent War raised crucial questions, but no one articulated compelling answers to them. The colonial past thus shadowed the national present—and future.36 The crisis was deepened after the Revolution when substantial migration into New York gave new prominence to the old but little understood leasehold practice. As New Englanders in particular poured into the Hudson Valley, the young patroon of Rensselaerswyck, Stephen Van Rensselaer III, employed an updated version of the old lease—drafted by Alexander Hamilton—on properties in the previously undeveloped hill towns inland from the river. On older lands, he also set about collecting back rents suspended during the wartime chaos. He was a fair, reasonably progressive man, and under his reign Rensselaerswyck tenants, old or new, enjoyed conditions that were in some ways better than those affecting true renters on other New York estates. But over the long term, no tenant, regardless of the terms by which the land was held, enjoyed prospects equal to those of fee simple purchasers. Things therefore had never been quiet for long on any of the manors. Since the middle of the eighteenth century, for instance, uprisings had occurred on various estates, especially in the lower Hudson Valley, where dominant term leases forced chronic economic and personal insecurity on tenants. An allied sense of vulnerability led to the Rensselaerswyck troubles in 1839, following the death of Stephen Van Rensselaer III. He had managed the manor relatively well up to and beyond the War of 1812, but the Panic of 1819 forced many tenants, with his connivance, to once again begin skipping rent payments. Some fell so far behind that by 1839 a total of some $400,000 stood in arrears on the manor’s books. Given their landlord’s indulgent attitude, the farmers had come to expect that these debts would be forgiven. But that expectation, understandable as it was, proved unrealistic. Because the patroon left debts roughly equal to the overdue rents, he instructed his executors (and, through them, his sons and

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heirs, half-brothers Stephen IV and William) to collect rather than forgive the back rents. Although he left instructions to take the hardships facing individual tenants into account, the upshot was that families accustomed to virtual freehold tenure of lands (for which they had paid neither an original purchase price nor obligatory rents over recent years) were suddenly faced with the prospect of seizure and forced sale. Amid rising egalitarianism and market competition, Rensselaerswyck’s leasehold farmers felt burdened by the demand for back rents as well as their overall dependence on the patroon. Furthermore, the land itself, especially in the hill towns where the 1839 protests first arose, was only marginally fertile. Access to markets was also difficult from there, and competition from richer, more accessible lands to the west—lands that in most instances could be simply purchased— made agricultural success even more unlikely. Small wonder that Rensselaerswyck tenants began presenting themselves as trapped in a position of “voluntary slavery,” as the protesters described their plight in the “Anti-Renters’ Declaration of Independence,” first voiced at Berne, in the Helderberg mountains district of Albany County on July 4, 1839. In keeping with their adoption of Revolutionary rhetoric, they soon garbed themselves in Indian costumes, like the Boston Tea Party protesters of 1773, who were being newly celebrated in the 1830s. Covering their faces with crude calico masks and adopting names for their “chiefs” like Big Thunder, the Anti-Rent “Injins” roamed the countryside cheering the tenants and disrupting landlord attempts to collect rents or seize property in lieu of them.37 Although it is not hard to sympathize with the protesters—like my own ancestor Isaac Wilsey, a tenant and protester at Berne—there is considerable misconception about the nature of the farmers’ situation, the causes of the “war,” its halting conduct, and the reasons why it did not succeed.38 As to that last point, although one student of Cooper asserts that the Anti-Rent War was “a largely successful rent-strike,” it was instead a colossal failure insofar as it sought to alter the fundamental terms of the leasehold system by effecting substantial political and legal change. Indeed, it did not even achieve an abatement of past-due rents.39 Both the Democrats and the Whigs were internally split over the cause—united only by their insistence that, if the farmers’ plight were resolved by political means, the victory would not belong to their foes. Conversely, each party proved adept at blaming the other for failures to solve the problem. Charles W. McCurdy concludes that some substantial solutions were possible but were not achieved because of a basic failure of political will. Not even the supposedly inviolable contract clause of the U.S. Constitution, often described as a block to more radical redistributionist proposals for ending the crisis, or for achieving broader agrarian reform, really posed an absolute bar to action. It was the players who stumbled, not the game itself that was flawed.40

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Cooper did not directly address the subject of Anti-Rent until it entered its final, accelerated phase in 1844. That was the time when the movement, in the words of David M. Ellis, “passed from a somewhat localized struggle against the Van Rensselaer family to a full-fledged, well-organized revolt against leasehold tenure throughout the eastern part of the state,” including the counties, heretofore relatively quiet, of Delaware, Schoharie, and Columbia. So widespread did the Anti-Rent protests eventually become that in early 1845 even previously quiet (and relatively tenantless) Otsego County witnessed an attack on a deputy sheriff seeking to serve papers on farms abutting Schoharie ’s Summit township. The official, “surrounded by persons disguised as Indians,” refused a demand to surrender his documents. He thereupon “was seized, and all his pockets searched,” and the papers he intended to serve locally were destroyed. After that, the Albany Argus reported: “His horse was unharnessed and tied by the side of the road, about 10 rods distant. He was then taken about a quarter of a mile out in the lots, where they told him to sit down; he refused; they then threw him down, took off his boots, filled them half full of tar, and pulled them on again; then took off his cap and [poured] on tar with the bucket, and replaced it again; then took a paddle that was in the bucket, and plastered his face, &c.” When he still defied them, they threatened rougher treatment should he ever come back.41 Although this close-to-home episode no doubt attracted Cooper’s attention, by the time it occurred he was almost done writing Satanstoe, the first part of his Anti-Rent trilogy, and already had sketched his plans for the second and third parts—The Chainbearer and The Redskins.42 The novels, each one purportedly written by a different member of the Littlepage clan living between the 1750s and the 1840s, have a mostly unified political point of view—in his preface to the last of them, Cooper described their goal as the desire to give a “fair account of the comparative sacrifices of time, money and labour, made respectively by the landlord and the tenants, on a New York estate” (RED 1:iii). But not every episode in the books was aimed at driving home the main points as Cooper the political creature saw them, and overall they make for a very impressive achievement almost regardless of their political purpose. The relatively self-contained Satanstoe is thus one of his best books, offering a charming portrait of Anglo-Dutch New York.43 It can be read and enjoyed without reference to the Anti-Rent War, although a complete understanding of the story requires at least passing awareness of the protests. The second novel in the series, The Chainbearer, while not as powerful artistically, is a similarly engaging narrative of the start of frontier development immediately after the peace of 1783—the origin-point, as it were, of the Cooper family’s own story. It addresses the troubles more insistently, but, again, can be read well on its own terms. Only the

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third novel, The Redskins, set in Cooper’s day and directly concerned with the Anti-Rent dispute, seems inextricably linked to it, and to most readers it suffers as a result. But it has had its admirers; and the completed series, offering an extended historical chronicle that reprises many of the key themes of Cooper’s frontier fiction and his latter-day political theory, is unquestionably an impressive achievement, even with its more strident final installment.44 Cooper, coming off the more improvised double novel about Miles Wallingford, envisioned the Littlepage books as forming a coherent whole from the outset. In January 1845, when Satanstoe was well along but he had not begun the other books, he described the whole trilogy for Richard Bentley: “ ‘The Family of Littlepage’ will form three complete Tales, each perfectly distinct from the other as regards leading characters, love story &c, but, in this wise connected. I divide the subjects into the ‘Colony,’ ‘Revolution’ and ‘Republic,’ carrying the same family, the same localities, and same things generally through the three different books, but exhibiting the changes produced by time &c. . . . In the ‘Republic’ we shall have the present aspect of things, with an exhibition of the Anti-Rent commotion that now exists among us, and which certainly threatens the destruction of our system” (LJ 5:7). With this coherent overview fixed in his mind, Cooper speedily completed the impressive design: the three novels appeared between June 1845 and July 1846, a remarkable rate even for Cooper in this busiest of his decades (S&B 138–47).45

Yorkers and Yankees In Satanstoe and The Chainbearer, the residual feelings called up as Cooper explored the well-known scenes of his youth infused the action with autobiographical meanings that may not be immediately evident, especially in a series nominally engaged with the public issue of Anti-Rentism. The books are read best, however, when those two levels are kept in mind throughout. To exemplify what this approach entails, I would point to the figure mentioned earlier— Andries Coejemans. In The Chainbearer, Coejemans has more narrative background and emotional significance than his overt part in the plot requires. We can see this in two details. The first is that Andries, when serving with a very young Mordy Littlepage during Burgoyne’s 1777 defeat, regaled him with “his whole history, commencing with the emigration of the Coejemans from Holland, and ending with our actual situation, in the camp at Saratoga” (CB 1:16)—a personal saga that hints at some underlying history outside the fiction (and Anti-Rentism) to which Cooper was himself privy. This impression is deepened when, after Mordy recounts for the reader the warm feelings he naturally has for his immediate family, his mother’s friend Mary Wallace, his father’s

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friend Dirck Follock, and the old slave Jaap, he says of Coejemans, “Andries was the man whom I loved without knowing why” (CB 1:19). Both these details, suggesting a surplus of feeling in Cooper himself, have nothing to do with the overt subject addressed by the Littlepage series. On this level, what was at issue in the Anti-Rent War was not manorial estates up and down the Hudson, but rather the private territory of Cooper’s own past.46 At the same time, Cooper engaged Anti-Rentism intensively, and within an innovative cultural framework. In this regard, the rich narrative and descriptive texture of the books mattered fundamentally to their political subject. Cooper’s detailed presentation of New York’s Dutch cultural legacy, especially in Satanstoe, has often been praised as an early instance of American local color, but we must not overlook its personal significance for Cooper or its analytical function in terms of the Anti-Rent War. Cooper took some of his Dutch details from Anne Macvicar Grant’s equally charming Memoirs of an American Lady (1808), adding to it observations of his own—on, for instance, the Afro-Dutch celebration known as Pinkster or Pinksterfest, on which Cooper offered culturally valuable observations (see SAT CE 56–84).47 But he also drew on and expanded Grant’s astute portrait of the Yankee-Yorker conflict that provided Anti-Rentism, as it had provided New York society in Grant’s day, with its underlying dynamic. Whereas much modern analysis of the conflict has focused somewhat anachronistically on class tensions and economic inequality, for both Grant and Cooper the invasion of New York by Yankee migrants who were unfamiliar with and hostile to New York customs and institutions was far more important. From the New York perspective, migrating Yankees embodied an expansive colonizing spirit that submerged a formerly independent region under the dominating flood of foreign occupiers. Ethnicity and culture mattered profoundly in this story.48 Cooper was not unsympathetic to the Yankees. He understood that their lack of familiarity with local New York practices such as the widespread use of leasehold, and their impatience with the way those practices limited their own freedom, would naturally give rise to the discontent, protest, and violence witnessed in the Anti-Rent War. But for the most part the Yankees fare as poorly in the Littlepage trilogy as they do elsewhere in Cooper’s fiction. If the Anti-Rent War might be viewed today as one of many incidents arising from and contributing to the more general circulation of people and goods in the early republic— and, eventually, to the standardization of institutions, beliefs, and habits across state and regional boundaries—for Cooper, nationalist though he was, it was about New York’s death at the hands of intruders. Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady predated the Anti-Rent War and did not address specific tenant uprisings that had occurred in colonial New York. It

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nonetheless provided much useful background for the Littlepage novels, especially on the Yankee invasion as she and her family had experienced it. The point comes across with real force in Cooper’s handling of land ownership patterns and agricultural development on the early frontier. His family’s experience in Otsego, and perhaps even more in St. Lawrence County, where the novelist set up his general store with a cousin a few years before he became an author (see JFC:EY 216–21), certainly informed his approach. And his 1834 visit to settle up affairs regarding the old “Manor of Feronia” in Broome County, discussed briefly in my sixth chapter, also must have provided background. He confirmed and extended his own impressions, however, by relying extensively on Grant’s discussion of her father’s career as a landlord, an aspect of her book he had already used in Wyandotté a few years earlier. He even chose to locate the fictional grants of Ravensnest and Mooseridge east of Lake George, in territory that he did not know well personally but that was very close to the land Grant’s father owned in what became Vermont.49 That setting in turn made it easy for Cooper to introduce the Yankeeversus-Yorker element into his story. On that topic, Cooper knew a great deal from his family’s experience with the eastern migrants who dominated Otsego, but reading Grant confirmed what he already knew, extended its scope, and gave it deeper background. Grant and her parents, who had seen much of the Yankees during their years in Albany and then later on their Green Mountain property, found them “conceited, litigious, and selfish beyond measure.” If Joel Strides in Wyandotté was one fictional expression of this observation, another and somewhat more sinister one was Jason Newcome in The Chainbearer. Newcome ’s more dangerous allies in that novel, the Timberman (or “Thousandacres”) family of squatters, also clearly derived from the typical Yankees who broke in on the Macvicars’ peace in colonial New York: “Obadiah or Zephaniah, from Hampshire or Connecticut, . . . [who] came in without knocking; sat down without invitation; and lighted their pipes without ceremony; then talked of buying land; and, finally, began a discourse on politics, which would have done honor to Praise God Barebones, or any of the members of his parliament.” The Timberman son who makes the biggest impression in The Chainbearer is, not coincidentally, named Zephaniah. That young man, fancying himself Mordaunt Littlepage’s rival for the hand of Dus Malbone (the niece of Andries Coejemans), attempts to enter her very life, not just the Littlepage premises, without knocking or invitation.50 Yankees made up the bulk of the settlers on Duncan Macvicar’s grant. They proved, like the Timberman family, to be “a set of fierce republicans . . . whom litigious contention had banished from their native province, and who seemed let loose, like Samson’s foxes” (see Judges 15:4)—another Timberman son in The

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Chainbearer is named “Sampson”—“to carry mischief and conflagration wherever they went.” These “all-sufficient personages,” accustomed to applying both law and scripture “to every selfish purpose,” absolutely refused to acknowledge that they held their land from a former redcoat officer like Duncan Macvicar.51 Being addicted to the Yankee pastime of quibbling over boundaries between small freeholds, they now chose to quarrel about the grander lines dividing Anglo-Dutch New York from Puritan New England. As laid down in 1664 via the Duke of York’s charter, the northeastern boundary of the recently conquered province of New York was the Connecticut River—which, once New Hampshire was created in 1679, therefore divided that new province from preexistent New York. In legal terms, the river boundary remained in force up to the 1760s. There was, in other words, no “Vermont,” a name that was made up in the 1770s (by whom exactly is not known) to conjure into existence some sort of organic tie between the Green Mountains and the very lately arrived settlers in “New Connecticut” (one of its slightly older, and more accurate, names) and thus give those settlers the appearance of legitimacy. As every Yorker knew at that time, the proper name for that area had long been and should remain “New York.” The latter province had included these lands in Albany County until 1766, when it created three new counties there, Cumberland, Gloucester, and Charlotte.52 For some years, the New England governments, having long ago expunged the river boundary in the south, tried to ignore it in the north. Their ostensible motive was not the desire for abstract territorial aggrandizement but the need for more arable land to accommodate New England’s burgeoning population. New York, with or without the Crown’s continued support for its established northeastern boundary, represented then, as it always had, a general bar to the westward expansion of New England. Because it was thinly populated and spread over a large and complex territory, New York had small chance of resisting the moves of Obadiah and Zephaniah and their kindred. Furthermore, Yankee pressure on New York’s northeastern zone was not just a matter of individual settlers, such as the Thousandacre/Timberman clan, seeking new land for their own families. Recently, Gov. Benning Wentworth of New Hampshire had made a habit of granting new townships on the far side of the Connecticut River in what remained, as he very well knew, legally part of another English province. Very little of the land Wentworth granted went to actual settlers. For the most part, the grantees were speculators, a fair number of them the governor’s close associates and relatives. Indeed, he was himself one of the biggest beneficiaries of his own grants. If, as Yankees sometimes claimed, and the Anti-Rent farmers repeated, New York land titles were suspect—this was especially the case with regard to Livingston Manor and the Philipse Highland Patent—Wentworth proved with astonishing boldness that, adept as New Yorkers were at fraud, they had no corner on the game.53

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Owing to New York concern over Wentworth’s depredations, the British government was asked to consider the conflicts between these “Hampshire Grants” and those emanating from the New York government, some of which covered identical parcels. A 1764 Order in Council, reaffirming the Connecticut River as New York’s northeastern boundary, might have settled the issue, but the quick succession of events caused by the 1765 Stamp Act left it unresolved as the Revolution came on. We need not enter here into the details of how, out of the resulting chaos of titles and the lack of governmental continuity, the independent republic (and then state) of Vermont was cobbled together. What matters for considering Cooper’s Littlepage series is the way in which he made use of these historical facts as background to the Anti-Rent War and as a source for the dramatic conflict in his second novel, in which the Timbermans represent the Yankee model of self-validating expansion while the Littlepages represent the Yorker model of orderly, supervised division of wild lands. Thereby he embodied his cultural and historical analysis of the Anti-Rent War.54 Satanstoe specifies that the lands at Mooseridge and Ravensnest lay “in the country near the Hampshire Grants” (SAT CE 52; see also 290), a point reiterated in The Chainbearer (see CB 1:25). Then, in a long passage at the start of the latter book’s second volume, Cooper outlines what that fact meant by having Mordy narrate the history of the conflict between New York and New Hampshire and the eventual emergence of the state of Vermont (see CB 2:7–8). As the major contests in The Chainbearer are a microcosm of this larger geopolitical struggle, the details are diagnostic. We learn that each of the Littlepage properties had seen some preliminary development before the Revolution. At Ravensnest, which Herman Mordaunt decided to lease rather than sell outright, the French and Indian War forced the fifteen or twenty tenants to whom he had already conveyed parcels to declare “an intention of abandoning their huts and clearings”—already, some have “gone off towards the Hampshire Grants, whence they had originally come” (SAT CE 273). After that war’s end, other willing settlers, mostly from the Hampshire Grants as well, migrated across the provincial border and took up parcels there. By the time The Chainbearer opens, their leases (“for three lives; or failing these, for a full term of one-and-twenty years”—CB 1:175) have mostly expired.55 Hence Mordy remarks before going to Ravensnest that the tenants are all “remaining at will, waiting for more quiet times to renew their engagements” (CB 1:25). During his first two weeks once he gets there, he and Frank Malbone (brother of Mordy’s future wife Ursula, or “Dus”) therefore set future rents for the estate’s properties by “classifying the farms; putting the lowest into the shilling category; others into the eighteen pence; and a dozen farms or so into the two shillings” (CB 1:173).56

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Nominally in charge on the Littlepage lands during the war has been Jason Newcome, who holds a lease on a Mooseridge mill seat. His rule over the grants has been marked by dishonesty and chicanery. In Satanstoe, he has made clear his dismissive attitude toward all things in and of New York: “Every thing was Dutch, according to his view of matters, and when it failed of being Dutch why, it was York-Colony. The doors were not in the right places; the windows were too large, when they were not too small; things had a cabbage-look; the people smelt of tobacco; and hasty-pudding was called ‘suppaan’ ” (SAT CE 144).57 In The Chainbearer, Newcome’s scorn, laughable as it is, underwrites a disposition for theft. He not only connives with the Timberman clan when it sets up its Vermont-style republic on unclaimed Mooseridge lands; he also becomes the main wholesale customer for the vast quantities of timber the squatters rob from the surrounding forests and run through their makeshift sawmill. Cooper loathed Newcome as he loathed few of his many other Yankee characters. At the same time, he was not entirely without sympathy for Aaron Timberman/ Thousandacres. He gave the squatter a kind of rough, wild dignity that Newcome, sneaky and manipulative (and educated) as he is, cannot match. Like Ishmael Bush in The Prairie, Thousandacres has strong if not good qualities, and it is clear that Mordy speaks for the novelist in declaring that, despite all he knew of the squatter’s character, he found “something imposing” in his manner (CB 2:52).58 Having situated Aaron Thousandacres as a squatter on Mooseridge, Cooper then set against him, as the man charged with reducing that grant to marketable form for its lawful owners, the even more impressive Coejemans—an uneducated man who, the admiring Mordy remarks, is “illiterate almost to greatness” (CB 1:19). Cooper thus gave his readers a miniature version of the Anti-Rent War as he understood it. It was not primarily a struggle between the landed and the landless. Coejemans stems from the Dutch landowning class, but it is his Dutchness, and all that it marks in terms of values and vision as a Yorker, not his link to the Coeymans Patent, that matters in the conflict with Timberman. Of course there are landholders in the trilogy, and we must be careful not to ignore them. Even so, Cooper saw the Coejemans-versus-Timberman clash as a dramatic condensation of the larger cultural fight in its earlier phase.59 While Cooper was in the midst of his labors on The Chainbearer, events in the real Anti-Rent War made those in his fictional one much more difficult to manage. By the time he wrote the preface to The Chainbearer, the Anti-Rent War had resulted in the murder, on August 7, 1845, of Undersheriff Osman Steele of Delaware County (see CB 1:iii). This violent assault, arising outside the book, intruded into it. The novel went into production shortly after Steele ’s murder, so that event could not affect the book’s overall tone; but it arguably affected how Cooper chose to end it. The mortal finale, in which the two patriarchs, the

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orderly Coejemans and the anarchic squatter Timberman, are shot by unknown assailants, probably was improvised by Cooper both to echo the Steele murder and to hint at the darker turn public events seemed to be taking.60 Osman Steele had been shot when the massed “Injins,” deciding to prevent the sale of cattle on a farm in Andes, Delaware County, formed a cordon around the herd and blocked the gate so that potential purchasers had no access. Steele and another official, Delhi constable Erastus Edgerton, jumped their horses over the gate with their guns drawn. Edgerton, according to some reports, fired into the crowd. Then the masked protesters, ordered by one of their “chiefs” to fire at the enemy’s horses, let off a volley, killing both of the mounts. Edgerton was unhurt, but Steele was hit by three bullets and died that night.61 Although Coejemans and Timberman do not see eye to eye, the violence that suddenly engulfs them is not really prepared for in the chapters Cooper wrote before Osman Steele’s death. In fact, the two men—by background, disposition, and character—seem closer to each other than to other figures who, like Mordy, come from the markedly different world of settled New York. Timberman, after Mordy has tried to convince him of his errors, turns to Coejemans and says: “There’s no use in talkin’ to this young spark, Chainbearer. . . . [H]e’s passed his days in the open country, and has got open-country ways, and notions, and talk; and them’s things I don’t pretend to understand. You’re woods, mainly; he’s open country; and I’m clearin’. There ’s a difference atween each; but woods and clearin’ come clussest; and so I’ll say my say to you. Be you, now, r’ally disposed to accommodate, or not, old Andries?” (CB 2:143). What Timberman wants is to marry his son Zeph to the Chainbearer’s niece, Dus Malbone. The squatter tries to present this idea gradually, but the Dutchman’s deafness to every innuendo at last forces Timberman to state it directly, at which point Coejemans roughly scorns any such alliance. Not only has Timberman’s manipulation failed; Coejemans, asserting his own superiority to the squatter and his clan, rouses the Yankee ’s ire. Timberman ominously replies, “Beware, Chainbearer; beware how you aggravate us; natur’ can[’]t and won’t bear every thing.” The Chainbearer does not fear Timberman and wants nothing from him. He therefore prepares to lead Dus out of the squatter’s camp. Mordy, watching passively, sees the great old Dutchman wave the crowd aside (“with a steadiness and dignity that I began to think would really prevail”) so he can pass with her. He seems assured of a moral victory until “a rifle suddenly flashed; the report was simultaneous, and old Andries Coejemans fell.” The implication is that one of the squatter’s family—someone in and of the crowd (like the costumed “Injins” on that Delaware County farm)—has pulled the trigger. It was likely not Aaron himself, who “roared like a maddened bull, and . . . was soon hoarse with uttering his menaces and maledictions,” but rather his

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eldest son Tobit, who is quieter yet “probably more dangerous.” Soon, with similar anonymity, someone shoots Timberman (probably it is the Onondaga ally of the Littlepages, Susquesus, seeking revenge for Coejemans), and the deaths of the two old men, putting a sudden end to their argument, remind us that heated talk can have mortal consequences (CB 2:148–49).

Homecoming After this tragic denouement to the second Littlepage book, for many readers The Redskins proves anticlimactic. Yet there is a certain amount of ambiguity in how Cooper conceived of and presented the latest members of the Littlepage family, and how he mounted his most direct attack on the Anti-Renters. He clearly did not make Uncle Ro and Hugh Littlepage likable—moreover, I think that the decision to forego ingratiating his readers in this regard was a quite conscious one. That was partly because he viewed the Anti-Rent War as a crisis about rights, not popularity. But it was partly, too, because his own interests were not perfectly aligned with those of the landlord class, and he therefore sabotaged, or at least moderated, his chronicle as he came to its current phase. Because this point is not at all self-evident, it needs to be carefully considered. In some ways, the last pair of Littlepages are out of touch not only with the Anti-Renters but also with the evident values of Cooper himself. This last point is especially clear in matters of race and ethnicity. Throughout the trilogy, Cooper has carefully sought to establish the scale of historical change in New York across the near century that the books cover. In another instance of this effort, Cooper has Hugh specifically address the abundant use of the term “nigger” among the white (and indeed black) characters of his world, which he notes has diminished over time: “my uncle Ro was of the old school himself, and would say ‘nigger.’ ” Neither Hugh nor the ancient former slave Jaap employs that word in The Redskins, but in the very scene in which Hugh draws that selfcongratulatory distinction, he and his uncle indulge, with their lawyer friend Jack Dunning, in a snide discussion of the Irish servants who are replacing the old black ones (RED 1:56–58). I agree with Jerome McGann’s recent comment that this last scene offers us “a devastating exposure—the book has many—of three narrow and privileged men whose bigotry toward ‘niggers’ and recent Irish immigrants is on full view.” In Satanstoe, it is Guert Ten Eyck who uses the “N-word” most insistently, probably a similar indication of its recessive nature in New York society in Cooper’s own day (see SAT CE 337, 366).62 In these and other regards, Uncle Ro and Hugh Littlepage make a worse case for genteel privilege (if not also for landlord rights) than the pretty ineffectual Mordy in the second novel. Their choice to mask themselves by adopting

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false identities inscribed with ethnic difference and lower-class status seems like an instance of slumming. While it may not have been Cooper’s conscious intent to have these two “Jarman pedlars” resemble their actual prototype as little as the Anti-Rent Injins in their odd gear resemble the real Indians who enter the story in the book’s second volume, a reader cannot help but see the similarity. Furthermore, the landlords seem to be more engaged with their game, superficial as it is, than with the very real threats that are posed to landed estates in New York. It is as if playing at history is fun. The Redskins opens not in New York but rather in Paris. Uncle Ro and Hugh in this European moment are in some superficial ways stand-ins for Cooper. Not only do they live in Uncle Ro’s hôtel particulier on rue St. Dominique (the Coopers’ last and best address in the French capital); they also have returned recently from a long trip to the east and south that in some ways carried out, fictionally, the ambitious 1828 trip Cooper had planned to take with Gouverneur M. Wilkins. Yet the two Littlepage wanderers, absent from New York now for five years, part company with their creator on several significant grounds. Cooper had to work hard, very hard, to ensure that his family could take advantage of its European sojourn. His literary labors continued, and deepened, as the stay grew longer. By contrast, Uncle Ro is so flush from his Manhattan holdings (and his own fortunate yields from the otherwise unprofitable real estate scheme, “Dibbletonborough,” at Corny’s “Satanstoe Neck”) that he has been able to buy his “small hotel in the faubourg.” The major part of that structure is “let to permanent tenants,” but Ro maintains an apartment (“or rather appartement, for the words are not exactly synonymous,” Hugh prissily insists) that, when he is not occupying it himself, he rents out to “some American family”—some American family like the Coopers, perhaps? The tenants’ money allows Uncle Ro to maintain it in style (RED 1:10).63 Uncle Ro is no Corny Littlepage, whose first commercial endeavor in Satanstoe is to sell pork and other rural commodities to the British Army. He is also no Cooper. The recent European experience of the Littlepages does not transcribe the novelist’s—rather, it is a fantasy the novelist could afford only in fiction, and even then one he did not completely endorse. On this front, the models for Ro and Hugh were the well-heeled Americans Cooper had encountered while in Europe, including, as it happened, some members of the Van Rensselaer family. On seeing one of the latter during his own working visit to London in 1828, the novelist wrote Mary Jay that the young man’s “Dutch blood” had been “disturbed by the hauteur of the English.” This was most likely William Paterson Van Rensselaer, future heir of the “East Manor,” who had graduated from Yale in 1824 and then traveled for four years in Europe as a sometime student of the law. Cooper added to Jay that he had sought to correct

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Van Rensselaer on the subject of the English and then sent him on his way. “I think he will come home right as to England,” Cooper reassured Jay, and perhaps himself (LJ 1:359).64 The outcome, though, proved otherwise. Cooper saw William again in Rome a couple of years later, along with his slightly younger brother Philip, who had finished Yale in 1826 (on whom see LJ 1:401). The novelist clearly did not like what he saw and heard of these countrymen, who were half-brothers of his boyhood friend Stephen Van Rensselaer IV. On learning in 1831 that both young men had arrived back in New York, he hastened to update Mary Jay: “They mean well, but made themselves remarked among their countrymen abroad, by underrating every thing at home.” Although Cooper believed that the passage of time would “correct the weakness,” at present he rated William in particular as “a downright grumbler” (LJ 2:109). The material contrasts between the big landlords and Cooper were as stark as the social ones. The scale of the Van Rensselaer family’s life was far beyond anything the Coopers (or the DeLanceys, for that matter) might enjoy. They were the Vanderbilts of the age. On his way to Pennsylvania late in 1839, the novelist had learned from James Stevenson, another of his early Albany friends and now one of the dead patroon’s trustees, how amply the elder Van Rensselaer’s widow and children were provided for: the six younger children of this second wife were to receive legacies of $200,000 each, while Philip, whom Cooper had seen in Rome, was due $500,000. The two older sons, Stephen IV (Cooper’s boyhood friend) and his much younger half-brother William (the “grumbler”) were guaranteed annual incomes of between $40,000 and $50,000, assuming that the back rents on the half of the enormous manor each inherited covered their father’s outstanding debts (see LJ 3:448–50). Here were revealed for Cooper the cavernous gaps separating his own situation as a working writer from that of the largely idle Van Rensselaer heirs. What Cooper had been due via his father’s will—property and/or money totaling $50,000—was just about what each of the two Rensselaerswyck heirs might expect in annual income, while it was only a tenth of the cash settlement Philip was promised and a mere quarter of what each of Philip’s six younger siblings was to receive. Even allowing for changes in the value of currency and the scale of the economy between 1809 and 1839, this was an enormous contrast. Furthermore, what had been promised to Cooper never materialized. Of course the same possibility existed for the Van Rensselaers as well, although even in the worst scenario then imaginable (the Anti-Rent War not yet having begun), most of the patroon’s heirs would be safe. The youngest children’s cash share, for instance, was covered outside the manor—by “city lots and commercial buildings in Albany and Manhattan, land in Hamilton and St. Lawrence counties, bank stocks and New York securities,” worth in the aggregate close to a million

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dollars.65 The gaps between Cooper’s circumstances and those of the patroon’s heirs may not have been unbridgeable, at least socially, but each attempt to cross over probably reminded Cooper how huge the distinction was. He still socialized with young Stephen during these years, although mostly on an accidental basis. In June 1842, when on his way to New York City, Cooper thus “found Stephen Rensselaer in the boat,” as he reported to Susan, “and he gave me a berth in his state-room, where I passed a cool comfortable night” (LJ 4:296). Yet even here one notes the sense of sufferance, as well as the contrast in scale. If he had not encountered his old friend, what accommodations would the novelist have had? Certainly not a stateroom—probably a seat somewhere on deck or inside where he could doze. Literature no longer could underwrite such modest expenses, even on what were, after all, business trips to New York or Philadelphia. Cooper was not overtly envious of the differences setting him off from these landlords, but he was hardly oblivious to them personally or in a larger social sense. During his December 1839 visit to Philadelphia, he picked up and passed on to his wife revealing news about the habits of the patroon’s family from Elizabeth Rush, a close friend of the DeLanceys: “I hear the Rensellaers live here in great style. The young ladies have the reputation of possessing $16000 per an. each, and all the élégants are on the alert.” To be sure, he thought “$6000” a better estimate, “for their property is not productive.” Yet the show, however well or ill supported, was all too obvious: “Mrs. Rush tells me they keep five carriages—two of which, no doubt belong to the young men, and one to each of the ladies.” Cooper added that one of those well-cushioned ladies, Euphemia Van Rensselaer, was “attached to John Van Buren”—the former president’s son—“but will not marry him, on account of her mother’s opposition.” Cooper closed his letter, “gossip, gossip—all is gossip,” but the message, murky as its information might be, was morally clear. Although John Van Buren was no perfect gentleman, one suspects that the Van Rensselaers felt themselves too good, perhaps now on mostly monetary grounds, for any member of the upstart Albany Regency. Adding edge to Cooper’s gossip is the fact that in the same letter he assured Susan that he was keeping his feet dry by wearing “galoches” as he trudged, carriageless, about the wintry city on his literary errands—and that, worried by the recent failure of a local bank, he was relieved to find that his own institution, though its officers were alarmed, seemed safe. He added with audible relief that on a recent exchange, evidently of English notes, he had lost only twenty dollars (LJ 3:455–56).66 Cooper’s observation of the young Van Rensselaer heirs while abroad (and perhaps his knowledge of his boyhood friend Stephen’s personal problems— “volatility, arrogance, and folly”) spurred him to develop Uncle Ro and Hugh Littlepage as something other than the mouthpieces for himself that hasty

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readers sometimes take them to be.67 At times, Ro and Hugh insist so strongly on the landlords’ case that they are indistinguishable from the opposing but obviously biased Anti-Rent lecturer who holds forth on the farmers’ cause in the Little Nest meeting house at the end of the book’s first volume. Yet it is important to remember that it is Hugh who characterizes the lecturer as “fluent, inflated, and anything but logical” (RED 1:238), not the book’s “editor,” and it is not at all clear that Cooper completely endorsed Hugh’s take on the man. For one thing, the novelist made the lecturer a Democrat, like himself, and gave the man, in addition to a stock of half-truths, a sort of rough political courage. Knowing that most members of his Anti-Rent audience are Whigs, the man not only admits but also celebrates the fact that he is “a Democrat,—yes, a Democrat. Glorious appellation! I delight in it! It is my pride, my boast, my very virtue. Let but the people truly rule, and all must come well” (RED 1:243).68 It is clear that the lecturer, regardless of the party affiliation he shares with the novelist, is no more a stand-in for Cooper than are the latest Littlepages. It is instead from Tim Hall, one of two pro-landlord tenants in the book, that we receive a more accurate definition of lowercase democratic faith as Cooper understood and indeed still endorsed it. Hall, who asserts that he has “no interest . . . separate from the general good of society,” tells the assembled citizens: “I, too, am a democrat, . . . but I do not understand democracy to mean anything like that which has been described by the last speaker. I tell the gentleman plainly, that if he is a democrat, I am none, and if I am a democrat, he is none. By democracy I understand a government in which the sovereign power resides in the body of the nation; and not in a few, or in one.” He adds that this principle gives the people no more authority to do wrong than a sovereign king has the right to commit injustices against his subjects (RED 1:245–46). Cooper could not have said most of this better in his own voice. One suspects that Tim Hall owns a well-read copy of The American Democrat.69 Cooper’s trio of novels had little effect on the course of the public AntiRent debate, or the resolution—rather, irresolution—that accompanied that debate. The important point is that he grounded his own critique of the movement not on the material interests of the landlord classes but rather on the legal and institutional questions the Anti-Renters and their supporters raised. Bolder thinking, as McCurdy has argued, might have answered those questions and, while resolving the difficulties the tenants faced, treated the landlords fairly too. Such bolder thinking, however, did not emerge in New York during Cooper’s last years, and not just in the legislature or headquarters of the political parties. The Van Rensselaer heirs, lacking the sort of commitment to the manor that their father had possessed, displayed a more detached turn of mind. Stephen and his half-brother William, treating their respective shares of the manor as a

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source of money rather than a landed source of identity and value, sold out their estates and even their mansions. Much as William’s mother lived lavishly in Philadelphia, far from Rensselaerswyck, the last patroon’s sons abandoned their domain and the social identity that for so long had been implicated in it. Cooper, by placing Uncle Ro and Hugh Littlepage in Paris at the outset, no doubt was anticipating this very sense of willful alienation. At the end of The Redskins, Cooper as editor adds a postscript. In it he divulges that, having recently spoken with Hugh—a lovely impossibility, of course—he knows what that last of the Littlepages has in mind should things turn against him and his ilk in the United States. He will leave the country for Europe, for “he has the refuge of Florence open, where he can reside among the other victims of oppression, with the advantage of being admired as a refugee from republican tyranny” (RED 2:230). Cooper himself at just this time was wishing that he might relocate his family to Europe, but he had neither the means nor the real intention of doing so (see LJ 5:121, 131–32). He differed from Hugh and Uncle Ro, too, in having come home in the 1830s in his own person, undisguised and unrepentant, and in having faced the Anti-Rent crisis, like earlier troubles, fully and trenchantly. Cooper was more interested in understanding the crisis than in using it as a metaphor for his own alienation or deploying Hugh and Uncle Ro as alter egos. His preface to the final Littlepage novel offered his readers a detailed engagement with the legal and political context of the Anti-Rent movement—including, for instance, a discussion of New York’s 1787 Act on Tenures, which had changed land law in important ways (see RED 1:v), the ancient Quia Emptores statute (see RED 1:vii–viii), and the recent act taxing “rents on long leases” (RED 1:x). In the body of the novel itself, Cooper also gave pretty accurate accounts of the whole war to date, as well as of specific parts of it (see RED 1:34–35), and he built some of the discussion of the issues in the Anti-Rent War out of similarly concrete materials. Without naming his fellow Democrat, Gov. Silas Wright, Cooper thus had Uncle Ro both praise the state ’s chief executive for behaving “perfectly well” in some regards and criticize him for having proposed to the legislature a plan for allowing tenants, on the deaths of their landlords, to purchase their farms in fee simple, as Wright certainly did (RED 1:36–38).70 Cooper had done his homework for this book, although over the course of several years rather than in a rushed study as he wrote it. He was also able to see artistic openings in the crisis, openings that had little to do with his particular political views on it. The portrait of Opportunity Newcome, Jason’s granddaughter and a would-be suitor of Hugh Littlepage, is inspired. She is no Anneke Mordaunt, who loses the ability to act even for her own protection on the Hudson River ice and must be saved by Corny in Satanstoe. Opportunity, as her name implies, is opportunistic, but like Aaron Timberman in

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The Chainbearer she has a certain subliminal appeal to the reader, and to Cooper. Artistically inspired, too, are the slippery manipulations by which Hugh, who has no real romantic interest in Opportunity (though he does rather admire her energy as she gallops around Ravensnest on her horse, sometimes at night), seeks to use her without quite trashing his own genteel code. He is an opportunist, too. In this regard he reveals in another way his marked difference from his forebears and his similarity to those who are, on other grounds, his self-maximizing opponents. Much as his Uncle Ro is no mystical guardian of the family property but a man who can profit from real estate speculation, Hugh is compromised—and purposefully so—by Cooper. Among their sources are the opponents Cooper challenged and fought, as suggested in chapter 8, during the libel suits. Not quite so effective, but interesting nonetheless, is the manner in which Cooper decided to hold over from Satanstoe and The Chainbearer the two nonwhite retainers of the Littlepage family, the former slave Jaap/Jof/Jop/Jacob and the solitary “Onondago” (as the book sometimes names him) Susquesus. Although white tenants are fertile in their resentments about the Littlepages, these two men by their ancient commitment as well as their longevity provide a model of social continuity and loyalty about which the Newcomes (and perhaps the modern Van Rensselaers and Littlepages) know little. Rather like Natty Bumppo in The Prairie, they have lived into the era superseding their own. The latter comparison also suggests that the real Plains Indians Cooper introduced into the book as a means of highlighting how fake the masked Anti-Rent protesters are (hence the novel’s subtitle, Indian and Injin) have come in some sense from Natty’s world. There is, to be sure, something stagey about their sudden appearance at Ravensnest. They have long heard tell of Susquesus and, having visited their “Great Father” at Washington, decide that they must come north to pay him homage before returning to the West. Cooper tried to make the details of their visit plausible (these he probably dredged up from his own encounter with Plains chiefs in New York City in 1821—see JFC:EY 474–80), even to the point of bringing into the book a latter-day Leather-Stocking in the person of Manytongues, their white interpreter. What may not work at the level of plot, though, works more impressively at the level of moral meaning. Only by importing into this debased modern frontier the figures who belong more properly to the earlier scenes of his own fiction (and the nation’s life) can Cooper stress both the specific thefts white America has committed against the Indians and the general declension of republican society—as well as the debasement that the republic has worked on his own best imaginings. Susquesus endures as both a moral yardstick and a stabilizing force. So for that matter does Jaap. But a society that has no better use for these venerable figures than installing them in their museum-like cabin is a society that will pay the cost of abandoning

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the past, including the institutional past that is under assault in the Anti-Rent War. As in The Pioneers, in which the heroic accomplishments of a figure like Capt. John Lawton from The Spy are remembered only in the name of a tavern dubbed the Bold Dragoon (see JFC:EY 344–45), the frontier Cooper had conjured into being as a literary topic and a moral locale exists by the end of the Littlepage novels only as something to be mocked, and for the lowest of purposes.

“The Rights of Property” Cooper’s investment in property as a theme in his mid-1840s books, although funded in part by the deep personal memories to which I have referred, also had a decidedly literary element to it. Because it has proved all too easy for readers to think of him as a conservative for whom property was the very basis of civilized order, we must attend carefully to his pronouncements on the subject. In many instances, what he said stemmed from the quite particular issues he was facing as a writer far more than from any political bias or interest. In August 1842, he thus wrote in Bryant’s Evening Post that “the rights of property are connected with all our moral associations” and added that when “property ceases to be protected, the door is open to barbarism.” While this bit of dogma dovetails very well with positions espoused by conservative landholders in the Littlepage books, at the time Cooper made it he was not even thinking of the then-somnolent Anti-Rent War, but rather the timely issue of international copyright. He did not favor fresh legislation on that issue but staunchly defended giving all foreign authors “a right of property in their productions”—for “literary property . . . is as much entitled to be protected, as houses, lands, and merchandise” (LJ 4:303). Even as he was finishing work on the final Littlepage book in May 1846 and preparing to go off yet again to Philadelphia to see a new piece of his own literary property through John Fagan’s shop, Cooper took time to reflect again on those concerns. The occasion this time was a letter from James Kirke Paulding, who, now retired from Manhattan to Hyde Park, was planning to resume his interrupted literary career. Having made “a good many bad Bargains,” as he put it, with booksellers and publishers in the past, Paulding thought Cooper a shrewd source of advice about how to make better deals going forward.71 But Cooper disabused him from the start. His own “pecuniary benefits” in the United States were negligible. “The cheap literature has destroyed the value of nearly all literary property,” he admitted with a sort of grim realism, “and after five and twenty years of hard work, I find myself comparatively a poor man. Had I employed the same time in trade, or in travelling as an agent for a manufacturer of pins, I do not doubt I should have been better off, and my children

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independent. The fact is, this country is not sufficiently advanced for any thing intellectual. And the man who expects to rise by any such agency makes a capital mistake, unless he sell himself, soul and body, to a faction” (LJ 5:131–32). Ravensnest as Hugh and his uncle return to reclaim it is also, in this light, a material proxy for the artistic terrain of Cooper’s past. Feeling, as he had in The Deerslayer, a need to clear away what others had made of his territory, Cooper restaged the frontier in the Littlepage tales as a Cooper literary property, in the process infusing the mythos with new meanings. He was writing about the immediate crisis in New York, and believed what he said about it. But he was also writing about his own career, and in two senses: about the forces during this era of “cheap literature” that were encroaching on—squatting on—his property; and about the forms he had invented two decades earlier and what value they still might have culturally if not financially. Moreover, the slippage between Hugh and Uncle Ro and the real landlords like the Van Rensselaers on the one hand, and between both the imagined and real landlords and Cooper himself on the other, expressed how poorly he felt he fit in the world of social privilege into which his wife had been effortlessly born. Writing had been the means he had constructed to fit himself into Susan’s universe. But now what value did writing have? He might just as well have been a traveling representative—a peddler?— for a “manufacturer of pins,” sharp and bright but tiny, inconsequential industrial products. As with Afloat and Ashore, in the three Littlepage books Cooper recorded not just the overt concerns of his social being but also the more hidden worries that he usually did not openly avow. The letter to Paulding bespoke his camaraderie with the fellow writer, Democrat, and New Yorker, but its blunt surface was not traceable to any particular intimacy with the man. It sprang instead from the raw feelings that, given vent in The Redskins most recently, help explain the vigor with which Cooper took the landlords’ plight partly (though never completely) as his own. And of course the Littlepage series itself was a piece of literary property. Or rather it was a set of properties, for although Cooper first mentioned his project as “the forth coming work, which I call ‘The Family of Littlepage,’ ” suggesting the larger coherence of the three books, the series did not really count as a single “work,” as Afloat and Ashore arguably did. It also was written and produced seriatim, involving much work at Cooper’s desk and much traveling between Otsego and Philadelphia (LJ 5:6). One bright spot was that his recent success in forging his new relationship with Burgess and Stringer, solidified by their publication of the second part of Afloat and Ashore in New York, made production easier than it had been for Cooper in some years. There were delays, but, buoyed by the new leaf he had turned in shifting from Lea and Blanchard to the New Yorkers, he produced much manuscript and corrected

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many proofs within a period of slightly more than a year. His concerns about literary property certainly did not slow his hand but rather, as was often true for Cooper, sped it up. Cooper had begun work on Satanstoe in the fall of 1844, and early the following March, he sent John Fagan from New York, “By express to-day . . . a few chapters,” telling him, “Begin at once, as I am in a great hurry, and wish to save time.” Three days later he was at Head’s hotel, in Philadelphia, and in another week—that is, on March 14—he already was done proofing the first volume (LJ 5:12, 16). Cooper then returned home to finish writing the second volume, which he brought to Philadelphia and left with the stereotyper while he himself attended the May 8 wedding of Shubrick’s daughter Mary to Dr. George Clymer in Washington. Once back in Philadelphia, he went through the second-volume proofs before leaving for New York on May 15. Having promised Bentley in a letter the previous month that he would ship the remainder of his copy by the May 16 steamer, he evidently met that commitment or put the material for Bentley on another ship soon after and then left for home (see LJ 5:19–27, passim). Cooper managed the economic part of the process as deftly as the production details. According to an agreement with Burgess and Stringer reached the same day he sent Fagan that first batch of copy early in March, he authorized the firm to print thirty-five hundred copies from his plates before he reclaimed the book and could begin reprinting it on his own.72 The arrangement with Bentley was more complicated, largely because of a confusion in Bentley’s overall account with Cooper. But by dint of much communication and several adjustments, once Satanstoe was done the novelist had cut an existing overdraft against Bentley in half (see LJ 5:6–7, 18–21). In London, the novel came out on June 10; in New York, on June 18.73 Cooper had already begun active work on The Chainbearer by mid-June, although tracking its progress is difficult. If, as I have suggested, Cooper changed its intended conclusion after learning of the August 7 murder of Undersheriff Osman Steele, then he probably was well into the second volume by that date: the murders of Coejemans and Thousandacres happen in chapters 25 and 26, respectively. Since finishing with Satanstoe, he once again had been working quite efficiently, and indeed from that point on he appears to have completed the writing quickly. By September 23, when he reported to Bentley from Manhattan that The Chainbearer was “now nearly stereotyped,” he accordingly drew on the publisher for the full amount due him on it (£200), correctly noting that he thereby was discharging the remainder of his overdraft (LJ 5:55–56). While he could not finish proofing as speedily as he imagined since he had to tarry in New York City so he could attend to affairs in the Episcopal Church (some of them “very laborious”—LJ 5:75), once released from those obligations on October 1

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he rushed to Philadelphia that same day and went immediately to Fagan’s establishment, no doubt picking up proofs to read in his room at Head’s hotel. The stereotyper was close to being done, and Cooper worked so furiously that he had finished proofing the first volume two days later and he and Fagan’s crew were then “hard at work on vol. II.” He reported to his wife on the eleventh that he expected to finish proofing that afternoon and would leave for Manhattan again the next day, as he most likely did (LJ 5:72, 79).74 On the thirteenth, he arranged for Bentley’s package to go on the New York steamer (along with a second package containing the sheets of his daughter Susan’s novel, Elinor Wyllys, which Fagan had likewise stereotyped and which Cooper urged Bentley to issue in England—see LJ 5:81–82). Also while in New York at this time, Cooper met with Burgess and Stringer and reached an agreement on the book. Its terms in the main copied those for Satanstoe. To ensure that Bentley’s rights were not infringed, Cooper specified that the New Yorkers not publish before November 25. That was a useful caution, as the two firms were operating on very similar schedules: Bentley published the book on November 19 (S&B 141) and Burgess and Stringer by November 26, according to Cooper himself (see LJ 5:99).75 By that last date, Cooper was well into composition of The Redskins. He had informed Bentley in mid-October that it would be “ready in the spring” (LJ 5:82), and in a January 1846 letter he more specifically wrote, “It is in a fair way, and will be ready in March to go forward altogether” (LJ 5:116).76 Had Cooper been able to keep up this pace, as he was clearly capable of doing, he could have met his projected deadline. But delays stemming from health concerns of his son Paul and especially his wife slowed him.77 Susan’s serious but unnamed illness (perhaps a heavy bout with her always worrisome asthma) in particular kept him close to home “for a month,” meaning that he could not leave for Philadelphia until the third week of May, with the rest of the now completed manuscript in his baggage (LJ 5:148). He thought proofing would be done by early June, although he cautioned Susan that he would have to tarry some days in New York City thereafter (see LJ 5:140).78 Fagan was producing forty pages a day—and Cooper was obviously proofing that much, too—but even so, problems with the shipments to Bentley threatened to delay the appearance of the English edition until after the American came out (see LJ 5:147, 157–58). In the end, a delay in New York kept Burgess and Stringer from publishing until “a few days” before Cooper wrote Bentley on July 20 to assuage his concern. The book appeared in London, under the title Ravensnest; or, the Redskins, on July 6 and in New York much later that month or early in August (BAL 2:298–300; LJ 5:164n2; S&B 145).79 During a brief visit to New York City in late March and early April, Cooper had worked out an agreement with Burgess and Stringer that differed from and

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indeed altered those for the previous two novels.80 He had reached terms with Bentley some time earlier but was so unhappy with the state of affairs between them that he warned the publisher, prematurely as it would turn out, “This work closes our arrangement” (LJ 5:148).81 Cooper’s gross receipts for the entire Littlepage series came to about $7,200—half from Burgess and Stringer and half from Bentley. Because Cooper’s largest out-of-pocket expense for the three novels was the series of bills from Fagan (a total of slightly more than $1,250), his net on the series was just shy of $6,000. As he continued to own the plates for the three books, which had a residual value, the latter figure is somewhat understated. Even so, given the subject of the Littlepage series and the novels’ realworld connections, one wonders whether it ever occurred to Cooper that what he had earned by the considerable expense of his wits across about a year and a half was considerably less than what each of the young Van Rensselaer daughters received per year for her incidentals. And, although Cooper’s gains in this instance were certainly significant, he no doubt knew that they represented only about a third of what he had earned per book in his heyday. The letter he wrote to James K. Paulding in May 1846, just as he made his second and final draft on Bentley for The Redskins (see LJ 5:148), may have derived its grim tone—as in the line about that “manufacturer of pins”—from Cooper’s reflections on where he was and where he once had been.

C H A P T E R

T H I R T E E N

Florida and the Pacific

T

he mid-1840s marked the peak of Cooper’s productivity. In addition to the five novels published between June 1844 and July 1846, during the same period he not only completed and then collected in book form his naval biographies, but also brought out his “Elaborate Review” of the Somers court-martial. And he was on the verge of developing yet further projects that, in their concern with distant settings, represented a new direction in his art. The first in order of time was a serialized novel called “The Islets of the Gulf; or Rose Budd,” which was the final fruit of his connection with Graham’s Magazine, where it ran from November 1846 (a few months after The Redskins was published) until March 1848. George R. Graham, who himself suggested the project in April of the earlier year, knew exactly what he wanted: “a sea story full of incident, and I think character—for a little love ‘goes a great ways’ in making a magazine sketch attractive & popular with the readers of the lighter magazines.”1 There had, of course, been very little love of the sort Graham meant in the naval pieces, or indeed in the “Pocket Handkerchief.” Cooper accepted Graham’s point with seeming equanimity, and during his next trip to Philadelphia that June signed a contract for the story. Entitled to secure copyright of the work in

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his own name, Cooper also retained the right to republish it in other formats in the United States, but, barring unreasonable delays on the magazine ’s part, not “until the whole tale has been first published” in Graham’s. He was to be paid $1,000 for the story, a large sum given its length (ten monthly installments of, usually, twelve Graham’s pages each) and the low overhead the project would have for its author.2 The last point was important. Despairing at this moment of receiving fair compensation from American book publishers, Cooper was looking for new arrangements that could save money or, better still, positively make it. It was in early May, about a month before signing the Graham contract, that he had written his dark analysis for James Kirke Paulding, for whom he emphatically added: “were it not for the convenience of correcting proof sheets, I would not publish in this country at all. I have a work in contemplation, that will be secured here, to cut off the profits of pirates, but which I do not mean to publish in America, at all, any farther than may be necessary to secure the copy right” (LJ 5:131).3 The “work in contemplation” was the very tale for Graham’s. Alert to possibilities for it outside the United States, Cooper kept Richard Bentley posted on the question from nearly the start, writing when he was back in Philadelphia and clearly had been speaking with Graham (but before they signed the June 3 contract): “I am negotiating here to publish a nautical tale in a Magazine— Graham’s,” then added, “and I should like to know what could be done with it, on your side of the water” (LJ 5:148). Evidently he was thinking about serial publication there, too, although he was vague enough that Bentley responded as if he had been offered book rights. Once Cooper finally persuaded Graham, by the end of 1846 or the beginning of 1847, to allow the tale ’s extension to fifteen parts, he was able to reach agreement with Bentley for issuing it as a book in England after Bentley had run it as a serial there, too.4 Generally speaking, Cooper adapted well to the demands of magazine publication. He certainly kept ahead of Graham’s. For instance, he managed to send the July 1847 installment (number nine) to Bentley for his Miscellany on May 15, meaning that it had gone to Graham’s well in advance of the usual four-week deadline (see LJ 5:216). In that particular case, Cooper’s expected absence in Michigan in June to tend to the Comstock business may have required more promptness than ordinary. But, be the cause Michigan or the magazine ’s needs, rarely had Cooper shown such exact attention to deadlines when he was primarily a book-writer (see LJ 5:228). Another trip to Michigan that fall caused some difficulty in transmitting copy to Graham for what must have been either the December 1847 or January 1848 installment, but again Cooper handled the matter with aplomb. The installment in question had been long finished. Writing his wife from Detroit on October 20, Cooper gave her instructions for their son

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Paul. He had been using his family Bible as a sort of safe for manuscript (more on this in the next chapter), so he now wrote: “In the Big Bible is the manuscript of Rose Budd. Let Paul take the part which comes next, about eight pages, and enclose it in one of the large envelopes, and direct it to— | George Graham Esquire | Graham’s Magazine | Philadelphia.” He added: “He will know which part to take by its number, he taking the lowest number of course. The paging will also be a guide for him” (LJ 5:243).5 Cooper’s professionalism also showed in the way he kept his various partners mindful of their mutual obligations. On returning to Cooperstown later in October, he readied a package for Bentley that contained “the last of Capt. Spike” (the main title in Bentley’s magazine and book versions). Sending this manuscript copy of the last two installments for Bentley’s convenience, Cooper reminded the Englishman that he relied on his “not anticipating” Graham’s, where the piece would “not end until March.” Cooper himself carried on his business with a scrupulous attention to timing. On November 11, he put that package aboard the steamship Washington, which delivered the material to Britain in time for Bentley to acknowledge its receipt on December 4, at which point the story still had three or four more installments to run (LJ 5:245–46). One further step remained. Over the weeks following, Cooper moved forward with plans for his own American book version (with Burgess and Stringer), which he had determined to call Jack Tier (the name assumed by the character Molly Swash while in disguise aboard the ship of her long-estranged husband, Stephen Spike).6 In midJanuary 1848, Cooper sent his draft preface, along with “the last sheet” of the Graham’s text, to John Fagan, emphasizing that he wanted the stereotyper to finish plates for an American book edition as soon as possible and send them to the New Yorkers by “early in February” (LJ 5:257–58).7 Another challenge Cooper dealt with in regard to this tale-turned-novel concerned its setting. Although the bulk of the action occurs in subtropical seas that were new to Cooper, it eases into the exotic distance by opening in waters very familiar to him and his readers. The first page thus discloses “the halfrigged, brigantine Swash, or Molly Swash,” which soon proves to be a smuggler, tied up to “a wharf of the renowned city of Manhattan” (JT 1:9); once the Molly Swash is able to sail, it furthermore follows a course very like the one pursued by the HMS Coquette as it stalks the eponymous smuggler in Cooper’s most famous New York maritime novel, The Water-Witch. In the sea chase at the heart of that 1830 novel, it will be recalled, the two vessels race up the East River, through Hell Gate, and out into Long Island Sound, whereupon the Witch takes refuge in an Easthampton cove. This is precisely the setting and action at the start of “Islets of the Gulf.” If, in the earlier book, Cooper was exploring what I have called “the sea of memory” as he bid a kind of fictional farewell to the United

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States while working on the heights above the Bay of Sorrento, here he was both connecting to his present location and importing from his pre-European years significant bits of his early New York experience on the same bodies of water. As in his five recent Hudson Valley novels, Cooper was engaging with his own past on several levels at once in “Islets of the Gulf,” a pattern worth some further exploration.8 He thus sited the wharf in “Islets of the Gulf ” about a mile above Corlear’s Hook, in the vicinity of “the old Almshouse—far above the shipyards in fact” (JT 1:10). Located some distance below Turtle Bay, where the Coopers had passed the summer of 1823 (see JFC:EY 389), this was not a part of the shore that bore any special significance for the novelist. But soon he shifted the action toward places he knew very well indeed. The view from the Molly Swash at its mooring ranges from Corlear’s Hook to the lower end of Blackwell’s Island, at which point Cooper’s personal domain commenced. Ordinarily, one might expect Capt. Stephen Spike to take the brigantine down the East River, through the harbor and bay and thence through the Narrows and out past Sandy Hook on his shortest way to Florida. But his covert purposes, given new edge by the sudden appearance of a steam-powered revenue cutter “doubling [Corlear’s] Hook, and going eastward”—that is, toward Hell Gate—determine him to depart in that direction himself once the tide rises from the south, with the goal of lagging behind the cutter until both vessels make the open sea (JT 1:12).9 From this point until the Molly Swash exits between Montauk and Block Island in the third Graham’s installment, the vessel continues to renavigate the channels Cooper had employed in The Water-Witch, but the passage this time is no faint copy of the earlier one. Cooper actually takes more explicit note of old landmarks that held special importance for him but updates them by mentioning new, not altogether pleasant features alongshore. We thus see the old Gibbs farm, Sunswick, where the novelist, long familiar with the site, had lived with his family in the summer of 1825 (see JFC:EY 466–68).10 But here we learn that the place was subdivided after George Gibbs’s death in 1833, so that the once pastoral locale is now (the novel’s narrator sardonically informs us) the prospective site of a “hamlet of villas” called “Ravenswood, though there is neither wood nor ravens to authorize the name.” Slightly farther upriver, where at Hallett’s Cove Cooper had been accustomed to catch the ferries that could take him to Manhattan so he could attend to his literary business while at Sunswick— he was furiously at work on The Last of the Mohicans in 1825—there had been a rechristening as well. It was “Astoria—not that bloody-minded place” at the mouth of the Columbia, about which Washington Irving had written his 1836 narrative, but rather “one of the many suburban villages that are shooting up, like mushrooms in a night, around the great Commercial Emporium” of New

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York (JT 1:31). Although in one sense we are back on the waters of Cooper’s 1830 novel, the adjoining shores would be quite familiar to the greedy likes of Uncle Ro Littlepage and the readers of The Redskins.11 Spike ’s passage through Hell Gate evokes a similarly realistic note when compared with that of Tom Tiller in his magical vessel in The Water-Witch. Passing Blackwell’s Island, Spike veers too close to one hazard, the Hog’s Back, only to rebound toward and become temporarily stranded atop another, the Pot Rock (see JT 1:32–34).12 At this point, we are in the waters of Satanstoe, in which Cooper recently explained that both obstructions are among the footprints Satan left in his passage from New York back to his native New England (see SAT CE 9), proper snags indeed for the devilish Spike.13 Even as Cooper knit this new magazine tale to two earlier novels, he kept track of the demands of the serial medium in which he now was working. Having ended the first Graham’s installment with that potentially serious encounter with the Pot Rock, he began the next with a catch-up: “We left the brigantine of Capt. Spike in a very critical situation, and the master himself in great confusion of mind” (JT 1:35). Cooper will not dovetail the installments with such insistence through most of the narrative, although it probably is fair to note, as has one critic, that in place of “the intricate structure of many of his later sea novels”— and indeed landward novels—Cooper adopted here the “simple, linear plot” customary in magazine fiction. Gone, for one thing, is the recollective musing so notable in the Littlepage family narratives. Here incident, not consciousness, drives the plot.14 Once the smuggler has extricated his brigantine, Cooper sends it farther into Hell Gate and beyond, again drawing on his own dense memories and current knowledge. When he is off Whitestone, just before Throgs Neck (“Throgmorton’s Neck”—JT 1:50), Spike finds the revenue cutter anchored midstream off the farthest extent of that point, where recently erected Fort Schuyler underscores the cutter’s intent to block Spike’s passage and question him. Still a considerable distance west of fort and cutter, Spike changes the look of his vessel so as to protect himself from such scrutiny. While this “metamorphosis” may recall the shifts and animations of The Water-Witch, especially those associated with that book’s “sea-green lady,” the change here is accomplished by carefully calculated material adjustments. The present brigantine has its “huge fore-and-aft mainsail and the jib” set, but not the sails on its squarerigged foremast. By a series of deft, fully described maneuvers to the rigging of both masts, Spike is able to mimic the appearance of a schooner, with fore-andaft sails on both masts (JT 1:51–52).15 The feint works for a time, allowing the Molly Swash to sail along the far shore between Great Neck to the south and Eastchester Bay in the Bronx. But as Spike again fiddles with the rigging so as to

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maximize his speed, the cutter’s lookouts call out “Brig ahoy!” and then “Schooner, ahoy!,” challenges Spike ignores as he scuds east before the cutter can get up a fresh head of steam. By eleven at night, he finally makes “Sands’ Point” and enters the Sound proper (JT 1:58–61). This, too, was water Cooper had known well since his navy years and his time in Westchester—as well as at Bayside, Queens (on Little Neck Bay opposite Throgs Neck), where his family spent the summer of 1824 (see JFC:EY 430). When he described the features of the western Sound, including Hempstead, it was with the firm knowledge of a sailor who had often explored it, so that the novel’s topographical details have deep saturation.16 Eastward of this maritime locale, Cooper’s knowledge dimmed, suggesting that here, as in The Water-Witch, he had passed the usual limit of his old rambles. When Spike soon rounds Montauk to encounter the turbulent Atlantic’s “vast sheet of green and rolling waters” (JT 1:89), he at last is launched on the story’s main adventure, which takes him far away from the seas plied by Tom Tiller, or by Cooper himself. The new geographical direction is accompanied by a shift of tone that distinguishes “Islets of the Gulf ” from the more romantic attitudes in most of Cooper’s earlier sea fiction. The change had something to do with his own evolution, and something to do with what other writers had been producing lately, often in imitation of his own work.17 The reaction to this last development took several forms. Much as Cooper had taken on his frontier imitators in The Deerslayer, he here aimed to set right what others had knocked askew. His virtual rewriting of the chase sequence from The Water-Witch across the opening installments of “Islets of the Gulf ” constituted both a wry parody of the derivativeness of much nautical fiction from the intervening years (as if he were saying, “See, I can copy myself, too”) and, in the tale ’s realistic emphases, a significant adjustment of his own attitudes toward the sea and sailors. (Partly we may trace here, too, his sensitivity to the post-Somers criticism of his earlier work. Someone like Philip Spencer might be inspired to fantasize about mutiny by “Islets of the Gulf,” but in that event his misreading would be wholly evident.) Cooper’s insistence on showing his readers all that had changed along this route—from “Ravenswood” and “Astoria” to Fort Schuyler—reflected his desire to incorporate the world as it was, not as romantic fiction of the dim past, his own included, might pretend it was. Nothing in the surviving documentation from “Islets of the Gulf ” indicates that George Graham wanted a contemporary nautical tale from Cooper, but that is what Cooper decidedly chose to give him. Its setting at the very moment of its appearance (to which we will return later) perhaps owed something to the fact that the book Cooper was finishing off as he agreed to write a tale for Graham—that is, The Redskins—was defiantly contemporary, and similarly realistic, too.

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The Gulf Evading other government ships, Spike continues sailing south until, at the beginning of installment four, his ship is in view of “the mountains of Santo Domingo.” He aims to go through the Mona Passage between that island and Puerto Rico, and then, hugging Cuba’s south shore, to turn northward and enter the Gulf of Mexico (JT 1:94–95, 102). After the attention to detail at the tale ’s start, the essentially blank jump that transports the smuggler from Montauk to the Caribbean seems meant to prepare us for a seascape of notably vague qualities. Certainly Cooper, never having sailed south of the Chesapeake, could have had no personal knowledge whatsoever of this sea or the nearby subtropical Gulf. Yet in fact he was to construct, from a variety of sources, a remarkably coherent picture of the tale’s main setting. Doing so mattered both to his new maritime realism and to the fact that he chose to set his story at the time of the Mexican American War. We can see how these things worked by mapping Spike ’s next movements. Lieutenant Wallace, of the American sloop of war Poughkeepsie, boards the Molly Swash and inspects Spike’s cargo, after which the wary smuggler changes course, leaving the Mona Passage to the sloop and heading farther south so as to pass completely around Jamaica. This dodge eventually brings him near the Yucatan coast, where he begins to implement his secret plans. As he passes Isla Contoy and reaches Yucatan’s northernmost point, Cabo Catoche, he thus orders his first mate to bring all the “instruments, charts, etc., and place them in the captain’s state-room, where it was understood they were to remain until the brig got into port” (JT 1:122). While the sailors thereafter may not know where they are, Cooper did, and quite exactly. And in fact he was as specific here as in the New York part of the narrative. Spike was heading for a rendezvous with his Mexican consignee at the Gulf of Mexico group known as the Dry Tortugas, the setting of the story’s main action.18 As we shall see later with regard to the Mexican American War theme, that was a publicly urgent choice. Given the remote, unfamiliar setting of the bulk of the Graham’s story, and yet the ease with which Cooper engaged it from his fourth installment on, we may well wonder from what source or sources he derived his knowledge about those critically important southern waters. Navigational guidebooks like Edmund Blunt’s American Coast Pilot (cited in my last note) offered helpful information but not the contingent sense of the Florida Reef and the Dry Tortugas that the tale as finished displays. In that regard, press reports of the Second Seminole War (1835–1842) probably were of slightly more use. But the most formative sources must have been anecdotes relayed by Cooper associates who had served in the West Indies Squadron (or in some

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other capacity at the Pensacola Navy Yard, where that squadron was headquartered after 1826) during the years surrounding that earlier conflict. Anyone passing between Pensacola and the Caribbean, Cuba, or the U.S. East Coast perforce was familiar with the Florida Reef and its westernmost manifestation, the Dry Tortugas. We shall come back to Cooper’s personal sources after examining in some detail how he actually managed the book’s remote settings. His descriptions at times seem so general as to be merely competent, as with his imprecise sketch of the Dry Tortugas as the Poughkeepsie draws near them: “The little islets scattered about, low, sandy, and untenanted, were the only land in sight—all else was the boundless waste of waters” (JT 2:146). In imagining the action of the tale, however, Cooper employed the Tortugas and other sites with a telling grasp of their dramatic potential. I am thinking, primarily, of the risky movements of Harry Mulford, Spike’s honest mate, as he tries to effect the rescue of several other characters after the loss of a schooner on its run to Key West in the eighth installment. Mulford decides he must swim through the dark, shark-infested shallows in search of a lost dinghy, the only possible means of escape. In what is a curiously existential effort, the young man alternately fears a circling shark and looks upon it as giving him “a sort of relief against the dreadful solitude of his situation.” Moreover, by closely observing “his terrible companion” as it makes somewhat irregular circuits about him, Mulford is able to determine that shallower water lies to his left. Soon he is able to wade to a “small spot of naked rock” and, drawing himself atop it, find temporary safety—he is as “rich as the most extensive landholder living,” as Cooper puts it with what we may think a decidedly personal emphasis. Making it safe to land in this case is like navigating the writer’s own increasingly dangerous financial seas (JT 2:6–7). Here, too, we in some ways are already in the elemental scenery Cooper would explore more fully in his next book, The Crater, where land and water play a dire game of give-and-take. Repeatedly, Mulford watches and avoids but also imitates the shark as he makes his way through this scene. In a book that employs such unfamiliar territory for its main scene of action, Mulford’s tense progress to the dinghy represents an impressive improvisation. It owes something to Cooper’s established methods and motifs. In one sense, it embodies the classic flight-and-pursuit pattern common not only in Cooper’s forest tales but in some of the sea tales as well—indeed, at the very start of this one. But two things distinguish the present instance. First, the menace represented by the sharks does not result from human conflict. It is a reminder not of the role the forces of human history play in most of Cooper’s fiction, from The Spy on, but rather of some deeply troubling malignity in nature, here represented by a ravenous creature that had played only an incidental role in Cooper’s earlier sea tales. Nor had

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his contemporaries widely exploited the shark to express the ocean’s special menace. This story thus preceded by several years Melville’s great meditations on sharks in Mardi and especially in Moby-Dick—preceded those meditations and conceivably contributed to them.19 As to the inspiration for his own reflections, Cooper may have had several. There conceivably was a visual source here— namely, John Singleton Copley’s Havana-set Watson and the Shark (1788). Although the three versions of that classic picture produced by Copley now are in the United States, in Cooper’s life all of them were in Britain, where both Copley and Brook Watson long lived. That actually made them somewhat more accessible to the American novelist. He could well have seen Brook Watson’s own version during his 1828 visit to Christ’s Hospital School in London, where the canvas (in the National Gallery of Art in Washington since 1963) then hung in the Great Hall (see GE CE 195–96, 318n). That Ned Myers had encountered sharks in the waters off Santo Domingo, as the book he and Cooper recently wrote together reveals (see NM 114), probably gave such general inspirations a personal edge.20 Cooper’s friends, acquaintances, and even relatives who knew the Gulf of Mexico well provided other sorts of ballast for his tale. William B. Shubrick, for one, briefly commanded the West Indies Squadron in 1839–1840. After returning north in his flagship the Macedonian in the latter year, as we have seen, Shubrick spent several days with Cooper on shore in New York City and then aboard that ship as it ran south again to the Chesapeake. It is hard to imagine that Florida and its waters did not figure in their conversation at the time; the region certainly had figured actively in their correspondence before then. Some time earlier, Shubrick in fact had invited his old friend to come to Pensacola for a visit, as Cooper (and his family) very well might have if Shubrick’s duty there had lasted longer. Once the two sailors were reunited, they no doubt caught up on the foreclosed opportunity and what it might have offered (see LJ 3:387–93; 4:51–55, 92–94).21 Their mutual interest in the subject of the Gulf was deepened by the fact that Cooper had arranged for one of his seafaring nephews, Samuel’s son William, to accompany Shubrick to Pensacola as his clerk in 1839 (see LJ 3:294, 363).22 “Commodore Bill,” as Cooper and Shubrick christened the young man in their letters, stayed with Shubrick throughout the latter’s posting there, then returned north with him on the Macedonian in July 1840. Having visited his uncle in Otsego in September of the latter year, Bill returned with Cooper to New York in early October and accompanied him on the cruise to Norfolk (LJ 4:72, 90–91).23 So the conversations over the table in the commodore ’s cabin or on the quarterdeck during that passage were potentially three-way. The two Bills had seen much together, as news reports of the time indicate.24

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Moreover, when in 1840 the younger Cooper went back to Pensacola on the Macedonian under the new commandant of the West Indies Squadron, Cmdre. Jesse Wilkinson, the frigate went through “the Mona Passage, getting a far-off glimpse of St. Domingo, Jamaica and Cuba”—rather as the Molly Swash would—before arriving at Pensacola just before Christmas. Press reports indicate that, having taken on fresh water and stores, it soon departed on another cruise. Later, in May and June 1841, it went out again, this time to Vera Cruz. In lists of officers from these newspaper sources, William Cooper remained “Commodore’s Clerk.”25 The novelist could have followed his nephew’s doings through the press but did not need to, since the young man kept him posted on many topics about the ship, including its officers and crew, via letters from Pensacola. In July 1841, just before the ship was due to go north again for the hurricane season, William thus sent a three-page account of its recent activities. Through his many other letters, he provided the novelist with a lively sense of the social environment of the Pensacola station, and the usual duties of the ships there. During their face-to-face encounters, he may also have filled Cooper in on the geography of the region, including the Dry Tortugas and the Florida Keys. When, on one occasion in 1841, he reassured his uncle that (despite rumors about “supposed piracies on this coast”) “no piratical acts have been perpetrated,” he may well have provided especially useful (if counterfactual) hints.26 Piracy was an enduring issue in accounts from this zone. Jesse D. Elliott had commanded the West Indies Squadron from 1829 to 1832, when the Spanish blockade against Mexico affected U.S. shipping and led to increased piratical activity in the Gulf and Caribbean. In giving his orders to squadron officers when he assumed command in 1829, Elliott observed that the bolstered U.S. naval presence in the area sprang from “the many and frequent unlawful depredations” on U.S. craft (and violations of U.S. law) by unlicensed cruisers, pirates, and slavers. His experience over the next few years included several visits to Mexico and Cuba and negotiations with officials in both nations. He also appears to have had close knowledge of the Dry Tortugas.27 Elliott’s usefulness as a source for Cooper was no doubt extended by yet other naval personnel. One was British-born William C. Bolton, who had commanded the Pensacola Navy Yard in 1836–1837, when Ned Myers served there under him, and later maintained ties with Cooper and William Shubrick as well as Myers, whom he helped in his drive for a pension.28 Ned himself, who was on the West Indies Station for three years during the Second Seminole War, may well have been an independent source not only on the Gulf of Mexico but also on another branch of the federal marine of interest to Cooper’s tale, the U.S. Revenue Service, in which he served in 1831, again on the Gulf. A list of the ports of call Ned remembered visiting on the USS Constellation during his Pensacola period will suggest the

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range of his practical knowledge: “The ship went to Havanna [sic], Trinidad, Curaçao, La Guayra, Santa Cruz, Vera Cruz, Campe[che], Tampico, Key West &c.” We know that Cooper and Myers discussed these topics, not just sharks, during their collaboration on Ned’s maritime narrative, and it is likely that some of what Ned shared stayed in Cooper’s mind long enough to provide details and color for “Islets of the Gulf ” (NM CE 173–74, 184–85).29

“Right or Wrong” If Cooper’s first inspiration for what became his Florida tale arose from chance conversations and correspondence over the years since his return to the United States, by the time he wrote his first installment for Graham’s it was the Mexican American War that provided his overt context. That conflict, which took its rise from the annexation of the Republic of Texas by the United States in 1845, was all but engaged when Graham and Cooper began their discussions the following March. Indeed, it was in precisely that month that U.S. forces occupied the land between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, a district that previously had been the subject of heated contention between Mexico and Texas. Moreover, although the war’s first notable clashes occurred in that disputed district, it also had a naval component from the outset that Cooper well understood and closely followed. During the Texas War of Independence (1835–1836), the United States had remained strictly neutral and therefore had not interfered with the trade that supplied Mexican forces via New Orleans; in fact, Texas privateers were seized by the U.S. Navy, thereby keeping Mexican supply lines open. On the signing of the preliminary treaty between Texas and the United States in 1844, however, Cmdre. David Conner of the Home Squadron was ordered to the Gulf of Mexico to protect Texas from expected Mexican reprisals. Later, after the joint resolution of Congress that prepared the way for the entry of Texas into the Union, Conner remained in the Gulf, ordered now to impose a blockade on Mexican ports and intercept ships attempting to run it.30 Because the most desirable source of supplies for Mexican forces in the northern theater of the ensuing war remained the U.S. port of New Orleans, the political situation from mid-1846 on was fraught with tension. Even though in “Islets of the Gulf ” Cooper’s smuggler stems from New York and technically avoids the interdicted Mexican ports by attempting to conduct his business in the seemingly neutral Dry Tortugas, the challenges Conner and his naval squadron confronted may well have suggested the central situation in Cooper’s story. One wonders, for instance, whether he read or heard about an incident in April 1846, just as he was planning the new tale, when navy lieutenant Frank Renshaw intercepted two U.S. schooners that tried to deliver cargoes (of contraband flour)

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from New Orleans to the Mexicans at Matamoros, soon to be attacked by Gen. Zachary Taylor. That Spike’s nominal cargo in “Islets of the Gulf ” is also flour (though the barrels conceal smaller casks of gunpowder for the Mexican government) suggests that Cooper had picked up that detail from those news reports. It seems likely, in fact, that the contraband plot of “Islets of the Gulf ” was indebted to incidents during Conner’s blockade.31 Once the Mexican American War started, Cooper expressed very mixed views of the conflict. He was impressed by the early success of U.S. arms both on land and at sea, but he was hardly alone among Americans in thinking the war politically unfortunate. In his case, the reasons had to do with his basic principles. Harry Mulford, first mate on Spike’s ship, speaks in terms that echo Cooper’s own views when he remarks to Don Juan Montefalderon y Castro, the upright Mexican patriot with whom Spike has made his traitorous deal: “As for this war, I know but little about it, though I dare say the Mexican government may have been wrong in some things that it might have controlled and some that it might not—but let right be where it will, I am sorry to see a nation that has taken so firm a stand in favour of popular government, pressed upon so hard by another that is supposed to be the great support of such principles. America and Mexico are neighbours, and ought to be friends; and while I do not, cannot blame my own country for pursuing the war with vigour, nothing would please me more than to hear peace proclaimed” (JT 1:142). Cooper showed equal restraint not only on the subject of the military conflict but also on the racial politics underpinning it. “Anglo-Saxons as we are,” the narrator editorializes shortly afterward, “we have no desire unnecessarily to illustrate that very marked feature in the Anglo-Saxon character, which prompts the mother stock to calumniate all who oppose it, but would rather adopt some of that chivalrous courtesy of which so much that is lofty and commendable is to be found among the descendants of Old Spain” (JT 1:150). On political grounds Cooper also was restrained. The narrator thus praises Montefalderon y Castro as a “soldier and a gallant cavalier” whose involvement with the despicable Spike sprang from “love of country . . . alone” (JT 2:50). Cooper’s view of patriotism here as elsewhere was contingent rather than absolute. In Afloat and Ashore, he had Miles Wallingford reject Stephen Decatur’s famous banquet toast from 1816—“our country, right or wrong”—by saying, “This may do for the rabble, but it will not do for God, to whom our first and highest obligations are due” (A&A CE 2:181).32 Decatur’s saying became something of a rallying cry for belligerent forces in the United States at the time of the Mexican American War and was picked apart in the antiwar press, especially the religious press, at the very time Cooper was writing.33 In the present story he used it to distinguish Montefalderon’s noble patriotism from the spurious

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kinds—the sort that aims at “political preferment,” for instance, or individual advantage, or that which “shouts ‘our country right or wrong,’ regardless alike of God and his eternal laws, that are never to be forgotten with impunity.” The Mexican patriot is spurred on by the desire to “defend his home and fire-side, his altars and the graves of his fathers, from the ruthless steps of the invader”—that is, pointedly, the United States (JT 2:50–51). Once more, near the end of the story, Cooper put into the mouth of the Reverend Mr. Hollins of the Poughkeepsie an interpretation of the saying that is consistent with what he might have read in the religious press at the time, or heard from some pulpit in Otsego or in New York and Philadelphia, albeit in this case an interpretation somewhat hedged about with cautions by which a navy chaplain might wish to abide: “If Decatur ever really said, ‘Our country, right or wrong,’ he said what might be just enough, and creditable enough, in certain cases, and taken with the fair limitations that he probably intended should accompany the sentiment; but, if he meant it as an absolute and controlling principle, it was not possible to be more in error. In this last sense, such a rule of conduct might, and in old times often would, have justified idolatry; nay, it is a species of idolatry in itself, since it is putting country before God” (JT 2:120).34 The naval officer Lieutenant Wallace laughs off this criticism, but not with the author’s support, tacit or otherwise. Indeed, Cooper insisted on the reciprocal sense of injury and justification that motivated both the Mexican and the American partisans in the war, which of course was still ongoing as he wrote. The narrator, suspending the claims of his own “country,” thus credits to Montefalderon a deep sense of “all the evils that environed his own land.” Cooper accordingly refuses to demonize him or any other opponent: “Although a Mexican, he could feel; although an avowed foe of this good republic of ours, he had his principles, his affections, and his sense of right. Whatever may be the merits of the quarrel, and we are not disposed to deny that our provocation has been great, a sense of right should teach every man that what may be patriotic in an American, would not be exactly the same thing in a Mexican, and that we ought to respect in others sentiments that are so much vaunted among ourselves” (JT 2:52). Comparing Cooper’s posture in this work to the disillusioned stance of the antislavery Whig James Russell Lowell in his portrayal of the Mexican American War soldier “Birdofredum Sawin” in the Biglow Papers (1848), Jaime Javier Rodríguez rightly concludes that Cooper’s Gulf of Mexico novel “deals inventively” with the war. Its note of “pervasive disenchantment,” despite its voicing of support for U.S. policy and military achievements, is unusual in the body of American fiction that addressed the war. Cooper here displayed his increasingly international perspective, which first developed while he was in Europe and then fed off the disillusionment with his compatriots that followed his homecoming.35

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As noted earlier, the U.S. offensive against Mexico began in the weeks when Cooper and Graham were discussing what became “Islets of the Gulf.” Gen. Zachary Taylor, already in Texas, had been ordered in March 1846 to take up a position on the other side of the Nueces. This advance had led to the first bloodshed when a body of more than fifteen hundred cavalry under General Mariano Arista of Mexico that crossed the Rio Grande in April ambushed a small force of some sixty or so American dragoons sent out to challenge him. The dragoons were all killed, wounded, or captured, and war thereafter came to seem inevitable. Before President James K. Polk and Congress could reach agreement on how to proceed, Taylor countered with a brilliant victory over Arista at Palo Alto, where several hundred of the numerically superior Mexicans were killed and only a handful of Americans. When Arista fell back to Resaca de la Palma on the next day, May 9, the Americans repeated their victory with an equally lopsided margin.36 Cooper recalled these two engagements at a crucial point in “Islets of the Gulf,” using them as a means of dating the action (“the battles of the 8th and 9th of May . . . had been just fought”), but also emphasizing the larger strategic context of his imaginary story.37 At this point, after Captain Spike has successfully transferred the flour barrels with their contraband to the Mexican sloop brought by Montefalderon to the Dry Tortugas, the latter vessel, upset by a tornado that strikes the islets, has sunk. The Mexican is especially desperate that the sloop be raised because the recent U.S. victories have left him with a sense of “deep mortification.” He therefore hastens to accept Spike ’s offer to assist in recovering the cargo even though the smuggler has demanded half of the gold the sunken vessel also harbors (JT 2:105, 107).38 Cooper did not import much more of the actual war into the story, for reasons I will return to later in this chapter. The important thing thematically is the contrast he drew between the utterly despicable figure of Captain Spike and his Mexican counterpart. There are, of course, patriotic Americans of the upright sort in the book, including Lieutenant Wallace and Capt. Adam Mull, his superior, and Harry Mulford as well. But what are we to make of a wartime nautical story in which the greedy captain of a U.S. merchant vessel betrays his country for the money to be made by supplying its enemies with critical materiel? Spike has his virtues, but these are strictly professional rather than moral. He is a seasoned sailor whose skill even Mulford admires, but he is corrupt—and worse. He is Ithuel Bolt from The Wing-and-Wing without that man’s few redeeming qualities. We see the worst of Spike at the end. Aboard the Molly Swash are not only Spike and his crew, but also three passengers—the elderly Mrs. Budd and her Irish servant Biddy Noon, who are accompanying Mrs. Budd’s ailing niece, Rose, on what they think will be a restorative sea voyage (Spike, though, has

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other designs on Rose, whom he intends to force into a marriage with him). When Spike, chased by the Poughkeepsie, runs his brig on the rocks in the fifteenth installment, he is forced to abandon it and continue his flight in a yawl. As a cruiser containing Wallace and Mulford at last gains on him, Spike lessens his draft by heartlessly forcing everyone overboard, beginning of course with two black characters (the steward Josh and cook Simon), but soon including Don Juan de Montefalderon and several crew members who, unaware of Spike’s intentions, instinctively attempt to save Don Juan. Spike turns next to Mrs. Budd, who has watched Montefalderon’s end “in a sort of stupid horror” without fathoming Spike’s evil. He coaxes her from the stern of the boat to its middle by insisting that she can thereby help trim its burden. When she is about to take her new seat, Spike causes the yawl to lurch, sending her—with pushes from boatswain Ben Clench and another crewman—over the side into the turbulent sea. Amid the screams of her Irish servant (who will be thrown over next), Mrs. Budd calls out for help, grasping the boatswain’s hand “with the tenacity of a vice” and expecting, despite all she has witnessed, to be rescued. “Cast off her hand,” Spike says to Clench “reproachfully,” warning that she will “swamp the boat by her struggles.” He then adds, “get rid of her at once! Cut her fingers off, if she won[’]t let go!” This order silences Biddy and brings immediate compliance from Clench, who draws “his knife across the wrist of the hand” still clutching his own, consigning Mrs. Budd to her fate. It is the most gruesome deed in all of Cooper’s fiction (JT 2:181–83). Spike’s bloody violence, while it may have something to do with the tale ’s larger politico-military context, runs deeper than that. If the tale is notably realistic by general comparison with Cooper’s earlier sea narratives, the character of Spike might tempt us to speak instead of a naturalistic turn in late Cooper. Spike certainly seems driven to destroy anyone weaker than himself. Unable to rest content with Mrs. Budd’s mutilation, he extends the murderous hemorrhage of humanity on the Molly Swash. “It’s the maid’s duty to follow her mistress,” he next says to Biddy Noon (JT 2:183). Her desire to pray gives him some pause, but once she forgivingly commits herself to the sea Spike turns on yet another victim. This is the short, rotund old sailor Jack Tier, after whom the story in its American book form would be named. Claiming an ancient tie to Spike, the mysterious Jack came aboard in New York waters and over the course of the story has betrayed an odd ambivalence toward the smuggler. Jack does not have a chance to spell out for Spike the secrets he obviously harbors before Spike says (“as if in a sort of sorrowful submission to a necessity that knew no law”), “It is your turn, little Jack.  . . . [W]e cannot spare you the room” (JT 2:186). Jack also plunges into the sea expressing forgiveness for Spike, but that pious attitude can redeem neither Spike nor the five sailors now remaining from

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his original crew. Those men throttle each other the way “bull dogs . . . spring at the ox’s muzzle”: “Oaths, curses, and appeals for help, succeeded; each man endeavouring, in his frenzied efforts, to throw all the others overboard, as the only means of saving himself.” Even after all are in the ocean, the battle continues: “They drowned each other by continuing their maddened conflict.” It is a Hobbesian vision, though Spike is so inured to such scenes that he looks on “in grim satisfaction,” like Satan, happy for the good that the suffering of others may bring him. Cooper does not underscore the political moral, but the carnage hardly demonstrates why the American nation (we have no reason to believe the sailors to be other than native sons) might deserve the victories already accruing to it in its own war with Mexico (JT 2:183–87).39 Later, after he has been sorely wounded by fire from the revenue cutter, Spike is taken to the hospital at Key West. There he is watched over by a curious woman garbed in what might appear to be a nurse’s outfit, with a head of hair “cut into short, gray bristles” and, to “give a sort of climax to this uncouth appearance,” a wad of tobacco in her mouth (JT 2:190). It is, we may already suspect and soon learn for certain, Jack Tier, who is in the process of casting off his masculine attire and habits and assuming her old identity as Molly Swash Spike, the smuggler’s long-abandoned wife. In a story that hinges on the concealment of destructive gunpowder casks inside seemingly wholesome barrels of flour, and features a brigantine that can be quickly shifted so that it resembles a schooner, the composite figure of Jack Tier/Molly Swash is a fitting emblem of the slippery nature of all appearances. Yet various critics have observed that a good deal more is at work in the fable of Molly Swash’s unveiling. Cooper had employed cross-dressing female figures in several of his earlier sea tales. As Luis A. Iglesias has argued, he had adopted them from widely distributed conventions in Anglo-American culture but had considerably muted or altogether removed the mandatory revelation scenes in which such figures typically return to their “real” nature and appearance. A curious ambiguity therefore underlies the masquerade. Cross-dressing Jack Tier is more explicitly revealed as Molly Swash at this tale ’s very end than was true, for instance, of the figure of Roderick, the androgynous cabin-boy in The Red Rover, whose femaleness is only inferentially suggested at the book’s end and whose female name, assuming s/he has one, is never divulged.40 At the same time, Molly/Jack’s part in “Islets of the Gulf ” represents another contrast with the romantic sea tales of Cooper’s first decade. Much as the run of the smuggler’s vessel up through Hell Gate is in so many ways a negative redrafting of that in The Water-Witch, Spike’s forlorn wife is the negative image of Master Seadrift (Eudora Van Beverout), the willowy girl-sailor in masculine disguise in the 1830 novel, with whom at that tale’s end Tiller runs off for a life afloat—

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even though in the middle of the tale Seadrift and Alida de Barbérie clearly feel (as Iglesias likewise points out) “a secret and powerful sympathy” for each other (WW 1:110) that strongly suggests sexual attraction.41 The composite figure of Jack Tier/Molly Swash lies at the far end of any continuum that begins with Seadrift. But what exactly are we to make of this other disguised female? Cooper had fun teasing his readers by placing disguised young women on board the ships in both The Red Rover and The Water-Witch: he clearly was aware of the sexual ambiguity such figures introduced into those stories. As Iglesias observes of the disguised woman in Cooper’s sea tales, “The narrative oscillates between the length to which she must hide her sex and the sexual tension that emerges from imminent discovery.”42 Cooper went even farther. He was aware, too, that the ambiguity of such figures played upon lubberly speculation about homosexual relations aboard ship, and may even have been covertly acknowledging what anyone who had been to sea before the mast knew—namely, that such speculation of course had some grounding in actual behavior afloat. One might respond that the primary function of Cooper’s cross-dressing sailors in terms of his plots was their ability to smuggle heterosexual romantic love—the sort that also dominated most of his other tales—into nautical situations where it was not part of the regular freight. Far from aiming to subvert the conventions of the novel (or society) as he had inherited them, this argument would run, he wished to extend them offshore, and probably in the interest of carrying female readers in his wake. He coded romantic love as female, adventure as male, and in his forest tales and his sea fiction alike he tried to appeal to both segments of his audience as he defined it. And yet, if Cooper began “Islets of the Gulf ” as a quizzical self-parody, drawing on the modes and strategies of his earlier sea fiction to upset rather than confirm them, he wound up creating something beyond parody through Molly Swash. Disguise is no longer a stagey routine meant to promote a hazily romantic notion of human experience. In the figure of Jack Tier as Molly Swash impersonates him it has become both a moral implement and an existential gesture. Cooper thus insists on mixing male and female terms in a very curious manner even after the revelations in his last chapters: “As for Jack, we call Molly, or Mary Swash by her masculine appellation, not only because it is more familiar, but because the other name really seems out of place, as applied to such a person—as for Jack, then, she sat with her face half averted, thumbing the canvas, and endeavouring to ply the needle, but perfectly mute” (JT 2:195). A few lines later, while Spike is still trying to absorb what Rose Budd has told him of this strange figure’s identity, he asks Jack, “Are you man or woman?” Jack replies: “That is a question I hardly know how to answer. Sometimes I think myself each; sometimes neither” (JT 2:196). Here, too, as in

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some other aspects of his later fiction, Cooper ventured well beyond his earlier modes in both theme and technique.43

Earth Histories In late March 1847, when Cooper informed Richard Bentley that the expanded “Islets of the Gulf ” could be issued as a book, he also mentioned that he had a new novel “about half done.” He described that book, to be called The Crater, and stated his terms for it, to which Bentley assented in a letter written late the following month (LJ 5:198–99).44 Evidently begun the previous fall, perhaps while Cooper was still finishing his Florida story (so thought his daughter Susan—see JT HE vii), this account of a Pacific utopia drew on a large background that we will explore after tracing out its various practical and thematic links to Jack Tier, as well as the slightly earlier Afloat and Ashore. Early in May, while awaiting Bentley’s answer on The Crater, Cooper wrote out in his own hand and then signed with Burgess and Stringer in Manhattan a double agreement covering both it and the book version of the Graham’s tale.45 A June trip to Detroit to deal with debts owed him on the Comstock venture (treated in the next chapter) delayed him somewhat. But once he came home, he worked so efficiently that he finished the new novel by the start of August; then, with about half of it stereotyped already, he packed up the new copy and went to Philadelphia to correct the rest of Fagan’s sheets at the rate of “40 pages a day” (LJ 5:227–29).46 He completed that work around the middle of the month and, after a quick stop in New York to dispatch Bentley’s last sheets, rushed home again. Bentley, who therefore must have had all the proofs by mid-September, published the book as Mark’s Reef; or, The Crater on the twenty-seventh of that month. Burgess and Stringer published it on October 12 or so, slightly more than two weeks after Bentley (S&B 150; BAL 2:301).47 It will be recalled that Jack Tier, although mostly if not completely written (and published serially) before The Crater, was not to appear in book form until more than four months later, on or about March 4, 1848, also from Burgess and Stringer (and from Bentley, as Captain Spike, on March 11). That the books appeared in reverse order is clear not only from various bits of documentary evidence cited earlier but also, and more interestingly, from their syncopated bearing on the Mexican American War. Modest as the conflict’s effect admittedly was on “Islets of the Gulf,” by the time Cooper began work on The Crater much of the uncertainty accompanying the war’s earlier episodes had dissipated, so that he mostly ignored it as a literary topic even as he remained personally very interested in its conduct and outcome.48 Few of the involved political and military maneuvers in California overtly entered into his Pacific narrative, perhaps

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because the larger strategic picture now seemed relatively unproblematic. Not until the twentieth chapter of The Crater do we find a fleeting, relatively upbeat reference to the distant likelihood of California’s statehood (“Californians may be admitted to an equal participation in the rights of American citizens”—CR 2:67).49 And, as far as direct references go, that is pretty much it, aside from a description of the black whaler Socrates’s fatal harpoon blow against a sperm whale as “a sort of Palo Alto affair,” by that point in the narrative pretty stale news out of Texas (CR 2:130). At a stretch, one might argue that the new book’s concern with territorial aggrandizement further reflects its wartime origins, or that its Pacific setting shows a dawning sense on Cooper’s part that the United States would thereafter play an expanded role in that ocean, as indeed it soon began to. Yet, even as Cooper continued to follow war news closely while writing The Crater, we may be pretty sure that he would not have centered his plot on the sandalwood trade with China in the 1790s if he really wished to embed the novel in contemporary events.50 That element in the new book in fact suggests that he was taking his lead here from Afloat and Ashore rather than from Spike ’s grim tale: for Miles Wallingford, who also visits the Pacific, trades in sandalwood there, too (see A&A CE 1:115, 223). Various other ties in fact connect these two Pacific tales. Opening in the wake of the American Revolution, as does Afloat and Ashore, the new book in its early chapters touches back to the threshold of the author’s own nautical ambitions and experiences. It is in this sense yet another deflected autobiographical fiction. Furthermore, although not narrated by its main character (a genteel Delaware Valley sailor named Mark Woolston—pronounced, we are told, “Wooster”), The Crater shares the generally recollective tone of Afloat and Ashore. When the book’s preface informs readers that Woolston’s journal of his eventual shipwreck on a volcanic island group is “the authority for most of the truths here related” (CR 1:vii), that is not entirely a conventional detail. Rather, it guides how Cooper actually developed his third-person account. After Woolston’s companion (a Ned Myers–like sailor named Bob Betts) is blown away in a pinnace assembled from a kit discovered in the hold of the Rancocus, their disabled ship, the narrative accordingly stays focused on the now totally isolated and soon ill Woolston. We do not learn of Bob’s experiences or indeed survival until he has returned to the Pacific islands fourteen months later, at which point he fills in Mark on all he has done during the interval, thus again becoming a subject, we presume, in Mark’s supposed journal (see CR 1:192–201). Similarly, to cite a single other instance, when the two old shipmates eventually encounter other survivors from the Rancocus disaster, those men recount their adventures to Bob and Mark, adventures about which we have heard nothing in the interim (see CR 2:37–41). In its

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immediacy of impression and statement, the narrative likewise bears out Cooper’s parting comment in the preface: “we have endeavoured to imitate the simplicity of Captain Woolston’s journal, in writing this book, and should any homeliness of style be discovered, we trust it will be imputed to that circumstance” (CR 1:viii). The book connects with the Wallingford saga in yet other ways. Woolston’s wish to combine a sea career with wedded bliss on shore revives the major tensions of the earlier fiction. The two works divide, to be sure, in the matter of pacing. It takes Wallingford virtually two full volumes of his narrative to detail his first three voyages, and he does not wed Lucy Hardinge until the very end of the fourth volume. By contrast, Woolston’s long voyages to Canton and to Europe are recounted with such remarkable economy in the book’s very first chapter that he manages to marry Bridget Yardley abruptly (indeed, prematurely) in the second chapter—which still has room to cover his passage around Cape Horn on his third, doomed voyage in quest of sandalwood. In the next chapter, with similar dispatch, Mark and Bob are already left alone amid scattered reefs in the Pacific, thus setting in motion an entirely new plot. When Cooper remarks, regarding the Cape Horn passage, “It is not our intention to dwell on the details of this long voyage,” he gives two reasons. The first is routine (rounding the Horn usually involves “the same incidents”), but the second and more important one shows that he knew this early what his real story was: “we have much other matter to relate” (CR 1:33). Afloat and Ashore had ramified slowly as Cooper, exploring the past and his present feelings about it, added incident to incident, resulting in Richard Bentley’s well-justified complaint that in order to publish the complete story he was being forced to pay twice as much as he had originally bargained for. The Crater was to have, from the outset, a clearly defined goal and an economical narrative drive.51 It is almost as if Cooper had sketched the plot of the novel in his last forest romance, Wyandotté, when he had Captain Willoughby make the following speech to the settlers on his lands: “We are like men on a remote island; a sort of colony of our own; and we must act fairly and frankly by each other” (WY CE 84).52 Cooper also brought to the 1847 story a good deal of his own landward energies as these had been at play in recent years at his hobby farm, The Châlet. That spot provided regular practical respite from his literary labors. But it also was a compact reminder of the various larger plots of land that Cooper and his family had once owned and manipulated—from the Otsego Patent to DeKalb Township, or the Manor of Feronia (and, across the lake from The Châlet itself, Fenimore Farm and Mount Ovis). As such, his farm-making activities there played, like his overlapping repurchase and remodeling of Otsego Hall, a restorative role. The Châlet as a project of seemingly light surface but deep resonance

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clearly could have suggested the basic idea for The Crater to Cooper—if not in some sudden inspiration like that connected with The Deerslayer, then cumulatively. He gardened at the farm up on its steep hill, and his daughter no doubt was right in her claim that his great enthusiasm for the produce he coaxed from the stony soils there (including melons, much praised in The Crater) provided some of the pleasure detectable in Mark Woolston’s own Edenic garden on his rocky Pacific lands (see CR HE x–xiii).53 Cooper built on this personal substrate a complex design that engaged vast global processes, processes that at the same time have a pronounced domestic political meaning. His fascination with the natural themes at work in the Pacific world revealed, first, his increasing engagement with large scientific issues across his last years. And yet science led him to elaborate in The Crater a dystopian romance meant to express his darkening view of his own nation’s present and future. Geology created Cooper’s setting; politics provided his plot. We will need to treat them separately and in their combined relations. First, it is worth recalling Horace Scudder’s 1947 argument about the novelist’s large debt, for his geological observations and theories, to the British scientist Charles Lyell. Suboceanic earthquakes and volcanic activity were topics of intense speculation and argument during Lyell’s period, and Lyell himself was very much engaged in that fight. Cooper derived from him and other scientists not only a general understanding of geological processes as then conceived but also certain key elements for his plot. For instance, the sudden creation of Graham Island in the Mediterranean off Sicily’s south coast in June 1831, which was much dwelled on by Lyell (and therefore was used by Scudder as prime evidence of the scientist’s influence on Cooper, then in Paris), may well have inspired the core episodes of the novel’s scientific plot. Expanding to a circumference of three miles by early August 1831, a few months later Graham Island and its central crater had all but disappeared owing to wave action. In the meantime, that it was the subject of much curiosity and speculation in the European press, as Cooper must have noticed, may have embellished its scientific appeal. In particular, the recently founded Paris newspaper Le Figaro reflected on the wider political and cultural meanings of the island. In one article, it went so far as to imagine Graham Island as the site of a utopian experiment by the St. Simonians. Here was a hint that may have been of special relevance to the convergence of science and politics in Cooper’s imagined Pacific.54 In drawing on his recollections about the odd case of Graham Island for The Crater, Cooper added details from his personal exploration of Vesuvius, Pompeii, and Herculaneum during his Italian visit. He had already explored his memories of his October 1829 ascent of Vesuvius with his nephew William in his Italian Gleanings. Although that book was uninterested in theories of

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volcanic activity, it archived powerful sensory impressions on which Cooper drew for the volcanic effects in his 1847 novel. This is especially true during Woolston’s second visit to an active crater amid the novel’s islands. From its edge he beholds a scene very much like those Cooper had witnessed on Vesuvius and at Solfatara, a scene characterized by the “sulphur-tinged and unearthly hue” of the uncertain crater floor, the “hissing sound” coming out of its cracks, and the sharp reports of small explosions, followed by the vertical ejection of rocks that soon come crashing to earth (CR 2:146). Such relocated impressions added immediacy to the book’s action. Geology, from Lyell and others, gave it conceptual order and thematic focus. The combative nature of that science at the time, though, made Cooper tread as carefully in these matters as tourists did at Solfatara. He therefore developed the central motif of volcanic creation in The Crater by hedging his bets: he gave his main character, for instance, a working theory that was true enough to the book’s historical moment but that Cooper himself would not (indeed could not) confirm scientifically.55 A key dispute in Cooper’s age, to which Lyell insistently linked the Graham Island event, concerned the mechanism by which volcanic mountains arise. Were they created when cataclysmic forces pushed underlying rock to new heights, thus exposing them to view? Or were they instead formed via more regular processes as eruptive forces spread new material upward through the earth’s crust? Lyell fiercely opposed the former “elevationist” view, favoring instead the idea that nature worked by uniform means (he was therefore a “uniformitarian”), without the sorts of cataclysms that the elevationists imagined. In the mid-1840s, however, elevationism gained adherents despite Lyell’s strong opposition. In particular, Charles Darwin’s Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands (1844) gave new life to the view that at least some volcanic peaks had “been raised in mass” and were therefore properly termed “craters of elevation.” Adding more support to this view was the authority of the great naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who in 1845 asserted that volcanoes “are not formed by the gradual accumulation of ejected currents of lava,” but rather by “the sudden elevation” of underlying masses of rock. Some proponents of this general theory in fact made use of Graham Island as a case in point, since early reports of a preexisting shoal at its location suggested that the island had been elevated bodily, rather than built afresh through the ejection of heated material from within the earth’s crust. So strong was this revival of the theory opposed by Lyell that he retreated for a time. Having engaged and sought to counter other proponents of the “craters of elevation” theory in the fifth and sixth editions of Principles of Geology (published in 1837 and 1840, respectively), he relented in the 1840s before, on the basis of new fieldwork and the research of others, he returned to his uniformitarian theory in the late 1850s.56

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No copy of Principles of Geology survives with proof of Cooper’s ownership. The two men apparently met at a soiree in London in April 1828, as we know from Lyell’s correspondence, but it is not clear that they spoke, let alone discussed scientific issues.57 In the absence of direct evidence, we may hazard some guesses as to when, and in what form, Cooper likely encountered Lyell’s theories. Shifts in the latter’s views as sketched above, in conjunction with the way in which Cooper imagined the creation of new land in The Crater, suggest that the novelist relied on a later rather than an earlier edition of the Principles— that is, one from the period when Lyell temporarily backed away from uniformitarian theory. Perhaps as a consequence, Cooper lent credence to both sides in the current debate. There certainly is eruptive action in the novel (see CR 1:159– 63, passim), but the single greatest effect of geological activity in Woolston’s immediate vicinity (the sudden rise of the island called Vulcan’s Peak) is portrayed as the result of cataclysmic elevation rather than the ejection of molten material from within the earth.58 Bare rocks suddenly raised above the surface of the water are thus the first signs of geological change Woolston glimpses from the ship’s bowsprit at sunrise. Elsewhere, Cooper writes even more explicitly that “the earthquake had thrust upward a vast surface of the reef, completely altering the whole appearance of the shoal!” As the castaway climbs the ashcovered slope toward his own (inactive) crater’s summit, he likewise notes the “vast changes” caused by “this sudden elevation”—the very word that had so much significance at the time (CR 1:161–62). Although he was writing a sea tale with strong social and political themes, Cooper clearly wanted to give it substantial (and, as far as possible, accurate) scientific ballast.

Imperial Fantasies From Lyell and his colleagues Cooper took the novel’s environmental vision; for its human plot, he relied instead on Daniel Defoe and his many imitators. The “island” theme in Wyandotté that I mentioned earlier suggests that for some time Cooper had been attracted to the fruitful parallels between Robinson Crusoe and his own American tales of border settlement. In the first chapter of the 1843 novel, in fact, Cooper had apologized for giving only a brief “sketch” of Captain Willoughby’s initial actions on his patent, adding, “we feel certain that a minute account of the progress of such a settlement would possess a sort of Robinson Crusoe–like interest” (WY CE 12). Thereafter he seemed intent on elaborating the parallel. In his next book, Afloat and Ashore, he thus had Moses Marble briefly strand himself on a reef-ringed Pacific island out of a desire (as Miles puts it when the two are reunited much later in the book) to “play Robinson Crusoe” (A&A CE 1:415). Although Marble gives up on the effort, his idea expresses

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feelings other characters share. Major Merton thus also fancies remaining on the island. When Miles asks Merton “what could you, or any other man do with himself, in a place like this, without companions, books, or occupation?,” Merton readily answers, “I should have every thing to create, as it might be, and the pleasure of seeing every thing rising up under my own hand.” Even Wallingford feels the fantasy’s appeal: “The island . . . would be easily tilled—one might do here, I acknowledge, and it would be pleasant to found a colony” (A&A CE 1:294, 296). Herein lay the seed, clearly enough, of the social experiment in The Crater, which lavishly follows out the parallel with Defoe. In first mentioning the book to Bentley in March 1847, Cooper described it as “a Robinson Crusoe story” (LJ 5:199), and he gave his characters ample opportunities to second the idea. Bob Betts jokingly describes the shipwreck as giving Woolston and him the chance to “Crusoe it for the rest of our days,” a formula repeated several times (CR 1:52; see also 1:56, 60, 113), and the two soon debate at length the fit between their situation and that of Defoe’s hero (see CR 1:65–68). The latter effort is important, since, as Cooper also told Bentley at the outset, his version of the Crusoe story was to contain “features entirely original” (LJ 5:199). He refused to spell them out unless and until Bentley bought the book, but what he had in mind is clear. The key difference is that Cooper’s two shipwrecked mariners will recruit a colony to join them and found a kind of Alter-America in their temporarily expanded Pacific territory. The social experiment, as I have called it, mattered to him for two reasons. It was, of course, the key element in all his own border tales, from The Pioneers to Wyandotté, and as such made up the American core of the new story. But Cooper’s political purpose in the present case gave that core element a new meaning. While he indeed was to spend much time in The Crater giving what he called in 1843 “a minute account of the progress” of the island settlement, all that progress was to be for naught—and he knew it from the outset. Cooper’s singleness of purpose is clear from the fast pace, noted earlier, with which he developed his novel’s opening episodes. Everything is aimed at the moment when Woolston, surveying his surroundings right after the geological crisis in the eleventh chapter, finds that it has opened “something like a new world to his enterprise and curiosity” (CR 1:163).59 Woolston is solitary at this instant, like Crusoe before he chances upon Friday, but soon the return of Betts with a few other Americans (including Woolston’s wife Bridget) sets in motion the collective experiment that distinguishes Cooper’s novel from Defoe’s. This is not to say, though, that the difference is entirely owing to Cooper. Here is where his debt to Defoe’s many imitators, not just to Robinson Crusoe itself, becomes evident.60

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The most famous collective version of Defoe ’s story is Swiss Family Robinson, written by Bern pastor Johann D. Wyss and edited and first published by his son, Johann R. Wyss, in 1812–1813. Cooper almost certainly knew that book, as well as other texts that had used and commented upon the Crusoe myth, especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract and Emile.61 But his most important model was, instead, a relatively obscure British novel first published in 1831: Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative of His Shipwreck, and Consequent Discovery of Certain Islands in the Caribbean Sea, described on its title page as “edited by Miss Jane Porter,” the author of such bestsellers as Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) and The Scottish Chiefs (1807), from a manuscript said to have descended in Seaward’s family. In fact, the narrative ’s authenticity was cast in doubt soon after it appeared, and it quite recently has been shown to have been fabricated not by Porter but by her brother, Royal Navy surgeon William O. Porter, who had extensive experience in the West Indies.62 Porter’s long and very detailed Narrative favorably impressed many readers, among them Edgar Allan Poe, who arguably made some use of it in his own nautical imposture, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). In 1844, Poe furthermore linked Porter to Cooper in a place where Cooper was very likely to have seen and noted the point—that is, in a review of Ned Myers that appeared in Graham’s Magazine when Cooper was himself publishing there. Poe began his review with the following observation: “The words ‘edited by J. Fenimore Cooper,’ in the title-page of this volume, have, no doubt, a suspicious appearance. It has been the fashion, of late days, for authors to speak of themselves, modestly, as editors of even original works.” Drawing comparison between Ned Myers and such fabrications as Defoe’s and Porter’s (which he here called “a work of far deeper interest, and of far more vraisemblant character than even ‘Robinson Crusoe’ ”), Poe nonetheless took Cooper at his word, concluding that Ned Myers was “strictly true,” and as such better even than Dana’s Two Years before the Mast. These comparisons to one side, what is interesting about Poe’s review is the manner in which it likely planted (or perhaps renewed) in Cooper’s mind a series of associations that, four years later, brought him to write his own journal-based (and not-quite-edited) narrative of a shipwreck and its aftermath.63 There survives from Cooper’s library a copy of one volume of the 1831 New York edition of Porter’s Narrative, a pretty conclusive proof that he at least knew of the work.64 There are other clues in The Crater itself. Some circumstantial details in Cooper’s novel thus suggest an influence from Porter’s. For instance, it is a curious fact that, notwithstanding the great importance of Bristol for English maritime activity, Edward Seaward departs from there on his Caribbean ventures and that Mark Woolston similarly hails from Bristol, Pennsylvania.

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Perhaps even more striking is the fact that, much as Seaward christens one new boat the Avon and wants to name another the Severn (after rivers of personal importance in his home region), Woolston sails to the Pacific on a ship named for a creek that ran close to Cooper’s ancestral home in New Jersey (Rancocus) and names another craft for a creek near his own American hometown of Bristol, the Neshamony. Nor is this all. Although Seaward takes his new bride (Eliza Goldsmith) with him on his second, ill-fated voyage, whereas Bridget Yardley must be brought to Mark’s Reef almost two years after he has wrecked there, the bulk of both stories consists of the couples’ joint occupation of their islands and the slow expansion of their familial domains into colonies. Even the shipwrecks seem mirror images of each other. In Robinson Crusoe, a fierce storm grounds the ship on the sand, forcing the captain and crew to take to a boat. That craft in turn is upset by a monstrous wave, separating Crusoe from his mates and eventually causing his solitary landing. In both Porter’s and Cooper’s novels, by contrast, the crisis comes when someone aboard the ships, spying danger ahead, shouts out “Breakers, breakers! land! breakers” (Porter 1:32) or “Breakers ahead!” (CR 1:38). Even the relative speed with which the disaster comes in Cooper, rare in a writer of many languorous openings, may indicate that he was indeed following Porter here, in general plan if not page by page. Although Seaward’s ship springs leaks as a result of striking rocks, whereas the Rancocus does not, once things settle down in each book the survivors discover that their respective vessels are trapped inside a nearby reef. Through various additional accidents, in each instance officers and crew alike have also been torn away in the night, leaving only two survivors—Mark and Bob and Edward and Eliza Seaward. But the most important comparison between the works concerns the action once the survivors have acclimated themselves to the scene of their lucky survival. With the return of Bob Betts and the addition of those he brings back from Philadelphia, the Woolstons set about a project roughly parallel to that of the Seawards. Critical in both instances is the fact that these onetime castaways positively choose to remain on and/or return to their islands. At the end of the first part of the three-volume Porter Narrative, Edward and Eliza leave St. George’s Key for Jamaica, where they settle some business and recruit new participants in their experiment. (Seaward might be Woolston when he records that his intention was “to people the settlement with honest and industrious families”—Porter 2:35.) Soon one of the new vessels they have purchased goes to England and, on returning, brings Edward’s brother and Eliza’s sister to join the venture (see Porter 2:89), much as Bob Betts on his return from Philadelphia brings not only Bridget but also Mark’s sister and her husband. The Seawards decide to visit England themselves—a decision copied in The Crater when Mark, having taken a cargo of sandalwood to Canton in the Rancocus, ships tea for

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Philadelphia. Once there, he recruits some two hundred new colonists to accompany him back to the Reef. The details of the respective heroes’ experiences in their homelands vary considerably. Seaward becomes entangled in political affairs as he tries to secure (or rather buy) rights to the Seaward Islands from the Crown, but eventually he receives the grant and is knighted by the Queen Regent (see Porter 2:177). For his part, Woolston manages to satisfy the claims of the insurers of the Rancocus through his profits from the Canton voyage; they in turn insist that he take the ship as a reward for his honesty and reliability. In their own way, then, these return voyages mark the reintegration of the castaways with their original social worlds. Significantly, no such interim return occurs in Robinson Crusoe. These and other parallels do not erase the profound differences in action and tone between Cooper’s novel and Porter’s. The geological element in The Crater has no natural counterpart whatever in Seaward’s Narrative, for one thing, and its importance to Mark Woolston’s experience is so integral that in itself the catastrophe sets the two books well apart. However, in their social and political dimensions the books nonetheless have a compensatory relationship. Very little disturbs the surface in the Seaward Islands. When Sir Edward and Lady Seaward return from their voyage home, the islanders receive them with notable respect. “On our approach,” narrates Seaward, “they all came down to the beach—men, women, and children; accompanied by our four carpenters, and their negro apprentices. This animated body gave us a noisy hurrah; which the brig, as well as ourselves, returned with a hearty cheer” (Porter 3:13). To the end of the story, the colonial population observes proper deference, presenting a contrast with the political corruption Seaward has uncovered through his dealings with Sir Robert Walpole back home. What begins to undo the dream he and his wife entertain for their colony is external pressure from the Spaniards, then at war with Britain. But the Spanish threat in fact is reinforced by British connivance and disingenuousness, again traceable to Walpole. This turn of events invokes the court-versus-country tension that characterized British politics at the time of the book’s action. Seaward, put in the uncomfortable position of apologizing for British misdeeds against the Spanish—but at the same time denied full authority to meet the actual Spanish concerns—is seized and imprisoned. He manages to extricate himself from this crisis, while the next Spanish threats, in the form of naval forces pestering his islands, are either beaten back or happily dispersed, like a second Armada, by a fierce storm (see Porter 3:98–119, 213–14). Following these good outcomes, Seaward, reflecting on the diminishing strength of his wife and agreeing with her that their “child [i.e., the colony] is grown up,” decides that they may therefore return to Britain for good. There is a hint, as Eliza says, that there is “nothing [in their Caribbean islands] but bustle

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and anxiety,” but when they do leave, all is again orderly and one might say sweet, if not saccharine: “On Sunday, the 12th of February [1744], after coming out of church, we took a general and affectionate leave of all the people; myself addressing a few parting words, I may say, of parental exhortation to them; which were answered by the tears of many, and bows of reverence from all. My dear wife wept too; and as she passed, every lip blessed her: sobs now became audible around us: then waving my hand kindly to them, I pulled my hat over my own eyes, and hastened forward” (Porter 3:221, 228). The journal proper ends with a fragment: “After clearing the gulf, and passing Cape Canaveral, the fleet * * * * *.” Jane Porter in her role as the book’s editor explains that “from this point, seventy-three pages of the original manuscript are missing; that is, from page 630 to page 704 in the old MS.” This nice touch, another effort in establishing the historicity of the supposed document, suggests that experience is open-ended. But in fact Porter and her brother now bring forward a final four pages that, taking up the story five years afterward, seem intended “to close the Journal” (Porter 3:230). Of course this addendum will satisfy the reader that the Seawards indeed made it home safely. But that is not the main drift. It seems that Prime Minister Henry Pelham (Walpole’s replacement) and King George II, eager to settle the long dispute with Spain, have ceded the Seaward Islands to that power. “These islands, or rocks, or whatever they are,” Pelham is quoted as saying with perfect political nonchalance, “must be delivered up immediately to the crown of Spain.” Seaward attempts to counter this dictum by pointing out the importance of those “rocks”: “Whether we contemplate Seaward Islands in a naval or commercial point of view, they are of no small importance; and the Spaniard knows it.” He continues in this vein for a full page as Pelham’s intermediary, the duke of Newcastle, bites his lip and blushes. But finally the duke repeats his earlier comment: “I tell you, the thing is done.” Seaward is promised a monetary indemnification, but no other satisfaction. Newcastle is dumbfounded, as he says, by what he calls Seaward’s attachment to “these abominable rocks of yours.” When Seaward’s wife learns of this exchange, she tries to soothe his feelings, and more so his concern about “his people” on the islands, who may be exposed to mistreatment owing to this scurrilous act of their government. He tries to ease the transition for them, but in the end all he and Eliza can do is look forward to retiring to their Gloucestershire estate (Porter 3:231–36).

Eruptions In Seaward’s Narrative, a utopian experiment that has proved fully possible of success is ruined by the worldly manipulations of Parliament and Crown. This Whiggish turn to the plot is one that would have made sense to an American

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reader of Cooper’s stamp, since American republicanism embodied much of the court-versus-country dichotomy of eighteenth-century British politics. But when he came to revise Porter’s shipwreck narrative for American purposes, he of course had to change the political values—had to, but also wished to. At the Reef, Mark Woolston is not cherished but rather cut down. When he returns from Philadelphia with ample cash and new legitimacy, the initial threats that he faces are, like those troubling the Seaward Islands in the early 1740s, external, since Waally, the neighboring native villain who was subdued in earlier parts of the story, reemerges at just this time (that is, in chapter 20). But Waally is quickly defeated, as will be the East Indian pirates with whom he later seeks to join forces. In any case, the real threat is internal to the colony. The initial symptom is a difficulty about religion that Mark is somewhat surprised to discover (and for which he is substantially responsible). Spending a week with Bridget and their children at Vulcan’s Peak, he broaches the topic to her. Like Seaward, Woolston has introduced only one religion to his islands— that is, the American Episcopal version of Seaward’s Anglicanism. It is not officially established in the Crater colony, but owing to the lack of other clergy the point is pragmatically moot. That said, the situation here is quite different from that which obtains in Porter’s book. No one in the Seaward Islands complains about the exclusion of dissenting sects (or of the Lutheran Church that the settlers in his “Germantown” presumably might prefer). Nor do the Porters bring up that issue. Order, again, flows perfectly well in a top-down direction as long as the head of the snake in Westminster and at court is lopped off or at least restrained. In the American colony, religion by contrast becomes the first serious source of internal discord. When Mark, following a discussion of the matter with Bob Betts, brings up the topic with Bridget (raised as a Presbyterian), she candidly admits she is not surprised by the brewing discord. A very interesting conversation follows. Bridget has known from the start that many of the colonists have merely “tolerated” the Episcopal clergyman’s “ministrations,” a truth they have concealed from Mark (CR 2:156). Indeed, Cooper adds that Bridget herself, though she has “quietly consented” to Mark’s faith, is but “half converted” to it, a point she reveals by terming Episcopalianism a “sect,” something Mark never does (CR 2:157–58). What Mark views as “the church” is thus seen by other characters, including his own wife, as one institution among many equals. Although Cooper had certainly become more overtly concerned about religious issues by the time he was at work on The Crater, and soon would begin filling pages of his journals with references to his readings in the Bible (see LJ 5:251 for the first instance, on January 1, 1848), he made Mark Woolston, as he had made Richard Jones in The Pioneers, blindly insistent on the universality of his own ways.65

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Woolston is thus no more a perfect leader in Cooper’s eyes than Hugh and Uncle Ro (or the younger Van Rensselaers) were perfect landlords. Bridget Yardley Woolston is not just incidentally a Presbyterian; nor is Bob Betts just incidentally a Quaker (though a peculiar one at that, having been “born and educated an Episcopalian” [CR 1:87] and having only lately moved toward the Friends, especially after marrying one while back in Pennsylvania). Cooper wanted to introduce fundamental differences into the heart of the island colony because they existed all about him in the United States. He knew quite well from his own experience, his sole surviving sibling having long before joined the Presbyterian congregation in Cooperstown, that people made choices in such matters and tended to ignore or tolerate their differences. His and Ann Pomeroy’s father, no model of piety in either Quaker or Episcopal terms, had provided the land and cash for the Presbyterian church in “his” village as well as for the Episcopal—and for the Presbyterian first, in point of fact.66 Furthermore, Cooper’s own tolerance of Catholicism not only in Europe but also in North America bespeaks an even wider openness of mind on the matter. In The Crater, he therefore did not endorse Mark Woolston’s Episcopal preferences as the obvious standard. Woolston’s views on the matter are a sign of his opacity; Cooper at one point even comments that a sarcastic question Woolston asks Betts reveals “a little malice” (CR 2:141). Small wonder that the Episcopal minister Woolston has brought to the colony is named Hornblower. Although the narrator does state that Hornblower is “no bad appellation . . . for one who had to sound so many notes of warning” (CR 2:72), to the reader the name suggests a noisy talent for drowning out other tunes. Cooper was not exactly on one side as opposed to the other here. Or rather he was on both. If he probably shared Woolston’s view that openly reading from a printed Book of Common Prayer was more honest than pretending to a spontaneous inspiration that had in fact been faked (this is the subject Woolston is discussing with Betts when he displays his “malice”), that may have had less to do with specific doctrine than with general moral principles. Furthermore, it is increasingly clear that Mark Woolston’s rigidity in religious matters contributes to the problems his colony will face—and that Cooper wishes us to appreciate that fact. This is an important conclusion about Cooper’s own views given the tendency among some critics to read The Crater as overwhelmingly concerned with political issues. Insofar as the collapse of the colony has a beginning point, it lies in religion, not politics. Cooper had written pragmatically about religion and American society in Notions of the Americans, asserting that established religion had “nothing to do with truth” and that the way faith as a general matter took precedence over specific denominations in frontier communities was salutary. In this sense, Richard

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Jones was a bully, not a man of faith (Notions 2:234–36). More recently, Cooper’s comments on religion in The American Democrat (mostly in the brief penultimate chapter) were concerned with its spiritual functions rather than its institutional nature. He nonetheless added “a few words on the peculiarities of religion and of religious feeling in America.” These did not concern the matter that most interested him in 1828—the lack of an establishment and the resulting competition among sects in the interest of faith—but rather what he now called “the taint of sectarianism.” This affliction he traced not to the country’s political system but rather to the religious obsessions that accompanied so many of the early settlers from Europe: “Fanaticism was the fault of the age, at the time our ancestors took possession of the country, and its exaggerations have entailed on their descendants many opinions that are, at the best, of a very equivocal usefulness.” As a consequence, “The nation is sectarian, rather than Christian” (AD 188–89). The question to be asked is whether, a decade later still, Cooper thought Mark Woolston above this fray or rather its exemplar. It is hard to imagine Woolston meeting the test as The American Democrat had established it: “Religion’s first lesson is humility; its fruit, charity. In the great and sublime ends of Providence, little things are lost, and least of all is he imbued with a right spirit who believes that insignificant observances, subtleties of doctrine, and minor distinctions, enter into the great essentials of the Christian character. The wisest thing for him who is disposed to cavil at the immaterial habits of his neighbor, to split straws on doctrine, to fancy trifles of importance, and to place the man before principles, would be to distrust himself. The spirit of peace is not with him” (AD 189). What person has witnessed a more profound demonstration of the “great and sublime ends of Providence” than Mark Woolston, survivor of that stunning upheaval in his island group? And yet here he is, intent on the rightness of those “insignificant observances, subtleties of doctrine, and minor distinctions” that, critical as he thinks them, lead him to see many inhabitants in his colony as seriously amiss. The spirit of peace is not with him. In this regard, Mark Woolston is connected to the last generation of the Littlepages. Partly sympathetic as Cooper is, politically, with Mark or with Hugh and Uncle Ro, he does not endorse all they are, think, or say. Nor is he without the wit to perceive how much they willingly contribute to their own troubles. The message offered first by Bob Betts and now by Bridget might help the Episcopal proprietor of the Crater to see the light. Certainly Bridget evinces more wisdom and a deeper spirit of peace than her husband when she tries to explain to him that the great “variety of opinions, or rather of feelings” he has encountered during a recent tour of the colony is a natural human fact, not a cause for alarm, since “religion is, and ought to be, more a matter of feeling, than of reason.” He agrees with her, at least intellectually. But when he objects

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“a little reproachfully” on learning that she has long withheld from him the other colonists’ skeptical view of Episcopalianism, she counters with the further news—also not shared with him yet—that Methodist and Presbyterian ministers, perhaps even a Quaker preacher, are expected on an incoming ship (CR 2:156–57). The point is, of course, that Bridget has been privy to the secret plans of the other religionists, not just their dissenting views. Mark does not comment explicitly on that fact, although when he replies, “The law against the admission of an immigrant, without the consent of the governor and council, is very clear and precise,” Cooper once more emphasizes his mood—he is “looking grave.” Bridget’s answer is sweet but nonetheless firm, and significant: “That may be true, my love, but it would hardly do to tell the people they are not to worship God in the manner that may best satisfy their own consciences.” Mark’s reply is rigid, or at least opaque: as there is “but one God, and one Saviour,” how is it that there should be “more than one mode of worshipping them?” Bridget is more than equal to him on these questions. God may not be on her side, but Cooper certainly is. Citing the “great diversity of opinion which exists among men, in other matters”—exactly the point Betts made to Woolston in their earlier discussion of religion—she adds that “Mr. Hornblower has a fault, which is a very great fault, in one situated as he is, without a competitor in the field. He lays too much stress on his particular mission; talking too much, and preaching too much of his apostolic authority, as a divine.” His mistake, as the conversation goes on to reveal it, is that he is trying to make the colonists into Episcopalians (Mark’s view) whereas “he ought to be content with making them all Christians” (Bridget’s retort). Now is the point at which Cooper inserts the comment quoted earlier—namely, that Bridget “had quietly consented to the priestly control of her husband’s clergyman, though but half converted to the peculiar distinctions of his sect, herself ” (CR 2:157–58). One is prompted to ask a question here: in the Cooper household, whose “sect” exactly was Episcopalianism, and who had been quietly consenting to the priestly control of his spouse ’s clergymen (including her brother, the bishop) all these years? Soon after this discussion, the pirates allied with Waally attack, but their threat is handled with relative ease, introducing “a long period of peace and prosperity.” Although Cooper as narrator attributes these good results as much to “the bounty of God, as the industry of man,” he adds that “the colonists did not so regard the matter.” Victory having induced “a more exalted view of themselves,” they now take more credit for things than they deserve (CR 2:197). Although Cooper does not draw an overt connection to the consequences of the Mexican American War, one notes that he finished this novel while the reported conduct of Matthew C. Perry (at Tabasco, for one) was attracting his critical

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attention (see LJ 5:186–87). When he penned a Swiftian comment for Shubrick’s wife on May 2, 1847 (“No man is glorious that has not scalped and eaten a Mexican, or been run through with half a dozen of their lances”—LJ 5:211), Cooper was not being funny in the least. In The Crater at virtually the same time, he penned its corollary. Nominally about the victorious Craterinos, it could apply as well to his own countrymen: “The ancient humility seemed suddenly to disappear; and in its place a vainglorious estimate of themselves and of their prowess arose among the people” (CR 2:197). Military victory might lead to moral defeat, or indeed self-defeat. In the novel proper, the slide begins with the arrival of those other clergymen whom Bridget has been the first to mention to Mark and whom Mark, apparently having taken her points to heart, refuses to bar from his colony as he had told her he had the right to do. Four such men show up a few months after the Pirate War: a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Baptist, and a Quaker. They do not bring light to illuminate Hornblower’s darkness. Although they all profess “brotherly love,” and explain their departure from America as the result of rising sectarianism there (as if all of them have read The American Democrat), once arrived they “set to work, immediately, to collect followers, and believers after their own peculiar notions.” Nor is Parson Hornblower above the fray. Always having been, Cooper writes, “a good deal inclined to what are termed ‘distinctive opinions,’ ” he “buckled on his armour, and took the field in earnest.” The consequences of this turn of events are hardly cheering. The sometime keeper of merino herds at Fenimore Farm and Mount Ovis could not avoid a homely comparison that had, too, a New Testament warrant: “In order that the sheep of one flock should not be mistaken for the sheep of another, great care was taken to mark each and all with the brand of sect. One clipped an ear, another smeared the wool (or drew it over the eyes) and a third, as was the case with Friend Stephen Dighton, the quaker, put on an entire covering, so that his sheep might be known by their outward symbols, far as they could be seen.” With a luminous natural scene all around them in what Cooper in his very next sentence calls these “remote and sweet islands,” where innocent hymns of praise might have ascended as if by themselves, the settlers go about their all-too-worldly business. As the religious war heats up, their various ministers begin to “pray at each other,” Cooper adds. And if Hornblower refrains from this next bit of declension, it is only because “his admirable liturgy did not furnish him with the means of making these forays into the enemy’s camp.” His Book of Common Prayer at least had this benefit. Yet one cannot escape the conclusion that for Cooper the fixed Episcopal liturgy ought to have been “admirable” for other, higher reasons. It is certainly remarkable that he includes Episcopalianism within the target zone of his critique (CR 2:198–99).

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Two other sons of discord who have arrived in the colony with the four clergymen—that is, a lawyer and a printer—soon contribute to the worsening state of affairs. The lawyer stimulates the creation of a litigious spirit: “men began to discover that they were wronged by their neighbours, in a hundred ways which they had never before discovered.” The law, instead of serving “the purposes of justice,” now begins to feed a hunger for “speculation and revenge.” Among other things, money-lenders seeking to gain control of more colony real estate bait “needy” property owners with supposedly helpful loans—of course taking “judgment bonds, mortgages, and other innocent securities” as collateral. By this ruse, they soon manage to strip their victims as clean of assets as a mechanical corn-sheller spitting out “nothing but cob,” and “in a sort of patentright time” (CR 2:200). The astute reader is right to recall the despicable rural capitalist Van Tassel in Afloat and Ashore, who persecutes Moses Marble ’s longlost mother by falsely claiming that her dead husband never paid off the mortgage on their farm. The printer accompanying the lawyer of course brings his own patented apparatus to bear on the previously happy colony. Taking up “the cause of human rights” (a cause Cooper had championed in The Deerslayer), he exploits it to build the circulation of his weekly paper, the “Crater Truth-Teller.” As long as he can define the terms, as he expertly does, he can also control the direction of public discussion. That is bad enough. Worse is the fact that his manipulations lead the Craterinos to believe themselves oppressed: “the people were soon convinced that they had hitherto been living under an unheard-of tyranny, and were invoked weekly to arouse in their might, and be true to themselves and their posterity” (CR 2:200). Like the Anti-Rent lecturer in The Redskins, who works up the crowd by dwelling on the luxurious life Hugh Littlepage supposedly is living in Paris on their money (see RED 1:239–40), the newspaperman seeks to persuade the residents that Mark Woolston abuses them via his unjust power over colony affairs. The newspaper editor is grossly overstating matters, as any fair sketch of the evolution of the colony will indicate. Originally, Mark was the only occupant and owner of the expanded territory surrounding the Reef—literally monarch of all he surveyed, like the castaway Alexander Selkirk in William Cowper’s Crusoean poem.67 Still the sole proprietor of most of it once Bob Betts arrives with a few other settlers, Mark was “unanimously chosen governor for life” and also made a member of the council of three (along with Betts and Dr. John Heaton, Mark’s brother-in-law) that was to serve as a kind of legislative body (CR 1:224). Later, when the population has increased to around three hundred and the council is expanded and made an elective body, Mark voluntarily gives up his sovereignty, vesting it in the state and thus triggering a general distribution

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of land to all the adult males. Owing to Mark’s “humility, not to say his justice,” a quasi-princely private domain has become, by these generous means, a public commonwealth (CR 2:98–99). His behavior is in marked contrast to that of his counterpart in William O. Porter’s book. Sir Edward Seaward enjoys somewhat more restricted rights under his royal grant but staunchly retains and never hesitates to exercise them up to the point where the state’s intervention deprives him of all control over the island group. The result of Mark Woolston’s generous regard for others and for the well-being of the colony is that his South Sea paradise is no Ravensnest, let alone Rensselaerswyck. Furthermore, Cooper links property rights with human rights here. The owners of the distributed lots are free to do with them as they see fit. Stimulated by this sudden accession of property but short of labor to develop their lands, the hundred or so new freeholders look to the help they can get from able-bodied laborers imported from Ooroony’s islands. There is a wish among “a few of the colonists to make slaves of these men,” but neither Woolston nor his council—nor Cooper—will allow it. As if to signal his concurrence with the ill-fated Wilmot Proviso, pending again in Congress in 1847 after its defeat the year before, Cooper editorializes here that extending slavery into new territory, while “an expedient that might do well enough for a short time,” would produce “its own punishment in the end.” Woolston, intent on ensuring that the native free workers be well-treated, arranges for the government rather than the landowners to hire them and see that they are “paid the promised remuneration” (CR 2:105–6). Cooper thus might be seen as publicly aligning himself again, as he had in the 1830s, with “Jacksonian Antislavery.”68 The “Crater Truth-Teller” conspicuously overlooks these facts and instead fabricates gross lies about Mark Woolston and his character. Cooper’s attack on the paper’s unnamed editor excretes into the story, so to speak, his own strong feelings on the topic of the press and its abuses. The American Democrat had praised the press for its ability to rein in despots but at the same time had warned that, in a democracy, the tendency of the press to mislead the public “as regards facts, characters, or principles” was a very serious threat (AD 124–25), as mentioned in my eighth chapter. In drawing his portrait of the editor in The Crater Cooper clearly was guided by this insight. He also expressed thereby much of his disgust with the editors and publishers with whom he had tangled in the decade since he wrote The American Democrat. But he did not simply introduce Greeley or Benjamin or Weed into the novel under a thin disguise. Indeed, Cooper sought to historicize his remarks by speaking of the practices of the press forty years earlier, the nominal setting of his novel, a period when “a majority of mankind fancied that a statement made in print was far more likely to be true than one made orally” (an attitude, he added, that no one seriously

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entertained any longer, fortunately enough). He did not linger on this backward look, although he extended it a bit by drawing on an episode in the career of his sometime naval commander, James Lawrence, who in 1807 accosted and physically abused the clerk in the Manhattan office of the New York Public Advertiser for its editor’s taunting remarks on the officer corps. In The Crater, the outraged lieutenant becomes “a mate of one of the vessels”—there being no navy men at the Reef—but the story otherwise jibes with one that Cooper no doubt heard Lawrence or other officers speak of forty years earlier (see JFC:EY 125; CR 2:203). As we have seen in chapter 7, Cooper generally disapproved of the dueling impulse of that earlier period and saw the institution of the law as providing a good substitute for the sort of violent revenge Lawrence had exacted. Employing the episode here in his dystopian novel, though, let him have it both ways. He could indulge the fantasy in his fiction even as he had sublimated it in real life. Cooper makes it clear that the political “principles” of this editor are matters of sheer convenience. Whenever he runs afoul of his readers by virtue of his “dishonesty, selfishness, vulgarity, and lies,” he contrives to regain their trust by raising alarms about threats to “ ‘the people’ and their rights” (CR 2:203–4). His most useful principle is majority rule, on which he and Mark Woolston do battle on several occasions. Everything, the editor holds, is subject to the will of the majority, a point from which he retreats slightly when Mark points out that certain things—“the laws of God,” supremely, but also abiding political truths— rise above human choosing. When Mark further tries to argue, however, that a constitution, as the fundamental law of a community, also is not subject to repeated alteration by the momentary wishes of the majority, he sets up the scenario that will lead to his own undoing. Much as Cooper already has let us see Woolston’s shortcomings on the issue of religion, he does not completely endorse the governor’s political arguments here: he allows only that there “was a great deal of good sense, and much truth in what the governor wrote.” That does not matter much in practice, since Woolston’s arguments cannot prevail “with the ignorant and short-sighted, who put more trust in one honeyed phrase of the journal, that flourished about the ‘people’ and their ‘rights,’ than in all the arguments that reason, sustained even by revelation, could offer.” As the spirit of what is termed “Progress” runs its course, Woolston does avoid “extremes” in attempting to counter the false assumptions all around him: “The governor did not deny that men had their natural rights, at the very moment he insisted that these rights were just as much a portion of the minority as of the majority. He was perfectly willing that equal laws should prevail, as equal laws did prevail in the colony, though he was not disposed to throw everything into confusion merely to satisfy a theory.” There is some degree of rigidity, though, in his

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defense of his old prerogatives: “For a long time . . . he opposed the designs of the new-school, and insisted on his vested rights, as established in the fundamental law, which had made him ruler for life” (CR 2:205–6). This completely justified but not entirely prudent insistence gives the newspaperman more ammunition. Working up the “minds of the masses” against the governor’s presumption of special rights, the editor (like Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing) declares it “tolerable and not to be endured.” From politics, the popular mind as Cooper conceives of it descends to manners. Some citizens now object that Woolston brushes his teeth when they do not, eats his meals at unpopular hours, and otherwise adopts habits that suit himself rather than them. “Some even objected to him because he spat in his pocket-handkerchief, and did not blow his nose with his fingers” (CR 2:206). While these details are trivial in nature, they are not in Cooper’s view trivial in implication. The tyranny of the majority, once in force, would not stop at politics but would easily extend itself to matters of private preference and cultural taste. At this point in his narrative of the colony’s downfall, Cooper returns to the theme of religion. “All this time, religion was running riot, as well as politics,” he writes, adding that “next-door neighbours hated each other most sincerely, because they took different views of regeneration, justification, predestination and all the other subtleties of doctrine.” If Mark Woolston had the aid of a less vituperative and assertive Episcopal priest, he might have weathered these tyrannical winds, but the Reverend Mr. Hornblower proves himself at this new crisis to be as inflexible as ever. Were the cleric “prudent, he would have proclaimed louder than ever ‘Christ, and him crucified;’ but, he made the capital mistake of going up and down, crying with the mob, ‘the church, the church!’ This kept constantly before the eyes and ears of the dissenting part of the population— dissenting from his opinions if not from an establishment—the very features that were the most offensive to them.” Owing to the quarrels that arose about the “insignificant matters” that divide Christians one from another, Cooper concludes, “Perhaps religion . . . had quite as much to do with the downfall of the governor, which shortly after occurred, as politics, and the newspaper, and the new lawyer, all of which and whom did everything that was in their power to destroy him” (CR 2:206–7). The immediate cause of his downfall is a constitutional convention pushed by the “Crater Truth-Teller.” The original constitution contains language allowing for amendments, but because the process it spells out requires consent of the governor and his council before any change is taken to the people, the editor and those of the “disaffected” who are “aimed at revolution” now contrive a means of circumventing it. Because the colony is divided into several parishes that function something like “American town meetings,” with limited legislative

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authority, proposals are put forward in each of them calling on the people to vote on a call for a constitutional convention. Given that only about a quarter of the eligible voters in each parish attend the subsequent meetings—most of the others believe them “not only illegal, but dangerous”—and the proposals pass by very narrow majorities in only six of the ten parishes, the upshot is that the convention is approved by a razor-thin margin among a distinct minority of voters. In the next stage, the election of delegates to the convention, popular opposition to the process remains strong. As the majority of citizens again consider the process illegal, about a third of eligible voters cast ballots for slates apparently contrived by the editor and his close associates (Cooper comments that these “élites of the colony” soon went to work “to organise an election for members of the convention”). Once the new election is concluded, the result is predictable: “Thus fortified by the sacred principle of the sway of majorities, these representatives of a minority, met in convention, and formed an entirely new fundamental law; one, indeed, that completely subverted the old one, not only in fact, but in theory.” When the new document is put to the citizens, fewer than half vote on it; it passes by a plurality of a third. “By this simple, and exquisite republican process,” Cooper acerbically comments, “was the principle of the sway of majorities vindicated, a new fundamental law for the colony provided, and all the old incumbents turned out of office” (CR 2:207–9).69 Because Mark Woolston is still able to command more votes for governor than anyone else, an article in the new constitution provides that no chief executive may serve for more than five years consecutively. He therefore is forced to the sidelines for the next election. All of his relatives and close connections are also kept out of any office, though by pressure brought by “the nominating committees,” not by the electors themselves, “with whom they were still popular.” Drawing here on the notorious corruption of political affairs in his home state, Cooper probably was targeting the key figure in the Albany Regency, his old foe Thurlow Weed: among New York Whigs, Weed was certainly one of the key “wire-pullers,” Cooper’s term for the new party bosses of the Crater colony. Having avoided identifying the editor of the fictional “Crater Truth-Teller” with Weed earlier in the book, now toward its end Cooper made an open attack on all that the editor of the Albany Evening Journal represented. In Cooper’s view, Weed of course had proved incapable of telling the truth in his newspaper or in court (CR 2:209–10). Yet Cooper’s purpose was less to target specific individuals and their crimes than to point out ills that were seemingly endemic to democracy in this era. He conceded that Woolston thought of “knocking the whole thing in the head, by the strong arm”; but that would do little effective good, for there is no widespread revolt for his force to counter. In fact, Woolston is not opposed by the

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people at large. Most voters are still on his side, but they allow his handful of active opponents to prevail through their own passivity: “political jugglery,” Cooper writes, “held them in duress.” Woolston therefore submits “to the changes, through a love of peace.” Resuming his role as private citizen, he stands to the side as John Pennock (his first recruit for the colony years earlier), having proved susceptible to the seductions of power, is elected to the governorship. Woolston knows that “considerably more than half of the colony preferred the old system to the new, and that the same proportion of the people would rather see him in the Colony House, than to see John Pennock in his stead.” But the wishes of the majority do not effectively matter under the circumstances. Cooper, using all capital letters for his lesson, drives home the political truth Mark has learned: “that the more a people attempt to extend their power directly over state affairs, the less they, in fact, control them, after having once passed the point of naming lawgivers as their representatives; merely bestowing on a few artful managers the influence they vainly imagine [they] have secured to themselves” (CR 2:210–11). It may seem as if, through the fight he carefully constructs and chronicles, Cooper was pitching for his own class of gentlemen as the best protection of the people’s rights against “artful managers” like Thurlow Weed. There decidedly was a personal side to the battle. When, in the final chapter of the book, we learn that Mark’s ownership of the original Crater was called into question just prior to his departure for Philadelphia, we seem to have shifted from the arena of political theory to that of personal pique. This piece of earth has a meaning for its owner that echoes what Cooper found in Three Mile Point: “The crater was the subject of what to Mark Woolston was a most painful lawsuit. From the first, he had claimed that spot as his private property; though he had conceded its use to the public”—under a formal lease, to be sure, and for purposes of defense rather than recreation, but in the same spirit that the Coopers showed in handling the Point. Moreover, as with the Cooperstown editor Andrew Barber’s attack on the Cooper family’s rights to the Point, in Woolston’s case it is “the last comers who are ever the most anxious to dispute ancient rights.” Governor Pennock, beholden to “the people,” authorizes the attorney general—that is, the single lawyer who recently arrived in the colony—“to bring an action of ejectment against the party in possession.” Moreover, the echo of Cooper’s personal history is deepened by the fact that Woolston “argued his own cause” in the lawsuit that followed. And, as had happened in the November 1841 jury trial of James W. Webb in Fonda, the jury in Woolston’s case is divided—the “fearless, independent” Bigelow, another early Woolston recruit to the colony, staunchly holds out for “the right,” much as “Mr. Lansing” did at the Webb proceedings, forcing in that case (as in Woolston’s) a new trial at a later time (CR 2:217–19).

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These personal links between Woolston’s troubles and those Cooper endured are real, but The Crater does not quite amount to a defense of the need in democracies for the common people to follow the guidance of their “betters.” For those who are inclined to regard The Crater as an “aristocratic version of the Crusoe story” (Martin Green’s formulation in his otherwise insightful reading), the contrast I have drawn with William O. Porter’s Narrative provides some very useful tempering.70 Many who read The Crater hastily will miss a good deal of the political subtlety Cooper built into his account of the last days of Mark Woolston’s Pacific venture. Woolston himself, by virtue of his religious inflexibility, is, as I have remarked, complicit in the troubles that topple him. Even so (and this is another point readers frequently miss), he remains popular among the citizenry at large. Neither his position nor his power (about both of which he proves more flexible) creates his difficulties on its own. It is instead the presence of the various manipulators of the system already discussed who, by fabricating false issues, exploit the religious tensions for which Mark is initially responsible, thereby undermining his authority in order to take over public affairs. We may view this state of affairs as indicating that Cooper retained even in 1847 his fundamental faith in the sanity of the democratic masses, albeit he doubted that they had the needed vigilance to guard their rights from those who pretended to defend but in essence sought to abridge them. In that sense, the book is continuous with much of Cooper’s earlier political writing. Pointing out the defects in a system did not amount to rejecting it. Indeed, doing so was a positive obligation of those who, like Cooper, still had faith in it. My extensive discussion of the end of Woolston’s political reign obscures the fact that there is a curious foreshortening in Cooper’s plot. In a mere two chapters we run from the “Pirate-War” (CR 2:197) through all the turmoil just described and on to the cataclysm, which occurs during Mark and Bridget’s return to Pennsylvania. Only when Woolston comes back to the Pacific does the disappearance of most of the land he had discovered and nurtured become apparent. He is like Shelley’s traveler in “Ozymandias,” who has found a “colossal wreck” where something grand and promising once stood. (Cooper knew and liked that poem, having used the last lines, where that image occurs, as the epigraph for the twenty-first chapter of Homeward Bound. But he also, of course, knew and admired Thomas Cole’s five-part Course of Empire, which he called “a great epic poem” in 1849 and to which he referred at the end of this novel— LJ 5:397; see CR 2:224.) As with Graham Island, too, what was once there now is no more. From the seaman up at the crosstrees of the ship that carries Woolston back to the Pacific, he learns “that no land was in sight, in any part of the ocean.” As he looks for himself at the circling waters, the “same extraordinary vacancy” all around offers chill confirmation. Only after searching for several hours does

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a stubby remnant of Vulcan’s Peak become visible, although at first nobody recognizes it. “This strange land was of very small dimensions, rising out of the sea about three hundred feet. Its extent was no great matter, half a mile in diameter perhaps, and its form was nearly circular.” The rest of his “paradise had sunk beneath the ocean!” (CR 2:223). After his final return to Pennsylvania, Woolston will have very little to say about the colony or the Crater. But he often goes over “in his mind, all the events connected with . . . the Reef ”: the shipwreck and initial desolation; the hard work that made the rocky reef fertile; “the earthquake, and the upheaving of the islands from out of the waters”; the arrival of Bridget and others from home; then “the commencement and progress of the colony; its blessings, so long as it pursued the right, and its curses, when it began to pursue the wrong”; finally, “his departure, leaving it still a settlement surrounded with a sort of earthly paradise, and his return, to find all buried beneath the ocean” (CR 2:226–27). In this long, lingering meditation, there is something of Cooper’s own repeated musings over the ruination of his family’s similar ventures. But it speaks, too, to the artful energy by which, since 1820, Judge Cooper’s youngest child had repeatedly forced new land to solidify in the empty ocean of experience. The Crater, for all its political urgency and seeming finality, was very much about the creativity that in Cooper’s case had followed devastation. He knew now, as he neared his fiftyeighth birthday, that he would not—could not—go on forever. The novel’s last paragraph reflects on mortality and the vanity that pushes humans to deny it. Yet Cooper was not quite ready to play Prospero here and drown his book. More definitely would follow.

C H A P T E R

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and was very much on Cooper’s mind while he wrote The Crater because of his fresh efforts to recover debts from Midwestern speculators, primarily Horace H. Comstock and Comstock’s close associate, a supposedly wealthy developer named Sidney Ketchum. As discussed in the sixth chapter, Cooper had sought to help his niece, Sarah Sabina (Isaac Cooper’s daughter and Comstock’s wife), by investing sizable funds in Chicago lands in 1835. When he suddenly decided to publish his travel books and needed money for that purpose later the same year, he tried to reclaim his investment. Because Comstock had no ready cash, he gave Cooper four personal notes.1 Comstock paid the first two notes when they were due in 1836, but when he failed to meet the deadlines for the third and fourth, he substituted a Ketchum mortgage on a property in Marshall, Michigan, and its accompanying note, both of which Comstock himself held. Later still, after the Ketchum mortgage was withdrawn from Cooper’s hands, Comstock gave him a newer Ketchum note endorsed by three other Michigan men. This is getting slightly ahead of the story. First, as to Sidney Ketchum. When Cooper initially heard of him, Ketchum’s glittery star was on the rise. In 1838, well after the recent panic’s start, Comstock called him “among the

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wealthiest men” in Michigan.2 That was probably an exaggeration, but he certainly had been very active and was widely connected and supported. He was known for his “great energy and determination,” as well as his persuasive power—his “ready command of [the] most convincing language.”3 Born of Yankee parents in Argyle, Washington County, New York, in 1797, Ketchum had been a merchant and iron manufacturer in nearby Peru, in the Champlain Valley, before relocating to Michigan at the start of the land boom there in 1831.4 Some miles east of the future site of Comstock’s eponymous village, he founded a town he named for his supposed good friend, U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, and in 1836 he took over the nascent Calhoun County Bank there, of which he served as the first (and only) president. The town of Marshall, described in an early history as “a lively, and interesting place in those booming days,” grew so rapidly that for a time it was a contender for state capital. Ketchum built himself a “beautiful Mansion House” there and spearheaded the erection of a new Methodist church. With some associates who clearly trusted in his town’s future, he also constructed a very fancy hotel, the Marshall House, said to have been designed by famed New York architect Richard Upjohn.5 At this point, while Ketchum was still on the financial upswing, Horace Comstock’s reliance on him in attempting to secure his debt to Cooper probably seemed prudent. Comstock had trusted Ketchum enough to have bought land in Marshall in 1831 and to have established a drugstore there five years later, and it seems clear, from his possession of the mortgage and the notes he passed on to Cooper, that he was himself Ketchum’s creditor. Ketchum appeared so solid that he attracted the faith of many investors, including the Boston capitalist Samuel Hubbard, who with his associates invested some $250,000 through Ketchum in 1835.6 Even the novelist’s nephew Morris Cooper, who as Sarah Sabina’s brother was then living in Michigan and was associated with Comstock, told his uncle in the mid-thirties that “Ketchum was one of the best personal securities in Michigan” (LJ 3:366). And Comstock, in the (now unlocated) letter that accompanied the new, endorsed note given to Cooper in lieu of the Marshall paper, evidently praised him very highly as well. Yet despite appearances, the Midwestern land boom was indeed just that, an exuberant flurry that Sidney Ketchum exemplified by his ambitious activities and confidence in the future—as well as by his slippery evasions once the flurry ended. A Detroit associate named Charles C. Trowbridge felt Ketchum was too scattered in his interests and methods. Writing as early as 1835 to the Boston investor Hubbard, for whom he managed the money invested through Ketchum, Trowbridge complained that Ketchum was a “centrifugal force” who “jumps at results and leaves us to shoulder the details.”7 That was a prescient view, as (in the words of one local history) Ketchum “became hopelessly involved during

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the panic following the issuance of the specie circular [in July 1836] by Andrew Jackson.” Soon, a mortgage on some Ketchum holdings in Marshall was foreclosed; then in 1840 his bank failed.8 Even so, Ketchum’s ruin proved remarkably discontinuous. At times, he appeared about to sink, only to float back to the surface. Perhaps because he had his hand in so many games he was able to move remaining assets around so as to stave off a dramatic collapse. In 1837 or early 1838, when Comstock consigned Ketchum’s old notes and the mortgage to the novelist (in fact through Morris Cooper), the banker still seems to have been faring relatively well. There certainly is no direct evidence that Comstock knew at that time of Ketchum’s impending failure or suspected him of shady dealings. Ketchum owed him money and, short of cash when Cooper asked for repayment or security for what was owed him, Comstock essentially transferred to Cooper the debts owed him by Ketchum, with backup security in the form of the mortgage on the land in question, a quite usual procedure at this point in U.S. financial history.9 The newer Ketchum note that Comstock gave Cooper in lieu of the withdrawn mortgage also was perfectly valid on its face. Dated January 1, 1839, and written in the amount of $2,250 (half of the remaining amount Cooper was due from Comstock), it was payable in New York City at six months. Furthermore, it gained more apparent security from the endorsements of three other Michigan residents of some standing—J. Wright Gordon, George C. Gibbs, and James S. Sandford. Cooper, staying in Philadelphia with his family as he finished his research for the naval history, was in need of cash when he received the Ketchum note; he therefore discounted it through James D. P. Ogden, who (after a series of small deductions) credited slightly less than half its face value to the novelist at the Bank of New York. He held the remainder as security for the amount he had discounted for Cooper on the original third note of Comstock himself, which Cooper at that point had not yet repurchased from Ogden (see LJ 3:365–68; 5:220).10 Ketchum further complicated things in 1839 by injecting other instruments that clouded the lines of responsibility for the endorsers and himself. These were two drafts he wrote and had a New York merchant named Isaac Schuyler, with whom he had various business dealings, “accept”—obligating Schuyler under certain conditions to pay the amount due. Since Ogden still held the triply endorsed Ketchum note (which he jokingly called “the note of sundry names”), the Schuyler drafts were presented to him by Ketchum, then in New York. The manner in which they were presented caused various problems. The key question was whether they were meant as added security for the endorsed note, in which case the endorsers and Ketchum would remain liable to Cooper and Ogden for the amount, or were instead meant as replacements for that note, in

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which case the endorsers would be freed of their legal obligations.11 Since the priority of these various instruments was purposely obscured by the manner in which Ketchum handled them, only the courts could resolve the question of who owed what to whom and when payment was due. As the instruments in play became more numerous and more remote from the original obligations, and more people became involved, the chance of payment to Cooper and his own creditors, primarily Ogden, dimmed. Eventually, both Comstock and Cooper sued various other parties to recover their funds. Cooper had some luck with that approach in both Michigan and New York courts, but at the time of his death in 1851 he still had not been made whole. Cooper persisted in his efforts to recoup his losses in part because he had spread those losses among other individuals such as Ogden. And, as he sought to provide for his family at a time of decreasing prices for most literary wares, he had no money to waste. Moreover, the funds invested with Comstock had come at least in theory from his literary earnings: the matter therefore involved his pride as well as prudence or the general principle of the thing. But it also seems fair to conclude that, whatever the financial issues in the case, Cooper was attracted to the human drama that the land business entailed, which was, after all, an activity to which “a Cooper of Cooperstown” was connected almost by heredity. In this instance, what is more, studying the various individuals with whom he came into contact revealed for Cooper something about the moral and political character of contemporary society. The lessons were hardly uplifting. Yet as his fiction during the 1840s came more and more to dwell on contemporary issues, Comstock and Ketchum (like the newspaper editors Cooper pursued in court with similar tenacity during roughly the same period) showed him what sort of people were bidding to inherit the republic over whose origins and prospects his books had reflected so richly since 1820. It is not too much of a stretch to trace connections between Uncle Ro Littlepage or Tom Hutter (or even Captain Spike) and the Michigan developers who took Cooper’s money and then used every dodge they could to avoid giving him his due. In this regard, as suggested in chapter 8, Cooper’s dark characters in this decade owed a good deal to his tangles with Thurlow Weed, Sidney Ketchum, and their ilk in the contemporary United States. To be sure, Cooper did make some modest gains from the Comstock entanglement. Even at the time of his death, when a substantial portion of the original debt remained unpaid, Cooper owned more than a dozen lots in Kalamazoo that Sabina and Horace Comstock transferred to him in 1841 to cover some of what they still owed him then. And he managed to pick up considerable knowledge of the new state of Michigan, and indeed the Midwest as a region, during a series of trips he made there beginning in June 1847.12 Passing west by railroad

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and lake steamer, and making his way almost across the twenty-sixth state to investigate his Kalamazoo holdings on three of his five trips, Cooper gathered enough information that in 1848, immediately after Jack Tier finally appeared in book form, he began The Oak Openings, a Great Lakes tale set at the start of the War of 1812. Owing to this literary fruit borne by Cooper’s bad investment, I focus here on his Midwestern trips and the legal actions that eventually required them. I return to the Michigan novel itself later in this chapter. The trips followed on long-distance legal efforts. In 1844, suits were filed against two of Ketchum’s three endorsers—Gibbs and Gordon—in federal court in Michigan, and against Ketchum in Michigan state court, by Cooper’s Detroit attorney, George E. Hand. The third endorser, Sandford, who had since returned to his native New York, was sued in state court there by Cooper’s nephew, Richard.13 The action against Ketchum proceeded first. Tried before a jury in November 1845, it resulted in large damages for Cooper—on paper at least. The following June, his son Paul (a freshly minted attorney by then also involved in the business) summarized where things stood: “The suit against Mr. K. has been decided in your favour, the writ issued, & returned nulla bona [i.e., the sheriff found “no goods” in Ketchum’s possession]; Mr. Hand has proceeded against him by a creditor’s bill in chancery.”14 As late as August 1848, Paul’s cousin Richard was still trying to take judgment against Ketchum. It appears that he succeeded later that year, at least as far as legal proceedings were concerned, but after the novelist’s death in 1851 Richard would inform his cousin Paul (then embarked on one of his generally unsuccessful attempts to settle the Michigan business) that once the Ketchum judgment was perfected late in 1848 and the execution issued the following January, the sheriff of New York County, where Ketchum was then living, reported back to the court that the speculator had “no personal or real property” that could be applied to the judgment. Ketchum was generally nulla bona himself.15 Cooper’s legal efforts against Gibbs and Gordon in Detroit’s federal circuit court, in connection with which he would undertake his Michigan trips, were not ready to proceed until June 1847. The month before, Comstock, who previously had sued them and Ketchum on his own and hence could offer Cooper some useful counsel, warned that the endorsers were “very confident” of defeating the novelist by relying on the later Schuyler acceptances that Ketchum had used to confuse matters. Having also conferred with attorney Hand in Michigan, Comstock added for Cooper, “If possible I want you to attend the trial” (he also thought it would be very advantageous to have “Mr. Ogden at the trial in person”). At this time, Hand was assuring Comstock that if Ogden had received the later instruments in such a way that the due date was extended, Gordon, Gibbs, and Sandford might evade all responsibility. Statements already made by Ogden,

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Comstock went on to Cooper, were “not definite or clear and in connexion with Ketchum’s deposition [are] calculated to throw doubt upon the subject & operate against you.” Therefore, having Ogden attend and clarify how he had understood the Schuyler acceptances was essential.16 Taking Comstock at his word, Cooper first traveled to Detroit in June 1847 to push for progress against Gibbs and Gordon, thus causing the delay, noted in the previous chapter, in producing The Crater.17 Planning the trip took time. Cooper hoped to bring Ogden along to testify, but while in New York City early in June, he learned that Ogden, suffering severe financial difficulties owing to other problems and needing to go to Washington on urgent business, could not (or would not) make the Michigan trip. Cooper at once thought that the man who had unwittingly helped Ketchum cloud the matter, Isaac Schuyler, would make an excellent substitute. At this time, Cooper thought Schuyler “as ferocious as a bull dog” and likely to “tear Ketchum all to pieces.” Right then, to be sure, it seemed as if something less bloody than a dogfight might ensue. During Cooper’s June visit to Manhattan, hopes for a better resolution arose when Cooper repeatedly encountered Ketchum—who, spotty as his record was, attempted to allay his concerns in person. Cooper wrote Hand at that time: “I have seen a good deal of Ketchum, who has let me into his speculations &c (showing me his contracts and the property with which he is connected) and I rather think he will pay the judgment, himself, shortly after the autumn sales of land re-commence.” As a wishful postscript, Cooper added for Hand, “In my opinion Ketchum is about to make a fortune.” The novelist therefore had already told Hand that, if need be, he should formally request a brief postponement. Once the court granted that, he should send Cooper a telegram via Utica, and Cooper would summon Schuyler and the two of them would rush to Detroit to ensure that the court, once the proceeding resumed, did not give a default verdict in favor of Gibbs and Gordon (LJ 5:222–23). Evidently Hand contacted Cooper while he remained in Manhattan, since he set out directly from there on Thursday, June 17—though without Schuyler. Pausing at Fort Plain to dispatch some purchases to Susan, and then staying one night in Rochester, Cooper boarded the steamboat London in Buffalo for a quick run to Detroit, where the Michigan press announced his arrival on Tuesday, June 22, 1847.18 Not much happened at this time in the suit—apparently only a preliminary hearing during which the endorsers maneuvered for advantage. As for Comstock, not much happened with regard to him, either. He had urged Cooper to undertake the suit and the visit, and Cooper had dropped everything to comply. While in Michigan, however, Cooper never even saw Comstock, who, having failed to make the journey from his current home in Kalamazoo to Detroit, wrote some weeks later to say he had been “violently ill” at the time.

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Perhaps that was true, but Cooper must have begun to observe that his niece ’s husband was long on advice and short on help, as he had been quick to talk of big gains but very slow in repaying even the basic amount Cooper had advanced in 1835, never mind the promised profits.19 There were, though, some positive results of the trip. Cooper glimpsed the “calm and placid landscape” of Michigan (as Hand called it in writing him in July, perhaps echoing Cooper’s own language in a now lost letter) and moreover had a chance on his way home to see Niagara—for the first time since 1809. He also laid the foundation for a friendship with attorney George Hand himself. Soon, in fact, Hand would visit Otsego, where the Coopers made him feel very much at home.20 When a preliminary trial on the suit against the endorsers took place a few months later, in October 1847, Cooper returned to Hand’s hometown of Detroit, this time with a slightly less uncooperative Ogden, who had required much coaching and encouragement to sort out his memories and keep them straight. Hand (as he reported to Cooper) had written Ogden directly to explain that the new deposition he had asked him to provide was for backup purposes—he should not assume that it obviated his personal attendance at the trial (only “sickness and unavoidable casualty” ought to prevent him from coming to Detroit). Hand even spelled out how Ogden should travel, as if rehearsing the route would make him more committed to the venture: from Buffalo, Ogden was to take the steamboat Canada on Saturday morning, October 9, in order to ensure that he arrived prior to the start of the court term on Monday, even though the case would not be heard until Tuesday. Hand took no chances with Ogden. For Cooper, he therefore added: “Would it not be well for you and he to make your arrangements to come along together on the Canada leaving Buffalo on the morning of the 9th[?] . . . Our greatest concern now is to have Mr. Ogden on the ground in good time.”21 The two New Yorkers dutifully arrived in Detroit on Monday, October 11, 1847; Hand’s preparations to one side, however, they had to wait until that Friday for the case to be called. It continued until the following Thursday, the twenty-first. In writing his wife from Hand’s office before the case finished, Cooper expressed his concern that the defendants’ counsel would make use of a recent Pennsylvania ruling in a case he found “strictly analogous” to his own (LJ 5:242). If Gibbs and Gordon escaped payment, it would be proof of Cooper’s somewhat cynical observation to his wife: “I am called on to pay every cent, even to the last, and my debtors evade payment by every possible expedient.” Events in the Michigan courtroom certainly did not offer encouragement. Having stayed out two hours, the jury members came back to report they could not agree. The judge charged them again and they went back out, but after a further hour they returned “with the same story.” Although this outcome gave

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Cooper no victory, he was happy to learn that he at least had eight votes to four for the endorsers. Furthermore, his opponents were “sorely disappointed” that the present impasse would force a retrial in the spring of 1848. Cooper had no way of knowing what the outcome then might be, but for the present he was heartened (LJ 5:242–44).22 Even so, the Michigan suit continued to eat up time and money. For one thing, Cooper had to procure supporting materials and, if possible, witnesses for court actions several hundred miles from home. Moreover, having already traveled that distance himself on two occasions (in June and October 1847), he would have to do so twice again in 1848, and once in 1850— and, as noted earlier, on three of his trips (those in October 1847, June 1848, and June 1850) he would travel even farther, across much of the Lower Peninsula to Kalamazoo, to view and tend to his property there. Each of the various trips had its special context and purpose. Each consumed more time and money.23 The third trip, in June 1848, was occasioned by the pending trial of the Gordon and Gibbs suit before Pennsylvanian Ross Wilkins of the seventh circuit and Judge John McLean of the U.S. Supreme Court, that circuit’s presiding judge.24 Once again Ogden tagged along. In a letter written to his niece Hannah Pomeroy Woolson of Cleveland on June 1, Cooper predicted that he would leave Otsego on the thirteenth or fourteenth and “go direct”—that is, take the steamboat from Buffalo without stopping in Ohio to see her, contrary to her hopes (LJ 5:368). When the departure date arrived (it was actually June 16) he met up with Ogden at Fort Plain and traveled all night to Buffalo, where they boarded their “old boat the Canada, the best as to comfort on the lake.” It left the Buffalo terminus at 11:00 a.m. on Saturday and arrived at Detroit at nine the next morning, June 18. The pair stayed again at the National Hotel—indeed, in “the very rooms we occupied so long, last autumn,” as Cooper informed Susan once he had settled in (LJ 5: 370–71).25 The trial started on Tuesday morning, June 20, and ran through to Saturday the twenty-fourth. On Thursday night, when Ogden was ready to return to New York, Cooper wrote a brief letter to Susan for him to carry back. In it the novelist expressed his satisfaction with Ogden’s testimony this time as opposed to last, though it was still hard to tell yet what the overall outcome might be (Cooper did not expect the jury to be charged until Saturday). As McLean and Wilkins were hearing the suit together, a good deal would depend on whether McLean resisted the Pennsylvania precedent. Cooper, “not very sa[n]guine,” was “heartily tired of this work” and wished he was “home again” (LJ 5:372). Perhaps partly for that reason, on Saturday he took a brief break to attend to other business, heading west from Detroit to visit Kalamazoo for the second time (as noted above, he had also gone there the previous October). He did not come back until four days later (see LJ 5:373). By then he knew that Wilkins in

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fact had not prevailed over McLean, which was good news. But there also had not been a verdict in the case. The progress he could report to Susan from aboard the Canada on his way back to Buffalo was that his attorneys had managed to get “all the law settled on our side,” so it was possible to “see our way clear.” On the other hand, by that point he was having some second thoughts about Ogden. Although the man’s testimony was “improving,” he now told Susan that Ogden “would thrust in his opinions with his facts, and it was these opinions that did the mischief.” Evidently he was something of a storyteller, like his friend Cooper, though a more impulsive one (LJ 5:373). The court’s summary of the case, later published by McLean, indicated the main issues. First, it was arguable that even a tacit extension of the due date on the endorsed note effected between Ketchum and Ogden at the time the Schuyler drafts were turned over did “an injury, in a legal point of view, to the indorsers.” This would not mean, as one might think, that the latter remained responsible for repaying the debt, but quite the opposite. In a notable piece of legal contortionism, McLean added that the endorsers’ duty to meet their obligation and their right to thereafter seek restitution from Ketchum were so seriously eroded by any extension of the clock between Ketchum and Ogden that they were “consequently relieved from responsibility.” Cooper had been assuming that Ogden’s acceptance of the draft as security for the endorsed note did not relieve Gibbs, Gordon, and Sandford from the normal obligations of endorsers, as to the contrary the substitution of the draft for the endorsed note would have. But if the possibility raised by the court were confirmed, and it was decided that Ogden and Ketchum had extended the time allowed for payment, the effect would be the same—the endorsers would be released.26 That was a big “if.” When Ketchum took the stand during this June 1848 trial on the liability of the endorsers, he testified that Gibbs, Gordon, and Sandford were “accommodation endorsers,” a term indicating that the three received no money from Ketchum in exchange for their endorsements but had added their names to the note solely to help him. Ketchum’s further courtroom testimony repeated much of the earlier story in his depositions. Despite his attempt to persuade the court that his arrangement with Ogden in 1839 had formally released the endorsers from any obligation for the debt, the court’s final ruling went against him. Because Ketchum allowed that note to remain in Ogden’s hands, the court decided that the acceptance indeed was used as security on the note, not payment for it.27 But this was a technical ruling. The court also held that if Ogden and Ketchum had agreed to a specific extension of the due date for the accepted drafts—for instance, if the two men agreed either orally or in writing that no legal proceedings might go forward on the note until the due date of the drafts had passed—then, as McLean put it in his report on the

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trial, “the defendants [i.e., the endorsers] are discharged.” Even so, this point was “left for the jury to determine.” Despite the ruling of the court and the fact that Ogden’s testimony seems to have been somewhat inconclusive on the matter, the jurors “could not agree, and were discharged.”28 A similar outcome occurred the following fall, when Cooper attended yet another court session in Detroit. He and Ogden again traveled together, stopping overnight in Auburn and then Buffalo before boarding the steamboat on the morning of Wednesday, October 11, 1848. They arrived in Detroit on Thursday, but the case did not come up until the following Wednesday. Cooper took time to dine with Lewis Cass, former governor of Michigan and the present Democratic candidate for president. Cass, who in an 1828 review had famously criticized Cooper’s portrayal of Native American character as too idealized, told lawyer Hand in the summer of 1847 he was sorry to have missed Cooper’s visit at that time. Their dinner in 1848 was, to all appearances, merely a courtesy.29 As to the trial, Cooper wrote his wife, “Counsel are battling inch by inch” (LJ 5:381–83). One very contentious issue was the deposition of Isaac Schuyler, whom Cooper and his lawyer and friend Henry Cruger had visited at Schuyler’s New Jersey farm over the summer to discuss the two instruments he had accepted at Ketchum’s request. Cooper and Cruger told Schuyler that he might be required to give a deposition about the Ketchum drafts and his involvement with them at some future point. Two months later, on September 15, 1848 (his fiftyninth birthday), Cooper ran into Schuyler near the City Hotel in New York and persuaded him to go, with Cruger in tow, to a nearby office where he indeed gave that deposition, which, they later held, amounted to a cross-examination of him. When later asked, while giving a second deposition in June 1849, whether Ketchum had made “any representations of a fraudulent or deceptive nature,” Schuyler would reply, “I think not.” But he had told a more damning story to Cooper and Cruger the previous September. He then admitted that he had had Ketchum arrested in New York City “for obtaining money and acceptances under false pretenses,” leading to Ketchum’s two-month imprisonment there.30 Such testimony as was contained in Schuyler’s September 1848 deposition would obviously harm the endorsers’ case, as it would allow an attack on the motives for which the Schuyler drafts had been created and given to Ogden. If those new instruments were no good, they could not affect the liability of the endorsers in any essential way. As Cooper summarized for his wife on October 22, the Schuyler deposition was “very important in two respects: in throwing great distrust on Ketchum’s testimony, and as showing fraud in procuring the acceptance.” So engrossed was Cooper in the legal business that he interrupted his communication to her and inserted a long technical discussion for his lawyerkin, nephew Richard and son Paul. It began: “I write for Dick and Paul. We

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have taken the ground that, if Ketchum obtained the acceptance of Schuyler by false representations, and made a fra[u]dulent use of it in the act of passing it to us, . . . it so vitiates any contract to give time, that Ogden might have sued him the next day, even had the bargain to give time been in writing, and set aside the contract” (LJ 5:384). At this point it looked as if the endorsers would not be released.31 Cooper was accordingly upbeat as the proceeding advanced that October. He thought he had won some points. Schuyler’s deposition was “let in on our side,” he wrote Susan on October 23, and he thought the judge was with him on the matter of fraud. Furthermore, Ogden’s testimony was the clearest yet. When the judge questioned him closely, he “swore much more fully than ever before, that he did not take the acceptance in payment, or on an agreement to give time.” Cooper nonetheless did not expect a verdict at this time and closed his letter on a characteristically ironic note: “I never was better, and am prepared for the worst” (LJ 5:385). As the trial dragged on a few more days, Cooper remained optimistic, summarizing further points for both his wife and son. When he promised, “I shall telegraph the result, if I beat—if beaten, or a drawn game, my silence will let you know it” (LJ 5:387), he certainly was hoping to be able to share good news. But the jury split again and he went back to Otsego without, as far as the record shows, uttering another word by pen or via his friend Morse’s invention.32 At first it seemed as if the fourth trial would go forward the next spring, perhaps to the same conclusion. Cooper, arriving in New York City for a visit late in April 1849, wrote Susan to have Paul find out “when Cir. Court U—S— sits at Detroit” (LJ 6:25). Later during the same trip, he anxiously asked her whether she had indeed forwarded to him a letter from attorney Hand (see LJ 6:38), and even told her (for they had talked about her accompanying him to Niagara, perhaps to Michigan as well) that she “must get ready for the falls, at least, if not for Detroit” (LJ 6:41). Preparations were also going forward in other camps. Ogden’s bookkeeper and clerk, Robert Balmanno, was deposed by Henry Cruger in New York in the middle of May in anticipation of the trial.33 Yet that is as far as things went then. That fall, Cooper once more was thinking that he might have to return to Michigan. He went to New York City at the end of September 1849 “preparatory to going West,” he informed Shubrick, “but unexpectedly find my presence in Michigan unnecessary” (LJ 6:72). Two weeks later, on October 19, he wrote his wife from the city that “Ketchum’s affair has terminated for the present, without any cost, but without any results.” Whether “Ketchum’s affair” embraced the endorsers as well he did not indicate. Gordon and Gibbs apparently did something at the October session of the court that put off the suit once more. As to Sandford’s part of the business, at this time Cooper

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stayed on in New York because of the motion his nephew was to make in a proceeding against that particular endorser there (LJ 6:75). Over the following winter, Cooper spent considerable stretches of time in New York (and Philadelphia) by himself—from late November until just before Christmas, and again from late January through the middle of March. Back in New York again by the middle of May 1850, he wrote his wife then to indicate that he was once more thinking of the old Michigan lawsuit and the need to revive it. At first, it was slated to be heard on Tuesday, June 18. But Ogden could not accompany Cooper to Michigan this year, so Cooper figured he “must get the cause put off, again”—much as his opponents had the fall before. Despite the legal inactivity, Cooper nonetheless thought, as he wrote Susan, that he would “have to go to Michigan”—“to look after my lots,” if nothing else (LJ 6:179).34 Toward the end of May, Sidney Ketchum came to see Cooper in New York, clearly with “some proposal to make,” but their discussion was broken off when another visitor Cooper was expecting showed up and Ketchum left (LJ 6:184–86). Cooper was, he confessed to Susan a week later, “fully on my guard against” Ketchum, for he was “not likely to pay any thing, at present at least” (LJ 6:190). Two days later still, however, he spent several hours with Ketchum once again “looking at a purchase he has made.” Ketchum clearly retained his gift for inspiring largely unmerited confidence in others, even those he had repeatedly disappointed. Now Cooper thought “he will succeed and pay me my money in the course of the next twelvemonth” (LJ 6:192). His son Paul nonetheless urged caution in dealing with the debtor, for he was suspicious that Ketchum might have been maneuvering to aid the endorsers, all old friends.35 By mid-June 1850, with the Michigan case clearly postponed, Cooper had decided that he and Susan would visit Niagara around the end of that month and then go to Michigan “for a few days” (LJ 6:193). In fact they did both, taking daughter Charlotte with them. This time they did not just glimpse the cataract, as Cooper himself had in 1847, but “did the falls effectually.” Cooper explained to Shubrick after they had returned home that they “went in the Maid of the Mist, fairly into the spray of both falls, sheering the boat within the Horse Shoe.” Everything was safe, Cooper concluded, and, although there was “a devil of a roaring,” even his wife “was delighted, and so far from being afraid . . . scampered around the boat with the rest, like a girl of sixteen.” After Niagara, they took the boat to Detroit and went “nearly across Michigan,” certainly as far as Kalamazoo (LJ 6:207).36 There had been, shortly before the trip began, some discussion of an outof-court settlement in Cooper’s actions against the endorsers. On June 10, when he was on the verge of leaving New York for Cooperstown in preparation for Niagara and Michigan, George Gibbs, then in Manhattan, presented him with a

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proposal to end the Detroit suit as well as that still dragging on, in some fashion, against Sandford in New York. The terms were clear. The endorsers would pay Cooper’s attorneys $1,000, plus interest, on or before October 15, 1850, and neither party would be charged for the costs. Furthermore, if Cooper still wished to pursue Ketchum, the endorsers would allow him to “take judgment pro forma” against them—against Gibbs and Gordon at the June 1851 circuit of the federal court in Detroit, and against Sandford at a time mutually agreed upon by him and Cooper. While that step might prove helpful, Gibbs stressed that neither it nor the present offer from the endorsers was to be construed as admitting wrongdoing on their part. Furthermore, the three men would not permit the pro forma judgments to proceed too far: Cooper must agree in advance that they “shall never be enforced.” Gibbs called for the details to be worked out later but also stipulated that any such agreement was to be kept private between the parties. Because he added as a final point that he would like Cooper’s answer by the following day, Cooper probably gave it to him before going upstate. It was clearly “No.” Five weeks later, Paul Cooper wrote his father that it was “very doubtful” in any event whether he could compromise with “Gordon, or Gibbs, without releasing Sandford.” It was a slippery case all around.37 The October date in the Gibbs proposal reflected the expectation that, barring a deal, the Michigan suit would go forward again then. After Cooper rejected the deal, however, October 1850 came and went and there was no talk of Michigan, and apparently no thought of going there, at least not for legal reasons. Things dragged on. In mid-March the next year, 1851, Cooper wrote Susan soon after he again arrived in New York City for what would be his last visit: “I got my Michigan money.” But that was a small matter of a seventy-fivedollar draft that had been forwarded from Kalamazoo on March 6, a payment on a lot he had sold there (LJ 6:265).38 In May, George E. Hand wrote Cooper from Detroit that if they were going to try the case, they would have to be ready “on Tuesday June 17th at 9A.M.” The alternative would be to have the court declare a nonsuit, an indication that Cooper had not pressed the case hard enough to keep it in court. If so, Cooper most likely would have to pay the legal costs. But to go on also would have its costs: “we must have Ogden and need Schuyler,” Hand insisted. Could Cooper himself go? These were uncertain days for him. On that last trip to Manhattan, two months before receiving this letter, he was already ailing with health problems that would worsen over the coming weeks. Although his spirits were good, he obviously was in no condition to venture as far as Detroit again, let alone round up Ogden and Schuyler and bring them along by force of his usually considerable will. When he died in the fall, settlement of the whole matter, like Sidney Ketchum’s always-about-to-arrive ship, was still in the offing. A decade and a half after Cooper had sought to help

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another of his fatherless nieces and—perhaps—make some money to support his own family now that he had ceased to be a writer, the Comstock debt remained largely unsettled.39

Openings Cooper seems never to have become personally angry with Ketchum or Comstock, distressed as he was with both at times and persistent as he was in pursuing them and their associates. Perhaps his own experience as a debtor, or his memories of the collapse of his father’s estate, made him gentler than many people might be when facing similar disappointments. Perhaps, as suggested earlier, the human drama he observed in Michigan and New York was in some sense worth what it cost him. Besides, at some point as the mess continued Cooper began to realize that in this instance, as in many others, he still had resources at hand. The first consisted of those eighteen lots assigned by Comstock and his wife. During his second trip to Michigan in October 1847, Cooper thus wrote his wife that he intended to go on from Detroit to Kalamazoo to see whether he could sell some of the property there. That might take a week, of course, and he added, “time is very expensive to me,” but he had to give time in order to get money. He had been doing that for decades. Right now, he was “so anxious to realize something from this debt” (LJ 5:243). He left Detroit the next day, Friday, October 22, and was back there by Monday.40 Horace Comstock, aware of Cooper’s visit to Detroit, yet again had not gone there (Cooper thought he did not have money enough to travel—see LJ 5:243), but he managed to travel a few miles from his present home in the village of Comstock to meet Cooper in Kalamazoo, as Comstock soon informed his Cooperstown friend and creditor, lawyer William H. Averell. According to that report, Cooper was bullish on the value of the lots and “greatly admire[d] Kalamazoo.”41 But this brief side trip to attend to the Kalamazoo business gave Cooper more than excitement or a glimpse of future real estate profit. Early in November, back home, he thus wrote Richard Bentley (to whom he was then dispatching the remainder of “Islets of the Gulf ”) with word of another literary venture: “I have a new work in hand, scene Michigan, time the commencement of the War of 1812, incidents those of the wilderness but in a somewhat new form. I shall call it either ‘The Oak Openings,’ or ‘The Bee Hunter.’ A Beehunter is the hero, mingled with Indians, Lake sailors and a little touch of war” (LJ 5:245). Except that the finished book would involve no “Lake sailors” (and very little war), this initial description was reasonably accurate. That was owing in part to the strong effect the landscape had on Cooper as he rode across it on the recently opened Michigan Central Railroad to and from Kalamazoo. Known

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already as “Oak Openings,” this locally distinctive area was a zone of dry, sandy soils where the native cover consisted of grass and widely dispersed, dwarfish oak trees.42 Cooper must have heard something about the region from the Comstocks and from people he encountered in Detroit (and New York) in 1847 and 1848, perhaps including George E. Hand and even Sidney Ketchum.43 But he also probably had read about it in earlier years. It had been the subject of a learned article by James Pierce in the June 1826 issue of Benjamin Silliman’s American Journal of Science and Arts, which Cooper conceivably saw just before he left for Europe. “A considerable portion of the interior of Michigan,” Pierce wrote from personal observation, “is thinly wooded, and assumes in a state of nature, the aspect of a partially cleared country. . . . In the eastern part of the open rolling interior, yellow oak, often of diminutive height and thinly scattered, is almost the only tree found on a considerable portion of the hills and dry surface; many small meadows and plains are entirely divested of trees and shrubs. . . . ‘Oak Openings’ is the descriptive appellation affixed by settlers to this region. In the centre, and on the western declivity of the peninsula, hickory and bur oak lands are prevalent.”44 Then, too, New York writer Charles Fenno Hoffman in A Winter in the West (1835), which Cooper almost certainly knew, described well what he saw: “Clumps of the noblest oaks, with not a twig of underwood, extending over a gently undulating grassy surface as far as the eye can reach.” As it happened, Hoffman also visited and mentioned in his book, published in the year when Cooper first invested money with his niece ’s husband, “the little hamlet of Comstock, where an enterprising young gentleman, after whom the place is called, . . . is creating a flourishing establishment around him.”45 Horace Comstock was certainly someone people noticed and commented on, although appearances in this, as in other instances, could be deceptive. Cooper also may have known other published accounts. Caroline Kirkland’s popular satiric portrait of Michigan pioneer life, A New Home—Who’ll Follow? (1839), was focused on the fictional Montacute, Michigan. But that settlement was based on Pinckney, founded by Kirkland and her husband in Livingston County, within the original range of the oak openings. She therefore mentioned them, too.46 Kirkland is especially important for understanding Cooper’s experience as well as his book. Despite the fact that his personal involvement with Michigan, like Kirkland’s, centered on real estate speculation, unlike her he did not include that topic among the subjects of his Michigan book.47 But if he read A New Home, especially after his own Michigan experiences had deepened, it must have shed light on Horace Comstock, Sidney Ketchum, and their ilk. Kirkland’s treatment of land speculation, widely noted at the time as well, was more incisive still. She included among her gallery of frontier portraits glimpses

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of those “shoals of speculators” who circled about the farmers, each of them a perfect “land-shark.” Kirkland also added a point that was to be fully proved in Cooper’s case: namely, that “the collection of debts” was “a matter of ‘glorious uncertainty’ in Michigan.”48 Although Kirkland in her third book included a sketch called “The BeeTree,” featuring a bee-hunter akin to Cooper’s, it seems unlikely that this last of Cooper’s frontier novels engaged with such recent writers as Kirkland in quite the way that, as I argued in chapter 9, The Deerslayer had locked horns with Charles F. Hoffman and Robert M. Bird over their debased portrayal of forest hunters, the Indians, and the forest itself. Kirkland’s realism was of a different order from that sometimes attributed to Bird in particular—that is, she was not prescribing, let alone endorsing, the sorts of things she reported on from Michigan. It is also worth noting that, unlike Hoffman and Bird, she did not “borrow” very directly from Cooper: there is no Natty Bumppo figure in any of her books, and no noble Indian—indeed, hardly any Indians at all. So Cooper may not have felt challenged by Kirkland, as he arguably did feel challenged by Hoffman and Bird. Moreover, by 1848, with The Crater done and Mark Woolston’s utopia therefore mostly sunk below the Pacific, he may simply have lost interest in revisiting this part of his own legacy yet again. When telling Bentley that his new book was a tale of the “wilderness but in a somewhat new form,” Cooper may have been indicating this shift. If Oak Openings was linked to any of his previous frontier books, it was not The Pioneers but rather The Prairie. As in that novel, here he made the setting itself almost a character, so much so that his book engaged the Michigan landscape much more than Kirkland did in A New Home, which like The Pioneers focused attention largely on the awkward social realities of a little village and its immediate environs. Oak Openings thus describes the setting in the first chapter with leisurely thoroughness: “The country was what is termed ‘rolling,’ from some fancied resemblance to the ocean, when it is just undulating with a long ‘ground-swell.’ Although wooded, it was not as the American forest is wont to grow, with tall straight trees towering towards the light, but with intervals between the low oaks that were scattered profusely over the view, and with much of that air of negligence that one is apt to see in grounds, where art is made to assume the character of nature”—and so on (OO 1:10).49 As one critic argues, Cooper responded deeply to this zone because it offered an ideal embodiment of a locale that was central in many of his books—the clearing, or “forest interior.” In this final frontier book, Cooper created his best portrait of that iconic place: The Oak Openings thus contains “the most consistently drawn edenic landscape in all of Cooper’s fiction.”50 Given the forces that brought Cooper to Michigan, that is ironic indeed.

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Cooper was first exposed to the Oak Openings as a biotic region when passing through its core during his October 1847 trip. When returning to Kalamazoo by rail in June 1848, he traveled by buggy from the village proper to an especially alluring natural area known as Prairie Ronde, near Schoolcraft at the southwestern corner of Kalamazoo County (as it happens, also visited by Hoffman in 1835 and familiar to both Comstock and Ketchum). Cooper knew enough about Prairie Ronde before actually visiting it that he had made it the setting for the great Indian council in Oak Openings during which Scalping Peter, in his then unregenerate condition, rallies the assembled warriors to his bloody plans. There, relying on printed sources or oral reports or both, Cooper called the place a “remarkable little prairie,” adding that it was notable because, although recently settled by Euro-Americans, it lacked “that aspect of a rough beginning, including stubs, stumps, and circled [i.e., girdled] trees, that it has so often fallen to our share to describe” (OO 2:53). It was thus unlike the landscape he had first described in The Pioneers or had known while growing up in Otsego.51 Not until after returning home through Detroit from his second Kalamazoo visit (he got home on or around July 4, 1848—LJ 5:373) did Cooper compose a firsthand account of that spot. He might have been tempted to revise the earlier, imaginary description already included in his novel, but could not do that: placed near the start of the second volume, it had already gone off for production. Cooper therefore inserted the new portrait in an “extra” chapter at the end of the manuscript, a kind of pendant to the travel sketch he had placed at the front of The Heidenmauer in 1832 (see OO 2:224–27).52 At the start, Cooper’s work on the book had proceeded in a more orderly fashion. He began the writing at home over the winter and set the production process in motion from there by dispatching the first ten chapters to John Fagan at the end of January 1848. Fagan started setting type on February 2 and sent the initial batch of proofs to Cooper, still in Otsego, on the eighth (see LJ 5:257–58, 279).53 As he dealt with those and later proofs, Cooper also kept writing new chapters. He had confided in his journal early in the process that the book “gets on slowly,” that it “was not a labour of love, but a labour” (LJ 5:255, 278), marks, perhaps, of the deadening effect of his Michigan entanglement on this novel, which after all was among its results. But across February, having recently made his deals with Bentley and Burgess, Stringer, and Company for publishing the Michigan novel, Cooper managed to reach his stride. He thus recorded on the seventeenth that he was working “steadily” on the novel (LJ 5:284), and on the last day of that month he reached the halfway point (see LJ 5:287).54 As soon as the ice went out of the Hudson, Cooper eagerly left Cooperstown on a trip, lasting from March 21 to April 5, during which he attended to the book but also much else in Albany, Manhattan, and Philadelphia.55 On his way back

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through New York City, he was able to dispatch perfected proofs of the latter part of the first American volume to Bentley on March 30 (see LJ 5:326), but his plan to go directly home after that was frustrated by new developments in his unfolding suit against the Michigan endorser James Sandford, in which a New York State court in its Manhattan session seemed about to rule against Cooper. That ruling was averted, but waiting for it took another several days. Quite directly this time, the shadows cast by Comstock and his associates fell across the landscape of Cooper’s imaginary Midwest.56 When, after traveling “nine mortal hours” by coach from the Mohawk Valley to Cooperstown across impossibly muddy spring roads, Cooper finally got back to Otsego Hall late on the evening of April 5, he was very happy to be home (LJ 5:337). Over the next week and a half, the ice left Otsego Lake, the soggy roads dried out, and the weather improved quickly enough that he could direct or personally carry out spring garden chores (see LJ 5:337–39). All of this was pleasantly concrete, and far from the world of printing and proofing and indeed writing—or legal battles. But then Cooper got a sudden alarm in a letter from Richard Bentley that returned him immediately to both literature and, at least potentially, the law. In London on April 4, a venturesome publisher named Thomas C. Newby had advertised in the Morning Herald an obviously pirated “new novel by Mr. J. F. Cooper, called ‘Oak Openings or the Bee Hunter.’ ” On seeing the advertisement, Bentley immediately sent his chief clerk, Edward S. Morgan, to meet with Newby. The latter divulged that he somehow had learned of a supposed disagreement between Bentley and Cooper that opened the way for his edition (Bentley was to have paid “Cooper £100 for the work, but . . . the negotiation was broken off ”). Newby also let on that he had been working with someone who was “authorized to dispose” of the orphaned book’s sheets, the last of which he believed would arrive very shortly. Furthermore, if he received the shipment as expected, he vowed that “he should certainly publish the book.” Morgan gave Newby a verbal “caution,” which he backed up with evidence that Bentley securely owned the book—that is, Cooper’s own letter of February 10 (see LJ 5:280–81), with its discussion of proof shipments and its incidental mention that the novelist had already drawn a bill against Bentley for Oak Openings. Stressing that Bentley would take the usual steps to safeguard his rights, Morgan added a threat of legal action should Newby persist in his designs.57 With that, Morgan left for Bentley’s premises on New Burlington Street, where he made his report and where the publisher wrote his letter to Cooper, urging him to find out who was responsible for this breach of their customary system. Bentley also outlined a number of steps whereby Cooper might bolster the Londoner’s English rights to the book: “Permit me to suggest that an assignment of the Copyright should be made to me dated before the publication &

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forwarded to me, and that the remaining sheets or the manuscript of the remainder should be forwarded to me forthwith with permission to publish in England one clear month before its appearance in the States.”58 Cooper assented to these suggestions as soon as he learned of them. An assignment of copyright accompanied his April 25 reply, and he promised to send “a fairly written manuscript of the few last chapters” as soon as possible, so that the London printers could use that copy while Fagan was working from another in Philadelphia. Timeliness was indeed the best practical solution to the Newby problem. But, like Bentley, Cooper also wanted to discover how this threat had materialized. He assured Bentley he knew nothing of Newby, and certainly had not sold or given “sheets or copy” to any other bookmen aside from Bentley and the American publishers. Nor did anyone else have Cooper’s permission to dispose of the book on his account. He also explained to Bentley exactly where things stood in the production of Oak Openings. By this date Fagan had set and stereotyped only half of the book. This meant that even if Newby had part of the book, he could not possibly have more of it in hand than Bentley himself. Moreover, the rest of the work was safe. Cooper had not quite finished writing the last few chapters that he promised he would send in manuscript form: they “are snug enough yet in my cranium.” And the already written but not printed initial part of the second American volume (“several chapters,” probably including the imaginary first description of Prairie Ronde in the volume’s fourth chapter) was “lying in my family bible, where I always keep my manuscript.” He added, “Thieves never touch a bible” (LJ 5:348–49).59 Whatever the Bible’s efficacy, after this scare Cooper took other precautions. “It has just occurred to me,” he continued to Bentley, “that I can stereotype a chapter or two in this village.” He had made use of the Phinneys on several occasional works over the past decade, as we have seen, and he rightly guessed that pulling some material from Fagan’s copy and handling it locally would ruin any such scheme as Newby’s. “Add to this the precautions of Fagan, of manuscript and of time,” Cooper triumphantly added for Bentley, “and you can have nothing to apprehend. Mr. Newby has cut his own throat by advertising—You will remember that Cooperstown is three hundred miles from Philadelphia” (LJ 5:349–50).60 By the time he again wrote Bentley three weeks later, Cooper in fact had arranged for the Phinneys, Otsego’s only stereotypers, to set and cast plates for a portion of the opening of his second American volume.61 As it happened, Cooper need not have gone to such lengths in order to baffle Newby, for, as he learned from Bentley in an April 18 letter, that man in the meantime had backed off his threat.62 All those with a legitimate hand in Cooper’s book, however, continued to question how the pirate had compromised their system—if indeed he had. Fagan certainly was very interested in

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that question. An unlocated letter of May 18 from Cooper, passing on Bentley’s latest news about the situation, had arrived at Fagan’s office on the twenty-fifth, causing the stereotyper to reflect on the matter even though the danger had passed. He was, he assured Cooper, “almost sure that the rogue Newby never got his sheets from anyone in my employ,” since his hands were “honest, faithful fellows” who had worked for him “generally for 15 or 20 years.” He did wonder, though, whether proof sheets he had sent directly to Bentley without properly sealing the package might have fallen into Newby’s hands.63 Cooper’s next letter to Bentley, written two days later, conveyed Fagan’s suspicion that “Newby’s jackal,” as Cooper called him here, had somehow filched a set of proofs, and he pushed the Londoner on the issue (LJ 5:368).64 But that was not the problem— Bentley did have both sets of sheets. Besides, he himself eventually concluded that Newby’s threat had been overestimated. It had been “a disgraceful endeavour to annoy me,” he wrote Cooper late in June, meaning, apparently, that Newby never had any sheets in his possession and hence could not have pirated the novel after all. He was testing Bentley’s system and his resolve, nothing more.65 Newby to one side, other transatlantic difficulties also afflicted Oak Openings. Bentley had queried Cooper in December 1847 about delaying the planned publication date for this book, citing his concern that the upcoming release of Jack Tier in book form (slated for March 1848) might depress interest in the Michigan story, which he therefore wished to postpone until fall. Cooper responded in February that he thought it could not be kept back that long (he would ask Burgess and Stringer just to be sure), but he was pretty confident that “July, or August” would work. In March, Bentley assented to the compromise of a summer publication date, although he thought August, usually a very slow time in the book market, a bad idea and therefore favored July. No definitive decision, however, appears to have been made at this time (LJ 5:280).66 When Bentley wrote Cooper with his first update on the Newby business in mid-April, he asked that publication of the novel be delayed further, but now for new reasons—the revolutions then stirring across Europe, which would depress the market for most publications except “political pamphlets.”67 At the time Cooper received this letter (perhaps May 10–15), he still had not finished writing the book or forwarded any of the copy for the second American volume to Fagan, who as of May 25 remained in expectation of it.68 Assuring Bentley, “I shall delay the publishing according to your request as long as I can,” Cooper mentioned nonetheless his wish to have the rest of the sheets ready to ship to England by July 1, and six days later he added that he thought the American edition could indeed be delayed until “some where about” the last of that same month (LJ 5:365, 367–68).

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The “some where about” reflected not only the always approximate production process with all its variables but also Cooper’s next trip to Michigan on the Ketchum endorsers suit. He warned Bentley on May 21, “I am going west again . . . next month,” and on the twenty-seventh added more detail: “I shall leave home about the 10th June, to go to Detroit, in Michigan, on the business that took me there last year.” In the second letter, he said he would “finish the Openings” on his return (LJ 5:365, 367–68). What he meant by “finish” is not entirely clear. It is possible that he finally completed writing most of the rest of the book by May 27 and that he sent the remaining copy to Fagan just before leaving for Michigan, so that on his return from the Midwest he would simply have to proofread the sheets in Philadelphia. In point of fact, he came back from Michigan by July 4 or so (as already indicated), remained in Otsego at least through the eighth, and probably left for Philadelphia on Sunday the ninth. Some days later, on July 18, he was back in Manhattan with duplicate sets of sheets, so that “the last half of the book” was finally dispatched to Bentley over the next two days (LJ 5:373–74). The Michigan trip interrupted his work on his Michigan novel, but also, oddly enough, completed it. Cooper cannot have written his brief preface, or all of it anyway, until he returned to the East, since it mentions the June 1848 trip as completed “within the last few days” (OO 1:vi). And of course he could not have written the final “extra” chapter until then, either. Perhaps he did that writing, and any more that remained unfinished, during the week he took off to rest in Otsego before heading to Pennsylvania. Bentley at any rate received one or both shipments in time to issue the book (as The Bee-Hunter; or, The Oak Openings) on August 16, 1848. Burgess, Stringer, and Company followed very closely on Bentley’s heels, probably on August 24 (see BAL 2:301–2).69

Echoes The book’s conceptual history, like its production, may have suffered something of an interruption. Critic Gary Williams notes with some plausibility that Cooper upstaged his first hero, Ben Boden, by introducing a new plot element and a pair of new characters—Scalping Peter and Parson Amen—well past the midpoint of the first volume. What begins as a local color tale seemingly focused on frontier ways (bee-hunting and heavy drinking, among others), with the War of 1812 as historical context, thereafter becomes an allegory about the redemptive power of Christian love. Williams explains the change by reference to Cooper’s devotional reading habits during the months when he was at work on the novel. Absorbed in the Bible, at this time the Book of Acts, Cooper encountered in the latter’s ninth chapter the story of Saul’s conversion on the road to

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Damascus. He had read the seventh chapter (the story of Stephen’s martyrdom, relevant as well for the novel) on January 14 and read ahead on the following days until he finished Acts on January 24. It was just at this time (January 18), as he also recorded in his journal, that he completed the novel’s tenth chapter (in which Peter is introduced), after which he began revising the accumulated manuscript; on January 27 he noted sending off that first batch to John Fagan (see LJ 5:257–62).70 While the book eventually develops the religious theme Williams has identified, its material foundation rests on the first failures of U.S. military policy in the Great Lakes region during the second war with Britain. It opens in July and runs on into August 1812 (see OO 1:10, 199–200), a critical period following the June declaration of war by the United States. Framing the action is a trio of early events in the conflict: the surprise attack on Fort Mackinac on July 17 (see OO 1:36–37); the abandonment of Fort Dearborn, on the future site of Chicago, on August 15, which was followed by a bloody attack on the retreating garrison by British-allied Indians (see OO 1:158); and the ignominious surrender of Gen. William Hull at Detroit on August 16 (see OO 2:18–20).71 Cooper well remembered this series of army embarrassments from the war’s start, so much in contrast to the splendid naval victories of the same period. The reverses foreclosed any immediate hope for a U.S. victory in the Midwest and of the intended invasion of western Canada. Their effect for the plot of Cooper’s novel was similar. First, these events signal the start of general hostilities for the British-allied tribes, including the Pottawattomies, to whom the reader is introduced very early. They therefore set in motion Cooper’s characters, both Native American and Euro-American. Second, as these three “grand stations of the Americans on the upper lakes” fall into British hands (OO 1:39), the reader understands that Ben Boden and his new acquaintances, the Warings, will have a desperate struggle to survive in the valley of the Kalamazoo River. As the Native Americans advance individually and collectively, the Euro-Americans must retreat. Understood in this manner, the plot actually shifts more gradually than the religious theme would suggest. Scalping Peter, as a fictional associate of the Shawnee brothers Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa (known as the Prophet), is not an abrupt addition to the plot when he first enters in chapter 10.72 Like those real figures of native resistance to white ways and white presence, he preaches death to all whites as the desperate solution to the threatened destruction of his people. This had been a motive for the Shawnee brothers in 1811 when they attacked William Henry Harrison’s troops at Tippecanoe Creek not far from this part of southern Michigan. And it was still Tecumseh’s motive when he took to the field again with the British the following year and defeated Hull, or in 1813 when, as Harrison sought to retake Detroit, Tecumseh fell to U.S. fire.73 To be sure, one

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cannot imagine Tecumseh, had he survived, converted either to Christianity or to friendly feelings for the whites, but Scalping Peter clearly has historical roots in the events of this era. Something more is also at work in Cooper’s book. Thinking back to The Deerslayer, in which the mad scalpers are renegade white men eager to cash in on bounties offered by the British government, readers may at first find Peter a kind of white Indian in reverse—equal to Harry March or Tom Hutter in ferocity, though motivated by political convictions rather than convenience or cash. But the enlightenment against which March struggles throughout The Deerslayer, and which he denies even as he flees the bloodshed at the book’s close, is to be fully Peter’s as this tale unfolds. In a further irony, he will not seek to save the life of Parson Amen, the man who has sought his conversion and whose forgiving death actually effects it; nor will he seek to prevent the torture of the book’s single U.S. soldier, Corporal Flint, who has fled Fort Dearborn at its fall and has been captured along with Parson Amen. Furthermore, it is not Peter who puts Flint out of his misery, but rather Pigeonswing, the American-allied Chippewa. Still, what Peter’s conversion bespeaks is not Indian connivance at the inevitability of white victory but rather the religious equality of all people. Much as Natty and Cooper himself in The Deerslayer insist on “human rights” for all people, Oak Openings extends that argument from political to spiritual grounds. Parson Amen may seem to a modern eye like the servant of empire, but his forgiveness for Peter’s treachery is complete. It is Christian love that moves him, and in turn Peter. Even as this new novel expanded the themes Cooper had broached in his fifth Leather-Stocking book, his Midwestern trips may have set him thinking once again about writing a sixth Bumppo tale. As early as 1840–1841, according to George Washington Greene, Cooper had contemplated such a possibility. “I meant, when I brought [Bumppo] on the stage anew,” Greene quoted Cooper as telling him in an 1849 meeting, “to have added one more scene and introduced him in the Revolution.” But, fearing that the public “had had enough of him,” Cooper never carried out the idea. Various intervening complications, especially ones arising from the shifting production arrangements for Cooper’s novels during the 1840s, had conspired to keep him busy with other things. Telling Greene of the old idea, however, briefly renewed Cooper’s interest in it. Greene insisted that The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer had not sated, but rather whetted, the appetite of Cooper’s readers for that sixth tale. It was a pity, he told Cooper, that he had never attempted it. Cooper responded warmly to Greene that he had “thought a great deal” about the book during the intervening years and might just undertake it at last.74 For reasons I discuss in my next chapter, that was not to happen. But Oak Openings provides some indication of what had been entailed in thinking “a

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great deal” about the possibility. A key challenge in writing a Revolutionary War episode for Natty Bumppo would concern his apparent political trajectory in the five published tales. Because Natty has been a retainer of the Effinghams, whom readers remember as Loyalists during the Revolution, it often seems as if the hunter of The Pioneers can only have endured the Revolution, not fought in it—at least not on the winning side. In point of fact, his own master among the attainted Effinghams, the old Maj. Oliver Effingham, waited out the war as a neutral in Connecticut, from which state Natty has retrieved him shortly before The Pioneers opens. It was the major’s son, Col. Edward Effingham, who was the active Loyalist in the war and who therefore had asked Marmaduke Temple to watch over his lands in his absence. As I have written elsewhere: “To cast Natty in a Revolutionary War novel hardly would necessitate making him into a Loyalist—or even, technically speaking, the retainer of a Loyalist. There was more leeway here than we may remember.” It seems quite unlikely that Cooper had planned in 1822 for such a future installment of Natty’s life set in the Revolution, but he certainly had left himself an out by complicating the politics of the Effingham clan.75 A second problem with placing Natty Bumppo in the Revolutionary War entailed figuring out what exactly his role might be. On this issue, The Pioneers provided no hint, but other books did. In The Prairie, for instance, Duncan Uncas Middleton informs Natty that Middleton’s grandfather, an Americanborn British officer in The Last of the Mohicans, had fought on the American side during the Revolution—Duncan Heyward “did not forget his birth-place,” Middleton explains, “but . . . was true to his proper country.” The aged trapper endorses that decision as if it might recall something in his own past: “There was reason in it; and what is better, there was Natur.” He thus gives the only explanation Cooper would ever need for producing a Revolutionary installment of Natty’s own story at some future point. Moreover, another war story told to Natty in The Prairie evokes a further, perhaps even more pertinent memory from him. Ishmael Bush tells how he had fought against the Cherokees in the South after the Revolution and then under Gen. Anthony Wayne in Ohio during the 1790s. Natty now recalls for Bush that he, too, passing from Templeton westward to the prairies (that is, after the end of The Pioneers), paused in Ohio, where he fought his “last battle” under Anthony Wayne as well.76 In point of fact, the chronology of the overall Leather-Stocking plot would not have allowed for Natty to do that. Anthony Wayne ’s final major engagement in Ohio, at Fallen Timbers, occurred in August 1794, a time when The Pioneers still places Natty in Otsego. But the larger imaginative truth here is what matters. For, aside from his plausible usefulness as an historical figure then in Ohio, Anthony Wayne would have been the perfect commander for a younger

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Natty Bumppo to have followed years earlier, during the Revolution. The association of the two via The Prairie thus may reveal the drift of Cooper’s thought as he was “ending” Natty’s career in that book. He left an opening, in other words, for installments farther back in time that could have tied Bumppo more closely to Anthony Wayne.77 This array of possibilities may well have been in Cooper’s mind as, two decades later, he worked on Oak Openings, in which the old military fugitive from Fort Dearborn, Corporal Flint, recalls his own service under Anthony Wayne in Ohio. Parson Amen, eager for the veteran to fill in bee-hunter Ben Boden on the story, prompts Flint’s memory: “Here, corporal, come this way and tell our new friend how Mad Anthony with his troopers finally routed the red-skins. You were there, and know all about it. No language can be plainer: until the ‘long-knives and leather-stockings’ came into the woods, the red man had his way. Against them, he could not prevail” (OO 1:168). As Cooper had from the later 1830s on, he was here paying tribute to his own invention by pretending that his coinage from The Pioneers in fact had been in general circulation long before. And he was giving his new story a plausible foundation in the history of its region—for Anthony Wayne’s operations in Ohio during the 1790s had “settled” white-red relations in that area until the coming of Tecumseh in 1811, an event that is fictionally replicated in the planned 1812 revolt of Scalping Peter in The Oak Openings. Yet, however useful Anthony Wayne was for setting the context of Oak Openings, Cooper was also picking up in this 1848 book a hint he first laid down in The Prairie in 1827 that had more to do with Natty Bumppo than Scalping Peter. I think he probably was still toying here with the possibility of backtracking in Natty’s life to write the sixth tale that he would discuss the very next year in Manhattan with George Washington Greene. Strengthening the link between Natty and Anthony Wayne would make it easier for him to turn to that project now. Circumstances arising in 1849, however, were to make the point moot, as we shall see in the next chapter.78

Counterpoise In July 1848, a month before The Oak Openings appeared, Cooper already had a new book in mind. To be called The Sea Lions; or, the Lost Sealers, it would be set mostly in the Antarctic Ocean, where two American seal-hunting vessels are trapped during the long, brutal winter of 1819–1820. By virtue of its extreme setting and action, the book at first seems to stand alone among Cooper’s novels, more like a bridge from Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym to Melville ’s Moby-Dick than a companion piece to the relatively sedate tale of Michigan in 1812 that Cooper had just published—or most of his other domestic and, indeed, sea tales. But

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that impression is not quite accurate. For one thing, The Sea Lions partook of and would complete a fictional exploration of faraway zones that marked much of Cooper’s recent work, including not only Jack Tier and The Crater but also, in its own way, The Oak Openings. Coming on the heels of the inbred, superlocal Littlepage tales, the group of books ending with The Sea Lions collectively pushed out beyond Cooper’s customary horizons. This is another way in which his work fit in with—and once again critiqued—the aggressively expansive climate of the United States in the later 1840s. On this front, The Sea Lions enjoys an especially close connection to The Crater. Both novels, for one thing, center on the experience of a relatively small number of American characters amid secluded, imaginary island clusters where dire conditions display nature’s power over humanity. The settings have profound differences, yet the sterile sealing isles of The Sea Lions include a feature familiar from The Crater—a volcano that provides both a visual landmark and a recurrent reminder of the forces permeating the natural world. In both books one thus may trace Cooper’s engagement with recent theorizing about cataclysm and its role in earth history.79 Cooper’s first mention of The Sea Lions, in a July 1848 letter to Richard Bentley, in fact stressed the relationship between the books: “I intend it as a counterpoise, or pendant might be a better word, to the Crater. Scene, principally, Antarctick Ocean, and incidents very icy” (LJ 5:374).80 At the same time, The Sea Lions had other connections that The Crater lacked. Coming as it did near the end of Cooper’s life, and first described by the novelist to Bentley as probably “the last” novel he would write (LJ 5:374), it had a summary function, tying together strands reaching well back in his personal experience and literary career. He brought to it, first, his long-standing interest in two maritime topics specifically linked to the plot as he invented it: the effect of polar ice on navigation during an era of rapidly expanding commercial and scientific traffic at the ocean’s extremities; and the special role played in the U.S. nautical economy by sealing and whaling, mammal-hunting trades that were particularly important for seamen from northeastern ports. Cooper’s concern with both these topics had emerged in the years surrounding 1820 (one reason why he set the new book just then, too), and they had intermittently attracted his attention ever since. As a writer, he had first focused on Arctic ice in 1821–1822 by reviewing for Charles K. Gardiner’s Literary and Scientific Repository two important English books: William Scoresby’s Account of the Arctic Regions, with a History and Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery (1820) and William E. Parry’s Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific (1821). Cooper quoted relevant passages from both books about struggles with the ice in its various deadly forms and furthermore wrote extensive passages of his own on the topic. Among other parts of the two narratives that he would rely

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on for his 1849 novel were Parry’s long account of his successful overwintering in the ice off Melville Island in 1819–1820 (see ECE 82–96) and Scoresby’s briefer, secondhand account of the wreckage visited on the Dutch Greenland whaling fleet by ice some forty years earlier (see ECE 46–47). When Herman Melville reviewed The Sea Lions in 1849, he rightly speculated that Cooper had relied on “Scoresby’s Greenland narrative.”81 Cooper had relied on Parry’s book as well. Although Cooper’s fascination with polar themes reached its fullest fictional expression in the 1849 novel, it had also shown up in previous tales. Partly this was a simple matter of personal background. Having grown up on the shores of a mountain lake whose frozen, often snow-covered skin provided many treats (and threats) each winter, he had an enduring sensitivity to climatic cycles witnessed in much magnified form at the poles. Frozen Otsego Lake in The Pioneers, described with close attention to the color, sheen, density, and strength of its covering from December through April, was one literary result— written, as it happens, shortly after Cooper had read and reviewed Parry and Scoresby (see PIO CE 40, 213, 242–43). And then there was the Hudson, whose annual spring dissolution was a topic of great interest to many who dwelled along or passed up and down it. Melville, living in and near Albany for the decade before he went to sea, would memorialize that spectacle (and perhaps Cooper’s use of it in Satanstoe) in Ishmael’s guess that the begrimed painting at the Spouter Inn may represent “the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time”—or, again, via his overt comparison of the “tumbling” whales in “The Grand Armada” to “the tumultuous masses of block-ice when the great river Hudson breaks up in Spring.”82 For Cooper, whose memories of the Hudson’s annual tumult were especially vivid, the massive chunks of ice bearing down on Corny and Anneke in Satanstoe gave an intense, if brief, foretaste of the great suffering meted out to the sealers in The Sea Lions. Despite considerable difference in mode and tone, The Sea Lions also owed debts to The Monikins, in which the American sealer Noah Poke accompanies John Goldencalf and the four principal Monikins on a fantastic voyage to the south polar region. There lie Poke’s familiar sealing islands (secret, like those in The Sea Lions, and those of most actual sealers during the period); there, too, lie the temperate Monikin countries.83 On their way thither in the Walrus, Cooper’s 1835 voyagers pass the Falklands and then Staten Land (see MON 1:193), typical sealing stops, before encountering “a boundless barrier of glittering ice, broken into the glorious and fantastical forms of pinnacles, walls, and valleys,” a scene rendered more sublime by “the fearful action of the boisterous ocean.” This formidable barrier appears as impassable as the Antarctic ice will be in The Sea Lions; when the voyagers draw near, however, a narrow channel opens to a farther basin. While they have to evade icebergs there, and grapple with field ice

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that wedges their vessel bodily out of the sea, soon they come under the influence of a “steam-climate” that converts the polar waste into a habitable zone. Their ship is let back down onto its proper element by the sudden thaw, allowing them to push through the unresisting slush as if it is “so much thick water.” When the last of that is gone, they sail freely on “the open sea, rioting in the luxuriance of its genial climate.” Among other things, this is the spring thaw of Otsego Lake accelerated and rendered on a vast scale. But, up to a certain point, it is also a trial run for the less fantastic action of The Sea Lions (MON 1:214–27). There is little doubt that Scoresby and Parry had supplied much general guidance for The Monikins, especially on the risks of the ice and the means of dealing with it. But there were other sources for the 1835 novel as well. One critic, viewing “the sealing materials” in The Monikins as “strictly incidental to the main action,” concludes that no extra reading on that particular topic had been necessary then. On a strictly informational basis I think this is right. Yet we may ask where Cooper had come up with the idea of casting, as the unlikely companion of his wealthy British hero, the provincial American mariner Noah Poke, who hails from Stonington, Connecticut. Certainly not in the pages of Scoresby or Parry.84 Cooper knew something about sealing, and the importance of Stonington to it, from his time as owner and shoreward manager of the whaleship Union during the years 1819–1822. Yet I think that his personal knowledge was refreshed, and extended, by his encounter with a book published shortly before he returned from Europe, a book that we know was to provide much detail for The Sea Lions. This was Voyages Round the World (1833), by Edmund Fanning, a sealing captain also notable for his involvement in Pacific and Antarctic exploration, a topic of some importance to both novels. Fanning often operated out of New York City, but his writings made it clear that his native harbor of Stonington, snugly concealed behind Fisher’s Island on the far eastern edge of Connecticut, was sealing’s revitalized American center during the very years Cooper chose as the temporal setting for both The Monikins and The Sea Lions. Thomas Philbrick has called Fanning’s book a rich “storehouse” of details and incidents for The Sea Lions. I think it served in a somewhat more muted fashion as Cooper’s guide for The Monikins as well.85 His reliance on Fanning for both novels helps explain why they have many things in common. His plans for the 1835 book, as noted in the sixth chapter, developed slowly over a period of years. Although the satire as he finished it opens and closes in Europe, where he first sketched his plans for it, he probably did not imagine it as a full-blown sea tale, let alone write the early chapters that set it up as such, until he began serious work on the book in New York starting in 1834 (see LJ 3:30). By then, he must have read or been reading Fanning’s recently published Voyages, to which he would have been attracted, as he was to

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other such titles, by its polar and maritime subjects. Noah Poke, crucial to the book’s plot, surely came to him from Fanning. The sailor’s name may be glossed by reference to a passage in The Sea Lions that characterizes the typically venturesome, even nosey habits of sealers, productive alike of profit and new knowledge: “it is a part of their calling to poke about in channels and passages where no one else has ever been,” surely an apt description of Cooper’s sealer in The Monikins (SL 1:185). Poke brings with him into the 1835 book an air of endurance and worldly experience that makes him an ideal guide on John Goldencalf ’s southward voyage. Having suffered the loss of his old sealing vessel “on the north-east coast of Russia” (while there trading in skins, we learn), Poke has spent eighteen months going overland from the Pacific to Paris in an attempt to get back to America (MON 1:106–7). Wanting more than anything else to be home, the sailor is headed through Paris to Le Havre when he happens to meet Goldencalf at a cheap groggery, “a guinguette, near the base of Montmartre” in the French capital (MON 1:101). Poke’s strong homing instinct does not blunt his interest in new opportunities. He is persuaded to delay his return to Stonington in order to help organize the expedition Goldencalf wants to undertake, and then to command the ship. All Yankee shrewdness, Poke succumbs to inducements that any Stonington sealing master of the time could hardly refuse—money up front and exclusive rights to any new sealing islands the ship discovers. But the clincher is the promise from the chief Monikin, Dr. Reasono, that Poke will have the satisfaction of presenting “before the academy of Leaphigh”—the book’s version of the Royal Society—a paper on his “peculiar views touching the earth’s annual revolution, and of the virtue of sailing planets with their helms lashed hard-a-port” (MON 1:196–97). Poke is not only a great sailor—he is a quarterdeck geographer and philosopher as well. As I suggest below, that detail tells us something more about the deeper background of Cooper’s two Antarctic novels.86

Wilkes, Symmes, and Others Crucial for how Cooper treated the far more realistic Antarctic environment in The Sea Lions was, most immediately, the Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1844/1845), the multivolume report by Lieut. Charles Wilkes of what his large corps of sailors, scientists, and artists had accomplished over the years of their cruise (1838–1842). Cooper had already used Wilkes for information about the Pacific in The Crater. Here he relied on him more extensively, and with regard to the far more consequential work Wilkes had performed in Antarctica itself, where the name Wilkes Land, the part of that continent below Australia, survives as a mark of his discoveries.

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Various scholars have studied Cooper’s debts to Wilkes. In addition to looking at some of the ways in which Wilkes’s writings enabled The Sea Lions, however, it is important to understand both the relationship the two men enjoyed and the expedition’s larger context, for the latter was part of the novel’s own. Wilkes was not just an author whose writings provided Cooper with information or inspiration. In fact, Cooper knew Wilkes (and especially his family) quite well and had taken considerable interest in the officer’s career from its beginning.87 When Wilkes was finally named as the hardly obvious choice as commander of the U.S. Exploring Expedition in the later 1830s, the novelist acquired a sort of proprietary relation to the venture. The navy’s halting progress in the matter to that point had provoked a good deal of comment from Cooper in his letters to Shubrick (see LJ 3:301, 304, 314), but his primary interest in it, especially once the six vessels in Wilkes’s fleet finally left Norfolk in August 1838, was scientific.88 He followed press reports of the expedition’s accomplishments closely. Its first important destination being the high latitudes of the South Atlantic, specifically the onetime sealing area of the South Shetland Islands, gave the news special pertinence. In August 1840, just as word of the expedition’s Antarctic discoveries earlier that year was circulating, Cooper wrote Shubrick, “Wilkes has immortalized himself by looking at the ice” (LJ 4:53).89 Cooper had great hopes for the Narrative Wilkes would compile from the expedition’s various records (see LJ 4:430) and actually played a role in the work’s production, another reason why he turned to it when writing The Sea Lions. It is not true, as one scholar has it, that Cooper “moved into Wilkes’s Philadelphia hotel to help him write” the official report.90 Cooper indeed informed his wife from Head’s hotel in that city on August 23, 1844, “Wilkes is in this house, superintending the publication of his work.” And he added, “It will be a very magnificent book, and I make no doubt will do him credit.” While Cooper also made it clear that the two men talked, and about the expedition (specifically, about an Albany midshipman—the son of an old Cooper family lawyer—who had been killed in a fight with the Fiji islanders in 1840), there is no indication that they discussed the Narrative extensively, let alone conferred on its substance at that time (LJ 4:471–72). Cooper did become involved, though, in the process by which the cheap edition of the Narrative was produced by John Fagan and by Lea and Blanchard, the publishers who until very recently had handled his own work. He recommended Fagan in particular as a copy editor, again while the two authors were in Philadelphia, where Cooper was proofing Afloat and Ashore for Fagan.91 One reason for assisting Wilkes when the two conferred in Philadelphia in 1844 was probably Cooper’s hope that the young officer, who had been courtmartialed on his return from the expedition two years earlier, would be redeemed

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by the importance of his scientific findings. In The Sea Lions, which not only used Wilkes’s Narrative extensively but also praised Wilkes himself and employed him as an aesthetic and intellectual model, Cooper’s support for him was made publicly evident.92 No fewer than seven times he referred to Wilkes by name in the body of the novel. For instance, when seeking to capture the visual effect of icebergs, Wilkes wrote, “If an immense city of ruined alabaster palaces can be imagined, of every variety of shape and tint, and composed of huge piles of buildings grouped together, with long lanes of streets winding irregularly through them, some faint idea may be formed of the grandeur and beauty of the spectacle.”93 Several times within a single chapter, Cooper relied on this imagery. Once he wrote, “In ten minutes they drew quite near to that wild and magnificent ruined city of alabaster that was floating about in the antarctic sea!”; or, again, he wrote of the “passages between the bergs, or what might be termed the streets and lanes of this mysterious-looking, fantastical, yet sublime city of the ocean” (SL 2:53). Johan Wijkmark argues that the real debt Cooper owed Wilkes was not for romantic embellishment and mysterious effects such as these but rather for a sense of the overwhelming materiality of the oceanic ice, as well as the dire physical effects of polar weather on his characters.94 Wilkes himself used the language of sublimity, in which Cooper had helped school the members of Wilkes’s generation. But Cooper had been much interested in science ever since his time with Silliman at Yale, and as his reviews of Scoresby and Parry made plain, he trusted the capacity of science to resolve any mysteries the earth might present. In his penultimate novel, he was to use the material environment he so splendidly evoked and painstakingly described, in part by relying on Wilkes (and Scoresby and Parry and others), as Roswell Gardiner’s object lesson in human frailty and the need for divine aid. But he nonetheless got the science as right as could be expected in a work of fiction written in the late 1840s. It is not quite right to portray Wilkes’s Narrative as a determinative source for The Sea Lions, however, without noticing a series of earlier influences that contributed to both the Wilkes expedition and Cooper’s Antarctic fiction. I am thinking here not of the international interest in oceanic exploration or in the polar regions specifically, although that interest certainly provided a context for both, but rather of a peculiar American phenomenon that took shape after the end of the second war with Britain and that gave rise to a great many scientific, pseudoscientific, and artistic efforts by Americans over the next several decades. Both Wilkes and Cooper were the substantial co-beneficiaries of that phenomenon. This part of the story begins with the curious theories of a former infantry officer named John Cleves Symmes, who in 1818 announced that the earth was hollow and habitable within and that its interior could be accessed at the poles.

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That this notion in its general form was hardly new, various scholars (including Peter Fitting in his recent book Subterranean Worlds) have demonstrated. Although, as Hester Blum has argued, Symmes’s own goals were less national than “planetary,” he put forth his theory at an opportune moment and in a context that gave it special appeal to U.S. nationals.95 With the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the seas were open to traffic—and speculation—as they had not been for a generation, and Americans turned outward again in common with other peoples. In Britain, there was a push to mount expeditions like those in which William E. Parry became involved and to give the public extensive reports of the results, one of which, of course, Cooper reviewed.96 Even Symmes, zany as some immediately thought him, wanted to test his ideas by undertaking a north polar expedition (via Russia) and in 1822 petitioned the U.S. government for the needed funding. In this sense, he positively courted science. Nothing came of his proposal immediately, and between then and his death in 1829 Symmes lost control of the discussion to others who capitalized on the wider interest his theory sparked. Soon they were pushing for a much more general exploring expedition, and while their first effort in that regard also failed to secure federal backing, a renewal of the effort in the 1830s in fact resulted in the Wilkes expedition. For that reason, Symmes has been described as the man who set in motion the forces that eventually propelled Wilkes around the world. A wild fiction thus provided the basis for an enormous venture in the collection of facts.97 Symmes, who did not produce much of a written record by his own hand, kept his ideas before the public via his lectures. Soon he began to attract a mixed assortment of commentators (both sympathetic and not), including the New York scientist (and Cooper associate) Samuel L. Mitchill, who lent Symmes the support of his considerable prestige.98 Cooper himself never referred directly to Symmes, yet it is evident that his 1835 Antarctic fantasy had something to do with Symmes’s claims, and with their adumbration in an anonymous 1820 novel (Symzonia, by “Capt. Adam Seaborn”) that further popularized them. Like Cooper’s book, Symzonia used the pretext of a sealing voyage to the South Atlantic as the basis for an Antarctic fable. The alleged purpose of Seaborn’s voyage via the Falklands was to penetrate what he, copying Symmes, called the “icy hoop”—just as Poke takes the Walrus toward and eventually through a similarly limited barrier of ice protecting the south polar zone. In The Monikins, as already noted, the polar territory of the monkeys is habitable owing to steam vented from the earth’s core, a point that seems like a sly reference to Symmes’s hollow earth claims. Similarly, Cooper’s talking (and reasoning) monkeys, whatever their other sources, represent a satiric recasting of the superior beings (called the “Internals”) that the narrator of Symzonia discovers in his passage inside the globe. Hence the importance of Dr. Reasono’s promise to Noah Poke

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about presenting his scientific theories to the Leaphigh academy. Poke is Cooper’s poke at Symmes.99 Had Cooper read Symzonia? It certainly fit with his reading interests at the time. It furthermore was published in New York and was being sold by Wiley and Halsted in November 1820, just when Cooper began frequenting their shop and made his first contract with them (see JFC:EY 271). More to the point, other booksellers at that time placed Symzonia and Cooper’s first book, Precaution, together in the same advertisements. Indeed, Cooper’s friend Charles K. Gardner gave Cooper and Seaborn proximity and shared prominence in an extensive listing of new books inserted in the January 1821 issue of his journal, which also carried the first of the reviews Cooper wrote for it. The journal’s list named just three American novels, and in this order: Precaution, Symzonia, and, prematurely, The Spy (“An original novel—in the press”). While none of these details proves that Cooper read Symzonia, it clearly would have been hard for him to avoid all notice of the book, if not the book itself.100 The overall idea of a combined sealing and exploring voyage to the south is the most general tie between the two tales—a tie that eventually would extend to The Sea Lions as well. When we widen our focus to that second polar novel, another possible debt to Symzonia surfaces. The mates and men on Seaborn’s voyage are very apprehensive that they will stay so long in the south polar region that they will be iced in and perish there. This theme sounds throughout the book, even at its end, when Seaborn returns from his internal trip and heads north to pick up the sealing party he has left under the first mate, Boneto, on “Seaborn’s Land.” As the vessel approaches the place where Seaborn had erected the sealers’ base camp, all seems orderly—but eerily abandoned. Immediately, the sailors on the ship start accusing Seaborn of having in effect murdered the other men by abandoning them to the extreme cold and the monstrous beasts that wander this book’s polar lands. The fear proves wrong. Boneto’s party has “passed the winter very comfortably”—and profitably. For Cooper, however, we might see the fears voiced repeatedly in Symzonia as having survived from his early reading to provide hints for the basic crisis in The Sea Lions. Other men certainly were forced to spend a winter in polar ice, including Parry, but none of them except Seaborn’s characters are seal-hunters trapped, like Gardiner and Daggett, in the ice of the south polar zone.101 Symmes and his ideas remained very much alive between the time when Symzonia appeared and Cooper published The Monikins. Among Symmes’s most energetic and consequential associates was a young Ohioan named Jeremiah N. Reynolds, who would in time use the intellectual capital left over from the Symmes flurry to attract federal support for not one but two exploring expeditions. Reynolds went on the first of those himself (he almost went on the second,

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too) and thus provided the single most important human link between the hollow earth theory and the Wilkes expedition. Born in 1800, Reynolds became actively engaged with Symmes and his ideas in 1824, when Symmes lectured in Ohio. Then publisher of a newspaper in Wilmington, thirty miles northeast of Cincinnati, Reynolds soon shuttered his business, abandoned his old career, and in 1825 set out on a more ambitious tour of the East with Symmes.102 By the time the two men hit New York City the following May, Reynolds had already become Symmes’s manager and what we would now call publicist. He also was beginning to emerge as something of his own man, as the record of their New York engagements in the contemporary press indicates. Although editor George Pope Morris spoke approvingly of Symmes’s ideas about the poles and asserted that “a vessel could easily be fitted out to explore those unknown regions,” he soon began paying considerably more attention to Jeremiah Reynolds’s explication of the master’s ideas than to the master himself. In May 1826, Morris concluded that Symmes, while having “discovered a grand theory,” lacked the intellectual means of “maturing and preparing it in a proper form, and . . . should, therefore, leave it to be done by others.” Chief among those “others” was Reynolds: “The simplicity of his language, and the many interesting facts which he presents to the reader,” Morris commented, “will entitle him to the attention of all reflecting men.” Later the same month, in voicing his regrets that “Captain Symmes does not leave the management of this subject to Mr. Reynolds,” Morris predicted Symmes’s withdrawal and Reynolds’s decision to pursue “this subject”—and its public policy implications—on his own.103 Two months later, Reynolds went by himself to Washington to make contact with several officials. To Secretary of the Navy Samuel L. Southard, for instance, he pitched “a contemplated voyage to the unexplored seas to the South—for the sake of discovery on the broad and liberal principles of science.”104 He courted the public as well, placing an advertisement in the Daily National Intelligencer announcing “two gratuitous Lectures on the nature of the Polar Regions of the world and the importance of an exploration of them.” And he persuaded one of that paper’s editors to interview him and publish his written plan for the venture. Distinguishing Reynolds from Symmes, the editor stressed that Symmes’s ideas could “never be tested,” whereas Reynolds proposed a practical undertaking that would benefit scientific knowledge as well as “the whale and seal fisheries, &c.” Not in Symzonia or The Monikins alone were the two purposes of polar exploration and the mammal fisheries thus linked. Reynolds in his own statement also emphasized that he would recruit his crew exclusively from those fisheries.105 Navy Secretary Southard went to hear Reynolds lecture. Although he also discredited the Symmesian theories with which Reynolds was to some extent still

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associated, Southard felt “anxious that [Reynolds] should be successful in fitting out his vessels & have every means in his power to render his voyage useful.”106 Sharing that wish was Treasury Secretary Richard Rush, who publicized his personal pledge of money to Reynolds. Soon petitions were being sent to Congress in support of official funding. Having in the meantime lectured even more broadly around the country, Reynolds returned in February 1828 to the capital, where he gave a speech in the House of Representatives on the subject of Antarctic exploration that “carried the day,” as scholar Richard G. Woodbridge puts it. Before long, Southard was working with President John Quincy Adams on the details of the endeavor, which seemed certain to go forward. Reynolds, who wanted his expenses covered but expected no pay while on the voyage, was approved as its leader and sent off to learn more about the Southern Ocean from Nantucket whalemen who were familiar with it. Among the many supporters Reynolds attracted from the nation’s scientific community were Symmes’s ally Samuel L. Mitchill, as well as two former members of Cooper’s Bread and Cheese Lunch, Columbia chemist James L. Renwick and James De Kay, a naturalist who, partly because he was shipbuilder Henry Eckford’s son-in-law and close business associate, was also deeply versed in maritime issues (as indicated in the seventh chapter, he provided Cooper with much useful information for the naval history a decade after the Reynolds business). De Kay was so interested in the present venture that he addressed more than a dozen letters to Southard at this time on the subject. He was keen to go on the expedition himself and in fact would be named its principal naturalist by Southard.107 Despite this momentum, the expedition in its explicitly national form was not to be. President Adams favored federal support for scientific research; but following his loss to Andrew Jackson in 1828 (and in the face of strong opposition from South Carolina Jacksonian Robert Y. Hayne, who chaired the Senate ’s Committee on Naval Affairs), official backing for Reynolds was infeasible. Part of the reason arose from the heavy role that Southard was assigning to civilians such as Reynolds and De Kay, an approach that some (including Hayne and indeed Wilkes) painted as an insult to the officer corps. But the larger issue, beyond Wilkes’s attempt to manipulate events so as to assume a greater hand in whatever expedition eventually sailed, was Hayne ’s dogged insistence that the federal government had no just part to play in such things. Unfortunately, although the navy as an institution might benefit from the expedition, it had no unified view of the proposed venture; even among the officers in New York who wanted to participate in the expedition, there was “a flurry of jealous bickering,” historian William Stanton writes, an intense local example of the “perpetually cacophonous” behavior of the corps at large. In this sense, too, Reynolds’s effort in the late 1820s was the precursor of the Wilkes expedition.108

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What was intriguing about Reynolds at this point in his still young life was his capacity for rebound. Very quickly, he organized a privately funded expedition intended as a substitute for the canceled public one. To understand how he did so, we need to appreciate more fully the networks of affiliation, interest, and kinship that knit together the practical mariners whom he recruited to both ventures. We should not be at all surprised that—for money, ships, and personnel— he turned to Stonington. Whether considered as a fictional locale or a busy maritime center, Stonington was the logical choice then, and had been for some time.109 Reynolds’s associates in the private expedition that was to set out in 1829 did not just coincidentally hail from Stonington, like so many other sealers at the time: his chief partner was none other than Edmund Fanning, whom Reynolds called “the Father of all Sealers.” Fanning certainly was that, as well as a master mariner, and as Reynolds must have known, Fanning was also familiar with how to mount a maritime expedition: in 1812, President James Madison had authorized him to command two ships “intended for the exploration of the southern hemisphere, and [a] voyage round the world.”110 That expedition was about to sail when the venture was first suspended and then canceled owing to the U.S. declaration of war against Britain. It was also to have been privately financed, so when Reynolds, who had come to know Fanning while preparing for the canceled 1828 venture, turned to Fanning, he and his money were soon recruited. Their 1829 joint venture, known officially as the “South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition,” bore a name suggestive of the underlying purpose in Symzonia and in Sir John Goldencalf ’s original proposal to Noah Poke (that is, “to fit out an expedition, that should be partly of trade and partly of discovery”—MON 1:111). Its three ships set out in the fall of 1829 for Staten Land and then the South Shetlands before they undertook, as Fanning’s Voyages would put it, “a lengthy cruise of much anxiety and suffering towards the icy region, for the discovery of lands to the westward of Palmer’s Land, and likewise in search for the land said to have been seen by Captains Macy and Gardiner to the south-westward of Cape Horn.” The appearance of the names Gardiner and Macy in conjunction with a secret island is highly suggestive, since both were to appear in The Sea Lions.111 The Monikins, though, was itself suggestive for that later novel. Cooper was out of the country at the time of the 1829 expedition but remained very much in touch with nautical circles as well as old New York friends including De Kay. Furthermore, since Fanning included the official report of the 1829 venture in the penultimate chapter of his 1833 Voyages, the story was freshly available to Cooper once he came home and, though he had sworn off fiction, decided to expand and complete the little satiric tale he had determined to write while still abroad.112 Moreover, once Reynolds finally returned to the United States in 1834, he joined other members of the failed 1829 venture in pushing for what eventually became the Wilkes expedition. The

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renewed lobbying left traces in The Monikins. Dr. Reasono, wishing to protect his Monikin audience from the truth about what he has endured during his absence in the northern hemisphere, pretends that he hired the sealers who in fact seized him— hired them to accompany him on a grand exploratory expedition. Why? Knowing all too well that “the inhabitants of Leaplow”—the novel’s stand-in for the United States—“were seriously talking of sending out an expedition for this very purpose, he had promptly decided to profit by events, to push inquiry to the extent of his abilities, and to hazard all in the cause of learning and truth” (MON 2:14–15). Cooper, who by the later 1830s knew Reynolds personally and spoke with him about the new Wilkes expedition as it was taking shape (see LJ 3:304), had not just inserted a stray early reference to that venture into his 1835 novel. The book itself was part of the larger means through which the various polar fantasies of the 1820s, including those of Symmes and Reynolds and Fanning and his associates, had been revived in the new decade, revived and eventually given an institutional home and governmental backing. Imagining the South Atlantic even in a satire like The Monikins helped make that zone freshly available to national discourse. Picking up many early strands, Cooper helped pass them on to the expedition’s eventual commander. If Cooper was Wilkes’s beneficiary in The Sea Lions, he had already been his benefactor. The Sea Lions was to The Monikins as Wilkes was to Symmes—a realistic answer to an imaginative question.

Dogs and Bears Realism is relative, of course, and it is important to specify what I mean here. Unassailable as Noah Poke’s credentials as a sealer are, he does not hunt a single marine mammal in The Monikins. At one point, he tells Goldencalf that he is sorely tempted to “throw all the monikins overboard . . . and then go a sealing,” but the Briton objects and they sail on with their strange companions toward their original goal (MON 1:220). Here is a major difference between Cooper’s two novels. In The Sea Lions, we indeed see seals in considerable variety and number, and they are not just seen—they are hunted and killed and turned into valuable cargo. So engaged is this novel with sealing that fur seal historian Fredericka Martin (a sometime resident on St. Paul Island in the Bering Sea) described it in 1946 as containing “the most definitive and coherent description of a seal hunt” she had ever found. I do not disagree with that view but think it tells us as much about the dearth of other written descriptions of sealing (by comparison with whaling) as it does about the depth of Cooper’s engagement with this maritime industry. Cooper knew enough to make Poke a Stonington sealer in his 1835 satire, and later to handle the general business of sealing convincingly in The Sea Lions, but there were limits to his knowledge.113

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There thus is nothing in the 1849 novel to match the specificity of Cooper’s account of Brazil-ground whaling in the Scoresby review, or the fictional whale hunts in this very book and three earlier ones (The Pilot, Afloat and Ashore, and The Crater), let alone the cetological sections in Melville.114 To begin with, we might consider what Cooper knew and did not know about which species among the thirty or so varieties of pinnipeds sealers targeted—and for what purposes. At the time, the hunted varieties were put to specific uses either in sequence (newer ones substituted for more preferable species when those became depleted or inaccessible) or simultaneously (some for pelts, others for oil). When Cooper wrote of “ ‘sea-elephants,’ and ‘lions,’ and ‘dogs,’ and ‘bears’ ” (SL 1:209), he was demonstrating his awareness of the variety of animals sealers pursued, as well as his partial familiarity with the vernacular taxonomy used by men who grappled with those animals in the field and the marketplace.115 Fur was the most lucrative commodity and the first to attract Americans into the business. The best outlet for the pelts or skins of fur seals (of which there also are several varieties) was China. But it is important to recall that seal fur, however valuable, was itself a substitute for what the Chinese merchants much preferred—that is, the finer and therefore far more costly pelt of the Pacific sea otter, which was so overhunted that yields fell far below demand well before the nominal date of Cooper’s action. Americans had become involved in the sea otter business once they began trading with China after the Revolution. They then followed the lead of others, notably the Russians, into the substitute fur seal enterprise in the Pacific. (Presumably Noah Poke, given where his ship wrecked, would have had a hand in that branch of the business.) In the Atlantic, Americans had joined men from yet other countries in the exploitation of the Falkland Islands for furs and oil beginning in the later eighteenth century. After an early nineteenth-century downturn in the sealing trade (see note 85), the discovery of the near-Antarctic South Shetlands in 1819 by British merchant seaman William Smith stimulated a sudden renewal of activity, which occurred virtually under Cooper’s nose as he tended to the Union. His involvement in the related trade of whaling at just that moment was, for the purposes of The Monikins and especially The Sea Lions, a good piece of luck.116 Cooper’s knowledge of sealing, while accurate enough, was nonetheless relatively superficial. For instance, very early, before the vessels leave on the voyage, Gardiner’s objects as dictated by Deacon Pratt are said to be “seals, sea-lions, sea-elephants, and all animals of the genus phoca” (SL 1:78).117 The name Cooper bestowed on the twin vessels in the book (and hence the book itself ) is consistent with Pratt’s instructions. So is the list of the marine mammals the sealers encounter on their arrival at Sealer’s Land: “Sea Lions, Sea Elephants, huge, clumsy, fierce-looking and revolting creatures, belonging properly to neither sea nor land”—as well as “nearly every known species of the larger seals” (SL 1:201).

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Once the hunt begins, though, Gardiner particularly targets “fur-seals” (or in Cooper’s own later term, “bears”), not sea lions, and (as a secondary object only) “noble sea-elephants,” each of which yields “a very ample return . . . in oil” (SL 1:204). At the end of the hunt, when the vessels first attempt sailing home together, we learn that the Oyster Pond Sea Lion contains “a good cargo of elephant-oil, well chucked off with fur-seal skins” (SL 2:45). What has happened to the sea lions? Not one appears to have been taken. It is entirely possible that Cooper, not sure of the differences (or not overly nice in observing them), used “sea lion” when he actually meant “fur seal,” a confusion commonly seen in records from the period. But it is also possible that he was simply making a mistake.118 Cooper’s brief handling of the actual hunt once Gardiner and his men arrive in Sealer’s Land is, like his handling of the names, also not completely confident. In the gruesome practice of the period, fur seals were attacked with a club and then, as needed, stabbed with some sharp or pointed tool; the much larger sea elephants by contrast were simply run through with a lance at the outset. Cooper could have found this passage, for instance, in Scoresby: “The capturing of a seal is but the work of a moment. A blow with a ‘seal-club,’ . . . on the nose, immediately stuns it, and affords opportunity, by the active use of the club upon others, of arresting the flight, and making prize of many at a time.” Scoresby was of course writing about northern sealing, which targeted distinct species, but other sources of the period show that the same aggressive patterns prevailed elsewhere.119 Cooper’s sealers use no clubs but only “a sealing-spear or lance” (SL 1:202) against all their victims. In this regard, the novelist, having conflated species, may also have conflated the usual protocols associated with them. He knew enough to get his sealers to the South Atlantic and set them on the hunt, but not enough to give a coherent account of what such men actually did in such places. A further perspective may help here. It is evident that Cooper did not fully deploy in this book’s hunting scenes the eco-ethical concerns sometimes raised in other works. Unlike the sickening assault on the passenger pigeon in The Pioneers, “the business of slaughtering” in The Sea Lions, as he calls it at one point (SL 1:205), provokes no laments about suffering victims or squandered resources: no solitary hunter emerges from amid the ice and rocks, like an Antipodean LeatherStocking, to bewail the sealers’ “wasty ways.” Why not? Perhaps the difference stems from the fact that Cooper did not know these creatures (“huge, clumsy, fierce-looking and revolting” as some of them were to his mind’s eye) the way he knew and cared about the beasts and birds of his own temperate forest. Furthermore, what Cooper did know of marine mammals and how he felt about them was colored by the fact of his own benefit (as owner of a whaleship) from their slaughter. When Gardiner first arrives at Sealer’s Land, Cooper does not portray him as a

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despoiler like Richard Jones or Billy Kirby, but rather as a man happy to have found a large stock of the fur seal, a “creature that pays . . . tribute to the wants and luxuries of man, in numbers sufficient to promise him a speedy return to the northward”—and a speedy return on his investment (SL 1:204). This is the language not of waste but of providential abundance. In the phrase “the business of slaughtering,” Cooper may have put the emphasis on “business.” Even so, it is worth noting that Gardiner pursues a relatively more humane (and more profitable) course with the targeted animals than does Macy, the mate on Daggett’s vessel, who scorns Gardiner’s approach once Daggett is injured and Macy takes over his crew’s operations (see SL 2:32–33). Gardiner has made his own values clear to his men: no more animals are “to be slain each day than could be skinned or cut up at that particular time” (SL 1:206). By his intentionally cruel methods, Macy kills a great number initially but soon scares off the remaining animals, thereby extending the time required to fill his ship’s hold and incidentally forcing both vessels to spend the winter in the ice. Macy himself, freezing to death, is among the first of Daggett’s men to die, but Daggett is not innocent here. In addition to the rash behavior that injured his leg and allowed Macy free rein, his absorption in the profit he hopes to gain from the voyage exposes him and his men to the withering polar conditions. He is a polar speculator, akin in some ways to the Michigan developers who were similarly absorbed in the fight for profit. Like them, he is a person of limited emotional range and blunted spirit. Macy’s ill-advised assault on the crowd of sea elephants is thus underwritten by his captain’s impoverished materialistic values. By this point in the book, what matters is not the degree of Cooper’s accuracy in imagining the plot and its various episodes, but rather the meaning he has managed to give the story. Despite the limits on his polar knowledge, he clearly knew enough to make that thematic transformation believable.120 And thereby, of course, Cooper gained his own profit from this imagined voyage to the South Atlantic. It is tempting to read the allegorical contrast between Gardiner and Daggett as offering yet another guarded reflection on the course of Cooper’s literary career. It took focus, restraint, and ethical vision— as well as sheer endurance—to undertake such adventures and come back alive with something worthwhile (and profitable) to show for the experience. No one except those who had tried to do similar things could appreciate exactly how demanding the work was or how severe the conditions under which a novelist labored. That said, Cooper handled the onshore aspects of the business in this instance with his usual dispatch. He had proposed The Sea Lions to Richard Bentley from New York City in July 1848, so close on the heels of The Oak Openings that Bentley again hesitated to commit himself to another new book until the current one had actually appeared in mid-August. He finally approved

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the project in October, with the understanding that The Sea Lions would not come out before January (see LJ 5:374). Financially, Cooper wanted the same terms on which the two had settled for the Michigan book, which itself had been priced by reference to The Crater. To these terms, also in October, Bentley agreed (see LJ5:199).121 Given Bentley’s concerns about timing, Cooper evidently slowed his pace. Not until November was he ready to send Fagan’s sheets for the first English volume (i.e., chapters 1–10) by steamer (see LJ 5:374n2, 390; 6:11). As Cooper had been to Detroit again for a good part of October, this delay was also owing to the Comstock-Ketchum business. Cooper finished writing the rest of the new book by the middle of February 1849. By then, as he reported to Fagan in forwarding his last copy, he had received sheets up through the end of the second American volume’s eighth chapter, which coincided with the conclusion of the tenth forme or gathering (see LJ 5:402; CR 2:120–21). There were some setbacks in the larger process. On March 1, in a now unlocated letter from New York, Cooper explained to Fagan that he had returned corrected proofs through page 156 of the second volume (that is, the thirteenth gathering, which included the first couple of pages of the eleventh chapter). Evidently some slowing of the mails, perhaps related to the very cold weather at the time, had resulted in Fagan’s receipt of proofs from only the first twelve gatherings (i.e., to SL 2:144). And that package had not come until the very morning Fagan received and answered Cooper’s lost letter—that is, on March 2. Up to this point, under the impression that Cooper would finish proofing in Philadelphia, as he had been accustomed to do, Fagan seems to have been unconcerned about the delays. Indeed, he still needed to set the last thirty pages in type—thirty pages, presumably, of Cooper’s manuscript, meaning that the text for the last six gatherings was still sitting in his office. Cooper’s letter jolted him into action. He immediately “clapped on 7 compositors,” as he informed Cooper, adding, “I . . . hope to give you proofs of all to-morrow evening.” He proposed expediting the process further by sending Cooper duplicates of these last proofs so that the novelist could enter his corrections on both sets, returning one to Fagan and forwarding the other directly to Bentley. Once Fagan had received the corrections and cast the plates, he could send proofs of the final text directly to England as a confirmatory backup. He later confided to the novelist that he had himself sent Bentley, to cover the second English volume, the proof sheets bearing Cooper’s corrections, since “the marks [were] few and plain.”122 Cooper answered Fagan quickly on Saturday, March 3, and then in more detail the following Monday. Wishing to expedite things, he instructed Fagan to send him sheets of the book’s last ten chapters once they were ready, along with the preface (probably written after the book proper, one therefore may conclude), and the title pages necessary for copyright deposit. He would forward the

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required materials to Bentley himself from New York, where he remained at work (see LJ 6:9–11). Late in the afternoon of March 6, Cooper confirmed, in a letter to his wife, that everything had worked out according to this plan: “I have at length got all of my sheets in the mail for the English steamer to-morrow.” The next day, he confirmed to Fagan that he had indeed dispatched the hand-corrected proofs, reminding him to ship perfected sheets as a duplicate set (LJ 6:12, 15). Fagan replied on March 10 that he had sent off those sheets the day before. Addressed to Cooper in New York, they were to be transshipped from there by the novelist, as apparently happened. No acknowledgment from Cooper survives—nor the telegram Fagan asked him to send with the simple message “Send duplicates” in the event that the first set had not arrived in a reasonable period.123 Cooper reached agreement with Stringer and Townsend for The Sea Lions in November 1848, four months after first describing the project to Bentley. The basic terms were similar to those for other recent books. He was to have the plates prepared at his own charge and was to deliver them to the New Yorkers no later than February 10, 1849. The publishers were free to issue as many as five thousand copies no earlier than the tenth of March, and might follow through with later editions (of at least two thousand copies for the second edition and one thousand for subsequent ones) up to the expiration date—March 10, 1851. Thereafter, the plates were to be returned to Cooper.124 Owing to the delays in Fagan’s work already described, he did not finish casting the plates until March 12, when he shipped them for New York. Since these plates (the bill for which does not appear to survive) must have cost Cooper about half of the payment he was to receive from Stringer and Townsend, his gain on the book was modest indeed (although once the plates were back in Cooper’s hands he of course might peddle them—and the book—elsewhere).125 With the completion of Fagan’s labors and the shipping of copy and plates, the way was clear for the publishers to act. Bentley announced the novel for March 28, 1849, although he recorded it as published the next day; it came out in New York on or around April 10 (S&B 155–56; BAL 2:302).126

C H A P T E R

F I F T E E N

Last Words

W

hen, toward the end of the 1840s, Cooper wondered whether any of his books would outlive him, he decided that the LeatherStocking Tales “unquestionably” had the best chance. He would not “predict a very lasting reputation” for them; tentative rather than assured, he simply meant they had better odds than anything else. And whatever private hopes Cooper may have had for them were hedged with major public concessions. The tales had been created in a “very desultory and inartificial manner,” were jumbled in their chronology, and were so far separated in their publication dates (1823–1827 for the first three, 1840–1841 for the final two) that he thought many people who knew the initial books had never heard of, let alone read, the later ones. Although each book told part of a larger story, the closer Cooper looked, the less he could claim a unified artistic identity for the group. He had not said much about their cohesiveness in the past, had seemingly ignored them in recent years, and even now he hesitated, terming them “this series of Stories, which has obtained the name of ‘The Leather-Stocking Tales.’ ” Cooper himself had not so christened them, certainly not at the start; nor had he used that label to refer to any of the individual stories as they first appeared. The name had arisen among booksellers and publishers, and among

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readers, too, despite what Cooper said about the great gap separating The Pioneers from The Deerslayer. As for himself, he seemed content to wait for posterity to judge (DS CE 5–6).1 The occasion for these thoughts was a new general preface to the LeatherStocking Tales that Cooper wrote a year or so before he died. It was to accompany the first authorized reissue of the series as such, soon to be included by George P. Putnam in his ongoing edition of Cooper’s works. The latter venture was not a major publishing event, and it had its own desultory history, as I show in what follows. But it certainly was a positive development at a time of great doubt for writers in general, a time when “Collected Works” were rare on bookstore shelves in Manhattan or Boston or Charleston. Furthermore, the inclusion of the Leather-Stocking Tales in the edition not only allowed Cooper to reflect on the series as such but also changed how future readers approached it: for the first time, he put the books in the order of their hero’s life rather than their publishing history. The Deerslayer thus came first in this edition, while The Prairie came last. The idea for Putnam’s edition of Cooper’s works came as a surprise, since previous dealings between the publisher and author had been minimal. They had many mutual friends and acquaintances in the United States and Europe alike, and Putnam brought to his eventual relations with Cooper an affection for the latter’s works, but it is not clear that they had even met personally prior to the later 1840s.2 Putnam, starting his own firm at that time, nonetheless had ambitious plans. His first big undertaking was an “Author’s Revised Edition” of Washington Irving, which began appearing in 1848 and within three years would include fifteen volumes (see BAL 5:47–48). That venture succeeded so well that Putnam quickly approached Cooper and Catharine M. Sedgwick with similar proposals.3 He and Cooper met in New York City late in February 1849, when the novelist was there reading proof for The Sea Lions. “Putnam wishes to try a handsome edition of my works, on the same terms as he publishes the books of Irving,” Cooper quickly wrote his wife. He was interested—but skeptical, since he believed Putnam “has not much capital” (LJ 6:9). Once the two met again early in March and Putnam stressed how well the Irving edition was doing, Cooper explained to his wife, “The sale of Irving’s books had altogether stopped, but several thousands will go off, and have indeed gone off, under this new plan.” Might the same happen in his own case? Most of Cooper’s novels had rarely been out of print, but they existed in the marketplace in an irregular, even embarrassing fashion. For The Spy, Cooper stressed to Susan, “there never has been a decent edition in the country” (LJ6:12). So Cooper agreed, and the Putnam project began. What Putnam produced, though, hardly amounted to a full edition of Cooper’s works, and it never equaled his “Irving” in scope or success.4 Not only did it peter out in 1851; it had been conceptually fuzzy from the outset. How

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improvised it was is indicated by the fact that Cooper’s best-known works, those five Bumppo stories, were not part of the initial negotiation, a point that is generally not recognized but that was of crucial importance for how the scheme unfolded—and unraveled. Putnam began the edition with The Spy, a point hinted at by Cooper’s mention of that book to Susan, but he did not intend to proceed from it through the rest of Cooper’s early titles. He actually wanted to focus first on Cooper’s sea tales as a group, starting indeed with those from his initial years (The Pilot, The Red Rover, and The Water-Witch) but skipping over the first three Leather-Stocking Tales in the process. Many details required Cooper’s attention at the outset. Putnam insisted that his books copy the one-volume, continuously paged format already used for Irving and employ the same typeface. This decision gave the novels the trim, modern look that would characterize much later American fiction but at the same time required that they be reset and have new plates cast for them. Since Cooper for his part insisted that he pay for typesetting and stereotyping (so he could reclaim the plates once Putnam’s limited-use contracts ended), the venture would cost Cooper both cash and time. He immediately contacted John Fagan with detailed questions about the possible edition, and on March 2 Fagan quickly sent his answers, prompting Cooper to write again the next day.5 A third letter from Cooper, on March 5, confirmed that the project would go forward and that Fagan indeed would be involved. He then asked Fagan to go from his foundry on St. James Street the short distance to Lea and Blanchard’s, at Chestnut and Fourth, on an errand: “Lea has some English copies of a corrected edition of my books. They stand on a shelf in his office. Ask him to give you, for me, Spy, Pilot, Red Rover, and Water Witch, make a package of them, and forward them to me by express, at this house”—he was at the Globe in New York—“as soon as you can. Tell Lea to make me a present of the books, in order to do the thing handsomely” (LJ 6:11). The specific reason for Cooper’s decision to use those once-revised English editions—that is, the Standard Novels versions from the earlier 1830s—was his wish to benefit from his earlier revisions of the books.6 Using these versions might also bolster his right to reissue through Putnam books that were owned at present by other American publishers (mostly Stringer and Townsend), as we shall see.7 Seeing that Putnam hoped to issue the first of the books very soon (“in April or May”), Cooper eagerly forged ahead. Stressing for Fagan on March 5 that the presswork had to equal “Putnam’s edition of Irving,” he promised to send copy for it quickly, after which, he continued, “you may go on as fast as you please” (LJ 6:11). Fagan replied with his customary crispness a day later that Lea had “cheerfully yielded” the English copies and that they had already been forwarded to New York. No doubt eager to demonstrate his willing cooperation,

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Fagan added that he had “ordered a new fount [sic] of Bourgeois type for doing the work.” He expected to receive it “in time to suit the New-York publisher” and hoped it would prove “handsome enough to match Irving in every respect.”8 Putnam met with Cooper again on March 8 and they signed a specific contract for The Spy, which Cooper had already named in his March 5 letter to Fagan both as one of the first group and as the book he expected to send to Fagan “as soon as it is ready” (LJ 6:11). This contract confirmed many details already understood—about the Irving edition as prototype, for instance. Cooper was to have no money up front, only per-copy payments from Putnam’s sales. He also retained the right to issue a cheap edition of the book on his own or through other outlets and would own the plates and recover complete control of them after two years. A further provision, which was vague but promising, allowed Putnam “the privilege of publishing on the same conditions . . . one, two, three or more of the works . . . known as the ‘Sea Tales,’ should he deem it expedient to do so” (hence my earlier point—and the rationale for Cooper’s list of the other books he wanted from Lea and Blanchard). While The Pilot and The Red Rover did indeed follow The Spy, the third sea tale Cooper had asked Fagan to secure for him, The Water-Witch, did not appear until after Putnam had published the five Leather-Stocking Tales and two other sea tales (The Wing-andWing and The Two Admirals)—none of which was mentioned in the March 8 contract. Things may have been quite open-ended. Just two days before signing with Putnam, Cooper had told his wife: “We shall commence with the Spy, and have it out in April. We shall then see how we stand. I make no further contract, and I write a new preface” (LJ 6:14).9 The books Fagan had asked for at Lea and Blanchard’s arrived in New York on the evening of Tuesday, March 6, while Cooper was in the midst of writing that very letter to Susan, and the next day he worked through The Spy and returned it to Fagan with a series of cautions: “The English edition from which you will print has many mistakes I find; principally from not reading my writing well. They often mistake an ‘on’ for ‘in,’ my o resembling an i. I find other mistakes. You will have to read the proofs carefully, and let nothing unintelligible pass. In very difficult cases, the proof might be sent to me.” Cooper did not say he had corrected any of the mistakes he found in the text proper (or otherwise revised it), but he had altered the preface “a little, to adapt it to these later times.” And he insisted that he see proofs of the preface (actually called “Introduction” in the book) once they were run off (LJ 6:15). Cooper had revised the book three times before—not only for Bentley in 1831 but twice in the 1820s as well (see JFC:EY 352)—so the brief time he worked on it in 1849 is not surprising. His touch was light. Aside from a sprinkling of corrections in the body of the novel, most of which appear authorial,

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the 1831 introduction was somewhat more heavily altered (see Spy CE 448–50).10 The most interesting addition contained the first public version of an anecdote (shared privately with Rufus W. Griswold in 1843) about Charles Wiley’s insistence in 1821 that Cooper write the novel’s last chapter ahead of time lest the story run away with him (see JFC:EY 272–74). Cooper also added the reference to the Mexican American War noted earlier (chapter 13, note 39), including the line about how the U.S. was now “passing from the gristle into the bone,” and the caution that there was “now no enemy to fear, but the one that resides within” (Spy CE 21). By implication, the Revolution as Cooper had portrayed it in his second book was a fading reference point for the country in 1849. Fagan received the marked-up book and the “Introduction” on the afternoon of March 9 and the next day wrote Cooper: “I have already put 5 or 6 compositors on the work, having my new type all in case; and Mr. Putnam may depend on having the plates in 30 days.” Enclosing in this letter “a specimen of the type” he was using, Fagan added that he would “read the work with care” (as he always did, be the author Cooper or Charles Wilkes) and that he hoped to send the “proof-sheet of the Preface” in a few days.11 Fagan must have shipped the plates to Putnam by the very end of March or the beginning of April in order for Putnam to bring the book out when he did. At the end of April, when back in New York City, Cooper wrote his wife, “Putnam will publish The Spy next Wednesday”—that is, May 2 (LJ 6:25). Generally positive response to its appearance led Putnam to proceed, albeit slowly, with The Pilot. Fagan began working on it for Cooper in early July and had the plates ready a month later, but some unexplained delay on Putnam’s part put off its appearance until October, to the puzzlement of Fagan and Cooper alike.12 With the third book, The Red Rover, they nonetheless proceeded immediately. The novelist was in New York City at the time The Pilot appeared, assisting his nephew Richard with the suit against Michigan endorser James S. Sandford and tending to the needs of Ned Myers, then on his deathbed. He promised Fagan on October 19 that he would forward the hand-revised Standard Novels copy from Cooperstown shortly after returning there—along with more copy for his next new book, The Ways of the Hour, which had been occupying what free time he had for much of the recent past: “Manuscript and book as soon as I get home, or last of next week” (LJ 6:75). He evidently shipped both parcels on or about October 26. That meant Fagan could start on The Red Rover before November 1. Putnam apparently being in no rush, however, the stereotyper was only half done with it by November 26, when he answered Cooper’s inquiry (“When shall you want Preface to Red Rover?”—LJ 6:81) with an easy “in 2 or 3 weeks.” Although Cooper hit that target, sending the two-and-a-half-page preface in an unlocated

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letter of December 12, Fagan was still not finished: not until a month later would he bill Cooper for the job. By then, he had finally sent the plates to Putnam. The Literary World noted the novel as “now ready” on February 23, 1850 (BAL 2:303).13

“They Do Not Belong to Me” Cooper’s musings on the Leather-Stocking Tales, which in fact were to succeed The Red Rover in the Putnam edition, may suggest that they had been at the heart of that venture from the outset. But, as indicated earlier, they had not been. Those books were unmentioned in the first Putnam contract (for The Spy plus three other books), and none of them was among the volumes Cooper wanted Isaac Lea to forward from Philadelphia in March 1849, very early in the Putnam discussions. Not until writing Fagan late that November did Cooper, soon to relocate for an extended period to Manhattan, make a similar request involving the first books from the series: “By the way ask Lea to give me Pioneers, Mohicans and Prairie, and send them to me also, if you please, at Globe” (LJ 6:81). This request followed and no doubt stemmed from news Cooper had sent his wife a month earlier, during his previous trip out of Otsego—namely, that he had received “a very acceptable sum for correcting Leather Stocking Tales, for a handsome edition” (LJ 6:75). Although this “handsome edition” has been associated with Putnam’s, such was emphatically not the case.14 The payment had come instead from Stringer and Townsend, with whom Cooper signed a contract on October 15 (four days before writing his wife and five weeks before asking Fagan to again intervene with Lea and Blanchard) obligating him to “read, correct, and otherwise prepare” the Leather-Stocking Tales “for a new edition” and “to write for them new prefaces, together with a general preface for the whole series, all of which is to be placed in the hands of said Stringer and Townsend within three months from date.”15 At this moment, as Cooper well knew, he did not own the rights to those books: “They do not belong to me,” he matter-of-factly added for Susan (LJ 6:75). What he probably did not know before speaking with the New Yorkers, however, was that they themselves had just acquired the series from its previous owners, Lea and Blanchard. This transfer exemplified larger shifts occurring at this time, some of which Cooper participated in and which in almost all cases affected how (and when) he and Putnam eventually embarked on their own Leather-Stocking edition. As much of my previous discussion has shown, Cooper shrewdly managed his books in various contexts at home and abroad. But the history of how he did so is complex, especially during his final decade. Although Cooper had turned to Burgess and Stringer as his official publisher for the Littlepage novels in 1845–1846, his insistence on giving that firm only limited

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term contracts (and retaining possession of his plates and his larger rights) suggests that he envisioned some further commercial possibilities for the books. In reality, however, Cooper was so cash-poor by the later 1840s that he extended the lease on the Littlepage novels, along with his later books, as part of omnibus bargains with the New Yorkers that gave him very modest cash returns. As early as March 5, 1845, a day after he executed the initial Satanstoe contract, he signed a rather hastily crafted agreement, to be modified twelve days later, by which he sold Stringer and Townsend a five-year right to publish all the novels, plus Ned Myers, of which he then possessed the copyright.16 The Leather-Stocking Tales were not among the books covered then because Cooper also had not owned them in 1845. The details here illustrate the complex lines by which his literary property descended. When, six months before Cooper was to leave for Europe in 1826, Carey and Lea purchased the edition of The Last of the Mohicans that the late Charles Wiley had been managing for him, they simply bought the exclusive right to publish it for four years. The agreement was, in other words, a term contract much like that by which Cooper was to sell limited rights to Burgess and Stringer for Satanstoe two decades later. The 1826 agreement did not transfer Cooper’s ownership of the book under U.S. copyright law, even though in fact Carey and Lea deposited the book as its proprietors. As Cooper’s departure neared, however, he wished to increase his available funds and simultaneously reduce the need to manage his backlist from abroad. He therefore sold Carey and Lea exclusive rights to print and publish his next book, The Prairie, for the full term of its copyright (fourteen years), a point both parties understood as transferring the author’s copyright to the publisher. Also via this contract, Cooper sold Carey and Lea “the Copy Rights of Spy, Pioneers, Pilot, Lionel Lincoln, and Mohicans” to the ends of their own various fourteen-year terms (see LJ 1:133; JFC:EY 515).17 During Cooper’s absence, the firm filed for the copyright of all his new books in its own name. After his return, it claimed further works (including The Monikins and Gleanings) as its own property. Even in the case of Italy, for which Cooper agreed to split the profits with the publishers, Carey, Lea and Blanchard filed for the copyright. Cooper therefore had to recover his authorial rights to all the travels at a later time.18 After Italy, the pattern in place since the mid-1820s was altered. When the two parties signed a contract for Homeward Bound, Cooper required the book to be copyrighted in his own name. So habituated were the publishers to the old practice, however, that they mistakenly filed for copyright themselves and soon had to assign it to Cooper. Henceforth, the firm’s rights were severely limited. It had the “privilege” to sell 3,250 copies of Homeward Bound and an understanding that it would have to pay the same amount to enjoy the same limited privilege to a second edition.19 From then on, even once Cooper shifted to Burgess

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and Stringer in the mid-1840s, he consistently submitted titles and books for copyright deposit in his own name, from A History of the Navy to The Ways of the Hour. During these years, by specifying either the number of copies his publishers could make and sell or the period of time during which they could sell the book, or both, he also strictly controlled production and marketing. He assertively guarded his inventory.20 We should not view the change with regard to Homeward Bound as presaging the final break in Cooper’s dealings with the Careys, which was still several years in the future. Indeed, in some ways he was positively generous with them after his homecoming. In July 1836, before the change marked by Homeward Bound, Cooper thus authorized them “to re-print and publish” Precaution, The Spy, The Pioneers, The Pilot, and Lionel Lincoln—for free—until they received “written notice . . . to the contrary” (LJ 3:229). Even five years later, in executing the contract for what became The Deerslayer, Cooper expanded on this gift, and for no additional charge above the money Lea and Blanchard paid him for that novel. They were therefore to enjoy an exclusive right, to expire three years from the new book’s publication date (August 27, 1841), allowing them to publish not only the five books named in 1836 but five new ones as well: The Last of the Mohicans, Homeward Bound, Home as Found, The Pathfinder, and Mercedes of Castile. Until the end of August 1844, the firm thus could reprint and sell as many copies as it wished of a total of ten novels without paying Cooper a cent.21 This easygoing relationship would not last. When Cooper became convinced early in 1844, as I noted in chapter twelve, that permitting the arrangement cost him “from $1500 to $2000 a year” (LJ 4:443), he immediately reminded Lea and Blanchard that all the “free” books would indeed be withdrawn from their hands on August 27, 1844 (see LJ 3:229–30). This decision marked a new phase in his management of his affairs. Now in the midst of the heavily nautical phase noted earlier (and at this very moment self-publishing Afloat and Ashore), he showed particular interest in all his sea tales. Three of them (The Pilot, Homeward Bound, and Mercedes of Castile) he would reclaim at the August deadline. By an exchange with Lea and Blanchard three months after that date, he sought to consolidate his control over the rest. He thereby regained the plates for The Pilot (along with the plates and rights for The Red Rover and The WaterWitch), as well as the plates for Mercedes of Castile and The Two Admirals, books he owned outright because he had originally copyrighted them in his own name and the Philadelphians’ privileges on them had expired. The firm renounced any residual claims it might have to all those books, as well as to The Spy, the plates for which it now also relinquished. These dealings will suggest why Cooper and Putnam focused on this group of titles in their initial negotiations in 1849: they were still his core holdings.22

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In order to regain the sea tales and the other titles, Cooper gave up seven other books. His choices reveal how he viewed his career from the perspective of the mid-1840s. He could do without the newly revised Precaution and the Gothic Revolutionary War romance, Lionel Lincoln, as well as the copyrights and the stereotype plates for Home as Found and Wyandotté, all now turned over to Lea and Blanchard. But the other three books Cooper relinquished are striking from our present perspective: The Pioneers, The Deerslayer, and The Pathfinder. The first of these had been among the 1836 “free” books and hence had just recently come back into his hands. The other two, by contrast, were very recent publications but, now that the firm’s original terms for each had expired, were in Cooper’s hands. Yet he gave up those books and their plates completely. Because the firm already held the copyright for the second and third Leather-Stocking Tales, which it had claimed from publication and presumably had renewed in 1840 and 1841, respectively, the November deal gave it full ownership of the whole series. Three years after publishing The Deerslayer and five years before the idea arose of giving those five novels a “handsome” new treatment, Cooper seemingly cared so little for the individual books or the group that he turned his back on them, at least as articles of trade.23 The November 1844 agreement was the last significant business between Cooper and the Philadelphians, but it did not end the latter’s involvement in his literary property. Although they seem not to have advertised their remaining Cooper titles much, if at all, in the later 1840s, Lea and Blanchard indeed did sell them and reprint or at least update the dates on their title pages even after Cooper’s March 1845 bargain with Burgess and Stringer.24 As the New Yorkers acquired more titles either by further deals with Cooper or through their publication of his new books, Lea and Blanchard’s share of the overall sales no doubt dropped. The New Yorkers were furthermore quite aggressive in their marketing strategies. Proudly touting the fact that they had purchased Cooper’s stereotype plates for the nine books covered by the 1845 agreement, by 1848 they were combining those titles with five other recently written and published works in what they called “A New and Uniform Edition” of his “Standard Novels.” That this supposed edition contained only fourteen books, and except for the Littlepage series no forest tales, will suggest that their advertising terms were hardly accurate: the edition was neither new nor uniform, and the works included were hardly “standard,” either. Nor was the set of books complete by any stretch of the imagination. Recognizing all of these drawbacks, the firm noted in further advertising for this venture that “B. S. & Co. have also made such arrangements with the publishers of the other works of Mr. J. Fenimore Cooper”—Lea and Blanchard, that is—“as to enable them to supply all his Novels and Tales at the reduced price of 25 cents per volume,” half what it charged for the volumes it owned.25

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Time was on the side of Burgess and Stringer, and Cooper at first helped that trend. At the very moment his negotiations with Putnam began, he inscribed an astute new contract with the other New Yorkers, a contract predicated on what he imagined would come of the Putnam arrangement. This agreement allowed Stringer and Townsend (the firm’s new name) to market fifty-cent “cheap editions” of the books it had been publishing since 1845, including all the new books Cooper had written since then, beyond the various expiration dates of the original contracts for those new books or the March 1845 omnibus agreement.26 Otherwise, and herein lay his astuteness, Cooper was free to use his plates and print and publish these books as he saw fit, a reservation that allowed for the emerging Putnam arrangement. Although he was not allowed to use the most recent book, The Sea Lions (soon to be published by Stringer and Townsend), until April 1, 1851, after that time Stringer and Townsend (unless some new agreement intervened, as indeed happened) would have to cease issuing even the fiftycent copies of items Cooper still owned, including that last of his sea novels.27 In 1849, things kept going Stringer and Townsend’s way. While in New York at the time he made his new arrangements with both Putnam and Stringer and Townsend, Cooper learned that Isaac Lea was asking the latter firm to give him “$3000 for his copy rights and plates” of Cooper titles, and the New Yorkers were “half disposed to purchase” (LJ 6:12). After they declined the offer, Lea’s firm later put the same property up for auction, though unsuccessfully, as Cooper learned in August through John Fagan.28 Thereafter, the earlier discussion with the New Yorkers must have been renewed, as the two parties signed a contract on September 21 conveying the former’s holdings for only $2,100, a considerable saving for Stringer and Townsend.29 This sale prepared the way for Cooper’s own disposal of all his remaining rights to Stringer and Townsend on June 6, 1850, for a total of $3,500 (to be paid in a series of eight notes redeemable at three-month intervals between September 1850 and June 1852). The only exception to the sale, to which we will return, involved Cooper’s right to proceed with his agreement with Putnam for six books (corrected to seven in a June 8 addendum) in the latter’s “edition.”30 After these acquisitions from Lea and Blanchard and Cooper himself, Stringer and Townsend began issuing its cheap sets of all of Cooper’s “works,” including even Ned Myers and Notions of the Americans, but not the travel books or the historical or occasional texts (such as The American Democrat or A Letter to His Countrymen) or his final novel, The Ways of the Hour, owing to Putnam’s exclusive contract for the latter.31 Cooper made no additional income from these sets, and his family evidently was owed nothing from them after his death. By the start of the 1850s, the novelist’s financial arrangements with Stringer and Townsend, never richly rewarding, had become decidedly unproductive.

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Natty Bumppo Revised Cooper nonetheless sought other ways of putting his works to profitable use. His rights under his March 1849 omnibus contract with Stringer and Townsend allowed him to do as he wished with The Spy and The Pilot, the first two books included in Putnam’s edition, even as the former firm kept issuing its cheap versions. Many books, however, remained out of his reach—most particularly those Stringer and Townsend had just purchased from Lea and Blanchard, including the Leather-Stocking Tales. Once Cooper decided to let Putnam reprint the latter works, he therefore had to come up with a way to reclaim them. To appreciate his initiative in this regard, it is necessary to recall that the “handsome edition” of those books Cooper mentioned to his wife that fall had nothing to do with Putnam. In fact it was Stringer and Townsend, again, who had bought those books just twenty-four days earlier in the Lea and Blanchard deal, that got Cooper thinking about the value—commercial but eventually literary—that the series held. Trying to earn whatever he might from books otherwise out of his control, Cooper agreed to revise the five novels for Stringer and Townsend in the fall of 1849 and write the new front matter their bargain called for.32 Because their agreement required him to do all this within three months, he probably began drafting his promised “general preface” when he returned from Manhattan to Otsego at the end of October. Finding the loose-jointed venture full of awkward discontinuities as he looked back over the five novels, he must have felt that mere revisions might not suffice—for he now revived the old idea of producing a sixth Leather-Stocking Tale. Placing Natty Bumppo in the midst of the American Revolution, as I suggested in chapter 14, the new book would fill the major hole in the chronology of the series and at the same time resolve its key thematic uncertainty (i.e., on which side would Natty fight?). The idea, laid aside for years, had recently returned to his thoughts. Back in April or May, it had been the subject of the lively conversation, previously mentioned, with fellow Putnam author George Washington Greene. When Greene warmly encouraged Cooper to write the book, the novelist responded, “perhaps I may do it yet.”33 In the fall, having done his preliminary work toward the new edition while at home, Cooper planned his next steps. On Wednesday, November 21, he informed Fagan (then at work on The Ways of the Hour) that he would leave Otsego for New York the following Monday. Now it was that he asked Fagan to retrieve for him Lea and Blanchard’s copies of the Standard Novels versions of the first three Leather-Stocking Tales and forward them to his Manhattan hotel (see LJ 6:80–81). Fagan replied on November 26: “Those three books are in a 4th-story, whence I hope to have them exhumed to-morrow, and send them to

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you.”34 Cooper’s request was meant to facilitate his revision of the novels for Stringer and Townsend once he came to town. Almost on arriving, however, he in fact gave up on that effort—and the edition—after William A. Townsend, to whom he shared his new enthusiasm for the sixth tale, flatly rejected that idea. Townsend explained his reasoning: if the new book were unsuccessful, it “would prove an injury to a series that stood as it was at a high pecuniary value.” It all came down to money, a rich irony given Natty Bumppo’s ethical values. In three variants of the story, Townsend described Cooper’s reaction to this turn of events: “He appeared much surprised and disappointed, and at once abandoned the project”—“I never saw an expression of such blank disappointment as that which crossed Mr. Cooper’s face when we objected to his proposal”—“I shall never forget . . . the shadow that came over Mr. Cooper’s face on finding his plan was not approved.”35 With that turn of feeling, the sixth tale vanished—and, in vanishing, took the proposed Stringer and Townsend edition with it. Cooper seems to have felt that, if Stringer and Townsend would not accept the new book, he would not give them the benefit of his updates on the old ones. He did not immediately make a deal with Putnam for the series, but may well have talked with him about the question and even made preliminary arrangements for it soon after. In several letters to his wife from New York, he hinted at some quite recent impasse. On Thanksgiving, as if updating her on some slightly earlier but now lost letter, he thus wrote, “There is nothing new to say.” Then again, on December 4, he wrote: “I have nothing new to say. I am looking about me, but have done nothing, as yet” (LJ 6:89). On Thursday the sixth, he was a bit more hopeful: “I begin to grope my way through present difficulties, and this by disposing of literary property. As yet nothing else has offered. I hope to get through next week” (LJ 6:91).36 His optimism would be partly borne out by a set of four contracts executed with Putnam early that next week, which together tidied up their dealings over the past year and mapped out further steps. Cooper made the first move. On Saturday, December 8, he drew up a preliminary proposal by which he would recoup his outlays for the plates Fagan already had produced for The Spy and The Pilot and those even now being made for The Red Rover. It would also alter the terms under which Putnam was to proceed on any further books. Once the two met the following Tuesday to discuss the proposal, Cooper happily reported to Susan that things promised to end “very favourably” for him, without, as he added, “the sacrifice I apprehended” (LJ 6:94).37 The four contracts survive in a handwriting other than Cooper’s or Putnam’s but were evidently drawn up on the latter’s instructions as a joint response to Cooper’s December 8 proposal. The first two cover The Spy and The Pilot, both already issued by Putnam. In the original contract for these, Cooper’s income

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was to be determined solely by Putnam’s sales of each book over a two-year period. In the new contract, Cooper swapped this uncertain but theoretically more lucrative arrangement for cash payments for each book, in return for which Putnam acquired the right to issue a set number of copies with no time limit on the sales. The third contract covered the not-yet-issued Red Rover in similar terms.38 The fourth contract differed from the others in scope as well as terms. For the sum of one dollar paid by Putnam to Cooper (as “the author and copyright owner of certain works of fiction”), Putnam would be allowed to “stereotype, publish and sell at his said Putnam’s cost, and for his sole benefit, three thousand copies each of any three of the said works of fiction that he may select.” As with the other three contracts, this one reserved Cooper’s right to sell cheap editions of the works in question “as is now practiced with said books by Stringer & Townsend and according to the terms of an agreement [concluded] previously to the present between said Cooper and said Putnam.”39 Stringer and Townsend accordingly continued to use Cooper’s plates and sell his books under the terms of their March 1849 contract, and then under the expanded contract that was to be completed in June 1850.40 Where, in all this activity by both publishers, did the question of the Leather-Stocking series stand? Nothing would be said in the June 1850 agreement, significantly, about the now clearly abandoned Stringer and Townsend edition. The firm’s silence on the subject is matched by the silence of both Cooper and Putnam on their similar venture, for which no overt agreement appears to survive. If Cooper resolved the impasse with Stringer and Townsend (for instance, by refunding the cash they paid to him for the uncompleted revisions), he presumably did so prior to September 1850, when Putnam issued the first volume in his edition, The Deerslayer, which contained Cooper’s new preface to it and the general preface to the series. The Last of the Mohicans would follow a month later, and The Pioneers and The Pathfinder in mid-November and early to mid-December, respectively. The final book, The Prairie, came out in late January or early February 1851.41 Since Cooper still did not own the five novels, his right to use any of them remained questionable. It seems likely that he justified Putnam’s edition (to himself, anyway) on the premise that the new versions he had created by various means gave him fresh title to those versions. The new front matter would help, as would the claim that (as Putnam’s title pages stated) all the books were “Revised and Corrected.” As to the latter point, however, the claim generously overstated the truth. The Putnam versions do contain variants, but they are of very minor importance and uncertain origin. The Cooper Edition sees uneven evidence of Cooper’s hand in them and accepts only a portion (see, for instance,

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PIO CE 479–80, LOM CE 378–79, and PR CE 407–8). When first asking Fagan to secure the Standard Novels copies for him, Cooper may have planned to treat them much as he had the Carey texts when revising them for Bentley in the early 1830s—that is, he would have them cut open and interleaved with blank sheets so he could note his revisions with some care. By the time he had dropped Stringer and Townsend and not yet made new terms with Putnam, however, he may well have lost interest in such a thorough approach, even as he had lost interest in the sixth Leather-Stocking tale.42 It is also possible that, once Putnam had come on board in 1850, his rush in bringing out the five books within five months may have left Cooper scant time to carry through, whatever his wishes. Probably the biggest protection Cooper thought he could offer Putnam, in any case, was his choice of copy text. For the three 1820s novels, he used (as he had for Putnam’s sea tales) the Bentley Standard Novels texts, which had never been reprinted in the United States. Since, even without further revisions, they were substantively different from the Stringer and Townsend texts (which derived from the largely unrevised Carey and Lea versions), he may have believed that, especially in conjunction with the new front matter and whatever other revisions he introduced now, the Putnam volumes were separately copyrightable.43 Materially, Putnam’s Leather-Stocking Tales certainly looked like fresh versions. Under his management, they were printed on wider pages, with better spacing, and from more elegant type than had ever been accorded them in the United States. The contrast was given added value because Stringer and Townsend were still printing The Last of the Mohicans, for instance, from the stereotype plates created for Carey and Lea for the book’s second edition in 1826, and they printed the other books from similarly old plates. Periodic repairs to those plates, which were damaged or simply worn down from repeated use, could not prevent the volumes in the Stringer and Townsend 1852 edition of Cooper’s Novels from looking as cheap as they were. Putnam’s Leather-Stocking Tales, even though they differed textually and materially from the cheap versions, nonetheless sparked conflict between him and Cooper’s other American publishers. Under the June 1850 contract with Cooper, Stringer and Townsend no doubt assumed that their rights to reprint his books were expanded, not reduced. Under that contract, they thus would own all of his novels except The Ways of the Hour, which would also become theirs once Putnam’s limited rights expired. Moreover, the June 1850 contract did not restrict Stringer and Townsend to issuing only cheap editions of those books; nor did it explicitly reserve to Cooper, as had the March 1849 one, the right to simultaneously publish through other houses, or on his own, more expensive editions of any of them. All it did was to assert that the new agreement was

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“subject to the existing bargains with Geo. P. Putnam for the publication of seven of said books,” meaning (one would assume) seven of the ones for which Cooper still owned the copyrights when he made the 1850 arrangement, although the surviving documentation between Cooper and Putnam does not indicate what the seventh of those books, added by an amendment to the 1850 contract just quoted, was to be. It is worth noting, however, that until Stringer and Townsend had paid Cooper in full what they owed under that contract (that is, until June 1852), he retained, as security for their payments, his ownership of the copyrights and plates that contract nominally surrendered. And yet, among the unnamed seven books in the 1850 contract clearly could not be any of the Leather-Stocking Tales in the form Stringer and Townsend already owned in their own right.44 The conflict between the two firms came to a head across the middle of 1850. Some weeks before Cooper executed the June contract with Putnam’s rivals, Putnam bristled at the sight of a Stringer and Townsend advertisement for new issues of Cooper novels that did not strike him as being in the cheap format. These he took to be “decidedly injurious to the interests of the revised ed[itio]ns of ‘Pilot,’ ‘Spy,’ ‘Red Rover’ &c.” The terms of Cooper’s 1849 contract with Stringer and Townsend had been consistent, Putnam pointed out to Cooper, with the understanding (indeed, with “the words of the agreement”) between Cooper and himself. He and Cooper had assented, that is, to the other firm’s continued sale of Cooper’s novels, but only “in paper at 50 cts.” Now, as an alarmed, emphatic Putnam specified, Stringer and Townsend were advertising “New editions on Superior paper”—and “2 vols in one at 75 cts,” leading the public to perceive “a direct rivalry . . . between the two ed[itio]ns.” Putnam had spoken with William A. Townsend on the subject, and Townsend had at first agreed to alter the advertisements, but then had changed his mind.45 In his unpublished April 20, 1850, reply to Putnam, Cooper confirmed the latter’s understanding. Stringer and Townsend’s rights (prior to the soon-to-be concluded June 1850 contract just discussed) were indeed narrowly circumscribed as to duration and allowable retail pricing. The details were important to note. Under the terms of the five-year contract he had drawn up with that firm in March 1845, and the addendum a few days later, the firm’s “control . . . over my copy rights, plates etc.,” would have “terminated . . . last month.” He added, however, that (through a March 6, 1849, agreement negotiated with Stringer and Townsend just two days before the original contract for Putnam’s “edition”) he had extended that deadline “for one year.” And he stressed that, in guaranteeing Stringer and Townsend’s extended rights to issue cheap versions of his works, he had made provision for the contractual rights soon given to Putnam for his finer editions. As we have seen, the March 1849 extension with Stringer and

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Townsend, unlike the original March 1845 contract, did allow Cooper to publish through some other outlet any of the titles he there licensed to Stringer and Townsend.46 So far so good, at least on paper. Six or seven weeks after replying to Putnam, however, Cooper by that June 1850 contract made the outright sale to Stringer and Townsend of the plates and rights for all those books, with the stipulation that he might continue to make separate use of seven of the titles— specifically through Putnam, as already indicated. Although this final contract promised Cooper much cash at a time when he still sorely needed it, and also seemed to resolve the conflict between his two publishers, his shift of the suspended Leather-Stocking project to Putman after the disagreement with Townsend soon threatened to renew that conflict. Word of the shift probably took Cooper’s old firm aback, causing a new crisis. This one did not involve Putnam directly. Instead, what happened was that Stringer and Townsend did not make their first payment on the June 1850 contract, which was due on September 6, 1850, just at the moment when Putnam was about to issue his Deerslayer. Cooper forthwith rushed to New York City specifically to deal with the calamity, which he surely knew was not the result of mere financial exigency. In what was probably a rehearsed response, Townsend was in favor of making good on the unpaid note, while his partner at first held out. Not until the end of the month could a relieved Cooper write home that “a load of evil” had been “removed” by the firm’s actual payment. As nothing had been paid before then on the June contract, not even earnest money, Cooper rightly regarded the remaining payments as secured by the receipt of this very first cash-in-hand. The firm, having made its initial payment, hardly would default on future ones, since it would lose funds already paid and Cooper would withhold the plates and copyrights (LJ 6:225). Reading between the lines, one may assume that the firm, bothered by the shift of the Leather-Stocking project to Putnam, sought to make trouble for Cooper by threatening nonpayment. The June contract said nothing, and in fact could say nothing, about the Leather-Stocking Tales. Cooper was probably skating on thin ice in selling the books in a new form to Putnam when Stringer and Townsend already legally owned the existing copyrights. Causing an alarm over the September 6 payment was the one means short of legal action by which Stringer and Townsend could forcefully state their objection. But Putnam, undeterred (and probably given some go-ahead by Cooper), went forward with his edition of the tales, the first volume of which appeared almost exactly when (that is, once) Stringer and Townsend made that first payment. The clearest indication in the Leather-Stocking edition that some resolution had been formally arranged is the simple notice on the backs of Putnam’s title pages:

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“Entered, According to Act of Congress, in the year 1850, by Stringer & Townsend” (DS 1850 [iv]). The latter firm had secured its ownership by seeing to it that Putnam conceded the fact in this way. Perhaps his payment to them for the privilege entailed his future transfer to them of the plates, for which Putnam had paid. In 1854, having by then acquired those plates, Stringer and Townsend was to use them in bringing out a “cheap” set of the revised Leather-Stocking Tales. By then, too, they also had acquired the other seven volumes Putnam had included in his incomplete set. When they brought out a new edition of all Cooper’s fiction starting in 1859–1860, it was in the same format as Putnam’s edition—indeed, it used the same plates for the twelve books Putnam had published, though it gave all the books slightly more ample margins, added F. O. C. Darley’s splendid plates and vignettes, and bound the books in a very appealing fashion. Putnam’s failed edition thereby became the basis for Cooper’s substantially fresh appearance before the public in the “Darley edition.” Cooper’s reputation was at last solidified and indeed extended.47

Cooper’s “New York Book” Even as Cooper spent much time during his last two years managing his older “works,” he proved himself capable of fresh, even surprising departures—as his last two books demonstrate. They were connected in setting and subject and indeed may have emerged from a vaguer common impulse. One was a suburban New York murder mystery first called “The Tombs of Manhattan” (LJ 6:20)— after the prison where Melville would soon set the denouement of “Bartleby, the Scrivener”—but eventually published as The Ways of the Hour. The other was a history of greater New York that Cooper, in his very last mention of it, called “the Towns of Manhattan” (LJ 6:279), but that up to that point had been referred to as “The Men of Manhattan” (it had, in fact, undergone a number of important though hard-to-trace transformations that the change in title marked).48 The overlap between the books, suggested by the similarity in their various working titles, has led to some confusion in the records regarding them, a confusion increased by the fact that much of what Cooper managed to finish of the history prior to his death was lost in a January 1852 fire at the shop of the book’s Manhattan printer, Robert Craighead. Because the two works may have stemmed from a common intellectual origin, it is worth taking the time to sort them out.49 When Cooper was about to leave home for his very consequential visit to Manhattan in late February and early March 1849 (when he first worked out his agreement for Putnam’s edition of his novels), he wrote John Fagan that he might try to sell “a new work of considerable size” (“Two Vols. Octavo, I think”) on which he was then laboring (LJ 5:402). His emphasis on the work’s

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size and probable format (he never used octavos for any of his fiction) make it very likely that he was speaking of the history, not the novel. A notice soon appearing in Horace Greeley’s paper—“Cooper has a work in press, to be published in a few weeks, New York, Past, Present and Future, in two volumes, octavo”—makes that identification all but certain. Greeley may have overshot the mark when he described the book as “a general and elaborate review of the social and political history of the State”—not just the city—of New York; and it seems unlikely that Cooper was far enough along with the project that it could appear soon, as Greeley also indicated. But the fact that word of the project and its general purposes began circulating during Cooper’s late winter visit to Manhattan suggests he was actively working on and might soon finish it. It also seems likely that he mentioned the project publicly then.50 Also in March 1849, Cooper probably discussed the history with Putnam, who seems to have been willing to take it on. The major upshot of their discussion, the proposed “handsome edition” of Cooper’s works, in fact was also described rather spaciously by Greeley in his report on the New York project. By the same token, Greeley’s emphasis on the edition’s inclusiveness (it would be “a complete edition of his Novels, Tales, Histories, and Miscellaneous Writings”) suggests that a New York history would fit well into it. Yet here again there is enough slippage to inspire caution. Although the novelist’s February 27 report to his wife (Putnam “also wishes to publish my New York book”—LJ 6:9) could easily be read as referring to the historical project, we know that the two discussed Cooper’s murder mystery at this very time and that, as early as March 3, Putnam conveyed to Cooper a draft agreement for an unnamed work of fiction that can only have been what eventually became The Ways of the Hour.51 Writing Fagan on March 4 to confirm that Putnam indeed would issue the new edition of his works, Cooper added that Putnam was also going to “publish a new book for me, in the handsome form, in August” (LJ 6:10). Cooper was wrong on the publication date (as we shall see, the novel would not appear until April 1850), but there would seem little doubt that here, too, the reference was to what became The Ways of the Hour.52 These confusions reflect, as I have already suggested, the divergence of the two books from a common origin. New York, city and state, clearly had been very much on Cooper’s mind in recent years. In the Littlepage series of 1845–1846, he had reacted to the immediate challenge of the Anti-Rent War by extensively treating the state’s history and its distinctive institutions. In doing so, as we saw in chapter 12, he had placed the conflict within a wide regional context, representing it as the final fruit of a long battle between Yorker and Yankee values and practices. While The Redskins had brought Cooper’s story of this conflict down to the present, and thus in one sense closed it, Cooper hardly abandoned the larger line

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of inquiry. The earliest press report mentioning Cooper’s new historical project, in November 1848, suggested he was thinking on a grand scale that was consistent with the broad social vision of the Littlepage books: “Cooper is busy completing his ‘Historical and Philosophical Account of Society in the Middle States,’ to appear in a brace of octavos, which will show that there are two sides to the position that all the liberties and intelligence of the country comes [sic] from New England.” Six months later, the same journal modified slightly its description of the project, calling it “Mr. Cooper’s . . . ‘New-York, Past and Present’ . . . in two octavos.”53 Perhaps Cooper realized how ambitious his tentative “Middle States” project would prove and trimmed it back twice—first to the state, then to the city. Perhaps, too, part of his intended focus when he first envisioned the project was the legal culture of those “Middle States.” If so, what became The Ways of the Hour could well have been pared away from the history and recast, as the historical argument in the Littlepage series had been, in fictional form. One wonders whether Putnam counseled some such division of Cooper’s efforts into the two related but distinct channels. By the end of March 1849, then back in Cooperstown, Cooper was clearly focused on the fictional narrative as such. He shared with Fagan something of its innovative subject matter: “The new book is on a novel plan for me, and will make a highly interesting work I think. I shall call it ‘The Tombs of Manhattan,’ by ‘Tombs’ meaning the gaol. Time now. Incidents daily” (LJ 6:20). When he addressed Putnam regarding it on the last day of that month, he used that title again: “The ‘Tombs of Manhattan’ gets on well, and to my own satisfaction. I am already in medias res, and shall try to fight my way through” (LJ 6:22). Then he shifted for a time to calling it “The Ways of Manhattan” (LJ 6:22, 33, 44) before, writing Bentley in July, he used the title that from then on was set (LJ 6:52).54 Delaying until the next chapter further attention to Cooper’s historical project, we may first consider how the novel evolved as a story and how it was produced as an article of literary trade. Cooper cannot have written his way far into the book before he decided to replace its planned Manhattan setting (and hence outmode all those early titles) with one in “Duke ’s County,” a thinly veiled suburban substitute for Westchester. He opened the story in Manhattan and established one of his two main characters, the bachelor lawyer Thomas Dunscomb, in the city, with an old-fashioned painted brick house off Broadway below Canal Street and a Nassau Street office that we later glimpse (see Ways 10–11, 129). Thereafter, however, Cooper vacated the city proper, shifting to Dunscomb’s country house in the northern part of Manhattan, or to a series of rural venues in and about Biberry, in fictional Duke ’s County.55 To be sure, the action features various runs back to the city, both narrative and figurative, but the Tombs prison, mentioned only twice (see Ways 129, 145), is never described,

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and the book’s other leading character, suspected murderer and arsonist “Mary Monson,” is confined not there, but rather in the rural Duke ’s jail. Cooper nicely realized his rural alternative to the city. There is some genre painting of contemporary rural life that is reminiscent of The Redskins—for instance, in his description of “An American tavern-dinner, during the sitting of the circuit [court]” (Ways 356–57), or his later handling of the competition between the rural population’s noisy drink-fest at the same hostelry and the genteel characters’ game of whist in an adjoining parlor (see Ways 381–84). Best of all, though, is Cooper’s extended portrait of how a court in such a setting functioned at the time, drawn from his memories of the libel suits carried on in Cooperstown and especially in Fonda some years earlier. That personal link was substantively pertinent insofar as one of Cooper’s satiric targets here was the press. The newspapers in the novel indulge in rumor and innuendo, much as those that fought Cooper worked on public opinion during his trials, even to the point of seeking to propagandize—indeed, tamper with—jury pools. Stephen Hoof, the coachman for Dunscomb’s good friend, Dr. Edward McBrain, displays an unthinking attitude toward newspapers, which he naively trusts (see Ways 90). He furthermore is the dupe of a reporter who, riding back to Manhattan in his coach, plies him with questions about the case against Mary Monson, only to publish a distorted account of things based on the coachman’s incautious answers (see Ways 265–66). Several other incidents in the book bear out Dunscomb’s comment to McBrain: “as soon as you make a trade of the news, you create a stock market that will have its rise and fall, under the impulses of fear, falsehood, and favour, just like your money transactions” (Ways 88). The abuses of the press are copied and magnified by those emanating from the legal profession. Dunscomb employs a rural colleague named Timms, a dubious operator who uses money and the agents it buys him to help shape public perception. Cooper cannot help but admire Timms in certain limited ways. Yes, he blows his nose with his fingers, and insists on using such terms as “lady friend,” habits that irk Dunscomb (and Cooper). But Timms is not stupid or merely boorish. His adeptness at manipulative techniques Cooper had encountered in his opposing counsel in the libel suits is something that even Cooper endorses here, albeit in a limited fashion. In a world where rumor and gossip rule public opinion, and public opinion is invested by false democratic assumptions with a sort of sanctified power over individual fate and collective well-being, such tactics, when used to defend the innocent (as in this case they are) are not quite so dishonorable as they may seem. Indeed, they are prudent. Even Mary Monson, after all, pays Timms to spread false rumors against herself, making the public think she is “the stool-pigeon of a York gang” (Ways 396, 408), an impression that can be erased later, to her benefit. But the system overall is corrupt.

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Some of the novel’s satire seems aimed at an alliance of new foes who arouse Dunscomb’s ire. While Cooper personally shared some of that emotion, it is important to observe that he created his Manhattan lawyer as a character, not a mouthpiece. This distinction has not always been observed. Indeed, as John P. McWilliams has noted, most critics commenting on The Ways of the Hour wrongly assume “that Dunscomb’s opinions are Cooper’s opinions.” McWilliams to the contrary demonstrates that Cooper generally distanced himself from the character and in several instances objected to his views. As he did with regard to the later members of the Littlepage clan, Cooper dramatized a regressive viewpoint he neither inhabited nor completely supported. McWilliams goes on in his comments on Cooper’s last novel: “The more one studies Cooper’s relation to Dunscomb, the more difficult the problem becomes. In many particulars Dunscomb voices Cooper’s assessment of present and future injustices, be they political, cultural, or judicial. Dunscomb’s diatribes are expressed in a diction and tone, however, that Cooper as author seems anxious to avoid. One also wonders whether Cooper’s approval of Dunscomb’s opinions of American facts extends to Cooper’s approving of Dunscomb’s reactionary solutions. Dunscomb himself clearly desires a return to an appointive judiciary and an end to trial by jury. Cooper’s preface, however, acknowledges that, given the many injustices of jury trials, ‘the difficulty is to find a substitute.’ ”56 We may extend these crucial points, since they underscore the manner in which some persistent misreadings of Cooper’s politics deduce his attitudes inside his books from mistaken notions of what his personal positions were outside them. Dunscomb is a bachelor whose lack of a family of course means that he will leave no heirs or successors. He seems created by Cooper as a sort of dead end, a man whose failure to embrace his own future is matched by his being wedded to the past for its own sake, whatever the particular issue at question. And his views are often countered by other characters who do not share them. When Cooper has Dunscomb’s nephew, Jack Wilmeter, discuss legal matters with Mrs. Gott, wife of the Duke’s sheriff and jail-keeper, the young man refers to his uncle’s view that women have been getting the upper hand in recent legal changes, certainly a major question in the novel. Mrs. Gott quickly responds, “Well, . . . and isn’t that quite right?” He reiterates that his uncle “thinks it very wrong,” for it threatens, through “a mistaken gallantry,” to undermine “the peace of families.” Mrs. Gott humorously checkmates him: “Ay, Mr. Thomas Dunscomb is an old bachelor; and bachelors’ wives, and bachelors’ children, as we well know, are always admirably managed. It is a pity that they are not more numerous” (Ways 162–63). At least for the moment, Cooper gives her that smart little triumph. His interest lies in social drama rather than preachments. Dunscomb avows that he is “a democrat,” but in a notably conservative sense: “To the extent of giving the people all power, in the last resort—all power

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that they can intelligently and usefully use; but not to the extent of permitting them to make the laws, to execute the laws, and to interpret the laws” (Ways 86). As his nephew tells Anna Updyke, he furthermore has “little taste for change” (Ways 202). In a discussion with Dr. McBrain, Dunscomb himself maps the current range of views in New York: “To tell you the truth, Ned, the state is submitting to two of the silliest motives that can govern men—ultra conservatism, and ultra progress; the one holding back, often, to preserve that which is not worth keeping; and the other ‘going ahead,’ as it is termed, merely for the sake of boasting of their onward tendencies. Neither course is in the least suited to the actual wants of society, and each is pernicious in its way” (Ways 84). While this statement would seem to place Dunscomb in a moderate position between the extremes he has named, in the process showing Cooper’s own distrust of ultras of any stripe, Cooper as narrator soon makes it clear that Dunscomb is wrong in his own self-estimate. McBrain replies to his old friend in a conciliatory way, suggesting that where extreme positions are so sharply contrasted, the way is open for compromise. Dunscomb, naming an issue central to the book’s political situation (that is, New York’s adoption of a new legal code), comes back sharply: “What compromise is there in this infernal code?” (Ways 84). (As to the state Constitutional Convention that called for the drafting of the new code, Dunscomb had opposed it bitterly.)57 Although the novel at large is not kind in its remarks on that innovation, at this precise juncture in the story the narrator distances himself from the lawyer: “Dunscomb was an ultra himself, in opposition to a system that has a good deal of that which is useful, diluted by more that is not quite so good” (Ways 84).58 “Not quite so good” is, rhetorically and politically, far indeed from “infernal.” Cooper’s position, if not simply offered as a compromise, leaves that as a rhetorical possibility. The narrator (perhaps speaking for the author) is pragmatic rather than doctrinaire. The new legal code contained, we are told, “a good deal” that was “useful.” Cooper had honed his ability to state positions to the right (and left) of his own while composing the Littlepage tales. The narrators of those books increasingly diverge from the novelist’s own personal experience and political assumptions as the saga comes closer to his own time. One might express this point as an analogy already made in my discussion of those tales in chapter 12: Uncle Ro in The Redskins is to the landlords who ought to hold such estates what the AntiRent Injins are to the real Native Americans introduced in the later chapters of that novel. (One might say the same of the Van Rensselaers as Cooper had come to know them in their more recent generations, either in Europe or in Philadelphia. After 1839, the patroonship survived, barely, but the last patroon in the full sense of that peculiar term was indeed dead. External assault and internal atrophy combined to destroy the old order.) Furthermore, in The Crater,

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as we also have seen, Cooper’s insistence, not always noted by his readers, on making the religious dispute responsible for Mark Woolston’s civil downfall— and Woolston in turn largely responsible for that dispute—once again distanced Cooper measurably from his “hero.” Why did the novelist follow this pattern not only in the mid-1840s but also in this last, most politically engaged of his novels? His own political truths were too nuanced to make good drama, one might say. At the same time, he realized from the rough-and-tumble of his personal social and political and legal fights since 1833 that some opponents did occupy more extreme ground than himself, to the left and the right, and with less finesse than it gradually had become his habit to display. He furthermore had come to see, as in his dissection of the Somers business, that most moral questions—and political questions were, for him, moral questions, questions not primarily about power but about what was right—were often vexingly ambiguous. Perhaps the answers were more straightforward, but knowing exactly what questions to ask presented the real challenge. Had Mackenzie meant to murder Spencer and his supposed accomplices? Would he have regarded what he actually did to them as murder in any sense of the term? Had he colluded with his officers? Had he merely pressured them by dint of his greater age and higher rank or manipulated them via personal and family ties? It was unquestionably wrong that the three men had been hanged. Yet that was, again, the easy conclusion to draw. Why were they dead? How had their deaths come to happen? It was not possible, really, to answer those questions crisply without reducing human motive and disposition to melodramatic formulas that the ultras on either side were adept at deploying. Thomas Dunscomb occupies a different position from any of these figures, fictional or historical. He most resembles Uncle Ro from The Redskins, perhaps, in his inconsequential bachelorhood. He also resembles the old expatriate in the sense that he is the loco tenens of an institution under attack—not a family estate but rather the law, and especially the Common Law—and is as ineffectual in defending it as Uncle Ro is in seeking to defend Ravensnest from the ideological, if not the physical, assaults of the Anti-Renters. Dunscomb of course is “ ‘emphatically’ a common-law lawyer,” and, as its disciple, he speaks of that “perfection of human reason” with veneration (Ways 13). This attitude, though, provides another means by which to measure his distance from Cooper. That description of the English Common Law, as Cooper well knew, was closely associated with William Blackstone. Near the beginning of his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), Blackstone thus wrote: “our lawyers are with justice so copious in their encomiums on the reason of the common law; that they tell us, that the law is the perfection of reason, that it always intends to conform thereto, and that what is not reason is not law.” Blackstone ’s own posi-

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tion on this question, however, was rather nuanced. He did not believe that every provision of the Common Law was self-evidently reasonable. Nor was he opposed to modernization and statutory reform. He thus envisioned room for change when he wrote that “the particular reason of every rule in the law can[not] at this distance of time be always precisely assigned; but it is sufficient that there be nothing in the rule flatly contradictory to reason, and then the law will presume it to be well-founded.”59 For Thomas Dunscomb, to the contrary, nuance matters less than his serene confidence in the Common Law, which provides the mythic bedrock of his faith. He therefore sees little if any good in the new code that aimed at rationalizing New York’s procedures. Might we hear in the name of Dunscomb’s country estate, “Rattletrap,” Cooper’s sly reference to the Common Law in its imperfect totality? I think so. The novelist did not have complete confidence in the new code or the state ’s current legal culture, as we shall see in more detail in a moment. Yet it is good to recall that in The Two Admirals, when tracing out the absurd prohibitions of the half-blood principle, he cited with full irony Blackstone ’s description of the Common Law: “the half blood can’t take; so says the perfection of human reason” (TA CE 20). As a result of the logical and lineal contortions thrust upon the Wychecombes by that prohibition, an illegitimate and self-serving “heir” who in fact is unrelated by blood to the old baronet winds up in temporary possession of the title and estate. Sir Wycherly has of course acted foolishly in picking the devious Thomas to inherit, as he realizes before he dies, but if the Common Law allowed for truly rational solutions to the problem he faces, one of his legitimate cousins of the half-blood would have succeeded him in due course and without the need for a will drawn up by a doddering fool. A solution happily occurs when the legitimate son of his long-lost American brother happens to show up, but what sort of legal system is it that allows mere chance to resolve such matters? Cooper’s method in his last novel resembled that which he deployed in The Two Admirals. In both instances, he constructed implausible test cases meant to reveal flaws in a given legal system. His target in The Ways of the Hour was not New York’s new code per se. That is Dunscomb’s bête noir rather than Cooper’s, and in any event it concerned only civil actions, not criminal ones such as that in the novel. Cooper focused instead on the institution of the jury. Although skepticism about juries was not uncommon at the time, the new state constitution had placed New York squarely in their favor. Its bedrock first principle declared, “No member of this State shall be disenfranchised, or deprived of any of the rights or privileges, secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the laws of the land, or the judgment of his peers.” Although the document did hold out the option for parties to civil cases to waive jury trial, or engage in arbitration, its second

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point bolstered the first: “The trial by jury, in all cases in which it has been heretofore used, shall remain inviolate forever.”60 Although the new civil code made optional the use of a jury trial in civil cases, in the draft criminal code presented to the legislature on December 31, 1849, jury trials thus would have remained the rule.61 Perhaps it was Cooper’s own experience with juries during the libel suits that pointed him to this topic. Perhaps it was simply the bald idiocy of declaring anything “inviolate forever,” especially in his home state ’s second new constitution in two decades. Jury trials were institutions rather than first principles and therefore in Cooper’s view were historically contingent rather than universal. One might even claim that in the novel he was subjecting part of the legal culture inherited from England to rational scrutiny, much as the new code did with regard to New York practice.62 His basic objection to juries in The Ways of the Hour rested on a critical distinction. Juries as he understood them had evolved under monarchical conditions and provided protection for ordinary people from the abuse of power likely under such conditions. In a state in which the people were sovereign, Cooper asserted, power was distributed and there was theoretically no central authority to resist. Furthermore, the increasing tendency of Americans to defer to “popular impulses” meant that juries were not just unnecessary; they were positively dangerous, thrusting on defendants the full weight of public opinion as well as of the law. Cooper did not have “the vanity to suppose that any thing contained in this book will produce a very serious impression on the popularity of the jury.” All he hoped was that the book might cause those of his readers who had “never yet given . . . a moment of thought” to the subject to “reflect” on it (Ways v, vii). In stating his purposes as modestly as this in his preface, Cooper was once more distinguishing the ultra bitterness of his fictional lawyer from his own more temperate position. To show the effect of popular opinion on the legal process in the book, he had virtually everyone, including the Duke’s coroner, assume that the dead bodies found lying together, charred, in the bed in the burned house—the main evidence of the book’s supposed murders—must of course be those of its usual occupants, Peter and Dorothy Goodwin. Only Dr. McBrain, in a show of forensic skepticism, doubts this identification, giving his opinion at the inquest that the corpses are both those of female victims. The way is thereby opened for the book’s final revelation, which proves him right but which comes only after Mary Monson has been convicted on the charge of murdering Peter Goodwin. Her knowledge all along that he is not dead—indeed, he has been kept secreted in the tavern at Monson’s expense—is but the manipulative icing on the book’s very suspect cake. Why is Monson convicted in the absence of positive identification of her supposed victim? Because Cooper has developed his plot in such a way

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that the supposed murderer, owing to her refinement, high education, wealth, and evident status, rubs the people of Biberry the wrong way. She is guilty of being different. She is also made vulnerable by the greedy self-interest of a local woman, Sarah Burton, who in fact stole the money-filled stocking that provided the supposed motive for the hypothetical murders and then, while Monson’s purse was being examined, substituted for an innocent Italian coin in it an identifiably notched one taken from the stocking. Not only do we learn that Peter Goodwin is alive; we also learn that his wife and the German servant woman who, in his absence, had shared his wife’s bed, had been killed when the ceiling above their room collapsed, causing an old ploughshare in the attic to strike and fracture their skulls—and that it fell because a chronically faulty stove flue in the attic had yet again caused a fire. We also discover, when Monson closely questions Sarah Burton following her conviction, that the best witness against her is a conniving, dishonest woman who concealed some evidence and arranged other parts of it so as to strengthen false rumors about Monson and thereby ensure her conviction. The law may be clear, but justice floats on an ambiguous sea.63 If Cooper thus took his own stand on reforming trial by jury, constructing the plot of the book so as to drive home his doubts about the usefulness or indeed fairness of the institution in a modern democracy, in other regards he critiqued reformist efforts in general. Cooper presents lawyer Timms, for all his oily effectiveness in handling the jury pool and indeed managing the trial at large (except for Monson’s own supervening efforts), as the embodiment of a nervous appetite for modernizing change. And that appetite is largely, though not completely, discredited in the book. Timms in the past has been in favor of a series of progressive causes, starting with “the Common Schools” and “then the Temperance cause,” both of which Cooper generally favored (the first via his willingness to write textbooks for use in such schools, the second via his increasing emphasis on the moral degradation caused by drink in several of his late characters). More recently, Timms explains, he has toyed with the notion of supporting the “Free Sile and Emancipation Doctrines” but has shied away from them because “they are ticklish things, that cut like a two-edged sword.” They are “ticklish” in the sense that they divide people in the North and therefore pose a possible threat to would-be office-seekers like himself. “There are about as many opposed to meddling with slavery in the free States, as there are in favour of it,” he observes for Dunscomb. This part of their conversation gives that timely topic some diagnostic pertinence in Cooper’s novel. Dunscomb is to some extent to the left of Timms in the matter. In his view (and Cooper’s, as we have seen in earlier chapters), Congress had the right to exclude slavery from the District of Columbia, for instance, though (again like Cooper) he thinks it should do so only if the people of the district wish it to be excluded. He also

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holds that slavery could be excluded from California, certainly a very current issue in 1849–1850, because Congress had “the legal right to govern any of its territories despotically; of course, to admit or to receive what it may please into their limits.” When Timms reiterates his question (“Then you think Congress has power to exclude slavery from California?”), Dunscomb unequivocally replies, “I can’t imagine a greater legal absurdity than to deny it” (Ways 187– 89). That the principle rests on the Constitution rather than on the Common Law suggests the degree to which Dunscomb recognizes the power of modern political forms even as he says he prefers traditional legal structures.64 His opinion on this last question had another and quite contemporary context, for The Ways of the Hour as a whole reflects on justice in a racial, not just a judicial, sense. Cooper was to state clearly in the surviving fragment of his other New York book his conclusion that “the institution of domestic slavery cannot last” (NY 19). He was writing there in the immediate wake of the contentious debates in Congress and the press over what eventually emerged as the Compromise of 1850, passed in a series of votes that September. Since one of the provisions of the compromise was the exclusion of the slave trade (but not slavery per se) from the District of Columbia, Dunscomb’s comments on that matter reflected the previous state of that issue. The specific reference to California in the novel, however, likely reflects the rising debates that would be engaged in 1850. The ailing John C. Calhoun, in his proxy-delivered Senate speech of early March 1850, outlined his theory of equilibrium between the “Sections” and disputed any power in Congress to exclude slavery from U.S. territories, thereby heralding the policy Stephen A. Douglas would ultimately establish, to bloody effect, in the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1854. In New York Cooper specifically named Calhoun, with whom he must have had a passing acquaintance at Yale (see JFC:EY 50), as responsible for two erroneous doctrines. Slavery, Cooper went on, “is opposed to the spirit of the age; and the figments of Mr. Calhoun, in affirming that the Territories belong to the States, instead of to the Government of the United States; and the celebrated doctrine of the equilibrium, for which we look in vain into the Constitution for a single sound argument to sustain it, are merely the expiring efforts of a reasoning that cannot resist the common sense of the nation” (NY 19). Cooper had read Calhoun’s March 4 speech soon after it was printed, along with Daniel Webster’s March 7 answer to it, and, having declared to South Carolinian Shubrick that “Congress is a prodigious humbug, and ever has been,” added: “Mr. Calhoun’s equilibrium was a humbug, and Mr. Webster’s answer another.” Following Calhoun’s death at the end of March, Cooper may have discussed the matter at Henry Cruger’s with his host and another South Carolinian who was mentioned as a possible successor for Calhoun in the Senate, the nullifier James Hamilton (LJ 6:169).65

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In his final novel, race and slavery, while not major issues, do figure in the political discussions carried on among the characters, and in some comments of the narrator. In most cases, the references occur in connection to radical reforms of various kinds. When Dunscomb discusses the likely makeup of Monson’s jury with Timms, for instance, the latter asserts that two of the members “would not hang Cain, were he indicted for the murder of Abel.” Dunscomb jumps to the conclusion that they are “Quakers, of course” (a nice bit of distancing on Cooper’s part), but that comment prompts Timms to give both an update and a correction: “Not they. The time was when we were reduced to the ‘thee’s’ and the ‘thou’s’ for this sort of support; but philanthropy is abroad, sir, covering the land. . . . Pronigger, anti-gallows, eternal peace, woman’s rights, the people’s power, and anything of that sort, sweeps like a tornado through the land” (Ways 217). This catalogue of reformist causes is tricky. To begin with, because the fusillade comes from Timms, who himself has made a habit of toying with radical causes (for his own advantage, as we have seen), the reader is not quite sure how to take it.66 If it were Dunscomb who blurted out such a list, we would be pretty sure that he intended to dismiss each and every cause. The use of the “N-word” here, like the parallel uses noted earlier in The Redskins, would denote his unrepentant backward-looking attitude. But we cannot be quite so fast in this case. In fact, Timms himself performs an even more instructive use of that word after Dunscomb questions his colleague’s view that one man is as good as another in the United States: “The institutions clearly maintain that some men are better than others, Timms!” “That’s news to me, I will own. I thought the institutions declared all men alike—that is, all white men; I know that the niggers are non-suited.” Although Dunscomb seems to agree in his reply (“They are unsuited, at least, according to the spirit of the institutions”), that is not for him a matter of race (or legal right, the point of Timms’s “non-suit” figure) but rather of preparedness. And on that ground, many other men are also not quite ready for the public service Dunscomb thinks them theoretically entitled to. He therefore tauntingly replies to Timms: “If all men are supposed to be alike, what use is there in the elections? Why not draw lots for office, as we draw lots for juries?” (Ways 223). What Timms converted into a discussion about race is returned by Dunscomb to the matter at hand—that is, juries. And yet some readers may doubt that Cooper himself is on solid ground in his own handling of race in this book. It will be recalled that almost three decades earlier he had had the slave Caesar Thompson in The Spy object to Harvey

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Birch’s use of “niggar” and force the issue until Birch retreated. That was an important (because very early and very clear) marker of Cooper’s acknowledgment that the word was already felt to be pejorative, not only by blacks but by himself. Similarly, his certainty in The Deerslayer about the equality of all races from the Creator’s viewpoint (“God made us all, white, black, and red”—DS CE 50) was carried forward as late as Satanstoe, in which the pejorative term is used only in dialogue, and far less often even then than “black.” In The Redskins, as noted a moment ago and as argued persuasively by Jerome McGann (quoted in chapter 12), Cooper uses the term to mark the ignorant self-enclosure of those whites who unthinkingly use it. Yet in this last of Cooper’s books, in which a similar case can be made, we also have the usage of the narrator attributing to “the old-school black” Scipio, Dunscomb’s free servant, “the peculiarities that were once so marked in a Manhattan ‘nigger.’ ” Perhaps the scare quotes redeem him; perhaps not. (He goes on in a vein that certainly does not resolve the issue: “Unlike his brethren of the present day, [Scipio] was courtesy itself to all ‘gentlemen,’ while his respect for ‘common folks’ was a good deal more equivocal. But chiefly did the old man despise ‘yaller fellers;’ these he regarded as a mongrel race, who could neither aspire to the pure complexion of the Circassian stock, nor lay claim to the glistening dye of Africa”—Ways 106–7.) The best that can be said, and perhaps that is enough, is that Cooper was trying to catch the usage of some such early nineteenth-century black servant in New York, with his putdowns of “yaller fellers” and his asserted right to use the very word Caesar Thompson objected to when Birch used it. On the other hand, it is only right to point out Cooper’s recent use, in The Crater, of the term “nigger-letters” to refer, without quotation marks and in his own voice as narrator, to the informal communications circulating among the black characters in Bristol, Pennsylvania—though some slippage is present here, too, as he is referring to the fact that the literate slave, Juno, writes and reads half those texts (CR 2:14). A further reflection on this issue may be useful. While in Manhattan early in 1851, when The Ways of the Hour remained his most recent book, Cooper ran into ex-Quaker Dr. Samuel Hanson Cox, who had been one of the passengers on the Samson’s 1833 voyage home and at that time was an outspoken abolitionist. In the years since, Cox had become notorious for his conservative speeches on slavery and race and had publicly tangled with Frederick Douglass in 1846. Both Cooper and his wife clearly had kept track of Cox’s downward career in these matters, and perhaps in other regards. Writing Susan in 1851, Cooper therefore updated her about his most recent encounter with the man: “The Dr. was fresh from Buffaloe, w[h]ere he had been lecturing anti nigger” (LJ 6:264). Maybe his use of the term was meant to render Cox in his own debased terms, much as Timms’s string of labels seems meant to capture the clipped, befuddled

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language of American radicalism, left or right. Maybe not. Given Cooper’s views on Calhoun and on the inevitability of slavery’s disappearance, perhaps we should accept at face value his last overtly expressed opinions of slavery and the racism that supported it, and of the political contortions the South was mounting to defend it. It is also worth remarking that Cooper refused to soften his own opinions for such South Carolinians as Shubrick and Cruger. More was clearly at issue for him here than personal relationships. Cooper’s political sympathy for those old Southern friends was mostly gone by 1850, when the fugitive slave law divided the country along sectional lines, laying the groundwork for the Civil War. Some months before that law was approved, Cooper would write his wife, prophetically, from New York, “There is a good deal of uneasiness felt concerning political affairs, and many think the Union in danger.” He went on to add that if slavery had to be “accepted as a regular principle in the constitution,” a principle that would color everything else, he “would prefer a peaceable separation were it possible—but it is not possible” (LJ 6:152). By this point, he could no longer be accurately described as a man for whom the preservation of the Union was paramount. War over the issue of slavery seemed inevitable unless the South backed down; if it refused to do so and war came, then so be it. Later that year, writing to Shubrick, Cooper was bolder: “The fact is that a crisis has been reached in the history of slavery which any one could have for[e]seen; the slave states are overstocked, and space is needed to render the negro of any value as property. The Constitution must be bedeviled in order to do this.” Perhaps in another comment in that letter he still showed a desire to preserve the Union, but he did not indicate much hope for it: “You know I have never been affected by a false philant[h]ropy. Property in man is no more opposed to Christianity than property in a horse. All that Christianity exacts is that we use our power mercifully, or as we would have it used, reversing the positions. But this equilibrium doctrine”—Calhoun’s doctrine—“can not be tolerated an hour. The country will split on it. The bragging of the south merely excites the resentment of the north” (LJ 6:208–9). That was not ingratiating talk, but it was also not proslavery. For Cooper at what would prove the end of his life, the Constitution provided greater moral guidance than Christianity did on such crucial issues. The elimination of slavery was to be effected not through religion, but rather through affirming the secular ideals of the American republic.

Business Having sold his murder mystery to Putnam in March 1849, Cooper was uncertain how to dispose of it abroad. That May, when first offering Bentley the book, he had asked for “the old terms.” Cooper expected to send the first ten chapters

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“about 15 July,” with a planned publication date in England of either October 15 or November 1 (LJ 6:44).67 Bentley in his June 15 reply declined Cooper’s terms, owing largely to his sense that a recent and not yet reversed English legal opinion (in Boosey vs. Purday) threatened to deprive foreigners, unless they were resident in Britain at the time new works appeared, of copyright protections heretofore granted them. Bentley, who felt that he might suffer severe consequences from this ruling, complained bitterly of it to Herman Melville five days later, in a letter incidentally bearing the bad news about the failure of Mardi in Britain: “To complicate matters still further, our sapient Sir Fredk Pollock with Justices Platt & Rolfe have decided that a foreigner has no copyright. This drivelling absurdity can scarcely be suffered to remain, I trust, but in the mean time this decision will expose publishers like myself, who am so largely engaged in this department of publishing to the risk of attack from any unprincipled persons who may choose to turn Pirate.”68 That same day, obviously roused to defiance, Bentley also wrote Cooper with his second thoughts about how he should handle the ruling (which in fact would be overturned in 1851). Clearly not to be scared off, he expressed his anger in terms that the author of The Ways of the Hour would have found immediately relevant: “We hope soon to have this abominable and absurd judgment reversed, but such are the wretched quibbles, absurdities, anomalies and fictions admitted in our precious jumble called Law, that heaven only knows what may arise.” Even so, Bentley continued: “With regard to you and other American authors, with whom I have the honor to be connected, . . . I have resolved . . . that this decision shall not interfere with my course of business.” Bentley’s resolution in the face of that “precious jumble” (a term Cooper himself might well have used at this very moment) cannot have been unpleasing to this particular American author. But Bentley was less in tune with Cooper when it came to financial matters. The publisher insisted that the modest performance of The Bee-Hunter and The Sea Lions, both of which had been printed in small runs of 750 copies but both of which still failed to show a profit (he had so far sold only 400 copies of the second novel, out for three months by this time), meant that he still could not accept Cooper’s offer. Reluctant to end things with Cooper, especially in such a negative manner, Bentley nonetheless countered that he could pay less than a third of what the novelist had asked.69 Replying with little restraint on July 7, Cooper told Bentley that he had long thought his earnings in England less than what English writers received. He added that he had been “content with what I got, considering that it came from a foreign country”—his own dig at the terms of the recent Boosey vs. Purday ruling against “foreign” authors. As to Bentley’s specific counteroffer, Cooper was insistent: “I must distinctly decline accepting.” He had wanted to

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ask £600 up front, he went on, but had refrained because he “was indisposed to disturb old relations.” Now he was determined to follow another route in Britain. Once Fagan had stereotyped enough of the book to make a fair sample, he would “send the sheets to a friend in London, to do as well as he can with them.” Cooper did not look forward to such a change, as his touching self-description indicated: “I am a creature of habit, keep old dogs, horses cows &c, often at a loss, and dislike parting with any thing, even when it might be better to do so.” Bentley and his former partner Henry Colburn had together published Cooper for “nearly a quarter of a century”—longer indeed than anyone else, even the Carey establishment—and he sincerely wished he and Bentley might have kept on together longer. Yet that would not be possible given the current difference in their views. All Cooper could do was try to put a polite face on the break: “I take my leave with kind feelings, and wishes for your future success” (LJ 6:53). Bentley in his reply in July accepted the American’s sentiments but stressed that he had always paid Cooper as much as “British authors whose works circulated to a similar extent.”70 Before he had received this reply, Cooper explained the situation to Putnam and asked whether the New Yorker might try, for a commission, to place the book (now at last called by its final title) with “some English publisher.” He had spoken to Putnam before, as he now reiterated, of his distrust of Bentley’s “candor,” and he added that his most recent communications with the Londoner had “renewed all this distrust.” Spelling out his terms for any new deal, he made it clear that he was dead set against sharing the profits with whatever publisher might accept the book (he added: “This is the nature of Bentley’s last proposition, though he proposes paying me down for a certain number of copies”). The book would be ready “in about sixty days,” Cooper went on, although the presence of cholera outbreaks in the United States might make a delay in issuing it prudent (LJ 6:55–56).71 When nothing came of this attempt to recruit Putnam in the matter, Cooper faced the inevitable. Having resigned himself to abide by Bentley’s original offer, he wrote the Londoner straightforwardly in February 1850: “I have sent you the first half of the ‘Ways of the Hour’ by the steamer of this week, finding no offer materially better than your own.” Because this change of heart came so late, Cooper urged haste on Bentley: “You must go to press at once, and I will see you supplied with sheets in season, but time must not be wasted” (LJ 6:138; see also 6:136). Cooper’s call for haste, though, was an exclamation point at the end of a long, leisurely, halting sentence. He probably had begun sending manuscript to Fagan, who was to stereotype the book, as long ago as May 1849 (see LJ 6:33); but he was shipping parts of it as late as that November, and when he went to New York early in the new year, he carried the still unfinished project with

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him and wrote more of the book there. That was the point at which he wrote Fagan for an initial set of sheets to forward to London. While he promised Fagan that the “rest of the sheets” would be sent to him “soon” (LJ 6:129), suggesting that the stereotyper had finished setting the manuscript and had forwarded all proofs for correction to the novelist, Fagan in replying the next day indicated that he had perfected the plates only through the fifteenth chapter (that is, page 262, the extent of what he forwarded for Bentley)—and had only another twelve pages (in fresh page proofs) to be sent with that shipment for Cooper to go through and return. Fagan at the same time acknowledged receipt of two fresh batches of copy: while it is not clear whether these had just been sent by Cooper, or had been shipped somewhat earlier, the fact that the usually prompt Fagan had not yet set those batches, or at least not all of the copy they contained, must indicate that Cooper was indeed tardy. Perhaps he wished to drag his feet until the matter of publication in England was resolved so as to protect whatever rights he was able to convey to the eventual publisher there.72 The January-February-March visit to New York did not speed him up. That was partly because other projects were diverting his attention from the novel. For one thing, he was serving as his daughter Susan’s literary agent with regard to Putnam. He noted to his wife on Monday, February 11, that he had not yet received any of the proofs for her second book, Rural Hours, evidently because it was not yet in production, but added that he would see the publisher about it the next day. He had assisted his daughter in so many ways on the project that she would dedicate the finished book to “The Author of ‘The Deerslayer.’ ” Yet with his own proper labors slowed by his attention to her project, Cooper now suggested that Susan send further packets of manuscript directly to the publisher, hinting, it would seem, that he would not mind being left out of the loop (see LJ 6:131).73 Three days later, articulating more directly how his “own book moves rather slowly, on account of the interruptions” stemming from Rural Hours and other obligations, he nonetheless gave his wife a message for their eldest child: “Tell Susy she shall not be neglected. The proofs will soon come, and the work will be published at the appointed time” (LJ 6:135).74 The attentive father did keep progressing on his own work. He had finished writing the penultimate chapter (the twenty-ninth) by March 3, when he was also going over the proofs for the twenty-third one (see LJ 6:150). By March 9, he at last had finished writing the final chapter and sent it to Fagan (see LJ 6:154). Running off to Philadelphia for a brief social visit that same day, he probably stayed long enough to read the last proofs there and pick up a full set of corrected sheets for the book’s latter half, which he dispatched by fast steamer to Bentley from New York on March 14. Thereupon he at last could leave for

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Albany the next day and from there go home. Although things at last seemed to be coming together, a sudden glitch occurred when, once back in Otsego, he learned from a Putnam advertisement that the novel was to appear in New York earlier than he expected, always a worrisome eventuality. He had written Bentley on March 14 that he did not expect Putnam to bring out the book until “the last of April”—the twenty-fifth, he thought (LJ 6:156). The announced date now being March 30, “almost a month before the day agreed on” would mean, as he quickly wrote Putnam, that he would “probably lose the English sale” (LJ 6:159). Putnam, eager to prevent that costly outcome, promised in a quick reply that he would delay the date, and in fact did so. The Ways of the Hour, the last book Cooper was to bring out, was put on sale in New York on or soon after April 10, 1850 (see S&B 158), two days after Bentley brought it out in London. These syncopations with regard to Cooper’s final novel showed that the various tensions complicating the management of his career across large distances still remained in force.75

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Cooper’s large energies were evident not only in the range and number of his tales but also in the alacrity with which he engaged issues another creative writer might have happily left alone. But his energies were not boundless. His health had been sorely afflicted during the early 1820s by a variety of causes, and it took him years of recuperation at home and abroad before he recovered something like his original vigor. The recovery, even at that, was never complete. And now, as he was negotiating with Putnam and Stringer and Townsend and seeing what would indeed be his last novel through the press, old complaints joined with new ones to try his endurance and his spirit. When George W. Greene entered Putnam’s shop in May 1849 and recognized his old acquaintance there, Cooper was sitting. Apologizing to the younger man for not rising to shake hands, as Greene later recalled, the novelist explained, “My feet are so tender . . . that I do not like to stand any longer than I can help.” To be sure, after the two authors had chatted for some time, Cooper’s feet improved enough that he could go out onto Broadway with Greene. As they walked a few blocks south to the Globe, Cooper’s hotel, Greene kept turning toward Cooper “to admire his commanding figure and firm bearing,” and he added that the novelist moved as if he were fifty, not almost sixty. But the end of Cooper’s life in fact

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was not far away. Greene saw him again during Cooper’s last visit to Manhattan in March and April 1851, not quite two years later, by which point “the change in his appearance” caused “serious apprehension.”1 William Cullen Bryant, who had known Cooper since the 1820s, also wrote down his observations of the novelist during that 1851 visit: “Cooper is now in town—in ill health,—a disease of the liver. When I saw him last he was in high health apparently and in excellent spirits. He has grown thin and has an ashy instead of a florid complexion.”2 Cooper’s liver was not directly discussed in the surviving documentation of his decline and death until very near the end, as we shall see. For many years prior to 1851, however, he was subject to various complaints that never disappeared, some of which he and others linked, rightly or wrongly, to that particular organ—including even the various troubles he had with his feet from 1849 on. Because repeated bouts of illness made him unusually observant of his bodily processes across much of his adulthood, he left a fairly rich though scattered record of self-descriptions and diagnoses—especially in his letters to his wife when absent from home. The very first difficulties had arisen back in the summer of 1823, it will be recalled, when the couple’s son Fenimore died of an unknown disorder, perhaps yellow fever, that in turn seems to have attacked Cooper as well. In combination with his grief over Fenimore’s loss, a bout of heatstroke a month later, and financial difficulties he faced at the same time, Cooper’s original affliction made him excessively weak for some time. The following February, when he visited Shubrick in Boston and the two of them went about the city to see Revolutionary War sites of use for Lionel Lincoln, Cooper dragged behind his usually ambling friend (see LJ 1:109; 2:17). He felt better before taking his family to Europe two years later still, but one of the motives for going abroad was, of course, continued concern over his health. Only slowly did improvement occur, especially after the trying London trip of early 1828 yielded to the bodily exercise and the resulting good spirits Cooper experienced while wandering with his family (and especially solo) around Switzerland. By the early 1830s, as a result, he was temporarily stronger. In fact, he was so much better then that Horatio Greenough, having modeled Cooper’s bust in clay in the late 1820s, had to redo the sculpture later, as we saw in chapter 1, because the writer’s looks had dramatically improved. Even as he strengthened, however, Cooper continued to suffer from specific bodily symptoms throughout the European visit, symptoms that accompanied him home late in 1833. The most persistent were digestive. His daughter Susan in 1876 called the condition “a form of nervous dyspepsia” (LOM HE xiv), plausible enough given his own view that his symptoms indeed had a nervous or psychological dimension and were mostly centered in the digestive tract. He thus wrote Carey and Lea in November 1831, when he was temporarily feeling

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better than he had in years, “The stomach has come round again, and I escape those nervous attacks that used to lay me up, formerly, for a week.” He still had weak spells, especially “in bad weather,” but their frequency had diminished to “two or three in a year” (LJ 2:149). As it happened, he was being overly optimistic. When he declined the chance to meet Martin Van Buren in Paris in 1832, “a fearful head-ache” was the cause (commenting to U.S. minister William C. Rives about this persistent “malady,” he added, “The cold East wind always produces more or less of it, and yesterday I had the imprudence to walk out in the wind”—LJ 2:242).3 Because that symptom was linked to the older ones, the 1832 episode was no isolated or brief attack. Cooper wrote Greenough two weeks later: “I seize a moment from indigestion and head-ache to tell you the latest advices from home” (LJ 2:244). Soon after returning from Europe the following year, Cooper twice explained his delay in answering invitations as resulting from “a severe indisposition” that surely was of a similar sort. One of those invitations, from a group of staunch friends wishing to honor him with a public dinner, he declined outright, as noted in chapter 6 (LJ 3:11, 13). Leaving aside for now the “nervous” dimension of Cooper’s condition, we might consider how he understood his physical symptoms and their likely causes. When he looked back in 1828 on his initial difficulty five years earlier, he described it in a letter to Charles Wilkes as a “bilious attack” (LJ 1:241), a term that during his period pointed to the liver as the origin of his problem—the word “bilious,” in other words, was interpretive as well as descriptive. Bile, a secretion of the liver that aids digestion in the small intestine by encapsulating fats and hence making them easier to process, has a caustic taste that accounts for some of its metaphoric uses (as when an unsigned 1839 review of Homeward Bound and Home as Found described the second book as “the bursting out of superabundant bile” upon the American people).4 In Cooper’s time, bile was the focus of considerable medical and popular attention, especially as the supposed cause of “bilious fever,” a gastrointestinal affliction that was thought to discharge pent-up bile by either vomiting or evacuation. Cooper repeatedly saw his own condition as related to, though not always identical with, that malady. In an October 1835 letter from New York to his wife in Cooperstown that reported on the prevalence of “bilious fever” there, he explained that, since his own “bile” had been “carried off spontaneously”—through the bowels—he had been spared from the general outbreak (LJ 3:173). He had another “slight bilious attack” in October 1839 (LJ 3:437), and again in November 1845 he commented that “two attacks” he suffered had probably saved him “from a bilious fever” (LJ 5:100). The following summer, in Boston to see Shubrick, Cooper was ill with what he described as “cholera morbus”—a term that did not refer to Asiatic cholera, but rather (to quote Webster’s 1828 definition) indicated “a sudden

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evacuation of bile, both upwardly and downwards.” Cooper thus wrote Susan: “I have had a return of my attack of cholera morbus. It commenced Friday after noon, and was accompanied by fever. I vomited this time, pretty severely, and was ‘exercised’ in all ways”—meaning, I take it, that he had diarrhea, the “downwards” of Webster’s definition (LJ 5:162). Such attacks were quite common with Cooper; far from being concerned about them, he apparently viewed them as discharging bile and thus preserving him from worse things. We know of his attitude because of the way he reassured his wife in 1834 that their daughter Caroline did not have dysentery, as Susan feared, but rather simple diarrhea. “Dysentery is a particular disease,” he wrote, “and not a mere lax.” How did he know? “I am very subject to the latter, owing to a nervous temperament, but they”—that is, the bouts of diarrhea—“never do me harm” (LJ 3:45). We shall return to this subject because it may well have bearing on the medicines Cooper took, or didn’t take, across his life—and especially at its end.5 We should not overemphasize the effects of such inward complaints on Cooper’s appearance. As late as November 1850, Washington Irving encountered him in Manhattan and was impressed by his still healthy appearance: it seemed “but the other day,” Irving wrote within a week of Cooper’s death in 1851, “that I saw him at our common literary resort at Putnam’s, in full vigor of mind and body, a very ‘castle of a man,’ and apparently destined to outlive me, who am several years his senior.”6 During a visit to Manhattan that same fall Cooper sat for a series of daguerreotypes by Mathew Brady. In the lone surviving Brady plate, and other images based on Brady’s, Cooper certainly looks old, but at the same time he resembles the sturdy figure Irving recalled (plate 8).7 It was a different story, though, during Cooper’s last visit to Manhattan early in 1851, the one during which both Greene and Bryant noticed how ill he looked. At that time, Cooper once again complained of his “old fashioned” affliction: “Still bilious,” he wrote his wife on March 29, then added in a separate letter to their daughter Fanny: “I have just made a new attack on the bile, with some success. . . . we must rout the bile, first. . . . That done the rest will be easier. I have been at it to-day and yesterday, and feel all the better for it” (LJ 6:267, 270). Cooper’s quasi-military language in that second letter hinted at his use of active medical means to attack these symptoms, although he did not explicitly say so—let alone name what, if anything, he was then taking. Eventually, we know that he would turn to a medication (“a blue pill”) that had been recommended to him some time earlier for the problem with his feet that Greene had commented on in 1849. The pill, widely used at the time for liver complaints, was urged on Cooper by Dr. Edward G. Ludlow, a friend and long ago a member of the Bread and Cheese Lunch. Since Ludlow thought the root problem with Cooper’s feet lay in his liver, as Cooper informed his wife at the time, that

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particular medication was a plausible suggestion (LJ 6:37–38).8 Cooper did not resort to Ludlow’s recommended pill immediately, but he came away from the consultation with something else—a new name for what Ludlow thought ailed him. This is plain from the novelist’s report to Shubrick after returning from New York: “I have got a hereditary disease. . . . It attacks me in the heels, and once was called rh[e]umatic gout, but now goes by the more fashionable name of neuralgia” (LJ 6:48).9 “Neuralgia” was indeed a fairly new term. Coined by François Chaussier of Dijon in 1801 for a relatively limited affliction, by the 1830s it was being applied to cover nerve pain in general. Yet, even as this diagnosis offered Cooper a new way of talking about his secondary symptoms, it did not outmode older ones. Indeed, it creatively linked various of his afflictions, since, a decade or so before Cooper’s consultation with Ludlow, the English physician Richard Rowland noted that “the greater number of cases [of neuralgia] depend upon gastric or intestinal irritation.” Rowland furthermore cited one case that may have been of particular interest to Cooper: “A gentleman awoke in the middle of the night, labouring under a severe pain in one foot; at the same time that some other sensations, to which he was not unaccustomed, indicated the existence of an unusual quantity of acid in the stomach. To relieve the latter, he swallowed a large dose of an alkaline medicine. Immediately on the acid in the stomach having been neutralized, the pain in the foot left him.” In all likelihood, it was this linkage that had led Ludlow to speak of neuralgia in the first place.10 This potential association among symptoms would come to play a significant role in Cooper’s treatment. For some time, though, he seems to have forgotten about his older gastric and intestinal symptoms as he focused on relieving those lingering in his lower limbs. In July 1849, two months after consulting Ludlow, he went to nearby Richfield Springs to try the water cures there and found the “long, warm baths very penetrating” (LJ 6:57). After a likely return to the springs in August, Cooper dismissively joked about his heel to a correspondent, adding that he had climbed a mountain (perhaps “the Vision”) one day and hardly limped at all the next (see LJ 6:66).11 Even at the end of 1849, on the Manhattan trip during which Townsend rebuffed him on the matter of the sixth Leather-Stocking Tale, Cooper proudly wrote back home: “I never was better—walked about six miles yesterday, and actually feel no foot at all. That will never be serious, I am persuaded” (LJ 6:90).12 No digestive symptoms showed up at this time. And, so far, no blue pills were needed. Cooper retold the same story through the winter of 1849. “My leg has got back to its ancient state; feet much better,” he wrote Susan from New York on December 14. “Indeed, I scarce think of the heels at all. I never was better, and every one tells me I never looked better” (LJ 6:96). Things continued to improve

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over the holidays, though when Cooper returned to Manhattan in late January 1850 for the long visit focused on The Ways of the Hour, he reported back to his wife that he had had an attack of cramps in his calves, first one side and then the other: “But, what is singular, these cramps, succeeding one another by about five minutes, really seemed like electrical shocks, and have in a great measure taken the sensibility”—that is, the sensitivity—“from the heel. I walked at least eight miles yesterday, but did not feel any unpleasant consequences there. In the calves I did. The heels are still essentially free from pain” (LJ 6:115). For a time, Cooper actually thought this odd occurrence effected a kind of cure. His heels remained normal, or nearly so, through the beginning of March. His brief trip to Philadelphia that month to finish up work on The Ways of the Hour initiated, though, something of a setback. He caught a bad cold while sitting in front of “an open window, correcting proofs” (in a room “as hot as an oven,” either at his hotel or at Fagan’s foundry). His visit took place between the ninth and the fourteenth of the month, but the cold he caught proved exceptionally durable, suggesting that something more may have been involved. Cooper went home by March 16 or 17, but as late as April 13 he wrote Shubrick, whom he ’d seen in Manhattan before going to Philadelphia, in terms that suggested more fundamental problems: “I brought away this malady, and it has been lingering in my system ever since. The feeling has been of approaching chills, with loss of appetite &c, and a general lassitude. I did weigh in November 208 llbs, and now I weigh 185 llbs, a loss of 23 llbs. As I was aiming at this reduction, which had been gradual until I caught the cold, it does not frighten me; more especially as I now begin to feel better, and to regain my appetite” (LJ 6:167–68; see also 154–57). In November 1850, Cooper consulted with Dr. John W. Francis, not only his longtime friend (and another member of the old Lunch), but also, as Francis himself noted, Cooper’s “medical advisor” on various occasions over the nearly thirty years of their acquaintance.13 Francis offered Cooper “a few suggestions.” Believing that his “prominent annoyances” arose from excess blood in his system, the physician urged that he be bled (“I would recommend the loss of some twelve ounces of blood”). He also thought that Cooper suffered from “congestion of the viscera, the liver, spleen, &c as well as of the intestinal viscera,” a condition that resulted in “a diminished secretion of biliary material” as well as a slowing down of the digestive and circulatory systems. To enliven those systems, Francis proposed a variety of expedients, including dietary changes (limiting “animal food”) and the use of “mild purgatives, or the anti-bilious pills,” to be taken “2 at night occasionally.” Francis furthermore prescribed (as an “alterative”—that is, a substance intended, in contemporary medical usage, to “change, in some inexplicable and insensible manner, certain morbid actions of the system”) a solution of hydriodate of potassium in water, to be taken once a day

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in order to counteract “all tendency to rheumatism, gout, [and] rigidity.” Francis concluded that if his patient followed this advice and reflected with due “philosophical scrutiny” on “the admonitions of older age, mental toil and the vicissitudes of life, . . . our great American Writer will . . . add years to his important life and add still further to the literary glory of his age and nation.”14 The novelist condensed this rather orotund report for his wife a few days later. Francis told him that he had “a congestion, which renders the blood thick and dark . . . and that the heart does not force the blood in proper quantities to the extremities.” Cooper’s hands had been bothering him of late, too, feeling cold even when he sat in a hot bath; this symptom in fact was the immediate reason for consulting Dr. Francis. At this point, though, Cooper evidently did not wish to alarm Susan and he therefore played down the conclusions Francis drew from the examination. “He prescribed light medicine” (probably meaning the “anti-bilious” preparation), promising to leave the order for it later that day or the next, and told Cooper, or so Cooper told Susan, “a very little care will remove the difficulty” (LJ 6:240). Less than a week later, on Sunday, December 1, Cooper supplied another rosy update. While conceding that (for “the first time in months”) he had had “an old fashioned taste of bile” the day before, on the whole he was encouraged. It had been very wet that Friday, and he had been fairly soaked coming out of a meeting. But having gone back to his hotel and cleaned up, on Saturday he had run about “a great deal.” Now he found his hands and feet noticeably better, and had no symptoms of the cold that such an exposure to the weather might have brought on at some other time. Hence his disarmingly upbeat conclusion: “Body in excellent order” (LJ 6:242). The same tone is audible, too, in a letter Cooper began on December 3, 1850, to Shubrick. In fact, the first seven paragraphs said nothing whatever about his condition but instead overflowed with chatty news about an event that occupied much of Cooper’s attention during the New York visit—that is, the impending marriage of his daughter Maria Frances to her first cousin Richard (the Otsego lawyer). Cooper pelted Shubrick with details about the supplies he had picked up and was taking home for that event: “wedding dresses, hat boxes, cake, pickled oysters, grapes”—the Spanish sort, from the old Moorish town of Almeria, where he had eaten them forty-two years earlier while on the Stirling— “macaroons, motto-bon-bons, and all the paraphernalia of a wedding” (LJ 6:243; see also 240).15 That Cooper managed this foraging expedition at the same time he not only was checking with Dr. Francis on his health but also attending a special Episcopal convention as the Christ Church delegate suggests the degree to which his energy was sustained despite all his physical challenges. As if this were not enough, while on this trip he also visited at George P. Putnam’s Staten Island house, hopeful, apparently, for some new arrangement with the publisher for

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either himself—for what became “Towns of Manhattan,” James F. Beard suggested (see LJ 6:204)—or his daughter Susan, whose Rural Hours, finally issued by Putnam at the novelist’s urging in July and already in its third edition by December, was being widely praised (see LJ 6:216–17; BAL 2:311). What might be in the offing for himself, beyond the Manhattan book, is unclear; perhaps he envisioned some expansion of the “Edition,” seeing that Putnam’s LeatherStocking Tales were at last coming out just at this time (see LJ 6:241).16 With all its flurry, we might account this New York trip Cooper’s last successful foray away from Otsego. After suspending his December 3 letter to Shubrick, he left for home that day or perhaps the next, having now been away almost three weeks. Fanny’s wedding, “a moment of great family festivity” (LJ 6:247), took place in Christ Church on the tenth, but the excitement doubtless stretched out for some time afterward.17 It therefore was not until Christmas day that Cooper had a chance to resume and complete the letter to Shubrick begun three weeks earlier in New York City. Only now did he broach the matter of his medical condition. He began with a bit of grim maritime humor he surely thought his fellow sailor would appreciate: “I have been home three weeks . . . and have gone into dock with my own hulk, to be overhauled. . . . Francis [says] I have congestion of the viscera liver included, and that I must live low, deplete, and take pills. It was time, for my hands, feet and legs were often as cold as ice, on account of a suspended respiration. I have now some idea what the coldness of death must be.”18 In the mind of Dr. Francis and Cooper himself, the various symptoms, those of the viscera and the extremities, of the liver and intestines and legs and now arms, were all connected. He was by now on a special diet (“no meat, or next to none”). His weight loss apparently was continuing, but Cooper, perhaps forcing a cheery accent for Shubrick’s sake, added that he felt “strong and . . . clear headed.” The official message, despite the details, was once more positive (LJ 6:244). Cooper confided to his absent son Paul two days later that he was “under treatment” (LJ 6:248), no doubt a reference to the new dietary regimen but also to his continued reliance on the medicines Francis had prescribed in November. For Henry Cruger’s young cousin Saidee Cruger in February, Cooper admitted the obvious (“I have been, and still am ill”), then added, “But I think my maladies are under control, for my time of life, and that I may hope to be a sound man again.” He also passed on to the young woman “the truth” Francis had told him, though he put it into the hopeful past tense: “I had congestion of the viscera, which caused a torpidity of the liver, and a defective secretion of bile. The heels were nothing but a hint of what was to follow.” He felt that the medication he was taking had “aroused this liver”—he already could “feel the effect of my assault” on it (LJ 6:261).

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On the basis of such rosy perceptions, Cooper undertook what proved to be his last trip to Manhattan, in mid-March 1851. In the regular bulletins he sent home then, he described himself as doing well, but in fact he saw Dr. Francis again and received new instructions—and new medications—from him. For one thing, the physician prescribed a dandelion tonic (an old herbal remedy with “a special action upon the liver, exciting it when languid to secretion”) and a liniment to be rubbed into Cooper’s knees.19 He also provided “a capital pill that answers its work well” (LJ 6:267). More detail on this last item is supplied in a note Dr. Francis left at Cooper’s Manhattan hotel toward the end of the month along with phials probably containing the tonic and the liniment. The pills were not a refill of the previous anti-bilious prescription, but rather a new, stronger preparation known as “pill cochia,” a very strong purgative, so strong that it could result in intestinal bleeding. Taken in excess, it furthermore was decidedly poisonous.20 At first, Cooper was excited about its prospective benefits. On April 1, he updated his wife. He was feeling better right then than he had since leaving home about two weeks earlier: “This is the fourth day of my new attack on the bile, and it is beginning to tell.” Although it was during this visit to the city that both George W. Greene and William C. Bryant saw Cooper and noted distressing changes in his appearance, they obviously did not share their impressions with him; and Cooper, for his part, thought all three of the new preparations from Dr. Francis had improved his condition, not worsened it: “Every body says I look better,” he added for Susan on April 1, “and I certainly feel better.” At this point, he thought the pill Francis had prescribed was “mild,” and he was taking only one a day, relying more on the tonic and liniment (LJ 6:271). The “pill cochia,” or “the Coche” as Francis called it, later raised serious concerns for Cooper. Probably because of its strength and inherent danger, which Cooper must have discovered after he began taking it (either through discussion with other physicians or via adverse reactions in his own case that occurred sometime after his return home later in April), he became very concerned about the medicine. We know this because of a letter Dr. Francis wrote him two months later, on May 8, in an effort to soothe the concerns Cooper had raised in a now unlocated message: “Your interesting note was received last evg. It in part contains an alarming view. You must persevere & be not afraid of the Coche.” Francis also sent by express a large, fresh phial of tonic as well, suggesting that Cooper henceforth use it three times a day.21 Cooper had expected, as he wrote Rufus W. Griswold from Cooperstown on April 27, that he would return to Manhattan during this period (see LJ 6:272). The first delay was caused when he slipped and fell, hurting himself—an accident similar to one that had occurred the previous year while he was in New York.22 Then the world in general began to become one large slippery surface for

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him. For one thing, he no longer could hold and use a pen. When he informed Richard Bentley in mid-May about a new book his daughter Susan was writing, it was actually Susan who penned the letter bearing that news to Bentley, who, having brought out Rural Hours in London ten months earlier (see BAL 2:311), was Susan’s publisher now, too. How odd it must have been to serve as her father’s amanuensis in this business; he barely managed to sign what she wrote (see LJ 6:273).23 As had happened in France after William Y. Cooper’s death, and then in the United States in the early 1840s, serving the novelist as his amanuensis was something of a shared task. His wife took dictation a month later for a letter to George Copway, of the “Ojibwa Nation,” conveying Cooper’s “great interest” in the periodical (Copway’s American Indian) being launched by that man, whom he had previously met. Copway had asked for a letter he might insert in his first issue, and Cooper promised to comply once his health permitted. That was not to be, so on July 10 Copway instead inserted the short answer Susan had written out and, apparently, signed, too, in which Cooper lent support to Copway’s advocacy of Indian rights: “The red man has a high claim to have his cause defended,” Cooper’s letter read, “and I trust you will be able to do much in his behalf ” (LJ 6:275). This was—appropriately, given his long advocacy for Native American rights—among the very last of Cooper’s utterances. Copway may have been sufficiently moved by the brief statement he received that he visited Cooper during his final days (he would report that Native Americans gathered around his bed as he lay dying); he certainly was spotted on the stage at the February 1852 public memorial for the novelist.24 Sometime in May, Cooper had begun consulting an Otsego physician, Dr. Parley Johnson, a step Dr. Francis endorsed in yet another surviving letter. Johnson’s wish to employ galvanic therapy, no doubt to deal with the problem in Cooper’s limbs, did not win approval from Francis, who reported skeptically on his own lack of success with that method. Francis did, however, second Johnson’s plan to have Cooper take soda; indeed, he specified the dosage himself—“10 grams of the super-carbonate of Soda, in a little water night and morning,” for its “attenuant and resolvent” effects, and especially in this instance as “a clarifier of the blood.”25 Three weeks later, in response to yet another (unlocated) letter from his patient, Dr. Francis went over the accumulating facts. Cooper had shared his own “pathological views” of his case, and the physician confirmed much of what he observed. The key disturbance was, once more, to be traced to his liver, specifically to its “torpor,” that is, its “functional inability to secrete & pour out freely bilious material.” From that fact arose all of Cooper’s other troubles: “the deranged state of your bowels, slowness of motion, absence of Bile, &c.” “What then is advisable[?],” Francis asked. The answer was clear. “To take that remedy which is the most universal stimulant we know of, which

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acts upon every moving fibre of the body; which unlocks the secretory and excretory vessels, which pours out fresh secretions for functional action & power. This agent is mercury and I have on that account recommended to you the Anti Bilious Pill—to be used occasionally, in as much as it contains some calomel, and also Plummer’s Pills, which is slightly mercurial.” Cooper might persist in using the former pill at this point, or “2 grains of Calomel”—or, Francis continued, he might instead find that “one blue pill of 3 grains at bed time, every night for several nights in succession—then desisted from for 3 or 4 nights—then resumed, will prove a mighty plan in your behalf.” Once Cooper had taken this new medication for some time, Francis further suggested that he make a trip to Saratoga and “moderately use the waters” there.26 The next insight into Cooper’s condition comes from one of the letters that his last amanuensis, his daughter Charlotte, addressed on July 14 to New York banker Gorham A. Worth, an Albany native whom Cooper had involved years earlier in his Midwestern investments. Although the letter opened with a request for a short extension on an unrelated note payable at Worth’s bank in a few days, the bulk of it disputed the following report in Horace Greeley’s Daily Tribune: “Mr. Fenimore Cooper is so ill that he is not expected to live. His family were summoned to him on Saturday last [7/5/1851] and in the evening of that day he received the sacrament preparatory to dissolution.” On Cooper’s behalf, a Cooperstown resident already had written Greeley directly on the ninth, asserting that, while Cooper’s health certainly was “quite infirm,” the story was “entirely erroneous in every important statement.” Greeley, retracting his original report on July 12, “rejoiced” at this new information.27 In discussing the Tribune article in the letter he dictated for Gorham Worth, Cooper himself admitted that he was seriously ill and gave another short version of the diagnosis Dr. Francis had made (“congestion of the viscera, which has led to torpor of the liver, and derangement of the bilious secretions”). In what was an important new note, he added that, the dandelion tonic having been ineffective, he was at last following the latest suggestion of Dr. Francis: “We are now upon the blue pill, and that is working very sensibly on my system. I have great trouble in walking, and have no appetite, the consequences of the blue pill.” Cooper nonetheless went on to assure Worth that, as a result of this new medication, “the main difficulty is giving way” (LJ 6:277–78).28 But that was not true; at this point, Cooper had only slightly more than two months to live. There never has been clear agreement as to what finally laid him low. A panel of Cooperstown doctors assembled by Hugh MacDougall in 2001 rightly stressed, however, that the “blue pill” cannot have helped Cooper recover from his array of symptoms and may have contributed to or even caused his demise.29 “Blue pill” sounds like a colorful and even innocuous item, but pre-

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scribing that particular substance was in fact a serious mistake—not so much on the part of Drs. Francis and Ludlow as on that of the contemporary medical establishment and its surrounding culture. A trio of researchers who studied Abraham Lincoln’s early bouts of depression and “hypochondriasis” (a condition commonly ascribed to liver malfunction during the period) and his attempts at self-medication with that very blue pill have aptly characterized it as a powerful and highly toxic substance. “A round, gray pellet the size of a peppercorn,” it was often used as a cathartic and as a stimulus to the liver and hence was a common recourse in the bile-obsessed nineteenth century. Most of its contents were relatively innocuous: licorice root, rosewater, honey, sugar, and a “confection of dead rose petals.” But the final one, the chemical substance from which it derived its name—“blue mass,” a preparation of elemental mercury with various other substances—was and is a very powerful neurotoxin.30 In normal dosages (two to three pills daily in Cooper and Lincoln’s era), this medication was capable of delivering “130 to 185 mg of mercury—nearly 9,000 times the allowable amount” under modern U.S. Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. Even if Cooper took only one pill daily, he was still ingesting at least three thousand times more mercury than is now thought safe.31 Exploring contemporary reports about Lincoln’s depression, shortness of temper, moodiness, and physical difficulties (including his odd gait while walking and his difficulty writing because of a tremor), the researchers recount how, for several years leading up to his election as president in 1860, Lincoln had tried to stimulate the flow of bile through and thereby out of his system so as to manage psychological and somatic symptoms he and his physicians traced to that source. William H. Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner and eventual biographer, wrote the most succinct and most clinical account: in order to have “an evacuation, a passage, about once a week,” Lincoln “ate blue mass.”32 The researchers point out that physicians of the mid-nineteenth century thought this preparation stimulated the liver because on taking it, patients began to drool (proving the medicine promoted secretion in general) and because their stools turned from brown to green, supposedly indicating “that bile flow was being stimulated and obstructions relieved.” (The real cause of the color change was the deadly effect of mercury on intestinal bacteria, which under normal conditions convert “green bile pigments to brown bile pigments.”) The researchers furthermore trace links from the medication to various observed traits of Lincoln’s behavior prior to 1861, when (according to another former partner and in-law, John Todd Stuart) he ceased using the mercury preparation.33 We do not know how long Cooper took the similar medication prescribed by Dr. Francis—probably two or three months or so. In July, he wrote Henry Cruger, as Cruger summarized the unlocated letter, that he had “at last taken to

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Mercury,” confirming the July letter to Gorham Worth and likewise suggesting that the decision was relatively recent.34 When first mentioning mercury in connection to Francis, Cooper did not speak of it as something with which he already was familiar either generally or through prior use. I nonetheless think it likely that he had used calomel (a mercury-chlorine compound) earlier as an occasional or perhaps more than occasional dose for his enduring digestive complaints. Habitual use of that substance would have laid the groundwork for more acute mercury poisoning under his doctors’ treatment in 1851. Calomel was widely touted as useful in fighting yellow fever, which does involve the liver (the jaundiced look of some yellow fever victims derives from bilirubin, a component in bile) and which therefore was described by some medical figures, including the Philadelphian Benjamin Rush, as the “malignant bilious fever.” Rush promoted calomel as a treatment for the fever during and after the 1793 outbreak in Philadelphia, when he prescribed it to encourage complete evacuation of his patients’ bowels.35 In general, Cooper’s friend and physician Dr. Francis was outspoken for his time on the topic of mercury toxicity, having presented at the time of his acceptance into the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1811 An Inaugural Dissertation on Mercury, Embracing its Medical History, Curative Action, and Abuse in Certain Diseases. In that treatise, he had argued against the use of elemental mercury even for the treatment of venereal disease, for which it was a very common application, preferring “murias hydrargyri, or the corrosive sublimate,” that is, mercuric chloride (HgCl2), a more soluble compound than calomel (mercurous chloride, or Hg2Cl2). When Dr. Francis tended to New York victims during the 1822 yellow fever visitation there and became a prominent commentator on it, he considered blue pills or other forms of elemental mercury as too strong for use on it—and as ineffective, anyway, in a disease of such rapid and devastating effect. He nonetheless prescribed calomel for yellow fever, though for the medicine’s diuretic rather than cathartic effects.36 It is quite possible that Cooper followed the advice of Dr. Francis in 1823 and made use of calomel for himself—perhaps for his son as well. It is apparent from a close study of his records that he made some continuing use of medicine (again, I think calomel) to deal with recurrent fevers and bouts of indigestion for some years following. Calomel was widely used as a cathartic (also, shockingly enough, for children suffering ill effects of teething, as poor Fenimore did in 1823), and it therefore would provoke the sort of cleansing of the bowels that some physicians then urged both in general and as a specific remedy for bilious troubles. In Mercury, Blue Pill, and Calomel; their Use and Abuse (1840), British physician George G. Sigmond asserted that, even in otherwise healthy people, the “evils” attendant on “an inattention to the due unloading of the bowels almost surpass belief.” To maintain general health, Sigmond urged the use of emetics of

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various kinds if natural evacuation did not regularly occur. Furthermore, for those afflicted with disorders connected with “bilious secretion,” such as yellow fever or the illness Cooper suffered in the 1820s and later decades, he recommended “calomel or blue pill, or taraxacon [i.e., dandelion tonic].”37 Cooper, having suffered his febrile attacks, with their train of digestive disorders, on the eve of his thirty-fourth birthday in 1823, not only developed an understandable sensitivity to the state of his “viscera” but also gradually became convinced, I think, that he needed to manage matters himself. Hence his satisfaction on those occasions when his body’s “spontaneous” release of bile prevented a return of the original bilious fever. In his view and that of his contemporaries, few of his various symptoms (even after his foot problems began) were unconnected to the supposedly underlying cause in his liver. For instance, the threeday-long “terrible headache” he mentioned to a French correspondent in 1827–1828 (“depuis trois jours j’ai souffert un mal de tête terrible”—LJ 6:299) was likely traceable, in his period’s understanding, to the visceral troubles and their seemingly hepatic origin. The three Lincoln scholars thus indicate: “ ‘Sick headache’ was synonymous with ‘bilious headache,’ that is, associated with the liver, and to be treated with the blue pill.” Calomel, however, would be a plausible and safer backup. In theory, either medication would stop the headache by starting the bowels up again and thereby relieving the backed-up bile and restoring the liver to proper balance. Either would also, of course, introduce a dangerous poison into the system.38 As I suggested, the documentary record indicates that Cooper used some medication, again most likely calomel, to manage his bouts of illness and perhaps his digestion more generally. We probably should not imagine him as deranging his body and indeed his mind by overdoing it—as to the contrary Lincoln for a time did. The need for caution in this matter surely had been impressed on Cooper by Dr. Francis, for he seems to have followed a more conservative approach in line with the counsel Francis gave to the public. In July 1827, while in St. Ouen, Cooper thus wrote his friend and business agent Luther Bradish, “My health is quite restored, with the exception of the stomach, which, however, is coming gradually to its power—under abstinence and exercise” (LJ 1:221). The key information here is that the approach was behavioral, not medicinal. When, the following January, he described his health for Charles Wilkes, he likewise stated that walks and rides while at St. Ouen “did great service to my constitution.” He still was having attacks but appears to have endured them until they ended rather than fought them medically (LJ 1:241). When the symptoms recurred later on, at the time Cooper was confined in Rome or especially Dresden and Paris and it was harder to take regular physical exercise, managing them in the accustomed way proved more challenging. Cooper therefore seems to have

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started using medicine, or resumed using it, to relieve his attacks. In 1830, he accordingly wrote Greenough from Venice that he had given his “fever a good purge while at Rome”—language that almost certainly means he used calomel or some other cathartic to cleanse his body and thus, presumably, get his bile back in proper order (LJ 1:412). In a follow-up to Wilkes from Paris later that year, Cooper similarly mentioned that his acquisition of “some more knowledge of my own constitution” was helping him improve, a statement we might read as indicating active management of his bodily processes by medical means, although in this instance that is not certain (LJ 2:8). As stated earlier, Cooper seemed on an upward swing generally in the early 1830s, enjoying a kind of holdover from his healthful Wanderjahre (1828–1830). But by April 1832 his symptoms actively returned. When he mentioned dysentery and laxity to his wife in June 1834, one suspects that, having suffered the relapse of his final years in Europe, Cooper may have resigned himself by then to more-or-less regular use of calomel or some other similar substance. Lingering ambiguities in the record, present even then, certainly disappear in comments he made to Susan a bit later, while away from home by himself in 1835 and 1836. When he emphasized for her the spontaneous means by which his bile was “carried off ” in New York City in October 1835, an episode mentioned earlier, he certainly meant that he had not used medical means (LJ 3:173). Yet if he were not already a regular user of some cathartic to achieve that purpose, why would he stress the spontaneity of this particular occurrence? Similarly, in Philadelphia in 1839 he had “a slight bilious attack, which worked itself off, without the aid of medicine”—a clear indication that by then, if not much earlier, he was relying on a broad pattern of medicinal management (LJ 3:437). Although the early 1840s seem to have been relatively more calm for Cooper, perhaps indicating that he had ceased to take medications then (or, on the other hand, that he did so regularly), while in Boston in 1846 he informed Susan that the “return of my attack of cholera morbus” had caused him to vomit and also to purge, but he added, “I took no medicine, however, but iced water” (LJ 5:162). Medicine clearly was still an arrow in his quiver. Focused as these details are, they are hardly definitive. They matter because the doses of mercury-based medicines Cooper certainly took under doctors’ orders in 1850–1851 had serious medical and perhaps behavioral consequences, and those consequences would likely have been more dire if they followed upon regular use of less severe medicines such as calomel over a significant period of time. (Mercury is released from the system only slowly, allowing for its buildup with regular usage.) His difficulty walking preceded the start of the blue pills, but if he had been taking calomel for years with some persistence—to purge himself as a preventative against the return of his symptoms, or at least to man-

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age them as they attacked—that in itself may have initiated Cooper’s troubles, as the blue pills caused Lincoln’s. Furthermore, his difficulty with writing as a physical process (and hence his intermittent reliance on amanuenses from 1826 on) could well have been brought on by or at least worsened by mercuric poisoning. The three Lincoln investigators thus note that the “diminished motor speed and lessened dexterity” witnessed “immediately after mercury poisoning”—and lasting “years after the exposure”—may “affect the control of a steady flow from an ink-dipped steel nib, especially when the writer is under stress.”39 Cooper’s handwriting is never easy to read (or rather it looks easier to read than it is), but samples from the relatively happy period of 1817–1820 seem notably more continuous physically and hence more legible than those from some later periods, when the vexing tendency for words to dissociate themselves into two or three pieces can sorely try the reader. Did use of mercury-containing medicines at some periods exacerbate latent motor tendencies? Did his acknowledgment of the resulting difficulty lead to his decision to employ amanuenses in France, and at particularly stressful intervals thereafter? Then, too, the alienation between Cooper and his public and his fights with the Whig Party and its press outlets bear some suspicious hint of the sort of moodiness and aggression noted in Lincoln’s case. If Cooper had taken calomel regularly during his early years in Europe, the start of his troubles with the somewhat subdued but notable clashes in England in 1828, before the Swiss holiday, could well have been the first result. Even the fight with Edward S. Gould in Paris, whatever sparked it, and then the long train of quibbles and public battles that followed in its wake, may be partially explicable as a matter of mental truculence on Cooper’s part—although I would still hold that the underlying political and ideological issues were real and serious for him, too. If he took mercury in sufficient quantities to affect him, it may have sharpened but did not cause the indignation that the behavior of other people called forth on various occasions across his life. Nor did it, even as it may have affected his handwriting, cause him to cease inventing scenes such as those he created in the many books he wrote right up to 1850–1851.

Finis The end, whatever the array of its doubtless many causes, came at the close of summer in 1851. Cooper had written Shubrick in mid-April, probably after returning from New York—the letter does not appear to survive—and Shubrick, in answering from Washington at the beginning of May, expressed the hope that his old friend would be able “to take exercise out of doors” now that the Otsego weather was sure to moderate. He also urged Cooper to avoid spending another

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cold season there: “Cooperstown is a bad place for you to spend the winter. You are too much in the house—too much in your arm chair.” Instead, Cooper and his family ought to visit for the next winter with the Shubricks in their new home, which was to be finished by late August. “We are about a mile from the Capitol, a pleasant daily walk for an elderly gentleman” (CORR 2:715–16). Cooper’s mind, though, was on other things. On Ash Wednesday (March 5), before his final Manhattan trip, he had been baptized at Christ Church, as his eldest daughter prayerfully recorded in her diary. He took communion on Easter (April 20), after returning from New York City, and on July 27 he was confirmed as a member of a congregation he had long served as the son of sometime Quakers but the husband of a confirmed Episcopalian. These steps he must have taken in full recognition that his health probably would not get better. He was sorely taxed by the long church service at the end of July and had clearly endured it because his wife and daughters pressed him to enter the fold around whose edges he had long tarried. His eldest daughter said it well when she noted “how very happy we have been made by the vitally important steps my Father has taken during the last year.” He may have been squaring himself with God, but he was also making a few last moves to ensure that his wife in particular, but also his daughters, felt easy about him. The younger Susan thus remarked that these efforts were of “unspeakable importance” to herself and his other female relatives. That the July 27 ceremony was performed by Cooper’s brother-in-law, the Right Reverend Bishop William H. DeLancey, underscores the intertwining of genealogy and family habits with matters of the soul. Cooper had certainly been coming closer to God over the past decade particularly, but he danced this last ritual dance for many reasons, some of them worldly.40 Certainly his last thoughts aimed at times in a more worldly direction. He insisted on taking his wife on their customary drives to his hillside farm as late as the third or fourth week of July, just before the confirmation ceremony. He was himself, apparently, at the reins through the period, although as the days passed he had to be helped onto, and eventually lifted into, the carriage. Thereafter he became steadily worse. His eldest daughter wrote Anna Jay, William’s sister, on July 28 with that news. While she felt “able to assure” Anna that her father “was not so ill as the papers”—Greeley’s for one—“have represented him,” she confessed that she and the rest of her family felt “much anxiety about him.” Having rehearsed the course of his disease over the past two years, Susan happily reported that his doctors thought his liver was “yielding to medecine [sic],” yet added that his legs were “in a very bad state”: “He can scarcely walk at all without assistance.” She found his spirits “usually good, and his head perfectly clear.” Dr. Francis, she added, had led them to think his recovery possible, but the fact that he spoke of the affliction as a form of paralysis—a new

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term in the archive—was disheartening. Cooper’s manner was sweet; he expressed thanks for every little service those around him performed. He had been working regularly on The Towns of Manhattan, dictating to Charlotte, Susan noted, “until within the last few days.” Then he had to stop because “his physicians forbade his doing so any longer, lest he might overtask himself unconsciously.”41 In July, Shubrick, perhaps acknowledging that Cooper would not be able to visit him in Washington come the next winter, came to Otsego to see his old friend for what proved one last time.42 On August 11, Paul Cooper, visiting in Otsego, drafted a letter to Dr. Francis at his father’s request. The novelist wanted Francis to know that “the weakness and the swelling also in both his legs are very decidedly increased, and that both grow daily worse.” This was Cooper’s main worry at present. Walking by himself was unthinkable; even with someone supporting him on each side it was very difficult. He nonetheless insisted on taking his customary exercise, which consisted of going up and down the long main hall of the house forty times—not all at once now, but in fifteen or sixteen separate bouts, each of which exhausted him. Cooper thought there was “no change” in his liver. He was drinking large quantities of “Congress water”—mildly cathartic, from the Congress Spring at Saratoga—without ill effect. And he was sleeping fairly well, going to bed at nine and arising at six, though sometimes he would lie awake from midnight to two. While Dr. Parley Johnson thought his patient was getting enough nutrition, Paul reported his father ate little solid food aside from two “well cooked” eggs every morning, which he found “very acceptable” (even as he thought they might have “bilious” effects on him). About sunset, Cooper also took a “large spoonful of suppan”—cornmeal mush, as the Yankee Jason Newcome in Satanstoe prefers to call it. Paul ended his letter proper with the reiterated point: “The difficulty seems to him still to be the liver.” In a long postscript also written at his father’s insistence, Paul added the odd point that Cooper had “a smoky copperish taste” in his mouth when moving his jaws (the last line reiterated that point: “Just in this instant he says the smoky taste is quite perceptive”), perhaps an indication that, in addition to mercury salts, he was ingesting some salt of copper, a further poison. Paul also stressed here, though, that his father was worried most about his “limbs” and thought exercise of the utmost importance. Whenever the weather allowed, Cooper still went to his farm, but now someone else must have driven.43 In a later recollection, Paul’s eldest sister wrote that, when a friend called as late as the third week of August and offered to take her father for a ride, he expressed the desire to go not to The Châlet but to Three Mile Point, across the lake and farther up, past Fenimore Farm. Susan and apparently Cooper’s wife accompanied him. “We passed along that beautiful road on the western bank of

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the lake, his companions very sad at heart, though concealing, of course, all that was painful. But he himself was smiling and cheerful, enjoying the views of the hills and the water. On reaching the Point the carriage stopped by the road-side, under the shade of the trees. Leaning a little forward, he looked wistfully down through the vista of wood, to the beach.” Just letting his eyes make their way through the gauntlet of memories crowding this scene must have been satisfying. But that was not sufficient. Cooper soon made another request: “I should like a drink from the old spring”—the “delicious spring on the northern side of the point” that Cooper had mentioned in The Deerslayer (DS CE 287). It was hard to take the carriage there on the narrow track, but the driver worked down to the beach and then around on the gravel to the spot where the spring was accessible. Perhaps the cool water as Cooper sipped it temporarily chased away that coppery taste from his mouth. He sat looking out over a scene that was deeply mixed with his earliest memories—and his books. Many men and women had viewed and moved all around and over Glimmerglass across the years, but right now, by dint of his art and his laden recollections, it was very much Cooper’s. It was as much his at present as it was Natty’s when the young hunter emerged from the woods in the last (but also first) Leather-Stocking Tale and claimed it with his innocent, wondering eye (see DS HE xxxix–xl). Earlier in August, when Dr. Johnson wrote his Manhattan colleague John W. Francis, he indicated that Cooper seemed “very cheerful” then, although “his limbs [were] almost useless & somewhat swollen.” He nonetheless was able to “ride daily” and was free from pain. That nostalgic trip to the Point may have been his last. Soon after, Dr. Francis, having received Paul’s letter of the eleventh and perhaps others from various members of the Cooper family, paid an “unexpected” visit to the village.44 The patient was alert and calm when he saw Francis, but since the physician had last laid eyes on him in Manhattan the past spring, “his physical aspect was much altered.” Gone was “that noble freshness he was wont to bear; his complexion was pallid; his inferior extremities greatly enlarged by serious effusion; his debility so extreme as to require an assistant for change of position in bed; his pulse sixty-four. There could be no doubt that the long-continued hepatic obstruction had led to confirmed dropsy”—now called edema, a condition in which the collection of fluid causes tissue to swell— “which, indeed, betrayed itself in several other parts of the body. Yet was he patient and collected. That powerful intellect still held empire with commanding force, clearness, and vigour.” The physician saw that the end was plainly near. He explained to Cooper that his heart was sound and various other indications were likewise good, but there was an “urgent necessity” of countering “particular tendencies in the disorder.” Without a positive shift in the next week, Francis went on, there was little hope to stem the illness. Cooper “listened with fixed

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attention,” asking about possible remedies without giving the least sign of despondency.45 Susan wrote her brother Paul, now back in Albany, about the doctor’s visit: “Was it not kind in him? This shows the greatest interest in Father’s case, and since we have seen [Francis] we all feel much more confident in him; he has no want of decision, on the contrary was very earnest in all he said and did.” While Francis was in Otsego, the novelist’s wife spoke privately with him, learning (as she obviously relayed to Susan and Susan now passed on to Paul) that the patient was “very seriously ill, but not hopelessly so.” Some symptoms seemed worse, while others were “decidedly good.” But the visit seemed to mark a turning point. During the physician’s first night at the house, on August 27, Cooper thus had “an attack of severe fainting,” convincing Francis “still further of his great personal weakness.” The next morning, having slept fairly well, he seemed “refreshed.” Francis spoke with him before leaving for New York, reiterating the good and bad aspects of his condition. Looking back some weeks later, the doctor was convinced that after he left the house Cooper shared with his family the view Francis took of his old friend’s prospects—that is, his “apprehension of a fatal termination of his disorder.” This was bitter news, but Francis thought Cooper had accepted it with grace: “Never was information of so grave a cast received by an individual in a calmer spirit.”46 It nonetheless seems to have hit Cooper hard. Susan tended to blame the resulting deterioration in his condition on the fact that Francis altered her father’s prescription during his visit, either increasing the dosage or switching to some other, presumably stronger, preparation. She thus continued in her letter to Paul: “Since the change in Father’s medicine, a sort of crisis has taken place, last night he had a very great discharge of fluid, the whole mattress was drenched—he is now very feeble, and with no appetite, listless and drowsy—the doctor [Johnson] gives him quinine as a tonic, but we cannot yet tell if it will raise him sufficiently to produce a decided change.” He was now too weak to go out at all, and refused food or medicine his attendants offered him at the hours when, waking him from his doze, they were supposed to see that he took it. The only other thing Susan could say to Paul now was a sort of prayer: “God in his mercy grant that the crisis may end happily!”47 Letters the family sent to Dr. Francis over the next two weeks gave “some cheering facts of renovation” but largely recorded Cooper’s “augmenting illness and lessened hope.”48 If, as seems plausible, the change in medication involved a higher dose of the blue pills Cooper had been taking for some months, the effect cannot have been salutary. Susan’s description of the first event in the crisis suggests what was to follow, and probably why. Yet her father was so far gone by then that the change in medication merely hastened the end.

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Susan wrote in her diary early in October, three weeks after his death, that “he suffered so little pain.”49 That at least was good. She had kept Dr. Francis informed over the last days. There were some moments when, his energy slightly rising, Cooper socialized as much as he could now: in October, Susan wrote Anna Jay that “the society of his friends was always gratifying to him whenever they came to see him.”50 And he was happy to have those around him share incoming mail, as when Susan read a letter that William Jay, Anna’s sister and his father’s oldest friend, had written on September 3 from Westchester, mentioning the reports he had heard of Cooper’s illness and expressing the hope that they were exaggerated.51 But death even then was stalking Otsego Hall. On September 8, Cooper’s first grandchild, nineteen-month-old Harry Phinney, whom he had described to Saidee Cruger in January as “a prodigy” (LJ 6:258), died there. Harry had been sick across much of the summer, as Susan lamented to Paul at the end of August, and the doctor hoped that a return of cool weather might help. But “five weeks of constant diarrhea are a terrible trial on a child’s strength,” she added, and, a week after she recorded that observation, Harry succumbed.52 At just about that time, a paper in Buffalo, where the infant’s grandfather and great uncle now ran their printing business, reported—probably on the basis of correspondence from Cooper’s second daughter or her husband Fred—that “Mr. Fenimore Cooper is not so ill as has been represented; that Dr. Francis visited him from motives of personal friendship, having heard of his illness and having previously been consulted by him; that a new course of treatment has been adopted, and that though now weaker than before, several of his symptoms are more favorable.”53 But all that was not correct on several fronts. Born perhaps of a misguided sense of privacy and a bit of wishful thinking, the report was an effort to forestall the inevitable. Around one in the afternoon on Sunday, September 14, proving yet another newspaper story false, Cooper died. Susan and her mother and several of her siblings were present for “the peaceful close vouchsafed to my beloved Father’s life.” Fred Phinney was also there, in mourning already for his and Cally’s son, and when he wrote a letter that very day informing Dr. Francis of the novelist’s death, the burden must have been heavy.54 The next day, Susan wrote a short meditation that would be found among her papers after her own death in 1894: “Monday, Sep. 15th: His birth-day. He would have been 62. Charlotte and I stay up with his dear remains! His face very noble, and calm. Dear Mother went in with us to see him; kneeling and praying beside him. She is very calm, though grieved to the heart.” Probably the things that needed attention diverted her from the pain. The novelist’s funeral was scheduled for Wednesday, September 17, a week after Harry’s, in Christ Church, with interment in the adjoining churchyard. Before that day came, Cooper lay in

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Otsego Hall, which his father had built more than fifty years before and he himself had reclaimed, restored, and for more than fifteen years reanimated with his life and his art. Susan went to look on him again and again: “I go in very often to see him, and kiss him. His face seems just as dear to me in death as in life. I could sit by him, and caress him all the time. Never before have I loved the face of death” (CORR 2:722).55 Leaving aside the question of death as it figured in Victorian culture generally, we might give Susan the benefit of our doubts. Her love for her father was deep. His nature had been essentially sweet, those who knew him best agreed. He was, Susan would write Rufus W. Griswold in October, profoundly misunderstood, yet his last thoughts were not on his enemies, whom he left behind him without anger: “those who were pleased to traduce him are thoroughly forgiven; the end of the upright was peace.” Griswold, who had met Cooper in that chance encounter at a Philadelphia hotel almost a decade earlier, had spoken, in writing Susan, of the “affection” Cooper “merited.” This set Susan going: “Ah, sir, there indeed he was sorely misrepresented! No man had warmer sympathies, stronger affections, or a more social temper. Yet with the exception of those who knew him intimately, he was no doubt usually considered as a gloomy, disappointed cynic—a character wholly foreign to his nature, as you must be well aware, from your own intercourse with him.” Cooper’s afterimage among the public at large, certainly among those old “enemies,” was a fundamental libel on his character that in some ways still is in circulation.56

Pieces While traveling for the last time to New York in March 1851, Cooper had paused, as he often did, in his old haunt of Albany. One reason was to see his son Paul, who since the previous fall had been a partner in a law firm there. The day after Cooper arrived, he and Paul went for dinner to the home of James Stevenson, where they were joined by another of the novelist’s old friends, Peter Gansevoort, uncle of novelist Herman Melville as well as of Guert Gansevoort, first lieutenant on the Somers. Although this was an early farewell to old allies, Cooper hardly can have thought so yet. Besides, he still had many plans in play. One of the main reasons he was headed to Manhattan was the need to confer with George P. Putnam about his history of that place.57 The two had signed a contract early the previous December under which Cooper would submit copy and then read and correct proofs with sufficient dispatch that Putnam could publish, at his own cost, an edition of two thousand copies by March 1, 1851.58 A brief press reference as early as that January indicated that the book was then “in press,” but the contract’s schedule proved overly optimistic. Even when

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Cooper went to Manhattan on the March trip, he apparently brought little or no copy with him; not until July, when finally able to forward the introduction and the first eight chapters, did he advise Putnam to “commence printing” (LJ 6:279).59 Cooper’s deteriorating health caused much of the delay. But so did his ambitious plans for the book. Envisioning a heavily illustrated volume, for one thing, he relied on knowledge he already had about the city’s material and visual history (seen, for instance, in the close descriptions in a book like The WaterWitch) but also had to conduct further research. Some of that he evidently carried out on his own during various recent trips to New York, consulting books and images to refresh his mind and settle on possible items to use as illustrations. Among those we know he looked at (indeed, probably owned) was David T. Valentine’s Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1847, to which he referred directly when, house-bound, he wrote Putnam in July. He had asserted in the manuscript that there probably was no “single building now standing in New-York” that predated 1750. Was that so? He remembered seeing many earlier buildings himself, and “Valentine, page 370, Corporation Manual for 1847” showed one in particular that he asked Putnam to personally check on for him (LJ 6:279).60 The same July letter sketched audacious plans for fresh writing that also contributed to Cooper’s last-minute delays. He wanted not only to cover the city’s history but also predict—indeed, delineate—its future. Particularly engaged right then with imagining improvements to New York’s shipping infrastructure, Cooper already had written a chapter about the “docks that will connect all the towns on the New-York side”—as opposed to the Jersey side—“of the Hudson.” His proposal was “conjectural,” he admitted, but the subject was of such importance that he wanted a map specially made to codify his vision and pin it to some representation of New York’s actual landscape. “The artist can fill up the East River with slips and quays and ware-houses according to his own fancy, but I wish him to form the outlines of these docks, according to mine. Next the Hudson there must be a massive quay built of stone with a range of ware-houses in the center, and double sets of gates, extending from Whitehall to Governor’s Island, and the same from Governor’s Island to Redhook.” Such a structure, connecting lower Manhattan to Brooklyn via Governor’s Island and the Buttermilk Channel, evidently would handle increased shipping but also control tidal flows into and out of the East River. As if that plan were not ambitious enough, Cooper imagined a similar structure miles north stretching from the upper side of Flushing Bay west across to the mainland between Hell Gate and the Harlem River, thus bridging the East River a second time and similarly protecting its upper end. This enormous embayment would provide plenty of space for loading and unloading the commercial freight Cooper imagined New

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York would increasingly handle over future decades. Interconnected with this “noblest dock in the world,” furthermore, would be short-haul railroads to disperse shipments across the city. Bridges would help not only with delivering goods to and from the docks, but also with “uniting all the towns” that made up the emergent metropolitan area. By means of all these imagined provisions, New York would push “into insignificance” the notable accommodations for trade in London and Liverpool. In order to assist the mapmaker in giving such visions the substance he wanted the chapter to have, Cooper asked Putnam to procure and send to him “an old map of the East river” that he could mark up with his rough intentions (LJ 6:279–80). Putnam, recently returned from a short visit to London, replied to Cooper on July 31. He indicated that he had already given the “first portion” of the book to the printer and that Cooper should receive proofs for it “in a day or two.” Having personally called on David Valentine but found him “not yet come-atable,” Putnam held out the hope that he could soon confer with the compiler of the famous Manual and that Valentine would be able to fill Cooper in on “the old Dutch houses” as well as on the matter of maps. As to the future vision Cooper had sketched, Putnam conceded the usefulness of a sketch laid onto an already published map. Right then, he could enclose “a small map of a portion only of N.Y. Island”—a “large one extending to the Sound &c” that he preferred would have to come later by express.61 The latter evidently was forwarded, but not in time for Cooper to actually mark it up, as Susan reported to Putnam in October. Putnam also sent proofs of four woodcuts already engraved for the book, along with samples of “three or four others” he could commission. And he added a list of six other landmarks, from Trinity Church to the “Marble Palace,” as Alexander T. Stewart’s dry goods store on Broadway at the corner of Reade Street was known, which he could have engraved if Cooper thought best, along with yet others “which are essential.” He wanted Cooper to respond on the question of which ones were essential so that preparations for having the images copied or newly produced could go forward. Among other items enclosed at present, Putnam sent “a bird’s eye view of the city on Stone, which I can have done for a frontispiece.” And he had ordered a fresh plate made from an existing view from the vantage point of Union Square. Taken together, the two would provide “a good notion of the general outline” of the city and thus guide Cooper’s reader.62 Having noticed the somewhat vague nature of Cooper’s letter, Putnam went on to ask whether “the copy is all ready, & how much [of a book] it will make, so that the printer can make his calculations.” He wanted if possible to bring the history out “this Season”—meaning early in the fall. If that was to happen, the finished book would have to be ready for the market in September. That in turn meant that the writing needed to be completed right then, and once

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proofs started flowing to Cooper, he also could not delay in returning his corrections. Putnam, prepared to postpone publication until spring 1852 if necessary, must have thought Cooper had more time than would prove to be the case. The novelist’s July letter having been written in his own hand, the publisher ended his answer with great optimism: “I hope to hear of your complete recovery and that you may soon be in New York.”63 Owing to Cooper’s failing health, not even his will to dictate more of the book to his daughter Cally prevailed. On August 4, only twelve days after his most recent letter to Putnam, Cooper (according to Susan’s later memories) uttered his very last for the project. As if that were not bad enough, three days later still Putnam associate Frederick Saunders wrote to inform Cooper that somehow the last part of his “Introduction” to the book had gone missing.64 Barely a week after Cooper’s death, Putnam, indicating that he had had “two or three sheets set in type,” tried to find out from Paul Cooper more about “the condition of his book,” but Paul, in Albany, passed the query to his sisters in Otsego.65 Susan stepped in not only to manage what the novelist had produced but also to clean up and even add to the unfinished manuscript. She reported to Putnam on October 11 that the missing material mentioned by Saunders had not turned up at Otsego Hall and asked, “Has the waste paper of the printing-office been looked over?” Her suspicions settled on that office because she had discussed the matter with Cally, who had assured her that “a package could not be made up more carefully than that which contained the rest of the MS. and she feels confident that the Introduction, complete, and eight Chapters were sealed up together on that occasion.” Susan went over the proofs Putnam had since sent, finding that the text simply broke off at the bottom of page xli in the “Introduction,” in the middle of a sentence: “To show the influence of places like New York on the pecuniary conditions of the interior, we. . . .” She told him she thought it might be possible to truncate the section at the end of an earlier sentence on the page—“Or, should you prefer it, I might perhaps attempt to add a page myself; it would be an awkward, and an unpleasant task to me, but it might be done if necessary.”66 By the end of October, the publisher had determined, as he wrote Paul Cooper, that the unfinished book should “be published as a fragment, (being only about half completed) with some notes by your sister.” He concluded, however, that it would not be possible to bring the book out by December—February 1852 was now a more likely target—and that it would amount to only about a half the intended size. Susan, with Putnam’s encouragement, apparently wrote enough additional material to bring the “Introduction” to what she must have considered a close replication of her father’s original.67 The fire that destroyed much of the copy for Cooper’s New York history has already been mentioned. Putnam conveyed news of the event to Susan

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Cooper in the letter, dated January 23, that he wrote primarily to console her for another family tragedy, the sudden death of her mother, reportedly from the effects of her old affliction, asthma, three days earlier. He was “reluctant to say a word” about “business matters” at this moment, but added, “it seems proper that you sh[oul]d be informed that the question raised about the ‘Towns of Manhattan’ has been suddenly solved by an unexpected disaster—the destruction of the whole edition by fire at the printers. A portion only of the MS. is saved at the store—all the rest—both printed & MS. is destroyed. My own loss has been very severe—about $3000—besides the paper (costing about $350) for this work.”68 In December, Susan had raised the “question” to which Putnam referred in conveying news of the fire. The book by that time had been set in type and proofs had been pulled, but Susan, as James F. Beard summarized the matter, “proposed a remodeling of the entire work,” a point that, Beard added, understandably did not set well with Putnam.69 Once the fire ravaged the printer Craighead’s Fulton Street shop, the only pieces of The Towns of Manhattan that survived were two partial and not completely overlapping sets of proofs for the “Introduction” and one set covering the entire first chapter and part of the second, along with some fragments of the manuscript. One set of the proofs for the “Introduction,” which presumably had been complete, had been forwarded by Putnam to “a literary gentleman, then editor of a popular critical journal.” A little more than twelve years after the fire, this set became the basis for a series of excerpts published as “New York” in The Spirit of the Fair, a short-lived daily paper that appeared for the duration of the April 1864 New York Metropolitan Fair, a fundraising effort in support of the Sanitary Commission.70 In 1930, historian Dixon Ryan Fox edited this series as New York. By James Fenimore Cooper. Being an Introduction to an Unpublished Manuscript, by the Author, entitled The Towns of Manhattan. In 1953, Beard published material from the other set of proofs and surviving manuscript fragments as “The First History of Greater New York: Unknown Portions of Fenimore Cooper’s Last Work.”71 Together, these pieces provided a delayed and fragmentary end for what Cooper had imagined as an innovative as well as comprehensive account of his adopted city.

Memories Belatedly and in these bits of text, Cooper spoke from beyond the grave about New York. In its turn, New York gathered its wits following his death and paid him its own attenuated tribute. The New York Times, literally the city’s newest paper, printed news of Cooper’s death in its very first issue, on September 18, 1851. It got some of the facts wrong: he had not “graduated at Yale College in 1805,” nor “entered the Navy as a Midshipman the next year,” nor served in it for

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six years before leaving. But the paper also got some things right: “Cooper was not only a Novelist, but a man of strong intellect, clear and quick in his apprehensions, fearless in conduct and gifted with a force of will, which would have made its mark conspicuous in any calling upon which he might have entered.” Each clause in that summary judgment was fair but also astute. Moreover, the last line in the Times story—“His genius is one of which Americans should be proud”—remains even now, more than 160 years after his death, spot-on.72 He had his personal and artistic failings, to be sure. But they were often the underside of his very real talents. Cooper was not the sort of artist who explored some inner realm of poetic truth, circling ever more tightly as he went deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of his own contriving. He was instead a person who grappled with the manifold voices and visions of his time, rarely seeking a fight for its own sake but never avoiding one out of a wish to have peace in his own day, for he knew that peace so procured would sour from its inward deceits. In the process of being true to his own sense of the right, Cooper engaged a wide range of human experience, wider perhaps than had Walter Scott or certainly Jane Austen, or would Charles Dickens and, indeed, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe—even the prolific Henry James. In the sixteen novels Cooper wrote between 1840 and 1850, his settings ranged from Lake Ontario to Devonshire and Naples and on to the Florida Keys, Michigan, a group of alluring Pacific islands, and frigid Antarctic wastes. At the same time, though, seven of those final novels were set wholly or in part in his beloved (if never quite native) New York, both city and state. The last of them, furthermore, engaged the outskirts of contemporary Manhattan and, as we have seen, he was even then taking Manhattan itself as the central subject of his final nonfictional work. Local and cosmopolitan by turns, Cooper mapped his world at varying scales. He was never at a loss for new ideas nor, though it has been held against him, for words. Within a week of running its obituary, the Times noted efforts by an array of New Yorkers to “render appropriate honors” to Cooper. Among the plans discussed was the erection of a suitable monument somewhere in the city, an effort in which Cooper’s old friend Horatio Greenough became involved. But Greenough’s own sudden death in December 1852, along with other complications, left those plans essentially unrealized.73 Attention focused in the meantime on arranging for a suitable public ceremony. What was supposed to be a memorial gathering called by Rufus W. Griswold for the afternoon of Wednesday, September 24, fewer than two weeks after Cooper’s death, became instead a planning session for a larger public event that would be held in February 1852. Many prominent friends attended the first event, including Irving and Fitz-Greene Halleck, as well as Dr. Francis and Cooper’s old publisher, Henry C. Carey.

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Among the most important of those who could not come was Cooper’s longterm friend and fellow Democrat William Cullen Bryant. Then attending the state agricultural fair in Rochester (and after that bound for Chicago), Bryant mailed his regrets on September 19 but agreed in absentia to “any step” that might be taken to honor Cooper’s memory. George Bancroft similarly could not come, like his fellow historian William H. Prescott and the novelists John Neal and William Gilmore Simms.74 The attendees chose Irving to preside and Halleck and Griswold to serve as secretary and associate secretary, respectively. Irving in turn appointed a committee of five (Halleck, Bancroft, Dr. Francis, superior court judge John Duer, and lawyer and novelist Richard B. Kimball), the first of several bodies to be formed and reformed over coming weeks.75 The plan to honor Cooper’s memory required, first, finding the right person to address the public meeting. Because Irving, owing to a recent fall from his horse at Sunnyside, stayed away from the city for some time, Griswold took charge.76 The morning after the September meeting, he sent Cooper’s eldest daughter a newspaper story about it and informed her, “I believe it is in contemplation to have an eloge [sic] delivered sometime this fall by one of the most distinguished of Mr. Cooper’s friends”— either “Bryant or Bancroft.”77 The poet, who was the eventual choice and did very well at the task, did not volunteer for it. When he picked up news on the subject almost immediately on his return from Chicago to New York in October, he thus wrote his wife, “What I feared is true—they want me to give a eulogy on Cooper.” “They” was clearly Griswold, who must have spoken with Bryant as soon as possible. Even so, Griswold did not share with Susan Cooper word of his formal acceptance of the duty until November 11.78 At the Astor House across the fall, committee members met to plan other parts of the event, set first for December 16, then Christmas Eve, and eventually the last Wednesday in February.79 In the meantime, Griswold was working on a published tribute to Cooper loosely connected to the public meeting. The Memorial volume ultimately published by committee member George P. Putnam the following April, which contained Bryant’s “Discourse” along with many other items from the meeting, was impressive in its own way but was a muchreduced version of what Griswold originally envisioned.80 As he explained to Susan Cooper in his November letter, Griswold wanted to produce “two large octavo volumes” of what he already was calling “The Inedited Works of Mr. Cooper.” This impressive set would embrace, as he went on for Susan, “Tales, Essays, Biographies, etc. (including if necessary The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief, of which he retained the copyright; his articles in the Democratic Review on James’s History of the Navy, and various tracts, and his Letter to Lafayette, etc.).” To all this would be added Bryant’s expected address

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and other testimonials from the planned memorial event—that is, the very materials to which Putnam’s 1852 slim Memorial would be boiled down. Griswold was clearly thinking big, and he claimed the committee (no doubt including Putnam) had endorsed his idea. He furthermore solicited Susan’s advice about “any unpublished writings of Mr. Cooper, or uncollected writings, that can be made use of.”81 Griswold played to the purse as well as the pride of the Coopers, and the family in fact welcomed his initiative. Since word of their serious financial plight had already begun to circulate, Griswold was savvy enough to stress the sizable windfall they might receive from the venture—fully $10,000. He added that he hoped to hear from Susan soon enough for the matter to be brought up at the committee’s next meeting, slated for November 20, obviously so the project could move forward.82 On their own, the Coopers had been trying to figure out how to derive some intermittent—better yet, continuing—financial benefit from the novelist’s large body of work. Cally and Fred Phinney focused attention on reissuing two works, the History of the Navy and The American Democrat, rights to both of which Cally had received as a gift from her father two years earlier.83 For the former work, the couple evidently wished to commission a fresh continuation of the narrative. When Mrs. Cooper objected to the idea of someone else’s prose being added to her husband’s text, the family instead decided to reprint the existing version through Putnam, who began to set and apparently print it. Following Mrs. Cooper’s death late in January, the Phinneys reverted to their original notion, putting a hold on the new Putnam edition while they sought to recruit a suitable person to extend the narrative.84 By March 1852, if not slightly earlier, Cally and especially Fred took the lead in this effort, on which Susan advised them. Although eventually the continuation would be written by Fred Phinney’s brother-in-law, Rev. Charles McHarg (with input from navy men William B. Shubrick and Charles Morris), other possibilities they considered included Richard H. Dana the younger as well as William H. Prescott and Charles Wilkes.85 Back in the fall of 1851, the Phinneys also hoped to reissue The American Democrat. Here, too, Mrs. Cooper intervened, and more forcefully, after learning that Fred sought to make the book more marketable by changing its title and abridging its contents in some unspecified manner. His mother-in-law wrote him in mid-December 1851, obviously after some continuing correspondence or discussion: “I still feel unwilling, that you should change the name of the ‘American Democrat’ or should strike out any part of it.” She was not utterly opposed to a fresh edition, one notes, and in fact supported Fred’s plan to embellish the new version with an “engraving from Mr. Brady’s daguerotype [sic],” and even to add a variety of other materials, including letters Cooper had sent

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“to different literary societies, or in answer to the invitation of the Printers of Philadelphia and New York, to attend their annual dinners.” As to Fred’s wish to add some preface that would sketch the novelist’s life, however, she was adamantly opposed: any “Biographical notice” derived from previous sources or written on purpose for the Phinney edition, she thought, would violate “my Husband[’]s earnest charge, against any authorized biography,” evidently a death-bed prohibition. In this instance, Mrs. Cooper’s opinions held sway even after her own death: there would be no fresh edition of The American Democrat until the one issued in 1931 with H. L. Mencken’s introduction. And there would be, until the present volume and its predecessor, no biography based on the family archive.86 Mrs. Cooper, by contrast, supported Griswold’s “double octavo” project as “a memorial worthy [of her] dear Husband’s name,” and as a source of important “pecuniary” benefits. She went through possible “illustrations” for it herself, apparently with her eldest daughter’s aid, but her death early in 1852 probably caused Putnam to suspend his work on the naval history and Griswold to abandon the “Inedited Works.”87 The fire that destroyed much of The Towns of Manhattan at virtually the same time sealed the doom of both of these other projects, since Putnam now had extended credits to the Cooper family that it might be difficult to recoup. Doubtless he felt he could not undertake a new venture of the scope that Griswold had proposed, even though Mrs. Cooper had endorsed it. The naval history, already printed as Fred Phinney indicated, could not be abandoned but was put off until Fred and Cally took it up again. It would finally appear in October 1853, copyrighted in Cally’s name, and would be reprinted by Putnam with some corrections the next year (see HN 1854 [xii]). These same unfortunate circumstances no doubt caused Putnam to cut Griswold’s opus back to its essentials, producing a Memorial volume that documented the honors New York and the nation paid Cooper but contained nothing from his own pen, “inedited” or not. The thin book included some preliminary materials covering the Irving-Griswold committee’s early activities, but mostly it focused on the February 25 gathering, held in Manhattan’s lavish new theater, Tripler (or Metropolitan) Hall, at 667 Broadway. As such, the volume surely had less circulation than Griswold’s proposed octavos would have, but at the same time it gave sharper focus to the memorial meeting itself. That event opened with a brief self-effacing comment by Washington Irving. Although in some quarters it was still being reported that he would deliver a fuller address, he did not. Hastily, he performed his only function—“to present to you the Hon. daniel webster,” who was to preside and who in fact did make a brief contri­ bution. Now for the second time serving as the U.S. secretary of state, the orator and politician had been an associate of Cooper from the 1820s, when he

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reportedly was a guest at Bread and Cheese Lunch gatherings.88 But the two hardly were close, and the statesman admitted that he was no great reader of the novelist: “As far as I am acquainted with the writings of Mr. Cooper, they uphold good sentiments, sustain good morals, and maintain just taste; and, after saying this, I have next to add that all his writings are truly patriotic and American throughout and throughout.” Thomas Lounsbury, in his 1882 biography of Cooper for the original “American Men of Letters Series,” would pounce on Webster’s comments: “He had nothing to say, and he said it wretchedly.”89 As a description, this is unexceptionable. Yet it is only fair to note that the greatest living American public speaker was there not to deliver a long oration or offer profound critical insights, but rather to honor by his mere presence the nation’s first successful, internationally acclaimed novelist. Accordingly, when he was first contacted in November by his old Bread and Cheese associate Charles King about attending the memorial, Webster replied that he would try to come provided that well-known literary figures would, too.90 In any case, Webster kept his comments brief, and when done he followed the evening’s plans by properly turning to Bryant—the literary figure who would handle the questions Webster could not. There was, at that point, something of a glitch. Before Bryant could begin, the usually officious Dr. Griswold came forward to read “a few of the . . . letters” the committee had received from the absent great. He was, wrote the novelist’s nephew Ned DeLancey, “in execrable voice,” so that after he had croaked through “five or six, they called out ‘Bryant’ ‘Bryant’ and the Dr. sat down, and let B. begin his address, which was next in order.” Those sending letters included the writers Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Prescott, Francis Parkman, the elder Dana, and Melville—plus public figures such as Lewis Cass, Charles Sumner, and Richard Rush. There appears to be no record of which letters Griswold actually got through before he was silenced and turned the podium over to Bryant.91 None of the novelist’s children, still recovering from the more recent shock of their mother’s death, attended the event. Ned DeLancey assured Paul Cooper the next day that, once Bryant began to speak, “all went off exceedingly well.” Although Parke Godwin would later write that Bryant “spoke with less power than when he delivered his funeral oration on [Thomas] Cole,” he conceded that the poet’s manner was “still warm, earnest, and eloquent.” DeLancey, who estimated the crowd at forty-five hundred people, reported that Bryant “held the audience enchained for an hour & a quarter.” (Bryant’s paper would confirm that he started at 8:30 and finished around 9:45.) To provide more detail on the event for Paul, Ned enclosed a copy of the Daily Tribune for him, commenting that it gave “the best acct. of the proceedings” (that in the New York Herald was, he added, “a perfect travestie [sic] of the whole thing”). He was right about the

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relative value of these morning press reports. James Gordon Bennett’s Herald went for the easy, dismissive joke in its summary of the day’s events: Bryant’s address “was tedious, being partly a review of the writings of Cooper, and partly a biography; and it appears that such was its soporiferous effects, that even [Daniel Webster] fell asleep,” a point confirmed nowhere else. In the Tribune, by contrast, Horace Greeley gave full transcriptions with no snide commentary. The animosities of the previous decade had notably subsided. Greeley’s account pleased Ned, but he was even happier later in the day when Bryant’s coverage in the Evening Post appeared—for he went back and scrawled a postscript across the top of the first page of his letter alerting Paul to the fact that he had ordered copies of Bryant’s paper “for all the family.” The Evening Post gave prominent first-page treatment, for one thing, whereas Greeley ran the story on page 4 and Bryant’s own address on pages 5 and 6.92 It seems likely that Bryant had already set his address in type before the meeting, since the versions appearing the next morning in rival papers like Greeley’s and even Bennett’s, despite DeLancey’s criticisms of both, followed not only Bryant’s wording, but also, for the most part, his punctuation in the later version in the Evening Post, which in turn would be followed by Putnam for the Memorial. Bryant included discussion of a subject that Greeley might well have liked to excise—the libel suits—but he (and Bennett, too) included that discussion by Bryant with only a few minor differences. The poet-editor’s even-tempered approach to that topic, and to the rest of Cooper’s career, set a tone of fairness that would go some distance toward ensuring that the novelist’s reputation over the following years had a new luster. That the “Discourse” was used in Stringer and Townsend’s cheap sets of Cooper’s works, and then in the one Townsend on his own brought out in 1859–1861 with the Darley illustrations, made it easy for readers over the next several decades to navigate Cooper’s texts with the guidance of his longtime friend and fellow writer.93 Probably the deepest appreciation of Cooper as man and writer came, though, in the comments of a man who had never met him or even seen him— Herman Melville. In a letter from Pittsfield dated about a month after Moby-Dick had appeared in New York, Melville recalled the “vivid and awakening power” Cooper’s books had exerted on his mind during his boyhood back in Albany. To have such an effect on such a mind was indeed something, and now Melville repaid part of the debt. He was writing Griswold about the later-postponed December 24 meeting, but the sentiments suited the February gathering just as well. Reflecting on the unpopularity Cooper suffered during his latter years, Melville admitted it always “pained” him that Cooper’s fame in the United States had received that “slight, temporary clouding.” He recognized that Cooper may have called some of his troubles down on himself, but any weaknesses he had

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were of the sort that are “the almost infallible indices of pervading greatness.” Cooper, Melville added, “was a great, robust-souled man, all whose merits are not even yet fully appreciated.” Now at the last Christmas of his own soonfading fame, Melville remained optimistic: “a grateful Posterity,” he predicted, “will take the best of Care” of Fenimore Cooper.94 That has and has not happened. Cooper’s legacy is mixed, but some things remain clear. He established more kinds of fiction than his contemporaries in the United States—indeed, contemporaries or followers. His innovations include such American standards as the frontier novel (or western, as it later came to be called) and the U.S. version of the historical romance modeled on those of Walter Scott, as well as the very idea of a series of long fictions centered on a single actor (the Leather-Stocking Tales) or small group of actors (the Littlepage series). In a broader frame of reference, he created forms of such worldwide importance as the sea novel and the spy novel, the fundamental tropes for both of which derive from novels he penned in his first few years. He remains a vital force in world cinema as a source of specific stories but even more of general story lines related to those literary formulas. In these regards, it is worth stressing that, among his fellow novelists in the United States in the 1820s, only Cooper set up models that were to be followed for such a long time by other artists at home and abroad. He has been widely read and therefore very influential in the United States and around the world. To cite one example: the very first novel that the future author of Giants in the Earth (1927), Ole Rölvaag, read in his native Norway was The Last of the Mohicans, and Lincoln Colcord, his friend (and co-translator of Rölvaag’s “Saga of the Prairie”), added that “all of Cooper’s novels followed.”95 One looks in vain for a similar effect among the other novels published in the 1820s by Cooper’s compatriots. This is not to deny the importance of Catharine Maria Sedgwick or John Neal or James Kirke Paulding or Lydia Maria Child or any of the others who worked in the field then. It is only to stress how extraordinarily influential Cooper’s works were at the time and have remained ever since, and that despite his later troubles with public opinion and the press. If, as Philip Gura has argued recently, Sedgwick “established patterns that many authors, particularly women, reprised through the 1860s,” that end date itself makes my point about the influence Cooper exerted well past it. Moreover, when her second piece of long fiction, Redwood: A Tale (1824), was reprinted by European publishers who attributed it instead to Cooper, that was proof not only of her marketability abroad but also of Cooper’s better name recognition there even this early in their careers, when both of them published their works anonymously.96 We can begin to appreciate the scope and magnitude of his accomplishment by taking a brief backward survey. In the fifty years from 1770 to 1820, only

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about a hundred novels had been written and published by writers working in what by the latter year was the United States, many quite brief by comparison to later practice and most by authors who wrote only one or two such books. It was in the 1820s, when another hundred such books appeared, that the American novel as a cultural form—a set of imaginary tales reflecting on the individual and collective experience of the American people—first struggled into its own. During that decade, Cooper alone published virtually 10 percent of the overall national output, far more than any other single writer and almost as many as the four next most active writers combined. John Neal, who began his work with the two-volume novel Keep Cool in 1817, gave Cooper the stiffest competition in sheer numbers of separate works in the 1820s, when he issued five more novels (three of them in 1823, the last in 1828). But Neal, so frenetically active during those years, published very little fiction thereafter and by 1840 was virtually done with his strictly literary career until a flurry of late books published well beyond Cooper’s death. Moreover, whereas six of Cooper’s first nine novels were best sellers, Neal’s were never widely reprinted in his day. It therefore is no exaggeration to say that it was Cooper who gave the initial impetus to the American novel’s rising momentum with The Spy in 1821, the only book from that year that is still read at all widely. Only four other American works of fiction, broadly defined, were published that year, as listed in Lyle H. Wright’s standard but not overly precise bibliography. It is good to pause briefly over them. They were called: Love of Praise, James Talbot, Ida of Tokenburg, and Tales of the Tripod. The first two of these were very short, only 23 and 37 pages, respectively; the longest (the anonymous Ida of Tokenburg) ran to 211 pages; the last was a collection of three shorter tales rather than a novel strictly speaking. For 1821, that was it, aside, again, from the immediately popular and quickly revised and reprinted The Spy.97 Cooper outlasted not only Neal but also all his other early U.S. competitors. As I also noted briefly in my introduction, none of the latter was active as a novelist when Cooper reached his most productive phase in the forties. He was thus the only novelist from the 1820s who continued steadily active and successful up to 1850. A few pertinent comparisons can suggest the degree of contrast. Paulding was busy before and during the 1820s but did not publish his first novel (Koningsmarke) until 1823, and it was the early thirties before he published his next two; he then took a long break, not publishing his fourth and fifth until the later 1840s, after he had retired from public life.98 Sedgwick, who had published three important novels in the 1820s, brought out her fourth in 1830 and a fifth in 1835 but then abandoned long adult fiction except for her last novel, Married or Single?, issued as late as 1857. A similar pattern is evident in the career of Lydia M. Child, who brought out two novels in quick succession in the 1820s but published no

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others until Philothea (1836), which was set in classical Greece. Like Neal, all these other early novelists had rivaled Cooper in the 1820s and all remained alive and writing in the later decades but had turned to other concerns and forms, essentially conceding the field of long fiction to him. Cooper’s dogged longevity as a writer left him virtually alone in the 1840s as a very active holdover from the founding decade of the American novel—even as he, too, experimented in his final decade with many other kinds of writing. It should be added, too, that one of Cooper’s primary motives for writing, his need for a professional income, pushed him to develop commercial possibilities that benefited all his competitors from the 1820s on. He did not write for money, or not for money alone, but he was proud of his labor as such and persistently sought remuneration that made it possible for him to devote himself to literature rather than to some other pursuit. His experimentation with booksellers like Andrew T. Goodrich (for Precaution in 1820) and Charles Wiley (for The Spy and the next four novels, ending with The Last of the Mohicans in 1826) and then his successful deals with Carey and Lea in 1826–1827 and thereafter made it possible for other writers to seek, if not always to secure, payment for their novels from the newly emerging publishing houses in Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere. The novel as a social institution and a cultural form would never have established itself had it not been for the material networks that writers and publishers together created. And Cooper was a key player in this effort— indeed, the key player in it during the 1820s, since he almost singlehandedly gave the production of long fiction by U.S. writers a commercial value. For one thing, he proved by his popularity that American readers would pay a premium for works that addressed their collective experience: as they usually could buy imported works more cheaply, the added value they found in works by Cooper and his compatriots clearly motivated them to spend more. There was nothing natural or inevitable about this set of developments; they resulted from the inventive efforts of many parties, Cooper and his fellow writers among them. As we have seen in the later chapters of this volume, by the 1840s the fiction marketplace changed, limiting profits for publishers and authors alike. Even so, by that decade many new American writers were active, the number of novels by U.S. writers appearing each year had increased roughly eightfold, and the importation of literature from abroad, always significant, had become an even more sizable business in its own right. Facing the resulting decrease in earnings and increase in competition, Cooper still occupied a remarkable position among native writers. He admittedly never came close to matching a prolific popular figure such as Joseph Holt Ingraham, who in the single year of 1846 published sixteen separately issued works of fiction, though most of those were short tales in the as-yet-unnamed “paperback” or “dime novel” format, and were usually

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fewer, often much fewer, than a hundred pages in length. But no one else matched Ingraham, either, and his most productive period, ending in 1847, was in any case quite brief.99 And, among major new novelists who came on the scene in the 1830s and 1840s, Cooper was still at the top in terms of how much he wrote and in the fresh variety of forms, points of view, and themes evident in his new books. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s productivity was never high, and in any case most of his work lay ahead, in the 1850s; he had published one short and unsuccessful novel in 1828 and did not bring out a second—albeit this was The Scarlet Letter—until 1850, the year Cooper published his last novel. Herman Melville’s most productive and successful half-decade as a novelist was technically the later 1840s, but even then he published only five books, and his sixth (Moby-Dick) in 1851 to all intents ended his career as a popular writer even as it laid the foundation of his permanent fame. So, after Ingraham and Simms and such “cause” authors as temperance novelist Timothy Shay Arthur, Cooper in a new way dominated the market in U.S. fiction in his final decade. I mean these comments as no reflection on the importance of The Scarlet Letter or Moby-Dick, obviously, or their sheer brilliance as verbal art. Cooper never had a comparable accomplishment; his effect was powerful, but broad and suggestive rather than focused and deep. Nor are my earlier comments meant as a dismissal of the work done by Sedgwick, Child, Paulding, Neal, and other of Cooper’s early competitors. That he outlasted those early figures and also outwrote the rising generation as represented by Hawthorne and Melville is nonetheless an important mark of his long-lived presence in and effect on the field. And through his last decade, as we have seen across the later chapters here, he sold more copies of his books than he had in earlier decades. This was true even as his new books for the most part continued to sell at noticeably higher prices than the market in general, and despite the fact that competition from cheap imported fiction not eligible for copyright protection was intense. Across the 1840s, Cooper remained a vital force in the literary marketplace in part because of the several important artistic and thematic transformations he undertook as he resumed and intensified his career. Although in various instances he produced further versions of forms he had introduced in the 1820s (the sea novel and the frontier novel especially), those new versions were themselves innovative. And he had several breakthroughs not only in fiction (for which Afloat and Ashore and the Littlepage series offer the best proof ), but also via his more direct commentary on national experience in works ranging from The History of the Navy in its various versions between 1839 and 1847 to the ambitious but incomplete and mostly lost Towns of Manhattan of 1850–1851. Melville brooded long over Billy Budd, his indirect response to the Somers mutiny in which his first cousin Guert Gansevoort had played so disturbing a role; Cooper

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engaged the mutiny and the resulting court martial directly and trenchantly, and within a short period after the events. For thirty-one years, he had similarly engaged current issues even when doing so made his personal and professional situations difficult. In his fiction, he also created a company of characters who represented—amply if not perfectly—the demographic richness of his rising nation. If his primary gift to future generations of artists was a set of formative models that coached and enabled their own creativity, his most significant legacy for the nation at large was the collective portrait that he, like Mathew Brady with his indefatigable camera, left for his future compatriots. We are measurably richer for Cooper’s embrace of the landscapes and seascapes of his era, which he populated with a fair sample of the personnel of the period. In his books we can still read the imprint of the fractured experiment in democracy that began in the year of his birth and is still, in its own jolting way, moving on. Indeed, even in Cooper’s often remarked deficiencies as a writer we can trace the sometimes faltering power that is inevitable in such a grand attempt. In his very imperfections Fenimore Cooper bespeaks us. We should indeed, as Melville urged, take better care of him.

Appendix: Cooper’s Libel Suits

General Note: As indicated in chapter 8, Cooper filed at least thirteen separate civil suits against newspaper publishers and secured three criminal indictments against two of them as well. The dollar amounts of his various judgments are stated below where they are known, but it is important to note that he did not actually receive all the money awarded him. Money was not, in any case, an important motive for Cooper in bringing legal action against any of the publishers. He probably spent more conducting the suits than he won in awards. Elias P. Pellet, of the Chenango Telegraph in Norwich, New York: •  A civil suit filed in September 1837 for an 8/2/1837 story about the Three Mile Point controversy; slated for trial in February 1840, but Pellet died at the start of January and Cooper did not press the suit. •  A criminal indictment secured in June 1839 for a story published that May about Cooper’s suit against Andrew Barber; likewise slated for trial at the time of Pellet’s death. Andrew Barber, of the Otsego Republican in Cooperstown: •  A civil suit, filed in September 1837, for reprinting Pellet’s 8/2/1837 story, with additional comments on Three Mile Point; Cooper won $400 damages plus costs in a May 1839 trial (not until February 1841 did Cooper receive a part of that judgment).

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A ppendix : C ooper ’ s L ibel S uits

James Watson Webb, of the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer: •  A criminal indictment secured in February 1839 for a review of Home as Found published on 11/22/1838; several proceedings on it led to postponement, referral from the circuit court to the supreme court, two hung juries, and at last an acquittal (in November 1843). •  A second criminal indictment secured in June 1839 for a 5/24/1839 newspaper story about the means by which Cooper had secured the first indictment; withdrawn in November 1841 when Webb, after negotiations with Cooper, agreed to issue a retraction of the story in question. Park Benjamin, of the New York Evening Signal and the New World (weekly): •  A civil suit filed in May 1840 for his reprint of and comments on a paragraph from Webb’s paper; after delays owing to what one court called Benjamin’s “frivolous” legal moves, in September 1841 Cooper won a default ruling and damages of $375. Thurlow Weed, of the Albany Evening Journal: •  A civil suit filed early in 1840 for the 8/12/1837 reprinting (with added comment) of Pellet’s 8/2/1837 Three Mile Point article; after considerable delay, Cooper received a default court judgment against the absent Weed in November 1841, with an award of $400. •  A second civil suit filed at the end of 1841 for a report on the above trial that Weed reprinted on 11/22/1841 from Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune (but that Weed in fact had himself written); slated for trial in December 1842 but settled out of court when Cooper’s agent, Daniel Cady, secured Weed’s retraction. •  Two civil suits filed in later 1841 or early 1842 for various articles on the libel suits that Weed reprinted early in December 1841 from a variety of other papers (including Greeley’s Tribune) and one article of his own published on 12/4/1841; Cooper won $142 in damages at the trial in April 1842. •  A fifth civil suit filed at the same time as the above for Weed’s 11/27/1841 reprinting of two articles from other papers (including Benjamin’s New World); Cooper won $400 in damages at the trial in September 1842. Horace Greeley, of the New York Tribune: •  A civil suit filed late in 1841 for the “anonymous” report on the November 1841 Weed trial (written by Weed himself ), which Greeley published on 11/20/1841; trial scheduled for May 1842 but delayed until 12/9/1842, when Cooper won $200 in damages. •  A second civil suit, filed in December 1842, for Greeley’s 11/29/1841 article reacting to news of the first suit and, on a second count, his 12/12/1842 account of his first trial; much delayed until, after a New York Supreme Court hearing on 5/14/1845 found for each man on one of the counts, both men dropped the case.

A ppendix : C ooper ’ s L ibel S uits

William L. Stone, of the New York Commercial Advertiser: •  A civil suit filed in April 1840 for portions of two in a series of four anonymous review articles (written by William A. Duer) treating Cooper’s naval history and published by Stone from 6/8/1839 to 6/19/1839; after several court hearings Stone and Cooper submitted the case in May 1842 to an arbitration panel, which the following month ruled for Cooper, ordering $250 damages. •  A second suit filed soon after a 7/6/1842 article on Cooper’s supposed eagerness to collect the arbitrators’ damages; this Cooper won by default in May 1843, receiving damages of $250 in September (after Stone’s death, however, the Court for the Correction of Errors reversed the judgment). Rufus R. Northway, of the Oneida Whig in Utica: •  A civil suit filed at the end of 1841 or the start of 1842 for Northway’s 11/30/1841 article in the Oneida Whig on the default verdict against Weed two weeks earlier; the jury in the April 1842 trial awarded Cooper $75 in damages.

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Abbreviations

INDIVIDUALS AND INSTITUTIONS HSFC JFB JFC/JC PFC RFC SDC SFC WC

Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr. James Franklin Beard James Fenimore Cooper Paul Fenimore Cooper, Jr. Richard Fenimore Cooper Susan DeLancey Cooper Susan Fenimore Cooper Judge William Cooper

AAS HCA NARA NYHS NYSHA NYSL YCAL

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. Paul Fenimore Cooper, Jr., Archives, Hartwick College, Oneonta, N.Y. National Archives and Records Administration New-York Historical Society, New York City New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown New York State Library Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University

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A bbreviations

WRITINGS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER Collected Editions CE “Cooper Edition.” The Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard, Kay Seymour House, Lance Schachterle, and others. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980–1991, 17 vols.; New York: AMS Press, 2002–present, 7 vols. HE “Household Edition.” J. Fenimore Cooper’s Works. Household Edition (cover title). Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1876 (5 vols.; the Leather-Stocking Tales, all with introductions by SFC); 1881–1884 (27 additional vols., 10 with introductions by SFC).

Individual Titles A&A CE Afloat and Ashore; or, The Adventures of Miles Wallingford, ed. Thomas Philbrick and Marianne Philbrick. 2 parts. New York: AMS Press, 2004. AD The American Democrat, or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America. Cooperstown: H. and E. Phinney, 1838. “America” “America,” Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine 32 (October 1831): 297–311. “Autobiography” “Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief,” Graham’s Magazine 22 (January–June 1842): 1–18, 89–102, 158–67, 205–13. “Autobiography” CE The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief, ed. Matthew Wynn Sivils and James P. Elliott. New York: AMS Press, 2012. BLE The Battle of Lake Erie: or Answers to Messrs Burges, Duer, and Mackenzie. Cooperstown: H. and E. Phinney, 1843. BR The Bravo: A Tale. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1831. BR CE The Bravo. A Venetian Story, ed. Lance Schachterle, James A. Sappenfield, Kay Seymour House, and Anna Scannavini. New York: AMS Press, 2011. CB The Chainbearer; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1845. COC The Chronicles of Cooperstown. Cooperstown: H. and E. Phinney, 1838. CR The Crater; or, Vulcan’s Peak. A Tale of the Pacific. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1847.

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CR 1962 The Crater or Vulcan’s Peak, ed. Thomas Philbrick. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. DS The Deerslayer; or, the First Warpath. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1841. DS 1850 The Deerslayer: or the First Warpath. New York: George P. Putnam and Co., 1850. DS CE The Deerslayer or, The First Warpath, ed. James Franklin Beard, Lance Schachterle, Kent Ljungquist, and James Kilby. Albany: SUNY Press, 1987. ECE Early Critical Essays (1820–1822), by James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James F. Beard, Jr. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1955. EI Excursions in Italy. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1838. “ER” (pt. 1 or 2) “Edinburgh Review on James’s Naval Occurrences and Cooper’s Naval History,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 10 (May 1842): 411–35 (pt. 1); and 10 (June 1842): 515–41 (pt. 2). ES Excursions in Switzerland. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1836. GE CE Gleanings in Europe: England, ed. Donald A. Ringe, Kenneth W. Staggs, James P. Elliott, and R. D. Madison. Albany: SUNY Press, 1982. GF CE Gleanings in Europe: France, ed. Thomas Philbrick and Constance Ayers Denne. Albany: SUNY Press, 1983. GI Gleanings in Europe: Italy. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1838. GI CE Gleanings in Europe: Italy, ed. John Conron and Constance Ayers Denne. Albany: SUNY Press, 1981. GR CE Gleanings in Europe: The Rhine, ed. Ernest Redekop, Maurice Geracht, and Thomas Philbrick. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986. GS CE Gleanings in Europe: Switzerland, ed. Robert E. Spiller, James F. Beard, Kenneth W. Staggs, and James P. Elliott. Albany: SUNY Press, 1980. HAF Home as Found. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1838. HB Homeward Bound: or, the Chase. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1838. HMN The Headsman; or, The Abbaye des Vignerons. A Tale. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1833.

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A bbreviations

HMR The Heidenmauer; or, The Benedictines. A Legend of the Rhine. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832. HN The History of the Navy of the United States of America. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1839. HN 1854 History of the Navy of the United States of America. . . . Continued to 1853. New York: G. P. Putnam and Co., 1854. JT Jack Tier; or, the Florida Reef. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1848. LDANO Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1846. LGL Letter of J. Fenimore Cooper, to Gen. Lafayette, on the Expenditure of the United States of America. Paris: Baudry’s Foreign Library, 1831. LJ Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard. 6 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960–1968. LOM The Last of the Mohicans. A Narrative of 1757. 2 vols. Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1826. LOM CE The Last of the Mohicans. A Narrative of 1757, ed. James F. Beard, James A. Sappenfield, and E. N. Feltskog. Albany: SUNY Press, 1983. LTC A Letter to His Countrymen. New York: John Wiley, 1834. MC Mercedes of Castile; or, the Voyage to Cathay. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840. MON The Monikins; edited by the Author of “The Spy.” 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835. MON B The Monikins. A Tale. 3 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1835. NM CE Ned Myers; or, a Life before the Mast, ed. William S. Dudley, Hugh Egan, Karen Lentz Madison, and R. D. Madison. New York: AMS Press, 2009. Notions Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1828. Notions CE Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor, ed. Gary Williams. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. NY New York by James Fenimore Cooper, ed. Dixon Ryan Fox. New York: William Farquhar Payson, 1930. “OHP” (pt. I or II) “Oliver Hazard Perry,” Graham’s Magazine 22 (May 1843): 265–78 (pt. I); 22 (June 1843): 337–48 (pt. II). OO Oak Openings; or, The Bee-Hunter. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1848.

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PF CE The Pathfinder; or, The Inland Sea, ed. Richard Dilworth Rust. Albany: SUNY Press, 1981. PIL The Pilot; a Tale of the Sea. 2 vols. New York: Charles Wiley, 1824. PIL CE The Pilot; A Tale of the Sea, ed. Kay Seymour House. Albany: SUNY Press, 1986. PIO The Pioneers; or, the Sources of the Susquehanna. 2 vols. New York: Charles Wiley, 1823. PIO CE The Pioneers; or the Sources of the Susquehanna, ed. James Franklin Beard, Lance Schachterle, and Kenneth M. Anderson, Jr. Albany: SUNY Press, 1980. PR The Prairie; A Tale. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1827. PR Bos The Prairie, A Tale. 3 vols. Paris: Hector Bossange, 1827. PR CE The Prairie; A Tale, ed. James P. Elliott. Albany: SUNY Press, 1985. PRE Precaution, A Novel. 2 vols. New York: A. T. Goodrich, 1820. RED The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin: Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts. 2 vols. New York: Burgess and Stringer, 1846. “Review” “Elaborate Review” of the Court Martial of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, in Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial in the Case of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie . . . to which is Annexed, An Elaborate Review by James Fennimore [sic] Cooper. New York: Henry G. Langley, 1844, 261–344. RR The Red Rover, A Tale. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1828. RR CE The Red Rover, A Tale, ed. Thomas and Marianne Philbrick. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. SAT CE Satanstoe; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts: A Tale of the Colony, ed. Kay Seymour House and Constance Ayers Denne. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. SL The Sea Lions; or, the Lost Sealers. 2 vols. New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1849. “Somers” “Richard Somers,” Graham’s Magazine 21 (October 1842): 157–70. Spy CE The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, ed. James P. Elliott, James H. Pickering, Lance Schachterle, and Jeffrey Walker. New York: AMS Press, 2002.

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A bbreviations

SS Sketches of Switzerland. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1836. TA The Two Admirals. A Tale. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1842. TA CE The Two Admirals: A Tale, ed. Donald A. Ringe, James A. Sappenfield, and E. N. Feltskog. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990. Ways The Ways of the Hour. New York: George P. Putnam, 1850. Wept The Wept of Wish[-]Ton-Wish: A Tale. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1829. W&W The Wing-and-Wing, or Le Feu-Follet; A Tale. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1842. WW The Water-Witch, or The Skimmer of the Seas. A Tale. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1830. WW CE The Water-Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas, ed. Thomas Philbrick and Marianne Philbrick. New York: AMS Press, 2010. WW Dres The Water Witch or The Skimmer of the Seas. 3 vols. Dresden: Walther, 1830. WY CE Wyandotté, or The Hutted Knoll. A Tale, ed. Thomas and Marianne Philbrick. Albany: SUNY Press, 1982. WRITINGS BY OTHER MEMBERS OF THE COOPER FAMILY “Adventures” Susan Fenimore Cooper. “Adventures of Cocquelicot,” St. Nicholas Magazine 8 (October 1881): 942–46. CORR James Fenimore Cooper [grandson], ed. Correspondence of James Fenimore-Cooper. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922. L&T James Fenimore Cooper [grandson]. Legends and Traditions of a Northern County. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921. P&P Pages and Pictures from the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper, with Notes by Susan Fenimore Cooper. New York: W. A. Townsend, 1860. SFM Susan Fenimore Cooper. “Small Family Memories,” in CORR 1:9–72. SGB Susan Fenimore Cooper. “A Second Glance Backward,” Atlantic Monthly 60 (October 1887): 474–86.

A bbreviations





OTHER RESOURCES BAL Jacob Blanck, Virginia L. Smyers, and Michael Winship. Bibliography of American Literature. 9 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955–1991. Bentley PL Richard Bentley publication list, 1829–1873. Bentley papers, vol. 78. British Museum Add. MSS. 46637. JFC:EY Wayne Franklin. James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. S&B Robert E. Spiller and Philip C. Blackburn. A Descriptive Bibliography of the Writings of James Fenimore Cooper. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1934.

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Notes

C HAPTER 1 .  FROM MANHATTAN TO PARIS 1. John Griswold, receipt for passage, 5/24/1826, JFC paps., box 4, AAS. On Champlin, see Robert G. Albion, Square-Riggers on Schedule: The New York Sailing Packets to England, France, and the Cotton Ports (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938), 158, 314; Carl C. Cutler, Queens of the Western Ocean: The Story of America’s Mail and Passenger Sailing Lines (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1961), 156. 2. Cooper recalled the shipboard musical fun a decade later; I assume, based on that recollection, that Lynch sang (he was famous for his voice) and that he and Cooper performed as indicated on the crossing. Other Hudson passengers are named in the Baltimore Patriot of 6/5/1826. 3. Cooper and Miller had been connected originally by Washington Irving. See Complete Works of Washington Irving: Letters, Vol. 1. 1802–1823, ed. Ralph M. Aderman, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jenifer S. Banks (Boston: Twayne, 1978), 667. See also CORR 1:90. In February 1826, Cooper had written Miller about his impending trip to “France or Italy” (LJ 1:127); he probably sent a brief note on arriving in English waters to inform Miller that he would visit London on his way to the Continent with his family, prompting Miller to ready a statement of his dealings with Cooper. See “James F. Cooper Esq.

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notes to pages 2–3

in Acct. with J. Miller,” 7/4/1826, JFC paps., box 5, AAS, and, for further background, Henry C. Carey to JFC, 4/4/1826, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. 4. Defauconpret worked with various associates to translate hundreds of Englishlanguage texts, including works by Scott and Irving, and later Dickens; he had even translated Cooper’s first book, Precaution, in 1825. For background, see the article on him in Nouvelle Biographie Générale (Paris: Didot, 1852), s.v. “Defauconpret,” and his letter to the editor of the London Times, 7/17/1826. 5. The terms of the agreement Cooper later worked out regarding the French translations appear in JFC to Messrs. Gosselin, Meme, and Launay, 9/23/1826 (unpublished), Clifton Waller Barrett Collection, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; see also Orm Överland, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie: The Making and Meaning of an American Classic (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1973), 175n34. 6. Cooper compared this singer to a younger one, Maria Garcia Malibran, a member of a troupe Lynch had earlier introduced to New York. Recalling the London experience a decade later (see GF CE 38), he thought he had heard Pasta in Rossini’s Semiramide (1823), but the contemporary record does not confirm the point. See London Times, 7/8/1826–8/5/1826, 3/15/1827, and John Ebers, Seven Years of the King’s Theatre (London: William H. Ainsworth, 1828), 297–304. 7. On Price, see John W. Francis, Old New York: or, Reminiscences of the Past Sixty Years (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1866), 254; and London Times, 7/5/1826. 8. John Peter DeLancey’s sister Anne Jones wrote him a long letter around 1800 specifying and bewailing Anne Charlotte’s turbulent behavior. While he ignored her request that Susan Augusta, then eight years old, be sent to England to provide Anne Charlotte with companionship and a better model of how to comport herself, he certainly preserved the letter, which later passed into the Coopers’ hands. Anne Jones to John Peter DeLancey, 4/10/[ca. 1800], WC paps., box 24, HCA. On the kin with whom she had relations in Britain, see D. A. Story, The deLanceys: A Romance of a Great Family (n.p.: Thomas Nelson, 1931), 38, 91–92, 146–50. 9. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 7/19/1826, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. Susan noted that she and Anne toasted their father on July 15, his birthday. 10. At the time, Mrs. Cooper wrote a simpler account for another sister, Caroline. She emphasized Anne’s stunning appearance: “She is pretty—about as tall as Martha, and beautifully formed—her shoulders are remarkably fine—there is a strong likeness in her face to Tom’s, and our dear Mother.” Susan also thought Anne’s manners “delightful, highly polished and very ladylike,” and found her full of “wit and understanding.” SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 7/19/1826. 11. For the once-weekly Tuesday schedule of the steam ferry Camilla in this period, see Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 3/28/1825. Galignani’s New Paris Guide, or Stranger’s Companion, 13th ed. (Paris: A. and W. Galignani; London: G. B. Whitaker, 1825), gives the usual length of the trip (xiii). The vessel had suffered such serious

notes to pages 4–7

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reverses by this time that Cooper’s eldest daughter later recalled it as “small, rickety, jerky, dirty” (SFM 62). 12. Long a friend of Washington Irving, Beasley clearly had strong literary interests. See Complete Works of Washington Irving: Journals and Notebooks, Volume III, 1819–1827, ed. Walter A. Reichert (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 224–26, 495–98. When the Coopers found that an old family spyglass, used long ago to spot deer swimming across Lake Otsego, was missing, Désirée recovered the heirloom in a half hour. GF CE 49. 13. In his letter to his sister Ann from Paris, he more immediately described it as “second only to the Hudson” (LJ 1:149). 14. Soon after seeing her castle, Cooper had a chance to observe the “slight, delicate” duchesse in Paris (GF CE 121, 126). By the time he wrote of seeing Rosny, he also knew she had been forced into exile on the 1830 overthrow of her father-in-law, but returned covertly two years later and attempted to foment rebellion in favor of her son, only to fail and be imprisoned for a time (see GR CE 26). I reconstruct the Coopers’ itinerary here on the basis of fieldwork conducted in the Seine valley in July 2005. 15. Galignani’s New Paris Guide, Containing an Accurate Statistical and Historical Description of all the Institutions, Public Edifices, Curiosities, etc., of the Capital (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1841), 205–9. 16. Cooper knew Place de le Concorde by the name given it in 1826—Place de Louis XVI—but in 1830 its present name, first applied in 1799, was revived, as he well knew; Karl Baedeker, Paris and Environs, with Routes from London to Paris and from Paris to the Rhine and Switzerland, 7th ed. (Leipsic: Karl Baedeker, 1881), 76–77. 17. The Hôtel Jumilhac in which the Coopers resided was the main mansion, not an accessory structure. See GR CE 81–82; SFM 63; and Robert E. Spiller, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (New York: Minton, Blach, and Co., 1931), 109–11. For the date given in my text, see Cooper’s unpublished letter to Jacob Morton et al., 7/24/[1826], which he wrote that day and on which he gave “Paris, Faubourg St. Germain, Rue St. Maur, No. 12” as his future return address (original in the collection of HSFC; transcription of Jeffrey Walker, copy in my files). Cooper may have known of the compound from his acquaintances Catharine Church Cruger, who had lived there earlier, and Luther Bradish, recently returned to the United States from Europe (see LJ 1:154). The former occupant of the Cooper quarters, the baron Trigant de la Tour, remains a shadowy figure; that he was a baron may be doubted, but French titles at the time (and indeed prior to the French Revolution) were a more complicated affair than English ones, and Cooper thought Trigant deserved his (LJ 1:152); see B. Trigant to JFC, receipted bill, 8/8/1826, JFC paps., box 4, AAS. 18. See the folding map in Galignani’s New Paris Guide (1825). 19. The school was run by Mme. Trigant de Latour and Mlle. Amélie Kautz, later Madame Lacépède. The Coopers enrolled Susan, Caroline, Anne Charlotte, and Maria

— 

notes to pages 7–9

Frances in the institution when they rented the apartment. The girls, who were to leave the family quarters at six in the morning and not return for twelve-and-a-half hours, were to sleep upstairs but take their four daily meals at the school. On their studies and other arrangements, see SDC to Martha DeLancey, 9/25/[1826], 11/28/1826, and SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 3/4/1827, JFC paps., box 2, AAS; “Quittances [receipts] pour Mlles. Cooper, Institution de Mmes. Trigant de Latour & Kautz,” 4/1/1828, 7/1/1828, JFC paps., box 4, AAS; SFM 64–65; LJ 1:154. 20. Whenever they had to rent an expensive carriage, Mrs. Cooper wrote her youngest sister toward the end of September, they would hire it for a half day “and make the most of it by taking the Children, and visiting the many wonders, with which this great City is filled.” SDC to Martha DeLancey, 9/25/[1826]. 21. Henry C. Carey and I. Lea to JFC, 1/10/[1826], JFC paps., box 2, AAS; on Hector Bossange’s address, see JFC’s unpublished note to “Monsieur Hector Bossange | Quai de Voltaire   Paris,” 12/8/1826, my collection, and the imprint for The Red Rover: “Paris: Printed for Hector Bossange, Quai Voltaire, no. 11 . . ., 1827.” This location was immediately opposite the Tuileries. On Hector Bossange in Montreal, see C. F. Lhomond, Élémens de la grammaire française (Montreal: Imprimé par Jh. Victor Delorme, et à vendre aux dépôts des livres français, éstablis par H. Bossange, 1817). Following his return to Paris, Bossange and his brothers published a number of titles concerned with Canada. On the impressive career of Martin Bossange, a Bordeaux native who went to Paris in 1785, see Giles Barber, “Galignani’s and the Publication of English Books in France from 1800 to 1852,” Library, 5th ser., 16 (1961): 271. 22. These characterizations of the various Bossange houses are based on works issued by them that I retrieved via the online catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale on 7/5/2005; I found a total of 218 items issued by all of them prior to 1830: 66 by the father, 92 by the brothers, and 60 by Hector Bossange on his own. On the subject of Hector Bossange’s “English” work: the Cooper Edition probably overstates the case in calling him “a well-known Parisian publisher of works in English” (PR CE xvi). The Careys may well have known of him instead as an importer of English and American books. 23. On at least one occasion, in November, the printer wrote Cooper directly that he could not set more type because he had received no more copy. In that instance, more could not be sent until more was written and copied and corrected. Note from “Imprimerie de Lachevardière fils,” to JFC, accompanying proof sheets 33 and 34, 11/23/1826, JFC paps., box 4, AAS. 24. JFC to Charles Gosselin, 9/23/1826. For Cooper’s offer to Miller and Miller’s inability to accept it, see John Miller to JFC, 9/23/1826, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 25. If Colburn did not like the £300 offer, he might instead pay £425 for a bigger, more valuable package: the first edition and subsequent reprints of The Prairie; the remaining stocks of his three most recent books, including accrued proceeds, then in

notes to pages 9–10

  

Miller’s hands; and “the Moral Right as belonging to myself to reprint” those three works, plus The Spy and The Pioneers. Cooper favored the latter plan not only for its higher price, but also because he wished to “close all connexion with bookselling and to realize”—that is, give up partnering with booksellers for shares of potential profit and instead convert his accumulated literary assets into real money. Colburn accepted the first offer instead, however (LJ 1:166–67; emphasis added). Melissa Homestead in her instructive essay “American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–1857,” Yearbook of English Studies 45 (2015): 196, errs when asserting that Cooper’s negotiations with his various English partners benefited from his having “resided in Britain for extended periods in the 1820s and 1830s.” As I indicated in JFC:EY 268–69, Cooper had first worked with Colburn, very indirectly it should be added, when he prepared corrected copy of his first novel, Precaution, for reissue in London, but something went wrong with the process then. He did not meet with Colburn during his very brief London visit in July 1826 and, as I state in my text here, worked out the arrangements for The Prairie that fall in Paris with Moore, not Colburn, after learning from Miller that he could not afford to publish the book. By the time Cooper went back to London in 1828 for what would be his longest visit (still a relatively brief one), his relationship with Colburn was well-established; he went there to finish writing Notions of the Americans and see it through the press, not to negotiate publication. And once he went back a third time in June 1833 he was at first rebuffed in his attempt to meet Colburn’s partner and successor, Richard Bentley. Cooper handled most of his English business remotely, first from the United States, then from the Continent. 26. Cooper agreed to restrain Bossange so that Colburn’s edition could precede the continental edition by one or two days. He also agreed that “so far as he can controul” Bossange’s edition, he would keep it from being sold “in any part of the British Empire, except in the North American Provinces.” The latter exception no doubt reflected Bossange’s continuing business and personal ties in Montreal (S&B 221–22; the date given there, 3/16/1826, is a mistake for 11/16/1826). 27. Even the first shipment had been unaccountably delayed, perhaps for a similar reason. Cooper had written Carey and Lea an unlocated letter on 9/22/1826 saying that he hoped to send some copy text soon, but it did not go out until about a month later, as indicated in my text, and had not been received in Philadelphia by mid-November, when the firm answered him; see Carey and Lea to JFC, 11/15/1826, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. 28. Herein lay the first inkling of the “Leather-Stocking Tales,” a “general” title not prominently used by the author, however, until he prepared an introduction to the series in 1850, as we shall see in chapter 15. See also my essay, “ ‘One More Scene’: The Marketing Context of Cooper’s ‘Sixth’ Leather-Stocking Tale,” in Jeffrey Walker, ed., Leather-Stocking Redux; or, Old Tales, New Essays (New York: AMS Press, 2011), 225–52. 29. Cooper had not been well when his wife returned to Manhattan from Westchester late in May 1826, just before the family was to depart for Europe: he looked “pale and

— 

notes to pages 10–12

thin,” she reported to her sisters, and had had a fever, though not a severe enough one to make him hesitate about sailing. SDC to her sisters, 5/30/1826, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. The troubles lingered at sea; moreover, Cooper suffered a painful injury on the crossing. Susan confided to Caroline the following January that he had slipped going down a ladder and “strained himself,” evidently in his hips or legs. A severe cold that settled in the injured area the following winter further inflamed the strain. She feared the “weakness there” would “plague him some time,” as it apparently did. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 1/29/1827, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. When Cooper called off an outing in November 1826 due to “severe pain” in one of his legs, that affliction may have been a lingering consequence of the injury. JFC to David Bailie Warden, undated but ca. 1826, Warden paps., Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore (transcription prepared by Prof. Jeffrey Walker; copy in my files). 30. SDC to Martha DeLancey, 11/28/1826. Mrs. Cooper went on to note that his “thin and pale” appearance was especially unfortunate, since he had “just been sitting for his picture, for engravings.” She liked the representation, although he had “rather a french [sic] look.” It is likely that the “picture” was either that of Alfred Johannot (1800–1837), dated by JFB to “1827?” (LJ 2:pl. 5), or that of Madame Lizinska de Mirbel (1796–1849), dated “1827?” (LJ 2:pl. 6), both of which show a thin countenance; that of Julien Léopold Boilly (1796–1874), “1826–1833?” (LJ 2:pl. 7), while it shows a slightly fuller face, might be thought to match Mrs. Cooper’s comment about the French look to the picture. Mlle. Amélie Kautz, one of the schoolteachers of the Cooper girls, also did a portrait of the novelist at about this time, dated by JFB “1827” (LJ 2:pl. 3). 31. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 3/4/1827. 32. La Prairie, Roman Américain, 3 vols. (Paris: Charles Gosselin, Libraire, 1827), 3:244. This source doubtless provides the correct version of the unidiomatic reading that Beard followed (i.e., “le voic[i?]”), which he took from a printed transcription of Cooper’s evidently lost original. 33. S&B 48 gives the Colburn date. For Carey and Lea’s, see Daily National Journal, 5/21/1827, which states that the book was published in Philadelphia “last Thursday”— that is, 5/17/1827. The same newspaper on 4/26/1827 had stated that it would appear “in about a fortnight,” a bit optimistic, and commented on the five simultaneous editions Cooper was coordinating from Paris. 34. See The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, from the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford, ed. David Douglas, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890), 1:295. Scott and Cooper were already tightly linked in the popular mind even in France. When Le Figaro on July 30 announced Cooper’s very recent arrival in Paris, it called him “le WalterScott américain”—see GF CE xix. 35. Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1:280. Fitzball also produced a straightforward stage version of the book.

notes to pages 12–15

  

36. Cooper did not know of the theatrical context of Scott’s comments until 1838, when he read the excerpts from Scott’s Journal published in J. G. Lockhart’s biography of his father-in-law (see LJ 4:322–23). In 1826, he therefore took them as a general validation of his values as a man and writer and as a mark of Scott’s candor. Had he known about the Fitzball travesty and its great vogue in England—or the near riot that had occurred at the Adelphi between British tars and their American counterparts—he might well have seen more policy than praise in what Scott said (see JFC:EY 645n19). 37. The novelist’s daughter identifies the book, unnamed in Gleanings in Europe: France; see PR HE xxv. 38. During this visit, Scott was also quite unaffected, confiding in Cooper that he was the author of the Waverley novels, a fact that he had not yet admitted in public but that Cooper had long suspected (see GF CE 151). Cooper, who had been speaking with Lafayette before going out on his errand, had left the Frenchman chatting with Mrs. Cooper. Lafayette departed at about the time Scott arrived, but apparently via another exit. Neither he nor Scott knew their visits had overlapped (see GF CE 150–51). 39. Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1:283–86. See Henry C. Carey to JFC, 4/4/1826. 40. Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1:296, 81–100; Sam McKinstry and Marie Fletcher, “The Personal Account Books of Sir Walter Scott,” Accounting Historians Journal 29 (2002): 62. 41. Journal of Sir Walter Scott, 1:296. 42. “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Securing the Copies of Maps, Charts, and Books, to the Authors and Proprietors of Such Copies, for the Times therein Mentioned” (signed into law by George Washington on May 31, 1790), in Richard Peters, ed., The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America, vol. 1 (Boston: Little and Brown, 1845), 124–26. The 1790 act also recognized the rights of the “executors, administrators, or assigns” of either group. Cooper overstated the restrictions of the law when, in writing Carey and Lea on the subject in November, he admitted his previous errors, commenting, “I regret to see, that a narrow, and as I conceive an impolitic jealousy, has confined the right to works which are written by Citizens, in our Statute on the subject” (LJ 1:171). 43. See Cooper’s recollection of this episode for “The Editor’s Table,” Knickerbocker Magazine 11 (1838): 383–86. On Scott’s earnings from Carey and Lea’s Napoleon, see also David Kaser, Messrs. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia: A Study in the History of the Booktrade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 42–44; and David Kaser, ed., The Cost Book of Carey & Lea, 1825–1838 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 45–48. 44. André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq, Restoration and Reaction, 1815–1848, trans. Elborg Forster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 21, 29; 11–13. 45. Ibid., 27–66. 46. Ibid., 66–67.

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notes to pages 16–18

47. To take a single instance, in March of 1819, the New York Columbian translated the December 1818 proclamation by which Louis XVIII dissolved the government of Richelieu and appointed the new coalition of Decazes and his liberal colleagues, the marquis Dessolles and sieur de Serre. 48. When, on 10/5/1826, Cooper encountered “Count de Villèle, Prime Minister of France” at a state dinner that the American minister to France gave for his counterpart in Britain, Albert Gallatin, and for British foreign minister George Canning, his response was aesthetic and broadly cultural rather than narrowly political. Addressing Mary Jay soon afterward, Cooper sketched an impressionistic contrast (see LJ 1:159–61). 49. On Lafayette, Napoleon, and Louis XVIII, see Maurice de la Fuye and Emile Barbeau, The Apostle of Liberty: A Life of Lafayette, trans. Edward Hyams (London: Thames and Hudson, 1956), 226–40, and Sylvia Neely, Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal, 1814–1824: Politics and Conspiracy in an Age of Reaction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 9–12. On the term “Liberal” as applied to French politics in the period from 1815 to 1830 and beyond, I follow the cautions of Robert Alexander in Re-writing the French Revolutionary Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Most of all, French Liberals, Lafayette among them, were concerned with the establishment of national sovereignty. They therefore opposed any interference of foreign powers in French affairs. They also opposed royal pretensions within France itself. The legitimacy of any French government in their view derived from the authority of the nation—not the crown. Writes Alexander: “Liberal interpretation of the Charter [of 1814] as a contract entailed belief that the nation retained independent authority. Such authority was institutionalized in the Chamber of Deputies.” But this did not mean that they were radically republican, a point that Cooper did not, perhaps, sufficiently appreciate. Although not necessarily in favor of wide expansion of the franchise, French Liberals were opposed to institutionalized social privilege (27). 50. Quoted in Neely, Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal, 21. 51. Ibid., 19–40. 52. Lafayette’s attempts to thwart French actions against Spanish revolutionaries were bold enough in 1823 that any U.S. support for him in the immediate future might well be interpreted as meddling in French affairs (see ibid., 237–38). Since the U.S. government was seeking indemnification from France for injuries suffered by American shipping during the Napoleonic era, care was taken to avoid angering the French government. Lafayette was on this ground a very tricky ally. 53. Ibid., 251–55; Neely, “The Politics of Liberty in the Old World and the New: Lafayette’s Return to America in 1824,” Journal of the Early Republic 6 (1986): 151–71. 54. The Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 4, ed. James F. Hopkins and Mary W. M. Hargreaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 619; vol. 7, ed. Robert Seager II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 3.

notes to pages 18–20

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55. Albert Gallatin to J. Q. Adams, 10/18/1826, in A Great Peace Maker: The Diary of James Gallatin (New York: Scribner’s, 1914), 259. While on the visit to Paris during which he met Cooper, Gallatin happily reported to Adams that Lafayette seemed to have taken the advice to heart. Gallatin’s son James, who served as his official secretary at the time, added that his father “found Lafayette in a far more peaceful frame of mind than when he paid his visit to America” (ibid., 257). 56. Neely, Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal, 254. 57. Papers of Henry Clay, 4:694, 898; vol. 5, ed. James F. Hopkins and Mary W. M. Hargreaves (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 429, 1049. The Bourbon regime was indeed concerned about Lafayette’s movements and motives; on the day he left France in 1824 and the day he returned in 1825, as Russell M. Jones pointed out, police agents lingered in the large crowds gathered to see him off and greet him, and surveyed the preparations for his welcome back at La Grange as well as his arrival there; “The Flowering of an American Legend: Lafayette and the Americans, 1825–1834,” French Historical Studies 4 (1966):384, 387. 58. Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 6, ed. Mary W. M. Hargreaves and James F. Hopkins (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981), 438, 725. 59. De la Fuye and Barbeau, Apostle of Liberty, 243. 60. Jones, “Flowering of a Legend,” 393, quoting Rémusat, Mémoires de ma vie. 61. Cooper had explained to a friend, Francisque-Alphonse de Syon, in September of 1825 that he was “personally unknown to Lafayette.” He went on: “I was introduced to him myself, en passant, but never push’d an acquaintance, because I saw very well, he was over-worked—I met him, once, alone, and where I might have had a little conversation, but it was too evident he had just fled from one annoyance, to wish to persecute him, with another—besides he did not recognize me, and It would have been awkward as well as presuming to have introduced myself ” (LJ 1:126). Since Syon was close to Lafayette, and in fact had accompanied him back to France shortly after Cooper wrote that letter, Lafayette’s warmth in July 1826 may have been meant to make up for his neglect of Cooper in New York. Probably Lafayette learned of the Coopers’ impending arrival through the bureau des passports in the capital, to which foreigners’ documentation was forwarded on their arrival in the country; see John Sanderson, The American in Paris (first published as Sketches of Paris in 1838), 3rd. ed. (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847), 1:14. He could also have learned that Cooper was expected from American minister James Brown, who stopped at La Grange on 6/25– 26/1826, although it is not certain that Brown himself had any prior intelligence of Cooper’s consular appointment or his impending European visit; see Papers of Henry Clay, 5:501–2. 62. In fact, Lafayette had been at Cooper’s when Scott came to call and was in another part of the American’s lodgings talking with Cooper’s wife when the two novelists met on the stairs. See GF CE 151.

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notes to pages 20–23

63. Levasseur’s Lafayette en Amérique en 1824 et 1825, ou Journal d’un Voyage aux États-Unis (Paris: Baudouin, 1828), was translated and republished in the United States in both New York and Philadelphia (by Carey and Lea in the latter case, in part on Cooper’s advice) in 1829. A former military officer who had been involved along with Lafayette in the 1821 Belfort Conspiracy and then in other actions against the French government, Levasseur had resigned from the military and by 1824, although apparently not at all well-known to Lafayette, had been chosen to accompany the general. See Neely, “Politics of Liberty,” 156; Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal, 257. The production of Lafayette en Amérique was part of the original plan for Lafayette’s American tour. Following the return to France in 1825, however, the project languished. In 1826, Levasseur took a break from it (and from the hothouse of La Grange, where he had continued to live) to marry a woman from Germany and embark on a semi-independent career as a Paris businessman (see Levasseur’s letter to an unidentified Virginia friend, Baltimore Patriot, 8/25/1826). Some sort of rapprochement with Lafayette followed in 1827, perhaps as a result of Lafayette’s failure to persuade Cooper to write the book Levasseur had been hired to produce. 64. Levasseur indicates that he and Lafayette went to the House in the afternoon and then to the soirée on the evening after the vote (Lafayette en Amérique 2:47–49, 53–54), but J. Bennett Nolan, Lafayette in America, Day by Day (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), 273, does not include mention of the evening reception. On Cooper’s visit to Washington at this time, see JFC:EY 454–55. 65. Cooper could not have derived the details in this last long episode, with its important discussion of Benedict Arnold and John André, from the press, which did not report them at the time of the tour; nor is there any indication in Levasseur’s book that Lafayette actually had discussed his personal recollections of the infamous 1780 episode as the James Kent passed up through the Highlands (or back down a few days later). To the contrary, we may recall that it was Cooper who laid out this very story while escorting British actor Charles Mathews through the same scene the year before (see JFC:EY 377–78). It is reasonable to conclude that he created the Notions episode by reference to that personal memory. It is true that Levasseur presents a general narrative of the André episode, drawing extensively on James Thacher’s Military Journal during the American Revolutionary War (1822), in telling of this part of the general’s tour. But Levasseur does not even suggest that Lafayette had discussed the matter then. See Levasseur, Lafayette en Amérique, 1:210–22. 66. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 3/4/1827. 67. Lafayette to JFC, 8/14/1827, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. On Wright, see Gary Williams, Notions CE xx–xxiv. As Paul R. Baker observes, “For many Americans the spectacle of the conspicuous Miss Wright either accompanying or following closely after the world-famous Frenchman seemed most unusual and rather improper; gossipmongers had a splendid time.” Frances Wright, Views of Society and Manners in America, ed. Paul R. Baker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), xv. Fanny and Camilla

notes to pages 23–25

  

were thus present at the Castle Garden fête, where Cooper certainly saw them; like others who wrote about the event, however, he chose not to mention the fact. See also Neely, Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal, 186–91. 68. “Bigotinni” is the spelling in the original; see Lafayette to JFC, 3/23/1827, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. In a note written on another of Lafayette’s letters to her father, Cooper’s daughter confirmed the name and proper spelling; see Stuart W. Jackson, “Lafayette Letters and Documents in the Yale Cooper Collection,” Yale University Library Gazette 8 (1934): 118. The undated letter ascribed to “[1826]” by Jackson, ibid., 116, refers to Le Breuil and thus cannot be so early; I think it more likely a follow-up to the 3/23/1827 letter I have just cited and hence ascribe it to April 1827. On the April visit to La Grange, Susan Cooper’s first one, see SDC to Martha DeLancey, 4/27/[1827], JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 69. Late in April, Susan Cooper wrote home that she and her husband were “hesitating between [renting Le Breuil], and taking an Apartment at Versailles,” but it soon turned out that they liked neither. SDC to Martha DeLancey, 4/27/1827. 70. The St. Ouen property probably had come to Cooper’s attention through Lafayette, who often visited Ternaux, although it had been rented previously by American banker Samuel Welles, with whose family the Coopers had become intimate in Paris (see LJ 1:221). For positive views of it by other members of Cooper’s family, see SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 7/6–13/1827, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL, and SDC to Martha DeLancey, 11/27–29/[1827], JFC paps., box 2, AAS; also, William Yeardley Cooper to Hannah Cooper Pomeroy, 6/27/1827 and 8/29/1827, both printed in Clare Benedict, ed., Voices Out of the Past (London: Ellis, 1929), 30. 71. Essex Register (Salem, MA), 8/30/1827. 72. Benedict, ed., Voices Out of the Past, 29, 34. George Washington Greene, in recounting his own fall 1827 trip to La Grange, reported encountering Cooper and his family returning from there. George Washington Greene, “The Home of Lafayette,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (1861): 656; for dating this episode, I rely on Frederick Charles Harrison, “The Early Letters of George Washington Greene, 1827–1846” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1966), 2. For other instances of Cooper’s trips to Paris, see LJ 1:219–20 and GF CE 208–9. The best account of the visits to St. Ouen by their Paris friends (including the classmates of their daughters) is in SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 7/13/1827, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 73. Robert E. Spiller, “Fenimore Cooper’s Defense of Slaveholding America,” American Historical Review 35 (1935):578, 581–82. Cooper was on better ground elsewhere in his answer, which was translated into French and published by the editor of the Revue, the sometime Jacobin Marc Antoine Jullien, in its April issue (which did not, however, appear until some months later). See Revue Encyclopédique 34 (1827): 239–43. Spiller prints the surviving manuscript copy, in the hand of Cooper’s nephew William, from the British Museum.

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notes to pages 25–32

74. Spiller, “Slaveholding America,” 580. Cooper would essentially make both these points afresh in Notions of the Americans (see Notions CE 469–72). 75. Spiller, “Slaveholding America,” 578–82. In Notions of the Americans, Cooper softened his comments on this last subject (see Notions CE 476). In the Revue article, Cooper asserted, “For the two centuries that my family has been in America we have never held a slave” (580), but in 1840, when describing life in Otsego Hall during his boyhood, he named at least two black domestics who, unlike the third (Joseph Stewart, whom he pointedly called “a hired black man”), evidently were slaves: “Sarah the cook; and Betty, the chambermaid.” L&T 230. See also JFC:EY, 21 and 531–32n46, and Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 299–300. 76. Carey and Lea reported to Luther Bradish on 2/16/1827 that the firm had received a letter from Cooper asking whether it wished to negotiate for his next book (see LJ 1:224n1). By June, a Washington, D.C., paper that often had good news of Cooper’s doings reported he was “expected to publish, in the ensuing fall, another novel entitled the Red Rover of the Sea.” Daily National Journal 6/1/1827. 77. According to S&B 52, The Red Rover appeared in Paris on 11/27/1830, in London three days later, and in Philadelphia on 1/9/1828. 78. On the question of Melville, see Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogies: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 3–11. It is also worth remembering, as Rogin remarks, that slavery as historical fact and moral sign figures importantly in Cooper’s novel. One therefore might say that when Cooper finished with writing the answer to Sismondi and took up his new novel, the former did indeed shadow the latter. 79. SDC to Martha DeLancey, 11/27/[1827]. 80. The two busts are shown in LJ 1:pls. X and XI. 81. Benedict, ed., Voices Out of the Past, 27. 82. In Afloat and Ashore, Cooper’s narrator, Miles Wallingford, would add that “the inland view from Mont-Martre, of a clouded day” surpassed anything in England or America (A&A CE 2:13). C HAPTER 2.  LONDON AND THE ALPS 1. On the question of how far the work had progressed by January 1828, I rely on the conclusion of Gary Williams that Cooper referred to the substance of his twentythird letter in writing Charles Wilkes on 1/25/1828 (LJ 1:244). See Notions CE xxviii and xlvi n46. For the American publishers’ views, see Carey, Lea and Carey to JFC, 11/ [7?]/1827, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 2. Harriet Preble, niece of the naval hero Edward Preble, had been born in England in 1795 and raised and educated in France. Cooper, who was to mention her in his sketch of her uncle (see LDANO 1:174–75), not only knew about the translation—according to

notes to pages 32–33

  

his wife, he received $600 for it (see SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/1/[1828], JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL). For Preble’s view of Cooper’s book, see The Life of Harriet Preble, Containing Portions of Her Correspondence, Journal, and Other Writings, Literary and Religious, ed. R. H. Lee (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1856), 192, 194–95, 223. In the same 5/1/[1828] letter to Caroline, Susan indicated that Colburn had paid £400 for the book, adding that “by coming to London” her husband had “got a much higher price” than otherwise likely—furthermore, that this higher price would also affect his other books. 3. On the desire to see England, see SDC to Martha DeLancey, 11/27/1827, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. Susan was troubled by Anne Charlotte’s impending marriage for several reasons, among them the fact that she hoped to persuade her sister to come to the United States. She also thought McAdam, thirty-seven years older than Anne Charlotte and the father of grown children, posed various challenges. Even once the marriage had occurred and Susan had met McAdam in England, she wrote Caroline: “I like him very much, except as Anne’s Husband.” SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/1/[1828]. 4. The departure date is given as 2/25/1828 in SDC to Martha DeLancey, 5/9/1828, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. The Cooper daughters stayed behind at their school on rue St. Maur. Lucie is called “a Swiss that has now lived with us near two years” in an unpublished 12/20/1828 letter from JFC to Mary Jay, in the John Jay Collections, Columbia University Libraries, New York (transcription prepared by Jeffrey Walker; copy in my files); see also SDC to her daughters 5/23–27/1828, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. The American girl, named as “Miss Wiggin” in SDC to SFC, 3/27/1828, JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL, was almost certainly the daughter of one of the Wiggin brothers, Timothy and Benjamin, American merchants and bankers long resident in England. See Howard Payson Arnold, Memoir of Jonathan Mason Warren. M.D. (Boston: Privately published, 1886), 63. For the route, see GE CE 5–18, passim, and the February 1828 Parisian endorsements on H[enry] Clay, Passport, 5/26/1826, for JFC and family, Honeyman Library, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA. 5. SDC to her sisters, 3/10/1828, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. Dr. Guy Carleton Bayley to JFC, 1/30/1828, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL, conveyed the news to Cooper, but that letter was addressed to Paris and did not reach him in London until March 8, as Susan reported to her sisters. 6. See Wil Verhoeven, Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 239–45. Cooper recalled Godwin’s desire “to hear something of American literature. . . . He wished to learn, in particular, if we had any poets—‘I have seen something of Dwight’s and Humphrey’s [sic], and Barlow’s,’ he said, ‘but I cannot say that either pleased me much.’ I laughed and told him we could do better than that, now.” Pressed for examples, Cooper dredged up from his admittedly halting memory “something of Bryant’s, and a little of [Fitz-Greene Halleck’s] Alnwick Castle” (GE CE 25).

— 

notes to pages 33–35

7. In his 1828 diary, Godwin first noted calling on “Spy Cooper” (as the American was sometimes called in England because of his first famous book) on May 2 and recorded that “J F Cooper” repaid the visit the following day, and that he visited Cooper again on May 18. Available online at http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Thanks to Hugh MacDougall for this reference. In 1834, while visiting his old friend William Dunlap, Cooper described Godwin as “80 and upright, very short & small,” and recalled that “the old man had called on him & introduced himself. [‘]I am Wm Godwin.’ ” [Dorothy C. Barck, ed.], Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839), 3 vols. NHYS Collections, 1929–1931, 3:775–76. 8. On the challenges that Notions of the Americans presented to Cooper owing to its unusual subject matter and form, see Gary Williams’s discussion in the Cooper Edition text (Notions CE xxviii–xxxi, 585–86). Although no amanuensis copy has been located, Williams notes that Cooper’s own surviving manuscript bears some “occasional directions to a transcriber” (ibid., 598n3), and Cooper’s wife mentioned in one of her letters that the novelist’s nephew indeed copied it for Colburn. See SDC to Martha DeLancey, 5/9/1828. On the effects of his labors on Cooper: SDC to her daughters, 4/23/1828, 5/19/1823, both in JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL (emphasis added). Susan’s May 19 comment about her husband’s nerves gains importance when contrasted with her statement to her sisters just ten days earlier: “Mr. Cooper is looking quite well and we think growing fat.” SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/9/1828, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. Either she was guarding his condition then or, in the press of final work on the book, he had notably worsened. On May 1, she informed her sisters that her husband had to wait “until he sees the last proof sheet.” SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/1/1828, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 9. Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, ed. Herbert D. Adams (Cambridge: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), 2:68. It is possible that the “copy” from which Cooper read to Sparks was in the form of proofs, not manuscript. Not until 6/23/1828 did the London Times carry the announcement that Notions, then “printing for Henry Colburn,” was “nearly ready.” Colburn published the book in London on 6/20/1828; Carey and Lea brought it out in Philadelphia on 8/13/1828 (see Notions CE xxxii). 10. On these and other trips, see SDC to her daughters, 3/11/1828, and SDC to Charlotte DeLancey, 4/28/[1828], both in JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL; GE CE 31–34, 168–75, 223 (and the note on 318–19); GF CE 35–37; and LJ 1:261. Susan Cooper reported to her sisters that Verplanck, having been “a good deal with us since we have been in London,” had become “a great favorite.” He left for home via Liverpool on May 10. SDC to Martha DeLancey, 5/9/1828. 11. See SDC to her daughters, 3/19/1828, JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL; GE CE 250– 55. While visiting Hoddesdon, Susan was shown a miniature portrait of their father, painted before he married Elizabeth Floyd, that Anne subsequently sent to America; see SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/1/[1828]; also, SDC to Martha DeLancey, 7/11/1828,

notes to pages 35–36

  

JFC paps., box 2, AAS. On their parents’ former residence in the town, see SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/1/[1828]. 12. Spencer promised a sheaf of letters to ease Cooper’s way. Running out of time before the Americans left for London, Spencer gave him one letter then (for an acquaintance in Calais) and later forwarded others directly to London, as Cooper discovered when, calling at a bookstore (probably John Miller’s), he learned that several men on Spencer’s promised list had come asking for him there. W. R. Spencer to M. Lelente, Calais, 2/24/[1828], JFC paps., box 2, AAS. 13. Cooper long remembered the kind treatment and positive friendship Samuel Rogers directed toward him in the spring of 1828. Although he certainly knew his host’s poetry before they met, one mark of his appreciation was the fact that in 1829 he began using bits of it as mottoes for chapters in his novels. The first came in The Wept of Wishton-Wish, which Cooper started writing soon after leaving London. In his European trilogy soon afterward, Cooper likewise borrowed extensively from Italy (1822–1828), the poet’s most recent work. See Hugh C. MacDougall, Sources of the Epigraphs (“Mottoes”) in the Novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Susan Fenimore Cooper, JFC Society Miscellaneous Papers, No. 12 (August 1999): 20. Even before leaving London, Cooper had decided that he would arrange for Thomas Cole to produce a painting as a gift for Rogers. Cooper thus asked Charles Wilkes on 5/7/1828 that he commission Cole “to take a subject of his own . . . and put something into it, that he may call the Leather-stocking” (LJ 1:263). 14. American George W. Greene would later claim he had heard Cooper and his wife discuss the meeting when he visited with the novelist in Italy. Greene added that Cooper remembered his encounter with Wordsworth fondly: the American was “very much pleased” with Wordsworth because the poet “felt at home, and let himself out freely” at Rogers’s. George W. Greene, Biographical Studies (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1860), 32. P. W. Clayden asserted, with less decisiveness, that during Wordsworth’s visit to London in the spring of 1828, “Cooper, the American novelist, was there, and, of course, was to be seen at Rogers.” Rogers and His Contemporaries, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1889), 2:11. But Robert E. Spiller correctly noted that Cooper, although invited to meet Wordsworth on one occasion at Rogers’s house, was prevented from going because he was ill. Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (New York: Minton, Balch, and Co., 1931): 137; for Cooper’s confirmation of that point, see GE CE 166. 15. In chapter 3 I discuss the help Cooper gave Scott once he returned to France. 16. See The Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, ed. William Beattie, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1850), 2:204. 17. See Wayne Franklin, “James Fenimore Cooper and American Artists in Europe: Art, Religion, Politics,” in Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860, ed. Andrew Hemingway and Alan Wallach (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 145–47.

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notes to pages 37–40

18. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/1/[1828]. 19. George S. Hellman, ed., Letters of Henry Brevoort to Washington Irving, Together with Other Unpublished Brevoort Papers, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), 2:75. 20. JFC to Luther Bradish, 10/27/1827, Rare Book Room, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, State College (transcription prepared by Jeffrey Walker; copy in my files. I have altered his “i[n] common” to “[is] common”). 21. SDC to SFC, 3/27/1828. 22. Life and Writings of Jared Sparks, 2:68, 59. Sparks also recorded (2:56) that he dined with Cooper on 4/30/1828 at the club of the physician Granville Sharpe Pattison, formerly a professor of anatomy in Baltimore but in 1828 at the University of London; see The Annual Register, or a View of the History and Politics of the Year 1851 (London: F. and J. Rivington, 1852), 348. 23. The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles R. Sanders et al., vol. 4 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1970), 389n. But Montagu had a very bad habit of exaggerating—so much so that her longtime friend Thomas Carlyle, who owed to Montagu his marriage to Jane Welsh, dropped her and wrote of her in 1835, “The Truthless are a class of creatures from whom no man can extract profit.” The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle, Centenary Edition, vol. 8 (London: Chapman and Hall, [1907]), 130. 24. Sarah H. Burney to Charlotte F. Barrett, 4/28/1828, in The Letters of Sarah Harriet Burney, ed. Lorna T. Clark (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 279. I suggest in my final chapter that Cooper’s likely use of strong mercury-laced medicines at various points in his life to cope with enduring health problems (including those encountered during this stressful visit to London) may have exacerbated his behavior in the way such commentators noted. I will argue, however, that the underlying issues were nonetheless very real for him. His physical distress and the means he may have used to deal with it sharpened his political and cultural concerns into outrage, but did not create them. 25. The Journal of Thomas Moore, ed. Wilfred S. Dowden et al., 6 vols. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–1991), 3:1133. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 3:1139. Cooper asserted privately in Florence the next year that “He did not like Moore.” Thomas B. Johnson, 4/8/1829 entry, diary (12/16/1828–4/28/1829), Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 28. Journal of Thomas Moore, 3:1139. A third performance on the same morning is likewise notable, though for a sharper sally of Cooper’s wit. Washington Irving’s The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus had appeared in London the previous February, so it was still a subject of current chat. Rogers, who knew Irving well and had published his own fragmentary verse epic of the Genoan discoverer in 1810, had double

notes to pages 40–41

  

reason to read the book. So when he “said, in his dry significant way, ‘It’s rather long,’ ” Moore recorded, “Cooper turned round on him & said sharply ‘That’s a short criticism.’ ” Ibid. 29. SDC to her daughters, 5/23–27/1828, names the steamboat and gives details of the family’s intent to embark on it “on Wednesday [5/28] at ten o’clock.” The vessel left from the vicinity of the Custom House, which stood between London Bridge and the Tower; see Edmund Boyce, The Belgian Traveller, Being a Complete Guide through Belgium and Holland, 5th ed. (London: Samuel Leigh, 1827), 80. 30. Cooper first discussed the planned tour in some detail when writing Luther Bradish from St. Ouen; JFC to Luther Bradish, 10/27/1827. Wilkins, ten years Cooper’s junior, was the nephew and adopted son of statesman Gouverneur Morris. Cooper had probably first met him through the family connections of Gen. Jacob Morris of Otsego County, although the DeLanceys and Jays also knew the Wilkins family. The details of the trip Wilkins and Cooper planned altered frequently; some shifts may be traced in LJ 1:258, 286, 289. 31. SDC to Charlotte Cooper, 4/28/[1828], JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL. At virtually the same time in a letter to another sister, Susan Cooper gave a long-term statement of the couple’s plans: they expected to go to Italy once the summer was over, spend two winters there, then return through Germany and Holland to England (in, that is, 1830), whence they would leave for home via Liverpool. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/1/[1828]. 32. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 5/1/[1828]. Somehow Cooper alerted Wilkins soon enough that he could recruit a substitute companion—unattached South Carolinian William Aiken, then also in Europe (LJ 1:286). Cooper had expected at one point to meet Wilkins in Amsterdam and depart with him from there (see GE CE 305), but the Coopers actually met him and Aiken in Rotterdam and traveled together with them to Amsterdam, where they parted company. In his journal, Cooper mentioned some unnamed “American friends” with whom his family spent time in Amsterdam (LJ 1:267); in one of his Gleanings, he more specifically noted parting from “G. W.” (who was “on his way to Moscow”) in that same city in June 1828 (GI CE 28). 33. Cooper explained that Van Beverout defined “Lust in Rust” as otium cum dignitate—that is, “peace with dignity” (WW 1:82). Boyce (Belgian Traveller, 94) likewise commented on the named villas in this part of the country (he cites “Hope and Repose,” “Very Content,” and “Peaceful is my Garden”). Washington Irving gave a more accurate translation of “Lust in Rust” in his 1839 tale of the legendary character Wolfert Acker, explaining that Wolfert had inscribed over the door of his house “the favorite Dutch motto, ‘Lust in Rust,’ (pleasure in repose). The mansion was thence called ‘Wolfert’s Rust,’—Wolfert’s Rest; but in process of time, the name was vitiated into Wolfert’s Roost, probably from its quaint cock-loft look, or from its having a weathercock perched on every gable.” “The Crayon Papers,” The Knickerbocker 13 (1839): 207.

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notes to pages 42–44

34. From the fall of Napoleon until 1830, the southern Lowlands provinces were under Dutch rule. Hence in 1828 the Coopers crossed no official boundary in heading to Antwerp, but from the entry into Flanders cultural and religious differences were evident. 35. Boyce, Belgian Traveller, 229. On the Coopers’ use of Boyce, see SDC to her daughters, 5/23–27/1828. 36. Boyce, Belgian Traveller, 232. 37. Charlotte Wilcoxen, Seventeenth-Century Albany: A Dutch Profile, rev. ed. (Albany: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1984), 6–7. After leaving Antwerp the Coopers went to Brussels, where they visited a cluster of sites. The most important was the famous battlefield at Waterloo, eight miles south of the city. Although Cooper left very little in the way of commentary on the visit, he surely viewed it as the place where the terms of modern history—the yet enduring framework of his own world—had been decisively created. His wife commented to her daughters as early as her Rotterdam letter on May 29 that she expected they would spend two days at Brussels, adding, “we must look at the Field of Waterloo” (LJ 1:265). 38. Mmes. Trigant de Latour & Kautz, statement of account for “Mlles. Cooper,” 7/15/1828, JFC paps., box 4, AAS. This bill, covering the period from July 1 to July 15 for the Cooper daughters, was presented, perhaps to Cooper’s bankers (Welles and Co.), with another covering the period from April 1 to July 1; the former also had an item covering “les appartements pendant un mois et 5 jours,” precisely the count from June 10 to the morning of July 14. 39. Two detailed press reports indicate that U.S. minister James Brown, Lafayette and his son George, and Levasseur attended, but not Cooper. Baltimore Patriot, 9/5/1828, and Portland (Maine) Eastern Argus, 9/9/1828. 40. Prior to their departure, the Coopers in fact had written Simond, then living in Geneva, asking for advice about their impending trip. Moreover, once settled in Switzerland—if not before—Cooper purchased a copy of Simond’s popular twovolume account of his Swiss travels, which he consulted while there and later. A letter from Mrs. Cooper to Simond, dated Bern, 8/24/[1828], and surviving in the Bibliothèque Genève, thanked him for his previous aid; see GS CE xxxviii. On Simond’s book, see GS CE xxii. The family link is asserted by the editors of Cooper’s Swiss Gleanings (GS CE, 311). The families had certainly been close in New York City. Simond’s first wife, Frances Wilkes Simond, served as godmother for Cooper’s wife on her baptism (baptismal records, 5/17/1792, Trinity Church, New York). 41. The young American traveler George Washington Greene, then “fresh from the ‘Mohicans,’ ” had met Cooper for the first time at Lafayette’s Paris house when the Osages were also there. Gesturing toward those “feeble representatives” of the peoples around whom Greene thought Cooper had “shed a halo like that of Homer’s own heroes,” he asked the novelist what he made of them. “ ‘They are poor specimens,’ said

notes to pages 44–45

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he, ‘fourth-rate at the best, in their own woods, and ten times the worse for the lives they have been leading here.’ ” Greene described Delaunay as “one of those reckless white men who have abandoned their own homes to live among the Indians.” George W. Greene, Biographical Studies (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1860), 51–53. See also Greene’s “The Home of Lafayette,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (1861): 651–54. 42. GS CE 301 places the Osages at the Hôtel du Parc. Cooper’s third encounter with the Osages occurred when they were feted by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who asked Cooper his opinion about them: “I told him what I really thought,” Cooper reported, concluding that the “whole thing [was] . . . merely a speculation of the Frenchman who managed the affair” (GI CE 41). See Carolyn Thomas Foreman, Indians Abroad, 1493–1938 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943), 132–46, and Tracy N. Leavelle, “The Osage in Europe: Romanticism, the Vanishing Indian, and French Civilization during the Restoration,” in William L. Chew III, ed., National Stereotypes in Perspective: Americans in France, Frenchmen in America (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 89–112. For sources contemporary with Cooper, see Pittsfield Sun, 7/5/1827; [David Delaunay], Six Indiens rouges de la tribu des grands Osages, arrivés du Missouri au Havre, le 27 juillet 1827 (Paris: Delaunay, 1827); and [Paul Vissier], Histories de la tribu Osages (Paris: C. Béchet, 1827). Cooper’s cynical views of the Osage retinue (see GS CE 11) were not uncommon at the time. A more nuanced modern account of the episode is given by William Least Heat-Moon and James K. Wallace in their introduction to An Osage Journey to Europe, 1827–1830: Three French Accounts (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). That book, which translates the Delaunay and Vissier pamphlets as well as an anonymous third contemporary source, fails to mention Cooper and Greene but gives substantial personal details about the six Osages (four men and two women) and their Euro-American handlers. 43. See GS CE 23, and “J. F. Cooper in Account Current with Welles & Co. Paris,” JFC paps., box 8, AAS (noting “his draft of July 21 [1828], [in favor of] R. Bovet & co.”). 44. In 1836, Cooper would write, proudly but also facetiously: “It is the empirecanton of the Confederation, as we of New York so modestly term our own vigorous political sprout, which, a wilderness the other day, now contains ten times the wealth, twice the cultivated territory, a greater population, and more resources than the whole of even the Helvetia of our own times” (GS CE 25). 45. George P. Putnam confirmed the choice: “Like Mr. Cooper, we patronize ‘Le Faucon’ ”; The Tourist in Europe (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1838), 226. It was high season; so packed were most public lodgings in Bern that a printed “Rapport des Étrangers logés a Berne” as of the fifteenth of August that year, preserved in the Cooper papers, lists about a hundred foreign individuals and families holed up in the Falcon and seven other hotels. JFC paps., box 4, AAS. 46. La Lorraine remained separately visible as a compound of buildings near the river on Eduard Beck’s Karte der Umgebungen von Bern, rev. ed. (Bern: Beck, 1854),

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notes to pages 45–48

although by then the rail line ran right behind it on the landward side. A similar map issued in 1905 shows the estate surrounded by other structures; see Bern, Schweiz (Bern: Kümmerly and Frey, 1905). 47. LJ 1:269; Spiller, Fenimore Cooper, 142–43. The house is pictured in GS CE fac. p. 181. For Cooper’s contact with Charles Lucien Bonaparte in Washington in 1826, see JFC:EY 517. Young Susan Cooper’s recollection of La Lorraine as “a modest country house” (P&P 198) seems to have been something of an understatement. She also would assert many years later that it was not Joseph Bonaparte, but rather his brother Louis (le comte de St. Leu) who had lived there; SGB 474. Cooper later expressed the wish that the family had instead picked a spot on the shores of Lake Geneva, as they did on their second visit to Switzerland; see GR CE 183. The estate had received its name from a previous owner, Johannes Steiger, who in the seventeenth century had fought “in the Lorraine against the Austrian and Spanish armies” (Spiller, Fenimore Cooper, 144). In 1830, Cooper recalled it as “a good house” that had cost “80 [dollars] a month” (LJ 1:428). 48. Berthier was Prince of Neuchâtel; the elder Pourtalès had fought against Napoleon for the Prussians, but after Prussia’s defeat in the 1806 Battle of Jena he joined Berthier’s forces and by 1809 had been appointed master-of-the-horse to Empress Josephine. See George F. Spaulding, ed., On the Western Tour with Washington Irving: The Journal and Letters of Count de Pourtalès, trans. Seymour Feiler (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 3–5. Other famous tenants had also occupied La Lorraine; most recently, it had been rented to the Spanish minister to Switzerland (see GS CE 33–34). Spiller, Fenimore Cooper, 143, states that Cooper sublet the house from General de Toledo, the Spanish ambassador. 49. Cooper soon became close to Ludwig Walther. On returning through Thun from his third trip through the country, he encountered his neighbor at a militia drill there and comically joined in the company’s maneuvers. See GS CE 230–32. 50. See Thomas Weidner, “Die Grabmonumente von Johann August Nahl in Hindelbank,” Berner Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Heimatkunde 57 (1995): 51–102. 51. The memory of the Erlachs, which had made a heavy imprint in Bern, would remain clear enough for Cooper that he would refer to the family in The Headsman (see HMN 1:142). On the way back from Hinkelbank, the Coopers encountered the famous agricultural reformer Philip Emanuel von Fellenberg, whose experimental farm, Hofwyl, lay in the vicinity (GS CE 37). 52. Returning to the vicinity in September while on a walking trip, Cooper looked up from Interlaken toward this spot on the mountain’s side and could discern the same “oven-shaped hole” from which the snow had poured down the acclivity (GS CE 136). This closely observed series of mountain events had impressed itself sharply on his mind. 53. Jedidiah Morse and Sidney Edwards Morse, A New System of Geography, Ancient and Modern, for the Use of Schools (Boston: Richardson and Lord, 1826), 190. In the second edition of his more general Geography, while still calling the thirteen cantons

notes to pages 48–50

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then forming the confederation “so many different republics,” Morse had asserted that “the government is partly aristocratical and partly democratical.” He nonetheless added, “whether the government be aristocratical, democratical or mixed, a general spirit of liberty pervades and activates the several constitutions.” Jedidiah Morse, The American Geography, 2nd ed. (London: John Stockdale, 1792). Cooper sought to probe these political differences within the confederation, and between Switzerland as a whole and the United States, more critically. 54. The Archers; or Mountaineers of Switzerland; an Opera, in Three Acts (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1796), vii. 55. Ibid., 81–83. 56. James Kent, Dissertations: being the Preliminary Part of a Course of Law Lectures (New York: George Forman, 1795), 34–35. 57. Joseph Sansom, Letters from Europe during a Tour through Switzerland and Italy, in the Years 1801 and 1802, Written by a Native of Pennsylvania, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: A. Bartram and T. Dobson, 1805), 1:28, 104–5. 58. Wilhelm Oechsli, “The Achievement of Swiss Federal Unity,” in A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, and Stanley Leathes, eds., The Cambridge Modern History. Volume XI: The Growth of Nationalities (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 234–35. Although Cooper could not parse Switzerland’s internal political differences when he arrived there, by the time he wrote Gleanings his understanding was relatively detailed. He thus stressed that in 1828 such things as the following remained true: the Canton of Neuchâtel was a principality subject to the king of Prussia but was “decidedly aristocratic” in its bearing on the other cantons; the Canton of Bern remained technically aristocratic in its polity (the right of self-government residing in a limited group of burghers) and in the past had held the cantons of Vaud and Arau “in vassalage”; Zürich was “much less aristocratical than Berne”; and the Canton of Geneva was “an aristocracy of burghers.” He laid emphasis on such points repeatedly because “The notions that are generally entertained of republics are too often vague and untrue.” GS CE 23–24n, 29–30, 105, 254. 59. Anton Guilland, “France and Her Tributaries, 1801–1803,” in A. W. Ward, G. W. Prothero, and Stanley Leathes, eds., Cambridge Modern History. Volume IX. Napoleon (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 95–96. 60. Wilhelm Oechsli, History of Switzerland, 1499–1914, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), 318. 61. Guilland, “France and Her Tributaries,” 97–107. Oechsli, “Swiss Federal Unity,” 237–39. For two instances of Cooper’s reference to the liberalizations following the 1830 revolution in France, see GS CE 27n and 45n. 62. One wonders whether Cooper came across Heinrich Zschokke’s 1822 History of Switzerland (Des Schweizerlands Geschichte für das Schweizervolk, translated into French in Aarau as early as 1823 and retranslated in a Paris edition in 1828). Zschokke is best known as a novelist; his Abællino (1794) was one source for Cooper’s The Bravo, as

— 

notes to pages 51–52

we shall see in chapter 5. But his strongly democratic History of Switzerland was very popular at the time of Cooper’s visit to the country. Oliver Zimmer thus notes it was “the text most frequently used in secondary schools” in Bern from 1830 to 1848. A Contested Nation: History, Memory, and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 126. 63. A good instance of how Cooper’s later political insights affected the narration of his Swiss travels concerns an experience at the start of the family’s second tour. While near the Wildegg Castle in Aarau, they had stopped at Bad Schinzbach to look over its well-known mineral baths. Afterward, they climbed up through a “wood of birch and larch” (LJ 1:295) to the famous Habsburg Castle, the cradle of the future Austrian emperors. Cooper had relatively little to say about the castle or its owners in his journal, but the site called forth long political and historical reflections in his Swiss Gleanings (GS CE 75–77). He also recalled it in The Heidenmauer (1832); see HMR 1:86. 64. France, virtually all Roman Catholic in the geographical sense, had few subregions set apart by religion. Yet in matters of faith and practice France in the aftermath of Napoleon’s rule hardly seemed Catholic in any sense to Cooper. When writing up his trip via Soleure in Gleanings, he thus drew a pointed comparison between French Catholicism and that of the more “superstitious” but also more “pious” communities he found in Switzerland (see GS CE 73). In the Lowlands, Cooper had experienced the Calvinist provinces of the north, then moved into and through the Catholic south, whereas on this second tour of Switzerland, he switched back and forth between Protestant and Catholic terrain in rapid succession. 65. Witness his reaction to a tiny Catholic chapel where he discovered a bewildering array of what in 1836 he called “votive offerings, in the shape of arms, hands, noses, and other portions of the human frame”—for the suffering faithful had left these pieces of folk sculpture here as emblems of the cures for which they prayed (GS CE 75–76). Even in 1828, when he could not immediately identify the objects (he thought they were samples from a local factory placed there to bring good luck to the manufacturers but wrote “Inquire” in his journal), Cooper debunked the sight with Protestant scorn: the full-size body parts made the chapel look “like a coarse toy shop” (LJ 1:294). 66. Later, Cooper revised his view of St. Gall’s cathedral: it possessed “a second rate magnificence, which gave us the first idea of the splendor of the Italian churches”— annotated Englemann and Reichard, cited by Beard, LJ 1:305n2. 67. Cooper’s first foray into Schwyz came during the present tour. Having gone over the upland dividing St. Gall from the Zürichersee, the Coopers stayed that night in Rapperschwyl, on the lake’s north shore. The following morning, Cooper on his own crossed the lake on the long bridge leading into Schwyz. Even in his journal he described the walk as a “little pilgrimage to the cradle of Helvetian liberty” (LJ 1:308; cf. also GS CE 101), although at the time the atmospheric effects of the clearing air were more appealing to him than any political reflections.

notes to pages 52–56

  

68. One way Cooper parsed this tension was to stress that independence and liberty were not, of course, the same thing. In narrating his third tour in the Gleanings, he thus wrote: “At Lungern we halted a moment to refresh ourselves. This place is Catholic, as indeed are all the Forest Cantons, or the four little states that were the nucleus of Swiss independence—not of Swiss liberty, you will remember; the distinction being allimportant.” GS CE 142. 69. In his first journal entry for the trip, presumably written that night, Cooper curiously omitted mentioning that other family members had accompanied him to Thun. See LJ 1:312–13; GS CE 132. 70. The experience would have some effect on how Cooper imagined the action in his next book, The Water-Witch. As we shall see in chapter 5, he also borrowed from it in The Headsman. 71. In his Swiss Gleanings, written the year after the attack on the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Cooper cast a more conciliatory light on his experience of Einsiedeln. I agree with Gary Williams that the shrine deeply affected Cooper and that it influenced his choice of subject in the second novel in his European trilogy, The Heidenmauer; see “Cooper and European Catholicism: A Reading of The Heidenmauer,” ESQ 22 (1976): 149–58. 72. John Murray, A Hand-book for Travellers in Switzerland, Savoy and Piedmont (1838), reprinted with an introduction by Jack Simmons as Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland 1838 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, and New York: Humanities Press, 1970), 170 (hereafter Murray’s Handbook 1838). 73. It was the very next year, 1829, that Swiss highway engineer Ignatz Venetz “summarized his fourteen years of field research” on the subject in a meeting of the Société Helvétique des Sciences Naturelles at the Great St. Bernard; and it was 1834 before geologist Jean de Charpentier made a more technical presentation to the Société at Lucerne. See Robert M. Thorson, Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 87–88. 74. Later that night he would sample the hot baths in an effort to kill off an infestation of fleas he thought he had picked up at Einsiedeln (GS CE 187–89). 75. Cooper noted that he had been very busy studying the geography of “all the German States, the Swiss Cantons, and the new divisions of Italy,” presumably during his intervals of study in Bern. This was necessary catch-up, since his previous geographical knowledge, he added with a bit of humor, “had been a good deal deranged by the ambition of Napoleon.” While scanning this part of the European landscape, Cooper thus confessed that he couldn’t find Lichtenstein (GS CE 192). That principality, which his guide also could not find, in fact lay just north of Cooper in the Rhine valley. When, passing through Ragaz the day before, he had seen a “cream coloured chateau” across the Rhine, he thought it was “in Swabia” (later he changed this to “Germany”), but it must have been in Lichtenstein (LJ 1:329; GS CE 183).

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notes to pages 56–60

76. This was certainly not a well-traveled tourist route in 1828. A decade later, Murray’s Handbook still described it as “a cart-road, of the very worst kind,” adding, “the want of roads and of inns . . . has hitherto prevented this beautiful district being visited as much as it deserves.” Even twenty years later still, Murray still was giving similar cautions to travelers. Murray’s Handbook 1838, 194; John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont, 8th ed. (London: John Murray, 1858), 215. 77. The map Cooper carried showed “Juf ” as the name of this community west of Rueras—Cooper spelled it with an umlaut; see Heinrich Keller, Reisecharte der Schweiz (Zürich: Keller, 1825), section 8 of 12. 78. Ibid. 79. For a roughly contemporary account of Cooper’s route in this climb and what it demanded, see Murray’s Handbook 1838, 196. 80. While waiting for the steamboat to arrive, Cooper lingered for an hour on the shore. Overcome suddenly by “a sensation of loneliness” unlike anything he had felt in the most isolated alpine terrain, he saw someone he actually knew. This was the Reverend Henri Peneveyre, sometime minister of L’Église St. Esprit in New York, where Cooper and his wife “had . . . occasionally . . . listened to his prédications in French” (GS CE 245). Peneveyre had left New York just a month before the Coopers in 1826. See John Pintard, Letters from John Pintard to his Daughter, Eliza Noel Pintard Davidson, 4 vols., ed. Dorothy Barck (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1940–1941), 2:261–62. 81. Simond deferred to Cooper on this subject in part because, as Cooper quoted him in 1836, “you were the only person who foretold the result of the naval combats in the late war with Great Britain.” Cooper added that Simond had laughed at his “predictions, in 1812” (GS CE 253). Useful information on Simond is contained in David Ricardo’s letters from his 1822 tour of the Continent, in Piero Scraffa and M. H. Dobb, eds., The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, 10 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–1955), 10:270–73. 82. Indeed, it is possible that the Coopers’ itinerary ever since departing from London in May had shadowed Byron’s. The poet had gone through the Lowlands on his way to the Rhine, then to Basel and Bern. In the third canto of the poem Harold is even made to visit Waterloo. 83. In 1828, it had not yet become customary for English-speaking travelers to quote Byron while passing through this area. That began to change in the next decade. In the first edition of his Handbook in 1838, Byron’s publisher John Murray used the Swiss parts of Childe Harold as embellishments for various entries. See, for instance, Murray’s Handbook 1838, 117. 84. Memoirs of the Countess of Genlis, Illustrative of the History of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: Wilder and Campbell, 1825), 380.

notes to pages 61–64

  

85. Cooper’s planned visit to his consular post at Lyons would have had three interconnected purposes. He could have communicated to Henry Clay directly from that city, settled things with Bousquet, and perhaps returned his exequatur to the prefect of the Rhone. As it happened, Cooper informed Clay that he had kept both that French document and his American commission pending instructions from the U.S. State Department (see LJ 6:302). American consuls at the time did not necessarily live in the place to which they were posted. When Cooper arrived at the Isle of Wight in 1826, he looked for his old schoolmate from Albany, Robert R. Hunter, who served as consul there from 1823 to 1842. But Hunter then lived in Le Havre, where in fact Cooper eventually socialized with him briefly on the way to Paris. See GF CE 17, 49, 278. 86. Edgar Johnson, Sir Walter Scott: The Great Unknown, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 2:1003–4. 87. The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson et al., 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932–1937), 10:359, 413, 416. Having last seen the American at Sotheby’s house on April 22, Scott noted in his journal on May 4, “Visited Cooper, who kindly undertook to make my inquiries in Lyons.” The Journal of Sir Walter Scott, from the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford, ed. David Douglas, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1890), 2:172. 88. Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 12:435–38. For a transcript of the document supplied by Bousquet to Cooper, and by Cooper to Scott, see ibid., 436n1. 89. A. Bousquet to JFC, 10/1/1828, JFC paps., box 2, AAS; Letters of Sir Walter Scott, 11:8–9. Bousquet had written Cooper a week earlier on his findings, but that letter is now unlocated. 90. A. Bousquet to JFC, 10/1/1828 (where Bousquet refers to Bradford by name, obviously on the basis of what Cooper had written on 9/28/1828). See the letters from Lafayette and James Brown to Clay in Robert Seager et al., eds., The Papers of Henry Clay, vol. 7 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 521. 91. By the Thursday after Cooper had left Geneva, the Journal there reportedly announced that he had been a recent visitor; see Providence Patriot, 11/19/1828. C HAPTER 3.  ITALIAN SKIES 1. Contract, Elisabetta Peruzzi Ricasoli and JFC, 10/25/1828, JFC paps., box 5, AAS. See also the receipt for rent (to 1/24/1829) paid by E. Fenzi for Cooper, E. Ricasoli, 10/25/1828, JFC paps., box 4, AAS. 2. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 2/21/1829 and 4/11–4/13/[1829], both in JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 3. On Cooper’s dealings with the sculptor, including the work commissioned from him and the financial support the novelist provided, see Wayne Franklin, “James Fenimore Cooper and American Artists in Europe: Art, Religion, Politics,” in Andrew Hemingway and Alan Wallach, eds., Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art

— 

notes to pages 64–65

and Literature, 1790–1860 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 147–51. On Greenough’s return to Boston and his time in Florence, see Nathalia Wright, Horatio Greenough: the First American Sculptor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 60–62, 66, and The Letters of Horatio Greenough, American Sculptor, ed. Nathalia Wright (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 17–20, 24. 4. The Greenough sculpture, put aside early in 1829, was later remolded (owing to the fact that Cooper gained weight, considerably altering his thin look during the winter of 1828–1829) and eventually copied in marble. For an early mention of it, see SDC to Martha DeLancey, 8/4/1829, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. For more on this item, see Franklin, “Cooper and American Artists in Europe,” 162n13. On Ombrosi, see Charles Wilkes, Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798–1877, ed. William James Morgan, David B. Tyler, Joye L. Leonhart, and Mary F. Loughlin, with an Introduction by Rear Admiral John D. H. Kane (Washington: Naval History Division, 1978), 93–98. 5. JFC to Mary Jay, 12/20/1828, John Jay Collections, Columbia University Library, New York (transcription prepared by Jeffrey Walker; copy in my files). Rembrandt Peale to Eleanor Peale 7/11/1829, Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, microfiche edition, ed. Lillian B. Miller (Millwood: Kraus Microform, 1980), VIA/6B 9–12. In an 1835 note, Peale probably was reminiscing about the time the two men had spent together in Florence when he wrote Cooper, “My copy of Raphael’s beautiful Madonna will at least revive some pleasant recollections of Florence.” Note on printed circular (dated New York, January 1835) for “Peale’s Graphics, A Manual of Drawing and Writing,” ibid., VIA/8C 13 D1. Cooper was very happy to see the Mediterranean again after twenty-one years. In the oddest twist, when he and Gouverneur M. Wilkins visited Leghorn’s Protestant cemetery together, they stumbled across the grave of Cooper’s old messmate from Oswego, Capt. Thomas Gamble, who had died in command of the USS Erie a decade before. The novelist, writing a poem honoring this chance discovery, inscribed it with pencil on the very stone right then (GI CE 32–34). The poem is printed in L&T, 221–22. Another reference to the tour with Wilkins is in JFC to Mary Jay, 12/20/1828. An American tourist who saw Gamble’s grave in 1832 copied the poem (noting it was “written in pencil” on the stone) and sent it to the New York Observer. That paper published it, noting it must have been written by Cooper, who had signed his name to it. See New-York Spectator, 5/22/1832. 6. SDC to Martha DeLancey, 8/4/1829. 7. Thomas B. Johnson, 4/8/1829 entry, diary (12/16/1828–4/28/1829), Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. 8. Wayne Franklin, “Writing America from Abroad: Cooper’s Recollected Sources in The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish,” Literature in the Early American Republic 3 (2011): 1–39. I there argue that, contrary to the assumptions of some readers, Cooper had not read his friend Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827) before writing his own

notes to page 66

  

novel of seventeenth-century New England, but did draw on common sources with Sedgwick—and, perhaps, conversations the two had had in New York. 9. By the beginning of May 1828, when he and Susan were still lingering in London, Cooper wrote Charles Wilkes that he expected to “print again in the spring” (that is, of 1829), surely a reference to The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (LJ 1:263). Even so, when in Bern in August 1828, Cooper would inform Luther Bradish that the book was only “half done” (LJ 1:286). 10. In October 1828, the month of the shift from Switzerland to Florence, a Pennsylvania magazine reported that Cooper was “now preparing a novel ‘The Child of the Wish-ton-Wish’ ”—evidence that in conception at least the book had already taken shape. Philadelphia Album and Ladies Literary Gazette 3 (11/29/1828): 173. It hardly seems possible that Carey was the source of this rumor; it more likely came from some American in Europe. Even when N. P. Willis reported that “Carey and Lea . . . will soon publish . . . ‘The Wish-ton-Wish,’ by Cooper,” the notice was still quite premature. American Monthly Magazine 1 (April 1829): 76. No contracts survive for Colburn or Carey, Lea and Carey or any of the other firms or individuals handling the book. Cooper probably had sold the English rights to Colburn before he and Susan left London in May 1828. When he negotiated with Colburn for The Bravo in 1831, he defined his terms for that book as follows: “Mr. Cooper sells the sheets, as usual, . . . for £600—£200, to be paid on delivery of vol. 1, £200 on delivery of Vol. 2, and £200 on delivery of vol. 3.” James Beard plausibly interpreted the “as usual” in this offer as referring to “the terms on which the firm had published The Wept of Wish-[T ]on-Wish in 1829 and The WaterWitch in 1830” (LJ 2:52–53n1). In the case of Carey, Lea and Carey, Cooper later indicated that he had sold his American rights to Wept for $3,000, payable in four installments from February through May 1830 (see LJ 1:408). There is an undated (but post–Red Rover) letter from Colburn to Cooper in which the London publisher, obviously happy with the 1828 novel’s success, offered the novelist a total of £600 for each of two unnamed tales—one “an American tale” and the other a “Sea story”—pretty clearly The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish and The Water-Witch. Henry Colburn to JFC, “Thursday,” JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. In seeking to ward off infringements by the firm of A. C. Baynes in Liverpool in 1831, the novelist asserted that this was among the novels to which Colburn held the English copyright; see LJ 2:55. 11. Like many other visitors to Florence during the period, Cooper had come to know the Protestant editor Jean-Pierre Vieusseux, whose reading room on the first floor of the Palazzo Buondelmonte, on Piazza S. Trinità, was a gathering place for writers, artists, and intellectuals. Over the fall, Cooper had consulted Vieusseux “dans l’affaire de mon ouvrage” (as a surviving letter of Cooper’s from December 1828 puts it) and was referred to Molini. Initially, he planned to have Molini produce “une petite edition Anglaise” of the novel (LJ 1:353), and early in February 1829, the printer made him an estimate of costs for setting the text and printing between 250 and 500 copies. G. Molini

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notes to pages 66–67

to JFC, 2/10/1829, JFC Coll., box 6, YCAL. On Vieusseux, of French Protestant background (his family had relocated to Geneva), see A. A. Pons, The Holocaust: Italy’s Struggle with the Hapsburgs, trans. P. R. Lloyd (London: John Murray, 1919), 66–67. 12. Mrs. Cooper wrote home on February 21, “We have been clinging to the hope as long as possible, that Printing in English might be done in Florence—but the truth has been finally forced upon us, and Mr. Cooper is obliged to go to Paris—where most probably he must remain three months.” She indicated that he was planning to leave Florence “on Tuesday, the 24th,” but he instead appears to have left at around 6:00 p.m. the next day; by March 4 he left Aix-en-Provence for Marseilles. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 2/21/1829; GI CE 50–63; LJ 1:360–63. 13. Heaviside’s unsigned and undated (but ca. 3/10/1829) contract with Cooper, in Cooper’s hand and with endorsements in a second hand, had called for payment at the rate of fifteen francs per twenty-four-page sheet, subject to review by Molini. JFC paps., box 4, AAS. An anonymous but well-informed correspondent confirmed for a New York City paper a week or so later that Cooper had come to Marseilles to print a novel (“not Travels in Europe, as has been erroneously reported”)—but, failing to come “to terms with the publisher,” had gone back to Florence and his family. “Correspondence of the New York Journal of Commerce,” dated 3/18/1829, reprinted in Peter Force’s Daily National Journal in Washington, DC, 5/1/1829. For the financial dealings between printer and author, see J. Molini in account with JFC, 7/27/1829, JFC paps., box 10, AAS. 14. The Paris bankers reported to Cooper early in May that his package for Colburn had been carried to England by a member of the firm; the double shipment for Carey and Lea would be dispatched on packets due to depart on June 1 and June 10, while Adeline Welles would hand-deliver that intended for Gosselin. Welles & Co. to JFC 5/2/1829, JFC Coll., box 9, YCAL. Cooper relied not only on the Welles bank but also on the active agency of Adeline F. Welles, wife of its Paris head, to work out arrangements with Gosselin and, once he backed out, the Galignanis. Adeline Welles to JFC, 5/31/1829 and 7/3/1829, both JFC Coll., box 9, YCAL. The German firm of Duncker and Humblot wrote in May that it accepted William Cooper’s terms and would pay 600 francs as soon as it had received his last shipment of copy, assuming he abided by various conditions the Germans outlined. Duncker and Humblot to William Cooper, 5/15/1829, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. A slightly later letter from Duncker about The Water-Witch mentions the hope that Cooper would carry over for that book “the conditions which Mr. Bossange and Mr. Will Cooper had stipulated for delivering the sheets of Red Rover and Wept of Wish-ton-Wish.” Duncker to JFC, Berlin [6]/14/1830, S&B 233 (misdated there “Jany. 14, 1830”). Bossange’s earlier intercession with Duncker and Humblot having ended, Cooper directed his nephew to work out the details for Wept. He later revealed that he had let his nephew keep for his own use the proceeds of the German translations, as well as the French ones, evidently as pay for his work as copyist and agent. See LTC 58n.

notes to pages 67–69

  

15. On Colburn’s publication date, see also Bentley PL. The Molini edition was reviewed in the August–September issue of the Florentine journal Antologia, but Spiller and Blackburn seem right in their conclusion that Molini did not in fact issue the novel to the public until after Colburn’s date (see S&B 58). Carey, Lea and Carey had received the first shipment of sheets (all of volume 1 and the first signature of volume 2) at the beginning of August but did not get the rest of volume 2 until later that month or in September, and waited until the twenty-third of the latter month for “two copies of vol. III.” At that time, the firm estimated the publication date would therefore be pushed back as far as October 20, but while the firm deposited the title for copyright on October 10, it did not begin selling it until the date given in my text. Carey and Lea to JFC, 8/8/1829, 9/24/1829, both in JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 16. Apparently the woe-ridden party of Osages encountered in Paris, Dijon, and Florence were at Civitavecchia at the time, or had passed through there recently. Cooper again wrote the single word “Osages” in his journal on this date (LJ 1:378). 17. In his Italian travel book, he would sharpen the comparison by reference to his later troubles with the American press and, to some extent, the American public: “If it be patriotism to deem all our geese swans, I am no patriot, nor ever was.” But even in 1829, with those troubles years away, he committed the treason of admiring this most spectacular foreign spot (GI CE 95). 18. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 10/30/[1829], JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. An amused Cooper wrote the American consul at Naples, Alexander Hammett, in October 1829: “I don’t know but that I shall be obliged to advertise that the old bust without a nose in our salon is not a bust of Tasso, for the curious multiply so fast that the groom of the chamber is making his fortune in grassi.” JFC to Alexander Hammett, 10/28/1829, at http://www.goldbergcoins.com/view-auctions/catalog/id/38/82420. Thanks to Anna Scannavini for this reference. Cooper later added that the house was “one of the wonders of the district,” famous enough to attract visitors who paid the servant Roberto to give them tours of its more public parts (GI CE 145). 19. For the full description, see WW 2:61–64. 20. On the recent eruptions, see John Octavian Blewitt, Handbook for Travellers in Southern Italy (London: John Murray, 1853), 302–4 (Blewitt indicates that Sir Charles Lyell, on examining the 1822 flows in 1828, found them not yet cool). Cooper’s wife mentioned his visit to Vesuvius with William as having taken place around the start of October; see SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 10/30/1829. On Milton, see Margorie Nicholson, A Reader’s Guide to John Milton (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 195. 21. It seems likely that Cooper had at hand such traveler’s books as Mariano Vasi’s Nuova Guida di Napoli, of which a bilingual English-Italian edition had recently been issued in Naples; see J. B. De Ferrari, A New Guide of Naples, Its Environs, Procida, Ischia and Capri. Compiled from Vasi’s Guide, Several More Recent Publications, and the

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notes to pages 69–71

Personal Visits of the Compiler to the Churches, Monuments[,] Antiquities etc. (Naples: Printed for George Glass, 1826). As John Conron and Constance Ayers Denne point out (GI CE xlv–xlvi), Cooper openly cited Vasi’s guide to Rome (Itinéraire Instructif de Rome et de ses Environs, many editions) and obviously used it broadly. In making a comment about the size of the Vatican, Cooper himself notes (GI CE 241) that while writing the book he consulted Mariana Starke’s Travels in Europe between the Years 1824 and 1828 (London: John Murray, 1828). 22. The extensive contract called for the coachman to make all arrangements for lodging and meals en route, probably reflecting the road-weariness of the Coopers, now well into the second year of their absence from more-or-less permanent lodgings in Paris. JFC, Contract with Michel Christin, Naples, 10/26/1829, JFC paps., box 5, AAS. Traveling with them were Roberto Santini, a servant hired in Sorrento (see Roberto Santini to JFC, receipt, 10/1/1829, JFC paps., box 2, AAS), and Lucie, their now-pregnant Swiss nurse and cook, who would give birth in Rome early in 1830 (the father was Luigi, another servant in the household in Florence; see LJ 1:399, 404). Cooper seems to have spent much of October in Naples on his own prior to the family’s final visit there; in describing that visit, he noted he had “climbed to the castle of St. Elmo a dozen times within the last month” (GI CE 173). 23. In his final novel, Cooper would sardonically describe the lawyers’ offices on Nassau Street in lower Manhattan (which connected Wall Street with the prison known as the Tombs) as “so many monuments along the Appian way, with a ‘siste viator’ of their own, to arrest the footsteps of the wayfarer” (Ways 129). 24. Hence she wrote her sister, “I can hardly conceive any thing finer, than this exquisite music, in this Magnificent Building.” SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 1/1–1/11/1830, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 25. Susan noted these details. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 1/1–1/11/1830. 26. On the apartment and the horse, see also SGB 481. Cooper’s wife informed his sister that he “rides on horseback every day, and it has been of great service to him.” SDC to [Ann Cooper Pomeroy], 3/8/1830, Cooper family paps., NYSHA. 27. Mariano Vasi, A New Picture of Rome, and Its Environs, in the Form of an Itinerary (London: Samuel Leigh, 1824), iii. The following summer, Cooper reminisced for Mary Jay of the Via Appia: “I have since often ridden along this ruined way for miles. It is altogether a rare emblem of life” (LJ 1:426). Owing to the great size and many associations of the Coliseum, on the other hand, he did not tarry over it in his Italian Gleanings, instead hurrying his readers along the Via Sacra to the Forum. He nonetheless would return to the Coliseum many times—on, for instance, “one beautiful moonlit evening” when he took his family there along with his old acquaintance and new friend Samuel F. B. Morse. William Y. Cooper to Hannah Cooper Pomeroy, 4/15/1830, in Clare Benedict, Voices Out of the Past (London: Ellis, [1929]), 36; Samuel Irenæus Prime, The Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1875), 187.

notes to pages 72–74

  

28. When writing Brantz Meyer in 1848, Cooper would compare Italy to Mexico. Both countries, he opined, evinced “a fine nature in the hands of a fallen people—amiable, and in a certain sense polished, but indolent and inefficient” (LJ 5:367). 29. Benedict, Voices Out of the Past, 36. SDC to [Anne Cooper Pomeroy], 3/8/1830. On the news Morse brought from Cooperstown, see also LJ 2:86. 30. Morse diaries marked “Rome,” dates indicated (though he mistakenly dates the moonlight visit to the Coliseum to February 29), Samuel F. B. Morse paps., Library of Congress. Sometimes it is evident that both men attended the same events—such as the fireworks show Morse described in his diary and Cooper recalled in his Italian Gleanings (Morse, diary, 4/12/1830; GI CE 255–56), but there is no overt indication from either that they attended them together. On the incident with the Madonna, see Wayne Franklin, “Cooper and American Artists in Europe,” 152–53. 31. Details on the birthday party can be found in a brief note in Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 22 (1898): 507, which reprints a surviving invitation (to attendee James C. Richmond), as well as the 5/28/1830 New York American story, as copied in the Daily National Journal, 6/9/1830. For the remarks about the “elegant” dinner, see Theodore S. Woolsey, “Theodore Dwight Woolsey: A Biographical Sketch, [Part] III,” Yale Review 1 (1912): 634–35. Cooper made a brief reference to the celebration in his Italian travel book, where he recalled that “near seventy Yankees (in the European sense)” took part, adding, “We were very patriotic, but quite moderate in its expression” (GI CE 232). See also the brief account in William Y. Cooper to Hannah C. Pomeroy, 4/15/1830, in Benedict, Voices Out of the Past, 36. Morse received an invitation to the celebration the very day he arrived in Rome and managed to attend and gave a toast to “Americans Abroad.” His Washington’s Birthday invitation is found in General Correspondence and Related Documents, bound vol. 11, Morse paps., Library of Congress; for his toast, see the 6/9/1830 Daily National Journal report. Morse’s fellow traveler Ithiel Town also attended; see R. W. Liscombe, “A ‘New Era in My Life’: Ithiel Town Abroad,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50 (1991): 11. 32. J. Morley, ed., Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers, 3 vols. (London: J. M Dent, 1933), 1:377. Robinson, no lover of Cooper even though he could not stop reading his books (see ibid., 1:343–44, 347, 353), relished the report and entered it in his diary. On Richmond, see William M. Tillinghast, “The Orators and Poets of Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of Massachusetts,” in Library of Harvard University: Bibliographical Contributions, No. 46 (1892), 21. 33. Woolsey, “Theodore Dwight Woolsey,” 634. Some of Woolsey’s negativity may have stemmed from specific rumors circulating in New Haven. Woolsey had himself graduated from Yale in 1820 and returned there as tutor in 1823 and was, after all, the nephew of the man who had expelled Cooper from the college in 1805. 34. Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings, 2nd ser., 19 (1906): 455.

— 

notes to pages 75–77

35. Theodore Dwight Woolsey was a distant relative of Melancthon Taylor Woolsey, Cooper’s commander at Oswego in 1808–1809, but there seem to have been few active ties between them. It nonetheless is possible that Cooper knew of their kinship. See Woolsey, “Theodore Dwight Woolsey,” 634, and Benjamin F. Thompson, The History of Long Island; from its Discovery and Settlement to the Present Time, 2 vols. (New York: Gould, Banks, and Co., 1843), 2:437–42. 36. To Charles Wilkes in January 1830, Cooper mentioned a report that a group of twenty-seven other Americans had been “the other day, in St. Peters.” That April, he noted “a very pretty sprinkling of Americans” there (LJ 1:401, 410). His nephew, also in April, passed on to his cousin Hannah Pomeroy the estimate of the American consul, Cicognani, that “more than a hundred” Americans had passed through Rome that winter (Benedict, Voices Out of the Past, 36). The English visitors Cooper socialized with included Lord Russell and his wife, the very accomplished Elizabeth Anne Rawdon, Lady Russell (see LJ 1:405–6; Elizabeth Anne Russell to JFC, undated, but March or April 1830, JFC paps., box 2, AAS, and 3/27/1830, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL). Cooper also noted the presence of the earl of Haddington in Rome at the time, writing, “I meet him often, and we sometimes talk together”—about “politics,” Cooper added later in the year when the two met again in Paris, calling him then a “mild Tory” (LJ 1:409–10; 2:16–17). He also mentioned, as present in Rome early in the year, James Justinian Morier, author of The Adventures of Hadji Baba of Ispahan (1824), along with his wife (see LJ 1:410–11). 37. On the return passage from Marseilles, see LJ 1:365–66 and GI CE 62–66. For The Water-Witch, its most direct benefit came when Cooper had Trysail, sailing master of the Coquette, tell about finding his ship’s position off the coast of Italy by means of snow-capped mountains visible in opposite directions at the same instant (WW 2:26–27)—a feat Cooper himself had accomplished in just those waters (see GI CE 64). 38. Halfway through the second volume (see WW 2:126–37), Cooper tried—but unconvincingly—to implicate Cornbury in the smuggling business that provides the main justification for linking New York and Van Beverout to the book’s nautical scenes. 39. There was once such a creek/canal (the Heere Gracht) in lower Manhattan, but it had been filled during the later seventeenth century and the only visible trace in Cooper’s time was Broad Street, which followed its curving course and in fact had some remnant houses of the sort Cooper specifies. He probably was familiar with various Knickerbocker references to this landscape feature, and especially the so-called Ferry House (see WW CE 28 and Washington Irving, A History of New York, 2 vols. [New York: Bradford and Inskeep, 1809], 1:143). It is just possible, however—and here the oddity of the book’s transatlantic origins is perhaps extended—that his visual grasp of the scene owed something to his presence in Florence when he wrote his first few chapters. For in an old Medici family collection then housed at the Villa Castello outside that

notes to pages 77–79

  

Tuscan city would be identified early in the twentieth century a now famous plan of the lower tip of Manhattan, unknown in New York until that discovery. Of all early views, the Castello plan most clearly depicts the curving waterway, with a string of Dutch-style houses on either side. See I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, 6 vols. (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915–1928), 2, part III, “The Castello Plan”; John A. Kouwenhoven, The Columbia Historical Portrait of New York (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 40–42. 40. The health troubles may have been more serious than Cooper’s daughter recalled three decades later. At the time, Cooper’s wife wrote her sister Caroline from Rome that he “looks thin, but his appetite is good, and he suffers very little this Winter from attacks of the nerves, and from indigestion, which plagued him so much during the last Winter”—that is, in Florence. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 1/1–1/11/1830. 41. Preceding Seadrift’s description is Tom Tiller’s recollection, even more striking, of a passage down the Italian coast that clearly recapitulates Cooper’s—a description that must have been completed as soon as Cooper got settled in Naples or Sorrento (see WW CE 63–64). Cooper never saw the cross atop St. Peter’s, though, from his own vessel—a sight Tiller mentions in his tale (ibid.). 42. In 1831, Cooper wrote his former navy colleague William B. Shubrick regarding this novel: “I remember the passage of Wasp through Hell Gate very well. I had left the ship at Whitestone”—Whitestone Neck in Flushing—“and was dining at Gibbs’ place when she came down, I had also the benefit of poor [Neale’s?] description which beats mine greatly.” Lieut. Benedic J. Neale, one of Cooper’s fellow recruiters on the Wasp in 1810, had died in 1815 but must have given Cooper a lively verbal account of the horrors of Hell Gate, a description on which Cooper drew in the novel. The WaterWitch was in this sense a tribute to “poor Neale” (LJ 2:79–80; see JFC:EY 135). Cooper furthermore had lived for the summer of 1823 on the river’s west shore, at Turtle Bay, nearly opposite the lower end of Blackwell’s (see JFC:EY 389), and two years later he had spent that season at George Gibbs’s farm across the East River near Hallett’s Cove in Queens, where he kept his Dutch sloop, the Von Tromp, which he frequently used on all these waters. Gibbs’s was the property where he had dined in 1810 (see JFC:EY 467– 68, and, for Susan Cooper’s recollections, LOM HE xiii). 43. It is possible that Cooper was influenced by contemporary interest in automata such as Von Kempelen’s chess player, which was brought to the United States in 1826 and put on display in New York, where Edgar A. Poe later saw it. I have found no evidence, however, that he saw it then and no references to it in his writings or his archive. 44. Walter Scott, Rokeby; A Poem, 4th ed. (Edinburgh: John Ballantyne, 1814), 63, 331. 45. If Cooper indeed wrote the May 1822 review of Bracebridge Hall that James F. Beard attributed to him, it is interesting that he failed to even mention the longish “Dolph Heyliger.” See ECE 133–43.

— 

notes to pages 80–82

46. The Flying Dutchman closed early in November 1827; see “The Adelphi Theatre Calendar, Calendar for 1827–1828,” at https://www.umass.edu/Adelphi TheatreCalendar/m27d.htm. It is of course possible that a copy of the play’s printed version made its way to Florence or Naples when Cooper was at work on his novel. 47. William Kidd, the New York pirate, is part of the background lore to which Cooper gestures in his book. But the Flying Dutchman legend was arguably the more generative source. See, however, Willard H. Bonner’s suggestive argument about the convergence of the two bodies of lore in the United States, “The Flying Dutchman of the Western World,” Journal of American Folklore 59 (1946): 282–88, and more specifically, Bonner’s arguments in “Cooper and Captain Kidd,” Modern Language Notes 61 (1946): 21–27. 48. I quote one of the surviving play scripts from J. Q. Davies, “Melodramatic Possessions: The Flying Dutchman, South Africa, and the Imperial Stage, ca. 1830,” Opera Quarterly 21, No. 3 (Summer 2005): 501. 49. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 1/1–1/11/1830. 50. The sentence, retained in the printed editions, actually runs as follows: “While the City of the Medici is receding from its crumbling walls, like the human form shrinking into ‘the lean and slippered pantaloon,’ the Queen of the Adriatic is sleeping on her muddy isles, and Rome itself is only to be traced by fallen temples and buried columns, the youthful vigor of America is fast covering the wilds of the West with the happiest fruits of human industry” (WW CE 10). 51. The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish represented safer ground for the Tuscan authorities, in all likelihood, because of its setting in early New England and the fact that Cooper, although he finished the book in Florence, did not mention that city or, with one slight exception near the end, any other Italian places. The exception is the slight negative comparison of the elder Ruth Heathcote, as she contemplates her daughter in chapter 27, to some “Empress of Rome” witnessing “the dying agonies of the hapless gladiator” (Wept 2:163). Greenough said nothing about the need to have The WaterWitch approved in Florence but reported to Cooper that the other work he wished Molini to print for him, “a letter from Cadwallader to the Editor” of the Edinburgh Review, which recently had published an essay comparing Notions of the Americans to Basil Hall’s Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, would, in the opinion of Molini, encounter “no objection.” Wright, ed., Letters of Greenough, 50. Although the answer to the Edinburgh Review was never published, the censor did raise objections to several passages on religious and political grounds, and Greenough asked Cooper’s advice on the proposed resolutions (see Wright, ed., Letters of Greenough, 54–55). On this work and its later fate, see LJ 1:399–408, passim. 52. Molini agreed to do this work for the same price as The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish as long as “the handwriting [was] equally distinct as that of the former manuscript”— that is, William Cooper’s amanuensis copy. Wright, ed., Letters of Greenough, 50.

notes to pages 83–86

  

53. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 1/1–1/11/1830. 54. Dresden had been on the novelist’s ideal itinerary at least since 1829, when he informed two correspondents of his wish to go there (see LJ 1:368, 385). The point about the study of German comes from SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 1/1–1/11/1830. 55. SDC to [Ann Cooper Pomeroy], Paris, 12/7/1830, Cooper family paps., NYSHA. 56. Cooper reported that his indisposition caused him to skip a desired visit to the ancient republic of San Marino in the hills above Rimini (see GI CE 270). So he settled for the disappointing shrine of Loreto, where Catholic legend held that the house of Joseph of Nazareth had come to rest at the end of its miraculous passage from the Holy Land. Not surprisingly, Cooper was unconvinced. Loreto’s “Sacra Casa” would come to figure for him as a symbol of credulity, not faith: in Satanstoe, Corny Littlepage quips that the College of New Jersey, founded at Newark, made “as many migrations as the House of Loretto” before it finally “settled down at Princeton” (SAT CE 39). For other instances, see HMR 2:140, GS CE 167–68, and SL 1:11. 57. Starke, Travels in Europe, 416. 58. John Murray, Hand-Book for Travellers in Northern Italy (London: John Murray, 1842), 324. Cruger had ties to the DeLanceys, through whom Cooper perhaps had met him. His great uncle, the Loyalist John Harris Cruger, had married Anne DeLancey, Brig. Gen. Oliver DeLancey’s daughter and hence John Peter’s cousin. Henry Cruger, whose original middle name was Nicholas, became Henry Douglas Cruger in 1833 when he married New York heiress Harriet Douglas. To avoid confusion I refer to him throughout simply as Henry Cruger. 59. The one painting mentioned in detail in The Bravo, Paris Bordone’s “Presentation of the Ring to the Doge of Venice” (1534), is said to have hung in the Doge’s palace (BR 1:182). But Cooper saw it, as did the Philadelphia painter Rembrandt Peale a week later, in the Galleria dell’Accademia, where it was hanging in the first room; see Peale, Notes on Italy (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1831), 281. The scene in which Cooper’s poor fisherman, Antonio, having fished for the ring, presents it to the doge (BR 1:181–82) clearly derived from Bordone’s painting of a similar event, discussed by Mary Knight Potter, The Venice Academy (Boston: St. Botolph Society, 1912), 286–90. Thanks to Hugh MacDougall for identifying the canvas in question. 60. This opinion was expressed by Prof. Anna Scannavini of the Università dell Aquila during a session of the Cooper Society at the American Literature Association convention in Boston on 5/23/2009. 61. I will suggest below that this seemingly abrupt shift of feeling, reported later in his Italian Gleanings rather than on the spot, may have derived from the contrast between Cooper’s personal experience of the wonders of Venice and the grimness of the book he was to set there once he got to Paris later in 1830.

— 

notes to pages 87–90

62. Cooper thought he had visited the Cathedral of St. James, but the “row of knights in their ancient armour” that he remembered (GI CE 302–3) instead adorns the Hofkirche, or Court Church. 63. Paul F. Cooper dutifully noted Manuel Pour les Voyages [sic] by Engelmann in a “Francfort 1827” edition as being in the family library when he inventoried it (current whereabouts unknown), adding, “J.F.C.’s copy; marked ‘Bought at Munich in Bavaria the 13th May 1830.’ ” “Listing of ‘Old Books’: Partial Catalog of PFC, III Library,” HCA, 16. Here and over the past few pages I rely on Beard’s summary of JFC’s penciled entries in it for this period (LJ 1:413–14). 64. Starke, Travels in Europe, 548–49. William J. Diebold, “The Politics of Derestoration: The Aegina Pediments and the German Confrontation with the Past,” Art Journal 54 (1995): 60–66. Cooper apparently had met Thorvaldsen in Rome, where the sculptor worked; Greenough certainly knew the Danish master. See LJ 1:347; Wright, Horatio Greenough, 40–42. 65. Their apartment was directly opposite the house then occupied by the writer Ludwig Tieck. Cooper knew of Tieck’s presence and picked up bits about his comings and goings, but he felt reluctant to intrude on him. He did, however, try to answer the many questions put to him by a young fan of the German writer; see GR CE 114–15. 66. The draft contract, in Cooper’s hand and dated 5/26/1830, is printed in LJ 1:416n from the original in the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. A photocopy of an original in William Yeardley Cooper’s hand, and bearing a signature for the Dresden firm but not for Cooper, is in JFB paps., box 3, AAS. The following colophon appears at the end of the third volume of the Dresden edition: “Dresden: Printed by C. C. Meinhold and Sons (Court-Printing-Office).” WW Dres 3:251. On the history of the Walther firm, see Paul Emil Richter, “Zur Vorgeschichte und Geschichte der vormals Walther’schen, jetzt Burdach’schen Hofbuchhandlung (Warnatz & Lehmann) in Dresden,” Publikationen des Börsenvereins der Deutschen Buchhändler, new ser., “Archiv für Geschichte des Deutschen Buchhandels,” 20 (1898): 109–67, esp. 150–53. 67. Carey and Lea deposited its copyright for the book on October 30, suggesting that the sheets had been received and typesetting begun some time prior to that date (see WW 1:[ii]). The Ariel. A Semimonthly Literary and Miscellaneous Gazette, published in Philadelphia, indicated in its 11/27/1830 issue that the sheets had been “received in Philadelphia several weeks ago” and that the stereotyped Carey and Lea edition would appear “in a very few days.” Both these facts show that Carey and Lea had no hope of meeting the October 15 target date. Moreover, two weeks after its first notice on the book, the Ariel indicated that “an unaccountable delay” had arisen (ibid., 12/11/1830). 68. Daily National Journal, 12/11/1830. On the stage adaptation, see Edward Harris, “Cooper on Stage,” at http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/drama/stage.html#awater.

notes to pages 90–95

  

69. Daily National Journal, 12/25/1830. Cooper viewed Colburn and Bentley as free to sell his edition for the French market, despite the Walther contract. In June 1831 he confided in them: “I am a little surprised that you have not managed to get a few more copies of Water Witch to Paris. More than half of my personal friends have not yet read it, on account of there being no Paris edition” (LJ 2:94). C HAPTER 4.  IMAGINARY POLITICS 1. Cooper’s wife described the commemoration in considerable detail for his sister later that year. According to her, it lasted three days and the troubles began “on the third night.” She also added that the Coopers had displayed candles in their windows to show their sympathies with the Protestants. SDC to [Ann Cooper Pomeroy], 12/7/1830, Cooper family paps., NYSHA. In general, I rely on a contemporary news report of the Dresden violence from the Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, 7/1/1830, as quoted in Judith Silber, “Mendelssohn and His ‘Reformation’ Symphony,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 40 (1987): 317. 2. Good background is provided by David H. Pinkney, The French Revolution of 1830 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 5–8, and Clive H. Church, Europe in 1830: Revolution and Political Change (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983), 1–39. 3. There were other reasons to object to the very unpopular Polignac, whose character was marked by “stubbornness, a supreme self-confidence, and an unwillingness . . . to come to terms with reality.” Pinkney, French Revolution of 1830, 8. 4. Ibid., 9–17. 5. Ibid., 18–42. Pamela Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution in France (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 28. 6. Pinkney, French Revolution of 1830, 109–32. See also Pinkney, “Pacification of Paris: The Military Lessons of 1830,” in John M. Merriman, ed., France in 1830 (New York: Franklin Watts, 1975), 193; and Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution, 72. 7. Pilbeam, The 1830 Revolution, 91; for background, 16–17, 61–62. 8. Pinkney, French Revolution of 1830, 139–41. 9. Ibid., 156–57. 10. Ibid., 191–95. I take the exchange between Lafayette and Louis-Philippe from the version of Lafayette’s present secretary, B. Sarrans, in Memoirs of General Lafayette, and of the French Revolution of 1830, 2 vols. (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833), 1:238. 11. One proof of his hurry in departing from Dresden is a letter begun there at the end of July, before the French news arrived. Addressed to Charles King of the New York American, it was carried from Saxony to France by Cooper and there sent, with a postscript that explained his shift of locale and the sudden reasons for it (see LJ 1:433). 12. Rushed as the trip was, Cooper took advantage of a brief layover in Leipzig (8/11–8/13/1830) to explore the site of the huge battle fought there in October 1813 (see LJ 1:436) and to conduct some literary business. He met the scholar Johann Gottfried

— 

notes to pages 95–96

Flügel, with whom he corresponded briefly later in 1830—and again in the 1840s, when Flügel acted as a go-between seeking to enlist Cooper on behalf of the Leipzig publisher Bernhard Tauchnitz. See Cooper’s unpublished letter to Flügel, 11/10/1830, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL; Flügel to JFC, 8/20/1843, JFC paps., box 2, AAS; and LJ 4:463–65. A second literary matter involved proofs intended for Colburn, Carey and Lea, and Gosselin, which Cooper had been forwarding from Dresden via the Leipzig postmaster but which he was concerned may have been held up. Susan, on the basis of information she received in his absence, relieved his concerns via a letter. See SDC to JFC, 8/14/1830, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL. 13. Because Frankfurt seemed increasingly certain as Susan’s next step, he explored the area and mapped the route thither for her, giving her details in his 8/21–8/22/1830 Paris letters, sent poste restante to her in Frankfurt, and he in fact had left a letter of instructions with a financial draft for her in the latter city (see LJ 2:5–7). 14. Once in Paris, Cooper conferred with several other Americans who, like himself, had felt the need to “rush here to see the movement,” among them his New York friends Robert R. Hunter and Henry Cruger, who agreed with his assessment. The novelist, relieved, also found that his literary shipments from Dresden via Leipzig indeed had arrived in Paris. “So that matter is safe,” he informed Susan on August 21 (LJ 2:5). Because of the relative calm in Paris, Susan and the children, in the family’s carriage and under the guidance of William, in fact left Dresden for Frankfurt on August 25 (see LJ 1:436). 15. The earliest surviving item addressed to Cooper at the new lodgings is a 9/24/1830 letter from Henry Cruger (by then back in Liverpool), suggesting that Cooper had rented the apartment on rue d’Aguesseau before Cruger left Paris on or about August 23. See CORR 1:190. Susan reported in a December letter that she had arrived in Paris with the children on September 4; see SDC to [Ann Cooper Pomeroy], 12/7/1830. 16. According to a receipt in JFC paps., box 4, AAS, on 11/8/1830, Cooper rented “Lady Ranelagh’s” apartments until 4/1/1831. He first used rue St. Florentin as his return address on a 12/6/1830 letter (see LJ 2:45). 17. The “cheap appartment” and the Swiss or Normandy trips were mentioned in SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 4/26/[1831], JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 18. The new quarters were located at 59 rue St. Dominique, across the Seine and close to both Les Invalides and rue St. Maur (where the family had first resided in Paris). The apartment’s owners at that time, members of the noble Villermont family, lived in the compound and became such good friends of the Coopers that the novelist would be accompanied to England in 1833 by C. Alexandre de Villermont (see LJ 2:385). Toward the end of April, Susan enthused for her sister Caroline: “any one versed in the mysteries of Paris will tell You [it] is a very pleasant, and a very distingué part of the Town.” SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 4/26/[1831]. Cooper would recall the place warmly (see

notes to pages 96–99

  

GR CE 83). The couple spent money and time having the apartment furnished, and the attendant flurry interrupted Cooper’s social schedule and his work on current literary projects (see LJ 2:67, 71, 106). 19. The Chamber of Deputies had debated the elimination of the peerage, a move Lafayette supported, although he implicitly accepted the compromise motion that put the question off until 1831. See Pinkney, French Revolution of 1830, 192. And of course Lafayette had openly supported the restoration of the monarchy. 20. It is evident that Cooper was here referring to a number of documents printed in the fourth volume of the collection, which he probably read not in the original Charlottesville edition (unless that was the one he borrowed from Henry B. Brevoort in Paris in 1831—see LJ 2:232–33) but rather in the retitled London reprint, Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Late President of the United States, ed. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, 4 vols. (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1829), 4:159, which prints Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1/16/1811: “Hamilton . . . asserted, that, with its existing vices, [the British system] was the most perfect model of government that could be formed; and that the correction of its vices would render it an impracticable government.” For other relevant remarks about Hamilton, see 4:416, 455, 460, 485. 21. Cooper may have been especially taken by Jefferson’s 10/28/1813 letter to John Adams distinguishing between a “natural aristocracy” or aristocracy of merit and the “artificial aristocracy” holding sway in various social and political contexts. Jefferson was reflecting on his experience of Europe, speaking of the “tinsel-aristocracy” there in terms that may have suggested Cooper’s own use of the phrase “butterfly distinctions and . . . tinsel.” For the text Cooper used, see Jefferson, Memoirs, Correspondence, and Private Papers, 4:231–37. 22. In this regard, I disagree with Paola Gemme’s argument about Fuller and others in Domesticating Foreign Struggles: The Italian Risorgimento and Antebellum American Identity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). Fuller and Cooper could and did see beyond the blinders of their American perspective. Indeed, their European experience liberated them. I would add that Cooper was relatively free of the sorts of prejudices other visitors brought to Italy, including Goethe and Madame de Staël. On the latter, see Joseph Luzzi, “Italy without Italians: Literary Origins of a Romantic Myth,” Modern Language Notes 117 (2002): 48–83. 23. “Dinner to La Fayette,” New-York Spectator, 2/22/1831. This report, which was written by Cooper for his friend William L. Stone’s Commercial Advertiser and was reprinted in Stone’s semiweekly Spectator (see LJ 6:308), lists the participants. 24. The National Guard kept order in the streets of Paris during the trials of Charles X’s ministers from 12/15 to 12/21/1830. That the accused were spared the death penalty, which had been demanded by the people, threatened the city with riots, but the Guard prevented that outcome, proving its loyalty to the regime and, inadvertently, Lafayette’s expendability. Church, Europe in 1830, 77. Cooper, entertaining Amelia

— 

notes to pages 101–104

Opie at his home on December 22, waited for her to depart, then rushed out to see what was happening at the Palais Royale, for the two writers could hear the drum rolls calling out the Guard to put down the rioters. He therefore had firsthand knowledge of what many call the end of the Revolution of 1830. Cecelia Lucy Brightwell, ed., Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 2nd ed. (Norwich: Fletcher and Alexander, 1854), 275. 25. Lloyd S. Kramer, “The Rights of Man: Lafayette and the Polish National Revolution, 1831–1834,” French Historical Studies 14 (1986): 526. 26. I rely here on Church, Europe in 1830, 107–16, and Bronislaw Pawlowski, “The November Insurrection,” in The Cambridge History of Poland, from Augustus II to Pilsudski (1697–1935), ed. W. F. Reddaway, J. H. Penson, O. Halecki, and R. Dyboski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 295–310. 27. Robert E. Spiller, “Fenimore Cooper and Lafayette, Friends of Polish Freedom,” American Literature 7 (1935): 56–57. See also Arthur P. Coleman, “The Great Emigration,” in Cambridge History of Poland, ed. Reddaway et al., 311–23. 28. Mark Brown, “The Comité Franco-Polonais and the French Reaction to the Polish Uprising of November 1830,” English Historical Review 93 (1978): 777–81. Banished in 1823 to Russia, Mickiewicz went six years later to Italy, where Cooper was to spend considerable time with him. On this subject, see Ludwik Krzyz.anowski, “Cooper and Mickiewicz: A Literary Friendship,” in Adam Mickiewicz: Poet of Poland, ed. Manfred Kridl (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 245–58. 29. Alvan Stewart, Diary (5/16/1831–9/1/1831), Special Collections, Otto G. Richter Library, University of Miami, entries for 7/4–7/5/1831, online at University of Miami Libraries, “The Alvan Stewart Papers,” http://scholar.library.miami.edu/ stewart/diary4.html, “From London to Paris, June 27–June 30, 1831.” Stewart’s activity on behalf of the Greeks is documented in Levi Beardsley, Reminiscences (New York: Charles Vinten, 1852), 172. 30. Stewart diary (7/9/1831), online at http://scholar.library.miami.edu/stewart/ diary6.html, “Paris, July 9–July 14, 1831.” 31. Beard’s text, based on Cooper’s preserved manuscript, has “will [assuage?] many griefs.” I delete the brackets and question mark, copying the text as given in “Contributions for the Poles,” New York American, 9/5/1831, the earliest printing I have found. 32. The address went home with Alvan Stewart, who sailed on the packet boat Havre on July 22. The vessel, which had a longish crossing, arrived off New York on September 1. Almost as soon as Stewart landed, Contributions for the Poles began its circulation among editors from Boston to Richmond. Stewart diary (7/15–9/1/1831), online at http:// scholar.library.miami.edu/stewart/diary7.html, “From Paris to Havre, July 15–July 21, 1831,” and at http://scholar.library.miami.edu/stewart/diary8.html, “Return across the Atlantic, Havre to New York, July 22–September 1, 1831.” That source does not mention Contributions or any mail Stewart may have carried for Cooper or other individuals.

notes to page 105

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However, the editor of the Pittsfield (Mass.) Sun indicated in his headnote to the circular on 9/15/1831 that it had been “received by the arrival of the Havre, from Havre.” That ship’s 9/1/1831 arrival was reported the following day in the New York American, the paper that, as indicated in the previous note, printed “Contributions” on 9/5. 33. The new edition of his older books was Colburn and Bentley’s response to a threat from another British publisher, the Liverpool firm of Adam Clarke Baynes and Company, which contacted Cooper early in 1831 about reissuing his works with new matter added. See A. C. Baynes and Co. to JFC, 2/19/1831, JFC paps., box 2, AAS, and Cooper’s response, LJ 2:55. Colburn and his new partner had just reissued The Pilot as the inaugural volume in their new Standard Novels series (see S&B 35, PIL CE 442)— without any authorial revisions or additions, contrary to Melissa Homestead’s assertion in “American Novelist Catharine Sedgwick Negotiates British Copyright, 1822–57,” Yearbook of English Studies 45 (2015): 210. When they learned of the Baynes threat, they proposed their own series of his novels, newly revised by Cooper, with his notes and new prefaces, to follow The Pilot. Cooper accepted the idea in mid-March (see LJ 2:60) and instructed the London firm to acquire from John Miller copies of the Carey and Lea editions of the books in question (LJ 2:64) for his use. Eventually, Cooper revised nine novels for Colburn and Bentley’s Standard Novels, receiving £50 per book for his labors (see LJ 2:65n3). The group included the following (in order of republication): Spy, Mohicans, Pioneers, Prairie, Lionel Lincoln, Borderers (i.e., Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish), Water-Witch, Bravo, and Red Rover. It is clear that the choice of the Carey texts as the basis for his revisions, rather than those previously issued by other English publishers, provided a chance to create new rights for Colburn and Bentley, an important business point for Cooper and Colburn and Bentley alike. For Cooper’s recounting of the whole matter, see LJ 2:133–34; for that of the Londoners, see Bentley PL. 34. See Lance Schachterle, “Editing Cooper’s The Bravo (1831),” Textual Cultures 3 (2008): 1–16. Nowhere did Cooper inform his London publishers that he was seriously revamping the book, or that doing so was part of the reason for his delays in forwarding copy to them. 35. The contract, dated “February 1831” and covering both The Bravo and the untitled “Lake Ontario” story (i.e., what eventually became The Pathfinder), came to Cooper as an enclosure in Colburn and Bentley to JFC, 2/26/1831, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. The contract promised Cooper £650 for each title, in payments of £200 on receipt of copy for the first and the second volumes and £250 on receipt of the final batch of manuscript. 36. One notes, too, that in June Cooper sent “nearly all”—not “all”—of the second volume, meaning that he had not yet reached chapter 20. 37. Presumably the remainder of the second volume was included in this shipment. Cooper said nothing about the matter, however, and there is no surviving confirmation from Colburn and Bentley regarding it.

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notes to pages 106–110

38. Colburn and Bentley to JFC, 7/11/1831, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. 39. The thirty-first is not the only chapter missing in the first draft; as Schachterle notes, the whole of chapter 27 and parts of five others are lacking (BR CE 416). Present in the manuscript are different versions of two of the otherwise complete chapters and alternative (rejected) versions of three of the otherwise incomplete chapters. Logically, only the missing final chapter cannot be presumed to have ever been present in this first draft, since it is the last item in a series that may never have been completed. All the others were textually implicated in the rest of the sequence. 40. The comment is Thomas Philbrick’s, as quoted in Lance Schachterle, “A Long False Start: The Rejected Chapters of Cooper’s ‘The Bravo’ (1831),” AAS Proceedings 115 (2006): 89. 41. The “exposition” to which I refer is identified by Schachterle in the introduction to his transcription of the discarded Bravo fragment (see “A Long False Start,” 90). It consists of a comment in which the gondolier Gino Monaldi recounts his sighting of “a rover of strange rig and miraculous fleetness” off Otranto—a sort of vestige of the discarded chapters (BR CE 14). 42. John P. Hoskins, “Parke Godwin and the Translation of Zschokke’s Tales,” PMLA 20 (1905): 280–82. 43. Autobiography of Heinrich Zschokke (London: Chapman and Hall, 1845), 28. 44. For the play’s New York runs between 1801 and the 1820s, see George C. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage, 15 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927–1949), 2 (1927): 108–9, 128, 131, 141, 176, 219, 247, 275, 310, 327, 390, 398, 449, 478, 493; 3 (1928): 126, 214. (I have double-checked Odell’s record, and extended it for other cities, via contemporary theater advertisements in newspapers available on the Readex Early American Newspaper database on 12/29/2008.) On the privateer and its connection to Dunlap’s play, see the witty declaration of a Boston paper in 1814: “The ABAELLINO will keep the people of England in as great an uproar as ever the Great Bandit did in Venice” (Boston Yankee, 12/9/1814; see also New York Columbian, 8/12/1815). On the generalization of the term: in 1816, a robber in New York left a note signed “Abaellino” in a store he had plundered (Albany Daily Advertiser, 11/5/1816; see also New York Columbian, 4/5/1819). For Dunlap’s account of his work on the play and its first performance, see his A History of the American Theatre (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1832), 284–85. 45. “The Bravo,” New York American, 6/7/1832, reprinted in American Railroad Journal, 1:25 (6/16/1832), 391. While Dunlap’s play may have been outmoded by then, the fact that a man as young as Gould (born in 1805) recalled it at all in 1832 verifies its still lingering hold on American memory. Monk Lewis’s play was usually known as Rugantino, although there appears to have been some confusion between his work and Dunlap’s. 46. Another important source for the novel came from the poetry of Cooper’s London friend Samuel Rogers. In mentioning his Italian novel in an 1832 letter to

notes to pages 111–113

  

Rogers, Cooper asserted, “I frequently stimulated the imagination by reading your own images and tales of that part of Europe” (LJ 2:178). He was thinking of Italy, A Poem (1821–1828), in which Rogers (relying on Daru) had touched on the grimmer aspects of the Venetian legend. Cooper derived mottoes for six chapters from the long poem, probably using the most recent edition, Italy, A Poem. By Samuel Rogers (London: T. Cadell and E. Moxon, 1830), in which it was formally divided into separately named sections. The relevant sections in the case of The Bravo were “St. Mark’s Place” (57–64; BR ch. 12), “The Gondola” (65–68; BR ch. 7), “The Brides of Venice” (69–74; BR ch. 8), “Foscari” (75–84; BR ch. 27), as well as two sections not concerned with Venice per se. It also seems likely, given Cooper’s mention of Rogers’s “tales” in his 1832 letter, that the novel was indebted in some way to the prose tale printed in Italy, “Marcolini” (75–84). It concerns a young man wrongly executed when he is found with the jewel-studded sheath of a Bravo’s dagger, which he innocently picked up as he crossed St. Mark’s on his way home from seeing his lover, who goes crazy when he is executed. 47. John Pemble, Venice Rediscovered (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 91, 93. For the most part, Cooper used the two final volumes of Pierre Daru, Histoire de la République de Venise, 3rd ed., 8 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1826). Of special importance was Livre 39, “Vues générales sur la government de Venise” (7:211–338), and the whole of the eighth volume, which printed the alleged “Statutes” and related materials. 48. SDC to [Ann Cooper Pomeroy], 12/7/1830. 49. Pemble, Venice Rediscovered, 90–91. 50. Discorsi sulla Storia Veneta, cioè Rettaficazioni di Alcuni Equivoci Riscontrati nella Storia di Venezia del Sig. Daru, 2 vols. (Udine: Pei Fratelli Mattiuzzi, 1828). Pemble, Venice Rediscovered, 93–97. Cooper’s acceptance of the statutes as presented in Daru’s Histoire is apparent in such a statement as the following: “There is still in existence a long list of the state maxims which this secret tribunal [the Council of Three] recognized as its rule of conduct, and it is not saying too much to affirm, that they set at defiance every other consideration but expediency,—all the recognized laws of God, and every principle of justice, which is esteemed among men” (BR 1:174). For the 1835 attack on Cooper by Pier’ Antonio Zorzi, see Emilio Goggio, “Cooper’s Bravo in Italy,” Romanic Review 20 (1929): 222–30. Goggio points out that, despite such bitter attacks, the novel was in its fourth Italian edition by 1838. 51. Things remained unresolved in the Lowlands; not until 1838 in fact would the Dutch recognize Belgian independence. Cooper was assured of the safety of the route, however, because Elizabeth Ann Russell had read to him the letters she had received from her husband, who was then attached to the British embassy in the Netherlands and very much involved in bringing the Dutch invasion to an end. The Coopers had been close with this British couple in Rome, and Russell’s reports (Cooper summarized their news in a letter to Charles Wilkes begun on September 4) detailed precisely what been happening in Belgium. See LJ 2:137–38.

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notes to pages 114–116

52. On the measles and Susan’s health, see LJ 2:133 and SDC to [Martha and Charlotte DeLancey], 9/29/1830 [for 1831], JFC paps., box 2, AAS. For details on the stay in Frankfurt, see Robert Becker, “Cooper in Frankfurt: The White Swan Hotel,” JFC Society Newsletter 25:1 (spring 2014): 3. 53. The inn’s location is given in Teut Andreas Riese, “Fenimore Cooper als Gestalter deutsche Geschichte: Betrachtungen zu seinen Roman ‘Die Heidenmauer,’ ” in Ruperto-Carola: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung der Freunde der Studentenschaft der Universität Heidelberg 41 (1967): 75n6. Riese reproduces (p. 65) a modern watercolor imaginatively depicting Cooper’s arrival at the inn. 54. Riese (ibid., 75n6) reports that he found Künzel’s descendants still living in the town. See also William Howitt, The Year-Book of the Country (London: Henry Colburn, 1850), 339. 55. A[lois] [Wilhelm] Schreiber, The Traveller’s Guide to the Rhine, new ed. (London: Samuel Leigh and Baldwin and Craddock, 1830). This was first identified as the guidebook Cooper used on the present trip by Hugh MacDougall, JFC Society Newsletter 19 (April 1996): 5. As MacDougall indicated, Schreiber described the Heidenmauer and the Teufelsstein in ways roughly consistent with Cooper’s later discussion of them. See Schreiber, Traveller’s Guide, 119. 56. SDC to [Martha and Charlotte DeLancey], 9/29/1830 [for 1831]. Her relief was heightened in part by the fact, also conveyed to her sisters in this letter, that Cooper’s nephew William was seriously, indeed fatally ill. The young man had been very sick the previous winter but then had improved somewhat, only to have a relapse in May. In September, when the Coopers were preparing for their Belgian trip, they had sent him and a family servant off down the Seine toward Le Havre, believing that “the sea air” might help him. He had to pause en route at Mantes for several days, so weak he barely could go on. The Coopers saw him there and heard from him by letter during their own trip and were hopeful that he would indeed recover. He returned to Paris before they did and died, of complications from tuberculosis, on October 1. SDC to [Ann Cooper Pomeroy], 12/7/1830; SDC to her daughters from Rouen [postmarked 9/6/1831], JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL; SDC to [Martha and Charlotte DeLancey], 9/29/[1831]; LJ 2:144; William Yeardley Cooper to JFC [postmarked Mantes 9/7/— and Brusells 9/10/1831], JFC paps., box 2, AAS. Cooper asked Horatio Greenough, then in Paris, to help with the arrangements; see Frances Boott Greenough, Letters of Horatio Greenough to His Brother Henry Greenough. With Biographical Sketches and Some Contemporary Correspondence (Boston: Ticknor and Co., 1887), 87. Cooper purchased a burial plot for William in Père Lachaise Cemetery and in 1831 marked the grave with an inscribed monument. See printed receipt, Préfecture du Départment de la Seine, 10/6/1831; for the gravestone, see “Lèbeque,” receipt, November 1831. Both in JFC paps., box 4, AAS. At a time when the Coopers were quite worried about Susan’s health, William’s death fell like a shadow across their feelings. For his old schoolmate Robert Hunter, the Cowes consul, Cooper

notes to pages 116–119

  

sketched the young man’s previous troubles a month later, then added, “He has left a blank among us, and his death has thrown a melancholy chill over all our European recollections” (LJ 2:152; amended by reference to the original in JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL). 57. Brian Lacey, “A Preliminary Inventory of the Literary Manuscripts of James Fenimore Cooper” (MA thesis, Clark University, 1975), 27, indicates that the manuscript begins with the “Introduction” and runs directly into the tale proper, while the book’s three initial editions in English confirm that the compositors had the copy of the “Introduction” in hand when they began to set the novel. Moreover, the novel proper refers at several junctures to the “Introduction”: see HMR 1:34, 44; 2:46, 225. 58. SDC to [Martha and Charlotte DeLancey], 9/29/[1831], confirmed at the same time that he had begun work on the book. 59. The book was the 1827 issue of the Almanach de Gotha, which Cooper thought covered “the history of the Princes of Leiningen, who were formerly Counts of Haardenburg.” Beard pointed out, however, that its brief entry on the topic cannot have been of much use (LJ 2:145–46n1). Riese, “Fenimore Cooper als Gestalter deutsche Geschichte,” 66, suggests that the real source must have been Johann Georg Lehmann, Geschichte des Klosters Limburg bei Dürckheim an der Hardt (1822); he adds that in an 1834 book on the region around Dürkheim, Lehmann himself asserted Cooper had used the 1822 volume. 60. S. F. B. Morse, “Letter from Paris,” 12/17/1831, reprinted from the Albany Daily Advertiser in the New York Mercury, 2/22/1832. 61. Lacey, “Preliminary Inventory,” 27. Cooper had of course lost the services of William as amanuensis, and his wife and daughter for some reason did not substitute then. He explained to his sister-in-law, Caroline DeLancey, that “the two Susans were obliged to copy most of Bravo, for me,” but that “with the Heidenmauer, I am obliged to blunder on, as well as I can.” In any event, he was writing Caroline in an unsuccessful effort to persuade her to come to France and perform this labor for him. Cooper’s plan called for Martha DeLancey to accompany Caroline to Paris, either as “an idler” or as a caregiver for the Cooper children (see LJ 2:159–60). 62. Cooper miswrote the name as “Einsiedlen” in the novel. He had arrived at Einsiedeln just as pilgrims were flocking there for what was known as Die Engelweihe (the Consecration by the Angels), to be celebrated on Sunday, 9/14/1828, the high point of the shrine’s year and therefore an excellent time to observe the role of such holy sites in the life of the Catholic Church. See LJ 1:324–28; John Murray, A Hand-book for Travellers in Switzerland and the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont (London: John Murray and Son, 1838); reprinted as Murray’s Handbook 1838, 186. 63. Luther is referred to about thirty times in the book, usually in only a sentence or two. The most specific reference to his principles occurs when, in response to the burgher Heinrich Frey’s comments about the value of intercession for the dead, Count Emich asserts, “they say that Brother Luther denounces these post mortem prayers, as

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notes to pages 119–122

vain and of none avail” (HMR 2:205). Elsewhere in the novel, we learn that “the increasing heresy that had effectually shaken the authority of the Church throughout all Germany” has forced “Bonifacius, and his superiors” to display “great moderation” in their demands on Emich (HMR 2:141; see also 2:169); later still, we hear about “rumors [that] speak marvels of Luther’s success” (HMR 2:237). 64. Gary Williams, “Cooper and European Catholicism: A Reading of The Heidenmauer,” ESQ 22 (1976): 156–57. Morse later would publish Foreign Conspiracy against the Liberties of the United States (1834), among other anti-Catholic items. 65. Josef Tschudi, Einsiedlische Chronik oder Geschichte des Stiftes und der Wallfahrt zu Maria-Einsiedeln (Einsiedeln: Faktor Benziger, 1823). Murray was to use this in the first edition of his long-lived Swiss guide: see Murray’s Handbook 1838, 184–86. Another possible source, excerpted from Tschudi’s, was Father Konrad Holdener, Beschreibung des Klosters und der Wallfahrt zu Maria-Einsiedeln samt dem Flecken und dessen Umbegung (Einsiedeln: Faktor Benziger, 1827). It should be noted, too, that Cooper cites “the local opinion” of his own day as a source (HMR 2:146). 66. Williams, “Cooper and European Catholicism,” 157. 67. Marius Bewley, The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 49. 68. “Meeting in Favor of the Poles,” New-York Spectator, 9/13/1831. 69. Laura E. Richards, ed., Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe: The Greek Revolution (Boston: Dana Estes and Co., 1909), 377. Lafayette to JFC, 10/22/1831, Polish-American Committee in Paris, Records, 1831–1832, American Polish Committee papers, NYSL (hereafter APC paps.), fol. 1. 70. Edward Gould, minutes, 10/31/1831, 11/4/1831, and 11/7/1831–1/18/1832 meetings of the American Polish Committee, APC paps., fol. 8. Clearly, Cooper was still very much associated, in the minds of the Poles resident in Paris, with American support for their efforts, perhaps because several of his novels had been published in Poland in translations by Salezy F. Dmochowski, who also translated Scott—see N. F. Zaba and P. Zaleski, The Polish Exile (Edinburgh: J. and D. Collie, 1833), 217. When relief efforts failed in November, the “late Envoys of the Polish Government” to France thus wrote Cooper, rather than Howe, an official letter of thanks, which Cooper in turn translated from French into English and mailed with a cover note to Charles King, who published it in his paper, the New York American, 1/9/1832 (it soon was reprinted in other papers; see LJ 2:147–48 for the text). But the November report of the initial meeting of the “Central Committee in Favor of the Poles” was penned by Howe and Gould; see, for instance, Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 1/11/1832. N. P. Willis, Hurry-Graphs; or, Sketches of Scenery, Celebrities and Society, Taken from Life (Detroit: Kerr, Doughty and Lapham, 1853), 210; The Complete Works of N. P. Willis (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1846), 628. Gould had sailed from New York for Le Havre (with Dr. McDonald) on the Havre, which departed American waters on 6/1/1831 (see New-York Spectator, 6/7/1831).

notes to pages 122–523

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71. Richards, ed., Letters and Journals of Howe, 397–98; Instructions to Howe, 1/16/1832, APC paps., fol. 10. 72. Cooper was chosen chairman pro tem in lieu of the departed Howe late in December and in mid-January agreed to serve as chairman as long as Howe remained absent. Edward Gould, minutes, 12/28/1831 and 1/18/1832, American Polish Committee meetings, APC paps., fol. 4. For the February session, see Henry Cleveland, minutes, American Polish Committee meeting, 2/22/1832, APC paps., fol. 4. Cleveland later reminisced about this particular meeting that, when someone pointed out the significance of the date, which was Washington’s birthday, Cooper proposed a toast and then Lafayette “told us many anecdotes of Washington and the American revolution; and we all remained till a late hour of the night, listening to the conversation”—“Scenes in Europe. Lafayette in 1832,” New-England Magazine 8 (1835): 337, reprinted with attribution to Cleveland in The Boston Book (Boston: George W. Light, 1841), 273. 73. For the first word of Howe’s seizure, see the draft minutes of a special meeting, “Friday 16 th” [actually 3/15/1832], APC paps., fol. 9. Cooper’s visit to Rives is described by Morse, who accompanied Cooper on that occasion, in “Imprisonment of Dr. Howe. [From a Correspondent in France],” 3/13/1832, the New York Observer, as reprinted in the New York Mercury, 5/9/1832. 74. On Cooper’s contact with “VB,” see the draft minutes of the special American Polish Committee meeting on “Friday 16 th” [actually 3/15/1832]. For confirmation that “VB” was Martin Van Buren, see Samuel G. Howe to “Mr. Van Buren,” 5/25/1832, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. Morse noted in a postscript to his 3/13/1832 letter: “Last night we held a special meeting of the Committee to consider what could be done to release Dr. Howe. The Prussian authorities here, I am happy to say, have behaved courteously and acted promptly; a courier has been despatched [sic] to Berlin, and from the representations of the minister here, we look for a speedy and happy termination and explanation of the affair.” “Imprisonment of Dr. Howe.” 75. Richards, ed., Letters and Journals of Howe, 393–95, 411. Howe to JFC, n.p., n.d. (but from his jail cell, around 3/25/1831), APC paps., fol. 6. 76. The official report penned by Cooper in June added: “We are grieved to be compelled to say, that while he was thus employed, Dr. Howe, who it was understood, acted with the entire approbation of the Prussian local authorities, was peremptorily commanded to leave the part of Prussia where the Poles were quartered. He instantly obeyed, taking the road to Berlin. Here, it would appear, he was arrested, shut up in prison, and cut off from all communication with his countrymen” (LJ 2:261). Two bits of explanation are in order. First, Cooper very well knew that Howe had communicated with his “countrymen,” for Cooper himself was one of those to whom Howe wrote. It probably seemed prudent to conceal this fact, however. Second, Cooper’s locution “it would appear” may have been part of an attempt to dissociate the behavior of lowerlevel Prussians, whom he held responsible for Howe’s arrest, from what he called the

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notes to pages 123–126

“high personal character” of the king of Prussia, the Lutheran Friedrich Wilhelm III, whom Cooper had heard the rioters in Dresden praise when he was there in 1830. Cooper also felt that the Prussian minister in Paris, Wilhelm, Baron von Werther, had been responsive to the American Polish Committee’s entreaties (LJ 2:262). Jerzy Jan Lerski, A Polish Chapter in Jacksonian America: The United States and the Polish Exiles of 1831 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1958), 75–76, suggests that Cooper may also have been responsible for the recovery of Howe’s sensitive papers from Berlin (where he had secreted them inside a hollow statue of the emperor). 77. Richards, ed., Letters and Journals of Howe, 400. Cooper wrote for the American Polish Committee a final report, dated 6/30/1832 and printed in the American press, for which see LJ 2:259–64. C HAPTER 5.  REPUBLICAN PRINC IPLES 1. A royalist from Nancy who had served under Napoleon, Saulnier was at this time prefect of Loiret, some sixty miles south of Paris, as well as (in Cooper’s words) “a writer in the employment of the French government” (GR CE 29). He also was prefect of police in Paris in 1831, from mid-September to mid-October, just when his first article on American finances appeared. See the website of the Société Française d’Histoire de la Police, “Liste chronologique des préfets de police,” at http://www.sfhp.fr/dotclear/ index.php?post/2009/05/02/Liste-chronologique-des-préfets-de-police. Cooper’s Letter to Lafayette was issued in English in December 1831 and appeared in French translation early in 1832. 2. Westminster Review 1 (1824): 251, 255, 262. It should be recalled that one of Cooper’s targets in Notions of the Americans was the selfsame Quarterly Review, whose article on Frederick de Roos’s Personal Narrative of Travels in the United States and Canada (1827) he contested; see Notions 2:204–5n, 349–59, partly on the matter of the budget of the U.S. Navy. 3. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Library of America, 2004), 246. In Afloat and Ashore, a discussion of U.S. taxation introduces a dismissive reference to Tocqueville’s observations in the chapter of Democracy in America immediately preceding the one cited in this note (see A&A CE 2:160–61; Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 239–40). 4. See the various receipts in JFC paps., box 4, AAS. I quote a circular for Bossange’s “French, English, & American Library” on which one of Bossange’s clerks entered a receipt for Cooper in March 1831; JFC paps., box 9, AAS. 5. Of these two handbooks, Cooper may have known Force’s prior to leaving New York, since it had commenced publication in 1820. However, it was not issued in 1825, 1826, or 1827, so Cooper hardly could have thought of it as current when he departed from New York. Edwin Williams did not begin publishing his Register until 1830, and Cooper did not have that initial volume before him as he tried answering Saulnier, as he

notes to pages 126–128

  

admitted, only that for 1831 (see LGL 42). For an instance of his use of the latter volume, see his citation of the number of newspapers published in New York State: “I happen to have in my possession a minute account of the journals of New York, by which it appears there are in that single state 237” (“America,” 300), precisely the total given in Edwin Williams, New-York Annual Register for the Year of Our Lord 1831 (New York: Jonathan Leavitt and Collins and Hannay, 1831), 103. For the novelist’s growing interest in such statistical handbooks during this period, and his use of them in other contexts, see LJ 2:64, 169, 209, 218, 224, 225. 6. The issues of the Revue Britannique in which Saulnier published his various pieces appeared not at their nominal issue dates, but rather several months late. The first item, in the June 1831 issue, was the article forwarded to Cooper by Lafayette on November 9. Similarly, the second item, nominally in the October 1831 issue, did not appear until after Le Général Lafayette a ses collègues de la Chambre des Deputés (the French translation of Cooper’s Letter to Lafayette), which is dated 1832, and to which Saulnier’s second item overtly refers. The best internal proof of this pattern of delay is found in the third item, titled simply “Correspondance,” Revue Britannique, n.s., 9 (November 1831): 164–94, which prints a letter from François Delessert dated 2/24/1832 and another from Levett Harris dated 1/31/1832. 7. “Tableau Comparatif des Recettes et des Dépenses spéciales de chacune des vingt-quatre républiques de l’Union, et de leur population respective en 1828,” Revue Britannique, n.s., 8 (November 1831): following p. 226. Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Cadell and Co., 1829), “Table 1,” following 3:436. Saulnier did have the dollar amounts in Hall’s table converted into francs and added the new figures “communiqué par M. Balbi,” but Cooper was clearly right; see his discussion, LJ 2:195, 197; GR CE 32. In his first article, “Rapprochements entre les dépenses publiques de la France et celles des États-Unis,” Revue Britannique, n.s., 6 (June 1831): 272–324, Saulnier did refer (on pp. 291, 302, and 308–9) to three U.S. sources, though in fragmentary form. I give the full citations: Jared Sparks, American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1830 (Boston: Gray and Brown; New York: C. and C. and H. Carvill, 1829); the American Annual Register; for the Years 1827–8–9 (New York: E. and G. W. Blunt, 1830); and Edwin Williams, The New-York Annual Register for the Year 1830 (New York: Leavitt, Jonathan, 1830). 8. A possible indication of covert assistance from a sympathetic American may deserve special emphasis: a footnote in the Saulnier essay reads “Note du Tr[aducteur]” (“Rapprochements,” 311n1). This phrase, often used in the Revue (most of its contents being derived from British journals), made little sense in an original article avowedly written in French. 9. “Nouvelles Observations sur les Finances des États-Unis, en réponse a une brochure publiée le Général Lafayette,” Revue Britannique, n.s., 8 (October 1831): 195–260. This is the article containing the table mostly taken from Hall.

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notes to pages 128–129

10. Ibid., 196 (translation supplied). Cooper explicitly acknowledged the graciousness of Saulnier’s praise, and in a note he specifically instructed his translator to allow “no harshness of expression” in the French version of his text. See James F. Beard, “Cooper, Lafayette and the French Budget: A Postscript,” American Antiquarian Society Proceedings 95 (1985): 87, 92. 11. Saulnier seems not to have had a prior personal animus against Cooper. Earlier in 1831, he in fact had published a translation of Hall’s laudatory piece on Cooper from the New Monthly Magazine. See “Puissances Intellectuelles de Notre Age. No. VI. James Fenimore Cooper,” Revue Britannique 4 (1831): 94–108. 12. Beard, “Postscript,” 87–88. 13. Not that Cooper would accept such an argument. Indeed, here is his response to it: “allowing that . . . these gentlemen actually acquiesce for the sake of quiet, and with a view to advance what they conceive to be the interests of America, I shall maintain that the course is to the last degree impolitic and unworthy. Our motto is to ‘ask nothing but what is right, and to submit to nothing that is wrong.’ ” In a footnote he pointed out that the French government had delayed funding the spoliations treaty precisely because the “temporizing and selfish policy” of U.S. officials exposed weakness on the American side (GR CE 31–32). Rives later switched from the Jacksonian Democrats to the Whigs, perhaps a sign that his political distance from Cooper was growing even in 1832. 14. Levett Harris’s background is obscure. Born John Harris Pugsley, he changed his name in 1810, probably to honor (and become the heir of ) an uncle, Levett Harris, of Burlington, New Jersey. See Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Bioren, 1811), 1. The two men are sometimes confused in the historical record because both served, in succession, as U.S. consul in St. Petersburg. The younger diplomat later was John Quincy Adams’s assistant at the Russian court, but, after serious charges of corruption were brought against Harris, he had a bitter falling-out with Adams, then secretary of state. See John D. Lewis to “a gentleman in New York,” reprinted in the Lancaster (Pa.) Journal, 4/10/1818; Writings of John Quincy Adams, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, 7 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1913– 1917), 6:363–65; and Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary from 1795 to 1848, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 12 vols. (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott, 1874–1877), 5:292–96, 328–29. Background on the case is provided in James B. Rhoads, “Harris, Lewis, and the Hollow Tree,” American Archivist 25 (1962): 295–314. Cooper may well have heard of some of the sordid details about Harris’s venality from colleagues in the diplomatic service in Europe, but if he did, he did not use the knowledge against Harris. 15. From Rives, Cooper learned that he was to be challenged to a duel for “daring to prove what a set of liars they are.” Writing to Morse, Cooper quipped, “They must use heavier metal than any they have yet fired, even to extort a gun in return” (LJ 2:315). Nothing appears to have come of the threat.

notes to pages 130–131

  

16. Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopedia of American Literature, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1855), 2:467–68; Franklin B. Dexter, Biographical Sketches of Graduates of Yale College, 6 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1885–1912), 4:710. 17. Gould was also known for a brief time as “The Man in the Claret-Coloured Coat,” an anti-Jacksonian phrase originating during the so-called Arsenal Riot in Manhattan in April 1834. See Duyckinck and Duyckinck, Cyclopedia of American Literature, 2:467–69. 18. “Mr. Gould’s Poor English,” Literary World: Choice Readings from the Best New Books, and Critical Reviews 11 (1/3/1880): 3. The reviewer criticized Gould for his attitudes and values but also for repeatedly violating his own rigid rules. Gould’s book, first published in 1867 and reprinted in 1880, was called Good English; or, Popular Errors in Language. For his most direct attack on Webster, see “Webster’s Orthography,” Literary World: A Journal of American and Foreign Literature, Science, and Art 9 (7/26/1851): 68; see also his “Extracts from a Manuscript Journal of a Trip to Paris, in 1831,” New-York Mirror 10 (8/18/1832): 52n. 19. See Gould’s “Extracts from a Manuscript Journal . . . Number Seven,” NewYork Mirror 10 (9/29/1832): 101, and “Conclusion,” New-York Mirror 10 (11/17/1832): 156. On these opinions, see Dorothy Waples, The Whig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), 96. For a nice contrast between Gould’s and Cooper’s politics, see the treatment of the fleur-de-lis business in GR CE 71. 20. Owing to his pending departure for the United States, Gould resigned as secretary of the American Polish Committee on 1/25/1832; see American Polish Committee minutes for that date, Polish-American Committee in Paris, Records, 1831–1832, fol. 9, NYSL. See also Gould’s “The Return Home,” New-York Mirror, 4/14/1832. 21. In 1860, editor Lewis Gaylord Clark reprinted in his Knickerbocker Magazine an attack on Cooper by Gould that originally had appeared in that journal in 1838. Gould “had met Mr. Cooper abroad,” Clark wrote in discussing the matter, “and ‘struck’ with his manners toward himself and other ‘fellow-countrymen’ at that time in Paris, he came to regard him with an affection ‘passing the love of women.’ ” Clark went on: “If we remember rightly, there was certain ‘Parisian correspondence’ in one of our daily journals of that era, which gave full vent to this singular affection—‘par la gauche.’ ” “Editor’s Table,” Knickerbocker 55 (1860): 324. As far as I know, no one has ever unearthed Clark’s anecdote, with its implication of some sexual undercurrent in the matter, let alone found any elaboration of its points elsewhere. I have not located any such “Parisian Correspondence” from the early 1830s. 22. New York American, 6/7/1832. In a pompous lecture delivered on 12/29/1835, Gould continued his belittlement of Cooper: “It is true, the monstrous assumption has been in two instances circulated among us, that he who is called the American Walter Scott, is the full-grown rival—the successful competitor—the equal, at least, of his

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notes to pages 132–134

illustrious prototype!! But as that assumption has been patronized by a distressingly minute minority of Americans—and Americans, certainly, are most interested in according to cooper all the honour he really deserves—it is manifest that the comparison, thus far, is immensely in favour of Great Britain.” “American Criticism on American Literature,” in Lectures Delivered before the Mercantile Library Association, Clinton Hall (New York: Mercantile Library Association, 1836), 20. 23. “A Reply to the Attack on Sir Walter Scott, in the Knickerbocker for October,” Knickerbocker 12 (1838): 508–20. This is identified as Gould’s in Clark’s “Editor’s Table” column from 1860 already cited (note 21). Gould’s criticism of Cooper’s Latin appeared in the Knickerbocker 12:509n, and was repeated in The Sleep-Rider; or The Old Boy in the Omnibus (New York: J. Winchester, 1843), where the mistake is attributed to “an erudite American critic” (41). Waples, Whig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper, 179–80. 24. See “The Man in the Claret-Coloured Coat to His Countrymen,” New-York Mirror, 7/19/1834, 18–19. 25. Cooper added in his letter to Morse: “The Bravo is certainly no very flattering picture for the upstart aristocrats of the new regimes, and nothing is more natural than their desire to undervalue the book.” And, a few pages later: “I have seen many extraordinary and some impudent transactions in my time, but I can recall none more flagrant than this of putting an American on his trial, at the bar of public opinion, and that, too, in his own country, for having told the truth in defence of Gen. Lafayette, at a great pecuniary loss to himself, and without the smallest possibility of personal advantage” (LJ 2:377, 380). In 1834, Cooper reprised the story of his attempt to discover the identity of “Cassio” (LTC 19–35). In “Point de Bateaux à Vapeur: Une Vision,” which he wrote in French and published in Paris in 1832, Cooper had also discussed his suspicions, again linking “Cassio” with Saulnier; see Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-Un 9 (1832): 247, conveniently reprinted with an amplified English translation (originally in American Ladies’ Magazine 7 [1834]: 71–79) and notes and commentary by Hugh MacDougall as James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers: Reference Series, No. 16 (2002). 26. New York American, 6/24/1833. Gould there also denied having any political motives. While information about his life is sparse, one newspaper item from 1838 indicates that by then he was an active member of the Whig Party; see New-York Spectator, 4/12/1838. 27. American Railroad Journal 1 (1832): 410, reprinting a 4/25/1832 story from the Journal des Debats. SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 4/28/[1832], JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. Cooper tells a somewhat different version of the story in GR CE 22. 28. This brief action would suggest the denouement for Hugo’s Les Misérables. 29. This incident prompted Cooper’s later comment that he “preferred siding with the juste milieu, for once in my life” (GR CE 51). The juste milieu (“happy middle”) was the term Louis-Philippe himself used to describe his planned course of moderation on assuming the throne. See GR CE 15n.

notes to pages 135–137

  

30. Samuel F. B. Morse, “The Civil War in Paris,” New-York Spectator, 8/2/1832. Cooper visited the scene with Col. Thomas Aspinwall, U.S. consul in London and an old friend who handled literary business for him there. Aspinwall had actually penetrated to the scene of the worst fighting the day before and related to the novelist what he had seen. On his own and through this friend, Cooper was contemplating scenes oddly reminiscent of those he had conjured up a few weeks earlier while writing of the onslaught on Limburg Abbey in The Heidenmauer. See GR CE 58. The next evening, Cooper visited Lafayette, with whom he discussed not only the “Two Days” just ended, but also the “Three Glorious Days” of 1830. See GR CE 63–70. 31. As with the Gould incident, no surviving account indicates exactly what happened at the 1832 celebration. The gathering certainly was tense with political concerns. The Polish uprising and the Poles then in exile were not mentioned in the official toasts, leading Spiller to suggest that this forced omission may explain Cooper’s disgust. Robert E. Spiller, James Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times (New York: Minton, Balch, and Co., 1931), 181–82; “Fenimore Cooper and Lafayette: Friends of Polish Freedom,” American Literature 7 (1935): 62. France itself was such a delicate topic that General Bernard asked the advice of his “dear and honored friend” Cooper about how to support republican aims while still forestalling possible embarrassments at the Fourth of July celebration, to which Cooper had invited him (CORR 1:266–67). 32. Cooper shared his view of Irving and the Quarterly Review with Morse, who on returning to New York passed it on to William Dunlap. See Diary of William Dunlap, ed. Dorothy C. Barck, 3 vols., New-York Historical Society Collections, 1931, 3:635: “M[orse] says that the acc[oun]t of the dinner given to Irving caused a burst [in Cooper] that was frightful. We lament his indiscretion.” No surviving letters from Cooper to Dunlap discuss, as Dunlap there suggests some did, the novelist’s feelings with regard to Irving. However, see JFC to Carey and Lea, ca. April–May 1833, LJ 6:320: “A man who takes the money of the U. States with one hand, and that of the Editor of the Quarterly Review with the other, will never live on bread and cheese, when any thing else is to be had.” Irving’s essay on The Conquest of Granada was not strictly a self-review but rather an explanation of his own methods as a writer. It was necessitated by John Murray’s gaffe in listing Irving on the book’s title page as author—thereby exposing its fictive apparatus. Word of the 5/30/1832 Irving dinner probably had reached Paris before July 4. See Pierre M. Irving, The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, 4 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1863), 2:491–92. Nonetheless, surviving reports of the July 4 Paris meeting, such as a long one published in the New-York Spectator, 8/30/1832, do not confirm that the Irving matter came up there. 33. Samuel F. B. Morse to Sydney and Richard Morse, 7/18/1832, Morse paps., Library of Congress. 34. Of the July 25 discussion at William Ouseley’s lodgings, Cooper wrote the following in his journal: “There was a good deal of conversation about books on America,

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notes to pages 137–140

but as is usual, in the better sort of English society, it ended in vague and general professions of liberality” (LJ 2:282; see also Cooper’s letter to Ouseley, 2:278–79). For Ouseley’s support for Cooper, see Remarks on the Statistics and Political Institutions of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1832), 83–93, and esp. 102–35. For details on what the couples did together in Brussels, see LJ 2:281–82. 35. Cooper claimed in a long chatty letter to Morse that he found Spa dull (see LJ 2:290–93). A few days later, he wrote his nephew Richard: “Spa is a little, clean, comfortable town, about as large as Saratoga, but not a tenth part as gay” (LJ 2:295). He spent some time at Spa socializing with various old and new friends, including New Yorker William D. Patterson, the U.S. consul at Antwerp (where the two had also met); Sir Richard D. Henegan, an aide to Wellington in the Peninsular War; and New Orleans merchant Joseph Fowler, with whom, as we shall see, he would spend considerable time in the future (see LJ 2:280, 298; 294; 293). 36. In Frankfurt, Cooper caught up on English and French papers, learning that “Poor George Rodgers,” once his shipmate on the Wasp, had died in Buenos Aires. He also first read reports of the February 1832 U.S. naval action against Malay pirates under John Downes (also a Wasp shipmate) and Irvine Shubrick in the Potomac, about which he would write in the continuation of his naval history, first published in 1853 (LJ 2:309; History of the Navy of the United States of America . . . Continued to 1853, 3 vols. in 1 [New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853], 3:33–36). 37. In his “Introduction” to The Headsman, Cooper would recall that the family arrived in Vevey in 1832 “nearly on the same day” as four years earlier (HMN 1:111). But it was early in September this time, not October. 38. Spiller, Critic of His Times, 199, locates Mon Repos. SDC to Martha DeLancey, 9/11/1832, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 39. The artist would recall later in his July letter to his brothers that he and Cooper usually saw each other every day—first in the Louvre, where Cooper would come to observe Morse’s labors after his own daily writing was done, then later at the novelist’s lodgings, where Morse would come calling on the family. Morse to Sydney and Richard Morse, 7/18/1832. Cooper described his habits with piquant detail for William Dunlap in March 1832: “I get up at eight, read the papers, breakfast at ten, sit down to the quill at 1/2 past ten—work till one—throw off my morning gown—draw on my boots and gloves, take a cane that Horace Greenough gave me, and go to the Louvre, where I find Morse stuck up on a high working stand, perch myself astraddle one of the seats, and bore him just as I used to bore you when you made the memorable likeness of St. Peter. ‘Lay it on here, Samuel—more yellow—the nose is too short—the eye too small— damn it if I had been the painter what a picture I should have painted.’ ” By six at night, Cooper added, “we are home eating a good dinner, and I manage to get a good deal out of Morse in this way too” (LJ 2:239). 40. SDC to Martha DeLancey, 9/11/1832.

notes to pages 140–142

  

41. Cox was established at Lausanne at the time, as Cooper apparently learned when renting Mon Repos, which he found Cox had “looked at the other day” (LJ 2:328). 42. This is a point made, for instance, by H. Daniel Peck, who writes, “The moment of conception of many of [Cooper’s] novels seems to have occurred with the viewing of a natural scene.” A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 6. 43. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 27 (1830): 190–216. Hardman is identified as the author by Earl Leslie Griggs, ed., Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6, 1826–1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 837n3. A contemporary controversy about Hardman’s unacknowledged sources is briefly discussed in Eric W. Nye, “Coleridge and the Publishers: Twelve New Manuscripts,” Modern Philology 87 (1989): 68–70. It is possible that Cooper’s inclusion of his memories of the aborted execution of Stephen Arnold in 1806 in “The Eclipse” (ca. 1831) was stimulated by the chance reading of Hardman’s story. For Arnold’s crime and its effect on Cooper, see JFC:EY 61–64. 44. “Hereditary Honours. A Tale of Love and Mystery,” New Monthly Magazine 34 (1832): 433–40. When this piece was reprinted in a New York journal shortly after The Headsman was published, that journal’s editor pointed to the “singular coincidence” between the two. “Hereditary Honours,” New-York Mirror 11 (11/23/1833): 163. Cooper also must have known of the Sanson family, the hereditary executioners of Paris. 45. Another likely source, in a much more general way, was Rousseau’s Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), to which Cooper refers in his own novel as having familiarized “the reader of fiction” with the villages clustered on the north shore of the lake around Vevey, the home of Rousseau’s high-born heroine and her tutor-lover (HMN 1:87). 46. A U.S. newspaper report about the 1833 Fête des Vignerons stated that Cooper “was last year present at this festival, and has made it the subject of his new novel of ‘The Headsman’ ” (National Intelligencer, 10/12/1833). But that was wrong: there was no festival in 1832, and in 1833 Cooper was in London in July seeing the book through the press and then in Paris for two final weeks before he returned, this time with his family, to England, from which they left for New York. (The paper also gives a somewhat detailed account of the festival that would seem not to have been derived from The Headsman.) 47. For the sequence of festivals, see “J.C.,” Vevey et ses environs (Geneva: Ab. Cherbuliez et cie., 1842), 16–17. 48. In 1819, the Swiss Guards took their post at 4:30 a.m., and by 5:30 “occupera tout l’extérieur de l’enceinte, en se plaçant homme à homme à cinq pieds de distance.” Description de le Fête des Vignerons, célébrée à Vevey, le 5 Aoust [sic] 1819 (Vevey: Lœrtscher et Fils, [1819]), 9–10 (where the ceremony I refer to is also described). For the cowherd’s song, of which Cooper gives the text “in the patois of the country,” see HMN 1:244–46 and Description de le Fête des Vignerons, 25–27. Most of the slight differences between his version and the latter could have resulted from his misreading of the original

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notes to pages 142–144

or the typesetter’s misreading of his manuscript. But none is critical, and Cooper’s version is much closer to it than to the text from Gruyère, in the nearby Canton of Fribourg, that he might have found in George Tarenne’s more readily available Recherches sur les Ranz des Vaches, ou sur les Chansons Pastorales des Bergers de la Suisse (Paris: F. Louis, 1813), 65–66. 49. Description de Fête des Vignerons, 29–30. Although I appreciate Geoffrey Sanborn’s attempt to read The Headsman as an allegory concerned with slavery, and hence as a prototypical “passing” novel, I remain unconvinced by his argument. I think Cooper indeed saw all social rankings, including those entailed in European aristocracy and American slavery, as based on insupportable prejudices and gross exploitation. But in this novel I think the allusions Sanborn points to enrich Cooper’s political focus on the European political and social order rather than make the tale a veiled treatment of slavery. I would add that some of Sanborn’s adduced details (such as the use of blacks in subordinate roles in the vine-dressers’ festival) derived directly from the 1819 Description de Fête des Vignerons (in which see p. 18). For Sanborn’s argument, see “James Fenimore Cooper and the Invention of the Passing Novel,” American Literature 84 (2012): 1–29. Sanborn draws on and expands insights first proposed by Harold T. McCarthy in The Expatriate Perspective: American Novelists and the Idea of America (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974). 50. In the novel, Adelheid and the rejected bride, Christine, resting near the refuge in which they have spent the previous night, think another stone structure nearby is a second such refuge. Adelheid thus says, “there are travellers sleeping in yonder building, too,” but their guide, Pierre Dumont, answers, “Their sleep will be long, lady.” The dead bodies inside include one whose story Dumont knows well. It is no mason, but rather a vine-dresser who had climbed up from the Italian side, planning to labor amid the Swiss vineyards. Dumont explains: “I found his body myself on that naked rock, the day after we had drunk together in friendship at Aoste, and with my own hands was he placed among the others” (HMN 2:133–34). 51. Cooper also relied on other Swiss details in the book. Most notably, the storm that strikes the Winkelried while on Lake Geneva at the book’s start recalls the one that nearly swamped Cooper’s hired boat on Lake Lucerne when the dry downslope wind called the föhn struck it during his third 1828 tour; see HMN 1:101, and H. Lüdeke, “James Fenimore Cooper and the Democracy of Switzerland,” English Studies 27 (1946): 39. Similarly, the snowstorm that hits the book’s pilgrims during their ascent of the pass owes a good deal to the one Cooper had encountered, on horseback, toward the end of the same tour, much as the novel’s guide, Dumont, clearly recalls the one Cooper had employed then. To a lesser extent, Cooper also relied on various Italian memories, especially in developing the Italian character in the novel called Pippo (see HMN 1:68, 2:196). 52. Cooper’s sense of being besieged for his support of American principles was accompanied by the perception, shared with Greenough in the same letter, that

notes to pages 144–147

  

Americans who undervalued those principles were “rewarded with office.” He was thinking of his antagonist Levett Harris, “who so ably, God save the mark!—defended the French government in the late Finance question,” but who had “just been appointed Chargé d’Affaires to this Court!!” (LJ 2:383). 53. It however appears that Cooper finished writing The Headsman only once he arrived in London in June 1833. See LJ 2:389–91. 54. Dunlap had written Cooper on the subject while the Coopers were making their way to Vevey and sent the first three sheets of the New York edition to him as a sample. Cooper did his best, vouching for his “old and poor” friend to Colburn and Bentley (“I never knew a more honest man”) and pushing the book on them. Bentley, then on his own, later in the year undertook the project, agreeing to pay the always impecunious Dunlap £100 (see LJ 2:353–54, 356–58). When the U.S. edition of the History of the American Theatre appeared, Dunlap dedicated it to “J. Fennimore [sic] Cooper.” 55. Richard may have stimulated his uncle’s interest in Otsego Hall by writing in August 1831 about the “dilapidated state” of that “sad monument of the fallen fortunes of the family,” which he added was in danger of being torn down (CORR 1:235). After receiving the instructions contained in his uncle’s letter from Spa (dated 8/5/1832), Richard had discussed the matter both with Averell and with the novelist’s old friend and attorney in Otsego Robert Campbell. His two letters on the matter, referred to by Cooper in March 1833 as having been received earlier (see LJ 2:374), are unlocated. 56. Ethnically Lithuanian, Paç had been born in France and had fought under Napoleon in Russia. He was prominent in the November 1830 uprising against the tsar but then had been forced out of the country. Cooper had met him in Paris in the course of the Polish relief effort and knew him well enough by 1832 to include him in a dinner party honoring Lafayette at his own home (see LJ 2:363–64). After returning to New York, Cooper also would play some part in seeking to ensure that the financial legacy Paç intended for Polish refugees there was properly distributed following the nobleman’s death in 1835 (see LJ 3:262–63). Further information on the Paç legacy is found in Florian Stasik, Polish Political Emigrés in the United States of America, 1831–1864, trans. Eugene Podraza and ed. James S. Pula (Boulder: East European Monographs, 2002), 97–98, although Stasik overlooks Cooper’s participation in the effort. 57. The names of these coaches suggest that the admirably fast qualities of Cooper’s fictional vessels were recognized and imitated on land as well as at sea, and quickly at that. William C. A. Blew, Brighton and Its Coaches: A History of the London and Brighton Road (London: John C. Nimmo, 1894), 181. Red Rover became a popular coach name, as Cooper indicated (three of the seven on a list he was given bore it). 58. Among other things, the contract provided that Bentley would supply the customary five sets of perfected proof sheets “to be sent to America &c &c.” LJ 2:396. 59. This was his American friend’s summary of the point in answering Cooper. James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 6/24/1833, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. Rogers was out at the

— 

notes to pages 148–149

time Cooper called, but his servant pleasingly remembered the American from five years before. 60. Beard (LJ 2:393n1) identifies “Capt—Morris” as Capt. Charles Morris, the naval officer, but Ogden, writing from Liverpool the day before Cooper encountered Morris in London, noted, “Judge [John Cox] Morris of your County, Otsego, is in London, somewhere.” James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 6/24/1833. Besides, Capt. Charles Morris was in the United States at this time; see The Autobiography of Commodore Charles Morris, U.S. Navy, ed. Frederick C. Leiner (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002), 118–21. John Cox Morris, whose military title in Cooper’s journal no doubt derived from militia service, apparently soon went on to France from London. For confirmation, see LJ 2:293 and 3:9. 61. Beard’s date for the letter to Bentley to which I refer at this point in my text is as follows: “Friday morning [July? 1833]” (LJ 2:396). I believe for various reasons that it was written on 7/26/1833. Cooper probably was employing Black X packets to carry the sheets to New York for transshipping to Carey and Lea. The fact that those ships regularly left London for New York on the seventh, seventeenth, and twenty-seventh of each month would explain Cooper’s added note of urgency to Bentley: “It is quite indispensable that the sheets should be received before twelve on Saturday”—that is, Saturday, 7/27/1833—“on account of the departure of the packet” (LJ 2:396). See Carl C. Cutler, Queens of the Western Ocean (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute, 1961), 391; Robert T. Albion, Square Riggers on Schedule: The New York Sailing Packets to England, France, and the Cotton Ports (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1938), 34. 62. Of the four errors Cooper caught, Bentley’s printers corrected three (apparently he had also written Bentley or went to see him as soon as he was back in London early in the fall)—but the Philadelphians inexplicably corrected only the one at the end of the text, perhaps because the letter was not received by the firm until September 28, only a short time before the book was published, and the “Introduction” had been set and stereotyped early in the process (LJ 6:322–23). The Headsman was published in London on 9/12/1833 and in Philadelphia on 10/17 or 10/18/1833; S&B 76; LJ 4:5–6; Bentley PL. 63. Edward F. DeLancey to JFC, 3/7/1848, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. 64. There are two other bits of evidence on the possible Caen visit. While in London in June, Cooper had written a now unlocated letter to John Loudon McAdam seeking to arrange a visit with him and his wife then. Barring that, Cooper suggested the two families might get together once the Coopers left Paris on their way home. In a note added to her husband’s response, Anne Charlotte wrote, “Mr. McAdam’s business in Scotland renders our visiting Havre impossible”—not France, one notes, but specifically “Havre” (CORR 1:318). Did the DeLancey sisters imagine a meeting on ancestral ground? From Sorrento in 1829 Cooper himself, in a letter to a resident of Caen who happened to be an antiquarian, wrote: “We have thought of making a visit to your city

notes to pages 149–151

  

in order to learn more about the various members of the family. . . . In the event that we carry out this intention before our departure for America I may be so bold as to hope to have an occasion to tell you very briefly about my discoveries” (LJ 1:394; translation supplied). Cooper’s daughter, one notes, did not mention any stop in Caen in her recollection of the homeward passage (see SFC “Adventures”). 65. The servants, who would stay in the family’s employ for some time afterward, were listed in the ship’s manifest. Three came from Switzerland (François Emery, age thirty-one; Lucie Aubert, thirty-four; and Marietta Aubert, twenty-eight) and one from France (Louise Galleau [Galop], twenty-four). Ship manifest for the Samson, Port of New York, 11/6/1834, “Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897,” NARA, M237, roll 21 (thanks to Hugh MacDougall and Bruce M. Stewart for sharing this information). Account Book 1, Household Expenses, 1834–1835, JFC paps., AAS (which, however, indicates that the first three servants were French) gives details of their employment: François Emery and Lucie Aubert had been in the family’s employ for some time, as we have seen. Galleau was hired in Paris early in 1833 and paid in advance to serve as “une femme de chambre en Amérique” (receipt, Galleau to JFC, 4/10/1833, JFC paps., box 4, AAS). 66. The Coopers had originally intended to leave London on September 17 but “on account of the crowded state of the ship” due to sail then went on the Samson (LJ 2:411). 67. Albion, Square Riggers on Schedule, 282–83, 333. 68. New-York Spectator, 11/7/1833. 69. My identification of other passengers is based on the ship manifest cited in note 65. 70. Perkins’s father had provided Horatio Greenough passage to Europe in 1828, and Cooper, who learned much about the penurious Greenough’s finances while in Florence, probably knew this fact. Nathalia Wright, Horatio Greenough, the First American Sculptor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1963), 56. That Mrs. Perkins, like Susan Cooper, was a descendent of Norman Huguenots, and that her grandfather, Philip Dumaresq, had been a Loyalist, may well have given the shipboard conversation some added depth. See Henry Wilder Foote and Henry Edes, Annals of King’s Chapel, from the Puritan Age of New England to the Present Day, 2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1896), 363. Cooper later crossed paths with Perkins and his wife (see LJ 3:42, 228). 71. Theodore L. Taylor, Recollections of a Long Life (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1902), 210–11. Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies (New York: Library of America, 1994), 691–93. Among the other individuals on board the Samson with whom the family had contact in 1833 was former congressman Walter Patterson, son of Catharine Livingston Patterson and grandson of the last lord of Livingston Manor, Robert Livingston. See also LJ 2:393.

— 

notes to pages 152–155

72. Federal Population Census, 1850, Wayne Township, Steuben County, NY, NARA Record Group 29, M432, roll 600, pp. 313B, 316A. By 1870, Henry apparently had died, but John, farming in another nearby county, reported real estate worth $16,500. Federal Population Census, 1870, Tyron Township, Schuyler County, NY, NARA Record Group 29, M593, roll 1092, p. 668A. In telling of the shipboard incident, Susan Cooper did not say her father had never seen A Guide in the Wilderness before; but he himself never mentioned it. C HAPTER 6.   ROUGH HOMECOMING 1. Caroline DeLancey to JFC, 10/26/1833, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. On 5/1/1834, the Coopers moved to 6 St. Mark’s Place, a three-block enclave on Eighth Street in the East Village (see LJ 3:35, 42). On the Chauncey dinner, see the New York American’s report, reprinted in the Daily National Intelligencer, 11/14/1833. This mentions Cooper’s presence and indicates that a toast welcoming him home was delivered by “M. Jackson,” otherwise not identified. The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, ed. Bayard Tuckerman, 2 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead 1889), 1:81. 2. Once the Coopers had arrived, Jay wrote a brief note indicating he had been asked by DeLancey to pass on a letter and to convey DeLancey’s desire for reconciliation. Peter A. Jay to JFC, 11/6/1833, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. 3. The main cause of the booklet’s delay was the serious downturn in the publishing trades (and business in general) in response to removal of federal deposits from the Bank of the United States following President Jackson’s order of 9/26/1833. The recession made Wiley hesitate and gave Cooper some second thoughts (as he put it in his “Postscript”) about obtruding so “personal” a matter on the “gloomy” public’s attention right then (LTC 101). The printing seems to have been suspended when only partly done: also in his “Postscript,” Cooper could mention and quote from a message received from Lafayette “since the letter has been printed,” a nonsensical point unless in fact there had been such an interruption (LTC 102–3; Lafayette, who died in Paris on May 20, 1834, wrote his “last letter” to Cooper, the one so described and quoted from in A Letter to His Countrymen, on 4/14/1834—see JFC paps., box 2, AAS). Production of the body of A Letter to His Countrymen itself also had suffered at least a partial interruption, meaning that Cooper’s phrase “since the letter has been printed” is even more opaque than it at first seems to be. He added that, owing to the initial suspension, he had been led “to destroy more than half of what he had originally written, in order to illustrate his position by events of more notorious and recent occurrence, such as those connected with the removal of the deposites [sic]” (LTC 101–2). This statement must mean that the section on the bank (LTC 74–90) was written as a substitute for other matters during the time when the project was in abeyance; it would also seem that the substitution must have occurred before the supplanted section was set in type. Cooper’s further point about the printing— “Hasty writing and hasty printing (for the work was pushed while it was actually

notes to pages 155–158

  

proceeding) have occasioned a few inadvertences of style”—suggests that, once he and Wiley had decided to resume work on the project, Cooper hurriedly added the new material and the publisher and his printers pushed the work through the press (LTC 101). 4. The first article Cooper that considered had appeared in the Courier and Enquirer for 6/15/1833 and is reprinted in Cooper’s text (see LTC 36–45); the second had appeared in the Commercial Advertiser for 2/1/1833 and is reprinted in his appendix (see LTC 45–51, 111–13). 5. In his later “Postscript,” Cooper wrote about the pamphlet’s timing (101–6), then inserted an appendix, technically titled “Notes” (107–16), that reprinted several items referred to or relied on in the text of the Letter proper: Cooper’s letter to Morse, written from Paris on 4/2/1833 and published in part in the Albany Argus on 6/4/1833 (LTC, “A,” 106–11; see also LJ 2:376–82); the Commercial Advertiser piece on The Heidenmauer noted above, along with a second brief excerpt from the 4/11/1834 issue of that paper (LTC, “B,” 111–14); and, finally, a series of excerpts from the U.S. Constitution, specifically from Article 1, concerning the procedures and powers of Congress, points related to Cooper’s discussion of diplomatic appointments and the bank issue (LTC, “D” [sic], 114–16). 6. See the acknowledgment of Cooper’s “kind and acceptable present” at an earlier point in Mary A. Cooper to JFC, 3/15/1834, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. 7. Mason Whiting to JFC, 2/10/1834, JFC paps., box 2, AAS, and 5/28/1834, copy in JFB paps., box 11, AAS. JFC, “Belonging to the Estate of William Cooper,” JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 8. A list of the parcels Averell acquired in Otsego County alone contained dozens of properties ranging up to more than a hundred acres in size and including nine houses in Cooperstown. “Lands redeemed by Wm H Averell,” 11/23/1823, in JFC Coll., box 27, YCAL. 9. On the departure date for Cooperstown, see SDC to Caroline DeLancey, 8/4/ [1834], JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. JFC, articles of agreement with William H. Averell, 8/28/1834, Averell paps., box 3, fol. 27, NYSHA. The copy in JFC paps., box 5, AAS, carries the endorsement for the $1,000 payment on 9/29/1834. 10. JFC, assignment to William H. Averell (covering bonds and mortgages for fourteen properties in the Manor of Feronia, Broome County, NY, valued at $4,031), 9/1/1834; JFC (as executor of the estate of William Cooper), articles of agreement with William H. Averell, 9/1/1834; JFC, indenture for Lot 45 in Locke Township, Cayuga County, NY, valuing it at $500 and conveying it to Averell, 9/1/1834; all in Averell paps., box 3, NYSHA. On the Locke Township property, see also William H. Averell, receipt for quit claim deed from JFC, 9/1/1834, JFC Coll., box 27, YCAL. Averell conveyed title to Otsego Hall to Cooper on 5/30/1835 (see LJ 3:152–53). Once the property was in his hands, Cooper mortgaged it by prior arrangement to Peter A. Jay, the successor trustee of the trust set up to protect Susan’s property from her husband in the early

— 

notes to pages 158–160

1820s. See JFC, mortgage (in the amount of $8,250) to Peter A. Jay as trustee for Susan A. Cooper, 6/4/1835, Otsego County Clerk’s office, Cooperstown, Otsego mortgages, lib. T, p. 400; LJ 3:153–55. 11. Morse was coming to Otsego to deliver his Gallery of the Louvre to Hyde Clarke Hall; see Samuel F. B. Morse to George Clarke, 8/25/1834 (draft), Morse paps., Library of Congress. On Morse’s involvement with the Otsego Hall renovations, see the unsigned essay by George W. Greene in Homes of American Authors; Comprising Anecdotal, Personal, and Descriptive Sketches, By Various Writers (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1857), 203–4, quoting from “a much admired pen,” that is, the novelist’s daughter Susan: “The architectural designs of the changes were all drawn by Professor Morse, an intimate friend of Mr. Cooper, who was in Cooperstown at the time the work was going on.” For some of the changes, see LJ 3:56–58; COC 83–84. 12. Samuel Cooper to JFC, 2/3/1835, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. Also at this time Cooper found evidence in the framing of Otsego Hall of attempted arson years before— perhaps at the time his unoccupied mansion on the lakeshore, Fenimore, had been torched; see COC 72. 13. One of the things that made Cooper an easy target for his opponents after the Home novels appeared was the degree to which they self-consciously recalled and at the same time revised details from The Pioneers. With regard to the Wigwam, Cooper’s narrative thus notes that “the great hall had long before lost its characteristic decoration of the severed arm of Wolf[e],” and so forth (HAF 1:169). The confusion was evident even in Cooper’s private correspondence. When he wrote Shubrick about the house in the fall of 1835, he joked that he had “not disturbed the labors of Messrs Jones & Doolittle”— who in The Pioneers collaborated on changes to the Temple Mansion, described there as of the “composite order” (PIO CE 43)—adding, “The Hall is composite enough, Heaven knows, being a mongrel of the Grecian and the Gothic orders” (LJ 3:179). 14. Untitled, New York Evening Post, 6/17/1834. Leggett also quoted extensively from Cooper’s Letter. 15. In an April letter to Richard Bentley, Cooper wrote, “Unless France complies literally with the terms of the treaty, I think there is little doubt that we fight her” (LJ 3:143). 16. For the most part, Cooper avoided constitutional issues in dealing with the French matter. In considering what was to be done with the already ratified treaty if France refused to fund it, however, he denied that Congress had the power to modify the treaty by altering the payment schedule, as France apparently wished: “Who is there, in this country, to accept less than the conditions of a treaty?—Congress? Congress is less powerful than a treaty” (LJ 3:147). In the wake of the nullification crisis, interest in the Constitution as a source of union and public order had notably deepened, and it seems fair to link Cooper’s own concerns with the document (and traditions of interpreting it) to that broader public discussion.

notes to pages 161–163

  

17. For points raised in the Revue Encyclopédique article, see my discussion in the first chapter. 18. Cooper was to insert an essentially unchanged discussion of slavery in the District of Columbia into the constitutional debate Thomas Dunscombe carries on with the rural lawyer and reformer Timms in The Ways of the Hour (see Ways 189–95). While Cooper still voiced opposition to abolition there, the complacent Dunscombe’s view that “African slavery is an important part of God’s laws” (ibid., 195) was definitely not Cooper’s, as we shall see in chapter 15. See Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 19–27. 19. “Arrest of Suspected Slave Traders,” New York Evening Post, 2/10/1836; “Slave Vessel Stopped,” New-York Spectator, 2/11/1836. 20. “The Slave Brig San Francisco [sic],” New-York Spectator, 2/15/1836. The text proper uses the correct name for the San Nicholas. 21. Robert E. Spiller, “Fenimore Cooper’s Defence of Slave-Owning America,” American Historical Review 35 (1930): 579; Cooper was referring to what is sometimes known as the 1820 Piracy Law. 22. As Cooper himself explained in a previously unknown note (probably sent to District Attorney Price), Dos Santos was to be indicted for his part “in fitting out the brig San Nicholas as a slaver.” JFC to [William H. Price?], undated (but March 1836). Accessed online at Railroad Auctions, http://www.rrauction.com/pastUauctionUitem.cfm?ID=3324340. This item was sold at auction to an unnamed buyer in June 2014 from Catalog 430 (item 490). 23. “The Suspected Pirate Brig San Nicholas,” Rhode-Island Republican, 3/9/1836. An untitled note in the New-Bedford Gazette, 3/7/1836, ran as follows: “A true bill was found against the Captain of the St. Nicholas, slaver, at New York, on Wednesday—she had, however, sailed a few hours before, and had got so far to sea that all attempts to overtake him [sic] were fruitless.” On the trial, see the reports in “United States Circuit Court,” New-York Spectator, 3/31/1836, and “The Alleged Slave Ship,” The Mercury, 3/31/1836. For the legal proceedings, see U.S. vs. Angel Calsamilia and Domingo Joseph Dos Santos, 2/23–3/7/1836, and U.S. vs. Andrew Ghionio and John Batiste Brachie, 3/2– 3/4/1836, U.S. Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, NARA Record Group 21, M885, roll 1. In December 1836, the San Nicholas was seized by a Royal Navy brig off the British antislavery base on Sherbro Island, Sierra Leone, and was condemned on 1/2/1837 for being “unlawfully equipped”—in particular, for having gratings over its hatches rather than the solid wood covers required by an Anglo-Spanish treaty. Correspondence with the British Commissioners, at Sierra Leone, The Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and Surinam, Relating to the Slave Trade. 1837. Presented to Both Houses of Parliament, by Command of Her Majesty, 1838 (London: W. Clowes and Sons, for Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, [1838]), 9–14, 23, 34.

— 

notes to pages 164–167

24. Before going to Switzerland, Cooper also mentioned the project to Gosselin: “J’ai un autre ouvrage sur le tapis et lequel sera fini le mois d’Octobre, prêt à publier le mois de Decembre” (LJ 2:265). On Cooper’s title and its possible derivation, see John Wijkmark, “ ‘One of the Most Intensely Exciting Secrets’: The Antarctic in American Literature, 1820–1849” (PhD diss., Karlstad University, 2009), 81. 25. The maritime elements of The Monikins will concern me in chapter 14, since they underscore certain important relations the 1835 book had to Cooper’s other South Atlantic novel, The Sea Lions (1849). 26. There is no mention of this encounter in Cooper’s journal of the trip; see LJ 1:338–39. 27. The Monikins also tells the anecdote of the travelers encountered in the Furka (MON 1:vii–viii), to which it adds the second one about Goldencalf (MON 1:viii–x). 28. Cooper may have stayed at l’Ecu while visiting Geneva within two weeks of his actual ascent of the Furka and the Grimsel; certainly his family stayed there in 1832 (see GR CE 246). 29. As often happens in such allegories, the book holds out the possibility that Goldencalf has dreamt the whole thing. See MON 1:129–30 and 2:222. 30. Ludvig Holberg, Journey to the World Under Ground; being the Subterraneous Travels of Niels Klim. From the Latin of Lewis Holberg (London: Thomas North, 1828), 229–73. On Holberg, see the discussion in Wijkmark, “ ‘One of the Most Intensely Exciting Secrets,’ ” 88. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, Antient Metaphysics, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1795), 4:26–34. Of perhaps greater pertinence for The Monikins is the fact that Monboddo was infamous for his views on tails—human and otherwise. 31. On Cuvier and Cooper, see Cecelia Lucy Brightwell, ed., Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, 2nd ed. (Norwich: Fletcher and Alexander, 1854), 280–81. In Cooper’s library when it was given to NYSHA by Dr. Henry Weil (1997) and subsequently catalogued by Hugh MacDougall were vols. 3 and 4 of Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom, trans. H. M’Murtrie (New York: G. and C. and H. Carvill, 1831), bearing Cooper’s inscription. See Hugh MacDougall, “Draft List of Books Belonging to James Fenimore Cooper,” March 1998, box A (copy in my collection). Thomas Landseer’s well-known engravings in Monkey-ana, or Men in Miniature (1827–1828) remind us that monkeys were also featured in comic art at the time. 32. London’s zoo was described in Edward T. Bennett, The Gardens and Menagerie of the Zoological Society Delineated. Quadrupeds, vol. 1 (Chiswick: Whittingham, 1830). 33. Cooper may have been set thinking about land speculation at this time because of his encounter in the summer of 1834 with Horace H. Comstock, the husband of one of his nieces and a developer in Illinois and Michigan with whom, after The Monikins appeared, the novelist was to invest funds. So his criticism of speculation in the novel

notes to pages 167–169

  

was, or soon would be, quite personal. I briefly return to Comstock in this chapter and more fully in chapter 14. 34. In May 1835, Cooper recapped for Bentley the history of their terms: “you . . . offered for it . . . £500. This offer has since been increased to £550, you to have the sale for the Continent of Europe—I trust there has been no misunderstanding between us” (LJ 3:152). See Richard Bentley to JFC, 5/14/[1835], British Museum Add. MS. 46640, 120 verso. 35. For the American date, see also Daily National Intelligencer, 7/9/1835. Bentley’s advertisement in the Athenaeum, 7/4/1836, p. 520, the source cited by BAL, is itself dated 7/3/1835, but Bentley PL gives 7/4/1835. 36. But it should be noted that all these points are also true of the previous and next Cooper books published by Carey, The Headsman and Homeward Bound. 37. Carey, Lea and Blanchard to JFC, 2/12/1834, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 38. Carey, Lea and Blanchard to JFC, 11/13/1834, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. My figures derive from Carey’s: “When your early works were published, English novels retailed for $1.50 & American could be sold at $2. Now the one retails at $1 & the other at about $1.50 or less. It is true that the nominal wholesale price is still $1.50, but it is necessary to make discounts from that price in proportion to the quantity purchased & we cannot now estimate the product at more than $1.30 per copy. We made this alteration very unwillingly & did not do it until it was absolutely necessary—20 cents per copy on 5000 copies make a difference of $1000—.” One might speculate that Cooper had wished to sell the firm five thousand copies for its own sale in Philadelphia and for further wholesale distribution but wished $1.50 per copy for them. This point rests, as will be clear in my text, on the fact that Cooper really was producing the book on his own in New York City. Carey apparently calculated a wholesale price of $1.25 per copy after the firm finally bought the book. See David Kaser, ed., The Cost Book of Carey & Lea, 1825– 1838 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 173: “Will take 4300 @ 1.25 to pay Copyright & Plates”—not sound arithmetic in this case, by the way, as the plates and copyright together cost the firm only $2,932.74. There were, of course, other costs for any book. 39. On April 6 he alerted the Londoner that the first batch, covering “nearly, or quite the whole of vol—I. Monikins,” would be dispatched on the Liverpool boat of April 8. He then promised to send a duplicate of this first of Bentley’s three volumes on the packet of April 16, along with “part of vol. II.” He forewarned Bentley at the same time that he intended to draw for the first payment due under their agreement (£150) on 4/16/1835. He expected to draw for a second equal payment “on sending duplicate of vol. II,” and would make his last draft (for £250) “on sending triplicate of the entire work”—standard procedure between them but in this instance helpfully diagnostic of how work actually proceeded. Cooper estimated that the book would be ready to ship in its entirety soon and thought Bentley would have complete copy in his hands by June 1 (LJ 3:143).

— 

notes to pages 169–170

40. “Here” cannot have meant the United States as opposed to some other country: it would have been obvious to Bentley, after all, that the work was being done someplace in Cooper’s homeland, not France or Britain. Those “rough sheets,” as Cooper explained, were “struck off only on one side.” Because this was his very first direct experience with stereotyping (and perhaps Bentley’s, too), he obviously took note of the fact that his printer and/or plate founder pulled sheets from each plate separately. Printing on both sides of sheets from corresponding plates (or, where stereotyping was not done, from the corresponding formes) would normally produce proofs that had the same page-to-page continuity as the book’s eventual gatherings. The sheets Cooper sent Bentley lacked that continuity. He thought, as he went on for Bentley, that they would be “better to print from, than the sheets of a book itself,” though that point seems dubious given that Bentley’s printer formatted the book anew, producing different page breaks (LJ 3:144). 41. Henry C. Carey to JFC, 5/11/1835, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. Fresh discussions of the book between Cooper and the Philadelphians must have begun some time before April 21, when Henry C. Carey, although expressing to Cooper his concerns with the work’s satiric thrust and doubts about its likely market value, was open to handling it for Cooper even without earning any profit. Henry C. Carey to JFC, 4/21/1835, 4/28/1835, both in JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. From the Carey and Lea cost book, we know that the firm purchased the book’s copyright for $2,500. We also know that it recorded (alongside expenses for paper, presswork, and postage) a charge of $432.74 for stereotype plates, an amount somewhat higher, absolutely and relatively, than that entered for The Headsman in 1833. Kaser, ed., Cost Book, 172, 138. The Monikins curiously enough reflects on its own production. The book’s supposed editor, having recounted in the “Introduction” meeting Goldencalf and subsequently receiving his manuscript, states that he has “rigidly complied” with Goldencalf ’s instructions to publish it in the United States. When he adds that, single copies having gone off to Goldencalf and Poke, “the rest of the edition is at the disposal of any one who may feel an inclination to pay for it” (MON 1:xi), his comment is a coy fictionalization of the facts in Cooper’s own case. As production of The Monikins continued in the spring of 1835, however, the real author eventually came to terms with Carey, selling the firm the book shortly before its publication. 42. Bentley’s readings for the novel’s first twenty-seven chapters agree, except for a few very minor and local variants, with those in the American text. From that point to the end, however, Keat Murray, working from my conclusions as to how the book was physically produced in the United States, has uncovered many substantive differences that cannot be explained as the result of house style or compositor error but instead evince variations in copy text between the Bentley and the Carey. The concurrence of the bulk of the chapters argues pretty convincingly that the sheets Cooper supplied Bentley before Carey’s involvement must have been pulled from the New York stereotype plates. As the shift to Philadelphia occurred, Cooper, concerned to coordinate the two editions but also to ensure that Bentley’s appeared earlier than Carey’s, further

note to page 171

  

improvised his methods, producing the variants Murray has uncovered. One instance of those variants will suggest the nature of the resulting differences. In the Carey text, the heading for the book’s penultimate chapter runs as follows: “Explanations—A leavetaking—Love—Confessions, but no penitence” (MON 2:iv). In the Bentley, we instead have the following: “A Little Friendship—Some Sentiment—A Good Deal of Love, and a Settlement of Accounts” (MON B 3:279). The only conceivable way for this and other differences to have entered Bentley’s text on Cooper’s authority would be through his serial shipment of different states of chapters for Bentley’s final volume. For the most part, Bentley copied the readings of the plates that the Wiley team and then Carey provided Cooper. In the case of the last four chapters, Cooper (anticipating that complete sets of sheets sent on the June 1 packets might arrive too late for Bentley’s purposes) sent off duplicates of the first proofs. He did so after he had returned corrected copies of them to Carey’s printers. Having not kept track of his alterations for Carey, however, and having not yet received perfected sheets back from Philadelphia, Cooper evidently improved on his retained set of first proofs. In part, his new revisions aimed to capture those he had made for Carey. In part, too, they were the result of a fresh reading of material that Cooper wished to send to London in its best state. Then, too, some of the alterations were aimed at Bentley’s apparent concern about enhancing the book’s love plot, a concern Cooper had first read about in a March letter he received early in May (see LJ 3:151). That some of the changes to the chapter title given above point toward that effort (“Love” thus becomes “A Good Deal of Love”) is one proof of Cooper’s wish to satisfy Bentley on that matter (it is worth noting that in his May 5 response to Bentley he added at the end, “Do not form an opinion of Monikins until you get the whole”—LJ 3:152). Keat Murray also argues persuasively that several of the Bentley variants represent authorial changes made after the correspondent parts of the Carey text were set or at least stereotyped. Emails to the author from Keat Murray, July 2014. 43. As late as August 1835, Cooper still had stock in the Chemical Bank of New York that he evidently was trying to sell; see J. D. P. Ogden to JFC, 8/27/1835, JFC coll., box 7, YCAL. On this general subject, see also Charles Wilkes to JFC, 7/29/1830, JFC Coll., box 9, YCAL. When, in 1832, the ailing Wilkes was to be replaced as Cooper’s financial advisor by Peter A. Jay (see LJ 2:266; 6:316–18), he first conveyed 24,140 French francs to Cooper (see LJ 2:265–66); this amount, presumably representing funds received for and perhaps invested for Cooper, may have been part of the money Cooper brought home with him in 1834, some of which he then put into bank stocks. The total amount conveyed by Wilkes was, however, conceivably much larger; see Bank of the United States, printed bill of exchange (with handwritten additions), 3/9/1831, JFC Coll., box 27, YCAL. The usual rate of exchange between francs and dollars at the time was about five to one. See George P. Putnam, The Tourist in Europe (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1838), 62–63. Overall, Wilkes thus may have forwarded Cooper the equivalent of some $24,000 in 1831–1832.

— 

notes to pages 171–172

44. Ogden had helped with English publishers early in Cooper’s career. See James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 2/6/1823, JFC paps., box 2, AAS; same to same, 9/13/1823, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. Ogden is listed in A. Bleecker’s 1826 “Exposé” of the Lunch, copy of unlocated original in JFB paps., box 5, AAS. The two kept in touch in the early 1830s, while Cooper was on the Continent and Ogden, also abroad, operated in Liverpool and London—see Ogden’s letters to JFC (1827–1833), JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 45. James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 3/21/1834, JFC paps., box 2, AAS; “Account of Cotton bales shipped to Liverpool aboard the ship Choctaw,” 3/19/1834, JFC paps., box 5, AAS; James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 5/6/1834, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. Ogden, who was in Liverpool from mid-June 1834 until at least that September, personally handled sales of their cotton, reporting details to Cooper in the series of letters referred to in my next note. 46. Cooper’s share of the yield was about £500 ($2,000 to $2,500). The estimate is Ogden’s; see James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 9/30/1834, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. Cooper’s endorsement on James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 3/21/1834, explains that the first shipment repaid his investment and yielded a profit. For various details on the sales in Liverpool, see “Sales of 401 bales Cotton received p[er] Henry & Augusta,” 8/7/1834, JFC paps., box 5, AAS; James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 7/31/1834 and 9/30/1834, both in JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. On cotton prices, see “Commercial,” Macon Weekly Telegraph, 4/4/1834; “Liverpool Market, June 23,” National Banner and Nashville Whig, 8/16/1834; “Domestic Markets,” Boston Courier, 12/4/1834. Ogden’s firm provided Cooper (and presumably other clients) with duplicated updates of weekly sales in Liverpool. Three survive in Cooper’s papers from this year: one dated 6/7/1834, JFC paps., box 2, AAS, and two dated 6/14/1834 and 6/23/1834, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. See also James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 9/5/1834, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL, in which Ogden, writing from Liverpool, explains that English importers had been letting their supplies of cotton fall, depressing sales. He added that he expected the new crop might cause a rise in prices. 47. James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 8/27/1835, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. Ogden was back in New York by this time. In October 1835, Cooper, evidently out of concern about his own investments, informed a correspondent that “cotton is falling.” Cited in Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 10/26/1835, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. SFC, inscription on James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 2/11/1839, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. In fall 1836, Cooper wrote his wife from Manhattan: “Ogden thinks this will be a good year for the south, and promises me an interest,” and he added in another letter that he hoped there might “be an opening at the south,” but there is no evidence that Cooper took him up on the offer (LJ 3:244, 248). 48. James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 8/27/1835. 49. Cyrus Ballou Comstock, ed., A Comstock Genealogy: Descendants of William Comstock of New London, Connecticut (New York: Knickerbocker, 1907), 152, 224; John Adams Comstock, A History and Genealogy of the Comstock Family in America

notes to pages 173–174

  

(Los Angeles: Commonwealth, 1949), 236; George Newman Fuller, Economic and Social Beginnings of Michigan (Lansing: Wynkoop Hallenbeck Crawford, 1916), 349. Note that Cooper made “Mrs. Comstock, Comstock, Michigan” (that is, Sarah Sabina Cooper Comstock), the nominal recipient of the sixteenth letter in his English travel book (see GE CE 176). 50. In April 1835, following up on other face-to-face conversations with Cooper, Comstock wrote him from Chicago: “When I had the pleasure of seeing you last, you appeared disposed to avail yourself of any speculation, through me, which would be certain & productive.” Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 4/7/1835, JFC Coll., box 50, YCAL. In an unlocated 5/2/1835 letter, Cooper agreed to partner with Comstock. For details in Cooper’s unlocated 5/2/1835 and 5/7/1835 letters to Comstock, see Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 5/18/1835, and Horace H. Comstock to JFC, undated but ca. 5/20–25/1835 (it bears a New York City received postmark of June 6), both in JFC Coll., box 50, YCAL. Comstock favored Chicago because of his previous experience there and in Detroit in the Indian and military trade, on which see James M. Thomas, Kalamazoo County Directory, with a History of the County from Its Earliest Settlement (Kalamazoo: Stone Bros., 1869), 102. Further details of the arrangement with Comstock are reflected in JFC, declaration of trust in favor of Horace Comstock, 5/7/1835, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. The latter document also contains Cooper’s acknowledgment of his indebtedness to G. A. Worth and J. D. P. Ogden in the amount of $2,000 each as well as a later endorsement from Worth, dated 8/4/1835, relinquishing his interest in the land purchase (on the back Cooper himself entered the following additional detail: “My note to G. A. Worth, payable at City Bank for $2200. at 6 per cent interest at fifteen months. Dated August 4th, 1835,” apparently indicating that he had given Worth his personal note for Worth’s release on the 1835 letter of credit). Ogden, learning of this arrangement from Worth, wrote Cooper in August, “he informs me he has sold his interest to you for a mere song: 10% profit. Do you wish to sing more in the same strain: but on a higher key? Please advise me and my interest in the said Chicago purchase may be placed at your disposal.” James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 8/27/1835. See also James D. P. Ogden to JFC, release from agreement regarding land purchase, 9/23/1835, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 51. Horace H. Comstock to JFC, undated but ca. 8/15–8/20/1835 (it bears a Detroit postmark of August 22), JFC Coll., box 50, YCAL. 52. Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 10/26/1835, JFC Coll., box 50, YCAL. 53. Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 11/16/1835, JFC Coll., box 50, YCAL. Cooper’s nephew Richard wrote him in February 1836 to report on progress with Otsego Hall. He added congratulations “on your good fortune,” since he had heard that Cooper had “made $10 or 12,000, on your Chicago lot [sic].” RFC to JFC, 2/13/1836, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. Cooper was less sanguine, replying: “The report about Chicago is very much like all reports in our rumour-loving and prattling country, absurd.” At that time,

— 

notes to pages 174–176

of course, he did not really own any Chicago land, but he did not go into those details. Richard, who himself wished to invest in the West, had asked his uncle to accompany him there sometime that spring, but in the same answer Cooper informed Richard that he could not go that early. It is likely that no such trip occurred; certainly the novelist did not travel there until more than a decade later. LJ 3:204. 54. Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 12/19/1835 and 3/3/1836, JFC Coll., box 50, YCAL. Three years later, Comstock was suggesting similar ventures to Cooper, who reported to Ogden, “Comstock . . . has a bond and mortgage for $25,000, on property in Chicago, dated in 183[6], payable in five years; [mortgagor] good, and interest punctually paid, property renting for $2800, which he will sell at such a rate as to give the [purchaser] 10 per cent for his money, and pay [us] out of the proceeds, if we can help him in the transaction.” Cooper was intrigued, but nothing apparently came of this opening. JFC to James D. P. Ogden, 2/11/1839 (unpublished), transcription courtesy of Jeffrey Walker. I amend his first two bracketed insertions slightly. 55. From Paris at the start of 1832, Cooper had described to Peter A. Jay a series of travel books he thought he might write: “I propose to dedicate one volume to a short visit in England, and to my first residence in France. A second to a long visit in England, a journey through Holland and Belgium, a few weeks at Paris and Switzerland—a third to Italy. A fourth to Germany and France, after the revolution” (LJ 2:175–76). 56. Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 2/12/1834. 57. In Bentley’s 1833 London edition, that book ran to 438 pages in a format taller, wider, and thicker than any Cooper novel in Bentley’s triple-decker versions. Its format for Rush’s volume was described in Bentley’s records as “demy octavo”; see Bentley PL. See Richard Rush, A Residence at the Court of London (London: Richard Bentley, 1833). 58. Cooper asked Bentley for £200 per volume (see LJ 3:171), a third more than the £150 Bentley had previously offered. See Richard Bentley to JFC, 5/14/1835, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Ogden’s August letter, written soon after Ogden returned to New York City, suggested that Cooper had purchased the Chemical Bank stock with money borrowed from Ogden and that the resulting note was due on 9/19/1835. James D. P. Ogden to JFC, 8/27/1835. Cooper’s inquiry to Bentley about terms for the travel books came in a letter written in Manhattan on 9/18/1835, the day before the due date on Ogden’s note, and may well have been urgent for that very reason (see LJ 3:171). The closeness in timing cannot have been entirely coincidental. Indeed, Cooper probably came to Manhattan in September in order to settle the business of the stock and the note. On September 14, he wrote his wife somewhat cryptically, but with the suggestion of some financial matter that he had been attending to: “I enclose you twenty—As yet I have done nothing, but in a few days hope to get through” (LJ 3:166). 59. Cooper as yet lacked an understanding with Carey, who had expressed no interest in his travel book project as far back as 1828 and had turned him back early in 1834 by emphasizing the bleak market prospects for it. Some trace of Cooper’s original intent as

notes to pages 176–177

  

I describe it may linger in his 1838 comment to Greenough that the sales of Sketches of Switzerland had scarcely paid “the expense of printing” (LJ 3:330). Carey ultimately had reimbursed him for those expenses, as we shall see, but Cooper came to recall the book as if he indeed had paid them. 60. Cooper was in New York alone from September 13 or 14 until just after he wrote Bentley on September 18 about the travel books. Having returned to Otsego around the twenty-first, he came back to Manhattan with his two eldest daughters about October 10. Leaving them there, he returned solo to Otsego at the end of that month and, having collected the rest of the family there, brought everyone to Manhattan around November 5. This was when he would begin to expect Bentley’s answer, assuming it was indeed sent “as soon as convenient” (LJ 3:166–75, passim). 61. Hence Cooper, sending sheets for the book to Bentley in March 1836, remarked: “We have never had an understanding for the price of these sheets. I have never mentioned less than £200 a vol. nor have you ever offered more than £150” (LJ 3:207). For the delayed letter, see Richard Bentley to JFC, 10/15/1835, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. Cooper informed Bentley on 4/18/1836 that the “letter of Sept. 1835” [sic] had not reached him until “a day or two after” he wrote the publisher on 3/20/1836, when conveying the first sheets of Sketches of Switzerland (LJ 3:209). Beard surmised that the delayed item was “Bentley’s letter of 14 September 1835, mentioned in his letter of 15 October 1835” (LJ 3:210n1), but in his April letter Cooper went on to say that in the delayed item Bentley “accepted my offer” (LJ 3:209); as Cooper did not make the offer until 9/18/1835, it obviously was impossible for Bentley to have accepted it some weeks before he himself received it. It should be noted that, owing to the poor sales of The Monikins since its British publication in July 1835, Bentley’s October letter added a proviso: if the Swiss book did not sell a minimum of a thousand copies, a fourth of the promised £400 would be debited against a future Cooper work. 62. Of course he might discount the notes Comstock gave him in January 1836 as a way of getting ready cash from them, but that option did not become attractive to Cooper until later, as we shall see. It should also be made clear that Cooper of course owed money to the bank that had provided the original letter of credit on which Comstock drew. 63. The timing here is uncertain, mostly because we do not have any of Cooper’s letters to the firm or the resulting contract. Carey’s records, however, show a charge of $1,000 for the “Author” on each part of the Swiss narratives; Kaser, ed., Cost Book, 199, 205; GS CE xxxix n16. As early as November 12, Henry C. Carey asked Cooper: “how would it be to publish in single volumes[?]” He went on, tactfully as always but with a certain insistence: “Your Switzerland might then be put in 3 volumes of moderate size to appear at an interval of a month or six weeks[,] to be followed by the other parts of your travels. Think of this. I am inclined to think its sale wd. be greater than in any other mode of publication.” Henry C. Carey to JFC, 11/12/1835, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL.

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notes to pages 177–178

64. Henry C. Carey to JFC, 12/3/1835 and 12/9/1835, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. On the separation of the two parts, see also Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 12/21/1835, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL, which asked where exactly Cooper deemed “it advisable to stop the first part.” In his 12/3/1835 questions, Henry C. Carey also expressed his strong preference that Bentley “follow our example” in formatting. 65. On the likelihood that parts of Cooper’s European journals have been lost, see GR CE xxxix n4. Cooper did not always honor his own geographical or chronological boundaries in the travel books. In the second Swiss book, he thus wrote at length about the Finance Controversy (see ibid., 29–38, 232–37), a “long digression, that touches on the situation and interests of another country,” as Cooper’s preface acknowledged (ibid., 1). Bentley was to remove it from the text and place it in an appendix to his edition. 66. See the mass of receipts from Europe in JFC Coll., box 27, YCAL. For the items on the screens, now at NYSHA, see Hugh MacDougall, The Cooper Screens, JFC Society Miscellaneous Papers, no. 8 (September 1996), online at http://external. oneonta.edu/cooper/biographic/reference/screens.html. 67. Those letters were to descend in the hands of the Cooper family; most are now in the JFC Collection at Yale. Even if they were not permanently reclaimed soon after the family reached Manhattan, they must have been readily available there or in Westchester for Cooper to scan. 68. Part of our willingness to believe that Cooper collected and arranged actual letters comes from his care in generally mimicking his actual knowledge and circumstances when any of the Gleanings letters supposedly were first inscribed. He bolstered that impression by including footnotes at various points that remark on subsequent changes in the various countries visited or underscore the claim that a given document dated from a certain historical moment (even though in fact he had written it years later). When, in the second Swiss book, he wrote that “Berne republicanism is farther removed from democracy than it is removed from despotism,” he added a corrective footnote here (as he had twice in the first Swiss book) that was itself a bit of fiction: “This was written in 1828” (GR CE 45; see also GS CE 45, 162). It was, to the contrary, written in 1835 or more likely 1836 (as was the footnote) but was made to look as if it predated the political changes that had affected Switzerland and Europe generally after Cooper’s first visit to the country. In such regards, the Gleanings letters were deft ex post facto fabrications that claimed to convey his original experience. In them, Cooper applied his considerable skill as an inventor of fictional plots to simulate his own past. It should be added that, even when he had journals at hand, Cooper did not necessarily follow them closely. As has been apparent in my earlier chapters, there often is considerable disparity in detail and tone between surviving journal passages and the comparable parts of the travel books. We furthermore have almost no material intermediate between the journals and the five published books (for what little does survive, see GF CE 301–11 and GE CE 333–36). For the three books for which journal entries can be cross-checked, the Cooper

notes to pages 178–180

  

Edition provides very useful guides to parallel passages (see GS CE 321–22; GR CE 287–88; GI CE 327). 69. Although Richard, born in December 1808, would have made a very unlikely recipient of a first round of actual Swiss letters from Cooper in 1828, by 1835–1836 he was very close to his uncle and thus was a quite probable target for the fictional set from which Cooper composed the book as published. Strengthening this identification is the fact that Switzerland is intertextually linked to a not-yet-written letter in the French Gleanings, which, it turns out, was to be overtly addressed to “R. Cooper, Esq., of Cooperstown, New York” (GF CE 128; see GF CE 137 and GS CE 84–85 for the linkage). Despite Cooper’s initial assumption that the two Swiss narratives would make a single book, his imagined correspondent in the second part, although here too only one is implied, cannot have been his nephew Richard. On one occasion Cooper strongly implies that the addressee had paid a visit with him to “the little hunting tower of the poor Prince de Condé in 1827” (GR CE 124), altogether impossible for Richard. Somewhat later, he writes, “I have little new to tell you of Frankfort,” but this apparent cross reference to some other discussion of the city is a dead link in the five books as a whole (GR CE 135). It is just possible that Cooper at first imagined Gouverneur M. Wilkins as his fictive correspondent for this second book. 70. As with the French book, there are some larger aggregations of letters in the English Gleanings: Richard Cooper receives eight letters, William Jay four, and James Stevenson three. Three other addressees (Shubrick, James De Kay, and Jacob Sutherland) each receive two, while the rest are divided up among the seven remaining recipients. All of the people in question, when not old friends of Cooper, were family connections of Susan or himself. 71. On the call for copy quoted in my text, see Carey and Lea to JFC, 2/9/1836, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. Carey’s stereotyper for Sketches of Switzerland was the Englishborn Lawrence Johnson (see SS 1:[6]). On the production of the plates, see Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 3/12/1836; Henry C. Carey to JFC, 3/12/1836, both in JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 72. The pace with regard to The Prairie had been slower and the shipments smaller than Cooper had first expected, as he explained to Carey and Lea (see LJ 1:168, 182–83), but in most later instances the process tended to become more regular. Given its complexity, however, there always were problems to anticipate and avoid, or to resolve after the fact. The Cooper Edition describes Cooper as remiss in supplying copy text and returning corrected proofs for Sketches of Switzerland. Noting that “his copy arrived [in Philadelphia] in miniscule installments,” and that this fact caused the printers to reduce the workforce at first assigned to the project, they furthermore add that when “the sheets finally began to shuttle regularly overnight from Philadelphia to New York in February, Cooper was apparently still preoccupied with his copy; for the cry from the printers—who could set a gathering or twelve pages a day—was for more manuscript”

— 

notes to pages 180–181

(GS CE xxxiii). I emphasize instead the adjustments of both author and publishers following Cooper’s return to the United States. 73. The Cooper Edition (GS CE 326) concludes that all three shipments to Bentley consisted of revised sheets from the Carey edition, but variants between the two editions may indicate that for this book, as for The Monikins, Cooper supplied Bentley with different copy texts, especially as production neared its close. We now know from an unpublished letter to the Philadelphia firm that Cooper’s corrections of some errors in the first proofs were not properly made in the type or plates, prompting Cooper to make and forward a list of errata, most of which were subsequently incorporated into the American version (see JFC to Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 4/14/1836, JFC paps., box 3, AAS). As this discovery took place just when Cooper was preparing to send a fresh shipment to Bentley, whose text does not incorporate the changes in the list of errata, it is entirely possible that he dispatched an earlier version with some hand-entered corrections. See, for instance, the variant readings of a single sentence to which Cooper had objected in writing the Careys. In the Carey edition, the original reading (“I turned to maps and guide books with a good deal of curiosity”) was corrected in accord with Cooper’s errata sheet (“to my maps and guide books”—SS 2:69), while Bentley’s reading (“to the maps and guide-books”—ES 2:89) is an acceptable substantive variant that cannot have been a mere error. The book appeared in Philadelphia (as Sketches of Switzerland) on 5/20/1836, and (as Excursions in Switzerland) eight days later in London (S&B 84; BAL 2:287). BAL does not confirm the date for the American edition as given by S&B; however, see the 5/21/1836 advertisement for the Maryland bookstore of W. R. Lucas and R. N. Wight, which describes the book as “Just received and for sale,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 5/23/1836. Bentley PL gives 5/28/1836. 74. Henry C. Carey to JFC, 4/29/1836, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. None of the remaining Gleanings volumes, it should be noted, was stereotyped. 75. Beard dates the last letter 6/21/1836; I accept Thomas Philbrick’s conclusion that Cooper must have meant 7/21/1836 (see GF CE xxxiv n25). On the printers employed on the book, see Kaser, ed., Cost Book, 205. 76. Cooper and Carey both had learned from the delays with the first Swiss book, but haste with the next book may have made for some problems that had to be corrected during the work’s actual printing. The corrections in turn spread variants among surviving copies and led Cooper to insert an errata sheet in the first volume of his third travel book, Gleanings in Europe: France, that blamed “the peculiar circumstances” under which that book and “the second part of Switzerland” had been printed for the “many errors” in both (GF CE 294), a handful of which he specified. S&B 86 gives 10/8/1836 as the publication date for the American edition; BAL 2:287 asserts that it could not be ascertained, but see the advertisement of booksellers W. & J. Neal, dated 10/7/1836, which lists the book as “Just received and for sale,” Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 10/7/1836 (a Carey advertisement headed “Cooper’s Excursions in

notes to pages 181–182

  

Switzerland” dated October 8 does, however, indicate that the firm had “this day published” the book; see National Gazette, 10/11/1836). S&B gives 9/16/1836 for the English edition, as does Bentley PL; BAL cites the Literary Gazette as indicating the book would “shortly” be available (9/10/1836) and listing it as received very recently (9/17/1836). The London Times on 9/24/1836 ran a Bentley advertisement declaring that it was published on 9/15/1836. 77. The work appeared in London on 1/24/1837 (as Recollections of Europe) and in Philadelphia (as Gleanings in Europe) on March 4. See S&B 89 and Bentley PL. David Kaser, ed., Cost Book, 213, indicates that Cooper received $750 for the book in the United States and breaks down the printers’ bills (indicating that the Careys operated independently on this book and undoubtedly on the second part of Switzerland as well) but shows no charge for stereotyping, confirming the physical evidence of the Carey edition itself. 78. In an unlocated 12/26/1836 letter, Cooper offered the book to the Careys; see their response, Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 1/4/1837, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. The firm was to pay Cooper $750. When he first broached the topic with Bentley in November 1836, arguing that the English book ought to “excite more interest in your world than the others,” he stated that he wanted £350 for it. At the same time, he expressed his willingness to revert to the old rate of £200 for any future travel books (see LJ 3:221, 249). In the reply that had been long delayed by his illness, Bentley offered only £300 and noted that he might have to hold back some of that if sales were modest. He sweetened the news with a bit of flattery: he hoped he would soon be able, he wrote Cooper, to “announce another Work of Fiction from your pen: either a story of the Sea, or of the Back Woods.” Richard Bentley to JFC, 2/19/1837, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 79. Kaser, ed., Cost Book, 221, indicates the completion of the Philadelphia printing by late April; for the delay in issuing the book, see Carey, Lea and Blanchard to JFC, 6/26/1837 and 9/13/1837, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. Bentley PL gives 5/29/1837 as the English publication date. For the American edition, see also the advertisement by Bayly and Burns, booksellers (“This day received and for sale”), dated 9/5/1837, in Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 9/7/1837. 80. Greenough had written Cooper on arriving in the United States, and in his 6/14/1836 answer, Cooper had invited him to visit Cooperstown with Morse that summer (see LJ 3:220), but the death of the sculptor’s father in July kept him in Boston until shortly before he was to depart for Europe. (Cooper repeated his invitation in August, but Greenough could not manage the trip then, either; see LJ 3:234.) Greenough wrote Cooper from Boston late in September in the hope that they might meet in New York before he sailed from there on October 10. “Why can’t you go to Florence now? I end with this question,” Greenough had written in his 9/23/1836 letter from Boston that suggested their New York meeting. See Nathalia Wright, ed., Letters of Horatio Greenough, American Sculptor (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972), 197, 204. When discussing the Italian book in an 1838 letter to Greenough, then back in Florence,

— 

notes to pages 182–186

Cooper wrote: “My heart is in Italy, and has been ever since I left it. . . . I could wish to die in Italy. Were I a single man, I could be with you in sixty days” (LJ 3:329–30). 81. In an unpublished mid-March letter to Ogden, Cooper indicated that the manuscript of the Italian book was “nearly ready.” JFC to James D. P. Ogden, 3/19/1837, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. For the Careys’ hesitation, see Carey, Lea and Blanchard to JFC, 6/26/1837. 82. I base my last point here on the fact that, in answering Cooper’s unlocated letter, the Philadelphians asserted that he would have their “best wishes” for success if he published the book on his own. Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 6/26/1837. At summer’s end, the firm confirmed for Cooper how dire things indeed proved: “Since you were here we have not put to press a single new volume.” Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 9/13/1837. 83. Cooper had planned to pay off Ogden during this very trip by using $2,000 Comstock had promised to forward to an Albany bank. Comstock failed to follow through, however, leaving Cooper still liable for the full amount at a very risky time (see LJ 3:264–65). These dealings, which had a long aftermath, are covered in chapter 14. 84. Early in July, with the package ready, he informed Bentley: “By the Pennsylvania, which sails on the 8th I send to the care of Roskell & Ogden, Italy; a bill for two hundred pounds, agreeably to your letter, goes with it.” When he added, as an explanation, “I am compelled to be absent from town, and I have sent you the manuscript of this work, instead of printed sheets,” he was being less than forthcoming (LJ 3:268–69). 85. Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 9/5/1837, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 86. The November shipment was described in Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, [11/17/1837], JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 87. When writing Greenough in 1838, Cooper added to the list of the book’s gaffes: “In Italy I liken the top of St. Peters to a ‘table-land on a mountain,’ and it is printed in the English edition ‘a table laid on a mountain’ ” (LJ 3:329; see EI 2:181). This is one of the mistakes he corrected for the Carey edition (see GI 2:139). 88. Bentley would pay Cooper a mere £200 for the title; Carey, Lea and Blanchard, which printed one thousand copies at last, even less, $200 (GI CE xxvii–xxviii). Bentley’s edition appeared on 2/12/1838, the American on May 28. S&B 93; Bentley PL; BAL 2:289. C HAPTER 7.   PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE 1. Cooper, who had grown up with the slightly older Phinneys, often played with them in their father’s print shop. See Beard’s note, LJ 3:457, and Milton W. Hamilton, The Country Printer: New York State, 1785–1830 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), 74. The brothers’ Holy Bible (Cooperstown: H. and E. Phinney, 1827) was “Stereotyped, printed, and published” by the firm, as its title page indicates. Another project they produced for Cooper was his small 1843 book The Battle of Lake Erie, to which I turn in chapter 10.

notes to pages 186–187

  

2. The latter fact itself indicates how insulated Cooper’s work at this time was from the main literary currents of the period. 3. J. Orville Taylor to JFC, 5/16/1837, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL; see also Cooper’s later comment to Carey, Lea and Blanchard that he had written The American Democrat “at the instigation of a Mr. Taylor” (LJ 3:289). Taylor published a modest book of his own called The District School through J. and J. Harper in 1834, then revised it and pitched it more broadly for Carey and Lea the next year with a new subtitle, National Education. In 1836, he began issuing via his own Albany firm the “Common School Depository,” a series of new or specially edited books for use in New York institutions, among which he wanted to include one by Cooper. On Taylor’s career, see State of New York Department of Public Instruction, Thirty-Seventh Annual Report of the State Superintendent, 1891 (Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1891), Appendix, pp. 91–93, and “The American Common School Society,” American Journal of Education 15 (1865): 247–48. 4. I quote the series description included in J. Orville Taylor, The Farmer’s School Book (Albany: Common School Depository, 1837), 237. 5. The first item on a page removed from the Phinneys’ account book and preserved in Cooper’s papers at Yale reads: “1838 April 1 | To Stereotyping Amer. Democrat 192| p.   8/ [i.e., 8 New York shillings or one dollar for setting, correcting, and casting each page] $192.00.” Producing the book overall cost $576.95. (The Phinneys later credited Cooper $100 for selling two hundred copies he had taken on commission.) “J. Fenimore Cooper, Esq. to H. & E. Phinney, Dr.,” 4/1/1838 to 5/29/1839 (and later), JFC Coll., box 27, YCAL. The book bears no indication that it was stereotyped, and Spiller and Blackburn (S&B 95) are silent on the question. See also SDC to Henry F. Phinney, 12/13/1851, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL, which indicates that the copper plates for the book were then in the storeroom at Otsego Hall. 6. In 1838, the Phinneys charged Cooper for printing 2,500 copies, although only 750 were bound at that time. They bound another 50 copies in April 1839. “J. Fenimore Cooper, Esq. to H. & E. Phinney, Dr.,” 4/1/1838 to 5/29/1839. 7. “The American Democrat,” Boston Quarterly Review 1 (1838): 360–77 (this piece began, “The creator of Natty Leatherstocking [sic] and the author of the Bravo can hardly write a book that shall be read without interest, or fail to deserve the respectful consideration of his countrymen”). John P. Beile advertisement, (Charleston) Southern Patriot, 5/5–6/13/1838. “Literary Notices,” Knickerbocker 11 (1838): 461–63. The book was attacked by newspaper publishers with whom Cooper later tangled in court; see James W. Webb’s Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 4/19/1838, and William L. Stone’s New York Commercial Advertiser, 5/25/1838. The abolitionist Journal of Commerce, to which Cooper subscribed from late 1835 to late 1837, noted that his “attachment to republican institutions, and republican principles, his independence of mind, and, above all, his unyielding self-respect, have set the quills of a thousand petty porcupines bristling against him.” “The American Democrat,” reprinted from the Journal of Commerce

— 

notes to pages 188–193

in the New Hampshire Gazette, 6/5/1838; Journal of Commerce receipt, 10/21/1837, covering subscription from 12/22/1835 to 12/22/1837, JFC paps., box 4, AAS. 8. John P. McWilliams, Jr., Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 197–98. McWilliams carefully adds that most of the differences between the two books stem from altered purposes and audiences rather than profound changes in Cooper’s political values. 9. Cooper had outlined a similar position, it will be recalled, in a brief essay published in the Revue Encyclopédique in 1827, reprinted from the English original by Robert E. Spiller as “Cooper’s Defense of Slave-Owning America,” American Historical Review 35 (1930): 575–82. 10. Gerrit Smith to the editor, Otsego Republican, 4/16/1838. A second newspaper described the event in more detail: “Mr. C[ooper] enchained the attention of the assemblage for two and a half hours, in a speech characterized by great compactness and masculine power of thought, logical accuracy, and a great diversity of valuable information; and so perfect was his amenity of manner, his candor, and so happy the arguments, that men of all parties freely expressed their high gratification at the intellectual feast to which the discussion had introduced our citizens.” It added that “the sincere and dignified bearing” of Smith and Cooper toward each other “was precisely such as should distinguish minds of a superior order, in direct conflict upon a question of grave importance.” “Anti-Slavery Discussion,” Freeman’s Journal, 4/9/1838. Neither source indicates that Cooper favored “colonization” as opposed to “immediate abolition,” as Mary Phillips asserted, evidently on her own authority. Phillips, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: John Lane Co., 1913), 317. 11. Without access to family papers, Cooper also could not have inserted a 1794 letter from M. Le Quoi to Judge Cooper (see COC 37–38). References to the Cooper family and its papers may have unveiled Cooper’s role in the volume, which appeared anonymously and contained no copyright notice. That it was known as Cooper’s during his lifetime is shown by an article on “The Literature of the Local History of New York,” Literary World 3 (2/19/1848): 49, which openly attributed it to him. 12. Local history had not become the publishing industry in the 1830s that it was to become later. But Cooper was certainly aware of some salient models for his own work, including Annals of Tryon County; or, the Border Warfare of New-York, during the Revolution (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1831), by his neighbor and friend William W. Campbell of Cherry Valley. He would draw on that book for his own 1843 novel Wyandotté. 13. Evidently Cooper did not find in Otsego Hall or elsewhere in the village, including at his sister Ann Pomeroy’s house, a copy of his father’s Guide in the Wilderness, for there is no mention of it in the Chronicles and no evident reliance on it. He had, as noted in chapter 5, seen a copy in the emigrant farmer’s hands on the Samson, but there is little indication he ever read or owned the Guide.

notes to pages 194–195

  

14. Bentley agreed to pay £500 for the first edition, and £100 more if another printing were required. Richard Bentley to JFC, 8/5/1837 and 11/16/1837, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 15. The Careys, agreeing to pay Cooper $3,250 for the right to print 1,550 copies, with an option to issue a second edition on the same terms, asked him to arrange for Bentley to send proof sheets “as fast as printed, say every half volume, via Liverpool & N York, care of John Wiley, the last to be sent before publication in London.” Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 12/4/1837, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper informed his wife on 12/7/1837: “I have made an arrangement with Carey, for the New-Book. It is not what I hoped for, though, in the end, it may do better” (LJ 3:303). He restated the original terms for a second edition to the firm in an 8/25/1838 letter (see LJ 3:335). 16. Bentley offered £400 for the book. Richard Bentley to JFC, 2/22/1838, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 17. The London date is given in Bentley PL; S&B gives 8/4/1838 as the American date, which is followed by HB CE xviii, 480, 491n11. However, Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 8/10/1838, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL, clearly states, “It is now nearly two weeks since ‘Homeward Bound’ has been issued & there is a reasonable prospect of the edition going off.” Newspaper notices and advertisements became common in early August; see, for instance, the New-York Spectator, 8/6/1838. Hence the approximate date indicated in my text. The unusual delay for the American edition was owing to troubles with the proof shipments from London. See Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 5/22/1838, 5/29/1838, 6/12/1838, and 6/19/1838, all in JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL (in the third of these a postscript indicates that all proofs had been received by the arrival of the most recent packet boat from England, which had not left there until shortly after Bentley issued the book). 18. Homeward Bound was first deposited for copyright on 6/13/1838 by Carey and Lea, which transferred it to Cooper on 7/28/1838 (the 12/4/1837 agreement had, for the first time between the two parties, vested copyright in the author’s name—hence the correction late in July). Francis Hopkinson to Carey and Lea, receipt, 6/13/1838, with 7/27–7/28/1838 assignment on back to Cooper. Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. For $800, Cooper gave the firm the right to print two thousand copies of the second American edition from the new plates; he was also to receive $500 for every batch of a thousand additional copies and would take the plates into his own possession at the end of two years. Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 9/1/1838, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. In mid-September, Carey wrote Cooper that the stereotyped edition of Homeward Bound was then “in the binders [sic] hands & will be published in a few days.” Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 9/13/1838, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 19. See Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 8/10/1838 (the desire to use Bentley’s proof sheets); and same to same, 8/18/1838, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL (the wish to use Cooper’s manuscript—evidently the original, the one sent to Bentley presumably being a copy).

— 

notes to pages 195–197

20. For the Philadelphia edition, see as well “Home as Found,” National Gazette and Literary Register, 11/15/1838, indicating the book would appear “Thursday” (i.e., 11/15/1838). The London date is confirmed by Bentley PL. The Careys paid Cooper $1,800 for the right to stereotype the new book at their own expense and issue the first four thousand copies; they also agreed to pay him for additional copies over the twoyear life of the agreement at the same rate and method as for Homeward Bound (i.e., $500 per one thousand copies), after which the plates would be Cooper’s. See LJ 3:336–38. On the copyright in Cooper’s name, see HAF 1:[ii]). John Fagan would have a long future association with Cooper, both through the Carey establishment and on his own. For his background, see George A. Kubler, A New History of Stereotyping (New York: [Kubler], 1941), 155–59. The stereotyped second edition of Homeward Bound bears no mark of Fagan’s involvement, but it is reasonable to assume he produced it, given that he soon stereotyped the sequel, which bears his name on the verso of the title page—see HAF 1:[ii].) In selling Carey The Deerslayer in 1841, Cooper extended the firm’s right to print both the 1838 novels (and several other earlier ones) for the full term of the new book’s period, or three years from the date it published The Deerslayer. See Carey and Lea and JFC, memorandum of agreement, 4/2/1841, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 21. William Cooper, Will, 5/13/1808, in WC business paps., box 10, HCA. The first of the lakefront parcels, also known as Three Mile Point, derived its more poetic name from the myrtle grove mentioned in the biblical book of Zechariah, 1:7–17. It is located on the west shore of the lake three miles above Cooperstown. Shad Cam, the southernmost point of Mount Wellington, on the upper end of the east shore, was said by the novelist’s grandson to have been named by Judge Cooper’s sons in joking reference to a Scots fisherman’s fib that “in those days the shad cam up to that point” (L&T 20). 22. Robert Campbell to JC, 10/28/1823, JFC paps., box 2, AAS. See also JFC:EY 333. 23. Shad Cam had been reserved by Isaac Cooper when in May 1817 he sold the land adjoining it to the north to Mary and William Gilchrist. The Gilchrists transferred that land the same day to George Clarke, who in November 1818 purchased Shad Cam from the Cooper heirs, evidently via the novelist’s brother William, then the estate’s executor. See Noel Dries, “George Clarke’s American Empire,” Hyde Hall Newsletter, Fall 2013. 24. William Cooper, Jr., to Isaac Cooper, 7/13/1801, WC paps., box 20, HCA. 25. Probably another reason for the hold of Myrtle Grove on Cooper’s emotions was the fact that the recovered family mansion had no frontage on the lake and that both Isaac’s Edgewater and his own Fenimore Farm, which did front Otsego, had long since been taken from family hands. 26. Henry Campbell Black et al., Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th ed. (St. Paul: West, 1990), 53.

notes to pages 197–202

  

27. Ethel R. Outland, The “Effingham” Libels on Cooper, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 28 (1929), 31. 28. Ibid., 42. 29. In sending Shubrick word of his 1821 review of Thomas Clark’s Naval History of the United States, Cooper had made the claim that his own naval writing could give Shubrick and other officers “a niche in the temple of Fame” (LJ 1:69). 30. See New York American, 8/4/1824; LJ 1:113–14. For press rumors, see this item in National Gazette, 2/17/1825: “It is said that Mr. Cooper, the famous novelist, has undertaken a History of the American Navy.” The most notable private communications probably were those from Pennsylvanian Redmond Conyngham, who early in 1825 forwarded through Charles Wiley “copies of documents in my possession relative to Captain [Gustavus] Conyngham,” Redmond’s cousin and an early associate of John Paul Jones. That July, Conyngham wrote again, enclosing this time a set of his own notes on various naval subjects, including the 1777 capture of a British mail packet, Prince of Orange, by the American privateer Surprise, commanded by his cousin in European waters in 1777. Other notes concerned the confinement of Americans in British prisons, along with an account of the Alliance, an American vessel also active in European waters during that period. Redmond Conyngham to “Edward [sic] Cooper, Esq.” [i.e., JFC], 7/24/1825, JFC Coll., box 17, YCAL (Conyngham here mentioned the materials sent to Wiley and asked whether Cooper had received them). Cooper in answering Conyngham acknowledged his commitment to the naval history but expressed doubts about the “arduous” undertaking. Conyngham in a third communication encouraged Cooper (“I consider a history of our navy all important,” he wrote) and offered advice that may well have stuck in the novelist’s mind. An avid antiquarian, Conyngham urged Cooper to remember that extensive research was crucial, since “it is from documents alone a correct history can be obtained.” Redmond Conyngham to JFC, 11/8/1825, JFC Coll., box 17, YCAL. Cooper’s letter to Conyngham is unlocated; what I say of it comes from Conyngham’s 7/24/1825 reply. 31. Reminders of his pledge nonetheless began arriving soon after he returned to New York. When Cooper accepted honorary membership in the U.S. Naval Lyceum in February 1834, he asserted that he had “always loved” the navy and would be happy to perform “any service” the Lyceum might command (LJ 3:32). The naval history was to be the main form that service took, as the Lyceum no doubt expected, although Cooper also kept agitating, as he had earlier, for naval funding and support. See Paul David Nelson, “James Fenimore Cooper’s Maritime Nationalism, 1820–1850,” Military Affairs 41 (1977): 129–32. William B. Shubrick to JFC, 11/12/1835, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL. 32. Lea and Blanchard had the book printed by Isaac Ashmead and Co., probably providing the sheets forwarded to London, but refrained from the cost of stereotyping. The book at last appeared in Philadelphia on 5/10/1839 and in London twenty days later (S&B 103). The London date is confirmed in Bentley PL. For Philadelphia, see the

— 

notes to pages 202–204

various booksellers’ advertisements for the book as “this day published,” and all dated May 10, in the North American, 5/17/1839. Bentley was always cautious about the market for such a work in Britain. Mindful as well of the relatively low returns on the travel books, which furthermore dampened his generosity, he offered £400 for the history, a third less than Cooper wanted, but, no doubt still mindful of the shaky economy and his own insistent needs, Cooper conceded Bentley’s points and quickly agreed (Richard Bentley to JFC, 5/13/1837, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL; LJ 3:269). Bentley was right about the work’s British prospects. He therefore expected Cooper to credit him with £200 toward the £500 he was offering for The Pathfinder. Draft memorandum of agreement, 1839, Bentley paps., British Library Add. 46613, pp. 250–51. In the United States, arrangements went more roughly. When, in September 1837, Cooper informally asked Carey, “By the way, what do you say to the Naval History?” (LJ 3:289), the firm was not enthusiastic. Carey, Lea and Co. to JFC, 9/13/1837, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Months later, in May 1838, Cooper wrote his wife from Philadelphia: “I think my connection with Carey draws near a close. I do not expect that he will publish either Home-AsFound, or the Naval History” (LJ 3:326). He proved mistaken on both counts, although the fact that the copyright was recorded not in “Carey’s” name and in Philadelphia but in Cooper’s in “Northern New York” (i.e., Utica) suggests his hesitations— evidently he had sold Lea and Blanchard only the right to the first printing and therefore might make other agreements with other parties regarding the book (see HN 1:[iv]). The original Lea and Blanchard contract does not appear to survive. The revised edition of the naval history, issued by Lea and Blanchard in 1840, was arranged for in the agreement Cooper made with the firm for The Pathfinder. Lea and Blanchard wished to print an additional two thousand copies of the history, and Cooper agreed to provide “revised copy for that purpose” when they wanted it. He was to receive no further compensation. JFC, receipt to Lea and Blanchard, 7/24/1839, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 33. Brian Lacey, “A Preliminary Inventory of the Literary Manuscripts of James Fenimore Cooper” (MA thesis, Clark University, 1975), 35. 34. For instance, in 1817, soon after returning to Westchester from Otsego, Cooper met in New York City with Master Commandant George C. Read, recently back from lakes Erie and Champlain. Among other things, Read had impressed on Cooper’s mind “the great odds” against which Thomas McDonough and his men had struggled in defeating the British on Champlain in 1814 (“ER” pt. 1:420). In the article just cited, Cooper also included a letter from Read that he had solicited in March 1842 on the topic of Champlain. 35. It is worth pointing out that the naval history devotes only the first thirteen of its fifty chapters to the colonial era and the Revolution, while a fourteenth chapter covers the period from 1783 to 1797, the eve of hostilities with the French in the quasi-war. The second volume opens in 1803 and runs down only to the end of the second war with

notes to pages 204–205

  

Britain, a mere dozen years, so that its nearly five hundred pages concern a period of recent American history in which Cooper was a participant and then an observer. Long before he had reached the end of the first volume, as a result, Cooper was narrating events of which he had vivid personal memories. 36. “Private Armed Vessels,” JFC Coll., box 17, YCAL; James De Kay to JFC, 12/14/1837, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. 37. Cooper may have relied on the navy’s chief clerk, John Boyle, who in his long career often stood in as acting navy secretary. See Watson Boyle, “John Boyle, United Irishman, and His American Descendants,” Journal of the American Irish Historical Society 18 (1919): 224–32. Also of long service was the secretary of the Navy Board of Commissioners, Charles W. Goldsborough, with whom Cooper had had dealings during his own service. See The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Information, for the Year 1838 (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1837), 147; LJ 1:15–16, 26. Probably more important for Cooper, though, were the two members of the Board of Commissioners whom he knew well personally—Isaac Chauncey and Charles Morris. Morris we know aided in the production of the 1853 expanded edition of the naval history. See Caroline Cooper Phinney to “Commodore Morris,” undated, tipped into Morris’s copy of A History of the Navy of the United States of America Continued to 1853, 3 vols. in 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853), in Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, *AC8 C7863 839hh. 38. JFC, naval history notebook, JFC Coll., box 17, YCAL. Many of the two dozen or so separate entries in this unpaged notebook concern individual naval officers. Especially notable is a series of three entries on Isaac Chauncey (nos. 3, 19, and 21), including two very extensive ones that run to six and eleven very detailed pages, respectively. There are other entries on Joseph Nicholson (no. 2), Charles Morris (no. 9), David Porter (no. 18), Oliver H. Perry (no. 16), Thomas McDonough (no. 16), and James Biddle (no. 20), as well as three entries touching on James Lawrence and the Chesapeake (nos. 13 and 22–23). 39. JFC, naval history notebook, entry no. 17. 40. Probably of some use to Cooper on his Washington visit was the fact that a new navy secretary had been installed in July. This was Cooper’s old friend and fellow writer James Kirke Paulding, who had served as the naval agent in New York from 1824 to 1838 before taking over in Washington and hence knew a great deal about the department and its habits as well as its history. See Ralph M. Aderman and Wayne R. Kime, Advocate for America: The Life of James Kirke Paulding (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2003), 196–201. Although Navy Department personnel were more likely to help Cooper owing to his clear ties to Paulding, it does not appear that the secretary personally aided Cooper. When Paulding wrote Cooper to praise the naval history once it appeared, Cooper wrote back to express his gratitude but did not offer thanks for any aid he had received from the secretary. See Paulding to Cooper, 5/20/1839, in Ralph M. Aderman, ed., The Letters

— 

notes to pages 206–207

of James Kirke Paulding (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 256–57, and Cooper’s reply, LJ 3:379–80. 41. “Sundry Naval facts of incidents of the Revolution contributed by John F. Watson for the use of Mr. Cooper” (1/7/1839), JFC Coll., box 17, YCAL. Redmond Conyngham, as indicated in note 30, had also given Cooper information about the Alliance; see Redmond Conyngham to “Edward Cooper, Esq.,” 7/24/1825. 42. “Supplemental of the Revolutionary Navy for J. F. Cooper,” undated, but probably January 1839, JFC Coll., box 17, YCAL. 43. I[saac] Chauncey, Washington, to JFC, 1/31/1839; J. K. Paulding, Washington, to JFC, 2/22/1839; Albert Gallatin, New York City, to JFC, 12/30/1838; all in JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 44. As indicated, several later editions of the naval history appeared starting in 1840. Cooper himself prepared the treatment of the naval aspects of the Mexican War that first was included in A History of the Navy of the United States of America, 3 vols. in 1 (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1853). Other new material in that version was prepared by the clergyman Charles K. McHarg, who served the Cooperstown Presbyterian congregation from 1848 to 1850 and who became the brother-in-law of Caroline M. Phinney in the latter year and is mentioned in her presentation letter to Cmdre. Charles Morris (see note 37 above) as grateful for the help Morris gave him in Washington, presumably on research for the new passages (on McHarg’s role, see also H. F. Phinney to PFC, 10/30/1852 and 11/20/1852, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA). Caroline’s father had assigned his rights in the naval history to her in 1849; see JFC to Caroline Cooper Phinney, assignment of ownership, 12/22/1849, JFC paps., box 5, AAS. There was some confusion about the idea of extending the narrative, as I indicate in greater detail in my final chapter. Mrs. Cooper, who did not in fact legally own the work, had decided that Putnam should republish the naval history without additions by other hands, and he began presswork on it before her death. Once she died, however, the surviving members of the family decided that “it required additions,” and Putnam suspended the project. H. F. Phinney to PFC, 10/30/1852. In 1843, Cooper himself explained that he at one time had intended “to write a third volume of the History . . . which should contain all the services of the different State marines, as well as the more prominent and best authenticated combats of the private armed cruisers. The plan would have also brought down the history of the regular marine to the present time. But the abuse, calumny, and pecuniary sacrifices—sacrifices that I am little able to bear— that accompanied the publication of the two first volumes of the work, have long since induced me to abandon the idea, and to turn my attention to other subjects” (LJ 4:356). 45. Earlier editions of Bancroft’s first volume do not contain the brief account (which Cooper was to adopt) of Samuel Argall’s 1613 attack on the French settlement on the Penobscot called St. Sauveur, as well as on Port Royal. It is worth noting that Cooper somewhat garbled the details by placing St. Sauveur in Nova Scotia; see HN 1:40–41,

notes to pages 207–208

  

and George Bancroft, A History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, 4th ed. (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown), 148. For confirmation of Cooper’s positive view of Bancroft’s work, see his letter of 6/4/1839 to the historian (LJ 3:383–85), which may indicate when he was importing information from Bancroft to the naval history. 46. A Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Ecclesiastical, 2 vols. (New Haven: Maltby, Goldsmith, and Co., 1818), 1:356–57, 434, 451–52. Trumbull’s work, Savage’s edition of Winthrop, and Charles W. Goldsborough, The United States Naval Chronicle (Washington: James Wilson, 1824), are all listed in A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, 1835), 2:872, 876, 862, respectively. 47. John Henry Sherburne, Life and Character of the Chevalier John Paul Jones, a Captain in the United States Navy during the Revolutionary War (Washington: Sherburne, 1825). Some of the same items Cooper could also have found in Robert C. Sands’s later compilation, Life and Correspondence of John Paul Jones (New York: A. Chandler, 1830); both are in the Library Company 1835 Catalogue, 2:942. Cooper’s description of the Andrea Doria (HN 1:102) thus might have been based on either Sherburne (20) or Sands (55); by contrast, only Sherburne (102–3) printed a Jones letter of 8/11/1779 on which Cooper drew (HN 1:184). Information shared with Cooper by Conyngham and Watson had also fleshed out the narrative of John Paul Jones, with whom Cooper clearly was fascinated. As late as 1842, he secured a copy of a two-page deposition from the pension file of Sarah Lunt, widow of another of Jones’s associates, Henry Lunt. The maker of the deposition, Moses Davenport, asserted that he knew of Lunt’s association with Jones (Lunt in fact was second lieutenant on the Bonhomme Richard), adding that he once met Jones when Jones visited Lunt’s hometown, Newburyport, Massachusetts. Jones, eager to find Lunt and recruit him for a new venture, asserted (according to Davenport) that he would “prefer [Lunt] as an officer in the service to any he had ever known.” Moses Davenport, deposition, 10/4/1838, certified copy, JFC Coll., box 17, YCAL. 48. Library Company 1835 Catalogue, 2:867–68. Notes derived from “Sparks’ Diplomatic Correspondence” are in JFC, naval history notebook. The appendix to the first volume (HN 1:379) prints a John Paul Jones document attributed to Sparks’s compilation in its 1829 edition; see Jared Sparks, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution (Boston: Nathan Hale and Gray and Bowen, 1829), 3:205–7. Cooper’s earlier quotations from a Silas Deane letter to Robert Morris, although not sourced in the naval history, probably also came from Sparks, 1:107–9. And there may well be other such borrowings throughout the first volume of the naval history. 49. Abel Bowen, The Naval Monument (Boston: George Clark, 1830), 147–58. It seems likely that Cooper’s description of the scene of the Battle of Plattsburgh was based on the engraving and its key, prepared for Bowen’s book (placed between pp. 144 and 145) and that he copied his details about armaments from Bowen as well. I have

— 

notes to pages 208–212

found no convincing proof that Cooper’s History of the Navy made close use of Thomas Clark’s Naval History of the United States, from the Commencement of the Revolution to the Present Time, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1814), which he had harshly reviewed in 1821 (see ECE 3–20; JFC:EY 288–89). However, the Library Company 1835 Catalogue (2:861) listed copies of both the 1813 and 1814 editions of Clark, noting they were gifts from the author. By contrast, a rather different situation obtains with a British work, William James’s A Full and Correct Account of the Chief Naval Occurrences of the Late War between Great Britain and the United States of America (London: T. Egerton, 1817). Cooper thoroughly discredited James in his long two-part essay “Edinburgh Review on James’s Naval Occurrences, and Cooper’s Naval History” (1842), calling James’s book “indecent in tone and language, audacious in reasoning, and contradictory and illogical in its inductions” (“ER” pt. 1:435); and in his own history Cooper called it “a work of no authority . . . in matters of opinion at least” (HN 2:387). It nonetheless is clear that James provided Cooper handy copies of many British documents. Indeed, Cooper even cites documents from James three times in “Edinburgh Review” (pt. 2:519, 525). The Library Company 1835 Catalogue (2:775) lists a copy of a later, related book by James, The Naval History of Great Britain (1821); covering the period 1793 to 1820, it gave the War of 1812 somewhat curtailed treatment. Cooper was clearly more familiar with the original edition, which he used in his 1842 pieces (see “ER” pt. 1:413). He conceivably owned it. 50. Speech of Com. Jesse Duncan Elliott, U.S.N., Delivered in Hagerstown, Md. on 14th November 1843 (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber, 1844), 14. Cooper himself must have told Elliott of his dealings with M. C. Perry. In The Battle of Lake Erie, Cooper wrote that “all the testimony . . . was sent to me, while the history was in progress” (BLE 37). 51. For the Rodgers letter book covering the period from March to October 1811, see JFC Coll., box 19, YCAL. The material bears no indication of who made the copy or when. 52. For Jacob Frank’s comment, see “From the Editors,” New York Public Advertiser, 9/10/1807. On the larger fight about the Battle of Lake Erie and the History of the Navy, see Hugh Egan, “Enabling and Disabling the Lake Erie Discussion: James Fenimore Cooper and Alexander Slidell Mackenzie Respond to the Perry/Elliott Controversy,” American Neptune 57 (1997): 343–50. Mackenzie, Perry’s protégé, wrote an essay in the October 1839 issue of the North American Review severely critical of Cooper’s naval history for its account of the Battle of Lake Erie. In his own Life of Oliver Hazard Perry, published the following year, Mackenzie attacked Elliott and printed Perry’s charges against him as an appendix. Cooper replied with The Battle of Lake Erie (1843), which critiqued Mackenzie’s biography of Perry and exonerated Elliott. Mackenzie replied to Cooper’s critique in a lengthy appendix to the fifth edition of the Perry biography. I cover these topics in more detail in chapter 10. For Elliott’s gratitude for Cooper’s support, see the reproduction of the Elliott medal struck to honor Cooper in 1844, LJ 5, plate 1.

notes to pages 214–217

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C HAPTER 8.  LIBELS ON LIBELS 1. A list of all Cooper’s opponents and his actions against them is included as an appendix to this volume. 2. The Cooper suits were unprecedented not only at the time but also for a century afterward. Norman L. Rosenberg thus concludes that the novelist’s “crusade” was “unmatched until the chain libel suits against Drew Pearson by United States Representative Martin Sweeney in the 1930s and 1940s.” Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 137. On the political context of the press battle, one biographical detail captures the pattern. Elias P. Pellet, who began the fight, had learned his trade in the Norwich shop of none other than Thurlow Weed, at present in Albany, where he was a key player in the Whig establishment and in the libel suits overall—he was the second of the two editors who, as indicated in my text, would be sued for reprinting Pellet’s article. Weed and Pellet at the time of their first acquaintance were Clintonians, as was Cooper. But in the 1830s both became Whigs. See Harriet A. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), 81. For Weed’s reminiscences about Pellet, see the obituary he printed in the Albany Evening Journal, 1/11/1840. On Barber’s politics, see note 6 below. 3. Pellet’s article is reprinted in Ethel R. Outland, The “Effingham” Libels on Cooper: A Documentary History of the Libel Suits of James Fenimore Cooper Centering Around the Three Mile Point Controversy and the Novel “Home as Found,” 1837–1845, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, No. 28 (1929), 42–43. On pp. 205–8, she prints Pellet’s 12/25/1838 response to Cooper’s renewed activity on the civil suit. 4. Otsego Republican, 8/14/1837. 5. Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men, 26–28, 56–151; Lyndsay M. Campbell, “Starkie’s Adventures in North America: The Emergence of Libel Law,” in The Grand Experiment: Law and Legal Culture in British Settler Societies, ed. Hamar Foster, Benjamin L. Berger, and A. R. Buck (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), 196–97. In this discussion, I focus on civil libel law as it applied to individuals, leaving aside the issue of what was once known as criminal seditious libel. 6. Otsego Republican, 8/21/1837. Barber and Holroyd had acquired the Otsego Republican early in July, shortly after arriving in Cooperstown. Despite their paper’s nominal name, they were termed “sound, democratic, intelligent Whigs” by its previous owner and editor, Ambrose W. Clark, in his farewell to the readers, which urged continuing support of the paper’s political agenda (Otsego Republican, 7/10/1837). Thirtyyear-old Holroyd, from Rhode Island, had worked as a printer in New York City from 1834 to 1837. When he later returned to Manhattan, he was employed at two Whig papers that were also to tangle with the novelist: James W. Webb’s Morning Courier and New York Enquirer and, after 1841, Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune. See Sidney F. and Elizabeth Stege Huttner, A Register of Artists, Engravers, Booksellers, Bookbinders,

— 

notes to pages 217–219

Printers & Publishers in New York City, 1821–1842 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), 115; Rhode-Island Republican, 9/20/1837; and the anonymous Printers and Printing in Providence, 1762–1907 (Providence: Typographer’s Union No. 33, 1907), xliii. For the September 1837 filings against the two upstate papers, see Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 43. 7. On Webb’s combativeness, see James L. Crouthamel, James Watson Webb: A Biography (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 73–76. I quote Webb from his original article: “Home as Found, By the Author of Homeward Bound, The Pioneers, &c.,” Morning Chronicle and New York Enquirer, 11/22/1838. Webb began his treatment of the novel by reprinting the entire fifth and sixth chapters (which depict the gaucheries of New York City society) on the first page of that issue, so that his subscribers could follow his detailed references to the text on the second page. The later comments about Cooper’s parents are from Morning Chronicle and New York Enquirer, 9/13/1841. For Webb’s arrival in Cooperstown as an eleven-year-old orphan at the time Cooper and his wife were living at Fenimore Farm, see Crouthamel, James Watson Webb, 3–4. 8. Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 43; John L. Wendell, ed., Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature and in the Court for the Correction of Errors of the State of New-York, vol. 24, 2nd ed. (New York: The Reporter, 1850), 104– 6. For Willard, see Edwin Williams, The New-York Annual Register for the Year of Our Lord 1840 (New York: David Felt, 1840), 408–9. The outcome of the proceedings against Pellet is not widely known. The editor himself wrote in the spring of 1839 that the still pending civil case was slated to be heard in Albany County, although no trial date had been set. See “The Cooper Libel,” reprinted from the Chenango Telegraph in the Albany Evening Journal, 6/11/1839. Pellet was in fact the subject of two legal actions, including a criminal indictment secured by Cooper in June 1839 in response to remarks Pellet made about Cooper’s proceedings against Barber; see Oxford (N.Y.) Times, 9/25/1839. Pellet made arrangements to have both suits tried in Cooperstown in February 1840, but the newspaperman died on 1/8/1840, “a few days” before the trials were due to begin, as Cooper himself noted (LJ 4:11). An erroneous press report in May 1840 nonetheless asserted that Cooper had won a $400 verdict against Pellet not long before. New-Yorker 9 (5/16/1840): 14. That inaccurate story was relied on by Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 44–45. 9. Cooper learned that some jurors wanted to give him $1,000 in damages. See LJ 3:377–78 (he wrote this account, it should be noted, for his friend Daniel D. Barnard, himself a Whig). Barber, writing in his paper soon afterward, reported that Cooper had “summed up the cause himself in his own behalf.” “The Cooper Libel,” reprinted in the Albany Evening Journal, 5/23/1839. This point was confirmed by Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., who alerted Cooper from Manhattan on 5/28/1840 (see CORR 1:394–95) that he had written a brief article about the trial for Bryant’s New York Evening Post of 5/18/1839. “There was a large audience collected,” that article noted, “as well from the

notes to pages 219–220

  

nature of the project as from the expectation that Mr. Cooper would carry on the cause in person.” Sedgwick credited Barber’s attorney with following “a very skilful and liberal course as regarded Mr. Cooper,” but noted that “Mr. Cooper summed up himself for the plaintiff, and turned the scale. The jury gave what is a large amount for that part of the country and the nature of the suit, a verdict of four hundred dollars damages.” Cooper replied to Sedgwick that he had seen this article, adding he thought it “ascribed more virtue to my summing up than was merited” (LJ 3:381). Barber pleaded the “general issue,” a now disallowed plea that permitted him to deny all of Cooper’s claims without specifically answering any of them. As a consequence of that plea, however, the judge prevented his attorney from offering justifications for any of the assertions in the reprinted article or his additions to it. I discuss these legal issues further at the end of this chapter. See John L. Wendell’s comments on the Barber case in his edition of Thomas Starkie’s Treatise on the Law of Slander and Libel, and Incidentally of Malicious Prosecutions, 2 vols. (Albany: Van Benthuysen and Co., 1843), 1:36–37. 10. Wendell, ed., Reports of Cases, 24:104–6. 11. The novelist pursued a criminal indictment against Webb rather than filing civil charges because, according to Horace Greeley, The Autobiography of Horace Greeley, or Recollections of a Busy Life (New York: E. B. Treat, 1872), 262, Webb was notorious for his financial difficulties and would not have the wherewithal to pay any civil damages Cooper might win. When Webb in May 1839 accused the novelist of having exerted undue political influence on the Otsego grand jury to secure that first criminal indictment, Cooper secured a second one on the grounds that he had thereby libeled the Otsego courts as well. See “James Fenimore Cooper,” Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 5/24/1839. In Cooper’s last novel, the conservative lawyer Thomas Dunscomb would comment on precisely this sort of situation: “Any editor of a newspaper who publishes a sentence reflecting on the character or rights of a party to a pending suit, is guilty, at common law, of what the books call a ‘libel on the courts of justice,’ and can be punished for it, as for any other misdemeanor.” Ways 82. 12. Averell’s brother Horatio had wed Webb’s sister in 1823, while Averell himself had wed a Webb cousin in 1829. See Clara A. Avery, The Averell-Averill-Avery Family, 2 vols. (privately published, ca. 1915), 1:577–80. That the Averell brothers colluded with Webb in planning the delays they sought in 1839 is clear from a letter Horatio sent Webb shortly before the trial was due to open. See Horatio Averell to James W. Webb, 8/26/1839, in Constantine Evans, “Fenimore Cooper’s Libel Suits,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier 27 (1992): 64–65. For Webb’s account of the 9/9/1839 hearing in Otsego, see his letter in his paper, the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 9/13/1839. Another of Webb’s attorneys was Cooper’s old opponent Ambrose Jordan, with whom he had had a street fight in Cooperstown in 1815 (see JFC:EY 191–92). The third was Ogden Hoffman, former district attorney of New York City and at present a Whig representative in Congress.

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notes to page 220

13. Averell advised Webb on 9/3/1840, after the publication of the first New World piece: “Say nothing to anyone, at no time or place, of any agency in the review in the New World, or of your knowledge of its appearance before [it was] published, etc. See that the manuscript is destroyed, or at least take it into your own possession.” William H. Averell to James W. Webb, 9/3/1839, as printed in Evans, “Fenimore Cooper’s Libel Suits,” 68. Webb is mentioned in the New World reviews in the third person. The most convincing internal evidence of his involvement in their composition are the bits of information about Cooper’s family and Otsego that Benjamin would have had very little chance of knowing—but with which Webb was familiar, owing to his residence in Cooperstown earlier in life. See in particular the description of Cooper’s father as “an honest, hardworking wheelwright from New Jersey“ before his emigration to New York (New World, 8/29/1840, 1:13, p. 193), which closely parallels that in Webb’s own 1838 review of the novel (Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 11/22/1838) quoted earlier in my text. The further description of Cooper’s mother in the 8/29/1840 issue of the New World as “the daughter of an honest huckster” similarly echoes Webb’s language about her in, for instance, a 9/13/1839 article in his paper. My details of the September 1840 court session come from Park Benjamin’s report on the trial, which quotes from Webb’s own letter to him (see New World, 9/26/1840). 14. For Cooper’s report to Paul, see LJ 4:68–71. During the supreme court hearing on the venue issue, Cooper made clear through his nephew Richard his belief that Webb had had a hand in writing those articles as well as circulating them in Otsego County. Cooper also gave his own affidavit on this question before the clerk of the supreme court in May 1841; see LJ 4:243. Judge Esek Cowen, writing for the court, noted that Webb’s failure to respond to this accusation supported the conclusion that he had “aided in managing the most pernicious department of the machinery” deployed against Cooper and, indeed, against the circuit court. “The People v. Webb,” in Edwin Burritt Smith and Ernest Hitchcock, Reports of Cases Adjudged and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature and Court for the Trial of Impeachments and Correction of Errors of the State of New York (Newark: Lawyers Co-Operative Publishing Co., 1885), Book 15 (Nathaniel Hill’s Reports, 1–4), 93–95. On the minor case against Benjamin, see LJ 4:178–81, and Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 59–68. 15. Except where specific details are credited to Cooper, my narrative in this and the next paragraph is based on Webb’s report, “Cooper and His Libel Suits,” Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 11/23/1841. A possible rationale for reading the books into evidence was Webb’s contention that Cooper, having portrayed himself as Edward Effingham, had blurred the line between the author and the private person to such a degree that an important distinction in libel law (on which, as we shall see, Judge Willard soon lectured the jury) did not apply. For a discussion of this issue with regard to the third Webb trial, when his counsel likewise sought to read the books into evidence, see Richard H. Levet, Ambrose “Aqua Fortis” Jordan, Lawyer (New York: Vantage, 1973),

notes to page 221

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105–6. Probably part of Cooper’s motivation in his various published attempts to deny that the Home novels (and The Pioneers) were autobiographical was a wish to counter his opponents’ contentions in this matter. 16. A native of Guilford, Connecticut, and an 1813 graduate of Middlebury College, Willard was the nephew of Emma Willard and, in fact, a distant relation of William L. Stone. Although a staunch Democrat, he had a reputation for strict impartiality. See William L. Stone II, Reminiscences of Saratoga and Ballston (New York: Virtue and Yorston, 1875), 373–90, and The Family of John Stone, One of the First Settlers of Guilford, Conn. (Albany: Joel Munsell’s Sons, 1888), 28. Cooper did not think the summary of the charge to the jury given by Webb’s paper was very accurate at all (see LJ 4:199, 219); however, I use it as a source here because it is apparently the only surviving version. Cooper may have been more concerned, at any rate, with Willard’s handling of this part of the 1841 trial than with Webb’s account of it. Cooper had happily reported, following Barber’s trial in 1839, that Willard’s charge stressed “that an allegation against the literary character of a literary man, if false and written in bad faith . . . was as much a libel, as to say a tailor did not understand his trade” (LJ 3:382). However, in the Webb trial, as Cooper confided to his friend Shubrick, “the judge charged the jury wrong on the law of privileged communication. He is an honest man, but not a firm one. He charged dead against Webb, though he put the privileged communication point so blindly to them”—the jury—“that all the honest men were befogged, and as for the rogues their minds were made up before they were sworn.” He added, more emphatically than before, that Webb’s account was “a fiction from end to end” (LJ 4:204–5). The difference between the 1839 and 1841 jury charges seems to have been Willard’s clearer distinction in 1841 between an author’s literary and private characters. 17. Webb, “Cooper and His Libel Suits.” Cooper apparently was not in the courtroom when the jury was discharged. He later wrote Shubrick that a “respectable clergyman” who was present then told him the members “said, simply, that they stood eleven to one, and that they could not agree if they staid out two weeks—They did not even say how they were divided” (LJ 4:205). Emphasis in the original; throughout this chapter, emphasis in quotations from newspaper articles is in the original. 18. Webb, “Cooper and His Libel Suits.” Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 98–99, quoting the November 1843 court record. See also Thurlow Weed’s brief account of the 1843 trial, Albany Evening Journal, 11/23/1843. In contrast to this drawn-out process is the fate of the “smuggling” indictment against Webb. In the fall of 1841, the court was prepared to take it up as well. But Webb, prior to the discharge of the jury late on Friday night, sent word to Cooper that he would retract the objectionable charges he had made against the novelist. Cooper and his nephew regarded this outcome as “the most creditable victory we could gain” and therefore entered negotiations. Joshua A. Spencer and Cooper worked out an acceptable text, which Cooper stressed “should be published without comment.” Spencer’s reply to this point, Cooper went on in recounting the

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notes to pages 222–223

negotiations, was that “if any thing was said, it would be ‘kind’ . . . and I should have no ground of complaint” (LJ 4:197). Webb made his retraction before the court, but when he published his letter to District Attorney Schuyler Crippen in his paper on Tuesday, November 23, he prefaced it with a long and highly partisan report on the trial of the first indictment to which Cooper in turn objected in a letter to Bryant’s New York Evening Post (see LJ 4:196–99). 19. Cooper had heard “nothing” of the July 1840 sale, he wrote in Bryant’s New York Evening Post in March 1841, “except by report; but understand its history to be as follows: Certain persons held a judgment against Mr. Barber, for advances made, or as sureties, to purchase ‘my [i.e., Barber’s] press and types.’ These persons levied as soon as they found it was in my [i.e., Cooper’s] power to levy, but there was certainly no occasion to sell, until an execution from us compelled a sale. I am told that they wished a change in the management of the paper, and certainly their course looks as if the fact were so. Mr. Barber was sold out, by his own political friends, and not by me. I did not even know of the sale, until some weeks after it had taken place” (LJ 4:127; for other relevant comments, see LJ 4:52, 117). Cooper may well have been right—the backers may have seen Barber as expendable, either because he owed them money they otherwise might not recover or because they could use his failure as a justification for fresh attacks on Cooper’s character. I have uncovered no evidence of the identity of those backers, but as Cooper took them to be Whigs, they must have had political motives in recruiting Barber to move to Cooperstown and take over the Otsego Republican. I strongly suspect that one of them, perhaps the chief of the group, was William H. Averell. Certainly Averell and Barber were already associating politically as early as the fall of 1837, when they and a third man were chosen by the Otsego Whig convention to form the local party’s new central corresponding committee (see Albany Evening Journal, 10/24/1837). 20. Cooper thought he had obtained the execution on 2/6 or 2/7/1841 (see LJ 4:127), but Barber positively asserted the following week that the sheriff had come to his lodgings “early on Thursday morning last”—that is, on 2/4/1841. Andrew M. Barber, “To the Editor,” Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 3/9/1841. February 6–7 were in any case a Saturday and Sunday, unlikely dates for securing the execution. 21. Andrew M. Barber, “To the Editor,” which included a second letter addressed by Barber to Cooper. Incensed at Barber’s rank political maneuvering in the latter piece, Cooper asked Bryant to send a copy of it “to the Post Master General, on whose mind, I cannot doubt, it will produce the impression that I feel it must make on every right thinking man” (LJ 4:129). Barber received the position but lost it once John Tyler succeeded Harrison; see Boston Daily Atlas, 7/14/1842. After Barber resumed the editorship of the Otsego Republican the following year, a Washington, D.C., Republican paper called him “as rank a Clay-whig [sic] editor as breathes this side of Styx.” Madisonian for the County, 4/14/1843. As late as 1855, when he died, Barber’s claims about Cooper’s effect on the paper surfaced even in his obituary: “The judgment issued against the Republican, in

notes to pages 223–227

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consequence of [the Cooper] verdict, seriously embarrassed the concern.” New York Times, 8/28/1855. Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men, 137, errs in accepting the longlived Whig myth that Barber was forced to sell because of Cooper’s victory. 22. “Mr. J. Fennimore [sic] Cooper,” Albany Evening Journal, 8/18/1837. 23. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 521. 24. Weed was not easily conquered, however. He made it to Fonda later on Tuesday (see Greeley, Autobiography, 262), and, according to James F. Beard, soon managed to have the case reopened (see LJ 4:146). 25. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 522. 26. New-York Daily Tribune, 11/20/1841; Albany Evening Journal, 11/22/1841; Greeley, Autobiography, 262. Weed., ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 521, would corroborate Cooper’s own account of what happened at Fonda, although without quite giving Cooper the credit he deserved. It is worth noting that James W. Webb’s first report on the Fonda proceedings did distinguish between Cooper’s reactions on Monday and Tuesday; see Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 11/20/1841. 27. Albany Evening Journal, 11/26/1841, 11/27/1841, 12/4/1841 (reprinting Greeley’s Tribune). 28. Albany Evening Journal, 12/3/1841, 12/23/1841. Northway was sued for his 11/30/1841 article in the Oneida Whig on the Weed default verdict at Fonda. Northway had asserted that “no gentleman—no man possessing the common feelings of humanity” would have refused to delay the Weed trial. Cooper asked for $3,000 damages, but the jury in April 1842 reduced the award to seventy-five dollars. In reporting on this outcome, Northway conceded that Cooper’s defense team (Richard Cooper and Samuel Bowne) had presented facts about the Weed case absent from the press reports on which the original Oneida Whig article had relied, and admitted that, had he known about them at the time, he would not have condemned Cooper as he had. Northway further claimed that this partial retraction was voluntary. Utica Daily Gazette, 4/18/1842. 29. Albany Evening Journal, 12/7/1841 (“Effinghamania”), 12/17/1841 (first use of “Cooperage” as heading), 12/21–12/24/1841 (continuing use of the term, indicating as well that it was picked up in other papers), 12/24/1841 (clown anecdote). 30. “Prenticiana,” Albany Evening Journal, 12/11/1841. Weed did not further identify the paper from which the piece in question was copied, but it was clearly the Louisville Daily Journal, of Kentucky, edited by the famous Whig George D. Prentice. 31. The Lester anecdote was particularly offensive to Cooper. Lester did not name Cooper, but Weed, in reprinting the story, asked, “Could this have been ‘the mild and handsome Mr. Effingham?’ It is very like him.” C. Edwards Lester, The Glory and the Shame of England, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841), 1:x; Albany Evening Journal, 12/4/1841. In response to Weed’s comment, Cooper published a letter in Edwin Crosswell’s Albany Argus two days later admitting that the book agent had called at his house but challenging most of the other details (see LJ 4:216).

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notes to pages 227–229

32. Albany Evening Journal, 11/27/1841. In the 1842 cases, Cooper was awarded a total of $142; in the retrial of the 1841 case, the $400 award was pared down to $323. Beard summarizes these cases and gives the award figures, LJ 4:283. 33. In a December 1841 letter to the Albany Argus, Cooper himself asserted “that five libel suits have been brought against the editor and publishers of the Evening Journal, since the [November 1841] trial at Fonda, and that more are under consideration” (LJ 4:216), but it is not possible to track all of them or even determine whether they actually were filed. 34. Albany Evening Journal, 12/14/1842. Cady’s part in Weed’s retraction is specified in Cooper’s 12/16/1842 letter to the Albany Argus (see LJ 4:325). This was not quite the end of the matter. The day after reaching the agreement with Weed, Cooper had won a suit against Horace Greeley for that man’s 1841 publication of Weed’s covert report from Fonda. In the course of that trial, Cooper had mentioned, with considerable skepticism, Weed’s excuses for missing that trial. Greeley having reported Cooper’s comments, Weed took offense at them. He also accused Cooper of having negotiated in bad faith, since in his view the resolution worked out between them by Cady meant that Cooper should never have brought up the matter again. Cooper countered with the thinly veiled threat that he would expose Weed’s lies—thereby embarrassing the man’s wife and daughters. He also made it obvious that he had some definite proof in the matter, probably proof derived from Albany acquaintances who were privy to the actual details. Since Weed had refused to give an affidavit about the claimed illness in his family, even Judge Wendell had doubted that explanation for the editor’s failure to come to Fonda. After Cooper made his threat in December 1842, Weed, who finally had been “Coopered,” dropped the matter. See Horace Greeley, New-York Daily Tribune, 12/12/1842; LJ 4:324–27; and Wendell’s discursive introduction to Starkie’s Treatise on Slander and Libel, 1:39–43. 35. Greeley, never having lived in Cooperstown, described Three Mile Point as “a barren point of rock jutting from Mr. Cooper’s grounds into Otsego Lake” (New-York Daily Tribune, 6/21/1853). It was, to the contrary, three miles north of Otsego Hall’s grounds. 36. “Home as Found,” Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 11/22/1838. 37. Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 103, quoting Webb, Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 11/27/1843. Daniels, a Connecticut native trained as a lawyer, had worked in the editorial office at Webb’s paper from 1833 until 1837, when he acquired the Gazette; he returned to Webb’s employ in 1839 and stayed there until 1848. Annual Obituary Notices of Eminent Persons . . . for 1858 (Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1859), 82. In 1834, Cooper was to comment extensively on the article Webb published on 6/15/1833 about the Finance Controversy and the Cassio review of The Bravo (see LTC 36–45). That article was probably sufficient in itself to make him unwilling to socialize with Webb on his return.

notes to pages 230–232

  

38. When Precaution was making its way through the printing process in 1820, Stone was one of the editors to whom Cooper suggested that his agent, Goodrich, send a copy when it was finished (see LJ 1:68). In addition to the letter from Cooper published in Stone’s paper on 3/24/1827, Cooper had apparently written a slightly earlier letter to Stone as well; this is quoted from in LJ 1:145–46 but curiously is not printed in full by Beard. 39. The article proved to be the work of William Kent, son of the chancellor; see LJ 2:382n5, as well as Cooper’s 1840 recollection of the affair, LJ 4:57. 40. For Stone’s biography, I rely on Stone II, Family of John Stone, 19–27, 45–53. 41. William Leete Stone, “From New York to Niagara,” Buffalo Historical Society Publications 14 (1910): 212–14; Freeman’s Journal, 9/21/1829. 42. Stone II, Family of John Stone, 53–62. 43. “See what a rent the envious Casca made,” Albany Evening Journal, 7/30/1839, reprinting the New-York Gazette on Cooper’s view of the Effingham Libel Fund as well as Stone’s admission of his direction of it from his Commercial Advertiser. 44. The spur to Cooper’s eventual suit against Stone was Duer’s June 1839 attack, but before any of Duer’s articles had appeared, he already had thought about suing Stone. At the start of that month, he confessed to lawyer Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., “I have Stone . . . in view” (LJ 3:381). Duer converted that general idea into a specific plan. 45. New-York Spectator, 8/1/1839. The rumored amount Cooper was asking for was $2,000. 46. Stone’s bad feelings apparently were compounded by the indirect means through which he learned of Cooper’s decision. On April 28 of the latter year, Stone published an excerpt from the Philadelphia Inquirer announcing, on the basis of a report in Webb’s Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, that Cooper had “commenced an action against Col. Stone . . . for a libellous review, published some eleven months since, of his Naval History.” The target of the prosecution shot back: “Does the Inquirer mean what it says? If so, it libels us, for we have never published ‘a libellous review’ of Mr. Cooper’s Naval History, or any other of his works.” The following week, Stone finally was served with a process officially notifying him of the pending suit. Beard, LJ 4:40n1, quoting Stone’s Commercial Advertiser of 4/28/1840. The New-York Spectator, 5/28/1840, notes that Stone had been served with a process during the week of May 4. 47. A press report of the July 1840 hearing also indicated that the case “came up on a demurrer from the Court below,” suggesting an apparently undocumented earlier step. Oneida Whig, 8/4/1840. Cooper himself on 6/27/1840 wrote in the Albany Argus, “Stone has already demurred.” LJ 4:50. 48. Wendell, ed., Reports of Cases, 24:434–38 (i.e., the report of the November 1840 proceeding); New-York Spectator, 6/9/1839, 6/20/1839. In the July hearing, according to the report in Stone’s paper, “The gist of the matter was, that Mr. Cooper had awarded

— 

notes to pages 232–237

equal credit, in his history, to Perry and Elliott in the battle of Lake Erie.” New-York Spectator, 8/3/1840. 49. Wendell, ed., Reports of Cases, 24:439. 50. New-York Spectator, 6/19/1839; Wendell, ed., Reports of Cases, 24:439–40. 51. Wendell, ed., Reports of Cases, 24:440–42. 52. This is the observation of Cooper’s nephew (and lawyer) Edward Floyd DeLancey, in his short sketch of one of Stone’s lawyers, Marshall S. Bidwell, A Memoir, Historical and Biographical (New York: n.p., 1890), 9. 53. “An Unfired Shot in the Literary Battle of Lake Erie: Cooper’s Unpublished Reply to Alexander Slidell Mackenzie,” ed. Steven Harthorn, Literature in the Early American Republic 5 (2013): 90. Beard, LJ 4:145, wrote somewhat ambiguously that Stone, “fearing a lay jury would be nonplussed by the technical details of nautical history, agreed to submit the legal and moral points at issue in Cooper’s suit to a panel of three distinguished lawyers.” Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 55, more directly asserts: “Cooper suggested that the matter should be submitted to arbitration.” Samuel A. Foot in his Autobiography: Collateral Reminiscences, Arguments in Important Causes, Speeches, Addresses Lectures, and Other Writings, 2 vols. (New York: n.p., 1873), 1:211, says he was chosen by mutual consent and that Stone chose Lord and Cooper chose Stevens. Cooper had asked his Whig friend Daniel D. Barnard of Albany in September 1841 to serve on an arbitration he expected would be held that November, which probably was the one with Stone. Barnard replied that he “could not do it with propriety.” Cooper further asked Barnard to recruit “Mr. Olcott,” probably the prominent banker Thomas W. Olcott, who declined, and Stevens, who was out of town (Barnard promised to “try to see him” when he returned to town). D. D. Barnard to JFC, 9/26/1841, typescript copy only, Cooper family paps., NYSHA. Remembering Daniel Lord as late as 1849–1850, Cooper gave him a bit part in The Ways of the Hour: he has been conferring with Thomas Dunscomb in the latter’s office and as he leaves is seen by Timms (Ways 130). 54. “Interesting Case,” Brother Jonathan 2 (6/25/1842): 240. 55. [Henry T. Tuckerman], untitled review of first six volumes of Cooper’s Novels, Illustrated by [F.O.C.] Darley, 32 vols. (New York: W. A. Townsend, 1859–1861), North American Review 89 (1859): 305–6. 56. George Lippard to JFC, 5/21/1844 (sent 8/3/1844), JFC Coll., box 6, YCAL. Lippard asked Cooper to endorse a new magazine he was planning to launch, to be called Lippard’s Magazine of American Historical Romance. 57. Foot, Autobiography, 1:237–41. Foot’s dissenting opinion was printed with news of the award ($250). He felt that “Mr. Cooper some months afterwards wrote and published a pamphlet to neutralize its effect, but I believe that the public mind settled down on the opinion, that the narrative of the battle was unfair in the particulars decided by me to be so” (ibid., 212). Two particular faults of the Duer reviews were listed as follows in news reports: “1. That the review contains reflections on the personal character of the

notes to pages 237–239

  

author, and imputations upon his motives; 2. That the reviewer incorrectly charges the author with having given to Commodore Elliott equal credit with Commodore Perry in the conduct of the battle.” Freeman’s Journal, 6/27/1842, quoting the New York Evening Post of 6/21/1842. Thanks to Hugh MacDougall for this last reference. 58. Fish had been asked by Richard F. Cooper to receive the bulky award document and send it on to Cooperstown. One of the two copies in the Cooper papers at Yale must have come from him. 59. A brief summary of the award from Bryant’s New York Evening Post was reprinted in the Freeman’s Journal in Cooperstown on 6/27/1842. Thanks to Hugh MacDougall for this information. In June 1846, writing to Elliot C. Cowdin of the Boston Mercantile Library Association, Cooper called the Stone arbitration outcome “a triumphant award in my favour” (LJ 5:151). 60. William A. Duer, who held a midshipman’s warrant in the navy a decade or so before Cooper joined it, had been slated for court martial in 1800. Having stabbed a shipmate on the Adams and struck and threatened to kill his own lieutenant, he had been seized on shipboard, bound hand and foot, and confined by the master-at-arms. The only reason he escaped the punishments he seemed destined to receive was that his mother, daughter of William Alexander, so-called Lord Stirling, pressured Navy Secretary William Stoddert to allow the reprobate to quit the service and return to his interrupted law studies. Christopher McKee, A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794–1815 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991), 463. 61. New-York Spectator, 6/29/1842. 62. Greeley is quoted by Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 56; I quote Stone from NewYork Spectator, 7/6/1842. The total amount due Cooper was $300. For Cooper’s denial, see LJ 4:396. 63. RFC and JFC, “Amended Declaration,” July term 1842, Cooperstown; “Affidavit of Service of Declaration,” signed by James H. Blasdell, 8/9/1842, noting Stone had twenty days to plead, both in JFC Coll., box 25, YCAL. In the Court for the Correction of Errors. William L. Stone, Plaintiff in Error, v. James Fenimore Cooper, Def ’t in Error. Case (Utica: J. S. Clarke, 1844), 9 (published certified transcript of original judgment in the 1842–1843 case). RFC to Spencer and Kernan, “Notice of Argument,” 12/14/1842, JFC Coll., box 25, YCAL. Spencer and Kernan, “Demurrer,” receipted by Hiram Denio on 8/25/1842 and mailed to RFC from Utica 8/26/1842; and Spencer and Kernan to RFC, “Notice” (of argument on demurrer), 12/13/1842; all in JFC Coll., box 25, YCAL. See also Spencer and Kernan, “Copy Dem[urre]r to Am[ende]d Narrative [i.e., declaration],” receipted by Hiram Denio, 11/11/1842, and mailed to RFC from Utica 11/12/1842, JFC paps., box 5, AAS. 64. Hiram Denio, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court and in the Court for the Correction of Errors of the State of New-York, vol. 2 (1847; New York: Banks and Brothers, 1863), 2:293–96.

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notes to pages 239–245

65. Ibid., 2:294–95. [Spencer and Kernan?], “Defts’ points,” undated (but 1842), JFC paps., box 6, AAS. For Cooper’s comments on the January proceedings, see LJ 4:337, 350. In the Court for the Correction of Errors, 8, 10–12. Cooper had asked for $5,000 but received $250, plus $59.66 for costs. RFC to Spencer and Kernan, “Notice,” 7/5/1843 (concerns an inquiry of damages to be held at Ezra Truitt’s tavern, Cooperstown, on 8/3/1843); same to same, revised “Notice,” 7/12/1843 (rescheduling inquiry to 8/16/1843); RFC, statement of costs ($66.39), endorsed by Eben Morehouse for supreme court, 9/16/1843; all in JFC Coll., box 25, YCAL. 66. In the Court for the Correction of Errors, 13–14. 67. In the Court for the Correction of Errors ends with the two items just referred to but precedes them with Stone’s writ of error, Gridley’s ruling that the writ proceed, a certified copy of the record in the case from the clerk of the supreme court (Hiram Denio, who signed it on 10/28/1843), and a copy of the supreme court’s official judgment. 68. RFC to Spencer and Kernan, “Notice,” 5/2/1844; Spencer and Kernan to RFC, answer (undated); both in JFC Coll., box 25, YCAL. 69. Cooper’s friend Ogden had advised him as early as 1840 to recall the long history of friendship between Stone and himself: “You must have a heart of Stone to go at our friend of that name, after he came out in praise of ‘Precaution,’ ” but Ogden urged this to no avail, and Stone’s later conduct merely deepened Cooper’s hurt. James De Peyster Ogden to JFC, 4/2/1840, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 70. RFC to JFC, 6/3/1845, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. JFC, draft legal statement (affidavit), 6/4/1845, and filed copy of same, 6/4/1845, signed by JFC and by George B. Wilson, Otsego County Clerk; note to RFC accompanying latter, with which it is filed; all in JFC paps., box 5, AAS. 71. “Court for the Correction of Errors,” New York Herald, 6/10/1845 and 6/14/1845; “Court for the Correction of Errors,” Albany Evening Journal, 6/13/1845. 72. Denio, Reports of Cases, 2:297–98. 73. Ibid., 300–301, 306. 74. Cooper’s attention was drawn to Stone’s comment by a letter from his nephew, quoted here. RFC to JFC, 7/23/1843, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. 75. Spencer and Kernan to RFC, receipt, 1/29/1844 (for payment of Stone’s costs in supreme court and Court for the Correction of Errors suits, a total of $148.87), JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 76. “Beverwyck” was a new mansion erected by William P. Van Rensselaer in the 1840s. 77. Cooper sued Greeley late in 1841 for the anonymous report (written in fact by Weed) of the default verdict against Weed. This case resulted in a victory for the novelist in December 1842. A second two-count civil suit filed at that very time targeted other articles. Much delayed, the action was finally dropped by both men after they received split decisions in a May 1845 hearing.

notes to pages 245–248

  

78. Richard Scheidenhelm, “James Fenimore Cooper and the Law of Libel in New York,” American Journalism 4 (1987): 19. 79. Ralph Birdsall, The Story of Cooperstown (Cooperstown: Augur’s Bookstore, 1948), 290. 80. James Grossman, “Cooper and the Responsibility of the Press,” New York State Historical Association Proceedings 52 (1954): 514–15. For the later citations of Cooper cases, see Mason H. Newell, The Law of Slander and Libel in Civil and Criminal Cases, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Callaghan and Co., 1914), 34, 37, 43, 47, 50, 57, 336, 1078 (Cooper vs. Greeley); 679, 693, 699, 717 (Cooper vs. Stone). By contrast, no Cooper cases are among those cited in the later guide by William G. Hale, The Law of the Press: Text, Statutes, and Cases (St. Paul: West, 1923). 81. On libel law and especially on the use of justification in defending against an accusation of libel, see James Kent, Commentaries on American Law, 4 vols. (New York: O. Halsted, 1826–1830), 2:12–22. For a useful discussion of pleas of the “general issue” versus “special pleas” (including justification) in the United States during the period, see William E. Nelson, Americanization of the Common Law: The Impact of Legal Change on Massachusetts Society, 1760–1830 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 22–23, and esp. 73. Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men, 139, also speaks briefly of such procedural matters as an important aspect of the Cooper suits. 82. New-York Daily Tribune, 12/15/1842. 83. Outland, “Effingham” Libels, 195. 84. New-York Daily Tribune, 11/29/1841. 85. I quote Richard Cooper’s view from Hiram Denio, Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court and in the Court for the Correction of Errors of the State of New-York, vol. 1 (Albany: Gould, Banks and Gould, 1846), 353; and RFC, “Points and Brief ” on JFC v. Greeley and McElrath, undated but ca. 1845, JFC Coll., box 24, YCAL. I quote Seward’s special plea from Denio, Reports of Cases, 1:352; for slightly different wording, see also George E. Baker, ed., The Works of William H. Seward, 3 vols. (New York: Redfield, 1853), 1:401–2. 86. Scheidenhelm, “Cooper and the Law of Libel,” 25–27. He also points out (p. 27) that during the 1846 New York Constitution Convention, delegate Ambrose L. Jordan (who had represented James W. Webb in the second trial on Cooper’s criminal libel charges in 1843) introduced into the convention’s discussions a proposal “to prohibit judges ‘from arguing, advising, instructing, or expressing any opinion upon any matter of fact on the trial of any issue in any civil case.’ ” Ira Harris, an Anti-Rent activist, pushed similar changes during the convention, as did Jordan’s brother-in-law, Alvah Worden. None of these changes was approved, but the Field Code did adjust practice along similar lines. 87. Clemens’s surviving 1853 letters from New York are available on the website of the Mark Twain Project of the University of California, Berkeley. While in Manhattan,

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notes to pages 252–253

he worked at the large and very active office of John A. Gray, next door to the establishment of the Harper Brothers. Gray, in Clemens’s count, employed about two hundred “compositors, pressmen, stereotypers” at the time and produced not only the Knickerbocker, but also Littell’s Living Age and several other periodicals. S. L. Clemens to Jane Lampton Clemens, 8/31/1853, available at Mark Twain Project online, http:// www.marktwainproject.org. C HAPTER 9.  A LEGACY RECLAIMED 1. Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley to JFC, 2/26/1831, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL, enclosed a joint contract for The Bravo and what would become The Pathfinder. For Bentley’s response to the Two Admirals proposal, see Richard Bentley to JFC, 4/6/1839, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. The 1840 novel’s origins were diffuse. Bentley brought up the “inland Seas” idea at the time when Cooper’s naval history was in production on both sides of the Atlantic and was clearly thinking of a story set during the War of 1812. But, even though he did not specifically mention the 1831 proposal, certainly Cooper and probably Bentley himself connected the new idea to the older one. In turn, the Great Lakes story may have first taken shape in Cooper’s mind as early as December 1828, when he chanced upon the grave of his old naval friend from Oswego, Thomas Gamble, in the Protestant cemetery in Leghorn and found his thoughts, as the poem he wrote on the spot put it, borne “hence to wild Ontario’s shore” (L&T 221). Cooper also drew on Anne Macvicar Grant’s Memoirs of an American Lady (1808) for some details in The Pathfinder and perhaps its overall frame as well. See James H. Pickering, “James Fenimore Cooper and the History of New York” (PhD diss. Northwestern University, 1964), 255–56. I return to Grant’s influence on Cooper in my later discussion of the Littlepage series. 2. In the earlier Leather-Stocking novels, the love interest had been present but was confined largely to upper-class characters. 3. Cooper’s inability to go to the falls resulted from his engagement with other matters across the autumn. When he went to Philadelphia for a month or so in late September, his tasks there, partly focused on The Pathfinder, ate up a good deal of time. Before going home, he informed his wife that he foresaw no time for a trip away from Cooperstown (that is, to Niagara) once he returned there (see LJ 3:436). 4. Partly this aspect of The Pathfinder points ahead to the deep use of his personal past that Cooper would undertake in the five first-person narratives he was to publish in 1844–1845, a topic I return to in chapter 12. 5. “Death of Commodore Woolsey,” New-York Spectator, 5/24/1838. Cooper had not included a biographical note on Woolsey in the naval history but would write a brief life of him later in the 1840s, for which see LDANO 2:113–45. Woolsey’s loss doubled the memorial purpose for The Pathfinder, which had focused first, as indicated in my first note, on Thomas Gamble.

notes to page 254

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6. Transatlantic conditions were altering in several important regards. The London firm, owing to a change in English law, now needed to have a book’s manuscript in its possession, even though in Cooper’s case Bentley’s compositors worked from the more legible Philadelphia proofs. Rather than have this new manuscript copied, as that of Homeward Bound had been, Cooper waited until Lea and Blanchard were done with a sizable portion: he had kept Bentley’s copy back, Cooper informed him on October 18, “in order to send it to you printed, so many mistakes disfiguring the works printed from manuscript” (LJ 3:433; see Richard Bentley to JFC, 7/24/1839 and 11/8/1839, both in JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL). 7. Cooper’s concurrent work on the revised edition of the naval history (another reason for the importance I ascribe to the Woolsey connection) meant that, depending on how things stood with his publishers, he could balance the two projects against each other. The interconnections are evident in Cooper’s correspondence at this time. He thus informed his wife, when writing her that he was reading over the manuscript of the novel, that the “new edition of the history” was “nearly ready” (LJ 3:450), adding a few days later that only the appendix needed to be finished. The latter addition was short, but, as he hurriedly noted for his wife on 12/22 or 12/23/1839, not all the documents it would contain regarding the attack of the Leopard on the Chesapeake in 1807 were in his hands in Philadelphia. He requested that “one of the girls” find the rest of them, copy them out, and forward them “at once” (LJ 3:452). 8. One consequence of the many delays was that Bentley began advertising the book as “just ready” as early as 9/21/1839 (see BAL 2:239). Lea and Blanchard indicated in a letter to Cooper that they had decided to delay release in order to ensure that the rivers had opened and commerce had revived. Lea and Blanchard to JFC, 2/11/1840, JFC Coll., box 6, YCAL. Bentley PL confirms the London date as 2/25/1840, although Richard Bentley to JFC, 6/11/1840, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL, gives it as 2/24/1840. The business details for The Pathfinder were complicated. In June 1839, Cooper proposed that he receive £500 and hopefully more for Pathfinder, and on that assumption he drew against the publisher for half that amount at ninety days, but asked for Bentley’s immediate response on both matters (see LJ 3:393). Bentley accepted the bill but would pay no more for the novel than the £250 then in Cooper’s hands. Explaining late in July that he so far had sold only 290 of his 1,500 copies of the naval history, he wanted to lay off some of his resulting £600 loss on Cooper’s next works (Richard Bentley to JFC, 7/24/1839). Cooper, evidently offended, did not respond to this rebuff until October, when he wrote that he thought £250 “very little for a novel”; even in view of the naval history’s losses, he felt he ought to receive at least £400 for Pathfinder. He did not wish to break off his relationship with Bentley, however, and so proposed a compromise that linked that book to a second one (on the subject of Columbus, a topic Bentley himself had proposed), which he promised to finish for the following June (see LJ 3:433–34). Cooper wanted £1,000 for the pair; Bentley, although eager to compromise, insisted that

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notes to page 255

Cooper concede £200 of that total on account of the naval history losses (see Richard Bentley to JFC, 11/8/1839; a final unilateral tweak in November shifted amounts between Pathfinder and Mercedes and in Cooper’s accounting raised the total for the two books to £850—see LJ 3:444). With Lea and Blanchard the negotiations were shorter and easier. The naval history was doing so well in the U.S. market that the July 1839 contract for Pathfinder promised Cooper $3,600 for five thousand copies of that book plus the right to print and sell two thousand copies of the revised naval history. Cooper agreed to allow the firm two years' exclusive rights to the novel, but the copyright, Cooper insisted, was to be “secured by me and for my use,” much as had been the case with the naval history (JFC to Lea and Blanchard, receipt, Philadelphia, 7/24/1839, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City). 9. In writing Bentley in November, Cooper referred to Columbus as “your own subject” (LJ 3:443), and to James De Peyster Ogden in March 1840 he reported, “I am writing a tale on Columbus’ voyage, at Bentley’s suggestion” (LJ 4:27). 10. Cooper had acquired Irving’s biography in time to have made use of details from it in Homeward Bound—see HB 2:240 (a detail also used in MC 2:80). Compare with Washington Irving, History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835), 1:99–100. For Cooper’s set of Irving, see Hugh MacDougall, “Draft List of Books Belonging to James Fenimore Cooper,” March 1998, Box C (copy in my collection); that copy of the Irving book is now in the collection of NYSHA (Special Collections/JFC Library 970.01092 C723i 1835). The Prescott set once in Cooper’s library was received as a gift from William Blanchard in the early fall of 1839 (see LJ 3:427). Most details about it are not recorded, except that it was published in 1838. It probably was the Boston edition issued that year by Little and Brown. PFC, “Listing of ‘Old Books,’ ” 27, HCA. 11. What he meant is explained in part by his earlier comments (LJ 3:433) to Bentley that “Such a book . . . must be better than common; written with care, and a little in the ‘Ercles vein. It must also be O.P.” (that is, “over proof,” as with an especially powerful liquor; “ ‘Ercles vein” is Bottom’s term in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the bombastic style appropriate to a character such as Hercules). It is also true that, as noted above, The Pathfinder was being published later than Cooper originally hoped owing to the slow market, meaning that delaying the new book would make good business sense. 12. JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 5/18/1840, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper had written his Austrian friend, Baron Louis de Lederer, in June inquiring about the term “Mercedes.” Lederer, then consul general of the Austrian States in New York, replied at length on the array of names Mary bore in Spanish. See L. Lederer to JFC, 6/18/1840, JFC Coll., box 6, YCAL. In October 1839, Bentley offered Cooper £500 for the book in a contract that stated: “The sd. James Fenimore Cooper agrees with the sd. Richd. Bentley to write & compose a certn novel or work of fiction founded in the history of Columbus under the

notes to pages 255–257

  

title of Columbus or by such other title as shall hereafter be agreed upon betn the sd parties containing matter for three Vols. each containing [blank] Octavo pages.” The contract gave no date for submission of the manuscript or parts of it. I quote the surviving draft, Richard Bentley, draft memorandum of agreement for “Columbus,” British Museum Add. 46613, pp. 248–49. The description on the back of the draft indicates that two copies were sent to Cooper for signature on 11/13/1839. 13. To be sure, 1840 was not as busy with the lawsuits as 1841. Yet Cooper had to attend to several different litigations. The suit against Park Benjamin for his April article on Home as Found was filed in May, and the Utica demurrer was heard in June. The judgment against Andrew Barber was perfected in July. In the same month, action began against William L. Stone for Duer’s reviews of the naval history, and across the next several months proceedings in that case were held in Utica and then in Albany. Finally, a Cooperstown hearing on James W. Webb’s first indictment took place in August. 14. The day Cooper went aboard for the passage south was, probably not coincidentally, the 348th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the Bahamas. The change in Shubrick’s schedule allowed Cooper time to pay a visit to Susan’s sisters Martha and Cally on Sunday, during which, as Martha soon reported, they “had a very nice time asking & answering questions” (and Cooper, aware of their financial straits, offered to give them money when and if they needed it). Martha DeLancey to Charlotte Fenimore Cooper, 10/15–16/[1840], JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL. 15. BAL 2:292 confirms the London date but is vague on that for the Philadelphia edition. The Philadelphia National Gazette noted early in November that the book “is now rapidly passing through the press of Lea & Blanchard, and may be expected about the 10th instant” (11/3/1840); two weeks later it printed an extract from the book (11/17/1840); and nine days later still announced its publication (11/26/1840). Bentley PL confirms the London date. See also Anson Little, copyright receipts, 11/18/1840 and 1/2/1841, both on Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 16. Because Kettell’s name did not appear on the Boston volume’s title page (only in the copyright notice), Cooper referred to him simply as “the translator of the journal of Columbus” (MC 1:ix). But he surely understood the layered history of that text, rehearsed in Kettell’s preface. Cooper, admitting that he had written Mercedes of Castile “with the journal of the Admiral before us,” thus added, “or rather, with all of that journal, that has been given to the world” (MC 1:x). 17. Kettell is listed in A Catalogue of the Books Belonging to the Library Company of Philadelphia, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: C. Sherman and Co., 1835), 714. Cooper employed the Journal in a concentrated series of chapters covering the voyages to America and back (that is, from chapter 13 in volume 1 to the end of chapter 6 in volume 2 of the American edition, and then again—following a brief break that covers the time Columbus spent in the Indies in 1492–1493—for chapters 8 and 9 in the latter). The first, longer sequence began at the departure of Columbus from Palos and ended just before

— 

notes to pages 257–261

his arrival at San Salvador. Because only the first volume in the Bentley format, which included the initial twelve chapters, was done by March, I surmise that Cooper delayed for a time at that point, as already indicated, so he could make detailed use of the Personal Narrative at the Library Company while visiting Philadelphia in May (when, probably not coincidentally, he at last signed his contract for the project with Lea and Blanchard). For the question of the dating patterns in Irving and Cooper, compare Irving, Life and Voyages, 1:114–73, passim, with MC 2:88–136. Irving, in Europe at the time he wrote his account of Columbus, did not consult Kettell but rather cited the Las Casas version of the Columbus journal from Navarrete. 18. Thomas L. Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 126. 19. Steven P. Harthorn, “James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838–1851” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2005), 216. 20. John P. Larner, “North American Hero? Christopher Columbus, 1702–2002,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 157 (1993): 52; William Robertson, The History of America, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: J. Bioren and T. L. Plowman, 1812), 1:76–84. Bushman rightly notes that Robertson’s history, which covered only Spanish America, was the key English source for knowledge of the Spanish voyagers among North American readers until Irving published his accounts of Columbus and his followers. Claudia L. Bushman, America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992), 33. 21. See Frederic S. Stimson, “William Robertson’s Influence on Early American Literature,” The Americas 14 (1957): 39. 22. “Coleccion de los Viages y Déscubrimientos,” North American Review 24 (April 1827): 265–95. It is true that Las Casas made use of his own version in his History of the Indies, unpublished until 1875 but long relied on by other Spanish writers, so that parts of the lost journal had been known prior to Navarrete’s discovery of the original Las Casas transcription in 1790. 23. Masonic Mirror and Mechanics’ Intelligencer 3 (1827): 333. 24. Irving, Life and Voyages, 1:66, 70–71; William H. Prescott, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, 3 vols. (Boston: American Stationers’ Co., John B. Russell, 1838), 1:85n26; 2:124–25. She was also the niece of Francisco de Bobadilla, who caused Columbus to be arrested and returned to Spain after his third voyage, but Cooper does not link Luis with Francisco de Bobadilla. 25. Irving, Life and Voyages, 1:100; Samuel Kettell, Personal Narrative of the First Voyage of Columbus to America (Boston: T. B. Wait and Son, 1827), 33. 26. Cooper developed this part of his story through hints from Irving. As Robert D. Madison points out, the story of Luis’s apparent dalliance with Ozema is based on the quite real affair carried on by Miguel Diaz with an Indian queen ruling over a village on

notes to pages 263–265

  

the banks of the Ozema River. It was the actual queen who began their relationship, much as it is Ozema who in Mercedes thinks that Luis is in love with her. On the other hand, Ozema’s less Amazonian character (she is explicitly compared to Eve because of her “modest, artless, timid, and perfect” nature—MC 2:100) perhaps was based, as Madison argues, on the princess Anacaona as described by Irving. She seems, again, like an anticipation of Fayaway, much as Columbus in Mercedes has some Ahablike traits—a brooding intellect, an iron will, an abstract commitment to the idea of the voyage. Irving, Life and Voyages, 1:334. See Robert D. Madison, “Cooper’s Columbus,” online at James Fenimore Cooper Society Website, http://external.oneonta.edu/ cooper/articles/suny/1984suny-madison2.html. On Columbus as Ahab, see MC 2:3, as well as the conversation Columbus has on the following pages with an ordinary seaman who allows the helm to drift while he dreams of home. As Paul Metcalf indicates in Genoa: A Telling of Wonders (1965), Melville was deeply interested in all things Columbian. 27. This reference to Cooper’s own troubles was later excised. In Beard’s words, however, the “rhetorical violence” of the newspaper editors “was echoed silently in the physical violence” throughout The Deerslayer (DS CE xxviii). 28. Anne Macvicar Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady (New York: George Dearborn, 1836), 195–96. The story was still circulating in Cooper’s time, as a version picked up from Mohawk Valley minister James Murphy of Herkimer by pacifist William Ladd early in 1841 indicates. See “The Soldier’s Victim: Or the Influence of War on Domestic Morals and Happiness,” Advocate of Peace 3 (1841): 275–78. (Ladd refers to Grant at the end but gives details, such as the woman’s family name and that of her seducer, that Grant did not divulge.) 29. Hugh MacDougall dates Cooper’s acquisition of The Châlet to 1835 in Cooper’s Otsego County (Cooperstown: NYSHA, 1989), 111. However, a document in the Cooper papers gives a range of dates for properties purchased from several individuals between 1837 and 1846. “Memorandum of Deeds of Chalet,” undated but ca. 1846, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. The house had been erected by Ira Luce, a fiftyish farmer whom Cooper’s nephew G. Pomeroy Keese recalled as visiting the novelist at Otsego Hall and transferring the main property in exchange for $1,100. G. Pomeroy Keese, [History of Châlet Farm] (ca. 1880), Keese paps., NYSHA. 30. “Deer-slayer” was a compound occasionally used prior to the publication of Cooper’s novel; see for instance “Field Sports in the Feudal Times, Part 2,” New Sporting Magazine 7 (1834): 180. It may well be significant that one of the sobriquets of the Greek hunter goddess Artemis was “Elaphebolos,” or “deer-slayer”; for a source contemporary with Cooper, see Thomas Keightley, The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy, 2nd ed. (London: Whittaker and Co., 1838), 136. “Pathfinder” was also used occasionally prior to Cooper’s choice of it, but its future popularity as an evocative compound clearly derived from his example.

— 

notes to pages 266–268

31. To be sure, he might have written a new novel about Natty’s experiences under “Mad Anthony” Wayne at Fallen Timbers in 1794, or at the Great Falls of the Missouri (in Montana) thereafter, but he did not. But there is nothing in The Prairie to prepare the way for Natty’s service on Lake Ontario (The Pathfinder) or the grand opening of his forest career on Lake Otsego (The Deerslayer). I resume this discussion in chapters 14 and 15. 32. Richard Bentley to JFC, 1/7/1841, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 33. [Anonymous] to JFC, April [1841], JFC paps., box 2, AAS. 34. American Advocate (Hallowell, Maine), 1/22/1834, reprinted from the Western Methodist Review; Nashville Banner and Nashville Whig, 6/12/1834, reprinted from the New York Atlas and Constellation. No one has ever been able to show when and how Cooper encountered the stories about Daniel Boone, but it is clear that Cooper knew of Boone whether or not he had read any of the major Boone texts. He mentioned “Col. Boon” in an 1832 note to The Prairie as a frontier isolate who had moved beyond the Mississippi to escape the incoming rush of settlers, as Natty is of course said to have done on his departure from Templeton in The Pioneers (see PR CE 10). And the theme of the captive sisters in The Last of the Mohicans, repeated with significant variation in The Deerslayer, could arguably owe something to the saga of Boone’s daughter Jemima and her friends, the Callaway sisters, in Kentucky in 1776 (see JFC:EY 530–31n26). Although it is worth noting that the term “leather stockings” was not strictly an American coinage—as David Hackett Fischer indicates in Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 734—the references I cite from the American press in the 1820s and 1830s were all to Cooper and his character, and the Oxford English Dictionary cites The Pioneers as the first published instance of the term. For examples of the term’s use in the period, see “Leather Stocking,” Berks and Schuylkill Journal, 2/17/1827, reprinted from the Pottsville Miner’s Journal (on Joe Webb, “the Natty Bump[p]o, of the Schuylkill Mountains”); “Leather Stocking,” Rhode-Island American, 2/27/1829 (on Simeon Kendall, here called “the prototype of Cooper’s inimitable Leather Stocking”—see also Frederick W. Thomas, John Randolph and Other Sketches of Character [Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853], 75–76); “Death,” Daily National Intelligencer, 11/26/1835 (on Sir Jennings Beckwith, the eccentric Virginian known as “the ‘Leather Stocking’ of the Northern Neck”). 35. See “Rifle Shooting,” Spirit of the Times 5:3 (1/3/1835); “Bear Hunting,” Spirit of the Times 6:86 (4/30/1836). On the Tennessee practice, see Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001), 97. 36. “The Rifle,” Spirit of the Times 7:152 (6/24/1837); see also “Rifle Shooting at Hoboken, N.J.,” signed “Leather Stocking, jun.,” Spirit of the Times 12:342 (9/17/1842). “Rifle Shooting,” American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine 4 (1833): 410. “On Dits in Sporting Circles,” Spirit of the Times 12:270 (8/6/1842).

notes to pages 268–270

  

37. Baltimore Gazette and Daily Advertiser, 5/21/1835. The largely middle-class Improved Order of Red Men originated in Maryland in 1834 but claims an older general origin in the Sons of Liberty and (more correctly) in a predecessor working-class organization, the Society of Red Men, founded at Fort Miflin, Pennsylvania, during the War of 1812 and quite popular during the 1820s. See Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 58–59; and Charles H. Lichtman, ed., Official History of the Improved Order of Red Men (Boston: Fraternity Publishing, 1893), 18–20. 38. Charles Fenno Hoffman, Greyslaer: A Romance of the Mohawk, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1840), 1:32. 39. Ibid., 1:55, 57; 2:249, 259, 54. One source for Balt lay in observations Hoffman had made during his western tour. In particular, referring to James Hall’s 1836 article “Indian Hating” in Western Monthly Magazine, Hoffman underscored what he saw as the more vicious attitudes of western pioneers even as he seemed eager to import such attitudes back East. He thus inserted a footnote about “Indian hating nearer home”—an anecdote about an old hunter from Montgomery County, New York (where much of the action of Greyslaer is set) who in 1833 murdered an Indian by picking him off with a rifle as he sat fishing in a canoe with two white men. The hatred of the murderer, who had been arrested many other times for similar outrages but had always been acquitted, was explained as resulting from the annihilation of his whole family by an Indian attack when he was just a boy; see A Winter in the West, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), 2:30–34. Hoffman showed some sympathy for the injustices the Indians suffered at the hands of the worst of the pioneers, which he admitted had often motivated the natives’ violence. But in Greyslaer it is Hoffman as narrator who describes an Indian boatman as one of those “lounging, eel-catching degenerates of the aborigines that may still be found near some of the old families on Long Island.” Greyslaer, 1:224. 40. PFC, “Listing of ‘Old Books,’ ” 19. The entry does not give a publication date for the Cooper copy. Since the book was revised and reissued in January 1841 by Lea and Blanchard (see BAL 4:192), it may well be that this was the edition in Cooper’s library. 41. In my quotations from the novel in this paragraph, I use the 1841 edition since the Cooper Edition text, based on Cooper’s autograph manuscript, gives one crucial line here—“God made all three alike, Hurry”—as “God made all three, alike, Hurry—” (DS CE 50), which I think runs counter to the sense of March’s response as also quoted in my text. The three races are alike in their essential natures, not just in their having all been made by the same creator. The distinction is, I think, important. In his use of the concept of “human rights” here, it is likely that Cooper’s views were influenced by the liberal ideas of fellow Democrat George Bancroft, the early volumes of whose History of the United States (1834–1875) Cooper had praised in an 1839 letter to Bancroft as “a history written in the interests of human rights” (LJ 3:384). It is also possible that Cooper’s ideas were informed by Albert Gallatin’s monogeneticist linguistic theories, which were rooted in Jeffersonian principles of equality. See Robert Gunn, “John

— 

notes to pages 270–272

Russell Bartlett’s Literary Borderlands: Ethnology, War, and the United States Boundary Survey,” Western American Literature 46 (2012): 351–54. Cooper had known Gallatin since the 1820s (see LJ 1:188–89) and welcomed his support during the Finance Controversy in France (see LJ 2:401–5). But Gallatin was also a close associate of New York book dealer and intellectual John Russell Bartlett, at whose store Cooper was (according to Bartlett) a very frequent visitor during the 1840s. Autobiography of John Russell Bartlett, ed. Jerry E. Mueller (Providence: John Carter Brown Library, 2006), 24 (“FitzGreen Halleck and James Fenimore Cooper were daily visitors, and would sometimes remain for hours, generally in conversation”). Given Bartlett’s enthusiasm for Gallatin’s theories, Cooper could have been exposed to them in Bartlett’s store even if he never crossed paths with Gallatin there. Perhaps even more to the point in 1841 was the recently deceased journalist William Leggett’s radical extension of the Jacksonian creed to blacks. See Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 19–27. 42. Beyond this grim understatement of the book’s moral crux—it is an unprofitable calling, not a profoundly wrong one—March in fact is given a reasonably complex psychological treatment by Cooper. Cooper’s discussion of “human rights” explains the hunter as self-divided: his ideology results from his need to assuage the guilty conscience that, despite his boastful efforts at ignoring it, will not die. Nothing angers March more than attempts to counter his racist views, especially effective attempts—the reason being, of course, that his “sundry lawless acts against the Indians” were, at some level in his own mind, known and acknowledged as such. We see an instance of this psychological truth when the young Mohegan woman Hist, Chingachgook’s lover, upbraids March for his thoughtless murder of her Huron counterpart along the shore. Her verbal battering leaves March speechless, causing him to walk away, but Cooper explains that “she had a powerful ally in his conscience” (DS CE 322). 43. Bird indicates that the historical model for Slaughter had lived in Bedford County, Pennsylvania. Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods; or the Jibbenainosay. A Tale of Kentucky, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1837), 2:70–71. But he may also have been influenced by Hoffman’s brief account of the Montgomery County “Indian Hater” in A Winter in the West (see note 39). 44. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1964), 59, 62. 45. Bird, Nick of the Woods, 1:vi. The novel was published in April (see BAL 1:229– 30), when Cooper was in Philadelphia working on the proofs of his French Gleanings. It could have been among the books Carey gave Cooper during this visit (see LJ 3:260), although there is no record of his having owned it. 46. Ives Goddard, “ ‘I Am a Redskin’: The Adoption of a Native American Expression (1769–1826),” European Review of Native American Studies 19 (2005): 1–20.

notes to pages 273–276

  

See also JFC:EY 475–80. For Hoffman’s derogatory use of the term, see, for instance, Greyslaer, 2:259. 47. Robert Montgomery Bird, Nick of the Woods, or the Jibbenainosay. A Tale of Kentucky. New ed. (New York: Redfield, 1853), iv. 48. Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837 ed.), vi. Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought. Vol. 2: The Romantic Revolution (1927; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace, n.d.), 184. 49. Bird, Nick of the Woods (1837 ed.), 1:26, 94, 226. 50. Ibid., 2:25; 1:93, 51; 2:121, 153, 176. 51. Ibid., 2:102; 1:223. 52. Ibid., 2:106. 53. For a contrary view of Bird as an antiexpansionist Whig, see Rowland Hughes, “Whiggery in the Wilderness: The Politics of Indian-Hating in Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods,” Literature in the Early American Republic 3 (2011): 196–226. 54. Jules Zanger argued that “Leatherstocking, though unlettered, respects the educated; though primitive in dress and manner, defers to the conventionally ladylike or gentlemanly in his eastern companions; though plebian, he is content to keep his place.” “The Frontiersman in Popular Fiction, 1820–60,” in John Francis McDermott, ed., The Frontier Re-Examined (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1967), 149. But this argument ignores the friction between Natty and Judge Temple and even Elizabeth and Effingham—Natty does not obey the latter by staying in Templeton (i.e., being “content to keep his place” geographically as well as socially), but instead goes his own way. Furthermore, Zanger did not appreciate the degree to which Cooper created in Natty a lower-class character who thought for himself. 55. Richard Bentley to JFC, 5/29/1841, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 56. BAL 2:292 questions the priority of the American edition, citing several magazine notices. However, the August date for the Lea and Blanchard edition is confirmed in various contemporary newspapers: it was for sale in Massachusetts on the date given by S&B (Salem Gazette, 8/27/1841), while the New-York Spectator (8/28/1841) noted, “We have received a copy of Mr. Cooper’s new work, just published by Lea & Blanchard, and intend to read it forthwith.” An excerpt had been published in the Philadelphia National Gazette as early as 8/17/1841. Cooper wrote his wife on 8/29/1841, “Deerslayer is just out—no opinions yet of its standing. Of course nothing is yet known of its sale” (LJ 4:167). Bentley PL confirms the 9/7/1841 London date. 57. Richard Bentley to JFC, 1/7/1841, 3/5/1841, and 3/6/1841, all in JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 58. Richard Bentley to JFC, 4/30/1841, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 59. Richard Bentley to JFC, 6/17/1841, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. The letter Bentley wrote on 5/29/1841, before he received Cooper’s latest, anticipated his refusal to increase the offer for Deerslayer.

— 

notes to pages 277–281

60. Richard Bentley to JFC, 8/14/1841, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 61. Richard Bentley to JFC, 10/30/1841 and 2/18/1844, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 62. Lea and Blanchard to JFC, 2/9/1841, JFC Coll., box 6, YCAL. Bentley reported losing £150 on Mercedes; see Richard Bentley to JFC, 2/18/1844. 63. JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 4/2/1841, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper also was to retain the copyright of Deerslayer. He already had given the firm permission to reprint and publish some of the ten additional titles, a topic to which I return in chapters 12 and 15. C HAPTER 10.  PIECEWORK AND PATC HWORK 1. This was obviously true with the sketch of Melancthon T. Woolsey, but personal memory also played a part in those of Richard Dale and John T. Shubrick. 2. On the links between the naval history and the novel, see Richard H. Ballinger, “Origins of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Two Admirals,” American Literature 20 (1948): 21–23. 3. Richard Bentley to JFC, 4/6/1839, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Even so, The Pathfinder was not properly a naval story. 4. Cooper’s first mention of the notion had come when he was at work on the naval history, copy for the first volume of which accompanied the February 1839 letter to Bentley (see LJ 3:368). By that point, Cooper had already written (but not yet printed) the history’s original “Introduction.” The latter, crucial for understanding his motives in The Two Admirals, was no brief preface, but a separate text in its own right, concerned (as Cooper informed Bentley) with “Naval Policy—American Naval Policy” (LJ 3:369). Ringe (TA CE xv–xvii) helpfully summarizes Cooper’s early ideas for the book. 5. It is literally true that Cooper invented the naval battle in The Two Admirals, but there were some minor events he no doubt knew about from the target decade. The first of these was the 1744 encounter in the English Channel during which a French invasion force was turned back, in bad weather, by Sir John Norris. Ringe (TA CE xix) draws attention to this encounter, giving possible sources for Cooper’s knowledge, among them Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather (1827). That collection also contains a brief account of another pertinent event, the delivery of the Young Pretender to the British Isles by a pair of French vessels, one of which had a tough fight with HMS Lion. See Sir Walter Scott, Tales of a Grandfather (History of Scotland), in Miscellaneous Prose Works, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Robert Cadell, 1841), 3:382–84. 6. Several critics comment on the use of Nelson and Cooper’s sources of infor­ mation about his career, especially Ballinger, “Origins,” 20–30, and Ringe, TA CE xviii–xix. 7. On the officer promotion ladder in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, see Brian Lavery, Nelson’s Navy: The Ships, Men, and Organization, 1793–1815 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1989), 88–92. On that in the early U.S. Navy, see

notes to pages 281–284

  

Christopher McKee, A Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession: The Creation of the U.S. Naval Officer Corps, 1794–1815 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1991), 29–30, 33–34. When Cooper asserted that there were “only two commissions below that of a captain” (HN 1:xxvi), he was correctly not counting midshipmen, who in the earlier period were warrant officers. He counted both midshipmen (and passed midshipman, introduced in 1819) as on the ladder, though, when he wrote that there were “four promotions” in the U.S. Navy in 1839 (HN 1:xxiii). 8. When Cooper noted that Thomas Wychecombe had “risen to be a judge, by the style and appellation of Baron Wychecombe” (TA 1:17), he was thinking of that title in its legal sense. Wychecombe had become “one of the Barons [i.e., judges] of His Majesty’s Exchequer” (TA 1:213). See F. S. Thomas, The Ancient Exchequer of England (London: John Petheram, 1848), 1–4, 107–8. 9. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 2 vols. (New York: W. E. Dean, 1838), 1:378. Part of the joke in the novel is that Sir Wycherly Wychecombe, who does not understand Latin, repeatedly confuses the genitive nullius (“of nobody”) with the nominative nullus (“nobody”). 10. Tom is not even a Wychecombe at all, but “the son of a barrister in the Temple” who slyly fathered him via the venturesome Martha Dodd, a point unknown to the baron, the baronet, and Tom himself (TA 1:27). 11. Cooper emphasized the links tying the colonies to England: “the colonists may claim an interest in all the renown of England which was earned previously to 1775; and we leave their descendents to dispute with the present possessors of the mother country, what portion of fame earned by Oakes and Bluewater shall properly fall to the share of each” (TA 1:xi–xii). There was a specific naval tie he also emphasized by mentioning at several points, and by name, Americans who actually served in the Royal Navy—of whom young Wycherly Wychecombe is, of course, a fictional embodiment. See TA 1:13–14, 233. 12. The book raises another pertinent example of legal contortionism in the “rule of the half-blood” (see TA 1:25, 181), but this need not concern us at length here. In fact, that rule had been outmoded some years before the book was written (see “An Act for the Amendment of the Law of Inheritance,” 1833 Chapter 106 3 and 4 Will 4). Cooper was familiar, however, with several Anglo-American families that could, and probably did, tell him long tales about property disputes similar to the one he imagined in The Two Admirals. Among these were the Crugers, the Hyde Clarkes, and, indeed, the DeLanceys. See SFC’s comment in TA HE xv. 13. Richard Bentley to JFC, 8/14/1841, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 14. Richard Bentley to JFC, 10/30/1841, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Cooper’s draft was for £200 (LJ 4:178). He signed the Lea and Blanchard contract in Philadelphia on Saturday, September 18. They would pay printing (and, as it happened, stereotyping) costs and would buy exclusive rights to the book for three years from the publication

— 

notes to pages 284–286

date. Cooper promised to get them the finished manuscript in time for publication by 2/15/1842 and to “see it through the press,” meaning that he would read and correct proofs in a timely fashion. JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 9/18/1841, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper received from the firm a $1,000 sight draft immediately negotiable in New York (through which he was very soon to pass) and a note, payable in fifteen months from the contract’s date, for a like sum. 15. This progress came at a time when Cooper was very busy with the libel suits. In October, when he alerted Bentley from New York that the book would be “ready for publication in March” (LJ 4:178), he was preparing two letters for Bryant’s Evening Post about Park Benjamin (see LJ 4:178–81, 182–83). In November, having returned to Otsego in the interim, he went to Fonda for the tumultuous Webb and Weed trials; in December, other matters connected with those actions and the press accounts they generated (including Weed’s anonymous Fonda report) occupied him. His fast pace on the novel continued past New Year’s, when he updated Shubrick that the book was “nearly launched”—adding, in a jovial reference to Navy Secretary Abel P. Upshur’s call for the creation of many more than two fleet officers for the U.S. Navy, “Had I known the views of Mr. Upshur, the title should have been the Thirty one Admirals” (LJ 4:225). For recognition of the policy implications of the novel, see “The Two Admirals,” Southern Literary Messenger 8 (1842): 362: “Mr. Cooper is a sailor, and it is to be hoped Congress will give him an opportunity of showing how well an American fleet can be manœuvred, by creating Admirals for the Navy and sending them to sea.” 16. The London date is confirmed by Bentley PL, the Philadelphia by a 4/21/1842 Lea and Blanchard advertisement stating that the book would be published “tomorrow,” North American, 4/22/1842. Cooper deposited the title in Utica on 2/22/1842 and a copy of the finished book on 6/15/1842. Anson Little to JFC, receipts, 2/22/1842 and 6/15/1842, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. A New York weekly mentioned the book on 4/9/1842 as “To be published by Lea & Blanchard” and excerpted from it the whole of chapter 28. Brother Jonathan, 4/9/1842, 406, 418–20. 17. There actually were twenty notes, but one man (Edward Preble) was covered by two (see HN 2:10–11 and 2:140–41). 18. On Somers’s unreliable sister (Mrs. Sarah Keen), see LJ 4:306–7; George C. Read to JFC, undated (but ca. July 1842), JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL; and Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 8/6/1842, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. 19. See H. & E. Phinney to JFC, bill for $240.40, 7/20/1843, for printing of BLE, JFC Coll., box 27, YCAL. 20. The book proper would come later, when Cooper revised nine of the Graham’s items for his two-volume Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (1846). 21. Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (1842): title page.

notes to pages 286–289

  

22. Carey and Lea and its successors were located within a couple of blocks at the corner of Chestnut and Fourth streets, while John Fagan’s stereotype foundry stood at 19 St. James Street, a block or so south of Chestnut in the same area. The office for Graham’s Magazine was at Chestnut and Third. See J. Albert Robbins, “George R. Graham, Philadelphia Publisher,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 75 (1951): 282–83. I take Fagan’s address from his obituary in the Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, 12/15/1872, copy courtesy of Fagan’s great-great-great-grandson, Edmund Alberts Bateman III. 23. Cooper’s comment about the sale of the hotel’s furniture was no exaggeration, as indicated by auction notices inserted in the North American during his stay, especially on 9/14, 9/19, and 9/21/1841. 24. Head wrote Cooper in February 1843 to give him details of his plans for reopening the hotel and to ask for his investment. By April, Head asked for the note Cooper had agreed to provide. Joseph Head to JFC, 2/2, 4/16, and 7/19/1843, all in JFC paps., box 3, AAS. The revived business did not last. Joseph Head to JFC, 7/21/1844 and 2/28/1845, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. 25. PFC, “Listing of ‘Old Books’: Partial Catalog of PFC, III Library,” 18, HCA. The rise in Cooper’s use of American poets for his epigraphs is notable in The Wingand-Wing (1842) and Wyandotté (1843). 26. On Griswold’s ties with New York Whigs, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1930), 358–59. On his hiring by Graham, see W. M. Griswold, Passages from the Correspondence and Other Papers of Rufus W. Griswold (Cambridge: W. M. Griswold, 1898), 106–7. On the house-hunting walk, see Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 11/22/1842, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. 27. One thing we know they discussed that first time was Cooper’s present low estimate of Washington Irving’s character. Griswold probably flattered Cooper (as he would in a follow-up letter sent in August) with the assurance that the two famous New York writers had been “from my boyhood associated in my mind as the father[s] of elegant literature in America.” Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 8/6/1842. 28. Griswold, Passages from the Correspondence, 113. 29. “Editor’s Table,” Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine 21 (1842): 106. 30. Mott, History of American Magazines, 506–7. 31. George R. Graham later commented that he had paid Cooper “one thousand dollars for his Naval biographies,” a total amounting to “the highest prices we ever paid.” “Graham’s Small-Talk,” Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature, Art, and Fashion 43 (1853): 552. See also JFC and George R. Graham, memorandum of agreement, 4/9/1844, JFC Coll., box 20, YCAL. 32. On the holding back of the Perry sketches, see Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 8/23/1842 and 9/9/1842, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL.

— 

notes to pages 289–294

33. JFC and George R. Graham, memorandum of agreement, 9/24/1842, JFC Coll., box 19, YCAL. The reason for starting the “Autobiography” in January, Griswold reminded Cooper, was the publisher’s desire to commence it in a new volume of the magazine so as to accommodate his subscribers. Griswold also explained in that letter that “it will not do to begin a long [naval] biography in that number, unless the tale is to be deferred until March.” Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 9/24/1842, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. Eventually Bentley would publish the novella, too, but only as a book, taking the text from Brother Jonathan (Griswold’s former joint venture with Park Benjamin), whose new owners pirated it from Graham’s in April 1843. On the Brother Jonathan piracy, see Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 4/3/1843, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 34. PFC, “Listing of ‘Old Books,’ ” 13. Another likely model for Cooper was the recent book by an acquaintance, Rector Benjamin Dorr of Christ Church, Philadelphia, The History of a Pocket Prayer Book, Written by Itself, first published in 1830 and reprinted several times thereafter. 35. Warren S. Walker, Plots and Characters in the Fiction of James Fenimore Cooper (Hamden: Archon, 1978), 130. 36. The New York part of the story is set precisely at the time of crisis caused by Jackson’s 1833 removal of the federal deposits from the Second Bank of the United States. Halfacre’s wife uproariously thinks Jackson directly seized her husband’s money, causing him to fail. She thus tells her daughter: “Well, I declare, Dosy, this is too bad in the old General, after all. I’m sure it must be unconstitutional for a President to remove your father’s deposits” (“Autobiography” CE 68). Cooper has Mrs. Halfacre advise her husband to pay off his creditors with so-called real property: “But you have hundreds of lots—give them lots, Henry, and that will settle all your difficulties” (“Autobiography” 100). Although Halfacre manages to keep the land, selling his household goods instead, his wife’s proposal clearly mirrored Cooper’s personal experience with speculation. See Horace H. Comstock and Sarah S. Comstock, conveyance to JFC, 3/16/1841 (covering eighteen lots in Kalamazoo, notarized by J. Morris Cooper and recorded in Liber F, 225–26, Kalamazoo County, Michigan), JFC paps., box 8, AAS. 37. The Wing-and-Wing takes place in the busy summer of 1799, when the Neapolitans and the English under Nelson, having just recovered the region from the French, were solidifying their control. Cooper’s Italian memories, which I go on to discuss, certainly were a major reason for the book’s spatial setting, and the book’s focus on the Napoleonic era probably carried over from his historical borrowings for The Two Admirals. But the new book also drew on the novelist’s deeper personal recollections from his time on the Stirling, which had exposed him to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean in 1806–1807, when, despite Nelson’s death just over a year earlier, the struggle against Napoleon was very much in evidence. See JFC:EY 87–94. 38. The deaths of Caraccioli and then Yvard debunk the British hero Nelson much as the silliness about the Wycherly legacy demystifies the matter of Britain for American

notes to pages 294–297

  

readers in The Two Admirals. In this regard, though, Cooper was echoing English opinion, including that expressed by naval historian William James, whose writings he generally distrusted. James thus wrote that Nelson’s mind was “possessed by a demon, who had the power to expel every generous feeling, and substitute in their stead the worst of those vindictive passions which degrade human nature.” The Naval History of Great Britain, 6 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1837), 2:277. I would also argue that the antiheroic element in the 1842 novel is the fruit of Cooper’s later, darker political observations in France—and perhaps, too, compensation for his earlier failure to have engaged the political suffering of the Italian people. 39. The new precision among nautical writers expressed the “machine aesthetic” that one recent critic has seen as making sea fiction proto-modernist in spirit, with a kind of “ship fetishism” at its technical heart. See Joongul Paek, “The Ocean of Capital: The Cultures of Maritime Capitalism in U.S. Sea Narratives, 1830–1855” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010), 36, 44. 40. Perhaps most telling of all is the specificity of a nautical figure by which Cooper renders the lifeless body of Caraccioli in the book’s heart: “the body . . . hung, like one of the jewel-blocks of the ship, dangling passively at the end of the spar, as insensible as the wood which sustained it” (W&W 1:219). The figure, later used by Melville, too, seems to have had prior currency at sea. See, for instance, Matthew Henry Barker, Tough Yarns, a Series of Naval Tales and Sketches (1834; Philadelphia: E. C. Carey and A. Hart, 1835), 1:85. 41. Cooper had seen such vessels in the Mediterranean while on the Stirling. When telling of his visit to Leghorn in December 1828, he thus wrote, “Long years had gone by since I had seen the felucca, the polacre, the xebec, and the speronara, and all the other quaint-looking craft of the Mediterranean” (GI CE 32). 42. On American use of luggers in European waters at the time of Howell’s return voyage, see E. Gordon Bowen-Hassell, Dennis M. Conrad, and Mark L. Hayes, Sea Raiders of the American Revolution: The Continental Navy in European Waters (Washington: Naval Historical Center, 2003), 20–28, and John H. Sherburne, Life and Character of the Chevalier John Paul Jones (Washington: Sherburne, 1825), 233. 43. G. Pomeroy Keese, “A Bit of Forgotten History by J. Fenimore Cooper,” The Bookman 7 (1898): 394; Keese, “Introduction” to Ned Myers (New York: Putnam, 1900), v. Luggers are not uncommon in other Cooper novels. See RR CE 208, and A&A CE 1:138–39, 159. The “roads of Groix,” as Cooper knew from Richard Dale, provided John Paul Jones with refuge during the Revolution, including when he sailed to America in the Ariel (see HN 1:182–84, 207–8; LDANO 2:51, 53, 61, 88, 92–93). 44. On the complex political dimensions of impressment in this era, see Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 102–6. As Taylor points out, among the crewmen on the Stirling on its 1806–1807 voyage, only Cooper and three

— 

notes to pages 298–299

others were native-born Americans. Even Canadian Myers was, technically, a British subject. 45. Ithuel Bolt’s first name probably derived from yet another Italian memory: for it was in Rome that Cooper met the young architect Ithiel Town, who had come there with Samuel F. B. Morse. See R. W. Liscombe, “A ‘New Era in My Life’: Ithiel Town Abroad,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50 (1991): 11. Otherwise, Bolt embodies what Cooper had observed on the Stirling. In particular, Bolt’s further misadventures in the book resemble those of Thomas Cook, on whom see JFC:EY 83, 86. 46. Evidently the publishers quickly distributed Cooper’s information to the press, for soon various papers were announcing “a new work by Cooper, entitled La FewFollet [sic], or Wing and Wing, a nautical tale.” Baltimore Sun, 5/26/1842. See also the New Hampshire Gazette, 5/26/1842. 47. Bentley offered to pay Cooper between £150 and £500 for an edition ranging from five hundred to fifteen hundred copies. Richard Bentley to JFC, 7/8/1842, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Although in September he accepted Bentley’s terms, Cooper, having drawn for £200 at the end of May (see LJ 4:292), drew now for another £150 against the new book, promising to make good on any overdraft should it not sell the required number of copies (see LJ 4:315). 48. Bentley’s own date of publication is given as 11/23/1842 in Bentley PL. It was advertised for sale as early as November 19 in Washington and was noted in a Boston paper two days later as having been “just laid upon our table by Messrs Redding & Co.” Daily National Intelligencer, 11/19/1842 (“Mr. Cooper’s new novel, ‘Wing and Wing, or Le Feu-Follet.’ Just published in Philadelphia, and will be received for sale this day by F. Taylor”); Boston Daily Evening Transcript, 11/21/1842. The editor of the latter paper had received “a few proof sheets” of the novel even earlier and commented on the book; see “Cooper’s New Novel,” Daily Evening Transcript, 11/9/1842. BAL 2:294 cites Brother Jonathan of 12/10/1842 as asserting that the book was “published simultaneously in London and here.” Certainly the dates were very close, and Lea and Blanchard may even have preceded Bentley. For Cooper’s deposit of the title and the book for copyright, see Anson Little to JFC, receipts, 10/6/1842 and 12/7/1842, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 49. JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 9/28/1842, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. The firm gave Cooper two promissory notes for $500 each, payable in six and thirteen months, respectively. If more than ten thousand copies were called for, his payment rate would be seven-and-a-half cents per copy. Cooper promised to supply the plates “ready for printing” by 10/20/1842, and Lea and Blanchard promised not to publish the book before 11/15/1842. The contract stipulated that the “trade price” would not exceed forty-five cents, but press reports indicate it was actually sold at fifty cents. See Alexandria Gazette, 10/17/1842. While the

notes to pages 300–302

  

publishers had a narrow margin, Cooper’s own net on the first ten thousand copies was also low because of his obligation to pay Fagan almost $500 for the stereotyping. John Fagan to JFC, “To stereotyping ‘Le Feu Follet,’ ” 10/6/1842, and JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 9/18/1841, both on Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 50. Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 4/3/1843. Griswold had alerted Cooper at the start of their arrangement to a new constraint that publication in such a popular magazine entailed—namely, that the task of getting out its large press runs meant Graham’s needed his manuscript copy at least four or five weeks before the publication date. Returning proofs promptly also was crucial. Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 8/6/1842. 51. Cooper’s two-part Jones sketch brought a pair of answers from that man’s grandnephew, George L. Lowden, who provided various corrections and divulged that he had considerable manuscript material on the subject. See George L. Lowden to JFC, 7/29/1843 and 8/19/1843, both in JFC Coll., box 6, YCAL. 52. For the best text of Perry’s official report of the battle, from a contemporary copy, see Perry to Sec. of the Navy William Jones, 8/13/1813, in The Naval War of 1812: A Documentary History, ed. William S. Dudley et al., 3 vols. (Washington: Naval Historical Center, 1985–2002), 2:557–59. The full statement on Elliott runs as follows: “Of Capt. Elliott, already so well known to the Government, it would almost be superfluous to speak. In this action he evinced his characteristic bravery and judgment; and, since the close of the action, has given me the most able and essential assistance” (ibid., 2:558). 53. David C. Skaggs, Oliver Hazard Perry: Honor, Courage, and Patriotism in the Early U.S. Navy (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2006), 106, 108. I base my narrative on Skaggs’s detailed account of the battle (103–19). His point about the critical, last-minute change in the line of battle that pushed Elliott back is found on p. 105. 54. Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, The Life of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1840), 2:161–65, prints a garbled version of the May 1818 Elliott letter, along with the three supporting documents Elliott had forwarded with it, and, on subsequent pages, the further correspondence of the two officers at that time. A more accurate version of Elliott’s letter is given in Russell Jarvis, A Biographical Notice of Com. Jesse D. Elliott (Philadelphia: for the author, 1835), 108–9. The source of one anti-Elliott rumor reported to Elliott by W. H. Breckenridge in February 1818 was well-known to Cooper—William B. Shubrick. Mackenzie, Life of Perry, 2:163–64. 55. Skaggs, Oliver Hazard Perry, 203. 56. Susan Decatur wrote in her unsigned preface that Perry had wanted the materials given to her husband in order to protect Perry from the “baseness and falsehood of Captain Elliott.” Documents in Relation to the Differences which Subsisted between the Late Commodore O. H. Perry and Captain J. D. Elliott (Washington: [Susan Decatur], 1821), [3]. Skaggs, Oliver Hazard Perry, 219.

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notes to pages 302–304

57. “Captain Elliott’s Letter,” dated 1/20/1821, City of Washington Gazette, 1/22/1821; “To the Public,” signed Matthew C. Perry, dated 1/27/1821, City of Washington Gazette, 1/27/1821. I have located no copy of M. C. Perry’s 1821 pamphlet, which was published in New York in early April; however, its contents show up in various newspapers (e.g., City of Washington Gazette, 4/17/1821), and he himself reproduced those contents in his expanded 1834 reprint of Susan Decatur’s pamphlet. 58. See LJ 1:113–14, and M. C. Perry et al. to JFC, 7/21/1824, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL (an invitation to a dinner honoring Cooper for his naval ties and his literary fame). 59. While Elliott was no hero pure and simple, it seems unlikely that he was quite as unhinged or dishonest as his nineteenth-century opponents liked to say. On this issue, see the sane cautions of Lawrence J. Friedman and David C. Skaggs, “Jesse Duncan Elliott and the Battle of Lake Erie: The Issue of Mental Stability,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990): 493–516. 60. See Valentijn Byvanck, “The Jackson Figurehead,” Winterthur Portfolio 35 (2000): 253–67. In 1833, owing to his opposition to South Carolina’s Nullification movement, Jackson won short and wide support in New England, but his opposition to the Second U.S. Bank the following year revived Yankee disdain. 61. Skaggs, Oliver Hazard Perry, 228–29. Skaggs argues that Cooper had an obligation to assess the Lake Erie evidence more actively. He also thinks that Cooper’s eventual response to his various adversaries in the matter was at times as partisan as their own attacks. See ibid., 233–40. 62. For Perry’s support for issuing a midshipman’s warrant to Mackenzie in 1815, and Mackenzie’s service under Perry on the Java in 1816–1817, see Mackenzie, Life of Perry, 2:103–50, and Philip McFarland, Sea Dangers: The Affair of the Somers (New York: Schocken, 1985), 14–16. Mackenzie’s sister Jane was Matthew C. Perry’s wife; see Skaggs, Oliver Hazard Perry, 231. Mackenzie’s wife, on the other hand, was William A. Duer’s niece; see American Biography: A New Encyclopedia, Vol. 4 (New York: American Historical Society, 1918), 266–67. On the (distant) genealogical ties between Burges and Perry, see [Ebenezer Burgess], Burgess Genealogy. Memorial of the Family of Thomas and Dorothy Burgess (Boston: T. R. Marvin & Son, 1865), 12–13, and Galbraith Bourn Perry, The Perrys of Rhode Island, and Tales of Silver Creek (New York: Tobias A. Wright, 1916), 45. Tristam Burges, a notorious Anti-Jacksonian when in Congress, was wellknown in Rhode Island as the man “who thanked God that he never was a Democrat” (Rhode-Island Republican, 3/23/1836, 4/20/1836). Cooper defined the Perry “clique” (BLE 33, 85) as “the combination of men, who have united to obscure, if not falsify the truth, in this matter” (BLE 22). 63. The two had renewed their ties after Cooper’s homecoming. Perry had entertained Cooper at his house in New York in 1836, for instance, and during the evening the two discussed the upcoming debate in Congress on the naval bill. When Perry asked

notes to pages 304–305

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Cooper to write something on the subject of the navy’s resources, the novelist responded with “The Resources of the American Navy,” Naval Magazine 1 (January 1836): 19–33, as well as “Hints on Manning the Navy,” ibid., 176–91. See M. C. Perry to JFC, 11/15/1836, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 64. Speech of Com. Jesse Duncan Elliott, U.S.N, Delivered in Hagerstown, Md. on 14th November 1843 (Philadelphia: G. B. Zieber, 1844), 16. Cooper confirmed this assertion in more general terms: “all the testimony [on Lake Erie] . . . was sent to me, while the history was in progress” (BLE 37). 65. JFC, “An Unfired Shot in the Literary Battle of Lake Erie: Cooper’s Unpublished Reply to Alexander Slidell Mackenzie,” ed. Steven Harthorn, Literature in the Early American Republic 5 (2013): 86. I discuss this item at greater length in note 76 below. Tristam Burges, Battle of Lake Erie, with Notices of Commodore Elliot’s [sic] Conduct in that Engagement (Philadelphia: Wm. Marshall and Co., 1839), 65. This “Philadelphia” edition was in fact printed in Providence, where the first edition appeared and probably was stereotyped. The Providence edition was reported as “in press” on 9/4/1839 in the Rhode-Island Republican of that date and as “just received” in Charleston in an advertisement dated 10/22/1839 (Southern Patriot, 11/2/1839). 66. Burges, Battle of Lake Erie, 66. Burges had moved his own book into print precisely because the naval history had angered the Perry family. See ibid., vi–vii; Providence Courier, 9/5/1839 (“The recent publication of Cooper’s Naval History, in which a most unworthy attempt is made to deprecate the merits of Perry, has again aroused public attention to the part which Captain Elliot [sic] took in the battle. Mr. Burges has, at the urgent solicitation of many of our citizens, prepared a preface and an appendix to the lecture.”) 67. At the time the Burges booklet first appeared, Cooper repeatedly made light of it. See LJ 3:432, 437; 4:8. By early March 1840, he nonetheless was drafting a longish critique of it for an unidentified journal that had recently printed “some strictures . . . on Burges’ Lecture.” LJ 4:19. By that June, addressing the editors of the National Gazette and Literary Register, he let it be known that he intended to send them a letter responding to a recent Edinburgh Review article on his naval history, as well as “a few letters in reply to the Lecture of Mr. Tristam Burges . . . and one or two, in answer to the remarks [of Mackenzie in] the North American Review” (LJ 4:48). Soon, Cooper had drafted “at least six letters” for the National Gazette on all three unfavorable treatments of the history (LJ 4:48–49n3), but these were delayed by the pending suit against Stone, which Cooper thought they might injure, as well as by the Somers affair (see LJ 4:134). In the “Unfired Shot,” 87, Cooper explained fully why the answer to his critics was delayed. 68. In 1828, Burges had rehearsed his Yankee boasts in his anti-Jacksonian Speech of Mr. Burges, of Rhode Island, Delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, April 21st, A.D. 1828, on the Tariff (Washington: Way and Gideon, 1828), 82. 69. Burges, Battle of Lake Erie, 82–83.

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notes to pages 305–307

70. Ibid., 81. 71. Ibid., 52–53 (emphasis in original). 72. First having read Mackenzie’s Life of Perry early in 1841, Cooper then wrote Bryant’s Evening Post about the book. He was particularly concerned with Mackenzie’s adoption of Burges’s “exquisite distinction.” To counter it, Cooper introduced testimony from two men who were not in fact supporters of Elliott but who admitted he had engaged the enemy on his own: Daniel Turner, commander of the Caledonia, the ship preceding Elliott’s in the line during the battle, who “directly annihilate[d] the subtilty [sic] about the ‘enabled,’ by stating that the real question was when the Niagara ‘got’ into close action, and not when she was ‘enabled’ to do so”; and John Packett, commander of the Ariel, who in an 1818 letter to Cmdre. John Rodgers confirmed Turner by stating that the Niagara under Elliott’s command had passed the Lawrence before Perry abandoned the latter (LJ 4:135–36). About a month after sending his letter to Bryant, Cooper wrote Shubrick: “I think a book of travels written by one George Rapelje of New York [a privately published 1834 volume called A Narrative of Excursions, Voyages, and Travels], the worst book I ever read; Tristam Burges’s Lecture on the Battle of Lake Erie the next worst, and McKenzie’s [sic] Life of Perry the third”—tough company indeed for Rapelje! (LJ 4:148). 73. North American Review 49 (1839): 432, 460. Cooper may have refrained from suing the Review because, as a monthly magazine rather than a daily or weekly paper, it had less impact with the public at large. Or he may have avoided that course of action because the legal business against the magazine would have taken him and his lawyernephew to Boston on numerous occasions. It is important to note, however, that Mackenzie’s piece on the naval history did not contain any obviously libelous passages. 74. Ibid., 438, 448. 75. Dr. Grant Champlin Perry, the hero’s eldest son, asked Mackenzie to undertake this project because he thought Cooper had tarnished his father’s reputation and sought to enhance Elliott’s. To assist McKenzie, Perry forwarded his father’s papers along with “a vast mass of documents relating to the battle.” Mackenzie, Life of Perry, 1:iii. Cooper in fact regarded Mackenzie’s book as useful, though flawed. Admitting his indebtedness to it in the first part of the Graham’s Magazine sketch of Perry, he at the same time disparaged its “partisan . . . spirit” and claimed that it “abound[ed] with errors”—with the correction of which, however, Cooper did “not wish to disfigure” his own sketch of Perry (“OHP pt. I” 271–72n; see also “OHP pt. II” 347n). See also “Unfired Shot,” 81. 76. Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, The Life of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1843), 2:271. Cooper’s references in The Battle of Lake Erie to Mackenzie’s troubles with the Somers are many and pointed. In writing of Jesse D. Elliott after he was found guilty by an 1840 court-martial unrelated to Perry and Lake Erie, Cooper thus wrote: “Let it be imagined, for a moment, that he [like McKenzie] had assumed the responsibility of executing three men without a trial,

notes to pages 307–311

  

and then fancy the result! His life, justly or unjustly, would have been the forfeit” (BLE 49; for other references to the Somers affair, see 58–59, 73–74, 76–77, 95–96, 103). Cooper insistently linked Mackenzie’s historiographical vagaries to his personal ones. There is in Cooper’s papers at Yale an untitled sixty-page manuscript in his hand, with close revisions, that concerns Mackenzie and, as it makes explicit reference to the fifth edition of the Life of Perry, must postdate that version’s publication late in 1843. Although it shares various points with The Battle of Lake Erie, it is clearly the unpublished draft of the further attack on Mackenzie that Cooper indicated to Shubrick in November 1844 he was then writing (“I am now answering M’Kenzie’s answer to my pamphlet”—LJ 4:481). This is the manuscript that Steven Harthorn has published as “An Unfired Shot in the Literary Battle of Lake Erie,” referred to in note 65 above. 77. After discussing Burges (BLE 12–27), Cooper treated Mackenzie’s North American Review piece (BLE 27–31) separately from the biography (BLE 48–103), with Duer taken up in between (BLE 31–48). 78. McKee, Gentlemanly and Honorable Profession, 463–64. 79. New-York Spectator, 5/23/1839. 80. New-York Spectator, 6/13/1839, 6/17/1839, 6/20/1839. 81. Cooper made the same charge against Duer in “Unfired Shot,” 88–89. 82. “J. Fenimore Cooper to J. Fagan, Dr.,” receipted bill, 7/24/1843, for stereotyping Wyandotté ($399.91), JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Cooper first mentioned the book in a 3/23/1843 letter to Shubrick: “I intend to leave home for New-York, to-morrow, and shall go to Philadelphia for a day, having a new book, called the ‘Hutted Knoll’ to put to press. You may announce it, if you please, as this is the first that has been said on the subject. It is ashore, as the name indicates” (LJ 4:380.) Cooper apparently did not reach New York City until April 3, the day when he wrote Bentley on the matter, informing the Londoner he had drawn for £250 against the book (LJ 4:382). 83. JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 6/6/1843, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. The firm gave Cooper three $400 notes, due in six, eight, and ten months from the contract’s date. 84. Richard Bentley to JFC, 5/1/1843 and 7/1/1843, both in JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Cooper had alerted Bentley that he planned to execute a draft for another £150, bringing the total to £400. Bentley replied that he would pay only £300 in toto for the book, assuming a print run of a thousand copies. 85. There nonetheless is a telling link between Wyandotté and The Spy. When Robert Willoughby, now a major in the Royal Americans, wants to visit his family in May 1775, he arrives “under a feigned name” and in disguise, much like Henry Wharton in the 1821 book and (since he also bears an official charge from Gen. Thomas Gage) like Maj. John André as well. Later in the story, when he is placed under arrest during a second visit, he arranges a sort of alibi by marrying Maud so that he can “appear as a bridegroom, rather than as a spy” (WY CE 64, 364). It has been argued, with some

— 

notes to pages 311–313

plausibility, that Cooper initially envisioned the 1843 novel as a sixth Leather-Stocking Tale. See Steven P. Harthorn, “James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838–1851” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2005), 244–46. Whatever Cooper may have intended in that regard, however, before long he abandoned any such notion. Cooper’s relationship with Crèvecoeur would seem to be almost entirely the result of parallel themes, a similar sensibility, and a shared setting, although it is worth noting that Crèvecoeur’s wife was related through marriage to the DeLanceys. 86. Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin, Forgotten Allies: The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 225. For James H. Pickering’s points, see “James Fenimore Cooper and the History of New York” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1964), 93, and “New York in the Revolution: Cooper’s Wyandotté,” New York History 49 (1968): 122. 87. In this regard, as the Cooper Edition notes, Wyandotté is an early Anti-Rent novel (see WY CE xviii). 88. William L. Stone, Life of Joseph Brant-Thayendanegea, Including the Border Wars of the American Revolution, 2 vols. (New York: Alexander V. Blake, 1838), 1: appendix, lxviii. The story is also told, without mentioning Nick by name, in William W. Campbell, Annals of Tryon County; or, the Border Warfare of New-York (New York: J. & J. Harper, 1831), 108. On the Coopers and the Gansevoorts, see Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 163–68; JFC:EY 244. For Nick’s other names, see Glatthaar and Martin, Forgotten Allies, 230. 89. Pomroy Jones, Annals and Recollections of Oneida County (Rome: P. Jones, 1851), 872–82. Jones asserted that he reprinted the anecdote there from a newspaper where he published it in 1838 (see p. 873), but, like the Philbricks, I have not located that earlier version. I supplement this account with some details from Othniel Williams, Early History of Clinton (Clinton: L. W. Payne, 1848), as quoted verbatim in Amos D. Gridley, History of the Town of Kirkland, New York (New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1874), 39–42. On the elder Jones, see the obituary in the Roman Citizen of Rome, NY, 8/1/1884. Alan Taylor briefly discusses the trial of “Saucy Nick” for murdering a white man on the Oneida reservation in 1796, in The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 318–19. Perhaps this was another source of Cooper’s plot. 90. Susquesus in The Chainbearer similarly asserts: “Injin nebber forget. Don’t forget friend—don’t forget enemy” (CB 1:203). 91. Geoffrey Sanborn, Whipscars and Tattoos: “The Last of the Mohicans,” “MobyDick,” and the Maori (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 20–50. 92. One example of his inventiveness concerns Nick’s original name (Wyandotté), which he reassumes in chapter 19, when Hugh Willoughby, ironically, uses it (see WY

notes to pages 314–315

  

CE 244). The term is ethnologically confusing given what we have learned of Nick’s background; Cooper probably was drawn to it by considerable newspaper coverage in the summer of 1843 of the Wyandot/Wendat people’s westward displacement from Ohio to Kansas following the 1842 Treaty of Upper Sandusky. 93. Another possible influence on Cooper’s book was a tale by Chandler Robbins Gilman called “The Wyandot’s Story,” published first in the American Monthly Magazine and reprinted as a constituent story in Gilman’s Legends of a Log Cabin (New York: George Dearborn, 1835), 218–32. It concerns the cruel mistreatment of several members of a Wyandot family by white slaughterers. 94. Gridley, History of the Town of Kirkland, 41. Even so, it is notable that Gridley speaks of Nick’s “family,” not his race, and stresses that the Oneidas themselves viewed Nick and his kin as cruel and ferocious. Part of the appeal of Nick’s character in Cooper’s novel is his biting, and certainly not apolitical, humor. When Willoughby somewhat condescendingly begins to explain to Nick what “a grant—a patent” is, Nick quickly interrupts him, “I know him—paper to take away Indian’s hunting ground.” He similarly defends his own right to the land he wishes to sell Willoughby: “How came to own him?—How ’e pale face come to own America? Discover him— ha—Well, Nick discover land down yonder, up dere, over here” (WY CE 9–10). Nick’s speech is shrewdly observant throughout. Cooper may have modeled this aspect of the portrait of Nick on anecdotes circulating on the New York border about John Konkapot, some of whose descendants he knew personally. Gridley tells one such story: “When one of our citizens bantered him about the black mark put upon Cain, he replied, ‘P’raps it was a white mark’ ” (ibid., 38). This is, I think, exactly Nick’s tone. For more on Cooper and the Konkapot family, see my essay, “James Fenimore Cooper, 1789–1851: A Brief Biography,” in Leland S. Person, ed., A Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 55–56n4. C HAPTER 11 .  AT SEA 1. Opened in 1833, the Harbor prohibited “habitual alcoholics” from residence. Gerald J. Barry, The Sailors’ Snug Harbor: A History, 1801–2001 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 42. Ned had first gone to the hospital on the island known as the Seamen’s Retreat (he called it “Sailor’s Retreat”—NM CE 212). He knew this place from a previous stay there before his last voyage: “Still I drank too much, and by way of putting a check on myself, I went to the Sailor’s Retreat, Staten Island, and of course got out of the reach of liquor” (NM CE 192). 2. Cooper had come close to seeing Ned at Leghorn in 1828. See GI CE 32; NM CE 160–61. Once again, in 1833, when Ned was working on the packet boat Erie, he had been down in the hold when (as the two friends later figured out) Cooper was on deck arranging for some freight to be shipped home from France. See NM CE 1, 177.

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notes to pages 316–318

3. Cooper had alerted Bentley from New York on June 2, before he and Ned traveled to Otsego, that he would “come forth with a new nautical story, immediately” (LJ 4:388), and we know of no actual book aside from Ned Myers to which this statement could refer. But his July point about Ned Myers (that it would be “of an entirely new character”) suggests that the “new nautical story” was some other, ultimately unwritten work. 4. In writing Bentley then, Cooper described the book as containing “the experience, wrecks, battles, escapes, and career of a seaman who has been in all sorts of vessels, from a man of war to a smuggler of opium in China” (LJ 4:391–92). Although Ned may have talked ahead of where he and Cooper were in the actual writing by this point, and even jumped about in his story, his reminiscences about that “smuggler of opium” would occur in the eleventh chapter of the nineteen-chapter book. It is the chronologically latest episode in Ned’s life that Cooper mentioned to Bentley. 5. His friend Richard H. Dana, writing Cooper not long before, thus mentioned “the story of your first going to sea, which I once heard you tell so graphically.” Richard H. Dana, Sr., to JFC, 9/23/1840, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 6. How much Lake Erie was on his mind is shown by the fact that, during the novelist’s July 1843 trip to New York and Philadelphia, Ned, accompanying him as far as the former city, retrieved from the Globe Hotel some “Boxes” for Cooper, and, wrapping them “in tarpaulins,” forwarded them to Philadelphia. E. R. Myers to JFC, 7/31/1843, written on “S[team] B[oat] North America” and with the return address “Newburgh, NY” on the address flap, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. Although Ned said nothing about what they contained, the boxes in question probably held copies of The Battle of Lake Erie, which Cooper noted in early June would be “published next month,” and thirteen hundred copies of which he would sell in Philadelphia on this very trip, as he informed Susan with satisfaction on July 22 (LJ 4:388–89, 398). See also JFC to Saratoga bookseller Gideon M. Davidson, 7/27/1843, in Heidi Oberholtzer, “Two Unpublished Letters of James Fenimore Cooper,” English Language Notes 39 (2001): 83. 7. On the naval history revisions, see Cooper’s new note regarding the Scourge, which had been lost in a storm on Lake Ontario with most of its hands in 1813, a disaster Ned had survived. HN 1847 2:172. For a further instance of how Cooper’s naval connections helped him cross-check Ned’s story, see his 1845 letter (LJ 5:36) to George Bancroft, then navy secretary. 8. The man in question was Pennsylvanian Bernard Henry, who had been a midshipman on the ill-fated Philadelphia during the Barbary wars (and a prisoner until he and his shipmates were rescued) and later became U.S. consul at Gibraltar. See HN 1:17; LDANO 1:38; University of Pennsylvania Alumni Register 6 (1902): 323. 9. As that footnote also indicates, Cooper at some point (probably in June or July and in Ned’s presence) had spoken with Ned’s sister Harriet, then living in New York (see NM CE 54). The footnote in question appears to have been entered in the manuscript at the time that portion of the text itself was written (see NM CE 230).

notes to pages 318–319

  

10. “The Sailor’s Conversion,” Sailor’s Magazine 13 (1841): 208–12; this was contributed by Luther P. Hubbard of the New York and Marine Bible Society, as is made clear in a piece Hubbard soon wrote about Ned, “The Bible among Seamen,” Sailor’s Magazine 14 (1841): 68–69. Ellie Stedall, email exchanges, 2012–2014, copies in my files. The former document suggests that Ned was in a recollective mood long before he contacted Cooper. This does not mean he was not coached then, though: Ned could read but not write, and his amanuensis in this case may have helped to shape (or even induced) his story, especially since the amanuensis I suspect he used at this time was the Reverend John Ernest Miller, minister of the Dutch Reformed congregation at Tompkinsville, Staten Island, which Ned joined soon after arriving at the Harbor (see NM CE 192, 213–14). All eleven of Ned’s letters in the Cooper papers at Yale apparently were dictated to professional penmen. One document in his pension file is furthermore signed with his mark, suggesting that he indeed could not write at all. See Edward Myers, “Application for a Transfer,” 11/28/1838, attested by Sylvester Spencer, Notary Public, New York City. Navy Invalid file 1109, “Edward Myers, Seaman, U.S. Schooner Scourge (1814),” Pension Application Files, War of 1812, Death or Disability, NARA, Washington. 11. On sailors’ literacy, I rely on the useful summary of various findings in Hester Blum, The View from the Masthead: Maritime Imagination and Antebellum American Sea Narratives (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 26–32. Since 1790, U.S. marine law had stipulated that, for foreign voyages and many coastal ones, seamen and masters had to contract in writing for the sailor’s pay and obligations. Over the decades following, a practice seems to have evolved whereby the originals of these shipping articles were left in the hands of the U.S. Customs Collector in a vessel’s port of departure. Hence the revised statute of 1840 explicitly required that each captain “obtain from the collector of customs of the district from which the clearance is made, a true and certified copy of the shipping articles, containing the names of the crew, which shall be written in a uniform hand, without erasures or interlineations.” Twenty-Sixth Congress, Sess. 1, ch. 48 (1840). Shipping articles protected both sailors and masters. For a contemporary discussion of them, see Richard H. Dana, Jr., The Seaman’s Friend, 6th ed. (Boston: Thomas Groom and Co., 1851), 189. 12. “March 1815 left Halifax,” JFC Coll., box 17, YCAL. This covers from chapter 10 to the book’s end. Close comparison of various details in the last three chapters of Ned Myers with those in the 1841 Sailor’s Magazine letter and other sources reveals various discrepancies. In the instance cited in my text, the letter says that Ned shipped for Savannah on the packet boat William Taylor in New York and then returned to the latter port before shipping for Rotterdam and, ultimately, Indonesia (“Sailor’s Conversion,” 208). Contemporary newspaper records indicate, however, that the ship that took Ned to Rotterdam, the Hope, left from Savannah, not New York (see Philadelphia National Gazette, 11/25/1838; New-York Spectator, 3/7/1839). Both Ned’s outline and Ned Myers

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notes to pages 319–320

make this correction, supporting a conclusion that better recall (or research) supplied more accurate information. 13. The first page of the outline, with Cooper’s insertion, is reproduced in NM CE xii. 14. Interestingly, in one variation between Ned’s summary and the book, the naval historian’s supposedly greater knowledge may actually have gotten in his way. In Ned Myers, he gave a ship’s name as the Clyde of Salem, which was said to have arrived in New York from Batavia with Ned aboard “in January” (NM CE 126–27). But Ned’s summary (and contemporary records) give the name as the Glide. The latter ship (from Salem, as Ned indicated) arrived in New York from Batavia in mid-January 1819. See New York Mercantile Advertiser, 1/14/1819. The error may have been one of mistaken transcription (from the summary to the manuscript, or the manuscript to the book), although the similarity in sound may have contributed to the mistake as the two old shipmates talked. It is tempting, though, to see Cooper’s worldly knowledge, including knowledge of Scottish rivers, overriding Ned’s particular recollection. 15. Myra C. Glenn, Jack Tar’s Story: The Autobiographies and Memoirs of Sailors in Antebellum America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 74. As to sheer bad memory: Ned tended to accelerate the chronology at some points in his story and to elongate it at others. For instance, in the book he asserted that “in the spring of 1810, Capt. Johnston gave the ship to Capt. B—, who carried us to Liverpool for the third time” (NM CE 37). Newspaper records identify the “B—” as “Baker” and indicate that his first voyage in the Stirling cannot have taken place before quite late in 1810, not in the spring of that year. Such discrepancies are not uncommon throughout the book, although many are hard to pin down because Ned gave few specific dates except when prominent events intersected his path. Johnston left New York on May 28 (New York Columbian, 5/28/1810), arrived in Liverpool on July 7 (Baltimore Federal Republican and Commercial Gazette, 8/21/1810), was reported still at Liverpool on August 3 (New York Mercantile Advertiser, 9/18/1810), and, after a forty-four-day passage, arrived back in New York on 10/1/1810 with a cargo of salt, iron, and coal consigned to Jacob Barker (New-York Gazette, 10/1/1810). Baker’s first voyage with the vessel therefore must have been the one that began when he cleared New York for Liverpool on 11/28/1810, with Ned Myers no doubt aboard (New York Journal, 11/28/1810). 16. Cooper misdated the letter I use to establish his arrival in Philadelphia, writing “Friday, morning— | Sept. 7th 1843” (LJ 4:400) when that Friday was actually September 8. He furthermore began the next letter printed by Beard on the following Monday, but just after his note on Ned Myers he added for Susan, “This is Tuesday evening” (LJ 4:401). 17. Fagan’s estimate was $333.25, or “a little less than 7 cts per copy,” which he hastened to add was “exclusive of the stereotyping.” John Fagan, “Estimate for 5000 copies ‘Ned Myers,’ ” 9/16/1843. On September 20, Fagan gave Cooper his bill for the

notes to pages 320–324

  

stereotyping ($210.55), which Cooper paid with a six-month note. John Fagan, “To stereotyping ‘Ned Myers,’ ” receipted bill, 9/20/1843. Both on Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. The second document contains Fagan’s receipt for Cooper’s six-month note for the stated amount (on which see also LJ 4:445–46). 18. JFC and Carey and Hart, Memorandum of Agreement, 9/22/1843, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. On Carey and Hart, see David Kaser, Messrs. Carey & Lea of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957), 47–48. The terms were relatively straightforward. Cooper was to receive $1,000 for the right to print and publish ten thousand copies from his plates. The firm could issue yet more copies in increments of a thousand, as long as it paid him ten cents per copy. If it did not choose to go beyond the original maximum, the book (and plates) would revert to Cooper’s control. He also secured the firm’s agreement that the book’s retail price, in paper covers, would not exceed thirty-seven-and-one-half cents. Although BAL 2:295 gives a vague “November” publication date for the American edition, the Boston Daily Evening Transcript for 11/14/1843 listed the book as then available for sale there. The English Literary Gazette on 11/11/1843 contains Bentley’s advertisement indicating that his edition was “just published.” The date in Bentley PL is 11/6/1843. 19. Richard Bentley to JFC, 2/18/1844, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Bentley’s accounting, included in that letter, indicated that the book actually had earned £298.1s.8p. 20. The figure of one thousand copies is confirmed by Bentley PL. On the later sales, see Richard Bentley to JFC, 5/21/1844, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 21. Blum, View from the Masthead, 95. Although we do not know how much Ned received, Benjamin Griswold, “The Original ‘Ned Myers,’ ” Century Illustrated Magazine 28 (1884), 957, asserts that “the proceeds [from the book] went entirely to Ned.” 22. Ned Myers suggests the importance of religion for Ned, but the theme is even more prominent in Luther P. Hubbard’s second 1841 article about Ned, “The Bible among Seamen,” which recounts Hubbard’s visit to the Snug Harbor in search of Myers. Ned is there portrayed as guiding other retired mariners in religious matters. See Sailor’s Magazine 14 (1841): 68–70. 23. On Ned’s marriage, see also G. Pomeroy Keese, “A Bit of Forgotten History by Fenimore Cooper,” The Bookman 7 (1898): 396. 24. Ned’s original pension certificate, signed by John Boyle as acting secretary of the navy on 10/16/1838, is in Navy Invalid file 1109, “Edward Myers, Seaman.” 25. L. Lewis to JFC, 12/26/1843, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. More on Lewis can be found in NM CE 61, 63, 90, 97, and 102. On the last cited page, Ned indicates that he thought Lewis must have died shortly after the end of the war in 1815. His reconnection with Ned in 1843 may have stemmed from publicity about Ned Myers. 26. Ned Myers to JFC, 1/30/1844, JFC coll., box 7, YCAL. On Fish’s efforts at this time to secure Ned benefits for the War of 1812 injury, see U.S. House Journal, 1844,

— 

notes to pages 324–328

28th Cong., 1st Sess., 1/22/1844; for Brinkerhoff ’s follow-up on the matter, see ibid., 2/15/1844. It is possible that Cooper and Myers had met with Hamilton Fish or his associates while in New York. 27. Ned Myers to JFC, 1/30/1844; he sweetened his request of Cooper by revealing that Ned Myers had been “presented in the Presidents [sic] family and is very much liked here in Washington.” I have not located any collection of Stringham’s papers. 28. Ned Myers to JFC, 8/10/1844, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 29. Ned Myers to JFC, 1/2/1845, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 30. Ned’s January statement about his daily wage—“less than one shilling a day”— does not square with Cooper’s statement to Bancroft—“a dollar a day when he works.” There are two explanations for the discrepancy. Ned may have worked so sporadically that, across a given month, he made what amounted to an average of about a shilling per normal working day; or, by the time Cooper wrote Bancroft Ned may have secured more work in Brooklyn, and at a higher rate. By July 1846, his pay at the Brooklyn yard had risen to “twelve shillings per day.” Ned Myers to JFC, 7/4/1846, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 31. George Bancroft to JFC, 7/21/1845, JFC paps., box 3, AAS (also printed in CORR 2:549–50). 32. Ned Myers to JFC, 7/4/1846, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. Three years later, in February 1849, Cooper was to write his wife that Ned’s “wages have been raised, in consequence of my intercession”—at that point, from $6.00 per week to $10.50—and he may well have helped effect the 1846 increase as well (see LJ 5:406). 33. Ned Myers to JFC, 4/8/1848, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 34. Bills and Resolutions, House of Representatives, 30th Cong., 1st Sess., H.R. 438 (Report No. 511); Journal of the House of Representatives 43 (30th Cong., 1st Sess.): 735; 44 (30th Cong., 2nd Sess.): 318–21; Journal of the Senate 40 (30th Cong., 2nd Sess.): 161, 252. Ned Myers to JFC, 4/8/1848 and [7/23/1848]; same to same, 1/30/1849, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. In the July 1848 letter, Ned asserted that Representative Murphy had collected a number of relevant documents in Ned’s case and had them printed. Ned asserted that the pamphlet, which I have not identified further, mentioned Cooper’s name. This may have been, in addition to Ned Myers, a further means by which the Whigs learned of the novelist’s involvement in the issue and therefore decided to oppose the bill. Cooper’s interest in Ned’s personal situation was greater than the known record indicates. 35. Federal Census Mortality Schedules, 1850, New York State Education Department, Archive Roll M1. 36. “J. Fenimore Cooper in Brooklyn,” Brooklyn Medical Journal 8 (1894): 749. Otterson, born near Amsterdam, New York, in 1822, had graduated from the University of the City of New York in 1844; see Brooklyn Medical Journal 2 (1888): 323.

notes to pages 328–330

  

37. The cause of death, occurring on 11/6/1849, was “disease of heart.” Federal Census Mortality Schedules, 1850, New York State Education Department, Archive Roll M1; from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Cmdre. Charles H. Bell wrote Cooper: “ ‘Tom Coffin’ is gone—Ned Myers died this afternoon at 5 P.M. . . . I was informed by his family that he often spoke of you—Ned never forgot a kindness.” Bell to JFC, 11/6/1849, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Cooper’s contact with Ned over the years was quite frequent, as his many references to meeting with Ned during his trips to and through New York City suggest; see LJ 4:443; 5:102, 248, 406; 6:6–7, 35–36. We know, too, of several letters from Cooper to Myers that either went astray or did not survive the eventual breaking up of the Myers household. Early in 1845, Ned thus referred to a letter Cooper had sent to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, probably the previous November when the novelist was bound through New York to Philadelphia; Cooper had wanted to meet, evidently, but the letter did not reach Ned in time to arrange for that. Ned finally received the letter after it was advertised in a New York newspaper (see Ned Myers to JFC, 1/2/1845, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL). A late June 1846 letter from Cooper to Myers was acknowledged by Ned but does not survive (see Ned Myers to JFC, 7/4/1846, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL). A third letter, sent in July 1848, was also advertised in the New York press but apparently was never retrieved by Ned (see Ned Myers to JFC, “Sunday 23rd 1848” [postmarked “July 24 1848”], JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL; for confirmation, see “List of Letters Remaining in the New York Post Office, July 8, 1848,” New York Herald, 7/10/1848). 38. James Otterson to J. L. Edwards, 7/9/1850, in Navy Invalid file 1109, “Edward Myers, Seaman.” I find no evidence that the pension was ever awarded. It is worth adding that, although Cooper’s knowledge of Ned’s personal history may have provided inspiration for the alcoholic character Gershon Waring (a.k.a. “Whiskey Centre”) in Oak Openings, written just in this period, the novelist showed far more compassion for his friend Ned than he could muster for that oafish Michigan tippler. 39. The hundred-foot-long Somers had been completed in 1842 at the navy yard in Brooklyn. Those who saw it were impressed by its fast look, which was augmented by the tall, angled masts. Philip McFarland, Sea Dangers: The Affair of the Somers (New York: Schocken, 1985), 48–49; see also Howard I. Chapelle, The History of the American Sailing Navy: The Ships and Their Development (New York: W. W. Norton, 1949), 430–33. Cooper’s “beautiful” captured the general enthusiasm; as he spent much of May 1842 in Manhattan on the Stone arbitration (see LJ 4:287–93), he probably saw the Somers in New York waters soon after its launching. 40. McFarland, Sea Dangers, 77–80, gives the details of the brig’s departure from New York and the officer list, which included Perry’s young sons (and hence Mackenzie’s nephews)—Passed Midshipman M. C. Perry II (then twenty-two years old), the vessel’s acting master; and Acting Midshipman Oliver H. Perry (then seventeen), who served as Mackenzie’s clerk. Historian Buckner F. Melton, Jr., A Hanging Offense: The Strange

— 

notes to pages 330–333

Affair of the Warship Somers (New York: Free Press, 2003), 21, also comments on the fact. 41. “Miscellany. Philip Spencer,” New-York Tribune, 12/21/1842, reprinted from the New Haven Palladium. During his time at Geneva, Spencer was in close proximity to fellow student Paul Fenimore Cooper. It is evident that this connection provided Paul’s family with some insight into Spencer’s character. See Cooper’s letter to Paul, dated 1/28/1843, LJ 4:349–52, which is much concerned with relaying news about “Phil” and the mutiny; PFC to Charlotte Fenimore Cooper, 1/15/1843 and 2/16/1843, JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL; and Paul’s recollection of Spencer (mistakenly attributed to “Mrs. Paul Fenimore Cooper”), in The Chi Psi Story, ed. H. Seger Slifer and Hiram L. Kennicott (Ann Arbor: Chi Psi Fraternity, 1951), 74–75. Another possible source for the novelist’s views of Philip Spencer was more direct. He visited the Geneva campus to give an “address to the Societies of the College” on the subject of public opinion during the August 1841 commencement, a few months after Spencer had left campus; see LJ 4:212 and The New-Yorker, 8/14/1841. 42. McFarland, Sea Dangers, 64–71. The relevant documentation for these and other of Spencer’s misdeeds is printed from navy files in Harrison Hayford, ed., The Somers Mutiny Affair (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 217–20. 43. McFarland, Sea Dangers, 114–22. The two Greek-lettered documents no longer survive but were printed in Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry Appointed to Inquire into the Intended Mutiny on board the United States Brig of War Somers, on the High Seas, Reported for the New-York Tribune (New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1843), 4. This pamphlet ends with the final court session on 1/19/1843 and omits the court’s findings, first reported nine days later, according to McFarland, Sea Dangers, 174. 44. On the Articles of War, see Melton, Hanging Offense, 135–36; on the question of the intent to make a mutiny, see Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial in the Case of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, a Commander in the Navy of the United States, &c. Including the Charges and Specifications of Charges, Preferred against Him by the Secretary of the Navy. To which is Annexed, An Elaborate Review, by James Fennimore [sic] Cooper (New York: Henry G. Langley, 1844), 231, 251. The details of the seizure of the men, the officers’ council, and the executions are given in McFarland, Sea Dangers, 120–22, 128–49; for Mackenzie’s orders to the officers, see p. 148. 45. McFarland, Sea Dangers, 153, 160. Mackenzie submitted two early reports to the Navy Department—a letter written at the island of St. Thomas on 12/5/1842 (with which he enclosed excerpts from the Somers logbook for the period 11/26 to 12/1/1842) and the 12/14/1842 one dispatched via O. H. Perry. The originals of these are in NARA Record Group 125, M273, roll 49. I discuss his third and longest report later in this chapter. 46. McFarland, Sea Dangers, 160. 47. New-York Spectator, 12/17/1842.

notes to pages 334–336

  

48. “James F. Cooper,” Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, 1/23/1843. 49. On the 12/19/1843 narrative, see McFarland, Sea Dangers, 181–82. For Cooper’s likely first source of this text, see “The Somers Mutiny. Naval Court of Inquiry,” Albany Evening Journal, 1/4/1843, which gave details of that body’s second through fourth sessions. He also could have seen the narrative in the Democratic paper the Albany Argus, which reprinted the same material from the Tribune on 1/2/1843 (“By the Housatonic Railroad. The Somers Mutiny Court of Inquiry”). The “prayer” to which Cooper referred was surely this one, which Mackenzie said he recited after the bodies were sent overboard into the sea and which I quote here from the Evening Journal version: “Preserve us from the dangers of the seas and the violence of enemies. Bless the United States:—watch over all that are upon the deed [i.e., deep], and protect the inhabitants of the land in peace and quiet, through Jesus Christ our Lord.” This was adapted from The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church, According to the Use of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: S. Potter, 1818), 155. 50. There is no indication that Cooper gained access to the court of inquiry while at the navy yard, although it was open to the press and was attended at various times by spectators who included former mayor and diarist Philip Hone and (on January 4) Richard Henry Dana, Jr., who wrote a piece about it for Bryant’s Evening Post on 1/13/1843 (by which point Cooper was in Philadelphia). See McFarland, Sea Dangers, 170–72. This may also have been the time when Cooper’s old friend James De Kay tried to track Cooper down in New York. “You may imagine how earnestly I wish to see [you],” De Kay soon wrote, “to talk over old times & more particularly in reference to the Somers affair in which I find that I cannot coincide in the popular sentiment here. Perhaps my esprit de corps as a sailor has given this turn to my opinions but I have come to the conclusion, that no mutiny or overt act of mutiny justifying an immediate execution ever took place, that the officer commanding & his associates were panic stricken & acted accordingly—I was in hopes of conferring with you on this & other subjects.” James De Kay to JFC, undated but early 1843, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. 51. William B. Shubrick to JFC, 3/10/1843, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL. 52. To expand on this insight, Cooper referred Shubrick to Mackenzie’s The Life of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry (2 vols. [New York: Harper and Brothers, 1840]) (“vol. 2d, p.p. 20, 21”—where he accused Jesse D. Elliott of “meanness” with regard to the 1815 court of inquiry on the Lake Erie business), an attack that was to be read against the “correct copy of the record of that Court” as contained in the appendix to Russell Jarvis’s book on Elliott. The comparison would show, Cooper explained, that Mackenzie was wrong in his facts and his conclusions. Far from having done what Mackenzie accused him of, Elliott had done the opposite. Although Elliott remained very much alive in 1843, Cooper’s point was that, like Cromwell, he was a victim of Mackenzie’s hasty injustice (LJ 4:378).

— 

notes to pages 337–338

53. As Melton points out, Hanging Offense, 212–17, while the two naval courts met there was a considerable fight going on in the civilian courts over the issue of jurisdiction. This need not concern us here except in the ways I indicate. On Mackenzie’s request for the court-martial, see ibid., 191; the original, dated 1/7/1843, is to be found in NARA Record Group 125, M273, roll 49. Evidently Guert Gansevoort had similar anxieties about his vulnerability to murder charges in a civilian court. During the court of inquiry, he wrote Com. Samuel F. Du Pont asking him to help ensure, as Hershel Parker writes, “that if Mackenzie was court-martialed he could stand trial with him, so as to be exempt from any civil trials brought by survivors of the hanged men.” Herman Melville: A Biography, Vol. 1, 1819–1851 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 296–97. 54. Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 7. 55. Witness testimony occupied the bulk of the Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial; some documents were read into the record and of course the normal business of the sessions also took up some space. My page counts are therefore approximate. The other important witnesses were Acting Master M. C. Perry, the younger, and his brother, Commander’s Clerk O. H. Perry (eighteen and five pages, respectively); Wales (seventeen pages); and Midshipman Henry Rogers, who had translated the Greek papers at the time of their discovery (nine pages). Most of the rest of the testimony came in very brief appearances by another thirty-nine individuals who had been on the voyage (plus two who had not; a forty-second individual who had testified at the court of inquiry but had since fled, William Clark, was to have his testimony introduced from the inquiry Proceedings but it was not in fact printed in the Court Martial record). 56. The first report of the official findings appeared in the United States Gazette, a Philadelphia paper, on Monday, 4/10/1843. It was reprinted from there in other papers, including the Baltimore Sun and the Daily National Intelligencer (both on 4/11/1843) and Webb’s Courier and Enquirer, evidently on 4/10/1843, which in turn was reprinted on 4/11/1843 in Weed’s Albany Evening Journal. 57. We know that Guert Gansevoort in fact went to the capital at that time in order to be on hand to answer questions from Secretary Upshur about Mackenzie’s December 19 narrative, sent to him via Midshipman Henry Rogers. McFarland, Sea Dangers, 255. 58. Harriet A. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1884), 516. Gansevoort’s testimony at both the court of inquiry and the courtmartial as published at the time failed to mention any interruptions to the council or his negotiations with Mackenzie over its advice. However, he did provide what one might take as a cover for his absence when, in reply to Mackenzie’s question (“How long were you in deliberation, and how many witnesses did you examine?”), he said, “I was not present at the examination of all [witnesses]; my duties on deck prevented my attending all the time.” Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 36. Moreover, in the court of inquiry, as the manuscript record in navy archives clearly indicates, Gansevoort testified

notes to pages 339–340

  

on 1/3/1843 that there was another interruption: “I think it was about 6 o’clock P.M. [on November 30] that the Comdr. ordered me to break up the council as he considered the vessel in danger and ordered me to send the officers on deck as he wished to show a force about the vessel.” When asked to clarify whether the danger was from “the crew or from the elements,” Gansevoort replied, “from the crew.” NARA Record Group 125, M273, roll 49. 59. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 518–19. McFarland, Sea Dangers, 254–57, supplies details about the whereabouts of all three men at the times indicated in Weed’s book, but various discrepancies remain. 60. Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 203. Weed tried to inject what he had learned from Hunn Gansevoort into the court-martial. He had long been associated with John C. Spencer in New York and national affairs, and the two men had once been good friends. A recent rift in the Whig Party had placed them in different camps, however, and when Weed went to Spencer’s house on arriving in Washington right after his discussion with Hunn Gansevoort, Spencer would not see him. Later, once the courtmartial began, Weed, drawn by “a sense of justice,” went to the Brooklyn Navy Yard on at least one occasion. There, he approached John C. Spencer’s son-in-law, Henry Morris, and offered to testify as a witness or “suggest questions to be put to other witnesses.” Unfortunately, Morris shunned the editor, refusing even to recognize Weed in the courtroom. Once again, as Weed told the story, he left without being able to share the Gansevoort anecdote. Weed, ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed, 517–18. 61. On Ambrose Spencer, see his entry in “Biographical Directory of the United States Congress,” online at http://bioguide.congress.gov/biosearch/biosearch.asp. On John C. Spencer, see George G. Sause’s entry on him in Biographical Dictionary of the United States Secretaries of the Treasury, 1789–1995, ed. Bernard S. Katz and C. Daniel Vencill (Westport: Greenwood, 1996), 347–48. 62. As just noted, Spencer’s joining of the Tyler administration considerably weakened his Whig credentials. Before that point, however, he had close ties to William H. Seward as well as Weed. See Walter Starr, Seward: Lincoln’s Indispensable Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 73–74. Partisan lines were strongly inscribed at the time, but it is important to recall that Cooper’s longtime friend Luther Bradish served as Seward’s lieutenant governor, also as a Whig, from 1838 to 1842. Friendship could sometimes trump party. 63. The alliance of the state with Harper and Brothers had been arranged with the aid of Thurlow Weed, a friend at the time of both publisher James Harper and John C. Spencer. See Eugene Exman, The Brothers Harper: A Unique Publishing Partnership and Its Impact on the Cultural Life of America from 1817 to 1853 (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 106–8. 64. The abridged history was published in December 1841 by Thomas, Cowperthwait, and Company, which put a twenty-four-page advertisement for its

— 

note to page 341

textbooks at the rear of the book (copy in my collection). Cooper was first set thinking about the history as a textbook (for seamen and others) in 1839. At that time, the once and future navy chaplain Charles S. Stewart wrote him about the possibility of including the original two-volume version in what he called the “Common School & Village Library,” then being issued under the auspices of the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge by the firm of Harper and Brothers (see Charles S. Stewart to JFC, 4/2/1839, JFC paps., box 3, AAS; “The American School Library,” Albany Argus, 7/3/1838; “Memorial of the American Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,” Senate Documents, 25th Cong., 3rd Sess., doc. 235). Nothing came of that effort, but in 1841 Cooper would approach that unnamed New York bookseller who had some connection to the School District Library. It is also possible that John Orville Taylor, who, as seen in chapter 7, had approached Cooper in 1837 about what became The American Democrat, was involved in this effort. As Exman notes (Brothers Harper, 106), Taylor had made a deal with the Harpers in 1838 and was very active in promoting and selling their own derivative school libraries. In 1841, Cooper, after withdrawing from those murky negotiations and having the book printed on his own, would offer it in large quantities at discounts to the secretary of the navy as a possible “school book to be used by the apprentices”—the very boys who made up the bulk of the complement on the Somers (see LJ 4:172–73)—before finally turning to Thomas, Cowperthwait, and Company, whose involvement in the school-book trade must have been clear to him. John Fagan set the abridged History and made plates for it, and the firm of James Kay, Jr., and Brother printed three thousand sets of sheets. These unbound sheets the Cowperthwait firm bought for $500 in cash and a note for a further $1,030 payable on March 1, 1842 (an addendum to the contract reduced the purchase price to slightly less than $600 total when the publishers agreed to pay for the plates the Kay firm had used). A substitute contract executed late in 1845 between Cooper and the principals of the same firm—Joseph M. Thomas, Hulings Cowperthwait, and Charles De Silver—gave them a further ten years’ lease of the plates commencing on January 1, 1846, in exchange for a flat payment of $600 cash due at the contract’s execution. The 1841 contract (with the addendum) is published from the original at the U.S. Naval Academy in Robert D. Madison’s facsimile of the 1841 abridgement, The History of the Navy of the United States of America (Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1988), 467–68. For the 1845 contract, see JFC and Joseph M. Thomas, Hulings Cowperthwait, and Charles De Silver, memorandum of agreement, 12/8/1845, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 65. We have no direct record of the Philadelphia discussion, and Elliott’s letter to General Parker does not survive. Parker’s response, copied by Elliott to accompany an early February letter to Cooper, makes various details apparent. Jesse D. Elliott to JFC, 2/3/1843, with copy of D. Parker to Elliott, 1/28/1843, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. The personal reconciliation between Cooper and Spencer became evident a bit later in 1843, when Spencer happily supported the bid of the novelist’s nephew, Isaac C. Cooper, for

notes to pages 341–342

  

a post in the New York Customs Office (see John C. Spencer to JFC, 8/11/1843, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL); later still, Spencer expressed his gratitude for Cooper’s “intrepid sense of justice” (John C. Spencer to JFC, 9/17/1850, ibid.). 66. Greeley and McElrath’s Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry was advertised as for sale very soon after testimony ceased; see New Haven Daily Herald, 1/21/1843. For Spencer’s view on Mackenzie’s involvement in producing the court of inquiry record, see his son-in-law Henry Morris to JFC, 11/11/1843, JFC paps., box 3, AAS: “That Record was prepared by Mackenzie & was the text Book for the officers on the Court Martial.” Comparison of the 12/19/1842 narrative as included in Greeley’s Proceedings of the Court of Inquiry with the version in the manuscript report of that body (in NARA Record Group 125, M273, roll 49) makes it clear that Mackenzie did not supply Greeley with an accurate transcript of it; the Greeley text is indeed full of errors and omissions. See New-York Tribune, 12/30–12/31/1842 (since Greeley and McElrath printed their Proceedings from the standing type held over from their newspaper reports, the original errors persisted in the pamphlet). The manuscript record reveals that the document, as first presented to the court of inquiry in different forms, was itself discontinuous and flawed. The first version Mackenzie supplied proved to be only a fragment; when this fact was discovered, he promised to present a new, “complete” version—which he did, although even so that one was not the official copy he had sent to Washington. 67. New-York Tribune, 2/2/1843. 68. Ibid., 2/4/1843; Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 8. There are also persistent variations between the Tribune versions of various documents and those given in the Proceedings. 69. BAL 2:296 gives no publication date for the court-martial Proceedings but notes a 12/1[6]/1844 listing of the title in the British Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record; this states that the Review was by Cooper and indicates that the volume was available through the “American and Foreign Literary Agency,” 6 Waterloo Place, for nine shillings (p. 367). The Proceedings was listed in several U.S. newspapers as available much earlier, that is, in July 1844—see Alexandria (Va.) Gazette, 7/23/1844, reprinting the New York American; and the Philadelphia North American, 7/31/1844. The book was also noticed in The New World on 7/27/1844. It was originally slated for earlier release but was delayed following the disastrous explosion of a cannon on the new steam warship Princeton on 2/28/1844, which took the life of several officials, including Navy Secretary Upshur. Cooper learned in New York City in April that John C. Spencer, out of respect for Upshur, had intervened to delay the book (see LJ 4:451). 70. Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 193. The manuscript record of the trial consists of a book into which hundreds of strips of paper containing questions and answers were later affixed. This book (contained in NARA Record Group 125, M273, rolls 50–51) must have been derived from on-the-spot notes recorded during the trial. Working from it, navy clerks evidently produced the official record (contained in NARA

— 

notes to pages 343–344

Record Group 125, M273, roll 49), which differs in only a few very minor ways from the Langley volume. 71. See Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 241–44. 72. It has often been asserted that Cooper wrote a third short book on Mackenzie, entitled The Cruise of the Somers, which was issued in April 1844 by New Yorker Jonas Winchester, publisher of The New World. The attribution to Cooper is venerable but unsupported by contemporary evidence. Furthermore, Winchester’s magazine itself, in a longish 1844 article entitled “The Cruise of the Somers and J. Fennimore [sic] Cooper,” New World 9:5 (8/3/1844), 145–49, although pointing out the essential agreement of The Cruise of the Somers and the “Elaborate Review,” clearly assumed they were written by separate individuals: “There are before the public two very able reviews of the case; and the public generally will not be surprised that they have both come to the same conclusion, viz: that Captain Alexander Slidell Mackenzie ought to have been condemned and summarily punished” (145). 73. In 1843, Henry Morris was officially listed as one of the clerks in the Treasury Department; see Register of All Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States (Washington: J. & G. S. Gideon, 1843), 20. McFarland, Sea Dangers, 163, terms him Spencer’s “private secretary.” Beard (LJ 6:135n1) says that Morris was “a career naval officer,” but I find no confirmation of that in the usual naval records. I think his further description of Morris as the “manager of Mackenzie’s prosecution” (LJ 4:335) overstates the facts. In 1830, Morris was listed as an attorney in Canandaigua, New York, where Spencer then resided and practiced; see Edwin Williams, The New-York Annual Register for the Year of Our Lord 1830 (New York: J. Leavitt, 1830), 274. Because Morris was the nephew of Jacob Morris of Otsego, Cooper had older, independent links to him as well. During their dealings over Mackenzie, Morris passed on his respects to Cooper’s wife, “who, I trust, still remembers me.” Henry Morris to JFC, 10/27/1843, JFC Coll., box 6, YCAL. 74. Henry Morris to JFC, 10/27/1843. Morris suggested that, “as this is a matter of business,” Cooper might “receive the profits of the work, should there be any.” 75. In his 2001 “Essay on the Legal Aspects of Somers Affair and Bibliography,” David Howe incorrectly asserts, “No official transcript was made of testimony at the court of inquiry or the court martial. The testimony at each proceeding was reported by the New York Herald” (online at Naval History and Heritage Command, http://www. history.navy.mil/research/library/online-reading-room/title-list-alphabetically/s/ somers-essay-on-legal-aspects-of-somers-affair.html, section VI). Spencer was previously connected with Langley’s firm, which in 1840 had brought out Spencer’s edition of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Part the Second: The Social Influence of Democracy (trans. Henry Reeve). Cooper knew Langley on his own, having sold him his two-part article on the Edinburgh Review and naval history for the May and June 1842 issues of Langley’s United States Magazine and Democratic Review. See JFC to Henry

notes to pages 344–348

  

Langley, 3/18/1842 (not in LJ), in “Selections from Portfolios in Various Libraries— Continued,” Historical Magazine, and Notes and Queries 3 (1868): 21. 76. Cooper also asked Morris to have the court of inquiry’s official record copied, but Morris replied that transcribing the “voluminous document” would take too long and instead ordered Cooper a copy of Greeley and McElrath’s inaccurate pamphlet. Henry Morris to JFC, 11/11/1843. It seems likely that Jesse D. Elliott was in on the plan for the “Elaborate Review.” In a letter he sent Cooper in between the two the novelist received from Morris, Elliott signed off, somewhat cryptically, “All’s well, and letter coming from headquarters.” Jesse D. Elliott to JFC, 11/7/1843, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. The “headquarters” in question, I surmise, was Spencer’s office, and the letter was the one Morris wrote Cooper four days later. 77. See Hugh Egan’s “Introduction,” in his facsimile edition of Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial in the Case of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie (Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1992), 28–30; and his article “The Mackenzie Court-Martial Trial: Cooper’s Secret Correspondence with William H. Norris,” Studies in the American Renaissance: 1990, 149–58. 78. John Lorimer Graham to JFC, 12/8/1843, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 79. “Col. John Lorimer Graham,” New York Times, 7/25/1876; on William Cooper and his wife, Eliza Clason, see JFC:EY 142–43; on Graham’s marriage to Eliza’s sister Emily, I rely on information from the Graham Family Tree, online at http://trees. ancestry.com/tree/2645025/person/-1797504824. 80. John Lorimer Graham to JFC, 12/8/1843. Graham, adding that Norris was happy Cooper was to write the formal review of the court-martial record, also forwarded to Cooper Norris’s recent correspondence on the topic. 81. James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1949), 190; Egan, ed., “Introduction,” Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 28. 82. This was, Cooper, conceded, how a “theorist” might view the matter. He certainly believed in these principles himself, yet he hardly thought that the majority of his fellow citizens actually felt this way about the case. A close student of the press reports circulating since December 1842, he knew that many took an understandable (though misguided) pride in the fact that “one ‘of our officers, on board one of our ships, has hanged three villains who had conspired to run away with one of our vessels.” False patriotism, as Cooper had many reasons to observe, was alive and well in the United States (“Elaborate Review,” 266–67). 83. Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 6, 249. 84. Ibid., 251 (the text as given there reads “invalidate”; my bracketed correction comes from the manuscript of Norris’s summary of the law in NARA Record Group 125, M273, roll 49). In Norris’s view, as in Cooper’s, Cromwell’s peculiar fate loomed large. 85. Cooper regarded Cromwell as wholly blameless. Both Spencer and Small admitted their guilt, but Cromwell proclaimed his innocence, and neither of the others

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notes to pages 348–352

implicated him—in fact, as noted earlier in my text, Spencer twice exonerated him. Furthermore, Cromwell alone never was confronted with the specific accusations against him and hence had no chance to answer or explain them. Although Cooper viewed Cromwell and his fate on their own terms, his sensitivity to this part of the Somers story surely owed something to the fact that he wrote the “Elaborate Review” right after having spent five months with another common sailor—Ned Myers. 86. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (New York: S. Converse, 1828), s.v. “obliquity.” Tristam Burges, Battle of Lake Erie, with Notices of Captain Elliot’s [sic] Conduct in that Engagement (Philadelphia: Wm. Marshall and Co.), 66. 87. On Spencer’s statement about his “mania,” see Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 33. 88. Even so, Cooper still believed that had Mackenzie genuinely felt his ship was in danger and could be saved only by executing the three main prisoners, “it became his duty to stand for the nearest available port” (“Review” 294). 89. William H. Norris [to John Lorimer Graham], 12/27/1843, as quoted in Egan, ed., Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial, 29: “I have received Mr. C’s letter [not located] of which you sent me a copy with great pleasure. It satisfies my mind of what before existed merely in the shape of surmise; that is, that Mr. C. is sensible of his adversary position he has heretofore borne to Mackenzie, and is not conscious how far his own magnanimity is restraining him from forcing from the facts their true, thorough, startling and revolting deductions.” 90. Catharine M. Sedgwick to K. S. Minot, 6/6/1843, in Mary E. Dewey, ed., Life and Letters of Catharine M. Sedgwick (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1871), 285. C HAPTER 12.  COMING ON SHORE 1. Mackenzie himself spoke of Spencer’s taste for “piratical stories” in his 12/19/1842 narrative. Proceedings of the Naval Court Martial in the Case of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, a Commander in the Navy of the United States, &c. Including the Charges and Specifications of Charges, Preferred against Him by the Secretary of the Navy. To which is Annexed, An Elaborate Review, by James Fennimore [sic] Cooper (New York: Henry G. Langley, 1844), 195. At his court of inquiry, he added that Spencer’s “chief and favorite theme” while at college was “piratical exploits and the pleasures of a pirate’s life” and that his favorite volume “was the ‘Pirate’s own Book,’ ” which “on leaving Geneva College to embark on a whaler, he presented to the Students Library.” “May it please the court,” 1/10/1843, signed by Mackenzie, NARA Record Group 125, M273, roll 49. Mackenzie was referring here to Charles Ellms’s 1837 publication, which Spencer indeed had left behind as a dubious gift to his fellow students. The novelist’s son, writing his sister Charlotte in mid-January, reported that two students subpoenaed by Mackenzie had gone down to Manhattan, one of them bearing the copy of The Pirates Own Book

notes to pages 352–354

  

(1837) presented by Spencer to Geneva’s Englopian (later Hermean) Society. PFC to Charlotte Fenimore Cooper, 1/15/1843, JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL. 2. New York Herald, 12/20/1842. 3. Boston Evening Transcript, 1/5/1843. Like Cooper, both Frederick Marryat and Edward J. Trelawney had seen naval service. 4. R. M. T. H., “Washington, Monday night Dec. 26,” New York American for the Country, 12/28/1842. Hunter went so far as to wish that Mackenzie had had “Cooper or Marryatt on board as passengers” and had executed them along with (or instead of ) their “awkward disciples.” For reflections on this criticism of Cooper’s pirate tales, and on their influence on Melville, see Michael Paul Rogin, Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), esp. 6–7. 5. While pausing in Manhattan on this trip, Cooper must have seen Hunter’s letter in the paper of his old friend but recent enemy Charles King. King, once a member of the Bread and Cheese Lunch, had reprinted an early article about The Red Rover from the National Gazette in September 1827 that praised the novelist’s “knowledge and talent.” The next year, happily reporting that the book was selling well abroad, King proclaimed that such “Tales of the Sea” constituted Cooper’s “home.” New York American, 9/4/1827, 2/19/1828. 6. Another mark that the criticism of his pirate tales took hold on Cooper is the combination of landward as well as seaward elements reflected in the new work’s title, a point strengthened by Cooper’s complete turn away from the sea in the Littlepage novels, which followed hard on Afloat and Ashore. He would come back to the sea in three late tales, but in the meantime he disengaged from it. Cooper’s shifts in Afloat and Ashore may also have resulted from his sense that the market for sea narratives was temporarily soft in the wake of the Somers episode. From New York in January 1844, he wrote his wife: “To my surprise Wyandotté has sold better than ‘Ned’ ” (LJ 4:443). 7. I say that Cooper had written half or slightly more than half of the novel by January because the summary provided to Bentley ends very sketchily. The “islands of the Pacific” enter the book about halfway through. The characters arrive at the Sandwich Islands in chapter 15 (A&A CE 1:223) and reach Canton, after much delay, in chapter 20 (A&A CE 1:311), and at the end of the latter rather hurried chapter Miles is at last back in New York. I think that by January Cooper had written only as far as the “adventures with the natives” of the Pacific Northwest (chs. 12–14). 8. Perhaps significantly, Cooper had first used “Afloat and Ashore” as the subtitle for Homeward Bound (LJ 3:298), but the extension of the book into a second part made that inappropriate. 9. Afloat and Ashore; or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford, its title on both sides of the ocean, came out in London on June 4 (see A&A CE 1:xxii) and, having been shipped from Philadelphia to New York by Fagan as early as June 1, was being advertised for sale in Boston by June 6. Bentley PL confirms the London date. The novel was noted in the

— 

notes to pages 354–355

Boston Evening Transcript, 6/6/1844, as “Just received by J. H. Francis.” By then, Cooper was already well into the work’s continuation, which, in the somewhat confusing parlance of the American edition (issued in mid-October), would be called Afloat and Ashore; or the Adventures of Miles Wallingford . . . In Four Volumes. Vol. III (and Vol. IV), but in the British version (issued on 9/28/1844) was titled Lucy Hardinge: A Second Series of Afloat and Ashore (Bentley PL; S&B 135–36). It was advertised in New York and Boston as available on 10/11/1844 (A&A CE 2:xxiii; Boston Evening Transcript, 10/11/1844). Lucy Hardinge is Miles Wallingford’s sweetheart and eventually his wife. 10. See Richard Bentley to JFC, 2/18/1844, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 11. Cooper had given the firm the right to print and publish ten older books, first under a grant made in 1836 and then as an add-on to the original Deerslayer contract in 1841, without having to pay him anything from their proceeds. For the original grant, see LJ 3:229–30; for the Deerslayer contract, see JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 4/2/1841, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. For the 1844 change, see JFC to Lea and Blanchard, memorandum (receipted), 1/19/1844, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. I return to this issue in my penultimate chapter. 12. Lea and Blanchard to JFC, 4/6/1844, JFC Coll., box 6, YCAL. Cooper’s terms were these: he would again pay for typesetting and the plates, which he would allow the publishers to use for printing seventy-five hundred copies; they would have to pay him $300 up front, plus give him a six-month note for another $1,200. 13. Fagan arranged for printer C[onger] Sherman (A&A 1:ii) to produce thirty-five hundred copies of the book’s first part. It cost Cooper just over $1,100 to get it to market. Fagan’s charge for stereotyping the book was $457.80, and the total cost for paper and printing and binding was $647.90; in addition, Cooper was billed a modest amount for packing and freight to New York City ($28.25). John Fagan, receipted bill “To stereotyping ‘Miles Wallingford,’ ” 4/17/1844, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Other financial details are given in A&A CE 1:xxi. Cooper’s overall production costs were thirty-one cents per copy, and the book generally wholesaled for between fifty and sixty cents, so his gross earnings were notably higher than for recent books Lea and Blanchard handled for him. Cooper’s comment about “the combination of the trade” to Shubrick (LJ 4:463) reflected John Fagan’s later opinion that the book’s success was “especially gratifying, inasmuch as some of the vendors here [i.e., Philadelphia] took especial pains to injure the sale.” John Fagan to JFC, 7/15/1844, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. For further details on how the book was sold, see Carey and Hart, receipt, 6/3/1844, to JFC for copies of Afloat and Ashore, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City; and Abraham Hart to JFC, 6/6/1844, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. For New York, Cooper worked out a promising and important arrangement with the firm of Wiley and Putnam, which took a large number of copies (1,950), “to be accounted for at fifty cents a copy in cash after 1st July next as the said book may be sold.” Probably the New Yorkers distributed books

notes to pages 355–356

  

for both the upstate market and New England, and, it would appear, rather quickly. Burgess and Stringer, the New York firm that would in effect publish part two in that city for Cooper, took 1,625 copies “on house” (that is, on its own account). As a result of these two firms’ sales and distribution efforts, by the second week of July both New York concerns were virtually sold out. Cooper likewise told Fagan then that he had only a “few copies besides those of Carey & Hart’s left” and he expected he would have to reprint sooner rather than later (LJ 4:466–67). For the details, see A&A CE xxiii–xxiv. 14. Park Benjamin and Rufus W. Griswold began serializing pirated British novels in Brother Jonathan, their new Saturday extra of the Evening Tattler, in July 1839. That fall, having broken with their publisher, they founded a new paper and its extra—the Evening Signal and The New World. It would be in the latter in 1840 that Benjamin published his two-part “review” of the Home novels, the one that was distributed to the Otsego jurors. See Merle M. Hoover, Park Benjamin: Poet and Editor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 98–102. The effect of such new media for Cooper was more severe than for other writers because since The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie, he had asked for and received higher payments for his books, which in turn bore higher retail prices and generally sold very well indeed. In their cost book, Carey and Lea and their successors often figured the break-even cost for Cooper’s titles. For The Bravo in 1831, they calculated that they would have to wholesale it at $1.40 in order to defray Cooper’s payment ($4,500) and production costs (more than $2,300) for five thousand copies. Four years later, the wholesale figure for The Monikins, for which Cooper received $2,500, was $1.25 for a smaller press run of forty-three hundred copies. While the lower amount paid Cooper meant that Carey and Lea themselves had a higher margin, it was still not as high as was the case with other writers. For instance, John Pendleton Kennedy received a mere $1,200 for the rights to Horseshoe Robinson the same year as The Monikins, meaning that a mere two thousand copies wholesaled at $1.30 would pay all costs—while the extra thousand copies the publishers printed, as they noted in their cost book, would yield them pure profit. David Kaser, ed., The Costbook of Carey & Lea, 1825–1838 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), 107, 172–73. The prices Cooper realized on his books after The Monikins reflected both his falling sales (as with the travel books) and the general depression in the book trade. As late as 1833, for The Headsman, Carey, Lea and Blanchard still gave Cooper $4,500 for his rights, the same as for The Bravo (and The Red Rover five years before), and they printed and probably sold five thousand copies. Kaser, ed., Cost Book, 138. The Home novels had yielded Cooper increased earnings, resulting in the firm’s giving him $3,600 for The Pathfinder. But the most Cooper could get for The Deerslayer was $2,500, and he had to add to the contract for that book the clause extending their rights to various earlier titles. 15. A March 1842 advertisement indicated that the Saxton and Pierce set included The Pilot, The Red Rover, The Water-Witch, Homeward Bound, and the unnamed Two Admirals. Boston Evening Transcript, 3/4/1842, 4/28/1842, and 6/8/1842 (for the

— 

notes to pages 356–357

Leather-Stocking Tales “in twenty numbers, at 25 cents each; to contain the Deerslayer, Pathfinder, Last of the Mohicans, and Prairie”). I assert the derivation of Saxton and Pierce’s “numbers” from Lea and Blanchard’s sheets based on the notes on the AAS catalogue for its copy (G526 C777 SeaT 1842) of the twenty-part Sea Tales. By the Author of the Spy; Embracing The Pilot; the Red Rover; The Water Witch; Homeward Bound; and a new story, The Two Admirals (Boston: Saxton and Pierce, 1842). The Two Admirals was to appear in Philadelphia on April 22, about seven weeks after the first Saxton and Pierce advertisement ran. 16. On the reissue of The Two Admirals in a compatible cheap format at this time, see Philadelphia Public Ledger, 12/7/1842: “Lea & Blanchard have just published a cheap edition of Cooper’s novel of the ‘Two Admirals,’ in two volumes, to match the recent novel of Le Feu Follet.” Burgess and Zieber advertised this reissue at twenty-five cents per volume under the headline, “there they come—new works published this day,” ibid. 17. Zieber ran advertisements and even published books under the spelling “Zeiber,” as the title page of The Quaker City gives it (George Lippard’s Washington and His Generals of 1847 gives, however, “Zieber”). I give the first spelling preference because that is how Zieber signed his name on an 1861 passport application (on which, as well, his name recorded by the official filling it out was twice written “Zeiber” and then corrected). George Zieber, passport application, New York City, 9/27/1861, NARA, Passport Applications, microfilm M1372, roll 100. In an 1866 article on the American News Company, Zieber is named, with a handful of men from other cities, as one of the “noticeable newsdealers” of the early 1840s. “Sketches of the Publishers. The American News Company,” Round Table 3 (4/14/1866): 234. 18. 1850 Federal Census, population schedule, New York City, Ward 9, District 3, NARA microfilm M432, roll 544, p. 443b. Philadelphia Public Ledger, 7/19/1841, 12/27/1841 (Burgess on his own); 11/26/1842, 12/7/1842 (Burgess and Zieber); 7/22/1844 (Zieber on his own). North American and Daily Advertiser, 2/1/1843. Zieber was in the news business before (and after) teaming up with Burgess, with a particular tie to the mammoth story papers mentioned earlier in this chapter. In 1840, he announced that he had the latest issues of the Boston Notion and Benjamin’s New World on hand (Public Ledger, 3/9/1840, 6/27/1840), and five years later a letter from a Pennsylvania reader to James Gordon Bennett named Zieber as Bennett’s “enterprising agent” in Philadelphia (New York Herald, 6/20/1845). Zieber’s relationship with Burgess involved him much more in bookselling and publishing than he had been before. He was, I believe, a general merchant and something of a capitalist: best remembered for his early role in backing inventor Isaac Singer, Zieber may also have bankrolled Burgess even in the latter’s New York operation. For a brief but colorful piece on Zieber, see “Down Among the Dead Men,” Old Guard 9 (1870): 782–83. For Burgess and Zieber’s association with Lea and Blanchard, I derive my information from copies of the following books at AAS

notes to page 357

  

bearing the colophon cited in this paragraph of my text or others virtually identical with it: Heidenmauer (G526 C777 Heid 1843), The Monikins (G526 C777 Moni 1843), The Pilot (G526 C777 Pilo 1843), The Two Admirals (G526 C777 Two 1843), and The Wingand-Wing (G526 C777 Wing 1843). 19. Stringer’s obituary dates the partnership with Burgess to early January 1843, when advertisements for Burgess and Zieber in fact stopped appearing in Philadelphia. See Publishers’ Weekly 23 (4/21/1883): 477. A later obituary for Burgess’s nephew and sometime apprentice, William Brisbane Dick, asserted, however, that Dick “came to New York in 1844 with his uncle,” which is more consistent with the 12/9/1843 contract between Burgess and both his New York partners, James Stringer and William A. Townsend, that Steven Harthorn found in the Temple University library. It might be added, though, that in such a rapidly developing business at that time, formal contracts might well follow the actual start of a partnership. Publishers’ Weekly 60 (9/14/1901): 434; Steven P. Harthorn, “James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838–1851” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2005), 352–53. 20. The Churchman 47 (1883): 430; see also New-York Spectator, 12/28/1842. For Stringer, see the entry in Sidney F. Huttner and Elizabeth Stege Huttner, comps., A Register of Artists, Engravers, Booksellers, Bookbinders, Printers & Publishers in New York City, 1821–1842 (New York: Bibliographical Society of America, 1993), 217, indicating that he sold books at 144 Grand St. in 1841 and 1842. 21. Publishers’ Weekly 55 (4/22/1899): 681; see also Memorial of John, Henry, and Richard Townsend, and their Descendants (New York: W. A. Townsend, 1865), 172. Confirmation of the story about the “Editors’ Express” is hard to find, and 1837 seems a suspicious year given the financial panic that hit then. But across this decade New York editors, shifting their attention from competition for shipping news, which entailed news boats operating in and beyond New York bay, began to strive for preeminence in expressing news from Washington. Doing that was expensive. In 1835, for instance, James Watson Webb of the Courier and Enquirer, who had previously operated his own horse express, consolidated it with that run by the Journal of Commerce but still spent $7,500 monthly the following winter “gathering and sending news from the capital.” That was a very large sum, but his service was so good that it “always beat the government mails, sometimes by as much as three days.” James L. Crouthamel, James Watson Webb: A Biography (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 68. See also Richard A. Schwarzlose, The Nation’s Newsbrokers. Vol. 1. The Formative Years: From Pretelegraph to 1865 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989), 20–22. 22. N. P. Willis, “Jottings,” New-York Mirror 2 (12/16/1843): 174. For more on Townsend’s personal background, see Charles H. Winfield, History of the County of Hudson, New Jersey (New York: Kennard and Hay, 1874), 294–95, and 1850 Federal Census, population schedule, Jersey City, NJ, NARA microfilm M432, roll 452, p. 344b.

— 

notes to pages 357–358

23. Publishers’ Weekly 55 (4/22/1899): 681. After Stringer and Townsend brought out The Sea Lions in 1849, Cooper switched to Putnam for his final book, but, as we shall see in chapter 15, he was hardly done with Townsend and his affiliates then or thereafter. 24. In my text, I focus on the American arrangements, which were far more complex than those obtaining between Cooper and Bentley. The latter, though, were tricky in their own regard. Cooper’s English earnings from the second part of Afloat and Ashore were worked out by take-and-give between him and Bentley. In a 2/18/1844 letter that Cooper did not receive personally owing to his absence in New York when it arrived in Cooperstown (see LJ 4:455–56), Bentley had shown the balance between them up to and including the first part of the Wallingford story to be fifty pounds in Cooper’s favor. From New York in April, Cooper drew for £200 against the two parts, informing Bentley that he would “draw for the balance, whatever it may be, when the second part is sent forward” (LJ 4:456). Assuming he was due the same amount for the second part as for the first, in August he drew for another £200 (the odd fifty pounds would cover what he was owed on the first part). Having decided that he could afford to pay Cooper only £250 in toto for the second part, Bentley honored the new draft but charged half of it against a future title, meaning that dealings between the two over Satanstoe would be confused from the outset, as we shall see later in this chapter. See Richard Bentley to JFC, 3/3/1845, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. In the United States, the per-copy cost to Cooper for part two was slightly more than twenty-eight cents: it was cheaper than part one because it was significantly shorter. For details and costs, see A&A CE 1:xxii–xxiii. The printers Fagan used were the Collins brothers (Tillinghast and Phillip), who had printed The Pathfinder and Wyandotté for Lea and Blanchard earlier in the decade (and also handled the reprint of Afloat and Ashore, part one). See as well John Fagan to JFC, 10/5/1844, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. 25. John Fagan to JFC, 10/5/1844. Fagan’s terse note was written on the bottom of a Union Transportation Line receipt acknowledging that firm’s acceptance of the seven boxes that binders Lindsay and Blakiston shipped to Cooper in New York. See also Lindsay and Blakiston’s bill, 10/5/1844, enclosed by Fagan in his note to Cooper. 26. It is worth stressing again how unusual this arrangement was, at least for Cooper. So unexampled was it that Spiller and Blackburn say of the book, “Printed first in Philadelphia by T. C. [i.e., T. K.] and P. G. Collins (stereotyper: Fagan) for Burgess, Stringer & Co., New York” (S&B 135), thus leaving Cooper out of the picture altogether and implying a partnership of sorts between Fagan and the New York firm that did not exist. But then their formal bibliographical description of the book (“philadelphia: / published by the author”) leaves Burgess and Stringer out of the picture altogether. I base my own interpretation on BAL 3912, the AAS catalogue description of the Philadelphia imprint (G527 C777 Mile 1844 Copy 1), and my own complete copy of the New York version. Wiley and Putnam, which like Burgess and Stringer retailed part two, was also involved in managing the book. Cooper wrote John Wiley at the end of

notes to pages 358–361

  

September, “Announce the Conclusion of Afloat and Ashore, as being ready for publication between the 10th & 15th Oct. Let Burgess & Stringer know the fact, if you please” (LJ 4:480). No contracts for Wiley’s involvement in part two appear to have survived, but we do know from Wiley’s accounting to Cooper that his firm also handled some transfers to Burgess and Stringer. See “JFC in a/c with Wiley & Putnam Cr,” 3/3/1845, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 27. Charleston Courier, 6/21/1844. 28. See Burgess and Stringer and JFC, memorandum of agreement, 3/4/1845, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 29. Another instance involves the episode during which Miles goes aboard the Ganges, captained then by Richard Dale. His description of Dale’s “manly, benevolent countenance” is based, of course, on Cooper’s long familiarity with the officer (A&A CE 1:91). 30. The reason given in the book for shunning Albany at the last minute is that Miles and those aboard his sloop have seen the self-centered, villainous Rupert Hardinge about to land there, too. They wish to avoid shocking Miles’s seriously ill sister Grace, who has been spurned by Rupert (she will die soon afterward). See especially A&A CE 2:16–19, 108. In this regard, I suspect that Hardinge embodied some of the animus Cooper felt against Bridgen. In Cooper’s psychic geography, Albany itself was both the place where he was on his own for the first time in his life and the place where he then made a new friend who would later resurface and prove to be his worst enemy. Cooper had to get past the later bad associations he had with Bridgen (and Albany) in order to recover better ones, as he was able to do by having Corny Littlepage go there on what is the first significant independent action of his own fictional life. 31. Cooper not only named and exactly located Coejimans (as he spelled the placename in Afloat and Ashore), but also gave the correct pronunciation of the difficult word, and its etymology, in a footnote: “Queemans, as pronounced; this is a Dutch, not an Indian name, and belongs to a reputable New York family” (A&A CE 2:20). I know of no earlier printed source giving that pronunciation. In a group of Hudson River novels featuring such invented New York places (and names) as Clawbonny, Satanstoe, Mooseridge, and Ravensnest, it is curious that he kept coming back to this one actual locale. 32. On the Ten Eyck family, its ties to the Coeymans family, and Thomas Bridgen’s relations to it, I have relied on Edward Ten Eyck, “Ten Eyck Family Genealogy,” online at http://ed.teneyck.com/FTree/FTree-1.html. On bequests that conveyed Coeymans property to Bridgen’s mother, see the will of Anthony Ten Eyck in Abstracts of Wills on File in the Surrogate’s Office, City of New York, vol. 8, 1771–1776, in Collections of the New-York Historical Society for the Year 1899 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1900), 287–88; and “Surrogate’s Sale,” New York Statesman, 10/24/1820. For supporting documents and discussion, including the 1817 letter mentioning the sleigh ride

— 

notes to pages 361–364

Cooper proposed to Bridgen, see Wayne Franklin, “Six Early James Fenimore Cooper Letters,” Resources for American Literary Study 37:1 (2014): 29–59. 33. While floating alone on the wreckage of his ship in the North Sea, Miles scans the “bright, glittering blank” that surrounds him—and thinks (unaccountably, as he himself admits) about the fate of all his property back home (see A&A CE 2:296–97). When Miles encounters Rupert Hardinge in New York City, his old friend will not invite him into his house because, as Miles notes, he is dressed like and in effect has become a mere sailor (see A&A CE 2:360–61). 34. David M. Ellis, Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1946), 235–67. 35. Charles W. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839– 1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 1–2. 36. Ibid., 314. One of the means by which change might have been achieved was the state constitutional convention of June 1846. As McCurdy points out, however, that had not been called in direct response to tenant grievances, and, because the relief it offered on leaseholds specifically excluded leases already in effect, it did nothing to alleviate those grievances (260–61). The more effective move on the part of the state was a law that taxed landlord rental income. When this went into effect in 1847, landlords (the first being John A. King, who owned the Blenheim Patent in Schoharie County) began reaching terms of sale with their tenants (272–73). 37. Philip S. Foner reprints the Anti-Rent “Declaration” in We, the Other People: Alternative Declarations of Independence . . . 1829–1875 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 60–62. On agricultural difficulties, see Ellis, Landlords and Farmers, 226–27, 230. The argument that the leasehold system was “inconsistent with the spirit of the institutions” was first voiced in 1835 by Democrat John C. Kemble of Troy in the New York State Senate. See “Perpetual Leases, &c.,” Albany Argus, 2/20/1835. But this apparently was a common Yankee observation. In 1827, the future abolitionist martyr Elijah P. Lovejoy visited Albany on his way west from Maine. He wrote back to a newspaper published near Augusta an account of Rensselaerswyck that stressed the “feudal tenure” by which its lands were held, and, while praising Stephen Van Rensselaer for his “liberality and benevolence, and the lenity with which he treats his unfortunate or delinquent tenants,” concluded that “such establishments are dangerous to the institutions of our country.” “Letter to the Editor, No. III,” Hallowell Gazette, 8/22/1827, signed “E. P. L.” 38. On Isaac Wilsey, see Henry Christman, Tin Horns and Calico: A Decisive Episode in the Emergence of Democracy (New York: Henry Holt, 1945), 25. 39. Roger Hecht, “Nature’s ‘Cunning Alphabet’: Pastoral Landscape and Politics in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” (PhD diss., Syracuse University, 2002), 33. 40. “Party competition for tenant voters not only sustained the Anti-Rent agitation, as conservatives charged throughout the era, but also frustrated the enactment of statesmanlike solutions.” McCurdy, Anti-Rent Era, 333.

notes to pages 365–366

  

41. Ellis, Landlords and Farmers, 245; Albany Argus, 2/4/1845. 42. In both Wyandotté (as noted in chapter 10) and Afloat and Ashore, Cooper had made tentative responses to the issue. He overtly mentioned Anti-Rentism in the preface to the second part of Afloat and Ashore (see A&A CE 2:1). Furthermore, at the very end of that book, written when the protests were rapidly spreading into new parts of New York, he held open the possibility that Miles, who denounces “the miserable sophistry on the subject of landlord and tenant,” might take up his pen again and condemn the movement in a new work (A&A CE 2:394–95). 43. Many readers agree with Marius Bewley’s judgment: “Satanstoe . . . is perhaps Cooper’s best novel after the Leatherstocking tales.” The Eccentric Design: Form in the Classic American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 71. For a discussion of the book’s detailed exploration of its New York setting, see Judith Richardson, “The ‘Littlepages’ of History: James Fenimore Cooper and Local History in the Lower Hudson Valley,” in Reading Cooper, Teaching Cooper, ed. Jeffrey Walker (New York: AMS Press, 2007), 342–50. 44. George Dekker’s view of the Littlepage novels as comprising “the first family chronicle novel in American literature” is confirmed and expanded by Jerome McGann, who calls the series “the first chronicle novel in any literature that treats the history of a single family over the span of multiple generations as an index of the history of a nation.” Of The Redskins, McGann adds, “it is not only the climax of [Cooper’s] great trilogy but a work of consummate and deliberate art.” George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), 218; Jerome McGann, “Fenimore Cooper’s Anti-aesthetic and the Representation of Conflicted History,” Modern Language Quarterly 73 (2012): 146, 155. Donald A. Ringe likewise terms Redskins a “much underrated novel.” “Cooper’s Littlepage Novels: Change and Stability in American Society,” American Literature 32 (1960): 290. 45. The English publication dates were as follows: Satanstoe, 6/10/1845; The Chainbearer, 11/19/1845; Ravensnest, 7/6/1846, according to Bentley PL. In the United States, Satanstoe was advertised as “just published and for sale” in Boston on 6/18/1845; The Chainbearer was noted in the press as published “in December”; and The Redskins was similarly noted as published “in July” (BAL 2:297, 298, 300). This pace is even more impressive when one notes that Cooper was also managing other projects during this period. Reviving the naval biography series in Graham’s Magazine, in abeyance since June 1844, he thus published the four last sketches between December 1845 and the following June. At just this time, Cooper also reached an agreement with Carey and Hart (on their initiative, apparently) to collect the sketches in a two-part book, for which he would be paid $500 but for which he would need to write several new items (see LJ 5:17–18, 54). Titled Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers, the collection would not be issued until March and May 1846, when Cooper was at work on The Redskins.

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notes to page 367

46. On Cooper’s source figure here, Andries Ten Eyck, see Edward W. Giddings, Coeymans and the Past (Coeymans: Tri-Centennial Committee, 1973), 26–27; and Stefan Bielinksi’s entries on Andries Ten Eyck and his kinsman Samuel Coeymans on “The People of Colonial Albany Live Here,” online at http://www.nysm.nysed. gov/albany/bios/t/andte4835.html and http://www.nysm.nysed.gov/albany/bios/c/ sacoeymans.html, respectively. 47. Dorothy Dondore long ago showed how much Cooper drew on Grant’s book for Satanstoe. See “The Debt of Two Dyed-in-the-Wool Americans to Mrs. Grant’s Memoirs: Cooper’s Satanstoe and Paulding’s The Dutchman’s Fireside,” American Literature 12 (1940): 52–58. Not mentioned at all by Grant, Pinksterfest as Cooper used it enhanced the book’s local color; but its primary role was to highlight the profound cultural contrast between New York and New England, partly through the inability of the Yankee schoolmaster Jason Newcome to either understand or accept the celebration (see SAT CE 65, 71). What Pinksterfest was, how Cooper knew about it, and how he deployed it in the novel are large questions that cannot be treated in full here. Beard generally assumed, largely because Cooper set Pinksterfest on the old New York City common in the novel, that he had witnessed the celebration there during his childhood. See LJ 6:204; see also James F. Beard, “The First History of Greater New York: Unknown Portions of Fenimore Cooper’s Last Work,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 37 (1953): 111. It seems more likely to me that Cooper had heard of the Manhattan celebration from his wife’s family. (When Corny is returning from “the Pinkster field” in chapter 6, he thus sees Lieut. Gov. James de Lancey’s “chariot carrying the younger children of the family to the field”—SAT CE 78. In the real James DeLancey’s chariot in 1757 would have been four-year-old John Peter, just of an age when recollections of such things as attending Pinksterfest on the common would have begun to strike root.) I agree with Kay S. House in her conclusion that Cooper instead saw “the Pinkster celebration” in Albany—not, though, as she thought, while he was at school there in 1801–1802 (the event took place before he arrived in the former year and after he left in the latter), but rather while on a sketchily documented trip home from Manhattan in the spring of 1806. See SAT CE xvii; also, James H. Pickering, “Fenimore Cooper and Pinkster,” New York Folklore Quarterly 22 (1966): 15–19. On the 1806 return from Manhattan, see JFC:EY 68 and 554–55n26. 48. With some exceptions, the ethnic/regional component to the Anti-Rent conflict was more important for Cooper than it has proved for recent analysts such as Reeve Huston, who in Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) regards material and political considerations as of much more significance. An approach more compatible with Cooper’s is that of Patricia Bonomi, who, while hardly overlooking class tensions, finds cross-border competition rooted in differing cultural formations of more significance. See Patricia Bonomi, A Factious People: Politics and Society in Colonial New York

notes to pages 368–370

  

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 179–228; see also Dixon Ryan Fox, Yankees and Yorkers (New York: New York University Press, 1940), 117–51. D. W. Meinig, “New York and Its Neighbors: Some Problems of Regional Interpretation,” in New Opportunities in a New Nation: The Development of New York after the Revolution, ed. Manfred Jonas and Robert V. Wells (Schenectady: Union College Press, 1982), 69–108, is especially valuable here. 49. Cooper had based the general situation of Captain Willoughby in Wyandotté on that of Grant’s father. He also borrowed various concrete details; see, for instance, the parallel use of an old beaver dam in WY CE 13–14 and Anne Macvicar Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady. With Sketches of Manners and Society in America, as They Existed Previous to the Revolution (New York: George Dearborn, 1836), 282–83. 50. Grant, Memoirs of an American Lady (Dearborn ed.), 288, 295–96, 147–48. English radical Praise-God Barebone was a leather-dresser who became a Puritan preacher and in 1653 was elected to the Nominated Assembly, which, owing to his odd name, was known as “Barebone’s Parliament.” 51. Ibid., 305–6. 52. Alexander C. Flick, ed., History of the State of New York, 10 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933–1937), 5:11. With regard to the naming of Vermont, I rely on George R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (New York: Random House, 1945), 166–67, and Stewart, American Place-Names: A Concise and Selective Dictionary for the Continental United States of America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 254, 510. 53. On Benning Wentworth, see Matt Bushnell Jones, Vermont in the Making, 1750– 1777 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1939), 20–67. Cooper himself openly criticized New York’s own practices in Wyandotté and continued to do so in the Littlepage books. 54. Jones, Vermont in the Making, 67–75. 55. On the lease terms, some clarification may help. A lessee could name three people, the term of the lease extending as long as the last one survived. If they all died before twenty-one years expired, the lease would have that default term. Usually, lives leases (for one, two, or three lives) and term leases (usually for twenty-one or more years) were distinct types; see Reeve Huston, Land and Freedom, 23. (Cooper was not consistent on the matter; see for instance SAT CE 311.) Livingston Manor tenants generally held their farms for two lives, while Philip Schuyler and other landlords followed the three-lives model used at Ravensnest. See Ellis, Landlords and Farmers, 227–28. 56. Here is one proof that the Cooper family’s experience in land development provided background for the trilogy. In much the same fashion following the War of 1812, the Coopers had employed an agent to classify all its properties in DeKalb township, St. Lawrence County, which mostly had been abandoned by the original purchasers and needed to be sold to new ones (see JFC:EY 186–87).

— 

notes to pages 371–374

57. Suppaan (or suppawn) was evidently an Algonquian term for cornmeal mush that was used especially in the Hudson Valley by the Dutch and then the English. See Nicoline van der Sijs, Cookies, Coleslaw, and Stoops: The Influence of Dutch on the North American Languages (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009), 142. 58. Thousandacres knows what he wants and he takes it, justifying his actions by appeals to nature and nature’s god. And, although Mordy goes on to draw Cooper’s mandatory political conclusion about the man—namely, that he is a quintessential demagogue—the landlord still concedes that, unlike modern demagogues, Timberman is so attached to his own flesh and blood that he often treats them with indulgence, as no demagogue would treat “the masses” who submit to his “arbitrary, selfish and ever unjust dictation” (CB 2:53). 59. Appropriately, we learn early in the book that Andries has been “cheated out of his substance by a Yankee before he was three-and-twenty” (CB 1:14–19). 60. In this regard, the finale resembles the similarly surprising one in The Bravo— which, I have argued in chapter 4, embodied Cooper’s much delayed reaction to the turn that the July Revolution had taken in France, with extra influence from the Polish uprising he had just become involved with in the summer of 1831. 61. Huston, Land and Freedom, 149. Two earlier fatalities had occurred as Cooper was at work on Satanstoe but seem not to have influenced him directly. See McCurdy, Anti-Rent Era, 165–66. 62. Jerome McGann, “Fenimore Cooper’s Anti-aesthetic,” 153. Hugh’s sense of superiority over his kinsman is totally unwarranted, as Cooper makes clear when he has Hugh become annoyingly clinical in describing Jaap’s physical features and mannerisms in a way to dehumanize the old family slave: “Yop brought two lips together that resembles thick pieces of overdone beefsteak, fastened his red-encircled gummy eyes on each of us in turn, pouted once more, working his jaws as if proud of the excellent teeth they still held, and said nothing” (RED 1:124). See also Hugh’s similar language on 1:125 (“his blubber lips”) and 1:131 (“ ‘champing’ his thick lips together, somewhat as an alligator snaps his jaws”). For an insightful discussion of Jaap as a focus for Cooper’s complex views on slavery, see the 1992 conference paper of James D. Wallace, “Cooper and Slavery,” online at the James Fenimore Cooper Society website, http://external. oneonta.edu/cooper/articles/ala/1992ala-wallace.html. I cannot agree with Patrick Chura’s description of The Chainbearer as “a pro-slavery novel,” which misses such points as these and also fails to follow out the Littlepage story to its 1840s update in The Redskins. Thoreau the Land Surveyor (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 9. 63. A. N. Kaul rightly pointed out in The American Vision: Actual and Ideal Society in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963) that by dint of “Uncle Ro’s financial dealings regarding the development of Satanstoe into the town of Dibbletonborough, the Littlepages are themselves in the business of speculation” (89). Cooper’s view carries personal meaning: the orchard of his own favorite apple,

notes to pages 375–377

  

the Newtown Pippin, has been partly leveled in order to clear the way for the failed development. 64. On William P. Van Rensselaer, the patroon’s eldest son by his second wife, I rely in part on his obituary, New York Observer and Chronicle, 1/2/1873. 65. McCurdy, Anti-Rent Era, 14. Probably among the Manhattan properties was the house at 554 Broadway, owned by the old patroon, in which the Coopers had lived as renters in 1822–1823 (see JFC:EY 364). 66. Van Rensselaer’s second wife, Cornelia Paterson, was only a few years older than the patroon’s son and namesake. She had eight children, the youngest being Euphemia, born in 1816, who did not marry John Van Buren but rather the wealthy Hudson River landowner John Church Cruger. W. W. Spooner, “The Van Rensselaer Family,” American Historical Magazine 2 (1907): 133–36. On Cornelia’s modest background, which conceivably influenced her attitudes toward property, see John F. O’Connor, William Paterson: Lawyer and Statesman, 1745–1806 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979), ix, 243, 270. 67. Stephen Van Rensselaer IV was sent by his father to Princeton “to cure him of ‘volatility, arrogance, and folly,’ ” as the patroon’s father-in-law, William Paterson (then looking out for the boy), put it in an 1805 letter. Seven years later, while in Europe, Stephen “roused his father’s ire by considering marriage to a lady abroad.” William Bertrand Fink, “Stephen Van Rensselaer: The Last Patroon” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1950), 246–47. 68. Some of what this Democrat says seems to echo Cooper’s own private views. I am thinking of his comments to the crowd that Hugh Littlepage, who he thinks is still in Paris, is even then “squandering your hard earnings in riotous living, according to the best standards of aristocracy. He lives in the midst of abundance, dresses richly and fares richly, while you and yours are eating the sweat of your brows” (RED 1:239–40; emphasis in original). Cooper’s observations on the young Van Rensselaer heirs in Europe, or his reflections on “galoches” and wet streets and expensive carriages, lie somewhere behind this comment. Earlier in the book, Cooper has Seneca Newcome, Jason’s son, say to the disguised Uncle Ro, “I hope you’re no patroon—no aristocrat?” When Uncle Ro in his assumed German accent feigns ignorance of the terms (“I don’t know vat isht badroon, or vat isht arishtocrat”), Seneca replies with the lie he believes in: “A patroon is a nobleman who owns another man’s land” (RED 1:73). On one level, that is pure Anti-Rent cant. But on another level, and one Cooper was certainly aware of, Seneca’s definition nicely captures the complex reality of the New York situation. Leases in fee vested ownership in the tenants, who could legally sell their leases, but also in the landlords, who were due a portion of the proceeds. So in that sense, a patroon did own someone else’s land. 69. There is much debate in The Redskins, both in the action and in the narrator’s rants, but Cooper’s happiest image for the current state of American politics comes

— 

notes to pages 378–383

instead in his extended improvisation on the theme of whittling—a destructive habit often described, lamented, and laughed about in the press at the time. See RED 1:110–14. 70. See McCurdy, Anti-Rent Era, 160–61, 234–35. 71. The Letters of James Kirke Paulding, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 432. Paulding asked very particular questions about the terms Cooper had reached with his publishers. 72. The agreement’s financial terms were fairly straightforward. The firm was to pay Cooper a total of $1,050 for its limited rights: a third on publication day, with notes at sixty and ninety days to cover the remaining thirds. The agreement furthermore specified that the firm was to set the retail price at seventy-five cents and keep the wholesale cost at less than sixty cents. The single exception came in an addendum allowing the publishers, at their option, to bind “as many copies of this work as they please and put them at prices higher than seventy-five cents.” But any such copies were to be exempted from the calculations that would allow Cooper to print the book through other means once the firm approached the contractual maximum. If the firm set aside five hundred higher-priced bound copies, for instance, Cooper might make other arrangements as soon as its inventory of regular copies dropped to twenty-nine hundred. JFC and Burgess and Stringer, memorandum of agreement, 3/4/1845, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. The proceeds of this arrangement for Cooper were slender, especially when Fagan’s costs were included. The stereotyper billed Cooper on 5/13/1845, for a total of $416.80, which included boxes and extra proof sheets (the last evidently for England). This subtraction left Cooper a net gain on the book of $633.20. “J. Fenimore Cooper Esq. to J. Fagan, Dr.,” Philadelphia, 5/13/1845, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 73. On the overdraft, see note 24 above. Richard Bentley to JFC, 3/3/1845, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Cooper therefore received £200 net on Satanstoe from Bentley, equivalent to about $1,000. On the London date, see Bentley PL. Bentley began advertising the book as about to be released as early as 4/12/1845, but not until 6/7/1845 was it stated as ready to be published the following Monday (6/9/1845), and it was finally listed in the Literary Gazette as on sale by 6/14/1845; the Boston Evening Transcript advertised it as “just published” on 6/18/1845 (BAL 2:296–97; S&B, 138, give “after July 4, 1845” as the American publication date, based on a letter from Cooper to his wife of that date, for which see LJ 5:43–44, but that is clearly in error). See also Anson Little, copyright receipts for Satanstoe, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper learned in October that Satanstoe had been selling well. He reported to his wife from New York City, “The edition of 3600 [sic] is nearly sold, and Burgess is negotiating for more” (LJ 5:73). 74. For Fagan’s charges of just under $400, see “J. Fenimore Cooper Esq. to J. Fagan Dr.,” Philadelphia, 10/11/1845, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City.

notes to pages 383–384

  

75. Cooper received $1,050 in three installments for the right to print thirty-five hundred copies from his plates. Burgess and Stringer and JFC, memorandum of agreement, New York, 10/15/1845, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. The London date is confirmed by Bentley PL. See also Anson Little to JFC, 10/21/1845 and 12/21/1845, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 76. Probably Cooper had written his way to the book’s twelfth chapter by the latter time. In that chapter, he inserted a longish, very heated digression on the Court of Errors—obviously spurred by that body’s decision on the Stone suit, made public late in December (see RED 1:186–87; also 2:41–42). 77. Having suffered some sort of health crisis in Cambridge in the fall of 1845, Paul was ordered home to recover. Seeking out advice for his son from New York physicians and then others in Philadelphia, where his son joined him on November 20, took some of Cooper’s time away from The Redskins (see LJ 5:96–97, 104–6). Susan evidently was out of danger by the time Cooper mentioned her to Bentley in May 1846, but eleven months later he informed Shubrick that she was then “slowly recovering from the most severe illness I have ever known her to endure,” either a long postlude to the original trouble or a fresh onset (LJ 5:204; see also 236). She and other members of her family had long suffered from what at the time was called asthma; see, for instance, JFC to PFC, 3/30/1839: “Your dear mother has passed a very comfortable winter, so far as her asthma is concerned” (LJ 3:372). As we shall see in chapter 16, her death in the winter of 1852 was likewise attributed to that condition. Some further delay in Cooper’s finishing of The Redskins arose from the 1/28/1846 death of Mary Storrs Cooper, his nephew Richard’s wife, and that of the novelist’s niece, Sarah Sabina Comstock (the Michigan speculator’s wife), some two weeks later, losses Cooper mentioned explicitly to Bentley (see LJ 5:117, 148–49). 78. On May 28, Cooper updated Bentley, who (having heard nothing for some months about the novel and having advertised the book as early as March) had written with his worries. Cooper explained the delay, reassuring Bentley he at last had come to Philadelphia “to finish off, as fast as possible the new book” (LJ 5:148–49; BAL 2:298). 79. The London date is confirmed by Bentley PL. See also Anson Little, copyright receipts, 6/11/1846 and 8/4/1846, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. In confirmation of these production details, the preface in Bentley’s edition, Ravensnest; or, The Redskins, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1846), 1:xv, is dated “June, 1846.” The American edition gave no date. 80. For the full price of $1,500, paid to him on the spot (a significant accommodation), Cooper allowed the firm to publish The Redskins from his plates for a period of four years, with no limit on copies. He also gave it the right to produce and sell “three other several works called the ‘Chainbearer,’ ‘Miles Wallingford’ [i.e., both parts of Afloat and Ashore] and ‘Satanstoe,’ ” again from his plates, for a period of four years beginning on 3/1/1846. JFC and Burgess and Stringer, memorandum of agreement,

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notes to pages 384–385

4/1/1846, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. The firm also agreed to take custody of Cooper’s plates and return them, at the end of the agreement, in good condition. The date in question synchronized this smaller agreement with that by which, on 1/5/1845, Cooper had granted the firm permission to print (for five years) eleven of the older books for which he owned rights and plates. Because he could not in 1845 accurately recall all the titles then in his ownership, that contract allowed for him to check with Lea and Blanchard to determine the list. A document headed “Mr Cooper owns Copy Right of,” undated (but ca. 1845), in JFC Coll., box 20, YCAL, evidently was the result of that inquiry. It names fourteen books published between Precaution (1820) and Wyandotté (1843), including Ned Myers, for all of which, in the firm’s understanding, Cooper owned the copyrights. The list omitted Mohicans, Prairie, Red Rover, Notions, Water-Witch, the three European novels, the travel books, and Monikins. A second list on the same document asserts that Cooper owned the plates for the Home novels, Wingand-Wing, Wyandotté, and Ned Myers. See my treatment of the subject of that omnibus contract in “ ‘One More Scene’: The Marketing Context of Cooper’s ‘Sixth’ LeatherStocking Tale,” in Leather-Stocking Redux; or, Old Tales, New Essays, ed. Jeffrey Walker (New York: AMS Press, 2011), 234–36. 81. From Bentley, Cooper received £250 for The Redskins (LJ 5:115). Fagan billed Cooper for $437.21 total, including the shipping boxes. “J. Fenimore Cooper, Esq. to J. Fagan Dr.,” 6/3/1846, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. The title was deposited on June 6 and the book on August 4. Anson Little receipts, 6/6/1846 and 8/4/1846, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper’s gross income for the book is a bit hard to calculate because of the add-ons in the Burgess and Stringer contract. If we leave the “three other several books” aside, the total from both sides of the Atlantic was about $2,700. As Cooper’s cost for the plates was $437.21, he netted (leaving aside his usual traveling expenses) around $2,260. C HAPTER 13.   FLORIDA AND THE PAC IFIC 1. George R. Graham to JFC, 4/3/1846, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. A New York meeting between the two men set for early April having been canceled because Graham’s wife was ill, the publisher wrote this letter to indicate what he had in mind. Cooper still owed the magazine five more naval biographies, for which he had already received $500 in payment, and wanted to keep that money and complete the series later. Graham, eager for the new tale, was insistent on financial clarity. In the April letter, he released Cooper from the naval sketches contract and applied the sum already paid on them to the new project, but indicated he would be happy to pay for the sketches again at a later point. He also agreed to pay Cooper a further $500 “for a novel to run through ten numbers of Graham’s, in chapters or parts of ten pages or more—the first part to be delivered by 10th of May.” The two reached formal terms in June. See George R. Graham and JFC, memorandum of agreement, 6/3/1846, JFC Coll., box 20, YCAL.

notes to pages 386–387

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2. George R. Graham and JFC, memorandum of agreement, 6/3/1846. 3. Cooper sounded a similar note in a letter to the Louisiana writer Charles E. Gayarré seven months later: “My time . . . is nearly done. At 57 the world is not apt to believe a man can write fiction, and I have long seen that the country is already tired of me. . . . My clients, such as they are, are in Europe, and long have been, and there is no great use in going out of my way to endeavor to awaken a feeling in this country that has long gone out” (LJ 5:178). His sales in the United States did not support this somewhat self-indulgent view. 4. The tale’s eventual extension to fifteen numbers was agreed to in George R. Graham and JFC, memorandum of agreement, draft, undated (but probably December 1846 or January 1847), JFC paps., box 5, AAS. Cooper, who received an extra $500 for the enlargement, explained the reason for it (that is, to allow Bentley to publish the story as a full three-volume novel) in his canny letter to the Londoner of 7/20/1846 (see LJ 5:155–56). In its final form, the tale appeared in Graham’s Magazine starting in November 1846 and ending in March 1848. There were actually seventeen installments rather than fifteen because the final two (original numbers fourteen and fifteen) were both split in two. The tale ran in Bentley’s Miscellany across the same period, also in seventeen installments. On the background discussion of possibilities for Cooper in that outlet, and Bentley’s offer in the present case, see Richard Bentley to JFC, 11/29/1842 and 6/25/1846, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. Cooper’s basic assumption was that Graham’s Magazine would pay production costs and provide him the basis for American copyright, and more importantly would supply him with proof sheets for free that he conceivably could peddle overseas. 5. Cooper had a bit of a scare in February 1848 when a letter from Bentley suggested that some sheets of “Islets of the Gulf ” had not arrived in London. In the novelist’s answer of the tenth, we can sense the sort of detailed surveillance he necessarily kept on all parts of his far-flung literary business, even to tracking the ships carrying his wares eastward, like many another merchant: “All of Spike has gone forward . . . in duplicate, and no vessel has been lost in which any part of it was sent” (LJ 5:280). For Bentley’s alarm and his later reassurance that, as Cooper had predicted, the sheets had been in the Londoner’s hands all along, see Richard Bentley to JFC, 12/4/1847 and 3/11/1848, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 6. In the preface to this edition, Cooper explained that the unaccustomed process of “writing to a name” (that is, a prechosen title), as opposed to deriving one “from the incidents of the book itself,” had motivated the change (JT 1:iii). 7. Plans for the New York book version had been laid some months earlier. Burgess and Stringer had signed an unusual double contract in May 1847 covering both this book and The Crater, which was to appear in print some months before Jack Tier. The terms for both works were identical except for timing. For Jack Tier, Cooper was to have the work stereotyped early enough to supply plates for Burgess and Stringer by 3/1/1848, when

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notes to pages 388–389

the firm would be allowed, by this contract and Graham’s, to “immediately publish said book.” (Fagan was ready to send the plates to the New Yorkers early in February—see John Fagan to JFC, 2/2/1848, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL.) Burgess and Stringer could print and publish five thousand copies at once and bring out as many later “editions” (the contract’s term for fresh printings) as it could sell, as long as each subsequent printing included no more than a thousand copies. The right to publish the book would terminate on 3/5/1850 (congruent with the omnibus contract executed for The Redskins), when the plates would be returned to Cooper. Burgess, Stringer and Co. with JFC, memorandum of agreement, 5/6/1847, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Captain Spike; or, the Islets of the Gulf appeared in London on 3/11/1848. In the United States, the book proceeded equally well. Burgess, Stringer and Co. published it in New York in March, perhaps as early as March 4, when it was announced in an advertisement. Bentley PL supplies the English date. For the American book edition, the matter is somewhat less certain. Under the March advertisement’s heading (“Burgess, Stringer & Co.’s List of New Books, corrected daily”) is the following notice: “Jack Tier, or the Florida Reef, 2 vols., 50 cents, excellent Reading during these dull winter evenings.” New York Herald, 3/4/1848. Other sources suggest a somewhat later date. See S&B 148; BAL 2:301. 8. For my treatment of the New York setting in The Water-Witch, see “Cooper’s Magical Water-Witch,” Nautilus 1 (2010): 62–75. 9. As to Spike’s covert purposes, when the possibility of turning about and going to sea via Sandy Hook is discussed later on, he asserts, “I’ve no wish to be parading the brig before the town” (JT 1:38). 10. Recalling the 1809 “passage of the Wasp through Hell Gate” in an 1831 letter from Paris to William B. Shubrick, Cooper added that he “had left the ship at Whitestone” (a neck in Flushing) “and was dining at Gibbs’ place when she came down” (LJ 2:59). 11. On Gibbs’s death and the future fate of the property at Sunswick, see Vincent Seyfried, “Ravenswood,” in Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1085–86. 12. It is precisely the same hazard that, in The Water-Witch, had caused Captain Ludlow to bring the Coquette to a sudden, creaking halt lest he wreck on it. Saving his ship, he thereby nonetheless loses his chase (see WW 2:150). The Hog’s Back and the Pot (a whirlpool caused by subsurface rocks) both lay in the passage between Pot Cove (Astoria) and Ward’s Island, just where ships would turn east and enter Hell Gate proper. 13. I do not ignore the ways in which “Islets of the Gulf ” is also very much a rewriting in realistic form of The Red Rover, as several critics have noted. I shall pick up the issue of realism later in my discussion. 14. Thomas L. Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 203. Although Cooper may be less insistent at future breaks, the narrative does drive forward relentlessly. It took

notes to pages 389–391

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him half of The Water-Witch to get Tom Tiller’s ship going up the East River in 1830, whereas in this tale the passage begins almost immediately. 15. In the transformation of the Molly Swash, as in some other details of the vessel, its cargo, and its master, Cooper was drawing on his knowledge of the notorious San Nicholas case of 1836. That case, as discussed in my sixth chapter, involved a vessel that had arrived in New York in November 1835 as a schooner but had been rerigged as a brig before it prepared to leave on a suspected slaving cruise to Africa. It will be recalled that Cooper served as foreman of the grand jury that recommended federal charges against the vessel’s captain and several other individuals. That the San Nicholas outran a steamboat chartered by federal officials to pursue it suggests another source for details in Spike’s career early in the novel. 16. Even when he had Spike decide to head for cover into “Hempstead Harbour a few leagues ahead,” the close familiarity is evident. As I have suggested elsewhere, when Cooper made a hurried 1820 trip from Angevine, his last Westchester house, to Sag Harbor in order to tend to his whaleship, he apparently avoided Manhattan—and may well have crossed directly from Mamaroneck to North Hempstead (see JFC:EY 258). Certainly the sharp description in “Islets of the Gulf ” suggests embedded knowledge, as in Spike’s comment: “It is a deep bay, and has high land to darken the view. I don’t think the brig could be seen at midnight by anything outside, if she was once fairly up that water a mile or two.” When his vessel has pushed inside fully half a league, in fact, it acquires “a fine dark background of hills” that throws it into the shadows, concealing it completely from prying eyes out on the Sound (JT 1:62). 17. Philbrick has argued that nautical fiction in the 1830s, including that published in magazines (especially Graham’s), formed the dead end of the romantic course Cooper had opened in the 1820s. Writers such as Charles J. Peterson, whose Cruising in the Last War had appeared in Graham’s Magazine from 1838 to 1840, had exploited Cooper’s early mode, often in a derivative and unconvincing manner. Peterson’s novel nonetheless “set the pattern for the flood of cheap nautical novels which inundated the American book market in the 1840s.” Philbrick, Development of American Sea Fiction, 190. 18. That he did not use the modern names I employ (Isla Contoy and Cabo Catoche) momentarily muddles the geography of the Yucatan passage: “As respects the vessel,” he actually wrote, “nothing worthy of notice occurred until she had passed Loggerhead Key, and was fairly launched in the Gulf of Mexico” (JT 1:122). “Loggerhead Key,” a common name in the area, was then used for what I call Isla Contoy, and it indeed marked the point where the Gulf of Mexico waters were said to begin. See Edmund M. Blunt, The American Coast Pilot, Containing the Courses and Distances between the Principal Harbours, Capes, and Headlands, on the Coast of North and South America, 10th ed. (New York: Edmund M. Blunt for William Seymour, 1822), 337. There is also a Loggerhead Key among the Dry Tortugas, but Cooper does not use the name in connection to that group.

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notes to page 393

19. Sharks matter little in Melville’s first two books, one might add. For a separate argument on Melville’s possible debt to Jack Tier (in Pierre), see Daryl E. Jones, “ ‘Chronometricals and Horologicals’: A Possible Source in Cooper’s Jack Tier,” American Transcendental Quarterly 58 (1985): 55–61. 20. The provenance is given on the National Gallery of Art’s website at http:// www.nga.gov/collection/gallery/gg60b/gg60b-46471-prov.html. There was also a mezzotint, produced in 1779 by the accomplished London engraver Valentine Green, which Cooper probably could have seen even more easily. Certainly Green’s engraving was known in the United States—and was copied there by Cooper’s friend, William Dunlap, who took his version to Britain in 1784, presenting it as proof of his talents to the great Benjamin West, as Dunlap recalled in his 1834 history of American art. William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States of America, ed. Rita Weiss, with an Introduction by James Thomas Flexner, 3 vols. (New York: Dover, 1969), 1:255–56; Alfred Whitman, British Mezzotinters: Valentine Green (London: A. H. Bullen, 1902), 145. Copley’s painting “graphically documents what appears to be the earliest authenticated record of a shark attack,” according to medical historian Gordon Bendersky, “The Original Jaws Attack,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 (2002): 426. 21. Just before the reunion, Shubrick in his last Pensacola letter wrote: “As I am to see you so soon . . . I will not put on paper the thousand things that I have to say, but will keep them for some of our regular quarterdeck drifts after the discussion of a glorious chowder and a few bottles of claret.” William B. Shubrick to JFC, 7/4/1840, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL. 22. “Naval,” Southern Patriot (Charleston), 2/19/1839. William Cooper is explicitly listed here and in other press reports as the “Commodore’s Clerk.” 23. “Naval” [from Boston], New Hampshire Gazette, 8/4/1840. 24. The Macedonian during Shubrick’s Florida command spent many months away from the navy yard. Having proceeded by way of Turk’s Island, Santo Domingo, and the southern shore of Cuba (Spike’s initial course), it arrived in West Florida by mid-March 1839. It left on a six-week tour of the Gulf the next month, accompanied by several sloops and the frigate Constitution, which it met off Vera Cruz in May. Later in the year, on December 18, Shubrick took the Macedonian on another, even longer cruise to Cuba and the Windward Islands, from which it did not return until April 1840. That June, the flagship departed for Vera Cruz and from there proceeded to New Orleans, then returned to Pensacola one last time before its July departure for Boston. These details will suggest the common background of experience that Shubrick and Cooper’s nephew brought to discussions they had with the novelist individually or together. “Pensacola, April 6.—Naval,” New Hampshire Gazette, 4/30/1839; Alexandria Gazette, 5/30/1839; “Pensacola, April 4.—Naval,” Charleston Courier, 4/21/1840; “Correspondence of the Army and Navy Chronicle,” Charleston Courier, 4/23/1840;

notes to pages 394–395

  

New-York Spectator, 6/25/1840. William Cooper (“U.S. Frigate Macedonian | Pensacola Bay”) to JFC, 3/29/1839, and same (“Island of St. Thomas”) to same, 2/10/1840, both in JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. 25. New-York Spectator, 11/7/1840; “Correspondence of the Boston Atlas,” Philadelphia North American, 1/23/1841; Portland (Maine) Advertiser, 6/29/1841; “Pensacola, June 26,” Charleston Courier, 7/12/1841. For William Cooper’s listing, see, e.g., “Naval,” Charleston Courier, 8/2/1841. 26. William Cooper to JFC, 7/2/1841, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 27. Russell Jarvis, A Biographical Notice of Com. Jesse D. Elliott (Philadelphia: For the author, 1835), 260–92. In an 1835 letter addressed to Navy Secretary Levi Woodbury from the Boston Navy Yard (a subsequent posting), Elliott told of having dispatched several vessels from Pensacola to the Windward Islands with two-and-a-half months of supplies, which, however, proved inadequate because it took them so long to round “Tortugas Shoals” (302–3). 28. On Bolton at Pensacola, see George E. Buker, Swamp Sailors in the Second Seminole War (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997), 19. 29. Ned Myers’s pension file contains various documents indicating Bolton’s active involvement with the seaman’s pension efforts. Several of these are signed by others but endorsed by Bolton, who sent them on to the Navy Department with his own statements in early 1838. See Navy Invalid file 1109, “Edward Myers, Seaman, U.S. Schooner Scourge (1814),” Pension Application Files, War of 1812, Death or Disability, NARA, Washington. A final possible influence on Cooper involved the young naval officer Matthew F. Maury, a good friend of Bolton (with whom, under Cmdre. Jacob Jones, he had participated in the first U.S. naval circumnavigation in 1829–1830) and in future years famous as the virtual founder of the field of oceanography. Maury was the author of many technical papers and books but also of popular sea pieces under the pseudonyms “Harry Bluff ” and “Will Watch.” See Chester G. Hearn, Tracks in the Sea: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans (New York: International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 2002). Maury and Cooper were not well-acquainted (see LJ 3:301–2), and it is not entirely clear what Maury publications Cooper read. One he almost certainly knew, however, was a long and especially influential piece, published anonymously in October 1843, that called for upgrading the Pensacola Navy Yard and fortifying the Dry Tortugas, which Maury, articulating a view especially prominent among Southerners at the time, called “the most exposed and important point along the whole extent of our sea-coast, and the key to all the wealth that the Mississippi pours down into the Gulf.” “The Maritime Interest of the South and West,” Southern Quarterly Review 4 (1843): 309–10. On Maury’s authorship of this article, see the attribution in Southern Literary Messenger 11 (1845): 650. (Cooper more probably saw the article in the Army and Navy Chronicle, which copied it in full in its 11/23/1843 and 11/30/1843 issues. It was also widely noticed and reprinted in newspapers at the time.) In Afloat and

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notes to pages 395–397

Ashore, Cooper may have poked fun at Maury’s early ideas on ocean currents, later important for Melville’s portrait of Ahab; see A&A CE 1:509. 30. K. Jack Bauer, The Mexican War, 1846–1848 (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 6–8. Cooper would have been especially interested in news about his longtime friend Conner, with whom he had become acquainted during his own naval service. Wounded in the victory of the Hornet over HMS Penguin in 1815, Conner was the subject of a satiric drawing Cooper included in a letter the following year to his sister-in-law Caroline DeLancey, who had taken a fancy to the young officer (see LJ 1:33–34). In 1841, Cooper had written Conner in his effort to secure some appointment for his nephew William (see LJ 4:186–88). The following year, Shubrick passed to Cooper through “our friend Conner” information for Cooper’s LDANO sketch of Shubrick’s brother John. William B. Shubrick to JFC, 8/24/1842, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL. 31. See Bauer, Mexican War, 46–47. Spike’s flour barrels also bolster the case for Cooper’s familiarity with Maury’s 1843 article. In stressing the large and growing importance of Mississippi and hence Gulf commerce, Maury repeatedly played down the competing significance of New York, using its grain exports as a representative commodity (see “Maritime Interest,” 326–33). When Spike chooses to conceal the gunpowder casks inside flour barrels, he is setting himself up for challenge from Lieutenant Wallace of the Poughkeepsie, who in response to Spike’s statement of his nominal cargo says: “Flour! Would you not do better to carry that to Liverpool? The Mississippi must be almost turned into paste by the quantity of flour it floats to market” (JT 1:110). Wallace and other officers repeat this incredulous comment several times (see JT 1:113, 117, 119). That it is utterly consistent with Maury’s analysis again suggests Cooper’s reliance on that man’s article in this and other regards. 32. Cooper had also critiqued this short version of Decatur’s toast in Wyandotté: “ ‘Our country right, or wrong,’ is a high sounding maxim, but it is scarcely the honest man’s maxim” (WY CE 65). 33. Cooper’s good friend and peace activist William Jay pointed to the saying “Our country, right or wrong,” as rampant among the politicians who in his view had foisted the Mexican American War on the American people. See A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War (Boston: Benjamin B. Mussey, 1848), 263. For an example of the cry’s contemporary use consider this report of a public meeting in Baltimore’s Monument Square: “From the walls of yonder monument, we will unfurl our banner, and inscribe upon it the watch word of Decatur—‘Our country—right or wrong.’ ” Baltimore Sun, 5/25/1846. For religious critiques of the war and the Decatur slogan, see The Biblical Repository and Classical Review 2 (1846): 609; The Covenanter: Devoted to the Principles of the Reformed Presbyterian Church 2 (1846): 38; and The Oberlin Evangelist 8 (1846): 94. 34. Decatur’s toast as originally reported in 1816 was, “Our Country; in her intercourse with other nations may she be always right; and always successful, right or

notes to pages 397–400

  

wrong.” Daily National Intelligencer, 6/22/1816. Robert J. Allison, Stephen Decatur: American Naval Hero, 1779–1820 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 182–85, provides context and slightly different versions from other contemporary papers. The important first clause is omitted by Cooper, as it often was by others. 35. Jaime Javier Rodríguez, The Literatures of the U.S.–Mexican War: Narrative, Time, and Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 145. 36. Robert W. Merry, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 240– 42, 259; Bauer, Mexican War, 37, 52–63. 37. Cooper confirmed the date of the book’s action by later mentioning the destruction caused to Key West by a hurricane that struck “a very few weeks after the closing scenes of this tale” (JT 2:189–90). The same storm is later called “the hurricane of 1846, which is known to have occurred only a few months [sic] later” and which in this passage is credited with dislodging Spike’s corpse from its shallow grave, to leave his “bones among the wrecks and relics of the Florida reef ” (JT 2:212–13). Widely called “the Havana Hurricane” because of the devastation it earlier caused to that city, the storm in question hit Key West on October 10–11, 1846, and then passed up the west coast of Florida. See Corey Malcolm, “Understanding the Key West Hurricane of 1846,” Florida Keys Sea Heritage Journal 20 (2012): 1–15. The references to it late in the tale help date Cooper’s work on the manuscript. The earliest he probably learned of the storm would be the first week of November, when press reports began appearing in the Northeast. See “Hurricane at Key West,” Boston Post, 11/3/1846, which includes a letter attributed to an officer of the revenue service whose cutter was lost in the storm. Assuming that Cooper’s 9/22/1846 comment to Bentley about the tale being virtually done by then (see LJ 5:169) was relatively accurate, it remains true that the last two installments, in which the hurricane is mentioned, were not written until after early November. 38. Outside the usefulness of the two U.S. victories for his plot, Cooper had political reasons for dwelling on them. In his view, they exemplified the professionalism of “American officers of inferior rank”—that is, West Point graduates who, now in middle age, had been kept for years at modest ranks owing to a lack of opportunity in the service. Like his earlier arguments about the navy’s inadequate promotion ladder, Cooper’s digression on the army in Jack Tier suggests his wide range of acquaintance among the officer corps in both services and his advocacy for what he thought their—and the nation’s—best interests. He went so far as to invoke a recent kerfuffle whereby the second regiment of dragoons, having been disbanded, was reinstated, but instead of the commissions going “to those who had fairly earned them by long privations and faithful service, they were given, with one or two exceptions, to strangers” (JT 2:105–6). 39. Spike’s dark character may have owed something to episodes of the Mexican American War that troubled Cooper, especially M. C. Perry’s reportedly fierce bombardment of Tabasco in the fall of 1846, about which the novelist wrote heatedly to

— 

notes to pages 400–402

Shubrick the following January (see LJ 5:186–87; the action was actually less severe than first reported). Over time, Cooper’s views on the war tended to moderate. In his new preface to The Spy, prepared in March 1849 for George P. Putnam, he looked back on the then-completed conflict with a bit more assurance: “A great change has come over the country since this book was originally written. The nation is passing from the gristle into the bone, and the common mind is beginning to keep even pace with the growth of the body politic” (Spy CE 21). Even so, this is not necessarily the boastful statement it might seem to be. What Cooper meant was that the nation had come of age as a force to be reckoned with—for good, he hoped—and in the face of European power especially. After the turmoil of Europe in 1848, he thought the need for American strength was critical. Cooper’s final word on the Mexican American War came in the summer of 1851, when, already seriously ailing, he dictated a new section for his naval history mostly covering that conflict’s Pacific phase. This was first published in the expanded threevolume version of the History of the Navy of the United States that appeared from Putnam in 1853 and again in 1854 (see HN 1854 1:12). 40. Luis A. Iglesias, “ ‘And Yet He May Be Our Man’: The Cross-Dressing Sailor in Cooper’s Early Sea Novels,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65 (2010): 283–314. On Roderick in particular, see 298. 41. Ibid., 303. 42. Ibid., 288. The motif of the cross-dressing female was derived from the stage, where casting and costuming practices often would reveal the temporary masquerade to the audience. When the motif was adapted for fiction, those practices of course were not in play—one reason (but only one) why instances in Cooper are imbued with such playful ambiguity. 43. Among the critics, in addition to Iglesias, who have pondered Molly Swash’s nature and role in the novel, and what the figure can tell us about female characters in Cooper generally, are the following: Leslie Fielder, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Criterion, 1960), 211–12 (at the very end of his treatment of Cooper, race, and homoeroticism); Kay S. House, Cooper’s Americans (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 17–46 (she reads Molly Swash as an instance of Cooper’s supposed “viragos”); and Robert K. Martin, “ ‘No Longer Revolting’: Cross-Dressing in Cooper’s Jack Tier,” English Studies in Canada 23 (1997): 285–95. 44. Cooper asked for £350 up front, although he said he thought it worth £400 (see LJ 5:199–200). Bentley in his reply accepted the former price; Richard Bentley to JFC, 4/29/1847, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 45. Once again, Cooper was to arrange for stereotyping (by Fagan), and he promised to have the plates ready by July 15 so that the New Yorkers might publish as early as August 7, if they wished. Burgess and Stringer had the right to print five thousand copies of The Crater and to issue as many other “editions” (that is, printings) as they wished, as long as each consisted of at least one thousand copies. Cooper was to regain the plates

notes to pages 402–403

  

on 3/5/1850. For these rights, and the like ones allowed them on the Florida tale, the publishers were to pay Cooper a total of $1,800. JFC and Burgess and Stringer, memorandum of agreement, 5/6/1847, and JFC to John Fagan, Dr., receipted bill, 9/18/1847, both on Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper had told Bentley in March, a bit more optimistically, that he would send the first shipment of proofs for The Crater by July 1 and later promised that the whole would have reached London by the start of August (see LJ 5:199, 215). 46. On August 12, the day after he mentioned the “40 pages,” Cooper reported to his wife that only six chapters remained to be read, “and five to be mottoed”—indicating his not untypical practice of inserting epigraphs well after a book was written, perhaps as late, as this comment seems to indicate, as the first review of proofs (LJ 5:230). Four days later, on Sunday (8/15/1847), he extended the same (still unsent) letter, informing her that about four more days of work remained (LJ 5:231). 47. Bentley PL gives the English date. On the basis of Cooper’s earlier assurances, Bentley had begun advertising the book as early as July 3. By September 18, he at last announced it for September 25 (BAL 2:300). One curious fact about Fagan’s plates is that, as originally prepared, they mixed up the order of several pages in Cooper’s preface, so that in some early copies of the American edition page vi follows iii, to be followed in turn by pages v and iv, an error corrected in later copies. BAL 2:300 explains the mix-up in the preface; copies of each state are in the author’s collection. The papercovered Burgess and Stringer issue was priced at twenty-five cents per volume. The book’s title was deposited in Utica by Cooper on September 8; a copy of the book itself was received at the Smithsonian Institution, then charged with the task, on November 10. Aurelian Conkling to JFC, receipt for title, Utica, 9/8/1847; Charles P. Russell (acting assistant secretary) to JFC, receipt for book, Smithsonian Institution, 11/10/1847; both on Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 48. The personal interest sprang in part from Commodore Shubrick’s arrival on the Pacific coast in January 1847, from which point he became very much involved in the complicated affairs there. When Cooper sent his letter to Bentley that March, Shubrick was reaching his agreement with Gen. Stephen Kearny on how California, taken by Cmdre. John D. Sloat and then retaken by various hands after the Los Angeles uprising of the previous fall, was to be managed. News of these developments took some time to reach the East. For instance, Cooper learned of the disagreement between General Kearney and Shubrick’s immediate predecessor, Cmdre. Richard Stockton, sometime in April, four months after it had happened (see LJ 5:205). But he was assiduous in following news reports, reading correspondence, and talking with individuals returned from the Pacific. For the events I refer to, see Bauer, Mexican War, 194–95. 49. Cooper’s reference to the Mexican American War and the (pending) conquest of California was clouded by his attempt to answer foreign attacks on U.S. “rapacity” in the war: as Philbrick explained, the novelist criticized the French for their 1830 invasion

— 

notes to pages 403–404

of Algeria and their 1842 establishment of a protectorate over Tahiti, and the British for the Opium War of 1840–1842 and the 1840 annexation of New Zealand to Australia (CR 1962 297). 50. The details of Cooper’s setting and his use of the sandalwood trade as a context may be briefly sketched here. In giving the destination of the Rancocus as the “Fejee” group (CR 1:100, 102), and more particularly as Vanua Levu and Viti Levu (CR 1:103), he was pretty clearly relying on the explorer Charles Wilkes, who had spent considerable time at Fiji. Wilkes devoted nine chapters of the third volume of his report to the group and included a “Chart of the Viti Group of Feejee Islands,” on which Vanua Levu and Viti Levu were prominently placed and named; see Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 3:43–364. Fiji had been the most important source of sandalwood for Britons engaged in the China trade, although Cooper was anachronistic in having Americans involved in that activity as early as the 1790s. See Dorothy Shineberg, They Came for Sandalwood: A Study of the Sandalwood Trade in the South-West Pacific, 1830–1865 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1967), 3–9. One of Cooper’s sources on the trade as it involved American vessels may have been Edmund Fanning, Voyages round the World (New York: Collins and Hannay, 1833), 455–59. 51. By emphasizing the speed with which Cooper brought his main characters to the island group where so much of the remaining action will occur, I do not mean to downplay the novel’s nautical elements, which remain important throughout. The construction and deployment of various craft are key parts of the story, for one thing. And the intended purpose of the voyage of the Rancocus—the Canton trade—in fact is taken up and successfully engaged once Mark Woolston and his new comrades discover an untapped supply of sandalwood in the island group controlled by the friendly native Ooroony. Several voyages are undertaken to China, where the fragrant wood is exchanged for tea that in turn is sold in Philadelphia, yielding profits to fund the Pacific colony’s growth. Furthermore, once the sandalwood supply falls off, Woolston introduces the sperm whale fishery. This new activity, handled with a level of detail that anticipates Melville’s cetological focus four years later in Moby-Dick (for one thing, Cooper provides an extensive, proto-Melvillean glossary of whaling—see CR 2:127–37), brings even greater financial rewards to Woolston. Requiring more new vessels, whaling sees them depart for a new market—Hamburg—from which very ample profits are returned for Woolston and the colony. By this point, the plot is truly global in scope. 52. Later in the 1843 novel, Joel Strides, eager to be sent out of Willoughby’s colony to discover more news, says to some associates, “We are like people on a desart island, out here in the wilderness—and if ships don’t arrive to tell us how matters come on, we must send one out to l’arn it for us” (WY CE 106). This will be the colonists’ literal situation in The Crater.

notes to pages 405–406

  

53. For the process of assembling the farm from various mountainside parcels purchased between 1837 and 1846, see “Memorandum of Deeds of Chalet,” undated but ca. 1846, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. Cooper’s grandnephew G. Pomeroy Keese wrote a fortythree-page account of the farm and associated agricultural topics (particularly hops culture). See [History of Châlet Farm] (ca. 1880), Keese paps., collection 186, manuscript NM 90.63, NYSHA. I discuss the hillside farm in more detail in chapter 9. Philbrick, CR 1962 xiii, briefly speaks of its link to the 1847 novel. 54. Horace H. Scudder, “Cooper’s The Crater,” American Literature 19 (1947): 115. Charles Lyell’s first complete discussion of the island’s geological significance came in the third edition of his Principles of Geology, which was not published until 1834. Dennis R. Dean, “Graham Island, Charles Lyell, and the Craters of Elevation Controversy,” Isis 71 (1980): 571–88, provides a full discussion of the history of the island and its use by contending theorists; he also traces the expanding place of the subject in Lyell’s Principles of Geology between 1831 and 1834 (580–84) and reprints from the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of 1831 a map of Graham Island that shows its prominent crater (580). Press coverage was rich and varied, as I suggest in my text. When a fierce but absurd contention for control of the tiny spot of land erupted between the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and Great Britain (among other powers), Le Figaro of 10/12/1831 (at a time when Cooper was in Paris again and, with The Bravo just published and The Heidenmauer begun, was very interested in political issues) humorously reprised the battle in “L’ile de Sciaccia, ci-devant Corrao.” (“Graham Island” was the name given to it by the British; it was also known by various other names, including Corrao, Sciacca or Sciaccia, and Isola Ferdinandea.) For the St. Simonian reference, see “L’ile Corrao,” Le Figaro, 8/12/1831. The journal’s utopian speculations are cut short by the sudden arrival of fresh intelligence of the island’s sudden subsidence beneath the sea, an end provocatively akin to that in The Crater. For a reconstructed timeline of the island’s growth and disappearance, see Dean, “Graham Island,” 573–75. Charles H. Adams also discusses Lyell’s influence on Cooper; see “Uniformity and Progress: The Natural History of The Crater,” in W. H. Verhoeven, ed., James Fenimore Cooper: New Historical and Literary Contexts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993), 203–13. 55. Woolston has an antiquated understanding gained during his time at Princeton, as Cooper explains: “He supposed that the internal fires had produced so much gas, just beneath this spot, as to open crevices at the bottom of the ocean, through which water had flowed in sufficient quantities to create a vast body of steam, which steam had been the immediate agent of lifting so much of the rock and land, and of causing the earthquake” (CR 1:163). While Cooper is noncommittal here (“This theory may have been true, in whole or part, or it may have been altogether erroneous”—CR 1:164), I think it likely that Woolston’s views recapitulated since-rejected ideas Cooper himself had picked up at Yale while under the tutelage of Benjamin Silliman, who did not acquire more current geological ideas until he visited Edinburgh after Cooper’s association with

— 

notes to pages 406–408

him ended. One possible source for the older ideas, through Silliman, was the work of eighteenth-century Harvard mathematician John Winthrop III, who in speaking of the New England earthquake of 1755 “expounded on the role of expanding steam produced by water impinging on hot rocks or vapors from underground fires.” B. F. Howell, Jr., “History of Ideas on the Cause of Earthquakes,” Eos 67, no. 46 (11/18/1986): 1323. On Silliman’s Edinburgh experiences, see Chandos Michael Brown, Benjamin Silliman: A Life in the Young Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 189–92. It is also worth pointing out that Cooper’s personal acquaintance with Baron Georges Cuvier in Paris, referred to in chapter 6, may have provided a more immediate source of geological ideas. Cuvier, notable for his belief in cataclysm as the major source of geological change, provided in this regard a theory more consistent with Cooper’s ideas in The Crater than the opposing views of Lyell. See Frank Dawson Adams, The Birth and Development of the Geological Sciences (1938; rpt. New York: Dover, 1954), 265–67. 56. I rely here on Dean, “Graham Island,” 584–87, where he quotes from and summarizes the relevant documents. He quotes Alexander von Humboldt on p. 585. 57. Cooper did not mention Lyell in his letters or journals or his English Gleanings; the scientist’s brief reference to the encounter occurs in a letter to his father; see Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, ed. Katherine M. Lyell, 2 vols. (London: John Murray, 1881), 1:180. This was two years before Lyell published the first volume of the initial version of his iconoclastic Principles. 58. The role of earthquakes in regions of volcanic activity was something Cooper had noted in his Italian Gleanings (GI CE 104). 59. While it is necessary to read the book’s plot as in part an imperial fantasy (indebted, for instance, to the relatively long history by 1847 of American involvement in the Pacific), the fact that Cooper ended the novel with a second, reverse cataclysm hardly confirms some American sense of mission vis-à-vis the Pacific or any other region. It constitutes a dead end, not an opening. On the imperial theme, see, for instance, the perceptive essay by April D. Gentry, “Created Space: The Crater and the Pacific Frontier,” online at http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/articles/other/2002othergentry.html. 60. Martin Green’s study of Robinson Crusoe and Robinsonade (or “robinsonades”—that is, the large field of imitations of Defoe’s book, first described by German scholar Hermann Ullrich) offers perceptive comments on some of the differences between The Crater and Crusoe. He argues more broadly that, contrary to what one might expect from American writers, very few have ever undertaken a genuinely imperial Robinsonade. Broadening his view, he quotes the Australian novelist Henry Handel Richardson to suggest that writers from settler colonies generally rejected or deeply altered the wishful projections of metropolitan adventure tales like either Robinson Crusoe or Johann D. Wyss’s Swiss Family Robinson. Such tales were inadequate to the experience of writers from former settler colonies and they therefore could not naively

notes to page 409

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replicate European imperial formulas. I am not sure that the dark twist in The Crater and Cooper’s earlier settlement tales had as much to do with settler-colony exigencies as it did with the profound personal loss at the heart of the Cooper family story—and, in the case of The Crater, his sense of the political crisis confronting the country. But it is true that H. H. Richardson’s masterwork, The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1917–1930), embodies a similarly dark view of the process of colonial replication. A certain emigration trauma may underpin a good deal of settler-colony literature, and the rejection of homeland formulas may be part of how writers such as Richardson or Cooper dealt with it. We might say that in Cooper’s case ontogeny magnified phylogeny: the Cooper story made the trauma deeper and more acrid-tasting. Martin Green, The Robinson Crusoe Story (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990), 99–110. Henry Handel Richardson [Ethel F. L. Robertson], The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (New York: W. W. Norton, 1931). Richardson had her own difficult family background, on which the trilogy drew and which, as with Cooper, may have affected how she told the larger emigration narrative. For part of that background, see Michael Ackland, Henry Handel Richardson: A Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 45–58. 61. Both Rousseau texts were written in 1762. The first effected a major redefinition of Defoe’s book by using Crusoe as an evocative figure for philosophical inquiry, with a strong suggestion of the story’s utopian potential. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, Discourse on the Virtue Most Necessary for a Hero, Political Fragments, and Geneva Manuscript, ed. Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), 133 (book 1, ch. 3). Emile was similarly transformative because of its stress on the pedagogical usefulness of Crusoe. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or on Education, trans. and ed. Christopher Kelly and Allan Bloom (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2010), 331–36. 62. An article on the book in the Quarterly Review of December 1832, when a second edition appeared, extensively and enthusiastically summarized the action and noted that “nine-tenths of those who had perused the book, and among others a great many naval officers . . . believed it to be a true and genuine story.” Quarterly Review 48 (1832): 480–507. Documents in the Porter papers at the University of Durham reveal William O. Porter’s authorship and show that he relied on his sister’s help to get the Narrative published. Fiona Price, “Jane Porter and the Authorship of Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative: Previously Unpublished Correspondence,” Notes and Queries 49 (2002): esp. 55–57. 63. “Ned Myers,” Graham’s Magazine 24 (1844): 46. The unsigned review was attributed to Poe by Thomas O. Mabbott, “Newly-Identified Reviews by Edgar Poe,” Notes and Queries 163 (1932): 441; and by William Doyle Hull II, “A Canon of the Critical Works of Edgar Allan Poe” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 1941), 388–90. Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative was reprinted in New York by Harper and Brothers in 1843, close to the time when Poe penned his review of Ned Myers. See the list of

— 

notes to pages 409–426

“Important Works,” dated February 1843, in Robert M. Taliaferro, Life of John C. Calhoun, Presenting a Condensed History of Political Events from 1811 to 1843 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1843), 80. 64. The one known volume (the first) from that copy was inscribed to Cooper’s nephew, Thomas J. DeLancey, from the latter’s mother. I assume that the second and third volumes were once in the Otsego Hall library but went the way of so many other books in Cooper’s collection. PFC, “Listing of ‘Old Books’: Partial Catalog of PFC, III Library,” HCA, 26 (copy in my collection). This book was still in the family’s hands as late as around 1995, according to “Henry Weil, Books in Custody of (partial list— transcribed from rough penciled notes made by Hugh MacDougall)” (copy in my collection), where it is listed as item 18. However, I purchased this odd volume of the Narrative in April 2013 from Will Monie Books of Cooperstown. It bears the inscription roughly as reported by MacDougall: “Thomas J. De Lancey from his Mother, Jany 1st 1832.” I have used Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative of His Shipwreck, and Consequent Discovery of Certain Islands in the Caribbean Sea, ed. Miss Jane Porter, 3 vols. (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1831), which I cite parenthetically in my text hereafter as “Porter.” 65. Philbrick concisely analyzes this matter when he writes that Woolston’s “stiffnecked refusal to admit any rival” to Episcopalianism “is shown to be little more than arrogant dogmatism by his wife, who, advocating tolerance and the encouragement of Christianity as opposed to mere denominationalism, argues against it and clearly scores a moral victory.” CR 1962 xxvi. 66. Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 348–51. It will also be recalled that the first regular minister of the Otsego Presbyterians, Rev. William Neill, was heartily endorsed by Judge Cooper and employed by him as tutor for James and Samuel (see JFC:EY 64–67). 67. “Verses, supposed to be written by Alexander Selkirk,” William Cowper, Verse and Letters, selected by Brian Spiller (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 56. 68. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 69. Cooper clearly was thinking of the constitutional convention called in New York in 1846, as John P. McWilliams perceptively demonstrates in Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 376–79. 70. Green, Robinson Crusoe Story, 97. C HAPTER 14.   S PECULATIONS 1. Comstock figured his debt to Cooper as $8,650 ($6,000 principle, plus $2,500 profit and $150 interest). The notes were for $2,160 each, plus interest; all were dated January 1, 1836, but were individually payable at intervals of from six to fifteen months.

notes to pages 427–428

  

See Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 12/19/1835, JFC Coll., box 50, YCAL. Because Cooper had involved both James D. P. Ogden and New York banker Gorham Worth in the original investment, and later discounted Comstock’s and Ketchum’s notes through Ogden and through Robert M’Dermut, the bad investment made him liable to those men. Cooper later repurchased the third and fourth Comstock notes from Ogden and M’Dermut. See Horace H. Comstock to JFC, promissory notes, 1/1/1836, endorsed on back to J. D. P. Ogden and R. M’Dermut, respectively, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 2. Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 9/5/1838, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 3. [Henry B. Pierce], History of Calhoun County, Michigan (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts & Co., 1877), 13; Washington Gardner, History of Calhoun County, Michigan, 2 vols. (Chicago and New York: Lewis Publishing Co., 1913), 1:230. 4. The details of Sidney Ketchum’s birth are from Charles L. Ketchum, Jr., “Descendants of Edward Katcham/Cathcam. Generation No. 7,” online at http:// familytreemaker.genealogy.com/users/k/e/t/Charles-L-Ketchum-jr/GENE1-013. html. His activities in Peru, NY, and his arrival in Michigan in 1830 are documented in an account of another Peru, NY, transplant; see William W. Hobart, “A Brief Biography of Rev. Randal Hobart, A Pioneer of Michigan and California,” Historical Collections and Researches Made by the Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, 37 (1909–1910): 679. 5. Details on Ketchum’s Michigan career derive from E. G. Rust, Calhoun County Business Directory for 1869–70 . . . Together with a History of the County (Battle Creek: E. G. Rust, 1869), 38, and, especially, Gardner, History of Calhoun County, 1:229–40. On the Calhoun County Bank, see [Pierce], History of Calhoun County, 17–18, and Richard Carver, A History of Marshall (Virginia Beach: Donning Co., 1993), 28 (where it is called the “Bank of Marshall,” a term also found in Cooper’s papers). Several other members of the large Ketchum family, including Sidney’s brother George and their first cousin White Ketchum, were also very much involved in Marshall. See Rust, Calhoun County Business Directory, 30. 6. Rust, Calhoun County Business Directory, 38. 7. On Charles Trowbridge’s views, see Jack F. Kilfoil, C. C. Trowbridge, Detroit Banker and Michigan Land Speculator, 1820–1845 (New York: Arno, 1979), 103. Both Trowbridge and Hubbard would later be involved in Cooper’s efforts to extricate himself from his Michigan investments. 8. Gardner, History of Calhoun County, 238–39; Rust, Calhoun County Business Directory, 38. Historian Susan E. Gray sketches the context for Cooper’s dealings with Comstock: “The decade of the 1830s encompassed one of the most intense periods of federal land alienation in American history. Over fifty-three million acres of the public domain between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River passed into private hands between 1831 and 1837. A locus of the land rush was the southern peninsula of Michigan, where purchases in 1836, the peak of the boom, accounted for nearly 15 percent of all federal land sold that year. The heart of the land rush in Michigan was the Kalamazoo

— 

notes to pages 428–429

Land District, . . . where purchases in 1836 totaled over 6 percent of all federal land sold that year.” “Local Speculator as Confidence Man: Mumford Eldred, Jr., and the Michigan Land Rush,” Journal of the Early Republic 10 (1990): 387. 9. Both of Comstock’s protested 1836 notes (cited in note 1 above) carry two endorsements in Cooper’s hand on their back. The first records payments he received on “S. Ketchum’s mortgage” ($1,100 on 5/14/1845; $226 on 7/7/1845); the second carries equivalent endorsements plus another pair, also in Cooper’s hand, recording unique payments (of $35.35 on 9/8/1839 and $13.25 on 11/8/1839) directly from Ketchum. Horace H. Comstock to JFC, promissory notes, 1/1/1836. These credits I believe had something to do with the mortgage temporarily placed in Morris Cooper’s hands in 1838 and soon withdrawn, which I think Comstock later reclaimed from the bank and then turned over to Cooper. On both the notes Cooper also recorded a chronologically final payment of $114, credited on 11/16/1845 and received “by the hand of W. H. Averell.” As Averell’s voluminous correspondence with Comstock makes clear, the Cooperstown lawyer had been a source of credit for Cooper’s kinsman since at least 1835. See Otsego County Bank, protest of Comstock note to Averell as endorser, 12/17/1835, William H. Averell paps., box 9, NYSHA. In 1839, Comstock and his wife conveyed large amounts of land in Otsego Township, Allegan County, Michigan, to Averell in exchange for $30,000—not fresh cash, I would think, but almost certainly money he had loaned to them earlier for their Michigan operations. Horace H. Comstock, two conveyances, both dated 6/14/1839 (endorsed on verso by Sarah Comstock on 9/19/1839), Averell paps., box 9, NYSHA. William H. Averell to Horace H. Comstock, 8/16/1839 and 3/25/1844, copies, Averell paps., box 9, NYSHA. 10. Cooper further explained to Ogden that he had pressed Comstock for payment on his debt because he had need for cash right then: “foreseeing that I should want some money before I could get out the naval history, I wrote a strong letter to Comstock, and it brought an answer, containing a note of Mr. Ketchum” (LJ 3:365; the letter to Comstock is unlocated). There was a slight delay in the transaction through Ogden, as Comstock had mistakenly endorsed the Ketchum note to Cooper’s nephew Morris: that is (as the novelist informed Ogden on January 30) “to J—M. Cooper, instead of to J—F. Cooper” (LJ 3:366). 11. On the Schuyler acceptances, as they were called, see Sidney Ketchum, deposition, 5/23–5/25/1846, copy in JFC paps., box 6, AAS, and Isaac Schuyler, interrogatory deposition conducted by George Morell of New York City at JFC’s direction, 9/15/1848, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. “Sundry names”: J. D. P. Ogden to JFC, 2/14/1839, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. In the normal course of financial dealings at the time, the endorsers of an instrument were bound to assume and satisfy the underlying obligation if the instrument was protested. In turn, they might try to recover their outlays from its original maker. Ketchum’s endorsers would be expected to do just that should the note be protested. Ketchum’s questionable evasions, which involved Schuyler, introduced ambiguities that

notes to pages 429–430

  

he and the endorsers alike sought to exploit so as to avoid payment and delay legal action. See Isaac Schuyler, interrogatory deposition, 9/15/1848. Schuyler, who was kept in the dark about Ketchum’s purposes, later had him arrested. See J. D. P. Ogden to JFC, 3/27/1840, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. For Ketchum’s side of the story, see Sidney Ketchum, deposition, 5/23–5/25/1846, and interrogatory deposition, 5/16/1851, copies in JFC paps., box 6, AAS; also, Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 9/7/1839. 12. The eighteen Kalamazoo lots, each valued at $200, were intended to repay Cooper for one of Comstock’s unpaid 1836 notes. Horace H. Comstock and Sarah S. Comstock, conveyance to JFC, 3/16/1841 (covering eighteen lots in Kalamazoo, notarized by J. Morris Cooper and recorded in Liber F, 225–26, Kalamazoo County, MI), JFC paps., box 8, AAS. Although Cooper sold several of the lots over the years, including one to Horace Comstock, most remained in his hands at his death. It is worth noting here that Horace Comstock, though certainly without the knowledge of his wife, was aware of Sidney Ketchum’s manipulations and may even have joined in them. The third endorser, James S. Sandford, recalled that while visiting New York in September 1839 (just when Ketchum obtained the first Schuyler draft) he had run into Comstock under worrying circumstances: “I met Comstock one day at the head of Wall Street when he seized my hand and congratulated me on [the endorsed] note being arranged and on my being released from any farther [sic] liability as endorser upon it.” When Comstock started to explain how exactly Ketchum had “arranged” it, Sandford, not wanting to get into particulars on the open street, agreed to meet Comstock later at the Astor House. Comstock there explained that Ketchum had used Schuyler’s acceptance of the September draft to retrieve the endorsed note. Sandford further observed that Comstock, appearing very relieved at this apparent resolution of the issue, “was liberal in his expressions of satisfaction at this event and of the anxiety which he had felt on account of the endorsers of the note and of joy that we had been saved any trouble on behalf of the note.” In this private exchange, at least as Sandford recalled and related it, Comstock had shown not the least concern for Cooper’s interests. James S. Sandford, deposition, 6/10/1847, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 13. Details on the Michigan suits can be found in letters from George E. Hand, now in JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. I treat the less fully documented Sandford matter briefly at a later point in this chapter. 14. The award in the Ketchum suit was for $3,339.46. PFC to JFC, 6/6/1846, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. 15. Michigan Circuit Court for County of Wayne, certified judgment, copy in JFC paps., box 6, AAS. Beard (LJ 5:221) correctly explains the late date of Cooper’s suit by noting that he waited to sue Ketchum until after Comstock had done so. RFC, summons to Sidney Ketchum, 8/1/1848, copy, JFC Coll., box 24, YCAL. RFC to PFC, 6/13/1854, JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL. There was some success in extracting funds from other Ketchum assets. George E. Hand was able to collect $2,200 on mortgaged lands

— 

notes to pages 431–432

connected to Ketchum, a quite complicated subject, as other documents in Cooper’s papers concern Detroit lands linked to Ketchum in which the novelist had also received an interest. Hand began recovery efforts with a “sale advertized under the Decree upon the Ketchum mortgage” late in 1844, and in May 1845 at last forwarded Cooper a bank draft. See George E. Hand to JFC, 11/25/1844, 12/6/1844, 4/25/1845, 4/29/1845, and 5/3/1845, all in JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. 16. Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 5/25/1847, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. 17. He had thought he might have to travel there as early as November 1844, but that trip did not take place (see LJ 4:482). 18. Kalamazoo Gazette, 7/2/1847. Cooper recorded his expenses “in going to Detroit to attend trial against endorsers $40 in June 1847” in “Charges against H. H. Comstock, that are to be allowed in my favour,” undated, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. The London was a “British steamer” first put into service in 1845 (“Boat Race,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 6/24/1845). For incidental light on the trip, see a letter from one of Cooper’s fellow passengers, George F. Bennett to JFC, 7/8/1847, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 19. See Horace H. Comstock to JFC, 7/24/1847, JFC Coll., box 2, YCAL. Ogden proved scarcely more helpful. Cooper managed to secure a deposition from him while in Manhattan in June but worried about its utility if a trial did come. On June 16, he wrote Susan from there that he had “now got Ogden’s testimony straight” but thought it might be useless or even counterproductive. He furthermore thought Ogden might easily go to Detroit but added for his wife that he “will not budge.” LJ 5:224 (Cooper sent a note to Susan four days later from Buffalo in which, probably having reviewed Ogden’s written testimony while traveling, he confirmed his view that it was “straight, full and direct”—LJ 5:225). Unlike two later Ogden depositions, this one appears not to survive. Ogden later was somewhat more useful. 20. George E. Hand to JFC, 7/17/1847, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. In this answer to an unlocated Cooper letter of 7/11/1847, Hand also wrote, “I am glad to hear you speak of Niagara.” On this subject, see also LJ 5:239 and SFC, P&P 379–80. On the Otsego visit, during which Cooper introduced Hand to U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Nelson, see George E. Hand to JFC, 9/23/1847, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL; and Cooper’s 8/12/1847 letter to his wife from New York City (LJ 5:231). Hand and Cooper socialized in February 1849 in New York City as well and spent time discussing the case with Henry Cruger; see LJ 5:404–5, and George E. Hand to JFC, 2/5/1849, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. 21. George E. Hand to JFC, 9/23/1847. Ogden had written Cooper earlier that month: “as regards going to Detroit in Octr, I will go, if I can, indeed unless something occurs absolutely to prevent me, I merely suggested to Judge Hand that he had better have every thing prepared in the shape of question and answer, lest something should prevent. I know of nothing now, or likely to occur, to hinder me from going.” J. D. P. Ogden to JFC, 9/6/1847, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. George E. Hand had taken

notes to pages 433–436

  

the steamboat Canada back home himself the previous month, and when Cooper took it in June 1848, he described it to Susan as “our old boat” (LJ 5:370), so it seems clear that he and Ogden had followed the lawyer’s advice for their October 1847 trip. 22. At the same time that he was proceeding against Gibbs and Gordon in Detroit, Cooper was carrying on, though less vigorously, a suit against James S. Sandford in the New York State Supreme Court. That case was filed on 6/23/1845 to forestall the statute of limitations, which otherwise would have made Sandford untouchable after July 1. See JFC, deposition (New York State Supreme Court), 4/3/1847, certified copy, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. There was not much progress in the suit, but Cooper’s nephew managed to keep it alive until at least the fall of 1849 (LJ 6:17, 75). 23. For the Michigan trips from 1847 to 1850, Cooper recorded total expenses of $481.76, exclusive of lawyers’ fees and the cost of securing various depositions. “Account of Charges against Horace H. Comstock,” 1850, JFC Coll., box 28, YCAL. 24. Cooper identified McLean; LJ 5:371. Wilkins was not named by Cooper, but was the only judge then appointed to the U.S. District Court for Michigan. Cooper was wary of him because the Pennsylvania ruling he mentioned would allow endorsers greater latitude in evading responsibility for a protested note. For Wilkins, see Federal Judicial Center, “History of the Federal Judiciary,” online at http://www.fjc.gov/servlet/nGe tInfo?jid=2584&cid=90&ctype=dc&instate—i. 25. The “Splendid and New Upper Cabin Steamer” Canada was, like the London, a British steamer of the Central Rail Road Line. Both vessels followed the north shore route on Lake Erie (“Steamboat Lines and Appointments for the Season of 1849,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3/30/1849; see LJ 5:[218]). Edmund Lyon (National Hotel) to JFC, receipt, 6/24/1848, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 26. John McLean, Reports of Cases Argued and Decided in the Circuit Court of the United States for the Seventh Circuit (Cincinnati: H. W. Derby, 1851), 401. 27. Ibid., 397–99. 28. Ibid., 401–2. 29. For Cass’s wishes in 1847, see George E. Hand to JFC, 7/17/1847. For Cass’s discussion of Cooper’s “extravagances” in portraying Indians, see North American Review 26 (1828): 373–76. 30. Isaac Schuyler, deposition, 6/6/1849, copy in JFC paps., box 6, AAS; deposition, 9/15/1848. 31. See Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Law of Promissory Notes (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1845), 507: “If there be any valid agreement (that is, one founded upon a valuable consideration, and operative in point of law) between the maker and the holder, whereby the holder agrees to give credit to the maker of the note after it is due, or whereby the payment is postponed to a future day, and this agreement is made without the consent of the indorsers, they will be thereby absolved from all obligation to pay the same.”

— 

notes to pages 436–439

32. In March 1849, while making a deposition regarding all the steps in the then still active New York suit against James S. Sandford, Cooper’s nephew stated that the Michigan suit had been tried three times but that each trial had ended without a verdict “on account of the disagreement of the jury.” RFC, deposition [March 1849], copy, in RFC, “Copy of affvts & notice of motion,” 3/28/1849, draft, JFC Coll., box 24, YCAL. 33. Robert Balmanno, deposition, 5/12/1849, copy in JFC paps., box 6, AAS. It was also at this time that the second Schuyler deposition was given. 34. Ogden’s inability to go to Michigan at present, as well as the delay caused by the endorsers in the fall of 1849, are both discussed in J. D. P. Ogden, deposition, 6/6/1850, copy in JFC paps., box 6, AAS. Cooper heard the following from Isaac Schuyler in March: “If you should want my services to Michigan this Spring[,] as my health is reestablished, I do not know anything to the contrary but I can go.” Isaac Schuyler to JFC, 3/18/1850, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA. 35. Cooper saw Ketchum again in September 1850 and was once more impressed by the man’s promising outlook and seeming energy. Apparently without the slightest bit of irony, he wrote Susan, “He is working night and day, and is full of resources, in all ways but money” (LJ 6:225). For Paul’s caution, see PFC to JFC, 6/29/1850, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. 36. George T. Clark, tax receipt, 9/6/1850, noting that the information on the taxed lots in Kalamazoo had been “confirmed 20 July 1850.” JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 37. George Gibbs to JFC, in re: Cooper vs. Gibbs and Gordon, 6/10/1850, JFC paps., box 3, AAS; PFC to JFC, 11/21/1850, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. On 4/9/1851, Cooper reached out again to the endorsers via Gibbs, suggesting a revival of the previously rejected settlement. In reply, Gibbs wrote from Michigan: “I fear it will be impossible for me now to carry out the proposition for a settlement of our Ketchum matter I made you last year.” Gordon, “understanding . . . our proposition to be rejected,” had left the country for Brazil. He was essentially unreachable and Gibbs was neither willing nor able to pay his share. He did, though, write Sandford to see whether between them the two remaining endorsers might come up with the total Cooper expected. George C. Gibbs to JFC, 4/25/1851, WC paps., old microfilm series, reel 23, HCA. When he visited New York again the following month, Gibbs met with Sandford in person, but without luck: “I have embraced the opportunity . . . to consult with Mr. Sandford respecting the proposition made by you on 9th April for settlement of your Ketchum claim. The conclusion we arrive at, is not to accept your proposition. I hasten to advise you thereof, that you may have time to make such preparation as you may deem needful for, the trial in June next.” George C. Gibbs to JFC, 5/14/1851, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 38. George T. Clark to JFC, 3/6/1851, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 39. Comstock had written William H. Averell in the summer of 1849 about his plan to exchange the Kalamazoo lots for a farm. He did not own those lots at the time but mentioned “a proposition” he was prepared to make to Cooper in an effort to “finally

notes to pages 439–440

  

settle up his affairs with me.” Nothing came of this notion. See Horace H. Comstock to William H. Averell, 8/15/1849, Averell paps., box 9, NYSHA. Comstock later abandoned Michigan and returned to New York State. Having farmed and then taught school for a time, by June 1852 he was practicing law in Ossining, NY. See Horace H. Comstock to William H. Averell, 6/7/1852, Averell paps., box 9, NYSHA. After the novelist’s death, his son Paul inherited the trouble. The Michigan suit was put off several more times until George E. Hand, feeling that Paul Cooper was dragging his feet in the matter, withdrew as the family’s attorney in Michigan. See George E. Hand to PFC, 10/20/1851, 5/15/1852, 9/29/1852, 10/1/1852, 10/4/1852, 11/4/1852, 12/9/1852, all in JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL; and Notice of Probate of Cooper’s estate, Kalamazoo, 9/6/1852, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 40. I think Cooper was back in Detroit by Monday, October 25, because of a later document that credits payments received from Cooper there on October 17 and on October 25 as well. See D. Goodwin to JFC, receipt, 6/29/1848, JFC paps., box 6, AAS. See also Garrison’s Western Hotel, Detroit, receipt, 10/22/1847, with JFC endorsement “for Ogden and self,” JFC paps., box 6, AAS. On his way from Buffalo to Detroit in October 1847, Cooper had met Justus Burdick, an emigrant from Vermont who had acquired a considerable portion of Kalamazoo, including, he would claim, the lots Comstock had transferred to Cooper. Cooper, who told Burdick that he would “come to the village of Kalamazoo before he returned East,” claimed that Comstock owed him “from five to six thousand dollars.” Justus Burdick, deposition, 6/9/1848, copy in JFC paps., box 6, AAS. 41. Horace H. Comstock to William H. Averell, 10/24/1847, Averell paps., box 9, NYSHA. 42. See Lawrence R. Dawson, Jr., “James Fenimore Cooper and Michigan: His Novel, Visits, and Attitude,” Michigan History 59 (1975): 275–92. Oak Openings were also known in western Ohio and Indiana. For environmental and cultural backgrounds, see three articles by Bernard C. Peters: “Early Perception of a High Plain in Michigan,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62 (1972): 57–60; “Oak Openings or Barrens: Landscape Evaluation on the Michigan Frontier,” Proceedings of the Association of American Geographers 4 (1972): 84–86; and “Michigan’s Oak Openings: Pioneers’ Perceptions of a Vegetative Landscape,” Journal of Forest History 22 (1978): 18–23. The distinctive area is described as “Mixed Oak Savanna” in Dennis A. Albert, Patrick J. Comer, and Helen Enander, Atlas of Early Michigan’s Forests, Grasslands, and Wetlands: An Interpretation of the 1816–1856 General Land Office Surveys (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2008), xx–xxi, and mapped for Kalamazoo County in the same study, 12–13. 43. In May 1832, it was reported to Ketchum’s brother George, also then in Michigan, “that the Indians in the western part of the State were on the warpath, spreading death and desolation in their track.” He was asked “to rally every able-bodied man

— 

notes to pages 440–441

and meet at a rendezvous at ‘Prairie Ronde’ without delay.” Historical Collections and Researches . . . Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society 37 (1909–1910): 679. It is at this place that Cooper has the Indians in his novel rendezvous as well, so perhaps Ketchum repaid Cooper (unknowingly) by giving him some fundamental parts of the plots of The Oak Openings. Cooper surely would have appreciated the underlying ironies here. 44. James Pierce, “Notice of the Peninsula of Michigan, in relation to its Topography, Scenery, Agriculture, Population, Resources, &c,” American Journal of Science and the Arts 10 (1826): 305. 45. Charles Fenno Hoffman, A Winter in the West, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), 1:143, 214. Cooper probably knew Hoffman’s book by the time he was working on Oak Openings, if not before. For instance, Winter in the West seems to have been his most likely source for the fuller spelling of Kekalamazoo for the river, which Hoffman used exclusively in his book and which Cooper gave in his novel, too, with the explanation that it was “the true Indian word, though the whites have seen fit to omit the first syllable” (OO 2:181). 46. See Caroline M. Kirkland (“Mrs. Mary Clavers”), A New Home—Who’ll Follow? Or, Glimpses of Western Life (New York: C. S. Francis, 1839), 12, 14. Kirkland referred to Hoffman on the former page. For the original extent of the openings, I rely on J. G. Cohen, “Natural Community Abstract for Oak Openings,” updated version (Lansing: Michigan Natural Features Inventory, 2010), 1–2. Even Margaret Fuller, who did not visit the lower peninsula of Michigan in 1843, referred to the “oak openings, as they are called,” which she reported encountering as far west as Wisconsin. Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes, 1843, with an Introduction by Susan Belasco Smith (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 70. 47. That was in part because he had vented his feelings about speculators like Comstock and Ketchum in his portrait of the land jobber in “Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief,” Henry Halfacre, who deals not only in Manhattan real estate, but also owns “large undivided interests in Milwaukee, Chicago, Rock River, Moonville, and other similar places” (“Autobiography” 94). I cite that comment and cover the Michigan roots of Halfacre’s portrait in my discussion of the “Autobiography” proper in chapter 10. 48. Kirkland, A New Home, 44, 141, 295. Kirkland picked up the theme again in her third frontier book; see “The Land Fever,” Western Clearings (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), 1–14. 49. Pierce, “Notice of the Peninsula of Michigan,” 305. As Bernard C. Peters notes in “Oak Openings or Barrens,” 84–86, the term Cooper used was the preferred choice of those who derived from New England and New York. It had been applied to similar zones in western New York by Timothy Dwight during his 1804 visit there. “Barrens,” the preferred term of Southern visitors (for instance, the federal surveyors who first described the area), is not used in Cooper’s novel.

notes to pages 441–444

  

50. H. Daniel Peck, A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 50. 51. Prairie Ronde is the large yellow area southwest of Portage in Albert, Comer, and Enander, Atlas, 12. 52. Hoffman, although he had visited Prairie Ronde in winter, offered Cooper some useful details about that landscape feature, and Cooper may well have heard tell of it from people he met in Detroit and Kalamazoo on his earlier trips. See Winter in the West, 2:210–17. An added result of Cooper’s late visit to Prairie Ronde is his quite detailed rendering (OO 2:226–27) of an agricultural machine built by prairie settler Hiram Moore, widely credited as the inventor of the combine harvester. See Joseph Shafer, “Hiram Moore, Michigan-Wisconsin Inventor,” Wisconsin Magazine of History 15 (1931): 234–43. 53. John Fagan to JFC, 2/2/1848, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. 54. Bentley had agreed to give Cooper the same terms for this book as for The Crater, meaning that he would pay £350, or approximately $1,700 in 1848 dollars (see LJ 5:199; Richard Bentley to JFC, 4/29/1847 and 12/4/1847, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL). Cooper’s agreement with Burgess, Stringer, and Company promised him only $900 for a two-year lease of the plates, to terminate at the same time as the five-year omnibus deal Cooper and the New Yorkers signed on 3/5/1845. See Burgess, Stringer, and Co., memorandum of agreement with JFC (undated, but January 1848), and Burgess, Stringer, and Co., memorandum of agreement with JFC, 3/6/1849 (which extended the lease on Oak Openings, along with other books, to 4/1/1851), Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 55. For instance, he visited with friends and relatives in Albany and with more friends in Manhattan and Philadelphia, did research on the DeLancey family in the state capital, wrote two letters to a paper there on the recent revolution in France (which toppled Louis-Philippe from the throne), penned a further installment for a New York paper on the misdeeds of the DeLancey kinsman and Revolutionary War officer Gen. Nathaniel Woodhull, met twice with historian Elizabeth Ellet, learned of the great noise being made by the just-published “Something Eyre,” and picked up word of how Jack Tier was doing. See LJ 5:314–37, passim. 56. On the Sandford suit, see LJ 5:324 and RFC, “Copy of affvts & notice of motion.” 57. E. S. Morgan, “Minutes of a Conversation between Mr. Newby the publisher . . . and the Undersigned,” 4/5/1848, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 58. Richard Bentley to JFC, 4/5/1848, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. By the phrase “dated before the publication,” Bentley presumably meant before the date of the publication of Newby’s advertisement for Oak Openings, although he simply may have meant before his own edition of the book came out. On Edward S. Morgan, see Gordon N. Ray, “The Bentley Papers,” The Library 7 (1952): 181–82.

— 

notes to pages 444–446

59. He had, as noted in the previous chapter, hidden “Islets of the Gulf ” there. From Michigan, he then instructed his son to retrieve the next installment and forward it to Philadelphia. See LJ 5:243. 60. Despite Cooper’s implication that he had employed an Otsego stereotyper for earlier books, I find no evidence that he did so. He must have meant that he had relied in various earlier instances on a Cooperstown printer. He had, in fact, done that three times: for The Chronicles of Cooperstown, The American Democrat, and The Battle of Lake Erie, all of them of course printed by the Phinneys for Cooper. The American Democrat they also stereotyped, as indicated in chapter 7. 61. Cooper’s report that he had “put one chapter, (1st of Vol IId Am Ed.) into the hands of a stereotyper in this village” cannot have been quite right (LJ 5:365), for the bibliographical details of the second volume show that the Phinneys set the first two sheets (pp. 1–24), covering everything through the first seven pages of chapter 2. Their work bore no signature marks, which begin only on p. 25 (“Vol. II—3”). 62. Bentley had written that when Newby was shown proof of Bentley’s rights in the book he “declared he should proceed no further.” Richard Bentley to JFC, 4/18/1848, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. By the time Cooper received this letter in May, he had not yet arranged to have the “last few chapters” of the novel copied and forwarded to London in manuscript—in fact, he still had not written those chapters. Nor does a close comparison of the Bentley and Burgess and Stringer editions reveal any evidence that Cooper later used this expedient. It also appears that the material supplied by the Phinneys to Fagan was somehow incorporated into the American and English editions. 63. John Fagan to JFC, 5/25/1848, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. It is not clear that Fagan actually had sent sheets directly to London, although Cooper did not correct Fagan on the point, and Fagan reiterated his suspicions in an early June letter. See John Fagan to JFC, 6/3/1848, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. 64. For “Mr. Newby’s jackal,” Beard had “Mr.—Gadsall.” His copy text for the letter was a facsimile published in 1864 that contained that misreading. I quote the original manuscript from a 1998 transcription prepared by the firm of Howard S. Mott and employed by Jeffrey Walker in his collection of unpublished Cooper letters (copy in my possession). Thanks to Richard Morgan for alerting me to Mott’s September 1998 catalogue, where the letter was listed. 65. Richard Bentley to JFC, 6/22/1848, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 66. Richard Bentley to JFC, 3/11/1848, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 67. Richard Bentley to JFC, 4/18/1848, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 68. We cannot read Fagan’s comment in his letter of that date (“when I get chap. 2d and the rest”) as meaning anything but that. See John Fagan to JFC, 5/25/1848. 69. Bentley PL provides the English date I give in my text. In England, as BAL indicates, Bentley advertised in the Literary Gazette, 7/8/1848 (p. 464), that the book was to be published “during the present month”; this was before Cooper had even sent

notes to pages 447–450

  

him the last sheets. Similar notices kept appearing in various journals through July and into August, until the Athenaeum announced the book as “just published” on 8/26/1848, ten days later than Bentley’s own record states (p. 872). BAL cites the Athenaeum’s inclusion of the novel in a “List of New Books” a week earlier as indicating the publication date, although Bentley’s advertisement in that same issue still lists it as “to be published” that month (Athenaeum, 8/19/1848, pp. 828, 848). To add to the haziness, the Literary Gazette for 8/26/1848 reviewed the book (pp. 562–64), suggesting that it had indeed appeared a week or so before. On the American publication date: aside from BAL, see T. Wiley’s “Just Received,” Boston Evening Transcript, 8/24/1848. Cooper copyrighted Oak Openings in his own name, depositing the title page with the clerk of New York’s Northern District, on 7/28/1848; he deposited the book itself on October 10. See Aurelian Conkling, receipts to JFC, 7/28/1848, 10/10/1848, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City; also LJ 5:375. 70. Gary Williams, “The Plot-Shift in Cooper’s The Oak Openings,” English Language Notes 16 (1978): 26–27. 71. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 81–84. 72. Cooper may also have based Peter on the Ottawa insurgent Pontiac, as Kay House suggested, but Tecumseh and the Prophet came much more readily and pertinently to hand. See Kay S. House, Cooper’s Americans (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1965), 250. 73. Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Knopf, 2010), 126, 162–63, 244–45. 74. See Wayne Franklin, “ ‘One More Scene’: The Marketing Context of Cooper’s ‘Sixth’ Leather-Stocking Tale,” in Leather-Stocking Redux; or, Old Tales, New Essays, ed. Jeffrey Walker (New York: AMS Press, 2011), 229–32. I return to this matter briefly in my next chapter. 75. Ibid., 244. 76. Ibid., 245. 77. Before the Revolution proper began, Anthony Wayne had been active in what was classic Bumppo ground. For his victory at Ticonderoga during Benedict Arnold’s disastrous invasion of Canada in 1775–1776, Wayne received a promotion to brigadier general. Three years later, after several battles in his native Pennsylvania, Wayne personally led a courageous bayonet charge against the entrenched British forces at Stony Point on the Hudson, earning a medal from Congress. See Mark A. Boatner III, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole, 1994), 1175–77. In either this operation or that at Ticonderoga, Natty Bumppo could have taken plausible parts. Anthony Wayne was, furthermore, the sort of charismatic leader to whom Natty conceivably could have close personal ties. To have him join Wayne then would have given Cooper the perfect plot for that sixth novel. Ending that hypothetical book with a

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notes to pages 450–453

reprise of Natty’s service under Wayne in Ohio while on his solitary way to the West would have given the book a poignant coda, not unlike the one that closes The Spy. 78. Franklin, “ ‘One More Scene,’ ” 238–39. 79. Twice Cooper speaks of uplift as a prominent force in the shaping of the new novel’s Antarctic landscape. On the first occasion, he explains as narrator that “fragments of rock appear to have fallen from the principal mass as it was forced upward out of the ocean” (SL 1:200); on the second, he has Daggett misinterpret a sudden surge in water levels (actually caused when a big iceberg turns over) as the result of an earthquake. “That volcano has been pent up,” Daggett asserts, “and the gas is stirring up the rocks beneath the sea” (SL 2:55). That the two books had a common source in Charles Wilkes’s Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (1844/1845), a subject to which my discussion returns, helps explain both their faraway settings and their scientific preoccupations. 80. In thinking of the books as counterpoised to each other, Cooper may have had in mind their common bearing on Robinson Crusoe. The Sea Lions, after all, is a sort of polar castaway story, a point emphasized by Cooper’s reference to that “resolute and experienced seaman” Sir John Franklin, who (although in fact dead since 1847) was thought at the time of the novel’s publication to still be “locked in the frosts of the arctic circle” (SL 1:vii). 81. “Cooper’s New Novel,” Literary World 4 (4/28/1849): 70. 82. Moby-Dick, or The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988), 13, 390. 83. Sealers aggressively and rapidly expanded their grounds because their activity both decimated seals on newly discovered islands and caused survivors to shun human contact. Secrecy about the location of new sealing islands was much remarked during the period. See Johan Wijkmark, “ ‘One of the Most Intensely Exciting Secrets’: The Antarctic in American Literature, 1820–1849” (PhD diss., Karlstad University, 2009), 38, 84. 84. Thomas Philbrick, James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 217–18. It is true that Scoresby has a brief section on sealing that includes an account of the damage done to the German sealing fleet in 1774, but that can have suggested very little to Cooper. See An Account of the Arctic Regions, with a Description of the Northern Whale-Fishery, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Co., 1820), 1:513–17. 85. For the importance of Cooper’s experience with the Union to The Monikins, see Philbrick, Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction, 214–15. Edmund Fanning, Voyages Round the World (New York: Collins and Hannay, 1833), appeared early in the same year that Cooper came back from Europe; see the comment, “already in press and will shortly be published,” New-York Spectator, 2/4/1833. Fanning published a second

notes to pages 454–455

  

book some years later, Voyages to the South Seas, Indian and Pacific Oceans (New York: William H. Vermilye, 1838). This had contents different from, though related to, those in the earlier book. On the basis of Philbrick’s arguments about the debt of The Sea Lions to Fanning, I conclude that Cooper used the 1833 book (as, implicitly, does Philbrick, since that is the book he cites). A global industry with many players, quickly shifting locations, and a unstable resource base, sealing had seen American involvement fall off around 1805. But that involvement revived slightly in 1815, then experienced a brief but intense expansion in 1820–1822 owing to the discovery and exploitation of new sealing grounds in the South Shetland Islands, near the Antarctic mainland. See Briton C. Busch, The War against the Seals: A History of the North American Seal Fishery (Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1985), 21–24, 34–35. That flurry occurred precisely at the moment when Cooper, involved with his whaleship at Sag Harbor, was most likely to encounter sealers or former sealers and hear reports of their activity, much of it directed from nearby Stonington, then experiencing its heyday as a sealing town. 86. For more on those “peculiar views,” see Poke’s discussion with Dr. Reasono on the subject (MON 1:192–93). 87. Charles Wilkes, Autobiography of Rear Admiral Charles Wilkes, U.S. Navy, 1798–1877, ed. William James Morgan, David B. Tyler, Joye L. Leonhart, and Mary F. Loughlin, with an introduction by Rear Admiral John D. H. Kane, Jr. (Washington: Naval History Division, 1978), 37. Although Cooper in fact had discouraged Wilkes from seeking a naval career in 1817 owing to the lack of opportunities in the postwar service, Wilkes acknowledged that Cooper had “interested himself greatly in my behalf ” (ibid.). 88. Cooper had many reasons to be actively engaged with the expedition, among them the fact that in 1837 he had been mentioned by the proposed commander at that time, his friend Capt. Thomas ap Catesby Jones of Virginia, as a possible historiographer (along with Paulding and Irving) for it. Following its authorization by Congress in May 1836, the venture was delayed by internal strife, indecision, and poor management, exasperating Jones to such a degree that he feigned health problems and resigned in November 1837. William Stanton, The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838– 1842 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 37, 56. On the long lead-up to Wilkes’s choice, see 33–37, 60–62. 89. See “Latest from the Exploring Expedition. Highly Important Discovery,” New York Mercury and Weekly Journal of Commerce, 7/9/1840, partly reprinted in the Albany Argus, 7/14/1840. It was harder to follow the news later owing to the efforts of Whig President John Tyler to suppress it. See Nathaniel Philbrick, Sea of Glory: America’s Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838–1842 (New York: Penguin, 2003), 304. 90. Fauno Lancaster Cordes, “Winter Survival in the Antarctic as Described by James Fenimore Cooper” (MA thesis, San Francisco State University, 1991), 79. This

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notes to pages 455–456

may be a misreading of Stanton: “Cooper . . . spent some time with [Wilkes] in a Philadelphia hotel the two shared while Wilkes was assembling his big book.” Stanton, Great United States Exploring Expedition, 309. 91. Cooper’s evaluative comment in his letter to Susan (“very magnificent”) may suggest that he saw some part of the book or its illustrative material, including maps, while it was in progress, but that is by no means certain. LJ 4:471. On the cheap edition, see Wilkes’s comment: “In talking with Fenimore Cooper he told me his experience in this line and mentioned that Mr[.] Fagan, a printer and stereotype founder, was the most able proof reader he had ever employed, altho’ he was one of the most provoking individuals he had ever encountered, yet [in] his accuracy and facility of proof reading he had no superior, and [Cooper] advised me to obtain his services which I was enabled to do after some solicitation.” Wilkes, Autobiography, 536. The content of the five volumes, as published by order of Congress and reprinted commercially in expensive form in 1845, was widely praised. However, as Stanton indicates, the volumes were marked by many embarrassing mistakes: “As examples of American prose, they were a national disaster.” In part, that was owing to the composite nature of the Narrative, for which Wilkes incorporated passages from the journals all officers had been required to keep and, at the end of the venture, surrender. Stanton, Great United States Exploring Expedition, 308. As Cooper surely understood, Fagan would be especially useful to Wilkes in preparing the revised text for the cheap edition because of his exacting skill as copy editor as well as proofreader. Improving the Narrative would serve science but also Wilkes’s reputation. 92. As to Cooper’s direct use of the Narrative, W. B. Gates argued long ago that he not only had drawn on specific passages for The Sea Lions, but also had based the character of the orthodox Trinitarian sailor Stephen Stimson, improbable as the claim at first sounds, on Wilkes himself. Gates meant by the latter assertion two things. First, he showed that Stimson’s experience in the fictional south polar ocean parallels in several ways that of Wilkes in the ocean of fact. Wilkes did not, like Cooper’s sealing captains, overwinter in the Antarctic ice but rather in Orange Harbor, Tierra del Fuego. Consequently, we are not surprised to learn that Stimson has also passed a winter in that place (see SL 2:112–13). Gates likewise argues, also persuasively, that Stimson was “often used to express what Cooper found in the Narrative,” especially on the subject of the conditions to be endured in Antarctica. It is clear that, if Cooper did not write the novel “with the Narrative open before him,” as Gates says, he certainly did carry over many details and impressions from Wilkes’s book to his own. W. B. Gates, “Cooper’s The Sea Lions and Wilkes’ Narrative,” PMLA 65 (1950): 1074, 1070. For Orange Harbor, see Charles Wilkes, Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, 5 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), 2:119ff. 93. Wilkes, Narrative (1845) 2:298. Stanton points out (Great United States Exploring Expedition, 309) that Wilkes took the “Alabaster city” figure “from the officers’ journals” without crediting them for it.

notes to pages 456–458

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94. Wijkmark, “ ‘One of the Most Intensely Exciting Secrets,’ ” 192–206. 95. Peter Fitting, Subterranean Worlds: A Critical Anthology (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Hester Blum, “John Cleves Symmes and the Planetary Reach of Polar Exploration,” American Literature 84 (2012): 243–71. Blum does not take up the links between Symmes and Wilkes that I am arguing for and that several scholars, cited below, trace in their own work. 96. Francis Spufford gives some consideration to Symmes and related figures in I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination (New York: Picador, 1999), 64–74, but understates the involvement of U.S. sealers and navigators in south polar matters when he terms The Sea Lions a “potboiler” that “developed the American public’s sense that whaling and the Wilkes Exploring Expedition have given them [sic] a stake in the poles” (145). It was sealing as carried on in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I am arguing, that gave Americans their “stake,” and especially in the south polar regions. 97. Stanton, Great United States Exploring Expedition, 7; Philbrick, Sea of Glory, 18–21. Symmes joined the army as an infantry recruit in 1802, rose to the rank of captain by 1813, and was honorably discharged in June 1815. Francis B. Heitman, Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, 2 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903), 1:942. 98. Duane A. Griffin, “Hollow and Habitable Within: Symmes’s Theory of Earth’s Internal Structure and Polar Geography,” Physical Geography 25 (2004): 388–91; John Cleves Symmes, Light Gives Light, to Light Discover (St. Louis: Symmes, 1818). For Mitchill to Symmes, 7/10/1818, see “Dr. Mitchill and Capt. Symmes,” New-England Galaxy and Masonic Magazine, 11/13/1818, reprinting The Western Spy. Symmes, who in Light Gives Light listed “Doctor S. L. Mitchill, Sir H[umphry] Davy, and Baron Alex[ander] de [i.e., von] Humboldt” as his three scientific “protectors,” reportedly told a New York City audience in 1826, in Mitchill’s presence, that it was “the reading of a chemical tract of Dr. Mitchell’s [sic]” early in 1818 that provided the first stimulus to his polar theories. See “Symmes’ Theory,” The Escritoir; or Masonic and Miscellaneous Album, 4/15/1826. 99. See “Adam Seaborn,” Symzonia, A Voyage of Discovery (New York: J. Seymour, 1820), 23–36, 42–54, 103–15. For the “Internals,” see 95. The book’s copyright was taken out by its printer, Jonathan Seymour (as “proprietor”), on 11/2/1820. No satisfactory identification of the real author has ever been made, although the mariner and sea writer Nathaniel Ames is championed on largely circumstantial grounds by Hans-Joachim Lang and Benjamin Lease in “The Authorship of Symzonia: The Case for Nathaniel Ames,” New England Quarterly 48 (1975): 241–52. 100. “Wiley & Halsted, No. 3 Wall-street, have just received—Symzonia,” New York Commercial Advertiser, 11/23/1820; Henry Whyte, “New Works,” New York National Advocate, 11/27/1820; Charles K. Gardner, “List of Late Publications,” Literary

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notes to pages 458–461

and Scientific Repository, and Critical Review 2 (1821): 258. The year 1820 seems to have been fairly dry for American novels. Lillie Deming Loshe, in The Early American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1907), 114, listed only Symzonia and Precaution as appearing then. Not until 1823 did the publication rate pick up. 101. “Seaborn,” Symzonia, 45, 38, 63–64, 214. 102. Philbrick, Sea of Glory, 20. 103. New-York Mirror, 5/20/1826. For earlier supportive comments on Symmes, see ibid., 4/15/1826. Griffin, “Hollow and Habitable Within,” 383, offers a useful reminder that Symmes was valued at the time in part because he represented a freshly theoretical approach for American science and thus “may have helped catalyze the movement away from the strident empiricism that dominated American science in the early 19th century.” For Morris’s increasingly positive treatment of Reynolds, see NewYork Mirror, 5/20/1826, 5/27/1826. Cooper, in New York at this time tending to the arrangements for his family’s pending European trip, certainly knew about the presence there of Symmes and Reynolds even if he did not attend the lectures of the first or read the explications of the second. 104. Reynolds to Southard, 8/3/1826, in Richard G. Woodbridge III, “J. N. Reynolds, Father of American Exploration,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 45 (1984): 109. 105. Daily National Intelligencer, 8/3/1826. 106. Southard to Samuel Miller (draft), 8/7/1826, in Woodbridge, “J. N. Reynolds,” 110. 107. Woodbridge, “J. N. Reynolds,” 109–12; Stanton, Great United States Exploring Expedition, 21. 108. Stanton, Great United States Exploring Expedition, 23. While the federal government was still backing the expedition, its roster also presaged that of the Wilkes expedition. In the later part of 1828, Navy Secretary Southard thus named Thomas ap Catesby Jones its commander. And although Charles Wilkes, just twenty-seven years old, advised Southard against Jones, he was very eager to join the venture himself. Reynolds, who grew to dislike Wilkes, was impressed by Wilkes’s scientific interests and soon was willing to countenance him as an assistant to the astronomer (Wilkes wanted the principal position himself ). Southard also appointed De Kay “principal naturalist” and for De Kay’s helpers named Titian R. Peale and James Eights. Reynolds was named historiographer. See Stanton, Great United States Exploring Expedition, 16–24. 109. In 1819, when word of William Smith’s discovery of the South Shetlands spread to various South American ports, two vessels put out for the group. The first was an Argentine ship named Espirito Santo, which appears to have acted on intelligence picked up from Smith’s crew in Buenos Aires. The other, the Hersilia of Stonington, was then operating in the Falklands, where it evidently learned about the discovery from one

notes to pages 461–462

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of the Espirito Santo’s sailors and immediately pushed on to the new group. The Hersilia took some nine thousand seal skins in three weeks, a fabulous load, returning home in May 1820. Aboard this ship were supercargo William A. Fanning and second mate Nathaniel B. Palmer, both from Stonington. Edouard A. Stackpole, The Voyage of The Huron and The Huntress: The American Sealers and the Discovery of the Continent of Antarctica (Mystic: Marine Historical Association, 1955), 7–11. Supercargo Fanning no doubt relayed to his father, Edmund, the account of the voyage of the Hersilia that was to appear in the latter’s Voyages Round the World (see 428–31), and that may well have provided Cooper with some of his details on Antarctic sealing. Second mate Palmer of the Hersilia was, incidentally, the man to whom Robert Madison has pointed, not implausibly, as a possible model for Noah Poke. See “Cooper and the Sea: A Bibliographical Note,” American Neptune 57 (1997): 371. Palmer collaborated at sea with Edmund Fanning, who wrote about his accomplishments in Voyages Round the World (see 434–39, 479–88). See also John R. Spears, Captain Nathaniel Brown Palmer: An Old-time Sailor of the Sea (New York: Macmillan, 1922). 110. The characterization of Fanning is quoted by Stanton, Great United States Exploring Expedition, 18, from Jeremiah N. Reynolds, Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas (1836). On the 1812 expedition, I quote Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 492. 111. Philbrick, Sea of Glory, 24–25; Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 492–94, 479. 112. Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 478–91. 113. Fredericka Martin, The Hunting of the Silver Fleece: Epic of the Fur Seal (New York: Greenberg, 1946), 121. See also her longer, appreciative discussion of the book (131–34). I would correct one detail in her quite astute commentary. She asserts that the Union when Cooper owned it made “three ‘mixed’ voyages to the high south latitudes for elephant seal oil and fur seal pelts” (134). That is in error. A more specific argument about the novel’s documentary qualities is put forward by California geographer Fauno Cordes, who writes that Cooper’s account of the sealer’s hut erected by Gardiner’s men may represent “the only . . . extant” description of such structures. Given the lack of other contemporary references to Antarctic huts, however, it is hard to assess the value of this detail in Cooper or determine where he might have derived his information. Cordes suggests that he could have modeled his own account on Scoresby’s discussion of analogous Russian huts erected in the Arctic’s Svalbard Islands, but the description in The Sea Lions seems pretty generic to me—the hut is an old wooden wharf shed from Oyster Pond disassembled and shipped in Gardiner’s vessel (SL 1:204– 7). See Cordes, “Winter Survival in the Antarctic,” 95–109. Cordes also points out that American sealer Charles H. Barnard, marooned on the Falklands in 1814 and 1815 with a small party, built a (stone) house for shelter. Barnard’s experience was narrated briefly by the English sealer James Weddell in A Voyage towards the South Pole Performed in the

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notes to page 463

Years 1822–1824 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1825), 91–93, and at length in Charles H. Barnard, A Narrative of the Sufferings and Adventures of Capt. Charles H. Barnard (New York: Printed for the Author by J. Lindon, 1829). Cooper conceivably knew one or both of these South Atlantic sealing texts and could have met Barnard, who returned to sealing at the time when Cooper owned the Union. On the latter point, see Bertha S. Dodge, “Introduction,” Marooned: Being a Narrative of the Sufferings and Adventures of Captain Charles H. Barnard (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 22. 114. The Pilot allows the archetypal salt-sea sailor Long Tom Coffin to make a run after and successfully capture a right whale. In Afloat and Ashore, the Pretty Polly comes upon a vacant whaleboat adrift on the Pacific, and later the ship from which it has been lost—then in the midst of a hunt. After supplies of sandalwood run low in The Crater, several former whalemen now in the colony organize a lucrative fishery in nearby waters. Finally, in The Sea Lions itself, the two sealing vessels carry equipment suitable for whaling in hopes that a “turn of luck” may give them a chance to use it (SL 1:150). While on the Brazil grounds where the Union had operated, their luck indeed proves good and they take five whales between them. 115. To translate the less familiar of these into modern scientific categories: “sea bears” were southern fur seals (Arctocephalus australis), now considered to be members of the same family (Otariidae) as the southern “sea lions” (Otaria byronia), but distinguished from the latter by their underpelt, which the lions (also therefore called “hair seals”) lacked. Busch, War against the Seals, 6–7. The German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller, who sailed on Vitus Bering’s second Kamchatka expedition in 1741– 1742, had called the fur seals he encountered “sea bears,” a name that Linnaeus adopted. See Caroli Linnaei, Systema Naturae. Regnum Animale, 10th ed. (Lipsiae: Sumptibus Guilielmi Engelmann, 1894), 37 (“Ursinus marinus,” crediting Steller), and Martin, Hunting of the Silver Fleece, 20–28. Although Busch is uncertain on the term “sea dog,” in quoting an 1870s journal of Stonington sealer W. H. Appleman that uses it, he speculates that it was the same as “fur seal” (209). Cooper also uses the term elsewhere, though in a somewhat uncertain manner. When Watson (the spy whom Daggett has temporarily placed on Gardiner’s ship) expresses his concern about the crew’s inexperience, he remarks, “It needs good men to be operatin’ among some of them sea-elephants! Sea dogs; for sea-dogs is my sayin’. ” Watson soon adds that the large male sea elephants are “real old bulls, or bull dogs, as a body might better call ’em” (SL 1:80). Because Cooper in his own voice will later distinguish sea elephants from sea dogs, he is either inconsistent or (a less likely explanation, I think) interested in emphasizing some finer array of vernacular uses, including nonce words (“as a body might better call ’em”). Cooper might have found some of the terms, but not all of them (e.g., neither “dog” nor “bear”), in chapter 18 of Fanning, Voyages Round the World, “Description of the SeaElephant, Sea-Leopard, Sea-Lion, Hair and Fur Seals, in the Southern Hemisphere”

notes to page 463

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(347–59). Sealer Benjamin Morrell, also one of Cooper’s sources, wrote that on Sandwich Land in the South Atlantic in 1823 he found no fur seals but “about four hundred sea-elephants, together with about fifty sea-dogs.” Benjamin Morrell, A Narrative of Four Voyages (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1832), 66. Bernadette Hince, The Antarctic Dictionary: A Complete Guide to Antarctic English (Collingwood: CSIRO, 2000), 300, tentatively identifies the “sea dog” as “a seal, perh. a fur seal.” But she also cites an 1879 Kerguelen Island source that asserts, “The sealers tell me that sometimes, but very rarely, they found another kind of seal, like the Fur Seal somewhat, which they called the ‘Sea Dog.” Hince also defines “sea bear” as “a seal, usually a female sea lion,” perhaps a distinct Antarctic usage. One distinctive term Cooper does not use suggests his limited knowledge—that is, clapmatch, applied to female fur seals and female sea lions. Fanning, Voyages Round the World, 355–54; cf. Hince, Antarctic Dictionary, 85: “Clapmatch . . . A seal or sea lion, usually a fur seal and especially a (breeding) female.” On balance, Cooper’s variations seem to fall within the range of informed usage at the time. 116. Cooper’s involvement with whaling beginning in 1819 also deepened his prior familiarity (owing to his wife’s kin there—see JFC:EY 227) with the New York setting where the book begins and ends—Suffolk County, specifically its easternmost end, centered on Shelter Island, Peconic Bay, and the twin forks of Long Island. There were obvious details that carried over to The Sea Lions, such as the name Gardiner. Not only were the proprietors of Gardiner’s Island a prominent area family, as the book amply informs its readers (SL 1:24–25). More to the point, Charles Dering had tentatively signed a second mate of that name in 1819, only to have him quit and join his brother’s ship, making it necessary for Dering to replace him, much as happens with Watson in the novel (see Charles T. Dering to JC, 8/4/1819, 8/21/1819, both in JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL). In 1820 and later years, Cooper took an active role in disposing of the ship’s cargo, running whale oil and sperm oil from Sag Harbor to Boston on probably two occasions, maybe more. It is possible that these trips gave him an opportunity to stop in Stonington as well (see JFC:EY 257–58; JC to Thomas Bridgen, 9/4/1820, Tibbits family paps., box 333, NYSL; and Robert McDermott [sic] to JC, 7/7/1821, JFC paps., box 2, AAS). In what I write about the general history of sealing, I follow Busch, War against the Seals, 3–9, 23–25. 117. Today the family designation Phocidae is used only for earless seals. Both sea lions and fur seals, which have visible external ears, belong instead to the family Otariidae. See Pieter Folkens (illus.), Randall A. Reeves, Brent S. Stewart, Phillip J. Clapham, and James A. Powell, National Audubon Society Guide to Marine Mammals of the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 49–51. For deeper scientific background, see Victor B. Scheffer, Seals, Sea Lions, and Walruses: A Review of the Pinnipedia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), Table 1 (pp. 3–5) and passim. Cooper’s use of phoca in this way represents a classificatory blunder by modern standards, though not necessarily those observed in 1849. In his day, phoca often covered a wider array of

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notes to pages 464–467

pinnipeds. See, for instance, Edward Griffith et al., The Animal Kingdom, Arranged in Conformity with its Organization by the Baron Cuvier (London: George B. Whitaker, 1827), 5:175–85. 118. A British sealer in the 1820s thus spoke of “the sea lion (properly the sea elephant).” James Weddell, A Voyage towards the South Pole, Performed in the Years 1822– 24, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827), 85. In a longer passage later in the book, however, Weddell writes that this “amphibious creature, of the seal genus, is most properly denominated the Sea Lion, from its similarity to that quadruped” (198). Scientists in the period also were confused, or at least used confusing terminology. Even today, the scientific names of sea lions (Otaria byronia, Eumetopias jubatus, Zalophus californianus, and Neophoca cinerea and hookeri ) include no reference to leonine characteristics, while that for the southern sea elephant or elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) does. For an armchair naturalist of Cooper’s period who knew Latin better than he knew seals, opportunities for misprision were many. See Victor B. Scheffer, Seals, Sea Lions, and Walruses, 3–5. 119. Scoresby, Account of the Arctic Regions, 1:512. In A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817), by yet another sometime sealer, Amasa Delano, there is a short but clear account of the grim sealing procedures that were employed in the late 1790s on Más Afuera (Alejandro Selkirk Island) off the Chilean coast that is largely consistent with Scoresby’s in the use of clubs and knives. See Amasa Delano, A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (Boston: Printed by E. G. House for the Author, 1818), 306. 120. On ecological matters, I agree with a recent writer’s conclusion that in The Sea Lions Cooper issued “a call for sustainable harvesting of Antarctic marine mammals—a response, no doubt, to growing (and completely justified) worries at the time that seal populations in the region” were already becoming “dangerously depleted.” Elizabeth Leane, Antarctica in Fiction: Imaginative Narratives of the Far South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 45. 121. Cooper wanted £350, and Bentley agreed. In this instance, he wished to draw for £100 on the first of September and again on the first of October; he would draw for the remainder sometime in November, when he expected to finish the book (LJ 5:374). Richard Bentley to JFC, 10/2/1848, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 122. John Fagan to JFC, 3/2/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. 123. John Fagan to JFC, 3/10/1849, 3/12/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Fagan refers to letters received from Cooper dated 3/8/1849 and 3/9/1849, neither of which has been located. 124. For these extensive rights, Stringer and Townsend were to pay Cooper a mere $900. JFC and Stringer and Townsend, memorandum of agreement, 11/11/1848, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Stringer and Townsend advertised the book in the Literary World, 5/26/1849, as then in its second edition (i.e., printing),

notes to pages 467–469

  

presumably meaning the firm had sold the original five thousand copies and had printed another two thousand. 125. John Fagan to JFC, 3/10/1849, 3/12/1849. I estimate, on the basis of Fagan’s recent charges for stereotyping, that his bill for The Sea Lions would have been around $400. Putnam did not include The Sea Lions in his 1849–1850 edition, the other means by which Cooper might have marketed it at the time. Its exclusion was owing to a clause in an omnibus Cooper contract executed with Stringer and Townsend a few months before the appearance of the novel. This contract explicitly barred Cooper from publishing The Sea Lions in any other format until after the expiration date of that agreement. JFC and Stringer and Townsend, memorandum of agreement, 3/6/1849, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 126. The large Bentley display advertisement, in the Athenaeum, 3/24/1849, 291, indicated that the book would be available “on Wednesday next, the 28th instant,” but Bentley PL gives the actual English date as 3/29/1849. For the United States, BAL 2:302 cites the Literary World (“Issued during the period March 31–April 14, 1849, according to LW April 14, 1849”); however, the book was first advertised in the press in Boston and Baltimore on 4/10/1849 (Boston Daily Atlas) and 4/11/1849 (Baltimore Sun). N. P. Willis’s Home Journal, 4/7/1849, described it as “nearly ready.” C HAPTER 15.   LAST WORDS 1. I trace the emergence of the series title in the marketplace and in Cooper’s own usage in “ ‘One More Scene’: The Marketing Context of Cooper’s ‘Sixth’ LeatherStocking Tale,” in Jeffrey Walker, ed., Leather-Stocking Redux; or, Old Tales, New Essays (New York: AMS Press, 2011), 225–28. 2. Their most important mutual connection was John Wiley, Putnam’s partner from 1838 to 1847. In 1844, it will be recalled, Wiley and Putnam had joined Cooper and Burgess and Stringer in marketing Afloat and Ashore. For much of the period before 1847, however, Putnam had run the firm’s London operation and hence had little direct connection with its American business or with Cooper. See Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam: Representative American Publisher (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 42–69, 85–99, 202–3. Cooper had perhaps used Putnam as a go-between with Britain on a couple of previous occasions; see LJ 4:6, 392, 415n2. Putnam for his part had made it clear that he admired Cooper. See George P. Putnam, The Tourist in Europe (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1838), 226, and American Facts (London: Wiley and Putnam, 1845), 88–89 and facing page. 3. Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 215–17, 228–31. The first Irving volume, A History of New York (1809), came out in September 1848, followed by The Sketch Book (1819–1820) the next month. Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 2:395n129; Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 216–17. Putnam used his large proceeds from the Irving edition to finance those he

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notes to pages 469–470

undertook next with Cooper and Sedgwick, but he approached Sedgwick somewhat later than Cooper, according to Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 228–31. The first of her books issued in the new edition was the 1830 novel Clarence; or, a Tale of Our Own Times, which appeared in late summer or early fall 1849 (BAL 7:390). 4. Putnam’s undertaking was soon being talked about in New York as a much grander thing than it proved to be. On March 6, Cooper’s sometime foe Horace Greeley reported that “a complete edition” of Cooper’s “Novels, Tales, Histories, and Miscellaneous Writings, is about to be commenced in this City by putnam, in the style of the beautiful and eminently successful edition of the works of Irving.” We may doubt that either Cooper or Putnam took so broad a view that soon, but it is possible. “Literary Intelligence,” New-York Daily Tribune, 3/6/1849. Among the more intriguing aspects of Greeley’s report is the following: “[Felix Octavius Carr] Darley will probably be the illustrator.” Darley at the time was twenty-six. 5. Cooper’s unlocated letter to Fagan of 3/1/1849, only two days after the Putnam meeting, indicated that he would pay for and own the plates. We know of some of that letter’s contents through Fagan’s reply and Cooper’s follow-up of 3/3/1849 (LJ 6:10). Fagan thus wrote: “I will stereotype, on new type, and very handsomely, your ‘Sea Tales’ ”—one notes this emphasis from the outset—“to match ‘Irving,’ at 60 cts. per 1000 ems, (that is, 90 cts. per page, for his page has (50x30) 1500 ems bourgeois)—6 mos—I suspect Wiley must pay that.” Apparently Cooper had not named the publisher with whom he was discussing the edition and Fagan simply assumed it would be John Wiley, reasonably enough given Cooper’s recent connection to that publisher. Fagan also expressed the hope that Wiley would pick him for the stereotyping. John Fagan to JFC, 3/2/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Cooper corrected him on various issues in his March 3 answer. The “em” was the standard measure of a printer’s work and charges— the equivalent of the work and space required to set one letter “m” in the format requested, and hence a unit of cost as well. Putnam’s edition of Irving indeed used thirty lines per page, with a line length containing fifty ems, and was set in the Bourgeois typeface. For Cooper, this format was later changed somewhat, as we shall see. 6. Whereas Irving reportedly had agreed to substantially revise all his old works (see Williams, Life of Washington Irving, 2:216), Putnam’s surviving agreements with Cooper do not explicitly require him to follow suit. He altered texts and made additions to them, but was not contractually bound to do so. 7. In a wide-ranging comparison of the way Cooper and Walter Scott, though divided by political interests, were united in their manner of address to the English public and hence jointly participated in the same transatlantic cultural field, Joseph Rezek argues that Cooper’s use of the revised Colburn and Bentley texts introduced into the Putnam edition (and into later American editions derived in whole or part from them) the Anglicized usages he or his publishers introduced in the former, as well as the explanatory notes he himself had inserted so that English readers could better grasp

notes to page 471

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American facts and references. See Joseph Rezek, “Cooper and Scott in the Anglophone Literary Field,” ELH 78 (2011): 891–916. This insightful argument overlooks, though, the market conditions that affected Cooper’s decision to switch between transatlantic versions in both the early 1830s and the late 1840s. As I suggest in the present text (see chapter 4, note 33), the reason he revised the books for Colburn and Bentley in the first place was not only to burnish the prose and adapt it for a specifically English audience, but also to establish that firm’s copyright in his earliest books (a point Rezek recognizes but does not more fully explore), books that mostly had appeared in England under other imprints, several by piracy, in the 1820s. By contrast, his use of the Standard Novels texts as the basis for most of the books Putnam reprinted made his most significant revisions to date easily accessible to him should further revisions be needed. But, to anticipate a discussion I carry on later in the present chapter, that choice of copy text also gave Putnam (and, after Putnam’s two-year contract expired, Cooper himself and potentially his heirs) legal right, or so Cooper apparently thought, to texts that had never before appeared in the United States in this particular form and hence were not yet covered by copyright there. They wore the appearance, that is, of separate texts. Cooper was playing the two sides of the Atlantic marketplace off against each other in both instances, although in the case of the last two Leather-Stocking Tales, which he never revised for Bentley, he would rely on the Lea and Blanchard texts, the same ones Stringer and Townsend were using at the time, a subject I return to briefly later; see PF CE 405–8; DS CE 570–71. 8. John Fagan to JFC, 3/6/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. 9. JFC and George P. Putnam, memorandum of agreement, 3/8/1849, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper’s payments would be either twenty-five or thirty cents (depending on whether the retail price was $1.00 or $1.25) for each copy of The Spy sold by Putnam over the next two years; the cheaper copies he kept the right to sell were to have a retail price of fifty cents. As a final point, contained in a postscript, the contract allowed Putnam to include in “one or more editions of the above named work . . . illustrations made at his own cost or charge and to vend the same at any price he may think expedient.” Cooper had mentioned this issue, too, in the March 5 letter to Fagan (“we hope to sell a large edition, in part illustrated”), but Putnam would not pursue that possibility at this time. (The first three Putnam reissues bore on their title pages the claim that they were “Illustrated with a New Introduction, Notes, etc., by the Author.” The term as used in the contract and Cooper’s letter meant “with pictures added,” however, and it would remain to the subsequent owners of the Putnam plates, W. A. Townsend and Company, to illustrate the books in the usual sense.) Cooper had outlined the key points of the contract in a letter to his wife two days before the agreement was signed (see LJ 6:12). The “Author’s Revised Edition” of Cooper, as it was called, began with The Spy in May 1849, The Pilot in October, and The Red Rover in February 1850 (BAL 2:302–3). After further negotiations, to be discussed below, the

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notes to pages 472–473

Leather-Stocking Tales appeared between September 1850 and February 1851. Finally, The Wing-and-Wing, The Two Admirals, and The Water-Witch all were issued in late April or May 1851 (BAL 2:303–4). Although Cooper’s final novel, The Ways of the Hour, was first published in April 1850 by Putnam in the same format, it was not technically part of the set. 10. Cooper kept the central ten paragraphs of the 1831 introduction, with a few small changes, and made several additions. The latter consisted mostly of a brief first paragraph replacing two extensive ones in the Bentley, plus three longer concluding paragraphs in lieu of the single short one ending the 1831 version. 11. John Fagan to JFC, 3/10/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Some adjustments in the book’s design did intervene. Two days later, Fagan (in a letter mostly concerned with The Sea Lions) informed Cooper that Putnam had asked him to slightly alter his page size and spacing so as to trim Putnam’s printing costs. See John Fagan to JFC, 3/12/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Probably the proofs of the “Introduction” came to Cooper later than Fagan predicted. Its subscription in the printed book provides a rough date (“cooperstown, March 29, 1849), as does the letter Cooper sent Fagan the next day, in which he wrote: “The last line of the last paragraph but one of Introduction to Spy must be altered,” as it accordingly was (LJ 6:19). 12. See John Fagan to JFC, 5/3/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL, as well as Cooper’s own comments on the matter (LJ 6:20, 33, 38, 44). On the stereotyping and the delay, see John Fagan to JFC, 7/7/1849, 9/5/1849, 9/6/1849, 9/13/1849, 10/18/1849, all in JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. These summarize several unlocated letters on the matter that Cooper sent Fagan on 9/3/1849, 9/10/1849, and 10/17/1849. BAL 2:303 indicates that The Pilot had appeared by 10/13/1849. Whatever its cause, the delay offers a further contrast between the Cooper edition and that of Irving’s works. Within five months of issuing the first Irving volume, Putnam had brought other four more (see BAL 5:47–49); in Cooper’s case, he had managed to issue only one more over the same spread of time. 13. John Fagan to JFC, 11/26/1849, 12/8/1849, 12/13/1849, all in JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Cooper meant to send the preface with a December 8 letter but forgot to enclose it and then dispatched it four days later. John Fagan, bill to JFC ($419.75, for stereotyping The Red Rover, along with shipping charges for the dispatched plates), 1/18/1850, in John Fagan to JFC, 2/9/1850, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. It is again worth noting that Putnam, only ten months into the Irving edition at the time, was about to issue two more volumes in it, as well as a new collection edited by Irving, A Book of the Hudson. A further two Irving volumes would follow by May and a third by June (see BAL 5:49–51). 14. For instance, although Beard did not annotate the reference to the “handsome edition” in Cooper’s 10/19/1849 letter to his wife, it is indexed under “Leatherstocking Tales, . . . correction for Putnam edition” (see LJ 6:412). Beard did not know of the contract I go on to quote in my text.

notes to pages 473–475

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15. JFC and Stringer and Townsend, memorandum of agreement, 10/15/1849, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper received $250 in cash at that time as full payment for the revisions and new prefaces. 16. JFC and Burgess, Stringer and Company, memoranda of agreement, 3/5/1845 and 3/18/1845, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Cooper was to receive $1,000 (on top of the $1,050 promised for Satanstoe) in return for this assignment. The books named included five works from his first decade (Precaution, The Spy, The Pilot, The Red Rover, and The Water-Witch), plus three from his last decade (The Two Admirals, The Wing-and-Wing, and Ned Myers). The 1830s were represented by Homeward Bound and Home as Found. The contract also included, in the vaguest terms, “all the other copyright tales” of which Cooper was the owner: “those called Afloat & Ashore excepted and which books that are not named here are believed to be two, viz., Lionel Lincoln and Wyandotte, but about which there is no certainty; the fact remaining to be determined on enquiries.” Having gone on to Philadelphia the day after executing the March 5 agreement, Cooper checked with Lea and Blanchard, determining that he owned neither Lionel Lincoln nor Wyandotté, nor, indeed, two of the titles positively included in the first list (Precaution and Home as Found). On returning to Manhattan on March 18, he and Burgess and Stringer therefore executed an amendment dropping the latter books and adding the one other novel Cooper had discovered he also owned, Mercedes of Castile, as well as the five European travel books, likewise his own property. Under the revised agreement, the New Yorkers could use Cooper’s plates, but only under the supervision of his agent, obviously to prevent abuse—to prevent, for instance, the firm from stockpiling unsold copies as a book’s five-year deadline drew near. See LJ 5:12–13, and esp. 14, where the details agree with those in the contracts. Burgess never reprinted the travel books. 17. This further transfer carried an exception in the case of The Pioneers in favor of the New York firm of Collins, Hannay, and Company, to which Cooper had licensed his third novel when it brought out an edition in cooperation with Charles Wiley in 1825, the only authorized one then on the U.S. market. 18. JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memoranda of agreement, 11/20/1844 and 11/21/1844, Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. 19. Carey Lea and Co. [sic] to JFC, 12/4/1837, and Francis Hopkinson to Carey, Lea and Blanchard, receipt for deposit of the title of Homeward Bound, 6/13/1838, with endorsements on back, 7/27–28/1838, assigning the book to Cooper, both on Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. The published volumes give the firm as copyright holders. In the case of Home as Found, however, they give Cooper as copyright holder. 20. For the relevant receipts for copyright deposit between 1839 and 1850, see Cooper family paps. microfilm, HSFC, New York City. Earlier ones also preserved there result from various assignments from the original holders, as with Homeward Bound.

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notes to pages 475–477

21. JFC and Carey, Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 4/2/1841, Cooper microfilm. Cooper did not technically own Mohicans, an important point for the later fate of the Leather-Stocking series as a whole, though it had no particular significance for the 1841 gift. 22. JFC and Lea and Blanchard, memorandum of agreement, 11/20/1844. The publishers hereby gave back to Cooper the five European travel books as well, presumably with the plates for the first of them, if they still existed. 23. These books are named in the 11/20/1844 memorandum of agreement. It again should be stressed that the inclusion of Mohicans in Cooper’s 1841 grant to the firm had been a mistake. 24. I say this on the basis of various titles issued by Lea and Blanchard bearing the dates 1845 and 1849, including the individual Leather-Stocking Tales, Home as Found, Notions of the Americans, Lionel Lincoln, and even The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, in the collections at AAS. 25. The advertisement for the “New and Uniform Edition” on the back cover of my copy of The Oak Openings (New York: Burgess, Stringer and Co., 1848) is headed, “Price Reduced of Cooper’s Novels.” I have found no evidence that the New Yorkers indeed had purchased Cooper’s plates for the books they were publishing—to the contrary, Cooper clearly still owned them, as I indicate later in my text. 26. In addition to the latter agreement, the 1846 Redskins contract with Burgess and Stringer allowed the firm to publish that book for four years and granted it four-year contracts, to expire on the same date as the novels transferred in March 1845—that is, on March 5, 1850—for the two earlier Littlepage novels and the four-volume “Miles Wallingford.” Once the novels published later than the Littlepage series were added in March 1849, Stringer and Townsend owned rights to twenty-three books. 27. JFC and Burgess, Stringer and Co., memorandum of agreement, 3/6/1849, Cooper microfilm. This covered (in the order of the document) twenty-three separate works: Spy, Homeward Bound, Two Admirals, Wing-and-Wing, Jack Tier, Pilot, Mercedes of Castile, Red Rover, Water-Witch, Ned Myers, both parts of Afloat and Ashore, Crater, Oak Openings, Satanstoe, Chainbearer, Redskins, all the travel books, and Sea Lions (which would appear in April 1849). The 3/6/1849 contract extended for a further year, beyond the original five-year limit, the firm’s rights on the fourteen works covered by the 3/5–18/1845 contracts, and the five books added via the original Redskins contract, and extended the various rights the firm held on all subsequently published books so that all its rights would expire on 4/1/1851. For the Redskins contract, see JFC and Burgess, Stringer and Company, memorandum of agreement, 4/1/1846, Cooper microfilm. 28. John Fagan to JFC, 9/13/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. 29. The contract was executed on 9/21/1849; a second agreement transferred ownership of copyright from Lea and Blanchard to Stringer and Townsend on 9/9/1850, doubtless after the latter’s notes had all been paid. Fourteen novels, along with their plates

notes to pages 477–479

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and unsold stock, were covered, including the Leather-Stocking Tales, and it is likely that Lea and Blanchard also conveyed plates, stock, and copyright for Notions of the Americans, which Stringer and Townsend inserted into their first collected editions of Cooper’s “Novels.” For the transfer from the Philadelphia firm to the New Yorkers, see also Steven P. Harthorn, “James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship, and the American Literary Marketplace, 1838–1851” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2005), 360. 30. JFC and Stringer and Townsend, memorandum of agreement, 6/6–8/1850, Cooper microfilm. This contract left the rights and plates in Cooper’s hands as security for the firm’s obligation, which was to be satisfied within two years, at which point Cooper’s interest in the books and the plates would be formally vacated. The first of the eight payments was due on 9/6/1850, to be followed by the others at three-month intervals. Beard did not have access to this contract or the later ones Cooper made with Putnam, which I discuss next in my text. That may explain his grim judgment on how Cooper managed his literary property at the end of his life, with which I cannot agree: “Cooper colossally underestimated the value of his literary property and permitted Stringer and Townsend to gain control. Had he been willing and able to entrust this extensive property to Putnam, who sought to pay Cooper at the rate he paid Irving, the novelist could have left his family a far more substantial competence” (LJ 6:6). As I show in my text, Cooper did the best he could with the relatively few titles he still owned. Only once Stringer and Townsend bought out Lea and Blanchard’s interests in the fall of 1849, in addition, did he in turn sell his titles to the New York firm. Putnam himself might have made a deal with Lea and Blanchard for the works that the Philadelphians instead sold to Stringer and Townsend, but he probably did not have the means of doing so. 31. Copies of both an 1852 and an 1855 set are in my collection. Neither includes The Ways of the Hour, although the 6/6–8/1850 contract did include that novel among the books Cooper was conveying to Stringer and Townsend. For even earlier cheap sets, see the holdings of the AAS: G526 C777 Works 1850. 32. Contract, JFC and Stringer & Townsend, 10/15/1849, Cooper microfilm. 33. On the history of the idea for a sixth Leather-Stocking Tale, see Harthorn, “James Fenimore Cooper, Professional Authorship,” 244–46, and Franklin, “ ‘One More Scene,’ ” 229–32. Greene provided the most circumstantial contemporary account. He described their conversation as taking place at Putnam’s shop shortly after Putnam reissued The Spy—that is, in late April or early May 1849. George Washington Greene, “Personal Recollections of Cooper,” in Biographical Studies (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1860), 58–59. For my dating of this recollection, and details on Greene’s career, see “ ‘One More Scene,’ ” 229–31. 34. John Fagan to JFC, 11/26/1849, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. 35. Oliver B. Bunce, “To the Editor of the Critic,” Critic, 9/14/1889 (“high pecuniary value” and “the shadow”); “Published Cooper’s Works: William Adee Townsend and His Interesting Reminiscences,” Brooklyn Eagle, 12/8/1895 (“much surprised and

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notes to pages 479–480

disappointed”); Oliver B. Bunce, [Editor’s notes], Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art 8 (11/23/1872): 584 (“blank disappointment”). Townsend was wrong in dating their discussion to “about nine months prior to” Cooper’s death, that is, early 1851 (see “Published Cooper’s Works”). It must have occurred instead during a narrow window late in 1849. Cooper signed the “handsome edition” contract on October 15 and then went home for about a month before returning to New York at the end of November. It was after he arrived there that, as I make clear in my text, he and Townsend most plausibly spoke. On Cooper’s movements at this time, see LJ 6:75–77, 88. 36. Cooper’s Thanksgiving letter suggests that he had shared some bad news with his wife in an even earlier one that does not survive. After asserting, “There is nothing new to say,” he went on to add, somewhat cryptically: “I am hard at work, and have a good resolution, if nothing else. I have one dernier ressort in the book way, though scarcely like it.” LJ 6:88. 37. “Fenimore Cooper to G. P. Putnam. Proposal,” in George H. Putnam, George Palmer Putnam: A Memoir, rev. ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 143–44. The item is dated “1849. 3 O’Clock Saturday.” I assign it to 12/8/1849 on the basis of the series of linked issues I raise in my text. Cooper proposed that Putnam pay him a total of $1,200 for the plates for the three sea tales and wanted him to assume all production costs for what he vaguely termed “the remaining three books.” He also expected Putnam to give him, for the right to publish the three sea tales, a $300 note now (which he described as “copy money, or $100. a book”) and another $100 on the publication of each. Putnam would have the use of all plates for three years, after which they would become Cooper’s property. No restriction was mentioned on the total number of copies of any title Putnam was allowed to print within the three-year term, nor was it clear whether sums already paid on the earlier books were to be credited against the new contract. Details obviously remained to be worked out. 38. JFC and George P. Putnam, memoranda of agreement, Spy, Pilot, and Red Rover, 12/11/1849, Cooper microfilm. These contracts promised Cooper flat payments of $500 per title, in return for which Putnam had the right to issue three thousand copies of each book. They also adjusted several other existing terms. For instance, they included in the total sales figures all the copies of the first two books that Putnam had already sold. An added point is that, after “December 10” was crossed out on these documents, further clauses in the same handwriting were added, probably during the face-to-face negotiations that I have suggested took place on December 11, no doubt at Putnam’s office at 155 Broadway. Among them was one that similarly counted the payments already made to Cooper under the original contracts toward the $500 total due him on each book, an issue unaddressed in Cooper’s first proposal. No new dateline was added to the contracts proper when Cooper and Putnam signed them, but elsewhere on the documents Cooper recorded the execution date for all three as “December 11.” All three contracts included clauses allowing for the marketing of these books in cheap

notes to page 480

  

editions, a reference to the Stringer and Townsend editions, a point to which I return in my text. 39. JFC and George P. Putnam, memorandum of agreement, 12/12/1849, Cooper microfilm. Although Putnam was obliged to issue the three unnamed books before the end of 1850 and was to keep them “constantly in the market at a price at retail that shall not exceed one dollar and twenty-five cents a copy,” he hardly rushed his schedule. By prior arrangement, he brought out The Red Rover in February and The Ways of the Hour in April, then remained inactive until fall. Although he eventually published three more of Cooper’s sea tales (The Wing-and-Wing, The Two Admirals, and The Water-Witch), they were not issued until the spring of 1851, well after the deadline, and in fact were preceded by Putnam’s Leather-Stocking Tales, three of which came out before the end of 1850. 40. JFC and Stringer and Townsend, memorandum of agreement, 6/6–8/1850. 41. Putnam’s Deerslayer as first issued not only had the new preface Cooper had written for it but also, owing to an error, substituted the new Mohicans preface for his general preface to the series. A similar mix-up occurred with the latter book as well. See BAL 2:303–4. The Deerslayer had been announced by mid-September (see “George P. Putnam Will Publish in a Few Days,” Literary World, 9/14/1850, p. 219) and would appear by September 21 (see “List of Books Published in the United States from the 6th to the 21st Sept.,” Literary World, 9/21/1850, p. 239). Mohicans was included in the “List of Books Published in the United States from the 5th to 19th October,” Literary World, 10/19/1850, p. 318. There is some uncertainty about the time at which both The Pioneers and The Pathfinder came out. If Putnam were indeed following the order of Natty Bumppo’s life rather than the original order of the publication of the tales, The Pathfinder should have preceded The Pioneers, but that does not seem to have been the case. Advertisements and notices for The Pioneers ran before the end of 1850: for instance, see “George P. Putnam’s Latest Publications,” Literary World, 11/23/1850, p. 421, and “List of Books Published in the United States from the 17th to the 30th of November,” Literary World, 11/30/1850, p. 438. These references in fact predate the first ones located for The Pathfinder (“Attractive New Illustrated Works Now Ready for Publication by George P. Putnam,” Literary World, 12/14/1850, p. 489; “List of Books Published in the United States from the 30th [of] November to the 14th of December,” Literary World, 12/21/1850, p. 511). On the other hand, the Cooper Edition of The Pioneers, though citing the 11/23/1850 Literary World advertisement, asserts that it could locate “no copies of an 1850 Putnam imprint of this book” (PIO CE 479), and BAL 2:303–4 gives “1851” as the publication date for both it and The Pathfinder, even as it notes the advertisements already referred to. S&B 168 lists the books in “the order in which they were announced for publication,” dating Pathfinder to 1851 and Pioneers to 1850. For The Prairie, which also is dated 1851 on its title page, BAL 2:304 cites a 2/1/1851 advertisement calling it “now ready” and its inclusion in the Literary World “List of Books” for the period 1/25–2/8/1851.

— 

notes to pages 481–484

42. Cooper added two paragraphs to the preface for The Pioneers denying that his sister Hannah provided the basis for Elizabeth Temple, but the novel proper retained two footnotes he wrote for Bentley stressing connections between his own family and the story. More thorough revision of the whole book in 1850 probably would have caught such contradictions. See the Cooper Edition’s comment on this issue, PIO CE 479. 43. The copy text for The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer came from the 1840/1841 Lea and Blanchard editions; see DS CE 574; PF CE 477. Perhaps Cooper understood that the Bentley Standard Novels text of The Deerslayer had somehow been corrupted (the Cooper Edition thus asserts: “Sample collation indicates that the ‘Bentley Standard Novels’ text compresses and freely rearranges passages in Cooper’s text”—DS CE 572). Perhaps he did not. In any case, he had not revised that book or The Pathfinder for Bentley and hence would not have gained anything in terms of copyright by using the Bentley Standard Novels versions for Putnam. 44. Once again, if Putnam and Cooper had agreed on “seven” books by June 1850, why should Cooper write his wife several months later to inform her that he had just reached terms with Putnam for the last three sea stories? Putnam eventually published eleven older Cooper novels in his 1849–1851 edition, including six that Cooper owned at the date of his June 1850 contract with Stringer and Townsend: The Spy, The Pilot, The Red Rover, The Wing-and-Wing, The Two Admirals, and The Water-Witch. 45. George P. Putnam to JFC, 4/17/1850, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 46. JFC to George P. Putnam, 4/20/1850 (unpublished), JFC paps., box 3, AAS. Cooper’s syntax in this letter is especially challenging; I give my considered interpretation in the text. For the record, however, here is his original with two bracketed clarifications: “The control of Stringer & Townsend over my copy rights, plates &c, terminated by the terms of the [1845] contract, last month. I extended it [in March 1849] for one year, for the privilege of publishing your edition, reserving to them the rights to publish the books published by you in the cheap form, as then practiced by them.” 47. The significance of the copyright notices contained in Putnam’s set of the Leather-Stocking Tales is made clear by the different notice contained in the books Putnam had published that were still in Cooper’s hands. That in The Pilot; a Tale of the Sea (New York: George P. Putnam, 1849) thus read: “Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1849, by J. Fenimore Cooper” (iv). How Stringer and Townsend came into possession of the Putnam plates and how the Cooper family managed the novelist’s literary property after his death are questions beyond the scope of the present biography. My hunch is given in my text. By 1854, Putnam had no rights in the books, and the plates according to his contract with Cooper were to become the novelist’s property once those rights expired. It is also possible that Cooper’s family sold the plates to Stringer and Townsend. Certainly the family discussed the matter

notes to pages 484–485

  

with Putnam and Stringer and Townsend in 1853–1854; see H. E. Phinney to PFC, 2/22/1853, and Stringer and Townsend to H. E. Phinney, 6/8/1854, both in WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA. Here are the details on the Darley edition: Cooper’s Novels, Illustrated by [F.O.C.] Darley, 32 vols. (New York: W. A. Townsend, 1859–1861). 48. It was called “The Men of Manhattan” in Cooper’s death notice in the Free­ ­man’s Journal on 9/20/1851 and was there said to be “not finished at the time of his death.” 49. Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam, 282n66, identifies Craighead. Beard mistakenly thought the fire had occurred at Putnam’s own shop during a vague window “between December 1851 and July 1852” (LJ 6:205), but Putnam did no printing and according to Greenspan suffered no fire at this time. On the details of the fire in the building at 112 Fulton Street that housed Craighead’s shop, see “Fire,” New York Times, 1/23/1852, and “The Fire in Fulton Street,” New York Times, 1/24/1852, p. 1. The latter story states that among the works lost “was a portion of Miss Cooper’s new work,” by which evidently was meant her father’s last book, which she had annotated and probably extended and which she was then managing for Putnam, as I indicate in the next chapter. 50. “Literary Intelligence,” New-York Daily Tribune, 3/6/1849. If the “New York” book as Greeley described it was ever written, it either was lost or became the basis for the revision that produced the Manhattan manuscript. According to Beard, after her father’s death Susan indicated that he had made radical changes in the book as late as 1851, essentially beginning it anew (James F. Beard, “The First History of Greater New York: Unknown Portions of Fenimore Cooper’s Last Work,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 37 [1953]: 112). 51. George P. Putnam and JFC, memorandum of agreement (draft), undated (but March 1849); this was enclosed in a 3/3/1849 letter from Putnam to Cooper, which provides the date I give for the draft agreement. Both in JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. This document was not executed; nor was another, obviously related draft, reportedly in Cooper’s hand, that outlined similar terms with Putnam for a new novel, to be issued in the usual two-volume duodecimo format from stereotype plates Cooper was to supply. Advertised online at James Pepper Rare Books, http:// www.jamespepperbooks.com/?page=shop/flypage&product_id=1004719&keyword =cooper&searchby=author&offset=0&fs=1 (copy in my files). The contract for the “Men of Manhattan” project, it should be noted, was not executed by Cooper and Putnam until late 1850. 52. We already have seen that this book was in fact brought out in the same material form as The Spy and the other books Putnam was to issue in 1849–1850. The plan to issue the other New York book in octavos, as Cooper himself avowed in writing Fagan in February, may provide one tentative differential for interpreting the record. (Once

— 

notes to pages 486–488

Putnam did begin production of The Men of Manhattan, he chose for it the same format as the other books in his Cooper edition, but that was many months after Cooper first mentioned the project.) Essential in terms of both books were such details as typeface, number of lines per page, and the single-volume format. Cooper himself kept talking about the novel as if it were to appear in the usual two volumes in the United States, as when he asked Fagan in February 1850 to send him “duplicates of first volume of Ways of the Hour corrected” (LJ 6:129). But that was an oversight, as Fagan pointedly reminded him in his reply: “You are aware that I am putting the whole book into a single volume to match the new series. So I go off with [p.] 263 for new copy, as you will see with proof of 2 pp. also herewith sent.” John Fagan to JFC, 2/9/1850, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. (The fifteenth chapter ended with p. 262, the eleventh gathering with p. 264.) With regard to The Towns of Manhattan, comparison of the surviving page proofs as Beard printed them in “The First History of Greater New York” with pages from any of the volumes in the Putnam edition makes the coherence evident. It is true, however, that in accord with Cooper’s own wish (see LJ 6:280), the type size in the New York “Introduction” is smaller than that in the body of the book. Even so, it is worth noting that the “Introduction” uses the same font in the same size as the Putnam novels. 53. “Literary Items: The Whereabouts of Authors, etc.,” Home Journal, 11/11/1848, p. 2 (Cooper was in New York at the time this report appeared—see LJ 5:389–90). “Literary Gossip,” Home Journal, 4/7/1849, p. 1. 54. Cooper had by no means settled on that most recent title, largely because it was too close to Scott’s 1818 novel The Heart of Midlothian, which also concerned and indeed was named after a jail, the infamous Tolbooth municipal building in Edinburgh, which housed that city’s main prison. Putnam replied to Cooper’s other suggested titles, which included “The Ways of Manhattan” (LJ 6:22), by numbering four of them in the order of his falling enthusiasm, from “The Men of Manhattan” and “The Ways of Manhattan” to “The Minds of Manhattan” and finally “The Tombs of Manhattan.” On the latter choice, he commented, “I think ‘The Tombs’ has become a cant phrase, which would not give a good impression.” George P. Putnam to JFC, 4/–/1849, JFC Coll., box 7, YCAL. 55. The rural New York town in the novel was named after the one north of Philadelphia (spelled, however, Byberry) where Cooper’s father had been born. See JFC:EY 5. 56. John P. McWilliams, Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 389–90. See also his related discussion, “Innocent Criminal or Criminal Innocence: The Trial in American Literature,” in Law and American Literature: A Collection of Essays, ed. Carl S. Smith, John P. McWilliams, and Maxwell H. Bloomfield (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 67–71.

notes to pages 489–492

  

57. For Dunscomb’s opposition to the Constitutional Convention of 1846, see Ways 23. The convention, which met over the summer of 1846, debated various legal issues. In the new constitution approved that fall, as the delegates announced in their official report to the people, it had undertaken serious judicial reform: “After repeated failures in the legislature, they have provided a Judicial System, adequate to the wants of a free people, rapidly increasing in arts, culture, commerce and population.” S. Croswell and R. Sutton, Debates and Proceedings in the New-York State Convention, for the Revision of the Constitution (Albany: Office of the Albany Argus, 1846), 852. Cooper knew several delegates to the convention, most importantly his Otsego neighbor and friend U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Nelson, conversations with whom may well have informed him about discussions and debates at the convention. Ibid., vii–viii. That a preliminary version of the new legal code was approved by the legislature in April 1849 and was published just when Cooper was thinking about the New York novel suggests the latter’s topicality. The Code of Procedure of the State of New-York; As Amended by the Legislature, by an Act Passed April 11, 1849 (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., Public Printers, 1849). 58. McWilliams, Political Justice, 389n7, also cites this point as important for distinguishing Cooper from his main character. 59. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books. From the 18th London edition, with . . . References to American Cases, 2 vols. (New York: W. E. Dean, 1838), 1:47–48. 60. Croswell and Sutton, Debates and Proceedings, 841. 61. The Code of Procedure of the State of New-York; as Amended (1849), 75. Although not approved at the time and thus without effect when Cooper’s novel appeared, the completed draft civil and criminal codes, the work of David Dudley Field, Arphaxed Loomis, and David Graham, were indeed published then and may also have had some influence on the novelist. See The Code of Civil Procedure of the State of NewYork. Reported Complete by the Commissioners on Practice and Pleadings (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., Public Printers, 1850) and The Code of Criminal Procedure of the State of New-York. Reported Complete by the Commissioners on Practice and Pleadings (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Co., Public Printers, 1850). The former (p. 332) repeated the options about juries in the approved 1849 Code. On the failure of the 1850 drafts to win approval at the time, see Stephen N. Subrin, “David Dudley Field and the Field Code: A Historical Analysis of an Earlier Procedural Vision,” Law and History Review 6 (1988): 316–17, and Alison Reppy, “The Field Codification Concept,” in David Dudley Field: Centenary Essays. Celebrating One Hundred Years of Legal Reform, ed. Alison Reppy (New York: New York University Law School, 1949), 35. (Cooper may have known Field personally during that Connecticut-born lawyer’s earlier days, as Field had learned the law in the Manhattan office of the novelist’s associates Robert and Henry Sedgwick in the mid1820s, before becoming Henry’s partner in 1828. See Subrin, “David Dudley Field,”

— 

notes to pages 492–494

315.) In Cooper’s novel, it is Thomas Dunscomb who brings up the new code, often to quibble with its provisions. See Ways, 13–14, 33, 69. 62. Cooper’s insights into the jury as an institution, he claimed in one of his narrative asides in the book, stemmed from his “own experience, by no means trifling, as foreman, as suitor, and as a disinterested spectator” (Ways 365). As I noted in my sixth chapter, Cooper’s experience as foreman came early in 1836 when he served on a federal grand jury considering accusations against several mariners in New York. 63. On another issue that bothers Dunscomb, the newly established statutory right of women to control their own property, the new code said nothing. Although Dunscomb terms the statute in question the “Woman-hold-the-Purse-Law” or the “tea-cup law” (Ways 29, 202), it was officially named “the Married Women’s Property Act” when it was passed in 1848 by the New York legislature. This law, which recognized married women’s legal right to own property, was related to the codification movement in the sense that the new state constitution, by eliminating the state’s equity court (i.e., chancery), disallowed the protection previously available via that means from the Common Law doctrine of coverture. Because the legislature had eliminated realty trusts even earlier, in 1836, and these had been a primary means for protecting married women’s property interests from their husbands, the 1848 statute had been a necessary reform. It did not grant new rights to married women, or extend older ones, but rather gave standing in the law to the essentially informal devices once used to serve their interests. Barbara Ann Bardes and Suzanne Gossett, citing the work of lawyer Peggy Rabkin, similarly argue that the statute in question modernized property rights of married women in the interest of “legal tidiness” rather than in order to advance a feminist agenda. They further claim that in The Ways of the Hour Cooper “attacked” the new law “because he recognized its significance”—because he saw it as “a symbol of all the evils which were destroying American society.” Barbara Ann Bardes and Suzanne Gossett, “Cooper and the ‘Cup and Saucer’ Law: A New Reading of The Ways of the Hour,” American Quarterly 32 (1980): 502–5. Although citing McWilliams’s cautions about conflating Cooper with Dunscomb (500–501), they largely do just that. On the other hand, their probing of the book’s biographical backgrounds is refreshing. They thus plausibly suggest that the model for Cooper’s lawyer was the conservative Democrat Charles O’Conor, who as a member of the Constitutional Convention inveighed against granting married women control of their property (see 506). See also Peggy Rabkin, “The Origins of Law Reform: The Social Significance of the Nineteenth-Century Codification Movement and Its Contribution to the Passage of the Early Married Women’s Property Acts,” Buffalo Law Review 24 (1975): 683–760. 64. A final point about the distance between Cooper and Dunscomb derives from his other 1850 work—that is, the partially surviving comedy Upside Down, or Philosophy in Petticoats, performed at Burton’s Theatre in Manhattan June 19–21, 1850. The lead character is a “rich old bachelor of 66,” Richard Lovel, who is as adamantly opposed to

notes to pages 494–498

  

all innovations as Dunscomb. Opposing him is his nephew Frank, who is toying with Communism. Neither character, clearly, is Cooper’s mouthpiece. That he furthermore understood the old bachelor as the butt of satire rather than a center of value is indicated by his desire to have James H. Hackett, famous for his portrayal of Falstaff, take the part (LJ 6:166). William E. Burton, who actually played Lovel, was a perfect substitute, since he, too, was renowned as a comic master. Lovel gets his comeuppance in the play when he tries to trick the feminist Sophy McSocial into marrying him, only to have her surprisingly accept, thus trapping him and forcing him to threaten to seek a divorce in Pennsylvania. (She is, fortunately for him, already married.) See “The Drama: Mr. Cooper’s New Comedy,” Literary World, 6/29/1850, p. 178; “Drama,” The Albion, 6/22/1850, p. 25; and, for the one scene that is preserved, “Socialism. A Scene from a Comedy, by J. Fenimore Cooper. 1849 [sic],” in William E. Burton, ed., The Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898), 297–99. 65. Cooper admired Webster’s oratorical power in his answer to Calhoun (it was “a very great speech, showing tact, and power, and moderation, and a great deal that is true”). Then he went on for Shubrick, “It has capital faults, however” (LJ 6:169). One of those faults in the view of many New Englanders was Webster’s concession to the continued existence of slavery in the South and his call for the North to cooperate more fully in the return of fugitive slaves. Cooper did not specify which “faults” he had in mind. At the time of the Nullification Crisis in 1830, Cooper, then discussing that matter in Paris with Henry Cruger, had written Shubrick his view of James Hamilton: “His language can never be forgotten” (LJ 2:25). 66. Timms’s “anti-gallows” reference is worth a pause. As John Cyril Barton has suggestively argued, while Cooper was clearly no activist in this matter, the role of execution in his writings, from The Spy and The Prairie through The Bravo, The Headsman, The Wing-and-Wing, and at last The Ways of the Hour, is both prominent and complex. It is as almost always extralegal, the result of a mere desire for vengeance or the expression of an advantage in power rather than in right. In The Ways of the Hour, as Barton notes, Cooper’s legal target remains trial by jury; and yet what makes the jury here so dangerous is the ease with which it reaches a wrong though seemingly fatal conclusion about Mary Monson. John Cyril Barton, Literary Executions: Capital Punishment and American Culture, 1820–1925 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 135–37, 260–69. I do not agree with Barton when he writes that The Ways of the Hour expressed “Cooper’s anti-anti-gallows attack” (135), but his concluding discussion situates that claim in a more nuanced context (see 264). 67. The old terms were these: “£350, to be drawn for as the sheets go forward, in two drafts of £100, and one for £150, each at 90 days sight” (LJ 6:44). 68. The Writings of Herman Melville, ed. Harrison Hayford et al., Vol. 14, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), 596.

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notes to page 498

69. Bentley offered £100 for the privilege of printing five hundred copies of The Ways of the Hour. Richard Bentley to JFC, 6/20/1849, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. In an 1839 case, Bentley vs. Foster, Cooper’s publisher had secured an injunction in chancery against a book pirate named Foster who evidently was threatening to bring out an unauthorized edition of one of Cooper’s books, probably The Headsman. The court found that “protection was given, by the law of copyright, to a work first published in this country, whether it was written abroad by a foreigner or not; that, if an alien friend wrote a book, whether abroad or in this country, and gave the British public, the advantage of his industry and knowledge, by his first publishing the work here, he was entitled to the protection of the laws relating to copyright in this country.” However, chancery directed that the issue must be tried in a court of law. Nicholas Simons, Reports of Cases Decided in the High Court of Chancery, by the Right Hon. Sir Lancelot Shadwell, Vice-Chancellor of England, Vol. 10 (New York: Gould, Banks and Co., 1845), 329–30; Catherine Seville, The Internationalization of Copyright Law: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 275. A decision in an 1849 exchequer case, Boosey vs. Purday, noting Bentley vs. Foster and emphasizing the need there indicated for a court test, had reversed the chancery finding, declaring, “A foreign author residing abroad, who composes a work abroad, and sends it to this country, where it is first published under his authority, acquires no copyright therein.” W. N. Welsby, E. T. Hurlstone, and J. Gordon, The Exchequer Reports. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Courts of Exchequer & Exchequer Chamber, Vol. 4 (London: S. Sweet, W. Maxwell, and V. and R. Stevens and G. S. Norton, 1851), 145. It was on the basis of this opinion that Bentley expressed his concern to Cooper. By the time of his hurried second response, he had decided that the matter looked brighter than he first thought, perhaps because the Exchequer added that the question “must be finally disposed of in a Court of error” (ibid., 158). The matter was considered again in an 1851 case (Boosey vs. Jefferys) that overruled Boosey vs. Purday and restored older protections to foreign authors and British subjects to whom they might assign their works. Edmund H. Bennett and Chauncey Smith, English Reports in Law and Equity: Containing Reports of Cases in the House of Lords, Privy Council, Courts of Equity, and Common Law; and in the Admiralty and Ecclesiastical Courts; Including Also Cases in Bankruptcy and Crowns Cases Reserved, Vol. 4 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), 479–89. This case also cited Bentley vs. Foster (see 484). Before this reversal, Bentley had joined forces with John Murray to contest the piracies of such publishers as Bohn and Routledge. See Seville, Internationalization of Copyright Law, 277. In August 1850, Bentley advised Cooper, who had written him about his daughter Susan’s prospects: “Almost every American book is now pirated by the infamous dealers in stolen goods here; and there literally appears to be no chance for an American book.” He suggested that the U.S. Congress might intervene by granting “us Britishers” rights equal to those once enjoyed

notes to pages 499–501

  

by Cooper and his fellow Americans in Britain. Richard Bentley to JFC, 8/1/1850, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. 70. Richard Bentley to JFC, 7/24/1849, JFC Coll., box 1, YCAL. A press report dating from 1855 quoted Bentley as saying that “the following sums have been paid by his firm for American copyrights to three American writers.—that is, to Mr. Washington Irving, £2,450; to Mr. Prescott, £2,495; and to Mr. Fenimore Cooper, £12,590; in all, £17,535.” New York Times, 1/16/1855, p. 3, citing the Athenaeum. 71. Cooper’s distrust of Bentley had been primed by conversations with an old British acquaintance, Thomas Colley Grattan, British consul in Massachusetts from 1839 to 1846, who told the American that Bentley understated his sales even on his own record books. Grattan explained that another English publisher whom he knew assured him that his own house had bought twice the number of books from Bentley that Bentley himself claimed it had. To guide Putnam in his negotiations for the book in England, Cooper added that he would “expect somewhere about £400, for the book,” to be paid in sixty-day drafts (£100 for each of the first two volumes, £200 when the last was dispatched), terms much better than those Bentley had rejected. He noted that he had thought of asking £500 but concern about the copyright issue restrained him. LJ 6:55–56. As to cholera: Manhattan newspapers regularly reported that cholera was active in the city (and elsewhere in the United States) during the summer of 1849. 72. John Fagan to JFC, 2/9/1850, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Because Cooper in his [2/8/1850] letter had asked Fagan to send him duplicates of the novel’s first volume, Fagan noted in his reply: “You are aware that I am putting the whole book into a single volume, to match the new series.” As to when Cooper had sent manuscript to Fagan: he would recall just after the book finally was published in April 1850 that “nearly half ” of it had been “stereotyped in July last” (LJ 6:169). Some substantial portion of the book had gone off that early, but on 9/5/1849, Fagan noted that he had not received “any more copy for ‘Ways of the Hour.’ ” And eight days later he was yet “hoping to receive safely the copy for ‘Ways of the Hour.’ ” John Fagan to JFC, 9/5/1849 and 9/13/1849. Not until October 19 did Cooper indicate he was sending more manuscript (see LJ 6:75); still more was sent at the end of November (see LJ 6:80–81). 73. Susan Fenimore Cooper, Rural Hours, by A Lady (New York: George P. Putnam, 1850), [iii]. 74. For various reasons, the proofs for his daughter’s book did not materialize as quickly as Cooper thought they would, but he kept close track of the matter into March. At the end of that month, once finally back home, he wrote Putnam on Susan’s behalf, trying to sort out the process by which proofs moved back and forth and reminding the publisher that he should not forget “to instruct your agent to try and dispose of this book in England” (LJ 6:160). 75. Bentley PL gives the date as 4/8/1850. The Literary World for 4/6/1850, p. 356, indicated that Putnam would publish the novel “the ensuing week,” and a longish review

— 

notes to pages 503–505

appeared in that periodical on 4/13/1850, pp. 368–70. It was already being advertised as for sale by the firm of Crosby and Nichols in the Boston Evening Transcript of 4/13/1850. C HAPTER 16.  ENDINGS 1. George W. Greene, “Cooper,” in Biographical Studies (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1860), 39. This anecdote is relayed in the first of Greene’s two pieces about Cooper in that book. It is in the second of them, as noted in my previous chapter, that he recalled their discussion of the sixth Leather-Stocking Tale during the same meeting at Putnam’s shop. 2. Letters of William Cullen Bryant, ed. William Cullen Bryant II and Thomas G. Voss, 6 vols. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1975–1992), 3:149–50. Bryant had seen Cooper the previous November and made no comment about his appearance but found him in evidently good spirits, “full of the subject” of the choice of a new Episcopal bishop (ibid., 3:145). 3. Weather played a prominent role in Cooper’s understanding of his physical condition. He had the seemingly irrational (but at the time not uncommon) conviction, for instance, that winds from easterly directions made him sick. He thus wrote his wife from Philadelphia on 9/20/1838 (when there proofing Home as Found): “I got up with an easterly head ache and am still suffering.” That headache was so severe that he blamed the shortness of his letter on it, adding a few lines later: “More than this my head will prevent my telling you” (LJ 3:337). When on his cruise with Shubrick aboard the Macedonian two years later, he likewise wrote Susan: “I feel a little the effects of the easterly wind, but not as much as usual” (LJ 4:93). Cooper may have been thinking of that “perfect and upright” Job, whom “the east wind” carried away (Job 1:1; 27:21), of sailor’s superstitions (or experiences), or of general folklore (e.g., the nursery rhyme, “When the wind is in the East / ’Tis neither good for man nor beast”). As late as May 1842 he wrote his wife from New York City, “The weather is rather raw, with the wind at South East, but I feel perfectly well” (LJ 4:288). 4. “Cooper’s Last Works,” New York Review 4 (1839): 213. 5. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (New York: S. Converse, 1828), s.v. choler. Cooper tended to associate his bilious attacks with things he ate—as when, while staying in New York City in March 1850, he ate “raw oysters” that provoked an “attack,” ridding him, as he wrote Susan, of all his “spare bile” (LJ 6:154). 6. “The Late J. Fenimore Cooper,” New York Times, 9/25/1851; reprinted in Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: George P. Putnam, 1852), 7. I quote from The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Letters, Vol. 4: 1846–1859, ed. Ralph M. Aderman, Herbert L. Kleinfield, and Jenifer S. Banks (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 260. Irving did not date this encounter, and Cooper seems never to have mentioned it directly. I think it likely that it coincided with the meeting during which Cooper heard from

notes to pages 505–508

  

Irving’s “own mouth” how much he liked Rural Hours (see LJ 6:282), probably in November 1850. 7. Brady’s description of Cooper at that time, although recalled for an interviewer many years later, confirms the impression: “He came out in his morning gown and asked me to excuse him till he had dismissed a caller. I told him what I had come for. Said he: ‘How far from here is your gallery?’ ‘Only two blocks.’ He went right along, stayed two hours, had a half dozen sittings.” George A. Townsend, “Still Taking Pictures,” New York World, 4/12/1891, p. 26. Cooper informed his wife of the encounter in a letter dated 9/19/1850 (see LJ 6:220). The surviving Brady plate is at NYSHA. 8. On Ludlow’s membership in Cooper’s Lunch, see A. Bleecker’s 1826 “Exposé” of the Lunch, copy of unlocated original in JFB paps., box 5, AAS. 9. Cooper’s foot problems first bothered him in the very cold winter of 1849 but then improved somewhat that spring. For details, see his letters to his wife during two trips to New York he made between February and May of that year (LJ 5:403–9, 6:22–38). It seems likely that Ludlow himself defined neuralgia by linking it to the now discredited concept of “rheumatic gout.” Cooper did not entirely give up the old terminology. While doubting that he really was afflicted with gout, since his foot problems at the time were confined to his heels (see LJ 6:48), Cooper mentioned “gout” as afflicting him in a letter written in July (LJ 6:54). In Upside Down, the play Cooper wrote early in 1850, the old lawyer Richard Lovel complains of his gout, eliciting from his politically progressive nephew the following correction: “Neuralgia, or inflammatory rheumatism, if you please. There is no longer any gout.” “Socialism. A Scene from a Comedy,” by J. Fenimore Cooper, in William E. Burton, ed., The Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1898), 297. 10. Richard Rowland, A Treatise on Neuralgia (London: S. Highley, 1838), 3–5, 23, 25–26. The report regarding the man who awoke in the night came from Sir Benjamin Brodie, Lectures Illustrative of Certain Local Nervous Affections (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1837), 11. 11. Cooper was writing in this instance to Saidee Cruger, Henry Cruger’s young cousin, with whom the novelist maintained a sort of avuncular correspondence. The letter was carried by his old friend, who was leaving Cooperstown after a visit there. 12. There had been some difficulty before that walk on December 4, but Cooper did not fill Susan in on it until two days later. See LJ 6:92. 13. Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 94. 14. John W. Francis to JFC, 11/25/1850, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Hydriodate of potassium (also known as iodide of potassium) was a preparation noted at the time for stimulating bodily secretions—meaning that it was intended to increase the discharge of bile from Cooper’s liver. For a contemporary description, see George B. Wood and Franklin Bache, The Dispensatory of the United States of America, 8th ed. (Philadelphia: Grigg, Elliot, and Co., 1849), 1100–105 (my description of alteratives comes from p. 3).

— 

notes to pages 508–810

At this time, Dr. Francis did not name the “mild purgatives, or the anti-bilious pills” he had in mind. In June 1851, however, he indicated that the one he prescribed contained “some mercury” and further noted that he had prescribed a second similar pill, known as “Plummer’s Pill,” which was, he added, “slightly mercurial.” John W. Francis to JFC, 6/10/1851, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. Most such medicines at the time were compounded of similar ingredients in various proportions. They were thought to operate on bilious symptoms by stimulating secretions and purging the intestines, thus carrying off the fresh bile. See the list of “Purgative, Laxative, Digestive, Stomachic, Antibil[i]ous” items in “A Retired Druggist,” The Pill Book: Containing Recipes (In English) for One Hundred and Eighty Varieties of Pills (London: Houlston and Stoneman, 1853), esp. 11–16. For Plummer’s Pill, that source (p. 28) gives the components as follows: one part calomel (mercurous chloride, or Hg2Cl2), one part oxysulphuret of antimony (2SbS3 + SbO3), and two parts Guaiacum (gum from the Lignum vitae). 15. “Motto-bon-bons” were candies in paper wrappers printed with sayings. 16. When leaving Putnam’s house and attempting to board the ferry for Manhattan, Cooper may have exhibited a heretofore unremarked example of how his feet hindered his movement. A driver of a wagon cut him off, calling forth from Cooper a lecture on the rights of pedestrians as opposed to drivers, a lecture that, according to Putnam, “evidently impressed both the carman and the bystanders.” George Haven Putnam, George Palmer Putnam: A Memoir, rev. ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 391. Cooper was also at work at this time, in New York City, on his political allegory “The Lake Gun,” for which the publisher had already paid him $100 (see LJ 6:239). It would appear in The Parthenon, Containing Original Characteristic Papers by Living American Authors (New York: Loomis, Griswold and Co., 1851), which went on sale in July 1851 (BAL 2:304). 17. This was the second marriage among the five Cooper children: Caroline (“Cally”) had wed young Henry Frederick (“Fred”) Phinney in February 1849. Richard Cooper, whose first wife, Mary Storrs, had died in 1846, had had seven children with her, including young Richard Fenimore, for whom Cooper in 1850 helped secure a (shortlived) appointment to the new naval academy at Annapolis (see LJ 6:228–29; Richard Fenimore Cooper, Jr., to JFC, 2/16/1851, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL). In 1850, all of Richard’s older children still survived, giving Fanny, now thirty-one years old, an instant family. Eleven years younger than her husband, she would have four children of her own with him starting in December 1851. Wayne W. Wright, The Cooper Genealogy, NYSHA “Library Notes” (1983), 22. 18. By “respiration,” Cooper seemingly meant “circulation” in general. 19. Wood and Bache, Dispensatory, 707. Dandelion tonic (or taraxacum) was given new prominence at this time owing to the high-quality supplies prepared by the Shaker Community at New Lebanon, New York. See The Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science 10 (1850): 393.

notes to pages 510–511

  

20. [John W. Francis] to JFC, “College Place,” undated (but March 1851), JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL (Francis here called the new pill “the Coche,” adding that it was to be taken “according to Circumstances”). “Coche,” derived from the plant known colloquially as “bitter apple” or “bitter cucumber” (Citrullus or Cucumis colocynthis), was designated pharmaceutically then as pilulae colocynthidis compositae. James Rennie, A New Supplement to the Latest Pharmacopeias of London, Edinburgh, Dublin, and Paris, 4th ed. (London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1837), 318; Pill Book, 12–13. Wood and Bache, Dispensatory, 260, give the details of its strength and danger: “The pulp of colocynth is a powerful drastic, hydragogue cathartic, producing, when given in large doses, violent griping, and sometimes bloody discharge, with dangerous inflammation of the bowels. Death has resulted from a teaspoonful and a half of the powder.” 21. John W. Francis to JFC, 5/8/1851, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. 22. Griswold and Cooper had met and talked at least once and probably more than once during the novelist’s last Manhattan trip. On Saturday, April 5, they had discussed Bryant’s literary merits; Cooper called the poet and friend, “the author of America.” Bulletin of the American Art-Union, 5/1/1851, p. 32. Furthermore, the two apparently planned to travel together to Cooperstown following Cooper’s return visit, which his injury in Cooperstown forced him to cancel. See Rufus W. Griswold to JFC, 4/30/1851, JFC Coll., box 5, YCAL. On Cooper’s accident in New York in February 1850, see LJ 6:124. 23. One can trace the failure of his hand in a small group of checks drawn on the Otsego County Bank in Cooper’s final year. The last check made out in 1851 that bears a sure hand in the signature is dated April 15, though even this one is a bit shaky by comparison with several dating from January, and the April check proper was filled out in another hand. The next check, dated July 2, bears a quite shaky signature, and again the check proper was filled out in another hand. Several follow on later dates in July, including one filled in by Cooper as well as signed by him. The writing on that one is noticeably weak, but the signatures on those written later in the month deteriorate markedly. He clearly could write hardly at all during this period. The last check is dated 8/8/1851. Otsego County Bank checks, 1833–1851, JFC paps., box 4, AAS. Cooper’s signature is also frail and faltering on a further banking item from July. See JFC to City Bank of New York, sixty-day promissory note, for $260 plus interest ($2.73), 7/14/1851, JFC paps., box 4, AAS. This note, due on Cooper’s birthday, is stamped “paid” on the back, without a date. Cooper’s son Paul, having heard from “several quarters” in the middle of May that his father had taken a turn for the worse, wrote his mother in a now unlocated letter from Albany, only to be reassured by her in her also unlocated answer that in fact Cooper was “stronger and better,” as he noted in his surviving reply. PFC to SDC, 5/18/1851, WC microfilm, reel 23, HCA. 24. Beard indicates that the letter printed by Copway on July 10 was in the possession of Paul Fenimore Cooper when he saw it, but unlike the great majority of PFC

— 

notes to pages 511–512

items, it is not now in the Cooper papers at AAS. I rely on Beard’s annotation, which says, “The holograph seems to be in Mrs. Cooper’s script” (LJ 6:275n1). The possibility that Copway visited Cooper during his last days, and perhaps was present at his death, I infer from his report less than a week later (Copway’s American Indian, 9/20/1851) that the novelist “died in the presence of their [i.e., Native Americans’] representatives.” (If Copway indeed was there, that may explain how the now unlocated letter returned to the family’s hands.) It is possible, however, that Copway was referring instead to other Native Americans from whom he had had reports, in which case the most likely individuals probably were members of the Konkapot family (on whom see JFC:EY 668n48). Copway’s obituary for Cooper is discussed in David Shane Wallace, “Copway’s Homage to Cooper: Redefining the ‘Vanishing American,’ ” James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers 29 (2012): 17–24. Copway’s attendance at the February 1852 Cooper memorial, previously unremarked, is documented in this comment from the New York Herald, 2/26/1852, p. 7: “we noticed on the platform . . . George Copway, the Indian Chief,” with confirmation in Bryant’s Evening Post, 2/26/1852, p. 1. See also Robert S. Levine’s eloquent invocation of Cooper’s warm relationship with Copway in “Temporality, Race, and Empire in Cooper’s The Deerslayer,” in The Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, ed. Russ Castronovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 176–77. Copway, Levine points out, was working to counter federal plans to force the removal of the Ojibwe to Minnesota (176). 25. John W. Francis to JFC, 5/21/1851, JFC Coll., box 4, YCAL. An “attenuant” medicine at the time was one that had “the power of rendering the blood thinner, by diminishing the coherence of its particles,” while a “resolvent” was thought capable of dissolving hard substances. See Robert Hooper, Lexicon Medicum: or Medical Dictionary, 8th ed., revised by Keith Grant (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans et al., 1848), 212, 1157. Parley Johnson, who was about forty years old, was a druggist in Cooperstown as well as a respected physician. See “Home Gleanings,” Otsego Farmer, 11/14/1890. 26. John W. Francis to JFC, 6/10/1851. Francis wanted Cooper to let him know if he had any “local pain [in] the region of the kidneys or in the shoulder, either right or left” and added that Cooper might “safely take a Plummer for its beneficent action” even as he took “the Calomel or blue pill.” 27. “Illness of Mr. Cooper,” New-York Daily Tribune, 7/8/1851, and “Mr. Cooper’s Illness,” dated “Cooperstown, Wednesday, July 9,” ibid., 7/12/1851. 28. One further detail in the letter to Worth conveys a startling image: “Still I shave myself, though my fingers are so numb that I very often hold a thing in them without knowing it, or drop it in the same state of ignorance. In this particular, however, I am improving.” LJ 6:278. 29. For instance, here is the opinion of David Svahn, M.D., of the Bassett Hospital, a member of the 2001 panel: “We CAN be sure that much of his treatment, particularly

notes to page 513

  

the ‘blue pill’ he took at the behest of Dr. Francis from 1849 on, was extremely toxic.” Email to the author, 10/26/2004, copy in my files. (I know of no clear evidence that the pill in question was prescribed earlier than mid-1851, but as already indicated, other mercury-laden preparations had been prescribed for Cooper some months earlier; and, as I will speculate later, he may have self-medicated with similar preparations years before.) Reviewing both the array of references in Cooper’s letters and journals to various conditions and the documentation surrounding his death (including George Washington Greene’s commentary), the 2001 panel was not able to find a medical connection between Cooper’s digestive complaints and the “liver” issue, or the tenderness of his feet that Cooper mentioned to Greene and indeed to others. Amy E. Freeth, M.D., an endocrinologist who was then the chief medical resident at the Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown, put forward the suggestion that he may have “suffered from chronic gastroesophageal reflux disease [acid reflux], leading to Barrett’s esophagitis and then to esophageal cancer and his eventual death.” Appropriately skeptical about trying to read the incomplete record across an interval of so many years, and after so many shifts in medical understanding and indeed terminology, she wondered whether the foot problems, centered as they often were for Cooper in his heels, might not have been the result of quite unrelated conditions such as “plantar fasciitis, bursitis, or metatarsalgia.” “Thoughts on final illness of James Fenimore Cooper: Collaboration of MIBH [Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital] physician thoughts after review of his documented symptoms,” copy in my collection, provided by Dr. David Svahn, 10/26/2004. Dr. Svahn, while agreeing on the matter of plantar fasciitis, wrote to me in 2004 with the suggestion that “adult onset diabetes” might also have been indicated. While he pointed out that the latter disease can lead to “heart disease (via atherosclerosis) a common cause of edema which we know he had (dropsy)”—more on this issue later—he added that, like Dr. Freeth, he saw no evidence in the record of Cooper’s suffering from “some of the classic symptoms—like shortness of breath” associated with heart disease. Nor was there overt evidence of cancer in his esophagus, or elsewhere for that matter. Email to author, 10/26/2004. The documentation of Cooper’s symptoms had been provided to Freeth, Svahn, and their colleagues by Hugh C. MacDougall based on his and my own culling of references in Beard and a few other sources. See Hugh C. MacDougall, “Medical Report: James Fenimore Cooper,” January 2002, copy in my files. That report and hence the panel of physicians did not have access at that time to other archival materials, some more recently discovered, that I rely on in the present discussion. 30. Norbert Hirschhorn, Robert G. Feldman, and Ian Greaves, “Abraham Lincoln’s Blue Pills: Did Our 16th President Suffer from Mercury Poisoning?,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 44 (2001): 324. For a contemporary pharmaceutical description of blue pills, see “Pilulae hydrargyri,” in Wood and Bache, Dispensatory, 1067. 31. Hirschhorn, Feldman, and Greaves, “Abraham Lincoln’s Blue Pills,” 325.

— 

notes to pages 513–519

32. Quoted in ibid., 321, from an 8/16/1887 letter from Herndon to his friend, sculptor Truman H. Bartlett. The original source is Emanuel Hertz, The Hidden Lincoln: From the Letters and Papers of William H. Herndon (New York: Viking, 1938), 199. 33. Hirschhorn, Feldman, and Greaves, “Abraham Lincoln’s Blue Pills,” 320–22, 326. 34. Henry Cruger to JFC, 7/16/1851. Cruger added that, should Cooper be able to visit him in Saugerties, there would be “plenty of Congress Water, and blue Pill.” And he pointed out that he had in the past diagnosed Cooper’s problem as tied to his liver and had urged him to use calomel to control his “bilious secretions.” 35. James Thacher, American Medical Biography, or Memoirs of Eminent Physicians who have Flourished in America, 2 vols. (Boston: Richardson and Lord, and Cottons and Barnard, 1828), 2:40–43. See Benjamin Rush, An Account of the Bilious Remitting Yellow Fever as it Appeared in the City of Philadelphia in the Year 1794 (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1794), 200–201. The title of the latter work will suggest how Cooper may have perceived the 1822 and 1823 yellow fever outbreaks in relation to his own affliction, an important point in what I am about to discuss. The title of a later Rush book, Observations upon the Origin of the Malignant Bilious, or Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, and upon the Means of Preventing it (Philadelphia: Thomas Dodson, 1799), continued this accurate association of the disease with the liver. 36. Peter S. Townsend, An Account of the Yellow Fever, as it Prevailed in the City of New-York, in the Summer and Autumn of 1822 (New York: Oliver Halsted, 1823), 212–17. Townsend, himself a physician, drew heavily on Francis for this book, and in fact dedicated it to Francis. It should also be noted that its publisher was the man who partnered with Charles Wiley to produce The Spy for Cooper. For the earlier views of Dr. Francis on mercury, see John W. Francis, An Inaugural Dissertation of Mercury, Embracing its Medical History, Curative Action, and Abuse in Certain Diseases (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1811), 51–56. 37. George G. Sigmond, Mercury, Blue Pill, and Calomel; their Use and Abuse (London: Henry Renshaw, 1840), 51, 57. 38. Hirschhorn, Feldman, and Greaves, “Abraham Lincoln’s Blue Pills,” 322. 39. Ibid., 319. 40. SFC, “Diary 1845,” NYSHA, gift of Dr. Henry Weil, 2011. The details were confirmed in SFC to “Miss [Anna] Jay,” 7/28/1851, Clifton Waller Barrett Collection, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Many thanks to Rochelle Johnson for sharing her transcription of this letter with me. Susan added that Bishop DeLancey offered to perform the rite privately at home but that her father “preferred going to church if possible, and although it was with great difficulty that he got into the carriage assisted by several friends, yet he did so without accident, and was not so much fatigued by the long service as we had feared.” See also “Cooper the Novelist,” Baltimore Sun, 8/5/1851. 41. SFC to “Miss [Anna] Jay,” 7/28/1851.

notes to pages 519–523

  

42. Shubrick came to Cooperstown for some days in mid-July, leaving on the eighteenth. See RFC to PFC, 7/18/1851, JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL. Henry Cruger, having somehow learned of Shubrick’s visit, mentioned it in a letter to Cooper. He urged that the novelist come back down state with Shubrick and stop at Saugerties, but that was now out of the question; see Henry Cruger to JFC, 7/16/1851, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. 43. PFC to John W. Francis, 8/11/1851, JFC Coll., box 3, YCAL. In writing Anna Jay at the end of July about her father’s condition, Susan indicated that he had “until this last week been able to drive Mamma to his farm quite regularly.” SFC to “Miss [Anna] Jay,” 7/28/1851. Paul’s comment two weeks later suggests someone else drove but does not explicitly say so. The reply Greeley published in the New York Daily Tribune on 7/12/1851 to his own premature report of 7/8/1851 about Cooper’s approaching death noted that Cooper had driven his carriage himself on July 5 and that he had accompanied two villagers (the author of the 7/12 reply and that man’s father) for a ride of some five or six miles on July 8. “Mr. Cooper’s Illness.” 44. The visit by Dr. Francis was “unexpected” according to SFC to PFC, “Sunday morning” (ca. 8/31/1851), JFC Coll., box 11, YCAL. 45. Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 96–97. 46. SFC to PFC, “Sunday morning” (ca. 8/31/1851); Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 97–98. 47. SFC to PFC, “Sunday morning” (ca. 8/31/1851). 48. Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 98. 49. SFC, “Diary 1845.” 50. SFC to “Miss [Anna] Jay,” 10/26/1851, Clifton Waller Barrett Collection, University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Many thanks to Rochelle Johnson for sharing her transcription of this letter with me. 51. On 2/24/1852, five weeks after her mother’s death, Susan wrote on the back of Jay’s letter, “One of the last letters received by my dearest Father, and which I read to him as he lay in his bed—dearest Mother with him—the Lord’s will be done!” William Jay to JFC, 9/3/1851, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. 52. SFC to PFC, “Sunday morning” (ca. 8/31/1851). 53. “Mr. Fenimore Cooper,” Boston Daily Atlas, 9/8/1851, reprinting the Buffalo Courier. The Buffalo editor asserted that “the information ‘comes from a source entitled to the highest consideration.’ ” 54. SFC, “Diary 1845,” entry dated 10/5/1851. John W. Francis to H. F. Phinney, 9/18/1851, JFC paps., box 3, AAS, acknowledging Phinney’s unlocated 9/14/1851 letter and the “agonizing intelligence it contained.” 55. An account of the “Funeral of James Fenimore Cooper” by a correspondent using the pseudonym “Otsego” was published in the New York Times on 9/23/1851. Those attending gathered first in the great hall at Cooper’s home in the early afternoon of Wednesday, September 17. They could see his body in the adjacent drawing room,

— 

notes to pages 523–524

where it had been placed in an open mahogany coffin with silver handles and a silver plaque. Cooper was barely recognizable to those who saw the body, the correspondent added, “so great was the change which his sickness and death had made on his frame.” The service proper began at Otsego Hall at 3:30 with a prayer by the rector of Christ Church, Rev. Stephen H. Battin. Thereafter, eight of Cooper’s old friends lifted the coffin and bore it to the church, where other mourners had already gathered. Although Cooper’s brother-in-law, Bishop William H. DeLancey, attended the service, the Reverend Battin conducted it. A choir sang a hymn to the accompaniment of a newly installed organ purchased with contributions, the largest being Cooper’s own. When the ceremony was over, the body was carried out to the churchyard and interred in the family plot, where the novelist joined his parents, his sister Hannah, and his five older brothers. His one surviving sister, Ann Pomeroy, living in Wisconsin at the time, did not attend the funeral. Briefer notices of Cooper’s death appeared in the Freeman’s Journal and the Otsego Democrat on 9/20/1851. 56. SFC to Rufus W. Griswold, 10/2/1851, printed in W. M. Griswold, ed., Passages from the Correspondence of Rufus W. Griswold (Cambridge: W. M. Griswold, 1898), 277. 57. Cooper also conferred several times with Dr. Francis while in New York City. This is when he began using the dandelion tonic mentioned earlier, as well as using the liniment and, most importantly, taking the “coche” pills that later caused such distress. 58. George P. Putnam and JFC, memorandum of agreement (for “Men of Manhattan”), 12/4/1850, Cooper microfilm. The contract obligated Putnam to publish the book “in one Vol. 8vo, with woodcuts, the retail price of which it is estimated will be $2.50.” He was to have three years to dispose of that total number. A further point added in the margin of the document indicated that Putnam could print an extra seventy-five copies of the book, without charge, to distribute for free, evidently to the press or to learned institutions. According to the original terms, Putnam was to pay Cooper 15 percent “on all copies sold,” but having crossed out this provision before signing the document, the two men instead agreed that Putnam would give Cooper $700 in a series of notes. If Cooper caused delays that significantly pushed publication beyond March 31, the dates on Putnam’s notes were to be extended—or, if Cooper had already cashed one or more of them, he was to repay the amounts collected. Putnam later negotiated adjustments on his notes for the book with Cooper’s family; see George P. Putnam to PFC, 10/29/1851, and to SFC, 1/23/1852, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA, and George P. Putnam to PFC, 7/20/1852, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 59. International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science and Art, 1/1/1851, p. 187. Although rejected by Cooper as a title in favor of “Towns of Manhattan” that July (LJ 6:279), “Men of Manhattan” had a long afterlife. Putnam advertised the book as The Men of Manhattan from March to August 1851, and as late as January 1852 was circulating the news that he would “publish immediately a posthumous work of Fenimore Cooper, The Men of Manhattan, said to abound with curious statistics and opinions

notes to pages 524–527

  

relating to the City of New York.” “Literary Intelligence,” Church Review and Ecclesiastical Register 4 (January 1852): 635. For earlier advertisements, see, for instance, “G. P. Putnam’s Forthcoming Publications,” Literary World, 6/7/1851, p. 468; and “G. P. Putnam’s New Publications for the Coming Season,” Literary World, 8/16/1851, p. 139. When, toward the end of the Civil War, the book’s first fragment was published (in the fundraising newspaper of the U.S. Sanitary Commission), the brief headnote likewise referred to Putnam’s preferred title. See “Unpublished MSS. of James Fenimore Cooper,” Spirit of the Fair, 4/5/1864, p. 6. 60. Pictured there was a house with the archetypal Dutch stepped parapet gable, dated iron beam anchors, and freight doors in the upper gable. This same structure had been shown in the New-York Mirror in 1830 (“Dutch Architecture: The Old House in Broad-Street,” New-York Mirror, 7/10/1830, p. 1), Putnam’s likely source for his version, as Beard surmised (see LJ 6:281n1). 61. George P. Putnam to JFC, 7/31/1851, JFC paps., box 3, AAS. For Putnam’s return from England on the steamship Franklin on 5/14/1851, see manifest of passengers taken aboard that vessel, in “Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897,” Records of the U.S. Customs Service, RG 36, NARA, M237, reel 98. 62. George P. Putnam to JFC, 7/31/1851; SFC to George P. Putnam, 10/11/1851, quoted in LJ 6:281n2. Which bird’s-eye view of the city he had in mind is not clear; the Union Square view, however, was likely the 1849 southward-looking one created by C. Bachman and published by Williams and Stevens, and described in I. N. Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909, 6 vols. (New York: Robert H. Dodd, 1915–1928), 3:702–4. 63. George P. Putnam to JFC, 7/31/1851. 64. Frederick Saunders to JFC, 8/7/1851, JFC Coll., box 8, YCAL. 65. The comment about how much of the manuscript had been set comes from George P. Putnam to PFC, 9/24/1851, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA; the characterization of Putnam’s inquiry is from PFC to SDC, 9/29/1851, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. Paul told his mother: “Let Sue or Charlotte write him at once precisely how the manuscript stands—How many pages—the subject & character of what is written &c. I told him I would have the details sent him immediately.” 66. SFC to George P. Putnam, 10/11/1851, quoted in James F. Beard, “The First History of Greater New York: Unknown Portions of Fenimore Cooper’s Last Work,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 37 (1953): 114. 67. George P. Putnam to PFC, 10/29/1851. Susan’s addition, if any, was no doubt small. 68. George P. Putnam to SFC, 1/23/1852, WC paps., old microfilm series, reel 23, HCA. Putnam added that all the remaining portions of the work would be sent to Susan either with his letter or separately by express. On Mrs. Cooper’s death, see “Death of the Widow of J. Fenimore Cooper,” New York Times, 1/21/1852, p. 2.

— 

notes to pages 527–529

69. Beard, “First History of Greater New York,” 116; for the publisher’s reply to Susan, see George P. Putnam to SFC, 12/2/1851, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 70. The installments appeared in the following issues: 4/5/1864 (pp. 6–7); 4/6/1864 (pp. 18–19); 4/7/1864 (pp. 30–31); 4/8/1864 (pp. 42–43); 4/9/1864 (pp. 54–55); 4/13/1864 (pp. 90–91); 4/14/1864 (pp. 102–3); and 4/15/1864 (p. 114). 71. New-York Historical Society Quarterly 38 (1953): 109–45. 72. “Recent Deaths,” New York Times, 9/18/1851. 73. For Greenough’s thoughts, see “The Cooper Monument” in The Travels, Observations, and Experience of a Yankee Stonecutter (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), 158–77, reprinted with my brief introduction in Literature in the Early American Republic 7 (2015): 163–77. Greenough had been in England preparing to return to the United States when Cooper died. 74. A major reason for Griswold’s decision to turn the September event into a planning session was the large number of regrets he received from people who, like Bryant, could not attend on such short notice. Bryant’s reply to Griswold is in Letters of William Cullen Bryant, 3:162–66, as well as in “The Late J. Fenimore Cooper,” New York Times, 9/25/1851, and Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 8. (For the record, the latter source gives 9/25/1851 as the date of the gathering, but the Times on that date distinctly indicated that the “meeting was held yesterday afternoon.”) The Times printed two more letters of regret, from Edward Everett and G. P. R. James, in “The Late Mr. Cooper,” on 9/26/1851. 75. “The Late J. Fenimore Cooper.” The full lists are given in Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 7. 76. Because Irving did not want to be chosen to speak at the memorial, he begged off when Lewis Gaylord Clark of the Knickerbocker asked that he write “an appropriate sketch of Mr. Cooper’s life and writings” for his magazine. “Gossip with Readers and Correspondents,” Knickerbocker 38 (November 1851): 561. For Irving’s reply to Clark, which includes the information about his accident, see Washington Irving: Letters, Vol. 4, 261–62. 77. Rufus W. Griswold to SFC, 9/25/1851, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 78. Letters of William Cullen Bryant, 3:168; Rufus W. Griswold to SFC, 11/14/1851, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. Bryant was an excellent choice, not only because of his long association with Cooper, but also because, for all his earlier hesitancy, the poet and editor took the charge seriously and would work hard on the effort. His “Discourse” was not in the least perfunctory, did not avoid difficult matters, was fair rather than hagiographic, and in all these regards was to set reasonable terms for the appreciation of Cooper’s life and works across several decades. Some insight into how Bryant worked to get the details right is suggested by his 12/11/1851 letter to Dr. Francis: “I cannot find the account of the dinner to Mr. Cooper before his departure for Europe. I have written to Mr. King, who cannot give me the date of it, but is sure that it was before 1830 and

notes to pages 529–530

  

after 1827. Can you give me anything more precise—if so you will oblige me by communicating it.” Letters of William Cullen Bryant, 3:173. By the time Bryant composed his “Discourse,” he rightly placed the Cooper dinner in 1826, “just before his departure,” although he did not give a precise date. Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 51. 79. Washington Irving: Letters, Vol. 4, 275. The gathering, first planned for December 16 (mentioned in Rufus W. Griswold to SFC, 11/14/1851), was rescheduled for Christmas Eve but had to be delayed again when Daniel Webster, invited to preside, could not make that date owing to complications attending the arrival in the United States of the Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth. February 25 was at last settled on. See Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 13; Washington Irving: Letters, Vol. 4, 278–80. There was a preliminary tribute to the novelist at the New-York Historical Society on the evening of October 7, chaired by that body’s president (another old Cooper friend, Luther Bradish) but managed by the ever-present Griswold. See “Public Honors to the Memory of Mr. Cooper,” International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science and Art, 11/1/1851, pp. 458–59, and Rufus W. Griswold to SFC, 10/8/1851, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. 80. The Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, the most impressive tribute offered Cooper in the aftermath of his death, contained more commentary on his experience and his art than had ever before been gathered in one place. And it had an elegant appearance. Adorned with Henry B. Hall’s engraved frontispiece of Cooper, based on one of the Brady daguerreotypes, as well as a woodcut showing Otsego Hall after its Gothic remodeling, it had embossed covers and in its typography and overall design closely copied Putnam’s “handsome” edition of Cooper’s novels. As to its publication date: Susan Cooper’s copy of the Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper is inscribed in her hand “April 30th 1852 | Otsego Hall.” My collection. The volume also reprinted, on pp. 94–103, John W. Francis’s “Reminiscences of the Late Mr. Cooper—the Last Days,” which Griswold had asked him to write and which Griswold had first published in his International Monthly Magazine of Literature, Science and Art, 11/1/1851, pp. 453–56. 81. Rufus W. Griswold to SFC, 11/14/1851. 82. Ibid. It is doubtful that Griswold intended to receive no share of the profits from the “Inedited Works.” 83. JFC to Caroline M. Phinney, assignment of ownership, 12/22/1849, JFC paps., box 5, AAS. This same assignment covered both works, excepting only the rights of H. and E. Phinney to publish the complete naval history and of Thomas, Cowperthwait and Co. to publish the abridged version, but provided that Cally would receive all unpaid proceeds from both those editions in lieu of himself. In the case of The American Democrat, she was to receive “the entire copyright, stereotype plates, and balance of edition on hand in the hands of John Wiley of New York.” 84. Fred Phinney recalled for Paul Cooper in an October 1852 letter how all this had occurred: “your Mother decided it should be printed without additions from other pens, [and] Putnam put it to press—then when it was decided by the family that it required

— 

notes to pages 530–531

additions[,] the publication was & is suspended tho’ printed.” H. F. Phinney to PFC, 10/30/1852, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA. 85. Evidently the new edition Putnam had begun printing in 1851, for which no contract or correspondence appears to survive, was to incorporate the additions included by Cooper himself in the third edition, issued by H. and E. Phinney in Cooperstown in 1847 and by Lea and Blanchard in Philadelphia that same year, and reprinted in 1848. On the discussion of the continuation and who should be asked to write it, see SFC to H. F. Phinney, 3/27/1852, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL (where she asked, “Have you thought of Mr. Dana, the author of Two Years Before the Mast, for your Naval work?”), and H. F. Phinney to PFC, 3/30/1852, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA (in which Fred relayed Susan’s suggestion and asked Paul, “how does that strike you, as compared with Wilkes, or Prescott?”). Susan’s use of the expression “your Naval work” clearly indicates that Fred and Cally were behind the plan. On McHarg, see chapter 7 above, note 44. It appears that the edition Putnam at last issued incorporated the matter already printed under Mrs. Cooper’s edict in 1851–1852, since McHarg’s continuation did not affect earlier portions of the text. (By contrast, Fred had indicated to Paul in October 1852 that a correction provided by an unnamed naval lieutenant was “too late” owing to the fact that Putnam had already set and apparently printed some or all of the book. H. F. Phinney to PFC, 10/30/1852.) On some of the complications in managing the continuation, especially on the question of the Somers, see H. F. Phinney to PFC, 11/30/1852, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA. 86. SDC to H. F. Phinney, 12/13/1851, JFC Coll., box 13, YCAL. Mrs. Cooper had strong negative views on Phinney’s plan to cut the body of The American Democrat, evidently in line with his unmentioned new title: “[T]he other plan I decidedly object to, my dear Frederic[k.] [I]t has to me a catchpenny look, unworthy of the work. [I]t might sell well, for a little while, but you would lose an advantage, which by preserving it in its integrity, would increase its value to you every year.” The engraving from the Brady daguerreotype no doubt was the one now in the JFC paps., box 3, at AAS, which was produced by “J. Buttere” from an original “in possession of Mrs. H. F. Phinney.” For the sort of ceremonial letter Mrs. Cooper approved of, see her husband’s cheerful answer to an invitation for the annual 1850 dinner in honor of Benjamin Franklin in New York, which was published in the Literary World on 1/26/1850 (also in LJ 6:107–8). From Mrs. Cooper’s comments, it is clear that she thought Phinney could collect and reprint such things without too much difficulty. For more details on Cooper’s prohibition against a biography, see the comments of his grandson and namesake in CORR 1:3. See also JFB, “James Fenimore Cooper,” in Fifteen American Authors before 1900: Bibliographic Essays on Research and Criticism, ed. Earl N. Harbert and Robert A. Rees, rev. ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 87. 87. SDC to H. F. Phinney, 12/13/1851. She added for Phinney that the copper stereotype plates for The American Democrat were “safely boxed up” in the “storeroom” at

notes to pages 532–533

  

Otsego Hall and asked him to tell her, when he and Cally next visited, what to do with them. That is the last we hear of the matter. 88. John W. Francis recalled Webster as a frequent guest at meetings of the Lunch. See Old New York; or, Reminiscences of the Past Sixty Years (New York: Charles Roe, 1858), 292. 89. Thomas R. Lounsbury, James Fenimore Cooper (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882), 268. Bryant agreed at the time, writing Richard H. Dana, Sr., that Webster’s speech “was deplorably common place,—poor in thought, and clumsy in expression,” but added: “The man seemed in a sort of collapse and actually moved my compassion.” Letters of William Cullen Bryant, 3:178. (In fact, Webster, more than seven years Cooper’s senior, would die before 1852 was out.) Cooper’s later opinion of Webster was hardly complimentary. In January 1841, he wrote to James D. P. Ogden: “Mr. Webster . . . is not a great man—merely a man of great peculiarities. Least [of] all is he a sound originator of any thing” (LJ 4:114). 90. The Papers of Daniel Webster. Correspondence, Vol. 7: 1850–1852, ed. Charles M. Wiltse and Michael J. Birkner (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986), 516. Committee member Richard B. Kimball, writing Webster on 12/13/1851, nonetheless assured him that he had been invited precisely because of his own literary standing. Irving wrote him the same day to indicate that the event was to take place at Tripler Hall on Christmas Eve. When Webster wished to confirm that he indeed would be there on February 25, it was to Griswold that he wrote. Ibid., 522, 538. 91. I quote Bryant’s account of the meeting in the Evening Post, 2/26/1852; Edward F. DeLancey to PFC, 2/26/1852, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA. The Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, 26, would give a cleaned-up account, asserting that Webster turned directly to Griswold, who, he told the assembly, would “now proceed to read letters that have been addressed to the Committee of friends of Mr. cooper, by gentlemen who are not present.” Bryant confirmed DeLancey’s points about Griswold’s near inaudibility and the impatient audience. See Letters of William Cullen Bryant, 3:178. 92. Edward F. DeLancey to PFC, 2/26/1852, WC paps., old microfilm series, roll 23, HCA; Parke Godwin, Life of William Cullen Bryant, with Extracts from His Correspondence, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 2:61–62. The morning press reports I describe and quote are as follows: “Commemoration of Cooper,” New-York Daily Tribune, 2/26/1852, p. 4; “Mr. Bryant’s Discourse on the Life and Genius of James Fenimore Cooper,” ibid., pp. 5–6; “Summary of this Morning’s News,” New York Herald, 2/26/1852, p. 4; “American Literature: The Discourse of Mr. Bryant on the Life and Genius of James Fenimore Cooper” and “The Memory of James Fenimore Cooper: Great Meeting at Memorial Hal,” ibid., pp. 7–8. The account of the memorial meeting fills the whole first page and one-and-a-half columns of the second page of Bryant’s Evening Post, 2/26/1852. Bennett did run a partial account of the proceedings (including Bryant’s address) on pp. 6–7 but had to truncate the record owing to lack of space.

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notes to pages 533–537

The dismissive notice I quote from Bennett’s paper in my text was in a prominent location at the head of his “Summary of this Morning’s News.” 93. Stringer and Townsend inserted Bryant’s whole “Discourse” in the front matter of Precaution in its sets of Cooper’s works starting in 1852, assuring its continued availability and influence. It was retained in the Darley edition (Cooper’s Novels, Illustrated by [F.O.C.] Darley, 32 vols. [New York: W. A. Townsend, 1859–1861]) and in the Hurd and Houghton reprint of the latter in the 1870s. The report in Bryant’s Evening Post for 2/26/1852 cited in my previous note included the comment that Bryant was interrupted “by most flattering applause” at several junctures—including while he spoke of “Mr. Cooper’s controversies with the press.” 94. The Writings of Herman Melville, Vol. 14: Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993), 216. This version, based on the manuscript, corrects the date from “Feb. 20, 1852” to 12/19/1851 and a misreading in the text as given in the contemporary newspapers and the Putnam Memorial volume. The latter sources all read “are not seen, yet fully appreciated” (e.g., Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper, p. 30), where the Correspondence reads “are not even yet fully appreciated.” 95. O. E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth: A Saga of the Prairie (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991), xviii. 96. Philip Gura, Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 49. Cooper, who was still in New York in 1824 and had no control over how his works were published in Europe, had nothing to do with the misattribution of Redwood. Gura’s book is very useful for its attempt to direct our attention to the array of early U.S. fiction, especially short items of the kind I refer to later in my text. It fails to distinguish, however, between what I might call the archival residue from this period—the many items that we know were printed and published then and that a reader today might wish had been more influential at the time—and the actual market conditions at play during Cooper’s life, conditions that his works clearly dominated. I expand on these points in my text. 97. I rely here on BAL and on Lyle H. Wright, American Fiction, 1774–1850. A Contribution toward a Bibliography, rev. ed. (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1969), and his earlier reflections on the subject, “A Statistical Survey of American Fiction, 1774– 1850,” Huntington Library Quarterly 2 (1939): 309–18. 98. Paulding was a very miscellaneous writer who produced many kinds of books aside from long fiction. He therefore reminds us that the first internationally known U.S. writer, his collaborator Washington Irving, wrote no novels at all. In my discussion I focus on Cooper’s competing novelists. 99. Ingraham’s 1846 production exemplifies my point in note 96 above about the survival of short fiction published in separate volumes across the period of Cooper’s career. It is interesting to note, however, that the earliest works of fiction by Ingraham

note to page 537

listed in Wright’s bibliography, including Lafitte: The Pirate of the Gulf (1836) and Captain Kyd; or, The Wizard of the Sea (1839), were in the long double-volume format. And there is the famous example of his most influential title, The Prince of the House of David; or, Three Years in the Holy City (1855), a single-volume biblical novel of 456 pages.

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Index

Abällino (Zschokke), 109–110 Abbaye des Vignerons, 141 A.B.C. letters, 159–162, 167, 190, 286 Abolitionist movement, 102, 161, 190–191 Account of the Arctic Regions (Scoresby), 451 Adam Clarke Baynes and Company, 591n33 Adams, Brooks, 121 Adams, John, 24 Adams, John Quincy, 18, 64, 65, 205, 231, 460, 600n14 Afloat and Ashore (Cooper), 313, 381; autobiographical nature of, xi, 278–279, 354, 359–360, 361, 403; division into two parts, 354; earnings from, 694n24; island theme in, 407–408; patriotism in, 396; publication dates for, 689–690n9;

publishing arrangements for, 353–355, 358, 404, 694–695n24–n26; real estate speculation in, 428; realistic portrayals in, 353; Robinson Crusoe theme in, 407–408; sales of, 690–691n13; self-publishing of first part, 309, 355 African Americans. See Slavery and race Aiken, William, 567n32 Ainsworth, W. Harrison, 273 Albany (New York), 156; Cooper’s personal associations with, 695n30; Cooper’s visits to, 334, 442, 523; recalled by Dutch trip, 41, 43; setting of Satanstoe, 360–361; Thomas Ellison’s school in, 148, 360 Albany Argus, 250, 365 Albany Daily Advertiser, 231 Albany Evening Journal, 198–199, 214, 215, 226, 334, 422, 540 Alden, Ichabod, 312

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I ndex

Alfieri, Vittorio, 73 Allston, Washington, 64 Alps, 47, 53–58, 87 American Coast Pilot (Blunt), 391 American Democrat, The (Cooper), 186, 187–191, 248, 249, 349, 377, 415, 419, 530–531 American Journal of Science and Arts, 440 “American Men of Letters Series,” 532 American Polish Committee, 121–123, 130, 131, 134, 596n70 André, John, 560n65, 671n85 Andros, Thomas, 206 Antarctic voyages: and federal support, 460; and hollow earth theory, 456–458; in The Monikins, 164, 453, 454, 462; Reynold’s proposals for, 458–461; in Seaborn’s Symzonia, 457–458; in The Sea Lion, 451–454, 455, 456; Wilkes as source for, 454–456. See also Wilkes expedition Anti-Rent War, 362; and leasehold land tenure, 362–363; in Littlepage trilogy, 244–245, 250, 361–362, 365–366, 370–373, 485; murder of Steele, 371–372, 382; at Rensselaerswyck, 364; spread of, 365 Antwerp (Holland), 42–43 Arbitration hearing, in William Stone libel suit, 213, 214, 234–238, 341 Arista, Mariano, 398 Arnold, Benedict, 560n65, 729n77 Arthur, Timothy Shay, 537 Articles of War, mutiny under, 332 Artois, Charles, comte de, 15 Aspinwall, Thomas, 321, 603n30 Atlantic Passage, 1–2, 150–152 Autobiographical novels: xi–xii; Afloat and Ashore, xxxi, 278–279, 351, 354, 359–360, 403; The Crater, 403 “Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief, The” (Cooper), 4, 289–292, 299–300, 385, 726n47

Averell, William H., 439; claim against Cooper estate, 157, 158, 196; and Comstock, 720n9, 724–725n39; Otsego Hall bought back from, 146, 157–158, 220; and Webb, 220, 639n12, 640n13 Baillie, Joanna, 36 Bainbridge, William, 208, 288, 289 Balbi, Adriano, 127 Ballantyne (James) and Co., 13 Balt, character in Greyslaer, 268–269 Bancroft, George, 207, 325–326, 529 Barber, Andrew M., 423; damages paid to Cooper, 222–223, 238, 539; failure of appeal, 219, 221; guilty of libel, 219; libel suit brought against, 216, 217; reprinting of Pellet’s attack on Cooper, 199, 214, 215–216; and Whigs, 642 n19, n21 Barclay, Robert H., 300–301 Bardes, Barbara Ann, 752n63 Barlow, Joel, 258 Barnard, Daniel D., 646n53 Barron, James, 205, 302 Barton, John Cyril, 753n66 Battin, Stephen H., 764n55 Battle of Lake Erie, in naval history, 348; arbitration of libel suit, 213, 214, 234–238, 341, 646n53; attacks on Cooper’s treatment of, 303–309; Cooper’s counter attack on Duer, 308–309; Cooper’s libel suit against William Stone, 231–233; Perry-Elliot controversy, 208–209, 232, 233, 300–304, 308 Battle of Lake Erie, The (Cooper), 285, 307, 308, 309, 343 Battle of Plattsburgh, 210 Baudry, 127, 132, 179–180; Foreign Library, 117 Bayly, Thomas H., 326 Beard, James F., 161, 186, 198, 232, 527 Beasley, Reuben G., 4 Beecher, Lyman, 352

I ndex

Belgium, Coopers’ visits to, 113, 121, 136–137, 177 Benjamin, Park, 220, 221, 226, 227, 228, 248, 287, 540, 653n13, 691n14 Bennett, James Gordon, 352, 533 Bentley, Richard, 150, 288, 439; and Afloat and Ashore, 404; agreements with Cooper, 275–277, 283–284, 286, 310, 321, 322, 354, 384, 386, 402, 466, 498–499, 651–652n8, 694n24, 727n54; book suggestions of, 252, 254–255, 280; Cooper’s distrust of, 755n71; and The Crater, 408; delivery of proofs, 169–170, 172, 181, 183, 615n39, 617n42; and The Deerslayer, 275–277; and The Headsman, 147, 148, 180; and Homeward Bound (Eve Effingham), 194; and Littlepage trilogy, 382, 383; and Mercedes of Castile, 254–255, 256; and The Monikins, 167, 168, 169–170, 615–616n39–n40; and Naval History delays, 202–203; and Ned Myers, 320–321; and The Oak Openings, 442, 443, 444, 445–446; and The Pathfinder, 253, 254, 651–652n8; and pirated editions, 443–444, 445, 498, 754– 755n69; and publication dates, 181–182, 194, 195, 254, 256, 445–446; and The Sea Lions, 465–466, 498; and serial publication, 386; as Susan F. Cooper’s publisher, 511; and travel book venture, 175, 176, 177, 620n58; and Two Admirals, 298; and The Ways of the Hour, 497–499, 500. See also Colburn and Bentley Bentley’s Miscellany, 288, 289 Bentley vs. Foster, 754n69 Bergh, Christian, 150 Bern (Switzerland), 44–46, 62, 138 Bernard, Simon, 127 Bewley, Marius, 121, 697n43 Biddle, Nicholas, 292 Bidwell, Marshall S., 234, 242 Biglow Papers (Lowell), 397 Bigottini, Emilia, 23

Binghamton (New York), 157 Biographical Notice of Com. Jesse D. Elliott (Jarvis), 302–303 Biography, Cooper’s prohibition on, xvii, 531 Bird, Robert Montgomery, Nick of the Woods, xi, 271–273, 274, 441 Birdsall, Ralph, 245 Blackburn, Philip C., 320 Blackstone, William, 282, 490–491 Blackwood’s Magazine, 79, 140 Blancard, Francis, 327 Blanchard, William, 356 Blue pills, 505, 512–513, 515, 517, 761n29 Blum, Hester, 322, 457, 675n11 Blunt, Edmund, 391 Bolton, William C., 316, 324, 394 Bonaparte, Charles Lucien, 45, 70 Bonaparte, Joseph, 45, 147 Bonaparte, Lucien, 147 Bonhomme Richard, 203 Bonomi, Patricia, 698–699n48 Book prices, xiv, 169, 299, 354, 355, 358, 615n38, 691n14, 702n72 Book production partners, 26; Boston, 355–356; Cooperstown (Phinneys), 186, 187, 191, 192, 285, 307, 444, 728n60; distribution of copy text to, 8, 9, 11, 26, 34, 66, 89, 117, 169–170, 181, 182; Dresden, 83, 88–90; Florence, 66–67, 82; Liverpool, 171, 172, 183, 202; London, 2, 551–552n3 (See also Bentley, Richard; Colburn, Henry; Colburn and Bentley); New York, xiii–xiv, 155, 168, 194, 355 (See also Burgess and Stringer); Paris, 7–8, 12–13, 31–32, 65–66; Philadelphia, 355 (See also Carey and Lea; Fagan, John; Lea and Blanchard); Rome, 82 Book production process: Afloat and Ashore, 355, 455; The Bravo, 104–105, 179; in Cooperstown, 186, 187, 191; delays in proofs sent to England, 167, 169–170; Gleanings in Europe, 179–184; The Headsman, 147, 148; The

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— 

I ndex

Book production process (continued) Heidenmauer, 117, 179–180; Home as Found, 195; Littlepage trilogy, 382–384; The Monikins, 167–171, 179; Ned Myers, 319–322; Notions of the Americans, 31, 34; The Oak Openings, 442–445; pace of, 180–181; The Pathfinder (Cooper), 253–254; and pirated edition, 443–445; The Prairie, 8, 9, 11, 26; for Putnam edition of Cooper’s works, 470–473; The Red Rover, 26–27, 30; and return to America, 167–168, 179–181; The Sea Lions, 465–467; and self-publishing alternative, xiii, 170–171, 182, 191, 285, 309, 310, 355; stereotyping costs assumed by Cooper, 299, 356; The Ways of the Hour, 499–501; The Water-Witch, 81–83, 88–90, 179; The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, 65–66, 179; The Wing-and-Wing, 299, 309, 356. See also Publishers/printers, relations with Book production process, in Europe: and censorship, 82; delivery of copy to American publisher, xii, 8, 9, 11, 26, 34, 89, 117, 180, 578n14; delivery of copy to English publisher, 578n14; direct oversight over, 179–180, 578n12; from far-flung locales, 90; flexibility in, xiv; relations with printers, 66–67, 82–83, 88–90, 148 Boone, Daniel, 267 Boosey vs. Purday, 498 Bordone, Paris, “Presentation of the Ring to the Doge of Venice,” 585n59 Bossange, Hector, 7–8, 11, 26, 31–32, 66, 126 Boston (Massachusetts), Cooper’s trip to, 503 Boston Quarterly Review, 187 Bousquet, Achille, 60–62 Bowen, Abel, 208, 635–636n49 Boyce, Edmund, Belgian Traveler, 42 Boyle, John, 633n37

Brachie, John Batiste, 163 Bradford, Cornelius, 62 Bradish, Luther, 7, 9, 10, 26, 27, 37, 38, 60, 515 Brady, Mathew, 505, 530, 757n7 Bravo, The (Cooper), 38, 78, 84, 117, 188; book production process for, 104–105, 179; ending of, 101, 104, 106; French political situation as influence on, 97, 98, 100–101, 108–109; Gould’s “Cassio” review of, 110, 131, 144, 155, 230, 249; Polish crisis as backdrop to writing of, 104; publishing arrangements for, 577n10; revision of, 105–108, 131; sources for assassin figure, 109–113; Venetian setting for, 85, 96–97, 107, 108–109 Bread and Cheese Lunch, 72, 154, 204, 460, 532 Brevoort, Henry, 37–38, 103 Bridgen, Catharine Ten Eyck, 360 Bridgen, Thomas, 157, 307, 360–361 Britain: aristocracy, Cooper’s criticism of, 38–39; Atlantic passage to, 2; Battle of Lake Erie controversy, 208–209, 232, 233, 300–303; Common Law, 490–491; copyright law in, 89, 498; in Gleanings in Europe, 35, 37, 38, 179, 182, 210, 280; impressment policy, 209, 297; July Revolution as example to, 96; Royal Navy in works of Cooper, 279–283, 292; scientific expeditions in, 457; Whigs in, 35, 36, 412–413. See also English editions; London, Cooper/ Cooper family in Broglie, Achille de, 19 Bronson, Greene C., 227 Brooklyn Navy Yard, 153, 210, 267; Cooper’s visit to, 335; Ned Myers’ employment at, 324–325; Somers at, 330, 332; Somers mutiny case court of inquiry at, 334 Broome County properties, 157 Brown, James, 18–19, 24 Brown, Mark, 102

I ndex

Browne, Samuel, 220 Brownson, Orestes, 187 Brussels (Belgium), 136–137 Bryant, William Cullen, 65, 159, 286, 529; on Cooper’s health, 503, 510; Evening Post, 218, 219, 223, 238; memorial address of, 529, 532, 533, 766–767n78; on Webster, 769n89 Buffalo Commercial Advertiser, 227 Bumppo, Natty (character), xi, 311; comparison to Balt in Greyslaer, 268–269; comparison to Nathan Slaughter in Nick of the Woods, 271–272; in The Deerslayer, 251, 252, 262, 264–265; as Jacksonian hero, 274; and Loyalist sympathies, 449, 478; and memories from other novels, 266; in The Pathfinder, 251, 252, 253; persistence in popular mind, 267–268; in The Pioneers, 53, 265, 266; in The Prairie, 9, 10–11, 251, 266, 267, 449, 450; recalled in Home as Found, 251, 267; and sixth tale proposed by Cooper, 449–450, 479–480, 729–730n77 Bunsen, Christian, baron von, 70 Burdick, Justus, 725n40 Burges, Tristam, attacks on Cooper’s naval history, 303, 304–305, 306, 307, 348 Burgess, Wesley F., 356–357 Burgess and Stringer (Stringer and Townsend): agreements with Cooper, xiii, 283–284, 402, 467, 473–474, 477, 478, 480, 481–482, 702n72, 705–706n7, 727n54; cheap editions of, 477, 480, 484; conflict with Putnam, 481–484; Cooper’s switch to, xiii, 356, 358, 381; and copyright ownership, xiii–xiv, 358, 476–477, 478, 483–484, 744n26, 745n30; history of firm, 356–357, 693n19; and Leather-Stocking edition, 476, 480, 482, 483; and Littlepage trilogy, 358, 382; and The Oak Openings, 142; rejection of proposed sixth Leather-Stocking Tale, 478–479; and The Sea Lions, 467, 477

Burlington (New Jersey), 192 Burney, Sarah Harriet, 39 Burrows, William, 185 Burton, William E., 753n64 Bushman, Claudia L., 258 Byron, in Switzerland, 59–60 Cady, Daniel, 226 Caen (France), 96, 149 Caledonia, 301, 309 Calhoun, John C., 329, 494, 497 Calomel, 514, 515, 516–517 Calsamilia, Angel, 162, 163 Campbell, Robert, 192, 196 Campbell, Thomas, 36 Campbell, William W., 234 Canajoharie (New York), 156, 157, 192, 218 Carey, Edward L., 320 Carey, Henry C., 13, 154, 170, 180–181, 528 Carey, Matthew, 356 Carey and Hart, 320, 355 Carey and Lea, 7, 10, 67, 90, 148, 167; agreements with Cooper, xii, 167–168, 169, 170, 177, 195, 309, 536, 677n18; and book price, 169, 615n38; on Cooper’s intent to retire, 144; and copyright ownership, xiii, 170, 474, 616n41; corrected copy sent from Europe to, xii, 8, 9, 11, 26, 34, 89, 117, 180, 578n14; exclusive rights of, 475; Homeward Bound/Home as Found project, 194, 195; The Monikins agreement, 167–168, 169, 170, 616n41; and pace of production, 180–181; publication dates of, 181–182, 194, 195, 254; and travel books, 175, 177, 181, 182, 183–184, 620–621n59; as Walter Scott’s publisher, 13, 14. See also Lea and Blanchard Carey, Lea and Blanchard. See Carey and Lea Carey, Lea and Carey. See Carey and Lea Carisbrooke Castle, 2

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I ndex

Carlyle, Jane Welsh, 39 Carrel, Armand, 125, 286 Cass, Lewis, 326, 329, 435, 532 “Cassio” review of The Bravo, 110, 130–132, 144, 148, 155, 230, 249 Castle Garden fête, 17, 21 Catholicism: anti-Catholicism of Morse, 73, 119; Cooper’s changing attitude toward, 42, 118, 120; European observations of Cooper, 42–43, 51–52, 54, 70, 572n64, n65; in The Heidenmauer, 118–120 Chadwick, Daniel, 150 Chainbearer, The (Cooper), 379; Anti-Rent movement in, 370–373; book production process for, 382–383; Coejemans character in, 361, 366–367; Coeymans as setting in, 360, 361; frontier development theme of, 365; Yankee migration in, 368–369, 370. See also Littlepage trilogy Châlet, The (hobby farm), 264, 404–405, 655n29 Champlin, Henry L., 1, 147–148, 150 Chantrey, Francis, 36 Charles X, 15, 92, 94 Chauncey, Ichabod W., 45 Chauncey, Isaac, 153, 205, 206, 317, 633n37 Chaussier, François, 508 Cheap editions, 356, 477, 480, 484 Chenango Telegraph, 198, 215, 539 Cherry Valley attack, 311–312 Chesapeake, 297 Child, Lydia Maria, xiv, 534, 535–536, 537 Chodz´ko, Leonard, 102, 122 Cholera epidemic, 133 Christ Church, Cooperstown, 518, 522 Chronicles of Cooperstown, The, 186, 191–193, 200, 267 Chrystal, or the Adventures of a Guinea (Johnstone), 289 City Hotel, New York City, Cooper’s lodgings at, 153 Clapp, James, 157

Claremont, Claire, 59 Clark, Ambrose W., 637n6 Clark, Isaac S., 240 Clark, Thomas, 201, 210 Clarke, George Hyde, 196 Clary, Julie, 147 Clay, Henry, 18, 19, 61, 62, 575n85 Clinton, DeWitt, 15, 339 Clymer, George, 382 Coeymans (New York), as setting in Cooper’s novels, 360–361 Colburn, Henry, 26, 127, 252, 499; agreements with Cooper, 8, 9, 11, 322; copyright ownership of, 577n10; copy sent from Paris to, 578n14; New Monthly Magazine, 140–141; Notions of the Americans issued by, 34; Paris agent of, 9, 65–66 Colburn and Bentley, 143–144, 164; and The Bravo, 104, 577n10; and The Heidenmauer, 117; and History of the American Theatre, 145; and The Pathfinder, 252; reissues of Cooper’s early works, 591n33, 741n7; Standard Novels series, 104–105, 150, 591n33, 748n43; and The Water-Witch, 90. See also Bentley, Richard Colcord, Lincoln, 534 Cole, Thomas, 424 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 36, 140, 203–204, 210 Columbus, Christopher, Mercedes of Castile based on first voyage of, 254–261 Comité Franco-Polonais, 102 Commentaries on the Laws of England (Blackstone), 282, 490 Commercial Advertiser, 214, 225, 230, 232, 233, 300, 308, 541 Common Law, 490–491 Compromise of 1850, 494 Comstock, Horace Hawkins, 183, 442; debt to Cooper, 426, 718–719n1; family ties to Cooper, 172; fictional character based on, 291–292;

I ndex

Kalamazoo property transferred to Cooper, 429, 439, 721n12; and Ketchum endorsers suits, 430–432. See also Comstock land speculation Comstock, Sarah Sabina Cooper, 172, 426, 429 Comstock land speculation, 327; Cooper’s attempt to reclaim investment from, 426, 428; Cooper’s attempt to revoke, 173–174, 176–177; Cooper’s gains from, 174, 429–430, 438, 439; debt unsettled at Cooper’s death, 438–439; Ketchum’s debt transferred to Cooper, 426, 428–429, 437, 720–721n10, n11; lawsuits in, 429, 430–437, 446, 472; out-of-court settlement discussions, 437–438; partnership arrangements in, 172–173 Confidence Man (Melville), 29 Congress of Vienna, 101 Conner, David, 395 Constable and Co., 13 Constant, Benjamin, 102 Constitution, USS, 302 Cooper, Caroline (daughter). See Phinney, Caroline Cooper “Cally” Cooper, Charlotte (daughter), 63, 437, 512 Cooper, Fenimore (son), 503, 514 Cooper, Hannah (niece), 72 Cooper, Isaac (brother), 148, 157, 172, 196 Cooper, Isaac C. (nephew), 684–685n65 Cooper, James, 156, 329 Cooper, James Fenimore: amanuenses used by, 8, 105, 106, 511, 517, 595n61, 675n10; American values championed by, 75, 98; and Antarctic exploration, 455, 457–458, 461; biography prohibited by, xvii, 531; character and temperament of, xvi–xvii, 65, 74–75, 517, 523; and Cooper estate (See Cooper estate); Cooperstown home of (See Otsego Hall); on deathbed, 511, 760n24; death of, 174, 196, 438,

522–523; death of grandchild, 522; in Europe (See European residency and travels; Book production process, in Europe); on Europhile Americans, 75–76, 98, 166; final days of, 517–522; finances of (See Comstock land speculation; Earnings; Finances); friendship with Charles Wilkes, 455–456; friendship with George Hand, 432; friendship with Horatio Greenough, 64; friendship with Samuel Morse, 72–73, 604n39; friendship with Walter Scott, 11–13, 36; friendship with William Shubrick, 178, 280, 325, 382, 503; funeral of, 522, 763–764n55; health of (See Health problems); hobby farm of (The Châlet), 264, 404–405, 655n29; legacy of, 534–538; marriages of children, 508, 509, 758n17; Melville ’s tribute to, 533–534; memorial gathering for (See Memorial event); Memorial volume in tribute to, 529–530, 767n80; merchant voyage on Stirling, 295, 296; and nature, experience of, 53, 55, 69; in Navy, 203, 210, 211, 253, 331, 359; and Ned Myers collaboration, 316–319, 322; and Ned Myers’s employment with Navy, 324–326; and Ned Myers’s navy pension claim, 322, 323, 325, 326–327, 328–329; and Ned Myers personal relationship, 322, 327–328; Ned Myers’s reunion with, 315–316; obituary of, 527–528; physical appearance of, 29–30, 505, 510, 520; and politics (See Political views; Politics and political relations; Republicanism); and press (See Libel suits; Press attacks); reinvention of public persona, 236; and religion (See Religious life of Cooper); return to America, 72, 145–146, 153–154; scientific interests of, 455, 456; on slavery, xvii, 24–26, 160–162, 163, 190–191, 419, 493, 496–497, 562n75; as

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I ndex

Cooper, James Fenimore (continued) slave trade case jury foreman, 162–163, 707n15; solitary pursuits of, 75; Somers court-martial “Elaborate Review,” 343, 345–351, 352, 385; on Somers mutiny case, 307, 334, 335–337; travels of (See European residency and travels; Travels); whaling experience of, 737n116 Cooper, James Fenimore, literary career: African American characters, 161–162; Anglicized usages, 740–741n7; autobiographical novels, xi–xii, 193–195, 199–201, 278–279, 354, 359–360; and book production (See Book production partners; Book production process; Book production process, in Europe; Publishers/ printers, relations with); competitors in, xiv, 534–536, 537; copyright of works (See Copyright ownership); dark characters, 250, 429; earnings from, xii, xiv, 9, 380–381, 384, 386, 429, 536, 690n13, 691n14; earnings from, in England, 498–499, 577n10, 694n24; faraway settings in, 451; French translations, 2, 8, 10–11, 31; frontier stories (See Bumppo, Natty; Leather-Stocking series; Littlepage trilogy; Native American characters; Oak Openings, The; Wyandotté); German translations, 67, 83, 89, 90; Hudson Valley settings in, 354, 360–361; and imitators, xi, 268–269, 271–274; Memorial volume, 529, 530, 531; naval history (See Navy, U.S., Cooper’s history of ); New York City history of, xi, 484, 486, 519, 523–527, 531, 764–765n59; polar themes in, 451–454, 462; political themes in (See Political themes); productivity of, x– xi, 385, 535, 537; reissued editions of Phinneys, 530–531; reissued editions of Putnam (See Putnam edition of Cooper’s works); reissued tribute

edition, 529–530; religious themes in (See Religious themes); and retirement plans, 144–145, 146, 156, 164, 168; revisions, 105–108, 131, 149–150, 471–472, 479, 741n7; revival of, xi, 145, 175–176, 251; sea tales (See Nautical settings and themes); slavery as theme in (See Slavery and race); speculator characters (See Real estate speculation); theatrical version of works, 12, 80; travel writing venture of, 175–176 (See also Gleanings in Europe); Wilkes as source for, 454–455, 456; women characters (See Women characters). See also Magazine writing; Newspaper writing Cooper, James Fenimore, works: The American Democrat, 186–191, 248, 249, 349, 377, 415, 419, 530–531; “The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief,” 4, 289–292, 299–300, 726n47; The Battle of Lake Erie, 285, 307, 308, 309, 343; The Chronicles of Cooperstown, 186, 191–193, 200, 267; History of the Navy of the United States (See Navy, U.S., Cooper’s history of ); Homeward Bound, xi, 150, 193–195, 424, 474, 475; Jack Tier, 163, 250, 387, 402 (See also “Islets of the Gulf ”); The Last of the Mohicans, xii, 2, 7, 9–10, 12, 29, 39, 53, 55, 60, 251, 265, 277, 313, 474, 480, 481; A Letter to His Countrymen (Cooper), 110, 131, 145, 149, 154–155, 159, 230; Lionel Lincoln, 26, 260, 277, 475, 476; Mercedes of Castile (Cooper), 254–261, 277, 475; Ned Myers, 278, 316–322, 325, 353, 409, 474; The Pioneers, 9–10, 36, 53, 60, 193, 200, 265, 266, 277, 480; Precaution, 176, 277, 458, 475; Sketches of Switzerland, 180, 621n59; The Two Admirals, 252, 279–283, 286, 344–356, 357, 475, 491; The Wept of Wish-TonWish, 65–66, 150, 179; The Wing-andWing, 68, 278, 280, 332, 356, 398. See

I ndex

also Afloat and Ashore; Bravo, The; Chainbearer, The; Crater, The; Deerslayer, The; Gleanings in Europe; Headsman, The; Heidenmauer, The; Home as Found; “Islets of the Gulf ”; Monikins, The; Notions of the Americans; Oak Openings, The; Pathfinder, The; Pilot, The; Prairie, The; Red Rover, The; Redskins, The; Satanstoe; Sea Lions, The; Spy, The; Water-Witch, The; Ways of the Hour, The; Wyandotté Cooper, Maria Frances “Fanny” (daughter), 63, 113; marriage of, 508, 509, 758n17 Cooper, Mary Morris (sister-in-law), 157 Cooper, Mary Storrs (niece), 157, 758n17 Cooper, Morris (nephew), 427 Cooper, Paul Fenimore (son), 220, 386–387; in Albany, 523, 526; and Comstock lawsuits, 430, 435–436, 437, 438; in Europe, 31, 32, 45, 46, 64, 70, 113, 140; and father’s final days, 519, 520, 521, 759n23; health problem of, 383, 703n77; Michigan lawsuit inherited by, 725n39 Cooper, Richard (brother), 72 Cooper, Richard (nephew), 157, 192, 430; in arbitration hearing, 234; fictional letters in the Gleanings, 178, 623n69; and Ketchum endorsers lawsuits, 430, 435–436, 472; and libel suits, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 227, 240, 241, 242, 247, 640n14; marriage and family of, 508, 509, 758n17; and Otsego Hall repurchase, 146, 607n55, 619n53 Cooper, Richard Fenimore, Jr. (nephew), 758n17 Cooper, Susan DeLancey (wife): as amanuensis, 105, 106; ancestral French home of, 149; arrival in England, 2; on Atlantic Passage, 1, 151; correspondence with husband, 66, 156, 158, 192, 205, 234, 235, 237, 254–255, 256, 275, 287, 289, 298, 319–320, 376,

386–387, 432, 433, 434, 435, 436, 438, 467, 469, 470, 471, 472, 473, 485, 496, 500; correspondence with husband on health issues, 503, 504, 505, 506, 507, 508, 510, 516; correspondence with sisters, 10, 23, 29, 32, 81–82, 133, 139, 178; death of, 527, 530, 532; death of father, 32, 34, 41; and final days of husband, 519, 521; in Florence, 63–64; French travels of, 4–5, 43, 149; health of, 114, 383, 527, 703n77; on health of husband, 10, 29, 34, 555–556n29, 583n40, 759n23; Italian travels of, 83; on Lafayette ’s invitation to La Grange, 23; London visits of, 32, 34–35, 37, 38, 149–150; loyalist sister in England, 3, 32, 35; and Memorial volume, 530; Ned Myers’s stepdaughter in service with, 327; at Niagara Falls, 437; and Otsego relocation, 72, 156, 158; in Paris, 6–7, 95–96, 133; on The Red Rover, 29; and reissue of husband’s works, 530–531, 634n44, 768n85, n86; in Rome, 70, 72, 81–83; in Switzerland, 47, 58, 59, 139, 140; in Venice, 111 Cooper, Susan Fenimore (daughter), 171, 320, 503; as father’s amanuensis, 511; on father’s baptism, 518; on father’s death, 522, 523; on father’s final days, 518–519, 521; in Florence, 63–64; and memorial event, 529; in Paris, 6–7; in Rome, 82; Rural Hours, 500, 509, 755n74; on St. Ouen summer lodgings, 27–28; in Switzerland, 45, 46, 47; and Three Mile Point last visit, 519–520; on The Two Admirals, 279, 280, 283; and unfinished manuscript, 525, 526–527, 749n50; on The Water-Witch, 76 Cooper, Thomas Abthorp, 37 Cooper, William (brother), 196, 345 Cooper, William (father), 37, 192; author of A Guide in the Wilderness, 151–152, 628n13; in The Chronicles of Cooperstown, 193; churches funded by,

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I ndex

Cooper, William (continued) 414; Croghan grant, 191; land ownership of, 368; Webb’s press attacks on, 218; will of, 195. See also Cooper estate Cooper, William (nephew), 1, 24, 32, 47, 68, 72, 83, 89, 405; as amanuensis, 8, 595n61; death of, 594–595n56 Cooper, William “Bill” (nephew), in West Indies Squadron, 393–394 Cooper estate: Broome County properties, 157, 368; claims against, 19, 157, 360; executorship of Cooper, 197; forced sales from, 195; inheritance from, 466; redemptions of lost land, 195–196; settlement of Averell’s claim, 158. See also Three Mile Point (Myrtle Grove); Three Mile Point dispute Cooperstown (New York): book production partners in (Phinneys), 186, 187, 191, 192, 285, 307, 444; churches funded by William Cooper, 414; Cooper family’s permanent relocation to, x, 72, 146, 148, 157–158, 264; Cooper’s history of, 186, 191–193; Cooper’s home at (See Otsego Hall); Cooper’s homecoming trip to, 156–158, 368; eclipse of the sun, 53; Morse ’s visits to, 72; Webb’s libel trial in, 219–220; Whig editors’ ties to, 228–229, 230. See also Otsego County; Three Mile Point (Myrtle Grove); Three Mile Point dispute Cooperstown Federalist, 230 Copley, John Singleton, Watson and the Shark, 393 Copway, George, 511, 760n24 Copyright law: in Britain, 89, 498, 754n69; in U.S., 13–14, 89, 474 Copyright ownership: assigned to Cooper’s daughter, 530; of Burgess and Stringer (Stringer and Townsend), xiii–xiv, 358, 473–474, 476–477, 478, 483–484, 744–745n26, n39, 748n47; of Carey and Lea (Lea and Blanchard),

xiii, 170, 358, 474, 475, 476, 477, 616n41; in Cooper’s name, 354, 474–475, 480, 482, 629n18, 630n20, 652n8, 704n80, 748n44; of English editions, 2, 9, 11, 443–444, 577n10; of “Islets of the Gulf,” 385–386; of Leather-Stocking series, 356, 473–474, 476, 480, 483–484; reclaiming, 354 Corbin, Francis P., 147 Cotton speculation, 171–172, 176 Courier and Enquirer, 333, 334, 343 Course of Empire (Cole), 424 Court for the Correction of Errors, 241–244 Cowen, Esek, 232, 243, 244, 640n14 Cowper, William, 418 Cox, Samuel Hanson, 151, 496–497 Cox, William, 64, 143 Coxe, William, 48 Craig, Andrew, 192 Craighead, Robert, 484 Craney, William, 330 Crater, The (Cooper), 313, 392, 431; comparison to The Sea Lions, 451; gardening/farming activities in, 404–405; law in, 418; lawsuits in, 423–424; and Mexican American War, 402–403; nautical experiences in, 392, 403–404; political system in, 418–419, 421–425; press attacks in, 418, 419–421; publication date for, 402; religion in, 413–414, 415–417, 421; as Robinson Crusoe story, 408–412, 424; sandalwood trade in, 714n50, n51; scientific plot of, 405; slavery in, 419, 496; volcanic effects in, 69, 405–407, 451 Crèvecoeur, St. Jean de, 311 Crockett, David, 274 Croghan, George, 192 Croghan grant, 191 Cromwell, Samuel, 331, 332, 335, 337, 339, 348, 349 Cross-dressing sailors, 400–402 Cruger, Henry, 84, 85, 86, 87, 435, 436, 494, 513–514, 585n58, 588n14

I ndex

Cruger, Saidee, 509, 522 Cruise of the Somers, The, 686 Curtis, Benjamin, 122 Cuvier, Georges, 165–166, 716n55 Daily National Intelligencer, 459 Dale, Richard, 203, 289 Dana, Richard H., Jr., 286, 294, 346, 409, 530, 675n11, 681n50, 768n85 Dana, Richard H., Sr., 346, 532, 674n5, 769n89 Daniels, Constans Freeman, 229 Dante ’s Head Press, 6 Daru, Pierre, 109, 110–113 Darwin, Charles, 406 Dean, James, 312 Decatur, Stephen, 211, 302, 396, 710–711n34 Decatur, Susan, 302 Décrés, Lady, 147 Deerslayer, The, 185, 278, 280, 448, 498, 520; comparison to Greyslaer, 269–270; comparison to Nick of the Woods, 271–273; copyright ownership of, 354, 476; Indian victims in, 314, 658n42; lake views in, 264; name of, 655n30; Natty Bumppo character, 251, 252, 262, 264–265, 266; Putnam edition of, 480; reputation as theme in, 262–263, 346; self-serving characters in, 250; setting based on personal memories, 261–262; writing of, 274 Defauconpret, Auguste-Jean-Baptiste, 2, 8, 10, 12–13, 552n4 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, 407, 408 De Kay, James E., 130, 148, 178, 204, 460, 461, 681n50 Dekker, George, 697n44 DeLancey, Anne Charlotte (McAdam), 3, 32, 35, 552n8–10, 563n3, 608n64 DeLancey, Caroline, 150, 153 DeLancey, Edward Floyd, 149 DeLancey, John Peter, death of, 32, 34, 41 DeLancey, Ned, on memorial event, 532–533

DeLancey, Susan Augusta. See Cooper, Susan DeLancey DeLancey, William H., 154, 518, 764n55 DeLancey family, loyalist daughter in England, 3 Delaunay, David, 44 Delessert, François, 128 Democrats: and Anti-Rent War, 364, 377; and Ned Myers’s navy pension claim, 326. See also Jacksonian Democrats Denison, John Evelyn, 45 Descloux, Jean, 139, 141, 142 Dick, William Brisbane, 693n19 Dickinson, Daniel S., 328–329 Diplomatic appointments, 155–156 Diplomatic Correspondence (Sparks), 208 Dixon, James, 327 Dondore, Dorothy, 698n47 Dos Santos, Domingo Joseph, 163 Douglass, Frederick, 151, 494, 496 Dresden (Germany), 88–90 Duby, Jean Étienne, 70 Dueling, 211, 217, 420 Duer, John, 529 Duer, William A.: at arbitration hearing, 235, 236; background of, 647n60; challenges arbitration panel’s decision, 237, 238; Cooper’s response to naval history review, 231–232, 306, 308–309; review of Cooper’s naval history, 231, 233, 241, 307–308; ties to Mackenzie, 303, 307 Dumaresq, Jane Frances, 151 Duncker and Humblot, 67, 83, 89, 90 Dundas, James, 73 Dunlap, William, 48, 80, 110, 129, 145–146, 603n34 Earing, Edward, 80 Earnings: from literary work, xii, xiv, 9, 380–381, 384, 386, 429, 536, 690n13, 691n14; from literary work in England, 498–499, 577n10, 694n24; from magazine writing, 286, 288, 386 Ebel, Johann Gottfried, 44

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— 

I ndex

Eckford, Henry, 285, 460 Edinburgh Review, 210, 237, 297 Egan, Hugh, 319, 345 Einsiedeln, Abbey of, Switzerland, 54, 117, 120, 137 “Elaborate Review” of Somers courtmartial, 343, 345–351, 352, 385 Elliott, Jesse D.: and Battle of Lake Erie controversy, 208–209, 232, 233, 300–304, 305, 308; and Jackson figurehead episode, 302; as Jacksonian Democrat, 302, 303; and Ned Myers case, 324, 326; on Somers mutiny case, 335, 340; War of 1812 postings, 317; West Indies Squadron command of, 394 Ellis, David M., 365 Ellison, Thomas, 43 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 532 Emery, François, 134 English editions: copyright ownership of, 2, 9, 11, 443–444, 577n10; pirated, 443–444, 445, 498, 754n69; printed in Italy, 66–67, 82, 83, See also Bentley, Richard; Colburn, Henry; Colburn and Bentley Episcopalianism, 339, 382, 392, 413, 414, 417, 518 Erie Canal, 156 European residency and travels: in Belgium, 113, 121, 136–137, 177; book production process during (See Book production process, in Europe); cancellation of northern/eastern European trip, 40–41, 374; and consular post at Lyon, 16, 60–62, 575n85; correspondents during, 178–179; departure from America, 1–2, 27; in England, 2–3 (See also London, Cooper/Cooper family in); first transatlantic voyage, 315; in France, 3–5, 43, 60, 143, 149 (See also Paris, Cooper/Cooper family in); in Germany (See Germany, Cooper/ Cooper family in); health problems

during, xiv–xv, 10, 29, 75, 503–504, 515–516, 583n40; in Holland (Lowlands), 41–43, 76, 177; in Italy (See Italy, Cooper/Cooper family in); journal keeping during, 175, 177–178; return to America, 150–152; servants during, 609n65; in Switzerland (See Switzerland, Cooper/Cooper family in); Van Rensselaer family encountered in, 374–375 Europhile Americans, Cooper’s critique of, 75–76, 98, 166 Exploring Expedition and Antarctica, U.S., 454–455 Fabre, Julie, 7 Fagan, John (stereotyper), 477; and Afloat and Ashore, 358, 690n13; association with Cooper, 299, 309, 310, 630n20; costs assumed by Cooper, 299, 356; and The Crater, 402; and Homeward Bound, 195, 630n20; and “Islets of the Gulf,” 387; and Ned Myers, 319; and The Oak Openings, 442, 444–445, 446; proof reading of, 732n91; and Putnam edition of Cooper’s works, 470–471, 472–473, 479; and Satanstoe, 382; and The Sea Lions, 466–467; Standard Novels copies retrieved from Lea and Blanchard by, 470, 478–479, 481; and The Ways of the Hour, 499–500; and Wilkes’ Narrative, 455, 472; and Wyandotté, 315 Fanning, Edmund, 453–454, 461 Fanning, Joshua, 206 Fanning, Nathaniel, 206 Fanning, William A., 735n109 Farsin, William O., 162–163 Faux, William, 125–126 Fenimore Farm, 264 Ferney, Cooper’s visit to, 60, 61 Fête des Vignerons (wine festival), in The Headsman, 139, 141–143 Field, David Dudley, 248

I ndex

Fields, James, 288 Le Figaro, 405 Finance Controversy, in France, 124–129, 132, 133, 137, 149, 155, 166, 188, 230, 231 Finances: bank stocks, 617n43; and cotton speculation, 171–172, 176; and economic crisis, 182–183. See also Comstock land speculation; Earnings First Lessons in Political Economy (McVickar), 186 Fish, Hamilton, 237, 324 Fitting, Peter, 457 Fitzball, Edward, 12, 80 Florence (Italy), x, 63–67, 175 Flying Dutchman legend, 79–80, 584n47 Foot, Samuel A., 234, 236–237 Force, Peter, 126 Foreign opinion, deference to, 155 Fourth of July celebration, in Paris, 24, 43, 135 Fowler, Joseph, 146 Fox, Dixon Ryan, 527 France: Bourbon Restoration, 14–15, 17, 112; Catholicism in, 572n64; Cooper family travels in, 3–5, 43, 149; Cooper’s consular post at Lyon, 16, 60–62, 575n85; Cooper’s Ferney visit, 60, 61; Financial Controversy, 124; July Revolution, 15, 92–94, 96, 97, 108, 112, 130, 138; Lafayette’s political role and influence, 16–19; under Louis-Philippe, 94, 95, 96, 100, 160, 189; and Napoleon’s hundred days, 14, 17; and national sovereignty, Liberal view of, 558n49; Osage Indian tour of, 44; Polish exile relief in, 102–104, 121–123, 131, 596n70; and Polish uprising, 101–102; and U.S. reparations treaty, 160, 166. See also Paris, Cooper/Cooper family in Francis, John W., 528; diagnosis and treatment of Cooper, 507–508, 509, 510, 511, 512, 514, 515, 518–519, 521; visit to Otsego, 520–521, 522

Franklin, William, 192 Franklin House, Philadelphia, 287 Freeman’s Journal, 161, 190, 196–197, 199, 215, 231–232, 250 Freeth, Amy E., 761n29 French translations, 2, 8, 10–11, 31 Freneau, Philip, 206 Frey, Hendrick, 156 Friedenberg, Gottfried, 67 Frontiersman: debased portrayals of, 268–274, 313, 441; Leather-Stocking as cultural figure, 267–268; Michigan setting of Kirkland, 440–441; Whig co-opting image of, 274. See also Bumppo, Natty Frontier stories. See Leather-Stocking series; Littlepage trilogy; Native American characters; Oak Openings, The; Wyandotté Fugitive slave law, 497 Fuller, Margaret, 98, 589n22 Gabrielli, Charlotte, 147 Gallatin, Albert, 18, 128–129, 206, 559n55 Gamble, Thomas, 576n5, 650n1 Gansevoort, Guert, 331, 335, 337–338, 346, 349, 351, 523, 682–683 n53, n58 Gansevoort, Hunn, 338–339, 350, 683n60 Gansevoort, Peter, 312, 523 Gardiner, Addison, 242 Gardner, Charles K., 201, 286, 451, 458 Gemme, Paola, 589n22 Genlis, Madame de, 60 Geological Observations on the Volcanic Islands (Darwin), 406 Germany, Cooper/Cooper family in: book production partners, 83, 88–90; Dresden, 88–90; at jubilee to commemorate Augsburg Confession, 91; Munich, 88; Rhine Valley, 113–116, 137, 175, 177; setting for The Heidenmauer, 115–116, 137 German translations, 67, 83, 89, 90 Gertrude of Wyoming (Campbell), 36 Ghionio, Andrew, 163

  

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I ndex

Gibbs, George C., 428, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 436, 437–438 Gleanings in Europe: based on correspondence, 178–179; based on travel journals, 175, 177–178; book production process for, 179–184; English, 35, 37, 38, 179, 182, 210, 280; fictional letters in, 178–179, 622– 623n68–n69; financing for project, 176–177; French, 4, 5, 16, 135, 178, 181, 286; Italian, 69, 71, 83, 86–87, 182, 183–184, 195, 405; Rhine, 42, 85, 129, 135, 139; Swiss, 44, 50, 52, 54, 57, 60, 62, 109, 117, 164, 177, 572n63, 573n71 Glenn, Myra C., 319 Globe Hotel, New York, 315–316, 327, 502 Goddard, Ives, 272 Godwin, Parke, 532 Godwin, William, 32–33, 33, 37 Goldsborough, Charles W., 207, 633n37 Goodrich, Andrew T., 536 Gordon, J. Wright, 428, 430, 431, 432, 433, 434, 436, 438 Gosselin, Charles, 2, 8, 11, 12–13, 26, 67, 107, 116 Gossett, Suzanne, 752n63 Gould, Benjamin A., 73 Gould, Edward S., 517; on American Polish Committee, 122, 130; attacks on Cooper, 601–602n21–n23; “Cassio” review of The Bravo, 110, 130–132, 144, 155, 230, 249 Gould, James, 130 Government expenditures controversy (Finance Controversy), in France, 124–129, 132, 133, 137, 149, 155, 166, 188, 230, 231 Gower, Lord, 35 Grace, Henry and John, 152 Graham, Emily Clason, 345 Graham, George Rex, 286, 385, 390, 395, 398, 704n1 Graham, John Lorimer, 345 Graham Island, 405, 406

Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine, 287 Graham’s Magazine: “The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief ” in, 4, 289–292, 299–300, 385; Cooper as regular contributor to, 285–286, 288, 292; Cooper’s naval biographies in, 285–286, 287, 289, 292, 300, 329, 697n45, 704n1; Griswold’s editorship of, 287; “Islets of the Gulf ” serialized in, 385, 386–387, 389; pay scale of, 288; Poe ’s review of Ned Myers in, 409 Grant, Anne Macvicar, 263, 367–369, 650n1, 698n47, 699n49 Grattan, Thomas Colley, 755n71 Greeley, Horace, 225, 227, 228, 287, 327, 488; Cooper’s libel suits against, 245, 246–247, 540, 644n34; health reports on Cooper, 512, 518; and Somers court of inquiry, 341 Green, Martin, 424, 716–717n60 Green, Valentine, 708n20 Greene, George Washington, 448, 450, 478, 502–503, 505, 510, 568–569n41 Greenough, Horatio, 528; correspondence with Cooper, 81, 82, 100, 144, 145, 504, 516, 625–626n80; friendship with Cooper, 64; reminiscences of Italy, 182, 292; sculpture of Cooper, 503, 576n4; U.S. visit of, 625n80 Grenville, Thomas, 35, 74 Grey, Lord, 35 Greyslaer (Hoffman), 268–269, 270, 272, 274 Grinnell, Joseph, 73 Griswold, Rufus W., 287, 288, 300, 472, 510, 523, 691n14; and memorial event, 528, 529, 532; and Memorial volume, 530, 531 Grossman, James, 246, 345 Guide in the Wilderness, A (W. Cooper), 151–152, 628n13 Guizot, François, 92

I ndex

Gulf of Mexico, setting of “Islets of the Gulf,” 391 Gura, Philip, 534, 770n96 Gutierrez, Pedro (Pero), 259–260 Habersham, R.W., 134 Haddington, Earl of, 96 Hall, Basil, 125, 126, 127 Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 528 Hamilton, Alexander, 97–98, 363 Hand, George E., 430, 431, 432, 436, 438, 440 Handwriting difficulties, 511, 517, 759n23 Harpers’ School District Library, 340 Harris, John Levett, 127, 128, 129, 132, 155, 166, 230, 249, 600n14 Harrison, William Henry, 222, 447 Hart, Abraham, 320 Harthorn, Steven, 669n65, 671n76, 672n85, 693n19 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 532, 537 Hayne, Robert Y., 460 Hays, Charles W., 337 Hazard, Benjamin, 302 Head, Joseph, 286, 287 Headsman, The (Cooper), 58, 109, 123, 138, 164; book production process, 147, 148, 180; inspirations for, 139–141; as last novel of Cooper, 144; political focus in, 606n49; religious themes of, 140, 143; wine festival in, 139, 141–143, 607–608n46–n48 “Headsman, The: A Tale of Doom” (Hardman), 140 Health problems, 438, 555–556n29; bilious attacks, 504–505, 510, 515, 516; dietary regimen, 509; digestive symptoms, xv, 503–504, 506, 515, 761n29; during European residency, xiv–xv, 10, 29, 75, 503–504, 515–516, 583n40; and exhaustion from writing, 10, 34, 41, 53; from falls, 510–511, 556n29; feet and heels, 506, 507, 509, 515, 757n9; in final days, 517–522; handwriting difficulties, 511, 517,

759n23; headache, 515; impact on behavior and personality, xvi–xvii, 517; and liver disease, xv, 503, 504, 505–506, 511, 515; medical remedies for, 505–506, 507–508, 510, 511–513, 515, 516, 521, 757–758n14, 760–761n29, 764n57; from mercury poisoning, xv–xvi, 512, 513–514, 516–517, 566n24, 761n29; neuralgia, 506, 757n9; press reports on, 512, 518; recuperation from, 502–503, 506–507, 516; and weather conditions, 756n3 Heathcote, Caleb, 362 Heaviside, Richard, 66, 67, 578n13 Heidenmauer, The (Cooper), 442; book production process for, 116–117, 179–180; political themes in, 117–120; private atonement theme in, 120; setting for, 115–116, 137 Heidenmauer (Heathen’s Wall), 114–115 Heiskell, Horace M., 331, 337 “Hereditary Honours,” in New Monthly Magazine, 140–141 Herndon, William H., 513 Hersilia, 734–735n109 Hibbs, Mary Fanning, 206 Histoire de la République de Venise (Daru), 110–111, 112–113 History of America (Robertson), 258 History of Switzerland for the Swiss (Zschokke), 109 History of the Navy of the United States (Cooper). See Navy, U.S., Cooper’s history of History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (Prescott), 255 History of the United States (Bancroft), 207 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 441, 442; Greyslaer, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274; A Winter in the West, 440 Holberg, Ludvig, 165 Holland, Cooper family travels in, 41–43, 76, 77, 177 Hollow earth theory, 456–458

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I ndex

Holroyd, Stephen G., 217 Home as Found (Cooper), 278, 475, 476; autobiographical, 159, 199–201; book production process for, 195; libel suit over review of, 217–221; Natty Bumppo recalled in, 251, 267 Homeward Bound (Cooper), 150, 193–195, 199, 424, 474, 475, 629n18 Hone, John, Jr., 64 Hone, Philip, 154 Hopping Castle, 319 Howe, David, 686n75 Howe, Samuel Gridley, 133; on American Polish Committee, 121–123; arrested by Prussians, 597–598n76 Howison, John, 79 Hubbard, Samuel, 427 Hudson (packet boat), 1–2, 27, 151, 154 Hudson River, ice break-up on, 452 Hudson Valley, 354; Anti-Rent War in, 362, 363–366; Coeymans as setting for Cooper’s works, 360–361; land tenure in, 362–363; Yankee migration to, 363 Hugo, Victor, 8, 102 Hull, Isaac, 64 Human rights, xvii, 419, 658n42 Humboldt, Alexander von, 405–406 Hunter, Robert M. T., 352 Hunter, Robert R., 92, 100, 588n14 Iglesias, Luis A., 400, 401 Impressment policy, 209, 297 Indians. See Native Americans Ingersoll, Charles Jared, 37 Ingraham, Joseph Holt, 536–537 Irving, Washington, 37, 46, 229; Columbus biography of, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 261; Cooper’s criticism of, 135–136; and Flying Dutchman legend, 79; and memorial for Cooper, 528, 529, 531; on physical appearance of Cooper, 505; Putnam’s revised edition of works, 469 “Islets of the Gulf ” (Cooper): book version of (See Jack Tier); copyright

of, 385–386; cross-dressing female character in, 400–401; familiar settings of, 387–390; Gulf and Caribbean settings, sources for, 391–395; Mexican American War as context for, 395–400; negotiation with Bentley for British publication, 386, 402; realism of, 390, 399; serialization in Graham’s Magazine, 385, 386–387, 389 Italy: Cooper’s attachment to, 182, 292; setting of The Wing-and-Wing, 292–293; volcanic island near, 405–406 Italy, Cooper/Cooper family in: book production partners, 66–67; composition of The Water-Witch, 77; empathy for ordinary people of, 86–87; Florence, x, 63–67, 175; Naples and Bay of Naples, 67–69, 71, 175; northern tour of, 83–84, 86; Rome, 69–74, 76; Venetian setting for The Bravo, 85, 96–97, 107, 108–109, 111; Venice, 84–86, 107, 111; Washington’s birthday celebration in Rome, 73–74, 75 Ithaca Chronicle, 227 Jackson, Andrew, 292, 302, 428; and Congress, 155–156, 160; election of, 123, 460; figurehead episode, 302; meeting with Cooper, 154; recession under, 610n3, 664n36 Jacksonian Democrats, 131; and Battle of Erie controversy, 302, 303; and congressional Whigs, 160; Cooper’s support for, 15–16, 65, 154, 160, 187, 215, 419; and slavery issue, 162 Jacksonian hero, Natty Bumppo as, 274 Jack Tier (Cooper), 163, 250, 387, 402, 430, 445, See also “Islets of the Gulf ” James, William, 205, 206, 210, 237–238 Jarvis, John Wesley, 29 Jarvis, Russell, 302–303 Jarvis, Samuel Farmar, 64 Jarvis, Sarah McCurdy, 64

I ndex

Jaubert, Hippolyte François, 128 Jay, Anna, 518 Jay, John, 35 Jay, Mary, 10, 64, 74, 75, 88, 95, 178, 374, 375 Jay, Peter A., 88, 96, 100, 101, 154, 178, 234 Jay, William, 522 Jefferson, Thomas, 24, 25, 97–98, 589n21 Jeffersonian Democrats, 15 Jekyll, Joseph, 36 Johnson, Parley, 511, 519, 520 Johnson, Thomas B., 64–65, 75 Johnston, John, 315 Johnstone, Charles, 289 Jones, Henry, 222 Jones, Jacob, 332 Jones, John Paul, 203, 204, 206, 207, 292, 300 Jones, Pomroy, 312–313 Jones, Thomas ap Catesby, 731n88, 734n108 Jordan, Ambrose L., 211, 220, 235, 236 Journal des Débats, 132, 155 Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage (Parry), 451 Jullien, Marc Antoine, 102 July Revolution, 15, 92–94, 96, 97, 130, 138 Jury reform, in The Ways of the Hour, 490–493 Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1854, 494 Keep Cool (Neal), 535 Keese, Pomeroy, 296 Keller, Heinrich, 44, 57 Kenney, James, 35 Kent, James, 48, 229 Ketchum, Sidney, 440, 442; arrest of, 435; background and reputation of, 426–428; in debt negotiation, 437; debt transferred to Cooper, 426, 428–429; fictional character based on, 291; and lawsuits against endorsers, 430, 431, 434–436, 472

Kettell, Samuel, 256–257, 258–259 Kimball, Richard B., 529 King, Charles, 532 Kirk, Russell, xviii Kirkland, Caroline, 440–441 Kirkland, Elizabeth Cabot, 74, 75 Knickerbocker, 132, 187 Knickerbocker tale, The Water-Witch as, 41, 42 Konstanz (Switzerland), 51 Ko´sciuszko, Tadeusz, 102 Kramer, Lloyd S., 101 Kruse, Laurits, 140 Künzel, Christian, 114, 116 Lachevardière, Alexandre, 8, 9, 26 Lafayette, marquis de: Americans’ love for, 98–99; American tour of, 17, 18–19, 20, 560n63; and Bourbon restoration, 14, 16–18, 559n61; controlling personality of, 19–20; Cooper’s fictional account of American tour, 20–22; Cooper’s visits to La Grange, 20, 22, 27, 143; death of, 610n3; in Finance Controversy, 124, 126, 127, 149; and July 4 celebration, 24, 135; and July Revolution, 92, 93, 94, 96; and Louis-Philippe, 96, 99–100; and Polish rebels, 102, 121, 122; relationship with Cooper, 20, 22–23, 559n61; resignation from National Guard command, 99, 108 Laffitte, Jacques, 94 Lamarque, Maximilian, 133 Land speculation. See Comstock land speculation; Real estate speculation Land tenure, leasehold, 362–363; and Anti-Rent War, 362, 364–366 Lansdowne, Lord, 35 Larner, John P., 258 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 256, 258 Last of the Mohicans, The, xii, 2, 7, 9–10, 12, 29, 39, 53, 55, 60, 265, 277, 313, 474, 480, 481

  

— 

I ndex

Law of Civilization and Decay, The (Adams), 121 Lawrence, 301, 303 Lawrence, James, 203, 212, 335, 420 Lawrence, Thomas, 35, 38 Lea, Isaac, 356, 473, 477 Lea and Blanchard, 455; agreements with Cooper, 195, 255, 277, 284, 299, 310, 354–355, 475, 476; and book price, 299, 355; Cooper’s break with, 355, 356; copyright ownership of, 358, 475, 476, 477, 478; and Home as Found, 195; and Mercedes of Castile, 255, 256, 277; and Ned Myers, 319–320; paperback format of, 356; and Pathfinder, 254, 275; reclaiming of literary property from, 354; serializations of, 357; Standard Novels copies retrieved from, 470, 478–479, 481; and The Wing-andWing contract, 299, 309, 310. See also Carey and Lea Leasehold land tenure, 362–363; and Anti-Rent War, 362, 364–366 Leather-Stocking series, 9–10; copyright ownership of, 356, 473–474, 476, 478, 480; imitators of, 268–269, 271–274, 441; The Last of the Mohicans, xii, 2, 7, 9–10, 12, 29, 39, 53, 55, 60, 265, 277, 313, 474, 480, 481; Loyalists in, 449; memories from earlier novels in, 265–266; origins of name, 468–469; The Pioneers, 9–10, 36, 53, 60, 193, 200, 265, 266, 277, 296, 475, 480; in popular imagination, 267–268; positive reception of, 267; publication dates for, 468; Putnam edition of, 469, 470, 480–481, 509, 747–748n41–n46; sequence of, 265; serial edition of, 356; sixth tale proposed by Cooper, 448–450, 478–479, 481, 729–730n77, 745n33; and Stringer and Townsend edition, 476, 480, 482, 483. See also Bumppo, Natty; Deerslayer, The; Pathfinder, The; Prairie, The

Legal system, in The Ways of the Hour, 490–493 Leggett, William, 159, 162 Leiningen, princes of, 114 Leslie, Charles R., 36 Lester, C. Edwards, 227 Letter of J. Fenimore Cooper, to Gen. Lafayette, on the Expenditure of the United States of America, 127 Letters from an American Farmer (Crèvecoeur), 311 Letter to His Countrymen, A (Cooper), 110, 131, 145, 149, 154–155, 159, 230 Levasseur, Auguste, 20, 22, 24, 560n63 Lewis, Leonard, 323 Lewis, Matthew G. (“Monk”), 110 Libel law, in New York State, 216, 242, 245–246, 649n81 Libel suits: arbitration of naval history case, 234–238, 341; Battle of Lake Erie articles as subject of, 213, 214, 231–233; and Bryant’s memorial address, 533; Cooper’s prior relationships with editors in, 229–231; Cooper’s record of success in, 214, 221, 226–227, 248; Cooperstown ties of editors in, 228–229; damage awards in, 222–223, 539–541; defeat in Stone ’s executrix case, 241–244; Duer’s challenge of arbitrators’ decision, 237, 238; and Duer’s review of naval history, 231–232, 233, 241, 307–308; against Greeley, 245, 246, 246–247, 540, 644n34; impact on Cooper, 245; legal consequences of, 245–250; number of, 213–214; political context for, 637n2; reputation theme in Deerslayer derived from, 262–263; vs slander claims, 216; against Stone, 231–233, 238–244, 246, 541; Three Mile Point (See Three Mile Point libel suits) Library Company of Philadelphia, 205, 207, 208, 256 Liège (Belgium), 137 Life of Brant (Stone), 312

I ndex

Limburg Abbey, Germany, 114, 118, 119, 121 Lincoln, Abraham, mercury poisoning of, xv, xvi, 513, 515, 517 Lionel Lincoln (Cooper), 26, 260, 277, 475, 476 Lippard, George, 236 Literary and Scientific Repository (Gardiner), 201, 286, 451 Little Belt incident, 210 Littlepage trilogy, xi, xvii, 359, 473; Anglo-Dutch New York in, 77, 367; Anti-Rent War in, 244–245, 250, 361–362, 365–366, 377–378; autobiographical meaning in, 360–361, 366–367, 375–377, 381; book production process for, 358, 382–384; Cooper’s plan for, 365–366; Dutch cultural legacy in, 365, 367; earnings from, 384; European experience in, 374, 377–378; as literary property, 381–382, 474; publication dates for, 382, 383; race and ethnicity in, 373, 379–380; Van Rensselaers as models for, 370, 374–377; woman character in, 378–379; and Yankee migration to New York, 363, 367–373. See also Chainbearer, The, Redskins, The; Satanstoe Liver disease, xv, 503, 504, 505–506, 511, 515 Livingston, Robert, 362 Lockhart, John G., 36, 136 Loghtaudye, 312 London (England), Cooper/Cooper family in, 175; book production partners in, 2, 551–552n3 (See also Bentley, Richard; Colburn, Henry; Colburn and Bentley); critical of English attitudes, 36–40, 75; departure of, 34, 40; excursions of, 34–35; lodgings of, 32; Notions of the Americans finished in, 32, 34; social calls in, 35–36, 75, 147–148; travel from Paris to, 146–147; visit of 1826, 2–3; William Godwin’s visit during, 32–33 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 286

Lord, Daniel A., 234, 236, 237 Louis-Philippe, King, 94, 95, 96, 100, 124, 130, 160, 189 Louis XVIII, 14, 17 Lounsbury, Thomas, 532 Low, Nicholas, 45 Lowell, James Russell, 397 Loyalists in Revolutionary War, 449, 478 Ludlow, Edward G., 505, 506 Luscombe, Matthew H. T., 149 Luther, Martin, 119 Luttrell, Henry, 35 Lyell, Charles, 405, 406 Lynch, Dominick, 1, 2, 154 Macdonough, Thomas, 37 MacDougall, Hugh C., 512, 761n29 Macedonian, USS, 203, 255–256, 281, 393, 394, 708n24 Mackenzie, Alexander Slidell: actions against Somers mutiny suspects, 331–332, 333, 338–339, 490; character of, 348–349; command of Somers, 329–330; Cooper’s defense of naval history, 307; Cooper’s naval history reviewed by, 304, 305, 306; Cooper’s view of actions in Somers mutiny case, 334, 335–337, 347; court martial in Somers mutiny case, 304, 332, 337–339; executions of Somers plotters, 332; Perry biography, 306–307, 340–341; Perry’s ties to, 303; reports on Somers mutiny, 332–333 Mackintosh, James, 35 Madison, James, 461 Magazine writing: ““The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief,” 4, 289–292; earnings from, 286, 288; on Financial Controversy, 124–129; naval biography series, 285–286, 287–288, 289, 292, 300, 697n45; regular contributor to Graham’s Magazine, 286, 288–289, 292; serialized novels, 355–356, 385–386, 389, See also “Islets of the Gulf ”

  

— 

I ndex

Malibran, Maria Garcia, 552n6 Malmaison, 5 Mansion House Hotel, Philadelphia, 286–287 Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York for 1847 (Valentine), 524, 525 Marketing strategies, 355–357 Marmont, Auguste de, 93 Married or Single? (Child), 535 Marshall, John, 427 Marshall House hotel, Michigan, 427 Martignac, Jean-Baptiste Sylvère Gay, vicomte de, 15 Martin, Fredericka, 462 Mathews, Charles, 560n65 Maury, Matthew F., 709–710n29, n31 McAdam, Anne Charlotte DeLancey, 3, 32, 35, 551n8–10, 563n3, 608n64 McAdam, John Loudon, 32, 35, 608n64 McCurdy, Charles W., 363, 364, 377 McElrath, Thomas, 247, 341 McGann, Jerome, 373, 496 McHarg, Charles, 530, 634n44 McLean, John, 433, 434–435, 436 McVickar, John, 186–187 McWilliams, John P., 488 Medical problems. See Health problems Meinhold and Sons (Carl Christian), 89 Melincourt (Peacock), 165 Melville, Herman, xvii, xviii, 29, 393, 450, 452, 463, 484, 498, 523, 538; productivity of, 537; on The Sea Lions, 452; tribute to Cooper, 532, 533–534 Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies (Jefferson), 97 Memoirs of an American Lady (Grant), 263, 367–368 Memorable Days in America (Faux), 125–126 Memorial event: Bryant’s address, 529, 532, 533, 766–767n78; letters of tribute read at, 532, 533–534; newspaper reports of, 532–533; planning session for, 528–529, 766n74; presided over by

Daniel Webster, 531–532, 769n89; scheduling of, 767n79 Memorial volume, 529, 530, 531, 767n80 Mencken, H.L., 531 Mercedes of Castile (Cooper), 254–261, 280, 475 Mercury poisoning, xv–xvi, 512, 513–514, 516–517, 566n24 Mexican American War, 395–400, 402–403, 416–417 Michigan: Comstock land speculation in, 172–173, 429; Cooper’s trips to, 386, 429–430, 431–432, 433, 435, 437, 439, 446; Kirkland’s frontier stories of, 440–441; land boom in, 427, 440, 719–720n8; Oak Openings biotic region, 439–440, 442; published accounts of, 440; setting for The Oak Openings, 439–440, 441–442 Mickiewicz, Adam, 70, 102 Miller, John, 2, 8–9, 551–552n3 Miller, John Ernest, 675n10 Milton, John, 69 Mitchell, Samuel L., 457 Molini, Giuseppe, 66–67, 82, 83, 579n15, 584n52 Monboddo, James Burnett, Lord, 165 Monikins, The (Cooper): book price, 691n14; book production process, 167–171, 179, 615–617n39–n42; nautical themes in, 164, 452, 453, 454, 457, 461–462; political themes in, 154–155, 164–167; real estate speculation in, 614–615n33 Monroe, James, 18, 22 Montagu, Anna D. B., 39 Moore, Francis, 9, 65 Moore, Thomas, 39–40 Morgan, Edward S., 443 Morning Courier, 540 Morris, Charles, 330, 530, 633n37 Morris, George Pope, 459 Morris, Henry, 343–344, 345, 686n73 Morris, Jacob, 73, 157 Morris, John Cox, 148

I ndex

Morris, Richard V., 343 Morse, Jedidiah, 48 Morse, Samuel F. B., 117, 122, 130, 149, 604n39; anti-Catholic sentiment of, 73, 119; correspondence with Cooper, 187–188; and Otsego Hall relocation, 72, 158; Paris uprising observed by, 134–135; praise of Cooper, 136; in Rome, 70, 72–73 Mott, Frank Luther, 288 Munich (Germany), 88 Murphy, Henry C., 326 Myers, Edward R. (“Ned”), 359; collaboration with Cooper on Ned Myers, 316–319, 322; continuing personal relationship with Cooper, 322, 327–328; death of, 328, 472, 679n37; marriage and family of, 323, 327, 328; navy civilian employment of, 324–326; navy pension claim of, 322, 323, 325, 326–327, 328–329, 709n29; reunion with Cooper, 315–316; with West Indies squadron, 394–395 Myrtle Grove. See Three Mile Point (Myrtle Grove) Nahl, August, 46 Naples and Bay of Naples (Italy), 67–69, 71, 175 Napoleon: Elba residence, 67; hundred days, 14, 17; places associated with, 5; Swiss republic of, 49–50; in Venice, 111, 112; Walter Scott’s biography of, 13, 14 Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The (Poe), 409 Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (Wilkes), 454–456, 464, 732n92 Nash, Daniel, 230 Le National, 125, 127, 128, 286 National Calendar, 126 Native American characters: in Bird’s Nick of the Woods, 272–273; Cass’s criticism of, 435; in The Deerslayer,

269–270, 658n42; in Hoffman’s Greyslaer, 272; and Indian-hating frontiersman, 273–274, 275, 313; in The Last of the Mohicans, 313; in Mercedes of Castile, 261; in The Oak Openings, 447–448; and redskin terminology, 272; in The Redskins, 379–380; in Wyandotté, 311–314 Native Americans: Cherry Valley attack, 311–312; Copway’s advocacy for, 511; Osage tour of France, 44, 569n42, 579n16 Nature, Cooper’s view of, 53, 55, 69 Nautical settings and themes, xi, 278; The Bravo discarded version, 107–108; cross-dressing female characters, 400–402; in The Crater, 392, 403–404; disengagement from, 689n6; flightand-pursuit pattern in, 392; Flying Dutchman legend, 79–80; Homeward Bound, xi, 150, 193–195; imitators of, 390, 707n17; Mercedes of Castile (Cooper), 254–261; The Monikens, 164, 452, 453, 454, 457, 461–462; Ned Myers, 278, 316–322, 353; The Pilot, 26, 27, 53, 201–202, 294; pirate stories, 352–353; Precaution, 296; realistic portrayals of, 353; The Red Rover, 27, 79–80, 294–295, 353; The Two Admirals, 252, 279–283, 296; The Wing-and-Wing, 68, 278, 280, 292–299, See also Afloat and Ashore; “Islets of the Gulf ”; Sea Lions, The; Water-Witch, The Naval History of the United States (Clark), 201, 210 Naval Monument, The (Bowen), 208 Naval Occurances (James), 210, 237–238 Navarrete, Martin Fernández de, 256, 258 Navy, U.S.: and Antarctic expedition proposal of Reynolds, 460; Cooper’s biographical sketches, 284–286, 289, 292, 300, 307; Cooper’s service in, 203, 210, 211, 253, 331, 359; dueling and public fights among officers, 211–212, 420; and Mexican American War, 395;

  

— 

I ndex

Navy, U.S. (continued) Ned Myers’s civilian employment in, 324–326; and Ned Myers’s pension claim, 322, 323, 325, 326–327, 328–329; Ned Myers’s service in, 317, 318; reissue of, 530; West Indies Squadron, 391–392, 393–394. See also Somers mutiny case; Wilkes expedition Navy, U.S., Cooper’s history of, 280; abridged edition of, 284–285, 340; arbitration of libel suit, 234–238; archival research for, 204–208; Battle of Lake Erie in (See Battle of Lake Erie); biographical notices in, 207; and British influence, 281; delays in completing, 202–203; expanded editions of, 530, 633n37, 634n44, 768n85; information sources for, 203–204; inspiration for, 201–202; libel suit connected to, 213, 214, 231–233; navy’s cooperation with, 633n37; partisanship absent from, 210–212; reissued by Phinneys, 530, 531, 767–768n84; revised editions of, 206–207, 651n7; second edition of, 253; War of 1812, 208–210, 211 Neal, John, xiv, 529, 534, 535, 537 Ned Myers (Cooper), 278, 316–322, 325, 353, 409, 474 Neely, Sylvia, 18 Nelson, Horatio, 281, 292, 294, 298, 332 Nelson, Samuel, 751n17 Netherlands, Cooper family travels in, 41–43, 76, 77, 177 Newby, Thomas C., 443–445 New Home, A (Kirkland), 440 New Monthly Magazine, 125, 140–141 Newspapers: delivery of correspondents’ reports, 357, 693n21; friendly to Cooper, 250; health reports on Cooper, 512, 518; memorial event reports of, 532–533; obituary of Cooper, 527–528; serialized novels in, 355, 691n14; Somers mutiny case reports of, 333–334, 341–342; Wilkes

expedition reports of, 455, See also Libel suits; Press attacks Newspaper writing: x; A.B.C. letters in New York Evening Post, 159–161, 167; on slavery, 161; on Three Mile Point dispute, 196–197, 198–199 Newton, Stuart, 35 New World, 227, 248, 540 New York American, 21, 131, 155, 352 New-York Annual Register, 126 New York City: book production partners in, 155, 168, 194, 355 (See also Burgess and Stringer; Putnam, George P.); Cooper’s history of, xi, 484, 486, 519, 523–527, 531, 764–765n59; Cooper’s trips to, 315–316, 327–328, 334–335, 431, 436–437, 438, 442, 472, 500, 502–503, 505, 508–509, 510, 524; Dutch, 77, 365, 367, 582–583n39; Lafayette ’s visit to, 17, 21; lodgings on return from Europe, 148–149, 153; slave trade case, 162–163, 707n15 New York Commercial Advertiser, 541 New York Enquirer, 540 New York Evening Post, 162, 218, 223, 250, 286, 380, 638–639n9, 642n19; A.B.C. letters in, 159–161, 167 New York Evening Signal, 540 New-York Gazette, 229, 231 New York Herald, 352, 532–533 New York Public Advertiser, 420 New-York Spectator, 231, 238, 308, 333 New York State: civil and criminal codes of, 751–752n61; land tenure law in, 362–363, 378; libel law in, 216, 242, 245–246; Yankee migrant/Yorker conflict, 363, 367–373, 485, See also Anti-Rent War; Hudson Valley; New York City New York Times, Cooper’s obituary in, 527–528 New York Tribune, 225, 227, 341, 532, 533 Niagara, 301, 303, 305 Niagara Falls, 252, 437 Nicholas, tsar, 101

I ndex

Nicholson, James, 206 Nick of the Woods (Bird), 271–273, 274 Niels Klim’s Underground Adventures (Holberg), 165 Nisard, Jean, 132 Norris, William H., 337, 344–345, 347 North American Review, 258–259, 306, 670n71 Northway, Rufus R., 226, 541 Notions of the Americans (Cooper), xvi, 24, 25, 66, 188; anti-English tone of, 38; book production process for, 31, 34; fictional account of Lafayette’s American tour, 20–22; finished during London visit, 32, 34, 53; French translation of, 31–32; on government expenditures, 125; on press role, 249; religion in, 414–415; republicanism in, 189; slavery issue in, 161 Nott, Eliphalet, 227 Nullification Crisis, 317 Oak Openings, The (Cooper), 174, 430; book production process for, 442–443, 445–446; Michigan setting for, 439–440, 441–442, 725–726n43; pirated edition of, 443–445; publication date of, 445–446; religious themes in, 446–447, 448; Revolutionary War recalled in, 450; War of 1812 context for, 447–448 Oak Openings biotic region, 439–440, 442 O’Conor, Charles, 752n63 Oechsli, Wilhelm, 49–50 Ogden, David B., 162 Ogden, James De Peyster, 45, 154, 202; and cotton speculation, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176; and land speculation, 320, 428, 429; testimony in law suit, 432, 433, 434, 436; travel to Michigan, 433, 435, 437 Ogilvie, B. J., 205 Ogin´ski, Michał, 102 Ombrosi, James, 64

  

Oneida Whig, 226, 541 Osage Indians, in French tour, 44, 568n41, 569n42, 579n16 Otsego County: and Anti-Rent War, 365; border warfare in, 311; Cooper’s hobby farm in, 264; Yankee migrants in, 368. See also Cooperstown (New York); Three Mile Point (Myrtle Grove); Three Mile Point dispute Otsego County Courthouse, 191, 192 Otsego Hall: buying back of, 72, 146, 157–158, 172; Cooper’s death at, 522–523, 763–764n55; Cooper’s final days at, 517–522; library at, 718n64; Ned Myers’s stepdaughter in service at, 327; restoration of, x, 146, 158–159, 175, 192; winter isolation at, 517–518 Otsego Herald, 192 Otsego Lake, 193, 195, 264, 278, 329, 452 Otsego Republican, 199, 215, 539, 637n6, 642–643n19, n21 Otterson, Andrew, 328 Otterson, James, 329 Ouseley, William Gore, 137 Paç, Louis, 146 Paine, Thomas, Common Sense, 103, 104 Palmer, Nathaniel, 735n109 Panic of 1819, 363 Panic of 1837, 145, 426, 428 Paris, Cooper/Cooper family in: book production directed from, 8, 9, 11; and cholera epidemic, 133; departure for America, 149–150; first entry into, 5–6; and Fourth of July celebration, 24, 43, 135; and Lafayette, visits at La Grange, 20, 22–23, 27, 143; lodgings of, 6–7, 43, 95–96, 553n17, 588–589n18; meetings with Walter Scott, 11–13; Osage Indians encountered in, 44; return after July Revolution, 94–96; schooling of children, 7, 553–554n19; summer lodgings at St. Ouen, 23–24, 26, 27–28, 30, 515, 561n70; and uprising of 1832, 134–135. See also France

— 

I ndex

Parker, Daniel, 340 Parker, George, 285 Parkman, Francis, 532 Parry, William E., 451, 452, 453, 455, 457 Parthenon, Rome, 71–72 Pasta, Giuditta Negri, 2 Pathfinder, The (Cooper), 185, 277, 280; book production process for, 253–254; copyright ownership of, 476, 652n8; Natty Bumppo character, 251, 252, 253; publishing agreement for, 651–652n8; Putnam edition of, 480; sales of, 275; settings based on personal memories, 252–253, 264 Patriotism, Cooper’s view of, 396–397 Paulding, James Kirke, xiv, 37, 38, 187, 206, 380, 381, 384, 386, 534, 535, 537, 633n40 Peacock, Thomas Love, 165 Peale, Rembrandt, 64, 576n5 Pedersen, Anna Smith and Peder, 1 Pellet, Elias P., 198, 215, 217, 219, 539, 637n2 Pemble, John, 111 Pensacola Navy Yard, 392, 394 Pensacola station, of West Indies Squadron, 393–394 Périer, Casimir, 129, 133 Perkins, Thomas Handasyd, Jr., 151 Perry, Grant Champlin, 670n76 Perry, Matthew C., 208, 302, 303, 304, 329, 332, 416–417 Perry, Oliver H.: and Battle of Lake Erie controversy, 208, 232, 233, 300–304, 305; Cooper’s biographical sketch of, 285, 289, 292, 300, 307; Cooper’s research on, 206; death of, 302; Mackenzie ’s biography of, 306–307, 340–341; and Somers mutiny case, 333 Personal Narrative of the First Voyage of Columbus to America (Kettell), 256, 259 Peruzzi, Elisabetta, 63 Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), Cooper’s trips to, 205–206, 254, 255, 284,

286–288, 298, 300, 310, 335, 353, 376, 382, 442, 455, 507 Philadelphia Navy Yard, 324 Philbrick, Thomas, 453 Philothea (Child), 536 Phinney, Caroline Cooper “Cally,” 63, 505, 758n17; copyright assigned to, 530, 634n44; at deathbed, 522; and reissue of Cooper’s works, 530–531; and unfinished New York City history, 526 Phinney, Harry, 522 Phinney, Henry and Elihu, 186, 187, 191, 192, 285, 307, 444 Phinney, Henry Frederick “Fred,” 522, 530, 531, 758n17 Pickering, James H., 911 Picot, Jean, 50, 51 Pierce, James, 440 Pilbeam, Patricia, 93–94 Pilot, The (Cooper), 36, 277; copyright ownership of, 2, 475; Flying Dutchman legend in, 79; nautical setting of, 26, 27, 53, 201–202, 294; Putnam edition of, 471, 472, 479–480; stage version of, 12, 80 Pinkney, David H., 92, 99 Pinksterfest, 367, 698n47 Pioneers, The (Cooper), 9–10, 36, 53, 60, 193, 200, 265, 266, 277, 296, 475, 480 Pirated editions, 443–444, 445, 498, 754n68 Pirates, in Gulf and Caribbean, 394 Pirate stories, influence on mutiny plot, 352–353, 688n1 Pleasures of Memory, The (Rogers), 35 Podczaszyn´ski, Michał, 102 Poe, Edgar Allan, 409, 450 Poets and Poetry of America (Griswold), 287 Poland, revolt against tsar, 101–102, 603n31; refugee aid in Paris, 102–104, 121–123, 131 Polar expeditions. See Antarctic voyages; Wilkes expedition Polignac, Jules prince de, 92

I ndex

Political themes: in The Bravo, 104, 107, 108–113; in The Crater, 418–419, 421–425; in The Heidenmauer, 117–121, 123; in A Letter to His Countrymen, 155–156; in The Monikins, 154–155, 164–167; in The Ways of the Hour, 488–490, 493–495 Political views: in American Democrat, 186–189; on Anti-Rent movement, 373, 377; on dueling, 211, 217, 420; on electoral college reform, x, 65; on Europhile Americans, 75–76, 98, 166; on French political affairs, 15, 16–17, 96, 97–100, 108, 112; on human rights, xvii, 419; on Indian rights, 511; Jacksonian affiliation, 15–16, 65, 154, 160, 187, 215, 419; on Jefferson’s legacy, 97–98; on jury trials, 492–493; Lafayette ’s influence on, 16; on Lafayette ’s role, 98–99; on Mexican American War, 396; misreadings of, xviii, 488; and moral questions, 490; in New York Evening Post letters, 159–162; on patriotism, 396–397; on property rights, 380; on reparations treaty with France, 160, 166; on slavery and race, xvii, 24–26, 160–162, 163, 190–191, 419, 493, 496–497, 562n75; strong expression of, 65; on wealth, x, xvii, 166, 211. See also Republicanism Politics and political relations: x; affiliation with Jacksonian Democrats, 15–16, 65, 154, 160, 187, 215, 419; in “Cassio” review of The Bravo, 110, 130–132, 144, 148, 155, 230, 249; emotional toll of public criticism on, 144–145, 156; Finance Controversy in Paris, 124–129, 132, 137, 149, 155, 166, 188, 230, 231; Jackson’s meeting with Cooper, 154; and Ned Myers’s employment with Navy, 324–326; and Ned Myers’s navy pension claim, 322, 323, 325, 326–327, 328–329; and personality change from medical

treatment, 74–75, 517; and Polish refugee relief, 102–103, 121–122, 596n70, 607n56; in scientific research funding, 460. See also Libel suits; Press attacks; Somers mutiny case; Three Mile Point dispute; Whig Party Polk, James K., 325, 398 Pomeroy, Ann Cooper, 2, 4, 83, 157, 178, 192, 196, 414, 764n55 Pomeroy, George, 196, 197 Pomeroy decree, 157, 158 Porter, David, 205 Porter, Jane, 409, 412 Porter, William O., 409–412, 419 Pourtalès, Frederick de, 45–46 Prairie, The, 251, 441; book production methods for, 8, 9, 11, 26; British publishers of, 8–9; copyright ownership of, 9, 11, 474; edition size, 11; French translation of, 10–11; memories from early novels in, 265–266; Natty Bumppo character, 9, 10–11, 251, 255, 267, 450; as part of series, 9–10; Putnam edition of, 480; Revolutionary War references in, 449 Prairie Ronde, Michigan, 442 Preble, Edward, 207, 285 Preble, George, 285 Preble, Harriet, 31 Precaution (Cooper), 176, 277, 296, 458, 475, 476 Prentiss, John H., 230, 231 Prescott, William H., 255, 529, 530, 532 Press attacks: ix; on Cooper’s father, 218; and Cooper’s intention to retire, 144–145; in The Crater, 418, 419–421; impact of libel suits on, 248; inhumanity charge against Cooper in libel suits, 222–223, 224, 225–226; interconnections of editors in, 223, 228; personal nature of, 144, 215, 217; political basis for, 215; principled opposition to, 249–250; reprinted by Weed, 225–226; scope and intensity of, 214–215; Three Mile Point dispute as

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I ndex

Press attacks (continued) fuse for, 198–199, 215–216; in The Ways of the Hour, 487. See also Libel suits; Newspapers Price, Stephen, 2 Price, William B., 162 Principles of Geology (Lyell), 406–407 Property rights: Cooper on, 380; in The Crater, 419; of married women, 752n63 Publishers/printers, relations with: agreements with British publishers, 9, 104–105, 147, 283–284, 286, 321–322, 354, 384, 386, 466, 498–499, 577n10, 591n33, 651–652n8, 694n24, 727n54; agreements with Burgess and Stringer (Stringer and Townsend), xiii, 283–284, 402, 467, 473–474, 477, 478, 480, 481–482, 702n72, 705–706n7, 727n54; agreements with Carey and Lea (Lea and Blanchard), xii, 167–168, 169, 170, 195, 255, 277, 284, 299, 310, 354–355, 475, 536, 677n18; agreements with John Fagan, 299, 309, 310; agreements with Putnam, n38, 469–470, 471, 479–480, 482, 746n37, 764n58; and backlist, xii, 358; and book prices, xiv, 169, 299, 354, 615n38, 690n14, 702n72; and changes in publishing sector, xii–xiii, 355–356, 536–537, 610n3; and cheap editions, 356, 477, 480; conflict between Putnam and Stringer and Townsend, 481–484; and copyright ownership (See Copyright ownership); and isolated position in publishing market, 185–186; and marketing strategies, 355–357; paperback format of, 356; and serialized novels, 355–356, 385; switch to Burgess and Stringer, xiii, 356, 358, 381, 476; and travel book venture, 175–176. See also Book production partners; Book production process; Book production process, in Europe; Sales Putnam, George P., xiv, 321, 355, 739n2; agreements with Cooper, 469–470,

471, 475, 479–480, 508–509, 746n37, n38, 747n39, 764n58; conflict with Stringer and Townsend, 481–484; fire at printers, 526–527, 531, 749n49; and naval history reissue, 530, 531; publisher for Susan Fenimore Cooper, 500, 509; and unfinished New York City history, 523, 525–527, 531; Washington Irving revised edition of, 469; and The Ways of the Hour, 485, 497, 499, 500–501 Putnam edition of Cooper’s works, 740n4, 747n41; book production process for, 470–473, 740n5; contracts for, 471, 473, 479–480, 482; format of, 470; of Leather-Stocking Tales, 469, 470, 480–481, 509, 747–748n41–n47; Memorial volume, 529, 530, 531; preface to, 478, 480; of sea tales, 471; Standard Novels copies retrieved from Lea and Blanchard for, 470, 478–479, 481 Quarterly Review, 125–126, 136, 598n2 Race and ethnicity, in The Redskins, 373 Ray, Richard, 45 Real estate speculation: in Afloat and Ashore, 428; in “Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief,” 291–292, 726n47; in The Crater, 418; dark characters in Cooper’s fiction based on, 429; Kirkland’s satire of, 440–441; and Midwestern land boom, 427, 440, 719–720n8; in The Monikins, 614– 615n33; in The Oak Openings, 174; in The Redskins, 374. See also Comstock land speculation Red Rover, The (Cooper), 66, 150, 353, 474; based on Cooper family’s Atlantic crossing, 27, 294–295; book production process, 26–27, 30; cross-dressing character in, 400, 401; masquerade game in, 28–29; multiple

I ndex

names of characters, 29; phantom ship in, 79–80; Putnam edition of, 471, 472–473, 479, 480; stage version of, 80 Redskins, The (Cooper), 365, 485; Anti-Rent War in, 366, 378; book production process for, 383–384; and European experience, 378; libel suit reference in, 244–245; race and ethnicity in, 373–374, 495. See also Littlepage trilogy Redwood: A Tale (Sedgwick), 534 Reeve, Tapping, 130 La Régne Animal (Cuvier), 165–166 Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (Tawney), 121 Religious life of Cooper: baptism at Christ Church, 518; Bible readings, 413, 446; Catholic practice in, 120; Episcopalianism, 339, 382, 417, 518; observation of Catholicism in Europe, 42–43, 51–52, 54, 70, 118; observation of religious differences in Europe, 51, 91; in Paris, 149; Protestant skepticism, 51; tolerance of Catholicism, 42, 118, 120, 414 Religious themes: in The American Democrat, 415; in The Crater, 413–414, 415–417, 421; in The Headsman, 140, 143; in The Heidenmauer, 117–121; in Notions of the Americans, 414–415; in The Oak Openings, 446–447, 448 Remarks on the Statistics and Political Institutions of the United States (Ouseley), 137 Rémusat, Charles, comte de, 19–20 Renshaw, Frank, 395–396 Rensselaerswyck, 362, 363, 364 Renwick, James L., 460 Reparations treaty, French, 160, 166 Republicanism, 15, 33, 413; in The American Democrat, 188, 189–190; of Lafayette, 96, 99; in Notions of the Americans, 189; as political universal, 99; reinforced by French experience, 98; Switzerland as seedbed for, 48

Residence at the Court of London, A (Rush), 175 Revolutionary War: context for The Crater, 403; in Leather-Stocking sixth tale proposed by Cooper, 448–450, 478–479; recalled in The Oak Openings, 450; setting in Wyandotté, 310–312 Revue Britannique, 124, 126, 128, 129, 599n6 Revue Encyclopédique, 161 Reynolds, Jeremiah N.: federal Antarctic expedition plan of, 459–460; and hollow earth theory, 458–459; private Antarctic expedition plans of, 462; and Wilkes expedition, 461–462 Rezek, Joseph, 740–741n7 Rhine Valley, 113–116, 137, 175, 177 Richelieu, Armand Emmanuel du Plessis, duc de, 15 Richmond, James Cook, 74, 75 Ritter, Thomas, 162, 163 Rives, Judith P., 116 Rives, William C., 102, 122, 123, 127, 129, 149, 160, 504 Robertson, William, 258 Robinson, Henry Crabb, 74 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 407, 408 Robinson Crusoe story: in Cooper’s works, 407–408; Porter’s Narrative as model, 409–412 Rodgers, John, 10, 210 Rogers, Samuel, 35, 36, 39, 65, 147, 565n13, 592–593n46 Rölvaag, Ole, 534 Rome (Italy): censorship in, 82; Cooper family in, 69–73, 75, 76; Washington’s birthday celebration in, 73–74 Roosevelt, James J., 137 Rosenberg, Norman L., 216, 637n2 Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 21 Roskell, Nicholas, 171, 172, 183, 202 Rosny chateau, 4 Rotterdam (Holland), 41–42

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I ndex

Rouen (France), 4 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 409 Rowland, Richard, 506, 508 Royal Navy: and impressment policy, 207, 209; in The Two Admirals, 279–283; in The Wing-and-Wing, 292–299 Rural Hours (S.F. Cooper), 500, 509, 755n74 Rush, Benjamin, 514 Rush, Elizabeth, 376 Rush, Richard, 175, 460, 532 Russell, Elizabeth Ann, 593n51 Russell, John, 35, 36 Russell, William, 70 Sacia, Charles, 224, 225, 226 Sailor’s Magazine, 318, 319 Sailors’ Snug Harbor, 315, 318, 322 Sales: of Afloat and Ashore, 690–691n13; of History of the Navy of the United States, 241, 284; of Homeward Bound, 195, 474; of Mercedes of Castille, 277; of Ned Myers, 321; of The Pathfinder, 275; of The Sea Lions, 498; of Sketches of Switzerland, 621 n59, n61; of The Two Admirals, 298, 310; of The Wing-and-Wing, 310 Samson (packet boat), 150–151, 153, 154, 199 Sanborn, Geoffrey, 313, 608n49 Sandford, James S., 336–437, 428, 430, 434, 438, 472 Sansom, Joseph, 48–49 Satanstoe (Cooper), 77, 263, 358, 370, 373, 378, 496; Albany section of, 360–361; copyright ownership of, 474; Dutch cultural legacy in, 365, 367; ice break-up in, 452. See also Littlepage trilogy Saulnier, Sébastien-Louis, 124, 126, 127–129, 132, 598n1 Saunders, Fredrick, 526 Savage, James, 207 Saxton and Pierce, 355–356

Scheidenhelm, Richard, 247, 248 Schermerhorn, Peter, 73 Schreiber, Alois W., 115 Schuyler, Isaac, 431, 435, 436 Scoresby, William, 451, 452, 453, 456, 464 Scott, Walter, 128, 132; apologist for aristocratic power, 121; characterized, 65; financial problems of, 13; Flying Dutchman legend in work of, 79; French publisher of, 12–13; The Heart of Midlothian, 750n54; inquiry into deceased wife ’s French birth records, 61–62; meetings with Cooper, 11–13, 36, 37; and U.S. copyright law, 13–14 Scudder, Horace, 405 Seaborn, Adam, Symzonia, 457–458 Sea-green lady, in The Water-Witch, 78–79, 389 Seal hunt and trade, 451, 452, 454, 462–465, 730n83, 735n109, n113 Sea Lions, The (Cooper), 313, 461; Antarctic setting of, 450–452; book production process for, 465–467; publication dates for, 739n126; sealing in, 451, 454, 462–465, 735n113; sources for, 452–454, 455, 732n92; whaling in, 736n114 Sea tales. See Nautical settings and themes Seaward’s Narrative of His Shipwreck, and Consequent Discovery of Certain Islands in the Caribbean Sea (Porter), 409–412, 419 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, xiv, 351, 469, 534, 535, 537 Self-publishing, xiii, 170–171, 191, 309, 310; of Afloat and Ashore, 309, 355 Seminole War, Second, 391, 394 Serialized novels, 355–356, 385–386, 389 Seward, William H., 247–248, 329 Shad Cam, 195, 196 Sharp, Richard, 36 Sherburne, John H., 207 Shubrick, William B., 530;

I ndex

correspondence with Cooper, 110, 186, 194, 198, 202, 242, 244, 274, 287, 327–328, 335, 343, 355, 455, 497, 506, 507, 509, 517–518; friendship with Cooper, 154, 178, 280, 325, 382, 503; Macedonian command, 255–256, 393, 708n24; and Ned Myers’s navy pension claim, 324, 326; Otsego visit of, 519; on Pacific coast, 713n48; on Somers mutiny case, 336; on The Wing-and-Wing, 295; in Wasp service, 335; in West Indies Squadron command, 393–394 Siddons, Sarah, 36 Sigmond, George G., 514–515 Silliman, Benjamin, 100, 440, 456 Simms, William Gilmore, 529, 537 Simond, Louis, 43–44, 59, 568n40 Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard de, 24, 25 Skaggs, David C., 301 Sketches of Switzerland (Cooper), 180, 181, 621n59, 623n72 Skinner, John S., 100 Slaughter, Nathan, character in Nick of the Woods, 271 Slavery and race: Cooper’s views on, 24–26, 160–162, 163, 190–191, 419, 493, 496–497, 562n75; in The Crater, 419, 496; and “N-word,” 495–496; in The Redskins, 373–374, 495; and Samuel Hanson Cox, 151, 496–497; in The Spy, 495–496; in The Ways of the Hour, 493–495 Slave trade case, in New York City, 162–163, 707n15 Sleep-Rider, The (Gould), 132 Small, Elisha, 331, 332, 339, 346 Smith, Gerritt, 191 Smith, John Jay, 205 Smith, Richard, 205 Smith, Richard Penn, 90 Smith, Sidney, 39 Smith, William, 463, 734n109 Solfatara volcano, 69, 408

Somers: Mackenzie ’s command of, 329–330; Spencer’s midshipman warrant on, 330 Somers, Richard, 211, 285, 289, 329 Somers mutiny case: character of Mackenzie, 348–349; character of Philip Spencer, 330–331, 348–349; Cooper’s condemnation of Mackenzie ’s actions, xi, 307, 334, 335–337, 343; Cooper’s “Elaborate Review” of court-martial, 343, 345–351, 385; and Cooper’s ties to Spencer family, 339–340, 341, 343; court of inquiry decision, 336, 341–342; court-martial decision, 332, 337–339; court-martial documents, 343–345; executions, 332, 339; Mackenzie ’s actions in, 331–332, 333, 338–339, 490; Mackenzie ’s report on, 332–333; mutiny plot, 331, 337, 346; press coverage of, 333–334, 341–342 Sorrento (Italy), 65, 68, 69, 77–78 Sotheby, William, 36 Southard, Samuel J., 459–460, 734n108 South Sea Fur Company and Exploring Expedition, 461 Sparks, Jared, 38, 208 Speculation. See Comstock land speculation; Real estate speculation Spencer, Ambrose, 339 Spencer, John C.: Cooper’s ties to, 339–340, 341, 343; political offices held by, 330, 343; and Somers executions, 337, 343–344; Whig ties of, 339, 683n62 Spencer, Joshua A., 229, 241, 641–642n18 Spencer, Philip: character of, 330–331; execution of, 332, 339; influenced by pirate stories, 352–353, 688n1; midshipman’s warrant obtained for, 330; mutiny plot of, 331, 337, 346 Spencer, William, 330 Spencer, William Robert, 35 Spiller, Robert E., xviii, 320 Spiller and Blackburn, 168

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I ndex

Spirit of the Fair, The, 527 Spy, The (Cooper), 36, 79, 168; copyright ownership of, 277, 475; Putnam edition of, 469, 470, 471–472, 479–480; reprintings of, 535; slavery and race in, 495–496 St. Gall (Switzerland), 51–52 St. Germain-en-Laye (France), 5 St. Lawrence County, 368 St. Ouen, Cooper’s lodgings at, 23–24, 26, 27–28, 30, 515, 561n70 Stackpole character, in Nick of the Woods, 271 Staël, Madame de, 19 Stanhope, Hester, 40 Stanton, William, 460 Stedall, Ellie, 318 Steele, Osman, 371, 372, 382 Steller, Wilhelm, 736n115 Stevens, Samuel, 234, 236 Stevenson, James, 375, 523 Stewart, Alvan, 102–103, 590n32 Stewart, Charles, 204 Stirling, 315, 316, 317, 359 Stone, Susannah, 240–241 Stone, William L., 214, 215, 225, 227; death of, 240; decision of Court for the Correction of Errors, 241–244; libel fund started by, 231, 232; libel suits against, 231–233, 238–240, 246, 541; Life of Brant, 312; prior relationship with Cooper, 229–231, 240–241; ties to Otsego, 230 Stoppard, Tom, 21 Story of Cooperstown (Birdsall), 245 Stringer, James, 356, 357, 693n19 Stringer and Townsend. See Burgess and Stringer Stringham, Silas H., 324, 326 Stuart, Christine, 147 Stuart, Gilbert, 35 Stuart, John Todd, 513 Subterranean Worlds (Fitting), 457 Sully, Maximilien de Béthune, duc de, 4 Sumner, Charles, 532

Sutherland, Jacob, 221 Svahn, David, 760–761n29 Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss), 409 Switzerland: Fête des Vignerons (wine festival), 139, 141–143; Napoleon’s republic, 49–50; political system of, 48–49, 50; religious differences in, 51 Switzerland, Cooper/Cooper family in: Alps, 47, 53–58, 87, 175; Bern, 44–46, 62, 138; at Catholic sites, 46, 51–52, 54–55; Geneva, 58–59; knowledge of culture and history, 50–51; revisiting favorite sites, 137–139; setting for The Headsman, 139–140; Vevey, 139–140; at Villa Diodati, 59–60; walking tours, 43–48 Symmes, John Cleves: hollow earth theory of, 456–457, 458–459; north polar expedition proposal of, 457 Symzonia (Seaborn), 457–458 Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice de, 15 Tawney, R. H., 121 Taylor, John Orville, 186–187, 684n64 Taylor, Zachary, 326, 396, 398 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 81 Ternaux, Guillaume Louis, 23, 27 Teufelsstein (Devil’s Rock), 114, 115 Texas War of Independence, 395 Thorn, Herman, 103 Three Mile Point (Myrtle Grove), 423; Cooper’s last visit to, 196, 519–520; name of, 630n21; redemption of, 196; special place for Cooper family, 196, 262; vandalism of, 197; in William Cooper’s will, 195, 217 Three Mile Point dispute, 193; and adverse possession principle, 197; fictionalized in Home as Found, 199–201; as fuse for press attacks, 198–199, 215–216; no-trespass notice, 197–198; public property view of, 196–197, 217

I ndex

Three Mile Point libel suits: Barber’s appeal, 221–222; Barber’s damages, 222–223; Barber’s reprinting of Pellet article, 199, 214, 215–216; Barber’s trial, 219; and Pellet article, 198, 215, 219; Webb’s criminal indictment, 639n11; Webb’s review of Home as Found, 217–219, 640n13; Webb’s trial, 219–221, 640–642n14–n18; Weed’s editorializing on, 223; Weed’s reprinting of Pellet article, 198–199, 215, 223; Weed’s retractions, 225, 227–228, 333; Weed’s trials, 223–224, 226–227, 333 Tieck, Ludwig, 586n65 Tiepolo, Domenico, 112–113 Titian, “Assumption of the Virgin,” 85–86 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 126 Town, Ithiel, 72 Townsend, William A., 357, 479, 482, 693n19 Towns of Manhattan (Cooper manuscript), xi, 484, 486, 519, 523–527, 537, 749–750n51–n52, 764–765n59 Translations: French, 2, 8, 10–11, 31; German, 67, 83, 89, 90 Travel journals, 175, 177–178 Travels: to Albany, 334, 442, 523; Atlantic Passage, 1–2, 151–152; to Binghamton, 157; to Boston, 503; to Burlington, New Jersey, 192; on Macedonian, 255–256; to Michigan, 386, 429–430, 431–432, 433, 435, 437, 439, 448; to New York City, 315–316, 327–328, 334–335, 431, 436–437, 438, 442, 472, 500, 502–503, 505, 508–509, 510, 524; to Niagara Falls, 437; Otsego County homecoming trip, 156–158; to Philadelphia, 154, 205–206, 254, 255, 284, 286–288, 298, 300, 310, 335, 353, 376, 382, 442, 455, 507; to Washington, D.C., 154, 205, 325. See also European residency and travels Travels in North America (Hall), 125

Trowbridge, Charles C., 427–428 Trumbull, Benjamin, 207 Tuckerman, Henry T., 235–236 Tuileries palace, Paris, 5–6 Turner, Daniel, 309 Two Admirals, The (Cooper), 252, 279–283, 286, 296, 298, 355–356, 357, 475, 491 Tyler, John, 324, 330, 343 Typee (Melville), 261 Upjohn, Richard, 427 Upshur, Abel P., 330, 337, 662n15 Upside Down, or Philosophy in Petticoats (Cooper), 752–753n64 Valentine, David T., 524, 525 Van Buren, John, 376 Van Buren, Martin, 122–123, 504 Van Cortlandt, Stephen, 362 Van Ness, Maria, 137 Van Rensselaer, Euphemia, 376 Van Rensselaer, Philip, 375 Van Rensselaer, Stephen, III, 363, 375 Van Rensselaer, Stephen, IV, 75, 364, 375, 376, 377–378, 701n67 Van Rensselaer, William Patterson, 76, 364, 374–375, 377–378 Van Rensselaer family: Anti-Rent War against, 363–364; Cooper’s encounters with, 374–375, 376, 701n68; inherited wealth of, 375–376; leasehold land tenure in Manor of, 362–363; manor abandoned by, 377–378, 489 Vasi, Mariano, 71 Venetz, Ignatz, 573n73 Venice (Italy): Cooper family visit to, 84–86, 107, 109, 111; Napoleon’s conquest of, 111, 112; setting for The Bravo, 85, 96–97, 107, 108–109, 111 Das Verhängnis (Kruse), 140 Verplanck, Walton, 34–35 Vesuvius volcano, Italy, 68–69, 71, 405, 406 Vevey (Switzerland), 139–140 Vidocq, Eugène François, 112

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I ndex

Vieusseux, Jean-Pierre, 577n11 View from Apple Hill (Morse), 72 Villa Diodati, 59 Villèle, Jean-Baptiste, comte de, 15 de Villermont, A., 146 Vision of Columbus (Barlow), 258 Voltaire, 48, 60 Voyages Round the World (Fanning), 453–454, 461 Wagner, Johann Gottlieb, 88 Wagner, Richard, 79 Wales, James W., 331, 337 Walsh, Robert, 37, 90, 154 Walther, Ludwig Gottlieb, 46, 62, 138 Walthersche Hofbuchhandlung, Dresden, 88–90 Walworth, Reuben H., 242, 243 Waples, Dorothy, 132 Ward, George A., 207 War of 1812: in naval history, 208–210, 211; Ned Myers’s service in, 317; in The Oak Openings, 447–448. See also Battle of Lake Erie, in naval history Washington, D.C., Cooper’s trips to, 154, 205, 325 Washington, James A., 103 Washington’s birthday celebration in Rome, 73–74 Wasp, 203, 335, 583n42 Water-Witch, The (Cooper), 107, 108, 109, 150, 260, 475; and book production process, 81–83, 88–90, 179; cross-dressing female character in, 400–401; Dutch New York setting, 77; Mediterranean experience reflected in, 77–78; melodramatic style of, 81; and musical accompaniment, 80–81; nautical setting, 68, 76–77, 78–80, 260, 294; Netherlands visit as source for, 41, 42, 76; Putnam edition of, 471; sales of, 90; sea-green lady in, 78–79, 389; stage adaptation of, 90; written in Sorrento, 65, 77 Watson, Brook, 393

Watson, John F., 205–206 Wayne, Anthony, 449–450, 729n77 Ways of the Hour, The (Cooper), xiv, 163, 472, 481; book production process, 499–501; jury reform theme in, 490–493, 752n63, 753n66; married women’s property rights in, 752n63; political themes in, 488–490; press abuses in, 487; publication date for, 501; publishing arrangements for, 484–485, 497–500; slavery issue in, 493–495; suburban New York setting of, 486–487; title of, 486, 750n54 Wealth, Cooper’s view of, x, xvii, 166, 211 Webb, James Watson, 214, 227, 333, 423; combative reputation of, 217; Cooperstown connections of, 228–229; in criminal libel trial, 219–221, 639n11; and jury tampering, 220; libel indictments against, 217–219, 540; relationship with Cooper, 229 Webster, Daniel, 494, 531–532, 533, 753n65, 767n79, 769n89 Webster, Noah, 130 Weed, Thurlow, 230, 246, 350, 351; Cooper’s court victories against, 226–227; “Crater Truth-Teller” based on, 422, 423; damages awarded to Cooper, 540; guilty by default in first trial of, 223–224; libel suits filed against, 213, 214, 226; reprinting of attacks on Cooper, 225–226; reprinting of Pellet article, 198, 215; retraction of libelous statements, 225, 227–228, 333; on Somers mutiny case, 338–339; ties to Pellet, 637n2 Welles, Adeline F., 578n14 Welles, Samuel, 561n70 Welles and Co., 89 Wentworth, Benning, 369–370 Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish, The (Cooper), 65–66, 150, 179 West Indies Squadron, 391–392, 393–395 Westminster Review, 126 Whaling, 451, 463, 736n114, 737n116

I ndex

Whig Party, 131; and Anti-Rent War, 364, 377; and Battle of Erie controversy, 302, 303; in Britain, 35, 36, 412–413; characterization of Cooper, xvii; congressional conflict with Jackson, 160; Cooper’s attacks on, 211; Edward S. Gould in, 132; frontiersman image co-opted by, 274; and Harrison administration, 222; John C. Spencer in, 339, 683n62; and Ned Myers’s pension bill in Congress, 326–327; press attacks on Cooper (See Press attacks); satirized in The Monikins, 167; and Taylor administration, 326; and Tyler administration, 330; William L. Stone in, 231 Whipple, John, 144 Whiting, Mason, 157 Wijkmark, Johan, 456 Wilcoxen, Charlotte, 43 Wiley, Charles, 26, 472, 474, 536 Wiley, John, 155, 168, 194, 321, 739n2, 740n5 Wiley & Co., Booksellers, 183 Wiley and Halsted, 458 Wilkes, Charles (banker), 20, 37, 41, 75, 82, 83, 88, 96, 100, 116, 504, 515, 516 Wilkes, Charles (naval officer and explorer), 530; influence on The Sea Lions, 456, 732n92; relationship with Cooper, 455–456; and Reynold’s expedition, 460, 734n108. See also Wilkes expedition Wilkes expedition, 457; Cooper’s support for, 455; Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, 454–456, 464, 732n92; Reynolds’ support for, 461–462 Wilkins, Gouverneur Morris, 40, 175, 374, 576n5 Wilkins, Ross, 433, 434 Wilkinson, Jesse, 394

Willard, John, 219, 220–221, 224, 225, 641n16 Williams, Edwin, 126 Williams, Gary, 38, 119, 120, 446 Willis, N. P., 122, 357 Wilmot Proviso, 419 Wilsey, Isaac, 364 Wine festival (Fête des Vignerons), in The Headsman, 139, 141–143 Wing-and-Wing, The (Cooper), 68, 278, 280, 292–299, 309, 332, 356, 398 Winter in the West, A (Hoffman), 440 Winthrop, John, 207 Winthrop, John III, 716n55 Women characters: cross-dressing sailors, 400–402; in The Deerslayer, 362–363; in Littlepage trilogy, 370, 378–379 Women’s property rights, 752n63 Woodbridge, Richard G., 460 Woolsey, Melancthon, 203, 253 Woolsey, Theodore Dwight, 74, 75, 582n35 Woolson, Hannah Pomeroy, 433 Wordsworth, William, 36 Worth, Gorham A., 172–173, 512, 514 Wright, Fanny, 23, 560n67 Wright, Lyle H., 535 Wright, Silas, 378 Wyandotté (Cooper), 278, 309, 368, 476; Indian conflicts in, 311–314; “island” theme in, 404, 407; Revolutionary War setting for, 310–311 Wyss, Johann R., 409 Yankee migration to New York, 363; in Littlepage trilogy, 367–373 Yellow fever, 503, 514 Young, John, 227 Zanger, Jules, 659n54 Zieber, George B., 356–357 Zschokke, Johann Heinrich, 109–110

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