Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America

By Bill Christophersen

An examination of the renowned author's complex portrayal of frontier America

James Fenimore Cooper's Leather-Stocking tales—The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer (1823–1841)—romantically portray frontier America during the colonial and early republican eras. Bill Christophersen's Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America suggests they also highlight problems plaguing nineteenth-century America during the contentious decades following the Missouri Compromise, when Congress admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state.

During the 1820s and 1830s, the nation was riven by sectional animosity, slavery, prejudice, populist politics, and finally economic collapse. Christophersen argues that Cooper used his fictions to imagine a path forward for the Republic. Cooper, he further suggests, brought back Leather-Stocking to test whether the common man, as empowered by Jackson's presidency, was capable of republican virtue—something the author considered key to renewing the nation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781611179613

Bill Christophersen

Bill Christopherson holds a PhD in English from Columbia University and is an independent scholar in New York City who has taught literature and writing at Fordham University, the City University of New York, and other institutions. The author of The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic and three poetry collections, Christophersen received the 2017 James Franklin Beard Award from the James Fenimore Cooper Society. His writing has appeared in American Literature, Early American Literature, Studies in American Fiction, New York Times Book Review, New Leader, and Poetry.

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Resurrecting Leather-Stocking

RESURRECTING LEATHER-STOCKING

Pathfinding in Jacksonian America

Bill Christophersen

© 2019 University of South Carolina

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/.

ISBN 978-1-61117-960-6 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-61117-961-3 (ebook)

Front cover illustration:

Francis Parkman, by N. C. Wyeth,

courtesy of Alamy.com

In memory of my parents, George and Isabel Christophersen, who taught me to love books; Prof. Joseph V. Ridgely and Prof. Robert A. Bone, my mentors in American literature; and Madeleine Edmondson, friend and colleague—and a writer’s writer

Mabel: Pathfinder!

Pathfinder: So they call me, young woman, and many a great lord has got a title that he did not half so well merit, though, if truth be said, I rather pride myself in finding my way, where there is no path, than in finding it where there is.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Pathfinder, or, The Inland Sea

We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, or, The First War-Path

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

The Ghost of Leather-Stocking

CHAPTER 2

The Pioneers: Leather-Stocking in the Rough

CHAPTER 3

The Last of the Mohicans: History’s Bloody Pond

CHAPTER 4

The Prairie: A Reckoning in the Desert

CHAPTER 5

The Home Novels: Abroad and at Home, 1826–1838

CHAPTER 6

The Pathfinder: Trailblazing in a Democracy

CHAPTER 7

The Deerslayer: A Trial by Fire

CHAPTER 8

E Pluribus Unum: The Leather-Stocking Tales

Appendix: Bibliographical Overview of The Last of the Mohicans Scholarship

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

When readers encountered James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder (1840), in which Leather-Stocking and Chingachgook shepherd a sergeant’s daughter and her entourage through woods made dangerous by the French and Indian War, most were doubly delighted: first to see the wily scout of The Last of the Mohicans (1826) back from the dead and in his prime; and second, to see what looked to be a pure adventure tale, instead of another of the social critiques Cooper had been writing since he had laid Natty Bumppo to rest in The Prairie (1827). The novelist, said reviewers—and critics still echo the line—had set aside crankiness and gone back to his strong suit, frontier melodrama.

Yes and no. In Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America, I argue that Cooper resurrected Natty Bumppo not out of frustration with social criticism but rather to write smarter social critiques. The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer (1841), written in the wake of Andrew Jackson’s presidency and the economic panics of 1837 and 1839, are indeed romances of the woods and lakes. But they are also novels of ideas, experimental fictions that ask, in effect, whether the common man might not redeem a country that had, Cooper believed, lost its republican backbone, its moral compass. A genteel hero had been de rigueur in his previous fiction; in The Pathfinder he jettisons that model, making Leather-Stocking the protagonist, then lets the character struggle to find the moral and political path in a modern world of violence, betrayal, and flux. Pathfinder stumbles, then, learning from his mistakes, goes on to exemplify the values Cooper believed were needful if the Republic was to withstand the vices—materialism, prejudice, demagoguery, a sheepish conformity—that he saw threatening its soul. The tale, in effect, fictionalizes precepts Cooper had set forth in his political treatise The American Democrat (1838). But the cautious optimism The Pathfinder displays was short-lived: The Deerslayer dramatizes the near impossibility of cleaving to virtuous ideals, even when fortified by Christian precept. The young Leather-Stocking’s increasingly ironic attempts to tread a moral path, moreover, are linked with and amplified by America’s lofty myths and violent history. The result is a broad cultural critique.

The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer are not exceptional among the Leather-Stocking tales in the social concerns they exhibit. Although set mainly in the eighteenth century, all five novels engage themes vital to Jacksonian America. Chief among these is a concern with racial prejudice and its consequences. Investigating this concern led Cooper to revamp the captivity narrative. Though opposed to abolitionism, he understood that slavery and prejudice were time bombs. In The Last of the Mohicans, he projects the fear of a racial Armageddon onto the massacre of whites by reds outside Fort William Henry. In The Prairie—a Southern tale in the guise of a Western—he images slaveholding and manumission in a fiction that scrutinizes assumptions of racial purity and hierarchy that were gaining currency in the 1820s. The Pathfinder abstracts the vice of prejudice, presenting it in a context removed from the racial and sectional hatreds that rendered the subject contentious. The Deerslayer substitutes forthrightness for indirection: two characters debate racial prejudice openly. These fictions seek for a middle ground between Northern and Southern extremes but do so in ways calculated to avoid the automatic disapproval that, at the time, attended literature featuring social themes.

Sociohistorical motifs aside, the tales’ literary merits remain underappreciated. Cooper worked more extensively than is commonly understood with allegory, symbol, and synecdoche, with ironic parallel plots and dramatic contrasts. His tales are often palimpsests on which prior literary and artistic influences can be seen. Employing such symbols as the path, fire, the ship of state, the eagle, and the inland sea (as Pathfinder is subtitled), as well as such subtexts as Dante’s Commedia, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly, the Bible, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and Thomas Cole’s five-canvas The Course of Empire, Cooper broadened the relevance or qualified the implications of his melodramas. The Leather-Stocking tales show surprising continuities, cumulative arguments, and revisions of ideas, in addition to their republican concerns. Read without the bias toward romanticism that mid-nineteenth-century critics shared, the bias toward realism that Mark Twain’s critique was premised on, or the bias toward myth that mid-twentieth-century critics exhibited—read, that is to say, closely and historically—the series speaks astutely to its times and, alarmingly, to our own.

Acknowledgments

A portion of chapter 3 was published by Early American Literature as "The Last of the Mohicans and the Missouri Crisis" and is reprinted with permission from EAL 46, no. 2 (2011).

A portion of chapter 4, titled "Cooper’s The Prairie as a Southern Tale," appeared in Literature in the Early American Republic 7 (2015): 1–30. It is reprinted here with LEAR’s permission.

Portions of Jared Gardner’s Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (pp. 85, 108–10, 112, 114; ©1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press) have been reprinted with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.

In preparing the manuscript of this book, I received—and wish to acknowledge gratefully—critical feedback on select portions from professors Wayne Franklin, Jason Berger, and Sandra M. Gustafson.

CHAPTER 1

The Ghost of Leather-Stocking

John Effingham: If you will ply the oars, gentlemen, we will now hold a little communion with the spirit of the Leather-Stocking.

James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found

Halfway through Home as Found (1838), James Fenimore Cooper’s staid novel of manners slips abruptly into a twilight zone. As its protagonists, the Effinghams—descendants of the characters whose estate is the setting of Cooper’s first Leather-Stocking novel, The Pioneers (1823)—show friends around the same Otsego countryside, Leather-Stocking’s ghost is heard grumbling. His voice seems to boom from on high as their boat descends a tributary to Lake Otsego. The episode occurs moments after they have been eulogizing the frontier scout and hunter who united the simplicity of a woodsman, the heroism of a savage, the faith of a Christian, and the feeling of a poet and after Squire John Effingham has remarked: Alas! The days of the ‘Leather-Stockings’ have passed.… I see few remains of his character in a region where speculation is more rife than moralizing, and emigrants are plentier than hunters.¹

The voice is illusory—an echo of the Effinghams’ own voices reverberating from the stream’s rocky banks. But the incident is more than a nostalgic cameo and a nod to Cooper’s longtime readers; more, even, than a focusing device for the novel’s theme of America’s wilting social values. The echo from the past adumbrates a key moment in Cooper’s writing career: his resurrection of Natty Bumppo, the Leather-Stocking. Natty, after his debut as a gap-toothed, badgered squatter in The Pioneers, had had a stunning encore in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) as a scout employed by the British during the French and Indian War, whose closest ties were to two Delawares, remnants of an expiring race. Translated into eighty languages, the romance made the character an international legend. Legend became myth in The Prairie (1827), which limned Natty’s last days as a self-exiled trapper on the Great Plains. His bones were laid to rest at the novel’s end. Yet Cooper, as if haunted by his own creation, revived the woodsman after a thirteen-year hiatus to make him the protagonist of The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). Cooper’s explanation for the strategy—his latent regard for the character, an explanation so perfunctory, reticent, and obvious as to clarify nothing—belies his estimation of the results. They were, he said shortly before his death, the two [novels] most worthy of an enlightened and cultivated reader’s notice.² What that revival signified is the subject of this study.

Those familiar with Cooper’s career may see little mystery in the matter. His reputation had soared during the 1820s. Readers on several continents, but especially those in his own land, where the call for a native literature had resounded since the early years of the Republic, were thrilled by his romances dramatizing American history and mores and featuring American character types and speech. His country’s applause turned to catcalls, however, during the 1830s. The turnabout stemmed from his seven-year sojourn in Europe (1826–33). He went there to broaden his family’s horizons and secure the European editions of his books against the piracy that was siphoning off profits. His reasons for, and the official capacity of, his visit notwithstanding—he went as United States consul to Lyon—his prolonged absence and preoccupation with Europe irked domestic readers and undermined his popularity. While in France he became embroiled in a political flap (the Finance Controversy) that led to a quarrel with the American press.³ And he wrote three novels (The Bravo [1831], The Heidenmauer [1832], and The Headsman [1833]) set in Europe, featuring European characters and history. These books alienated native readers, never mind that their Old World settings spoke to New World concerns, dramatizing, among other things, the weaknesses of republics. Many Americans concluded that, in dallying on the Continent, Cooper had forgotten his homeland.

Cooper might have mended fences had he returned in a more gracious frame of mind. Instead—smarting, perhaps, from the disaffection he sensed in some quarters—he declined a homecoming dinner, reaping social snubs and increasingly testy press notices.⁴ Then, touting the Constitution and the wary republicanism it embodied, he scolded his fellow citizens for weak-mindedness in A Letter to His Countrymen (1834). As if to put an exclamation point to his lecture, he foreswore fiction writing. He soon broke his resolve, but not to good effect. The Monikins (1835), a lengthy satire on English and American political attitudes that envisioned opposing troupes of monkeys ruthlessly vying for political power, somehow failed to rekindle readers’ enthusiasm. His next publications, several volumes of travel writings based on his family’s excursions in England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, seemed to confirm suspicions that he had become disengaged from his country, intent on provoking rather than pleasing his countrymen.⁵ None of these works generated anything like the sales figures the first three Leather-Stocking novels had. Blake Nevius states that by 1840, Cooper had become the most unpopular man in America.⁶ Perhaps bringing back the canny scout, then, was—as H. Daniel Peck, among others, suggests—simply a ploy to regain the reputation and market value Cooper had lost.⁷

Or perhaps the explanation goes deeper. After his return to America, Cooper’s life became even more contentious than his impasse with readers indicates. It was the Age of Jackson, and many Americans no longer cared for the gentrified cut of Cooper’s jib. Although he had supported Jackson against the Whigs, whose commercial and materialistic ways he scorned, Cooper resented the egalitarianism afoot. He saw what he considered to be an ignorant citizenry, whipped up by populist newspaper editors and demagogues, challenging and in some cases usurping the prerogatives of educated gentlefolk. An episode close to home, known as the Three Mile Point controversy (1837), served as a flashpoint for Cooper’s neighbors’ resentments, as well as his own indignation. Some townspeople who had become accustomed to using land that was under Cooper’s trusteeship damaged a tree and an outbuilding while picnicking there. Cooper reminded them that the land was private property and, when the reminder was ill received, placed the land off limits to the public. A war of words ensued, the townspeople accusing him of encroaching on the public domain. Cooper responded by publishing a letter in a local newspaper detailing the history of the land and his responsibilities as its administrator. The matter might have ended there. But local resentment festered as newspaper editors used the occasion to chide him, sometimes misstating the facts of the episode and leveling personal insults. Cooper sued several of them for libel and made the Three Mile Point incident the subject of Home as Found (1838)—a tactic that infuriated local readers and brought his most vitriolic reviews yet. He won most of his suits, but the proceedings tied him up for years and perpetuated the feud. Given such pressures, his return to the Leather-Stocking saga, critics have suggested, may have been his way of escaping vicariously from the political hornets’ nests he seemed to keep stepping in, if not from an America to whose surliness these incivilities seemed to attest. Alexander Cowie’s and Robert E. Spiller’s views are early examples of the perception that Cooper’s last two Leather-Stocking tales represent a divest[ing] … of his critical toga, a nostalgic retreat from the social problem novel.⁸

Neither the pragmatic nor the psychological explanation persuades entirely. No doubt waning sales receipts made Cooper yearn for another bestseller. But he was a versatile writer who had achieved success with a range of fictional genres—Revolutionary War adventures (The Spy [1821], Lionel Lincoln [1825]), for instance, and romances of the sea (The Pilot [1824], The Red Rover [1828], The Water-Witch [1830]). Might not another novel along one of these lines have delivered a marketplace success? He had, to be sure, an outstanding agreement with his publisher to write a romance combining lake and forest adventure, an obligation he had deferred for eight years but would now fulfill.⁹ That obligation stipulated nothing, though, about reviving the character Leather-Stocking. No doubt that as his countrymen’s attitudes toward him soured, populist brushfires threatened his family seat, and personal invective greeted him from the daily papers—reviews of Home as Found accused Cooper of traducing his country—he found it pleasant to indulge fantasies of earlier times and places, such as the shores of Lake Ontario (The Pathfinder), where he had been stationed during his merchant marine service, and those of Lake Otsego (The Deerslayer) half a century before his father had founded Cooperstown, whose citizens were now so eager to dispute land titles. Cooper, however, was not an escapist. He took on rather than retreated from controversy, making his case with humor (Homeward Bound [1838]) or without (The Redskins [1846]); indirectly (The Two Admirals [1842]) or plainly (The American Democrat [1838]). He was a socially engaged writer; even when his fictions retreat to the woods, lakes, or poles, they rarely leave social concerns behind.

Richard Slotkin assays a third explanation: Cooper brought Natty back because he had some unfinished business to transact with the character he had buried. He flags the question of whether Natty was finally an Indian or a Christian, a contradiction that clearly haunts Deerslayer. Reprising D. H. Lawrence, Slotkin sees Cooper as caught up compulsively in the character’s, and his own, contradictions.¹⁰ That the novelist was caught, as Lawrence suggests, between Fenimore the gentleman, husband, father, civic scold, and founder of Bible societies and Cooper the frontier-bred adventurer, traveler, and seafarer,¹¹ and that this self-conflict caused him to tack back and forth as a writer are probabilities few will gainsay. And there is something compulsive about not being able to let go of a character one has re-created at length. But such self-contradictions and compulsions operate indifferently over decades and do not explain why Cooper in 1839 elected to revive Leather-Stocking.

A more persuasive reason for that gambit is to be found, I believe, in the times and in Cooper’s sense that it was a gentleman’s responsibility to lead in periods of crisis.¹² His first novel, Precaution (1820), makes it plain he considered fiction an engine for moving society.¹³ This sense of responsibility is attested to most plainly by the Home novels (Homeward Bound, Home as Found) and The American Democrat, a terse civics lecture written as the dust of the Panic of 1837 was settling, that makes explicit many views implicit in the fictions. All three works call for a return to eighteenth-century republican principles: for society to recognize that, although all (white male) citizens are equal politically, they are not equal in other respects, and the educated, independent gentry ought to lead. But history, as the Jeffersonian Cooper must have sensed even as he blustered, had already rendered this bid for republican renewal out of date: populism had overtaken republicanism, two decades’ worth of his gentlemen heroes and civics lectures notwithstanding. His readers were not about to reinstate the gentry. The relevant question, then, was no longer whether the trespassers and transients in Cooperstown might be browbeaten into learning their republican catechism and with it the propriety of tipping their hats to the likes of Squire Cooper. The question was whether the newly empowered American, one without the benefit of a gentleman’s education and means, might hypothetically rise to the challenge of sustaining the Republic. To do so he would have to be able to act virtuously—that is, bravely, deliberately, and independently; to take risks and make sacrifices, not just in behalf of himself, as he was becoming adept at doing in the economic arena, but in behalf of the polis. Was such a prospect feasible? The need to envision and test such a democratic hero, let me suggest, is the reason Cooper had to resurrect Natty Bumppo.

He might, of course, have created the character he needed out of whole cloth—someone, say, like himself,¹⁴ who had grown up in one of the new Republic’s frontier towns, improved himself, owned and managed property, traveled afield, and the like. Except that he had just done something of the sort with Home as Found. Ned and John Effingham, its Fenimore-ish spokespersons, had proved annoyingly didactic; more tellingly the astute, bold, independent Paul Powis, its young hero, had turned out at last to be a gentleman’s scion—an Effingham, no less! The book’s flirtation with a new kind of hero had been hobbled by the author’s stodginess. Leather-Stocking, on the other hand, was unrecognizable as a Cooper surrogate, had no closet pedigree, and enjoyed the good graces of the reading public. Of the author’s many characters, he was perhaps the only one common yet principled enough to serve as a test case for Cooper’s democratic times. He had, besides, a history of acting selflessly for the good of others, as he does throughout The Prairie; of behaving resolutely in the crunch, as he does in The Last of the Mohicans; of saying what needs to be said, rather than what is politic, as his reproaches to Judge Temple prove in The Pioneers. Uncouth and quirky though he was, Natty, whose character combined aboriginal virtue with gospel spirit, was not far from that contemporary public relations figment, the coonskin democrat, who was being touted as the man of the hour. (It was a Jacksonian image, but the Whigs co-opted it. In 1840 their candidate for president, William Henry Harrison, who hailed from one of Virginia’s first families, was seen by his handlers as lacking the common touch; they addressed the problem by making a log cabin his campaign logo and associating him with cider-barrel conviviality.) Schooled by the woods and frontier, Leather-Stocking had been walking the Jacksonian walk well before Old Hero became president. Furthermore, as Slotkin observes, there were contradictions in the character that had not been plumbed—questions about the cultural hybrid, the moralizing killer, that begged asking, and not just as an abstract exercise. Similar contradictions beset the nation, whose high-minded rhetoric of mission was bumping up repeatedly against, even as it was helping to finesse, heavy-handed tactics of expansion (the Mexican War was on the horizon and the Trail of Tears was ongoing as Cooper was summoning the shade of Natty Bumppo).

Cooper’s felt need to address his times in a more daring, relevant fashion led, then, to the literary experiments that are The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer. The first is cautiously optimistic: it paints a frontier outpost threatened with dissolution from within and incursion from without and bids for the possibility of salvation through a return to the kind of selfless virtue Cooper associated with the Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington. Pathfinder, a scout serving the British against the French and their Indian allies, is publicly challenged to confront a corrupt commander—and personally challenged to relinquish the woman he loves, who loves another. Both challenges require that he learn a few things beyond woodcraft, such as when and when not to defer to authorities he has long rendered unquestioning allegiance to. Part of the book’s interest derives from its makeover of the death-dealing rifleman Hawk-eye (as Natty is known in The Last of the Mohicans) into someone else—a pathfinder in a wood where (as the novel’s suggestive opening image indicates) age-old trees have lately been rooted up. But the experiment is qualified by its success: Leather-Stocking, who rises to the occasion and makes hard choices to do right, will not marry, procreate, or participate in the society his example presumably inspires.

In The Deerslayer Cooper—as if suspecting that a Cincinnatus-like virtue, although hypothetically possible, was too high a bar, after all, to set for the rambling, gambling, self-vaunting America he saw around him—examines how the behavioral equation changes when virtue is buttressed by Christian ethics. For a generation the country had been undergoing a broad-based Protestant revival. Cooper was an avid Bible student. In his final years, he wrote novels espousing an orthodox Protestant faith. Might not Christianity inspire the principled conduct needed to right the ship of state? In The Deerslayer Natty’s Christianity is tested against a colonial world gone so wrong that the British Crown is offering money for the scalps of Indians of any age or gender. But he is tasked as well with proving himself a viable warrior. How will he navigate those opposing imperatives? His personal conduct is placed, moreover, within a broader context summoned up by the eagle he shoots—a symbol whose associations run deep in American culture. A dark fiction, The Deerslayer scrutinizes at one remove the moral and civic ideals the nation laid claim to over and against the tendencies inherent in accruing power, land, and profit and sets forth the resulting dilemmas. In these tales Cooper tests his hero to see whether the traditional American guideposts of republican virtue and Christian precept still pertain, given the centrifugal forces operating on the individual and community.

It is hard to miss Cooper’s mounting sense, throughout the 1830s, that his country was at a crossroads. His oeuvre, to be sure, broods skeptically from the start over the nation’s prospects. The Pioneers paints a viable Republic threatened by fault lines. The Last of the Mohicans dramatizes the violence from which the Republic had emerged and—unless we accept the colonial setting and subject as purely historical, that is, innocent of contemporaneous concerns—toward which it might again be headed. Its centerpiece is a violent racial clash that, notwithstanding the gentlemanly compromises finessed by leaders who sought to manage it, leaves an outpost of civilization in ashes. The Prairie envisions an American desert, its landscape scourged by what the Trapper (Natty) sees as divine punishment for its settlers’ wasteful ways. It also examines the dilemmas posed to the community by prejudice, greed, and pigheadedness. The sense of national decline in Cooper’s tales picked up, however, throughout the 1830s. The European novels, in addressing the cynicism and corruption that had eroded past republics and initiated the modern age, gave indirect warnings to nineteenth-century America. The warnings became direct to the point of shrillness in the fictions of the mid-1830s, detailing the shame of a nation turned money-mad, coarse, and unprincipled. In 1840 Cooper wrote in a letter to his son Paul (November 30), Depend on it, my son, we live in … times that threaten a thousand serious consequences, through the growing corruption of the nation. If public virtue be truly necessary to a republic, we cannot be one.… Governments often profess one thing and practice another, and we are not what we profess to be.¹⁵ Nor was this sense of crisis a figment of the author’s imagination.

America in the late 1830s was by several measures a country in crisis. The Jackson presidency (1828–36) saw threats of nullification and secession, violations of civil liberties, and a war between the president and the national bank. Party rivalry manifested itself in riots; religious diversity, in violent attacks against minority sects. The Panic of 1837, whose speculation-crazed run-up Cooper had witnessed on a trip to New York City a few months before the event and whose onset he evokes in Home as Found, shook the nation’s confidence as well as its economy. A second panic followed in 1839. The policy of Indian removal that Jackson had expedited was playing out as a brutal uprooting of nations, among them the Cherokee, a people who had adopted white laws and customs and even won a U.S. Supreme Court verdict (Worcester v. Georgia) affirming their sovereignty over their lands. The problem of slavery, elevated to center stage in 1820 by the Missouri Crisis and punctuated by the wide-scale though abortive Denmark Vesey slave rebellion of 1822, was dramatized anew in 1831 by Nat Turner’s rebellion, in which blacks killed fifty-seven whites and vigilantes retaliated, killing more than a hundred blacks. The Amistad affair (1839–41)—a court case stemming from a rebellion aboard a vessel smuggling kidnapped blacks, in which an aged John Quincy Adams successfully defended the blacks and, in effect, put the Van Buren administration on trial for obstructing justice—kept slavery squarely in view. Abolitionists faced murderous opposition, and antislavery literature occasioned censorship of the mails, a curtailment of civil rights that received its imprimatur not from radical Southern leaders but from President Jackson and national postmaster Amos Kendall. Mob violence reached new heights, as Cooper’s native upstate New York had reason to note when a renters’ rebellion broke out in 1838.

A close reading of The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer shows that Cooper was not beating a retreat from such contemporary concerns and his own sociopolitical preoccupations but engaging them in new, experimental ways. The public quarrels he became enmeshed in forced him to rearticulate his political principles; as he peered through the local and personal problems he was experiencing, he saw the greater ones afflicting the nation—and tried to sort them out in his fiction. And as he restated his principles he reexamined their bases. The American Democrat, for instance, revises some of the views expressed in Notions of the Americans (1828), an overview of America’s government and habits. The earlier work was largely celebratory; the later is premonitory.¹⁶ It identifies the risks of republics and attempts, almost by fiat, to stay the degeneration of virtue that, as historian Marvin Meyers recognizes, had become Cooper’s foremost concern.¹⁷ The last two Leather-Stocking novels grew out of these meditations, exhortations, and reexaminations.

Cooper’s greater ambitions in these novels of ideas go hand in hand with the formal changes the novels introduce. As many critics have observed, the Leather-Stocking of The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer is not the Leather-Stocking of the 1820s trilogy.¹⁸ The middle-aged Pathfinder and youthful Deerslayer are protagonists. One consequence of this innovation is that they become more fallible and sympathetic than their earlier avatars. Pathfinder, formidable as Hawk-eye at wilderness skirmishing, proves all too human in other domains, falling in love and failing in his suit. Deerslayer exhibits a deacon’s qualms about shooting an enemy—qualms Hawk-eye is, for the most part, past agonizing over. More important, Pathfinder and Deerslayer, as Thomas Philbrick notes, differ from Hawk-eye and the Trapper in the extent to which their characters develop.¹⁹ Nor are these novels’ premises fixed, as were those of the earlier Leather-Stocking tales. Lake romances in more than just their settings, they leave the terra firma of moral and social verities behind to explore a more fluid universe of right and wrong, authority and responsibility. Generally the Cooper of the 1820s was, as David Brion Davis remarks, an expounder of a particular code of morality. The Pioneers dramatizes rather than investigates moral issues. (The Prairie, set on land that looks like sea, does both.) That strategy shifts in the later tales. In The Pathfinder Cooper tests tenets of behavior and their implications for the community. In The Deerslayer he is precisely what Davis faults him for not being, a philosopher seeking moral truth in the ambiguities of human experience.²⁰

The later Leather-Stocking tales harbor an uncharacteristic mood of anxiety and doubt. If, as Joel Porte has ventured, The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie derive from The Iliad and The Odyssey,²¹ The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer derive (I will suggest) largely from Dante’s Commedia, some of whose literary strategies Cooper incorporated into the tales. Pathfinder is for a time undermined by his emotions; is not always sure how to proceed; must traverse a realm where he can see no path; and at times stands in need of guidance and insight. Deerslayer is, at the outset, lost in the woods; the tale infuses the path he seeks with a religious dimension. The initiation he undergoes involves a spiritual as well as physical trial and points up the stygian consequences of misconduct. These fictions, although set in a previous century and at one remove from society, anticipate a nineteenth-century America threatened by greed, malice, and deceit—an America that has, in Cooper’s view, lost the path.

By the mid-1840s Cooper had apparently set aside the doubts, questions, and experiments that animate The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer. He wrote a series of social novels—the Littlepage trilogy (1845–46), comprising Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins—that left uncertainty and inquiry behind to reiterate the principle that the gentry knows best. And in several of his later novels (The Crater [1847], The Oak Openings [1848], and The Sea Lions [1849]), Cooper strapped on the shield and buckler of Christianity, armor that, apparently, no longer chafed as it had for Deerslayer. Some of these are powerful fictions. But they are less interesting in their self-assuredness. This study focuses on what was clearly a period of ferment for Cooper, when, judging from his output, he was less his resolute self than usual—and more of an artist.

My ancillary aim will be to reexamine the Leather-Stocking tales in general. Although they have been written about extensively for nearly two centuries, only two critics have made them the subject of a book-length study, and that was a generation ago. William P. Kelly, taking a historiographic approach, wrested the tales from the myth critics in Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales (1983), articulating the ways in which Cooper sought to achieve a sense of historical form. Geoffrey Rans in Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Novels: A Secular Reading (1991) amplified the approach, emphasizing the ways in which the first three romances unfailingly yield political and historical messages. My study is indebted to them for making the case in detail and with insight. Rans is especially astute in connecting the lack of conventional closure in the tales to the historical truths they convey—truths that resist closure. But both critics come up short in their discussions of The Pathfinder. Kelly’s is diffuse, focusing on the problems that result from a failure of vision and from an overreliance on convention or an unprincipled departure from tradition. Rans sees a declining interest in political and historical themes in the last two tales and rues "the diminished energy with which issues of history and political thought are addressed in The Pathfinder. And while he appreciates Cooper’s value as an expresser of political conflict, he rejects the author’s usefulness as a solver of political problems in fictional form."²² I hope to show the contrary is true. Neither critic, moreover, had the benefit of Wayne Franklin’s biography, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years, or the scholarship of Jared Gardner and Ezra F. Tawil, whose investigations of nineteenth-century racial theory and the frontier romance have opened a window onto The Pioneers and The Prairie.²³ The Leather-Stocking tales, I suggest, explore racial prejudice as a social liability and squint repeatedly toward the dilemma posed by slavery in nineteenth-century America.

Like Rans I discuss the tales in the order in which they were composed. Opening chapters on The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, and The Prairie will be followed by a chapter bridging the years between The Prairie and The Pathfinder and touching on Cooper’s stay in Europe, the novels he wrote there, his return to America, The Monikins, The American Democrat, and the character of Jacksonian politics and Jackson himself (for Cooper, however improbably, found in the president a model of republican virtue). The chapter’s focus, however, will be the two Home novels, in which Cooper details his critique of Jacksonian America and sets the stage for the return of Natty Bumppo. Next will follow chapters on The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer. I conclude with some observations about the Leather-Stocking tales as a series linked not only by character and setting but by theme and form and constituting a cycle whose continuities surprise. Throughout my assumption is Dana D. Nelson’s: that the five tales display a consistent engagement with key contemporary questions about democratic identity and interrelation in the early United States.²⁴

The Leather-Stocking novels may seem a strange place in which to search for sociopolitical themes. What, one might wonder, can these fictions, three of which are set in the colonial New York wilderness, have to say about nineteenth-century American social assumptions and civic values? Thanks to Kelly, Rans, Gardner, and other critics, the question no longer has the provocative edge it once had. Nevertheless it deserves an answer. First there is Cooper’s assertion, in the preface to Homeward Bound, that the novel’s aim—to exhibit the present state of society in the United States—was one that lay at the bottom of all his projects.²⁵ He accomplished this aim by using romantic as well as novelistic devices. As John McWilliams has observed, Cooper was adept at deploying synecdoche: His tales would deal with local struggles or historic events of lesser importance, yet through them Cooper would discuss the most grandly national of issues.²⁶ The earliest example is the way in which the quarrel, at the outset of The Pioneers, over who owns the shot buck becomes a window onto competing claims of land ownership.

The Leather-Stocking novels, as several critics have remarked, examine fundamental concerns about humankind’s relationship to nature, law, and the state. These abstract concerns are perhaps best investigated on a relatively uncluttered fictional canvas. Richard Chase suggests that the inner facts of political life have been better grasped by romance melodramas than by strictly realistic fiction.²⁷ A. N. Kaul in The American Vision addresses the same paradox. Acknowledging that many classic American fictions rich in social implications do not present Dickensian social panoramas, much less hew to the standard expectations of social realism, he ventures: There is a way of regarding social reality which takes into account not only observable social facts but also various aspects of imaginative response to these facts; which considers such things as ideals, or mythic archetypes of thought, to be important if not readily visible components of that reality. He speaks too of the moral assumptions underlying social values in America and of the moral values necessary for the regeneration of human society.²⁸ Kaul, writing in the early 1960s, was positioning his concern with social reality and forms within the prevailing mid-century critical framework emphasizing the moral and mythic aspects of American literature. Nevertheless the morals and myths underlying American history are part, surely, of its social forms. Precisely because the fictions are set in uncivilized, thinly populated tracts of colonial wilderness rather than the highways and townships of a thriving republic whose social and political organization, although still in flux, has already hardened into forms we recognize today, they address these concerns more penetratingly, perhaps, than do his overtly social novels. Tawil, who speculates about Cooper’s treatment of race in 1820s America, when the subject was almost taboo, notes as well that frontier romances could do political work precisely because they claimed to be ‘private’ writing, entertainment, and diversion—hence something quite different than a political vehicle.²⁹

The words myth and morals threaten, I suppose, to blur the sociohistorical focus I have promised. There is no way, however, to tease apart these elements of Cooper’s fiction. Nor, as Rans points out, is there any point in doing so. To focus on the tales’ topicality is not to deny moral and mythic dimensions but to engage them with one’s feet, as it were, on the ground. Cooper’s work has, of course, been approached from exclusive critical angles. The two seminal approaches—those taken by D. H. Lawrence and Robert E. Spiller—have often been at odds. Lawrence’s mythic reading of the Leather-Stocking tales in Classic Studies in American Literature (1923) treated the novels and Natty as timeless incarnations of American values and paradoxes. It fertilized criticism by Henry Nash Smith, R. W. B. Lewis, Richard Chase, John J. McAleer, Warren S. Walker, Leslie A. Fiedler, Richard Slotkin, H. Daniel Peck, Anna Krauthammer, and Anna Varkan, among others.³⁰ By contrast Spiller, in Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Time (1931), imposed a sociohistorical grid on the tales, preparing the way for discussions by Philip Fisher, Joel Porte, Donald Darnell, Kelly, Rans, Gardner, Tawil, Geoffrey Sanborn, and others.³¹ A third set of critics, however, heralded by James Grossman (James Fenimore Cooper: A Biographical and Critical Study, 1949) and including Roy Harvey Pearce, Marius Bewley, Donald A. Ringe, Richard H. Zoellner, Kay Seymour House, James K. Folsom, George Dekker, John McWilliams, Robert Emmet Long, Leland S. Person, and Dana D. Nelson, as well as Kaul, has sought to reconcile the two approaches by stressing their convergence in the realms of morals and ideas.³² That convergence is not artificial; the two Coopers are one. So it is that Kaul can state, The Leather-Stocking Tales derive their significance … from the constant interpenetration of history and myth; that McWilliams can hold that questions of national identity and political justice are treated within the seemingly apolitical settings of Cooper’s tales; that Nelson can write, Appreciating [the myth of Leather-Stocking] should not keep readers from understanding how Cooper also posed some immediate social and political questions about identity and social possibility in the new nation.³³

Finally my study builds upon David Noble’s premise, in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden, that Cooper’s fictions amounted to a counterargument to the optimistic national ideals formulated by historian George Bancroft. Bancroft, as Noble observes, articulated many of the Jacksonian era’s assumptions about the basic goodness of Americans. He presupposed, in a secularized update of the Puritans’ belief that the Massachusetts Calvinist settlers were a chosen people, that Americans were a breed apart from the old European order and consequently exempt from its fate. His history of the United States (volume 1 was published in 1834) popularized the idea that the American West was the great alembic, distilling an ever purer, less corrupt strain of humanity schooled by nature and nature’s god—an American strain whose history would be linear, not cyclical. Cooper’s view, as Allan M. Axelrad suggests,³⁴ was closer to Constantin Volney’s, a view given pictorial form by Cooper’s friend and illustrator, Thomas Cole: that there are no new historical paradigms under the sun; that every nation’s history is cyclical, growth yielding to demise, because