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 �