Wayne Franklin - James Fenimore Cooper: The Later Years

JAMES
FENIMORE
COOPER

Copyright 2017 by Wayne Franklin.

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Contents

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 much fine guidance on how to shape this volumes 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 Dolchs work as copy editor has contributed a great deal to the final product.

Funding granted by a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 20042005 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 Worleys use of the latter funding to buy some of the materials I used and, more recently, her successor Melanie Hepburns 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 20122013 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 Jagielloski in Krakw 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 biographys 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 writers private and public experience flowed up to his death in September 1851.

Like the present volumes subtitle, that bare summary emphasizes chronology but obscures broader thematic unities. I sometimes have designated those unities to myself by two reciprocal termsAbsence and Returnwhich, while literally covering Coopers European sojourn and American homecoming, also highlight several complex patterns across the whole span covered here. Given that Coopers 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.

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 Coopers 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 familys first permanent home. A second change involved Coopers 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 familys rude homecoming; a history of the village of Cooperstown; a treatise on U.S. democracy; and, finally, his large, long-contemplated, long-delayed