by Richard Gravil
[Gravil, Richard. "James Fenimore Cooper and the Spectre of Edmund
Burke." Romanticism On the Net 14 (May 1999)
<http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/cooper.html>]
James Fenimore Cooper, who disliked being called the American Scott,
would, one imagines, take no more kindly to being
called the American Burke. Yet without the writings of Edmund Burke,
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Saga, and its by-product
The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, would be of a very different character,
if indeed they had been undertaken at all. Nor is this
surprising. Two of Burke’s essays on American rights– ‘On American
taxation’, ‘On Conciliation with the Colonies’–were
schoolroom texts, and he was associated with the Federalist component
of Cooper’s early milieu. His works were published
instantaneously in American editions, and a major six volume edition
was published in Boston in 1806. Cooper’s first success,
The Pioneers, reflects the paradoxes expressed by Burke both in the
early essay A Vindication of Natural Society (which
opens the collected works) and in his Reflections upon the Revolution
in France. The subsequent Leatherstocking saga is
quite as Burkean: the formative aesthetic treatise A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful resonates throughout The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder
and The Deerslayer. Cooper’s most thoughtful
historical novel, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, is conspicuously permeated
by both Reflections and the Philosophical
Enquiry, and his own political treatise The American Democrat shares
surprisingly many of his assumptions. Yet because
Cooper refers to Burke just twice in his voluminous writings, Cooper
scholars do so hardly at all. (1)
The Pioneers, George Dekker has said, ‘is one of a handful of great
novels which deal so profoundly with American
experience in the context of American social history that no American
literature or history course can be sound without them.’
(2) Its context, however, is less parochial than that. Written in 1823,
the novel opens with a reflection on the condition of
upstate New York at that time, as a place rejoicing in ‘unfettered
liberty of conscience’ and ‘exhibiting how much can be done,
in even a rugged country, and with a severe climate, under the dominion
of mild laws, and where every man feels a direct
interest in the prosperity of a commonwealth, of which he knows himself
to form a part’. (3) This complacent note is
reminiscent not only of Rousseau’s ‘volonté générale’
but of the numerous celebrations of republican prosperity written
throughout the period from the 1780s to the 1830s by Crèvecoeur,
Adam Smith, Tom Paine, Chateaubriand and Tocqueville.
Lafayette, too, attributed American prosperity to ‘institutions founded
on the rights of man and the republican principle of
self-government’. (4) The point is reinforced–and related to the Federalist
interpretation of the Revolution–by an immediately
subsequent reference to the permanent improvements being made by a
hereditary ‘yeomanry’, though as Cooper well knew, no
such yeoman republic existed in New York, which was still at the time
of writing, governed by an aristocratic elite whose
power sprang, as Paine had complained, from its enormous landholdings.
The confident opening note is perhaps a little shadowed by Cooper’s
reference, in the following paragraph, to the swelling
population of ‘a million and a half inhabitants’ (that is, in 1823)
‘who are maintained in abundance, and can look forward to
ages before the evil day must arrive, when their possessions shall
become unequal to their wants’. As it happens, for much of
the novel, the leading citizen, Judge Temple, founder of Templeton,
will be in ineffectual dispute with his Sheriff and his Law
Officers and Deputies, who cannot be brought to see what Temple and
Natty can see very clearly, that what Natty calls their
‘wasty ways’ already threaten the destruction of the paradise whose
bounty they exploit with all possible speed and the least
possible restraint. The irony is deepened when one remembers that the
action of the novel is set in 1793, when Europe ‘was in
the commencement of that commotion which afterwards shook her political
institutions to the centre ... and a nation, once
esteemed the most refined among the civilized peoples of the world,
was changing its character, and substituting cruelty for
mercy’ (chapter 8, 96). In 1794, inspired by this commotion, Condorcet
would ask: ‘Must there not arrive a period ... When
the increase in the number of men surpassing their means of subsistence,
the necessary result must be either a continual
diminution of happiness and population, a movement truly retrograde,
or, at least, a kind of oscillation between good and evil?’
Citing this passage in 1798 while discussing the inequality between
population and production Malthus would find that ‘the
argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind’.
(5)
It is perhaps stretching a point to note that in 1793 one Tom Paine,
author of Common Sense and of The Rights of Man, was
imprisoned for ten months in Paris for displeasing the Directory. Natty
Bumppo spends merely an afternoon in the stocks for
colliding with the new edicts of Judge Temple. M. Le Quoi, who is in
Templeton as a refugee from the Terror, finds it safe to
make his way back to French possessions in the milder climate of late
1794, when, as it happens, Paine was released. But it is
surely pertinent to note that 1793 is the year of the first edition
of William Godwin’s Political Justice, the most reflective of all
the replies to Burke’s alarming Reflections, and that in the historical
epoch in which the novel is set, the terms of political
debate had already been set by Edmund Burke and Tom Paine as the two
English figures whose names were most popularly
linked with American liberty. (6) Until the publication of Reflections,
Burke’s liberal reputation was such that Paine expected
his friend to lead pro-French opinion in England, and Mirabeau cited
him regularly in the Constituent Assembly. In England,
after its publication, and that of Paine’s reply in The Rights of Man
you were either a Burkean or a Paineite. In America it
remained possible, or so the career of James Fenimore Cooper suggests,
to be both. Certainly, when writing in 1823, a novel
set in his childhood home in the period of his own boyhood, and contemplating
the justice of his father’s polity, Cooper
combines the mind of Burke, the heart of Paine, and the language of
both, in surprisingly evocative ways.
It is usual to see Cooper developing an American historical novel out
of the Scott model. In Waverley, for instance, the hero
has to choose between a romantic identification with the Highland clans
and a future within the new British constitutional
settlement. Similarly, Cooper’s young hero Oliver Effingham has to
choose between marrying into the prosaic future of the new
settlements, and their painful progress towards order, and remaining
loyal to the past. In disguise for much of the novel as
Oliver Edwards, he appears to be mysteriously related to two figures
who represent that past, Natty Bumppo, the
Leatherstocking, and Chingachgook, or Indian John Mohegan. Actually,
he is the grandson of the loyalist Major Effingham
whose estates–originally conferred on him by the gift of Chingachgook,
and passed on to his son–were confiscated after the
American Revolution and acquired by Marmaduke Temple. Temple, though
Oliver is not aware of this, has always regarded
himself as merely holding them in trust for his lost friend or his
issue. The plot may be somewhat obscured by these
Shakespearean disguises and surprises, as it leads towards the union
of Oliver Effingham and Temple’s daughter, but is
designed to suggest simultaneously the ultimate legitimacy of this
young American couple’s possession of land which was once
Indian, and the healing of the wounds of 1776 when loyalist (or ‘Tory’)
estates were–in part at the suggestion of the
aforementioned Tom Paine–confiscated by the victors for the benefit
of patriots.
This, however, is neither the sole, nor emotionally and imaginatively,
the primary plot. Templeton, the scene of the action, is a
settlement run by its somewhat feudal but nonetheless modernising and
constitutional proprietor, Judge Temple (a compound of
Cooper’s prosaic father, William Cooper of Cooperstown and the equally
enterprising and considerably more Romantic,
Governor De Witt Clinton) whose laudable ambitions are to temper the
rape of the land by its pioneers and to establish a
system of lawful governance. The legitimacy of this ambition is challenged
not only by the claims of the expropriated Effinghams,
but by the presence of two relics of the past. Natty Bumppo, whose
presence on the lake long predates that of Temple, now
appears an out-of-place squatter with no foot in this world of property
and law; yet his blood-brother, Chingachgook, is the
last representative of the Mohicans, the original owners of the territory.
The question for the reader is not whether the Temples
or the Effinghams are the legitimate owners, but whether a world of
title deeds can justly supplant a world of natural rights.
The novel opens with a parable of legality of which the tenor is that
of Blake’s Paineite poem, ‘London’–namely, what is a
‘chartered’ liberty? Blake’s denunciatory voice in ‘London’ focuses
on the monopolistic implications of charters which reserve
for the benefit of a ‘titled’ few what was once the liberty of all:
I wander through each chartered street
Near where the chartered Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
Cooper became aware of such ‘mind-forged manacles’ in London in 1806,
as a merchant sailor. Encouraged to exercise his
‘right’ to enter a Royal park, he understood for the first time, he
says, the difference between genuine liberty and mere
‘franchise’. (7) Judge Temple, on his way home with his daughter, stops
his sleigh to fire twice at a fine buck in flight from the
hounds of the Leatherstocking. His shots miss, but the buck is mysteriously
brought down by two further shots, fired it
transpires by Natty and by Oliver. The Judge persists in claiming it
as his own, on the grounds that it is in his woods, whether he
has shot it or not, until he realises that he has wounded Oliver. Despite
Oliver’s wound, which will later be healed by the ancient
arts of Chingachgook, the dispute takes several pages to resolve, because
a variety of claims have to be asserted and the Judge
is determined to establish ‘title’ by purchase if not by deed or by
shot. Natty is unwilling ‘to give up my lawful dues in a free
country.–Though for the matter of that, might often makes right here,
as well as in the old country for what I can see’ (1: 22).
Oliver believes that his own shot killed it, and proves that the Judge’s
did not, since he miraculously detects four of the Judge’s
five shot in a nearby pine tree, and the fifth in his own body. At
this the Judge cedes ‘title’ in the venison, but also declaims in
feudal grandeur:
‘I here give a right to shoot deer, or bears,
or any thing thou pleasest in my woods, for ever. Leather-stocking is
the only other man that I have granted the
same privilege to; and the time is coming when it will be of value’ (25).
Natty, who has never heard of any law that a man shouldn’t kill deer
where he pleases, stands on the rights of man in a state of
nature.
‘There’s them living who say, that Nathaniel
Bumppo’s right to shoot on these hills is of older date than
Marmaduke Temple’s right to forbid him’.
The Judge’s rule, of course, is not quite absolute, nor is he the big
bad baron. He functions as an odd blend of old baron and
new whig, with a considerable admixture of the archetypal liberal.
At a later point, when the potential for rapport seems to exist
between Natty and Temple on the matter of wasteful felling and wasteful
fishing, Temple tells Natty that laws have been passed
controlling use of seines and the cutting of timber and adds, ‘"I hope
to live to see the day, when a man’s rights in his game shall
be as much respected as his title to his farm."’ Natty is unimpressed:
‘"Your titles and your farms are all new together," cried
Natty; "but laws should be equal, and not more for one than another."’
(14: 134). Refusing Temple’s equation of broad
ecological management with hunting rights (he knows nothing of his
interest in developing mining rights), Natty sees Temple’s
notion of establishing proprietorial rights in game as restoring old-world
inequalities between gamekeeper and poacher.
Precisely such inequality is a principle indictment against the ruling
class in Obadiah Hulme’s Historical Essay on the English
Constitution, a exposition of the ‘Norman yoke’ theory of English history
which exercised considerable influence in 1776, on
such writers as ‘Demophilus’ and such persons as Thomas Jefferson.
As Hulme complained:
They have engrossed, within a line of their
own drawing, all hares, wild fowl, and fish, that are natives of this
kingdom; which, in their own nature, being
wild and wandering, and not subject to restraint, are, therefore, the
natural right of the first man that can catch
them. (8)
Temple’s arguably self-interested law-making will bring about the major
parable of the novel. At a later point, when it is
established that the Judge has created a close season, Natty again
shoots a deer, as a result of a ruse set up by one Hiram
Doolittle, a corrupt legal officer who, for reasons of his own, wants
an excuse to search Natty’s hut. Doolittle has released
Natty’s hounds, which start a deer. Natty and Chingachgook, unable
to resist the call of the wild, intercept the deer on the
lakeshore, and Natty kills it. Doolittle acquires a search-warrant,
on the pretext of looking for the carcass or the hide. Natty
resists the execution of the search warrant, is tried for both crimes,
and sentenced to the stocks and to a fine and/or
imprisonment (the stocks, Cooper points out, were a legacy of the common
law, which Paine–unlike Cooper–was particularly
anxious to extirpate in favour of a new republican code). His dignity
is outraged, he has no money, and of all men in the novel,
cannot abide the loss of liberty. He is also, of course, the one figure
in the novel whose relation to the natural world does not
need to be controlled by the laws Judge Temple has found necessary
for the rest of the settlers. In terms of abuse of the
resources of Lake Otsego, every law officer in Templeton is far guiltier
than he.
Much of the novel–including all of its greatest and most poetic scenes–is
devoted to establishing Natty as innately ecological
and responsible. In a court room he may appear clumsy and out-of-touch,
though his misunderstanding of court procedure have
the possibly unintended effect of bringing legal process, not himself,
into ridicule (at least, Cooper’s ambivalence shows itself
here in particularly confusing strength: his sympathy for Leatherstocking
undercuts quite fatally the theme of needful legitimacy).
With a rifle or a fishing spear in his hand, or steering a slender
canoe across the waters, he is not merely in nature but of Nature,
and the heart of the novel consists of successive narrative and descriptive
passages whereby Cooper (as Donald Davie has
shown most effectively) (9) shows his incipient Wordsworthianism in
the unobtrusive shift from literalism to symbol.
Natty’s touchstones are Billy Kirby, a robust and good-natured woodcutter
whose business and pleasure is the destruction as
efficiently as possible of virgin forest; and the Sheriff, who uses
cannon to shoot pigeons and a seine to dredge the lake of its
fish, in scenes which constitute a sort of mass ‘Nutting’, but without
the saving recognition. As all of Cooper’s readers
recognise, Natty, in his own environment, has no need of law. He embodies
justice, and is the fearless guide and protector of
anyone weaker than himself, which–in his own habitat–means more or
less everybody. Yet he becomes the helpless victim of
an unjust law, triggered by villainy. In an abstract sense the law
is necessary, Temple strives to administer it fairly, and
Templeton will be the better for it: concretely, its only casualty
is the most Adamic person on the scene, persecuted by the
law’s corrupt or compromised agents.
Almost any work on political theory from Aristotle to Locke would furnish
passages pertinent to Natty’s situation, but Edmund
Burke express its irony particularly well:
One of the first motives to civil society,
and which becomes one of its fundamental rules, is, that no man should
be
judge in his own cause. By this each person
has at once divested himself of the first fundamental right of
uncovenanted man, that is, to judge for himself,
and to assert his own cause. He abdicates all right to be his own
governor. He inclusively, in a great measure,
abandons the right to self-defence, the first law of nature. Man
cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and
of a civil state together. That he may obtain justice he gives up his right
of
determining what it is in points the most
essential to him. That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender
in
trust of the whole of it. (10)
This, at least, is how Judge Temple, scourge of Jacobin excess–‘these
Jacobins are as blood-thirsty as bull-dogs’ (14:
133)–might put the case, in explaining the matter to his more Romantic
daughter, whose heart inclines her towards Natty’s
position, and not merely because he has just saved her life. It is
a persuasive case, partly because it was penned by the man
who provided in his first published work, A Vindication of Natural
Society, the most eloquent statement of its contrary. Natty
himself, were he gifted in philosophical disputation, might well reply
as follows (he habitually appeals to God as the author of a
right state of things):
We will not place the State of Nature, which
is the Reign of God, in competition with Political Society, which is
the absurd Usurpation of Man. In a State of
Nature, it is true, that a Man of superior Force may beat or rob me;
but then it is true, that I am at full liberty
to defend myself, or make Reprisal by Surprize or by Cunning, or by any
other way in which I may be superior to him.
But in a Political Society, a rich Man may rob me in another way...
and if I attempt to avenge myself, the whole
force of that Society is ready to complete my ruin (A Vindication of
Natural Society, p. 87). (11)
Or, if not familiar with what Gilbert Imlay called ‘Burke’s paradoxical
book’, he might cite Paine, whose 1791 translation of
Lafayette’s ‘Declaration des droits de l’homme’, in defining ‘the natural
and imprescriptible rights of man’ observed that
‘Political liberty consists in the power of doing whatever does not
injure another. The exercise of the natural rights of every man
has no other limits than those which are necessary to secure to every
other man the free exercise of those rights...’. There is,
however, a further clause, or Catch-22, which Natty has not hitherto
noticed: ‘...and these limits are determinable only by the
law’. (12)
It is reasonable to assume, incidentally, as the Vindication is the
first work in Burke’s Complete Works (Boston 1806) and as
Gilbert Imlay refers to it as early as 1792, that Cooper knew it. (13)
That being so, it may also be relevant to note that Natty’s
claims on the Judge’s interest include the fact that he welcomed the
Judge to these parts, despite seeing Temple’s interests as
inimical to his own. He gave him his own bear-skin to sleep on, fed
him on ‘"the fat of a noble buck"’ (‘"Yes, yes–you thought it
no sin then to kill a deer!"’), and has just saved his daughter from
a panther–a point not lost on Elizabeth or Oliver. Natty might
well feel, in the words of the youthful Burke, that ‘it is an incontestable
truth, that there is more havoc made in one year by
Men, of men than has been made by all the Lions, Tygers, Panthers...since
the beginning of the world... But with respect to
you, ye Legislators, ye Civilizers of Mankind!... your Regulations
have done more Mischief in cold blood, than all the Rage of
he fiercest Animals in their greatest Terrors, or Furies, has ever
done or ever could do!’ (Vindication 35). What he does say,
more temperately, is ‘there’s them that says hard things to you, Marmaduke
Temple, but you an’t so bad as to wish to see an
old man die in a prison because he stood up for the right. Come friend,
let me pass; it’s long sin’ I’ve been used to such
crowds, and I crave for the woods ag’in’ (ch 33).
In Templeton, Natty has come to believe, Might is Right. At the close
of the book Natty will say to Elizabeth and Oliver,
symbolically descended from Quaker and Indian sires respectively, ‘bless
you and all that belong to you, from this time till the
great day when the whites shall meet the red-skins in judgement, and
justice shall be the law, and not power.’ Like every
comment Natty makes, it undermines Temple’s law as having anything
to do with natural justice, just as Cooper’s emotional
commitment to Natty makes nonsense of his intention to celebrate the
progress of civil society.
When Burke wrote his Vindication of Natural Society, with its impassioned
critique of all forms of human government (‘In
vain you tell me that Artificial government is good, but that I fall
out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the
Abuse!’, 68), he intended its irony to be recognised. His purpose was
to represent the anti-civil case as it might be put by a
Bolingbroke, in order that its speciousness might be recognised. Yet,
as Adam Phillips says of the Vindication, ‘He had so
successfully identified with the writer he opposed–and the theory,
derived from Rousseau, of a natural as opposed to a civil
society–that he had become stylistically indistinguishable from the
object of his contempt. Nine years later, in the Preface to a
second edition, Burke had to explain his ironic intentions.’ (14) Cooper,
when he created Natty Bumppo, and gave him the
toothless grin and silent laugh and nose-wiping uncouthness of the
comic outsider, did not intend that he should be a wholly
persuasive spokesman for Paine’s sansculotte views. The Leatherstocking
is meant to be a touching irrelevance, an archaic
hangover. Instead he not only walks away with the novel, but commands
his creator to write four further novels, each of which
takes us further from any sense of the moral superiority of white civilization
or civil law and provides further vindications of a
state of nature.
Natty’s age fully disguises the fact that in terms of civil society
his is an adolescent resistance to lawful authority that must be
overcome. At the same time, his force of character undermines any sense
one is meant to derive from the novel that the ways of
the settlers represent moral progress. Thus, the Paineite or ironically
Burkean sansculottism of the Leather-stocking is lent an
authority which is quite at odds with the author’s fixed views and
intentions. (15) Nor is the theme of historical progression and
legitimacy–the Henry V theme–much helped by the patently false fictional
manoeuvres to which Cooper resorts. The sublime
death of Chingachgook (he decides to allow himself to die during a
forest fire brought about by the greed and carelessness of
the settlers, and expires to the accompaniment of a thunder clap bringing
rain), combined with the miraculous rescue of
Elizabeth, and the brief reappearance of Major Effingham (named the
Fire-Eater by the Mohicans who gave him the lands
Temple now occupies) is meant to legitimise the act of dispossession
that has now been completed by this rapacious white
society. Mohegan recognises in Elizabeth Temple the Quaker heritage
which he admired, and blesses the forthcoming union of
the Royalist and Republican strains. He has remained quietly confident
that Temple, in whom he sees the heritage of William
Penn, or The Miquon, will willingly divide with Oliver the lands which
he, Chingachgook, once gave to Major Effingham. In any
case he himself articulates to Elizabeth the fatalistic view that ‘the
Great Spirit gave your fathers to know how to make guns and
powder that they might sweep the Indians from the land’. Judge Temple’s
polity is meant to represent the future, but since
neither Temple, nor ultimately his daughter and son-in-law, can command
the reader’s confidence, the myth of progress
whereby in Chateaubriand’s words ‘this liberty of the United States
replaces the liberty of the Indian’ (16) is felt as a myth of
regress.
Not for the last time, Cooper uses a gravestone motif with an effect
which may or may not be ironical. Chingachgook (the
Great Sarpent) whose splendid prime will be celebrated throughout three
of the subsequent novels, is known for much of the
novel as Mohegan, or John Mohegan or merely as Indian John. This progressive
renaming, Fiona Stafford points out, mimes
not only his loss of identity and status but the extinction of the
Mohican people, and symbolically the Indian race. (17) At the
end of the novel Natty contemplates the gravestones which Oliver Effingham,
the Young Eagle, has erected for his Tory
Grandfather and his Indian Godfather. A paragraph records the name
and rank and the numerous martial and Christian virtues
of Major Oliver Effingham. On Chingachgook’s, erected by Oliver, to
whom Chingachgook has bequeathed the lands of
his nation, his name is mis-spelled and posterity is told merely that
‘his faults were those of an Indian and his virtues those of a
man.’
Natty no more notices the irony, and the slight, than he does the beautifully
prepared irony in his own disappearance from the
novel in flight from the face of man: ‘He had gone far towards the
setting sun,–the foremost in that band of Pioneers, who are
opening the way for the march of the nation across the continent.’
The reader must have wondered from time to time, when
Cooper will introduce the ‘pioneers’ referred to in the title, rather
than the motley assortment of settlers, exploiters,
shopkeepers and landowners who make up the cast of the novel. The Pioneers,
without Natty, would be a remarkably English
social novel concerned with the foibles of a squire and his country
neighbours. The close of the novel, with its affirmation that
Natty is the Pioneer, leaves one with a bitter irony. Templeton, exemplary
frontier settlement, cannot be home to the one figure
who has bodied forth the values of natural justice America itself exists
to realise. (18) ‘Yes–yes’, Natty will recognise as soon
as he arrives in the opening pages of The Prairie, ‘the law is needed,
when such as have not the gifts of strength and wisdom
are to be taken care of’ (19) but for those who have such gifts, it
represents too unpalatable a departure from the first principles
of liberty. Of course, the reader recognises, waking from the anarchic
dream into which Cooper’s imagination has wandered,
since all men are not Natty Bumppo, the civil law is needed. But this
first Leatherstocking novel is the last in which that case will
get so fair a hearing. The truly representative American is not Natty
Bumppo but the proto-Jacksonian Billy Kirby, his natural
antagonist, whose very occupation spells death to Natty Bumppo, Chingachgook,
and their ways of life. ‘I earnestly beg you
will remember’ says Judge Cooper of the trees in which Kirby makes
‘such dreadful wounds’:
‘that they are the growth of centuries, and that when once gone, none living will see their loss remedied.’
‘Why, I don’t know, Judge,’ returned the man
he addressed: ‘It seems to me, if there’s a plenty of any thing in this
mountaynious country, it’s the trees.... I’ve
chopped over the best half of a thousand acres, with my own hands,
counting both Varmount and York states; and
I hope to live to finish the whull, before I lay up my axe.’
In The Prairie, Davie points out, Cooper has to conjure up a grove of
trees on the treeless prairie so that Ishmael Bush and his
sons may symbolically fell them: ‘here, too ... the sound of the axe
is for Cooper the sound of doom’. (20)
The Pioneers has had three major thematic concerns: America’s embodiment
of political justice; landscape and its resources;
and Indian dispossession. The first of these proved more tangled than
Cooper may have supposed when he began the novel,
and he returns to it equally indecisively in The Prairie and if anything
more despairingly in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish. Each
of these novels, together with The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder,
and The Deerslayer, also develops Cooper’s
landscape art. Natty is, as George Sand noted, an unparalleled observer
of landscape, the unobtrusive eye through which
Cooper’s reader experiences the virgin lands. Even on his debut in
The Pioneers (chapter 26) he devotes three pages to a
depiction of remembered vistas and waterfalls in the Catskills which
will become the stuff of the Hudson River School of
Painting. Cooper thus joins with the consciously Wordsworthian Bryant
and the unconsciously Martinesque Thomas Cole in
associating American liberty with the wildness of American landscape.
He is well aware, as he will point out in the opening
sentence of Wyandotté (1843) that while the world attaches to
American scenery ‘an idea of grandeur’, in reality ‘that portion
of the American continent which has [by this date] fallen to the share
of the Anglo-Saxon race very seldom rises to a scale that
merits this term.’ (21) The lush rolling forests of the Susquehannah
are, if anything, reminiscent rather of Surrey than the Alps,
which Cooper came to associate with genuine sublimity. But sublimity
is thematically essential to the novel’s Burke/Paine
argument. It was of course Thomas Paine who most famously established
the conjunction between the Romantic sublime and
American Liberty. Introducing Part 2 of The Rights of Man he deftly
turned the young libertarian Burke against the older
counter-revolutionary one:
As America was the only spot in the political
world where the principles of universal reformation could begin, so
also was it the best in the natural world....
The scene which that country presents to the eye of a spectator has
something in it which generates and encourages
great ideas. Nature appears to him in magnitude. The mighty
objects he beholds act upon his mind by enlarging
it, and he partakes of the greatness he contemplates. ... In such
a situation man becomes what he ought. He
sees his species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as
kindred; and the example shows to the artificial
world that man must go back to nature for information’ (Rights of
Man, p. 160).
The Pioneers, by making all but three of Cooper’s characters entirely
impervious to such effects, adds to the scepticism about
human perfectibility that his book conveys. It also sees American society
as incipiently a second edition of the artificial society
of Europe, and creates in Natty a child of nature whose very existence
is a critique of that artificial society.
Unlike Burke, Cooper never explained his ironic intentions–never, perhaps,
fully recognised that his intentions and performance
were so discrepant. Despite the author’s lack of sympathy for the Paineite
dimension of Jeffersonian Republicanism, the
sansculotte leatherstocking is the one figure in the book who fully
engages Cooper’s Romantic imagination and the one
character with whom every reader’s fullest sympathies engage. Unlettered,
ignorant of law, with limited vocabulary and syntax
(‘anan?’ is his invariable way of requesting a simpler paraphrase),
unimaginable within a polite drawing room - and tactfully
never placed in one throughout the saga– Leatherstocking is the antithesis
of almost everything that Cooper values, except
natural justice. Yet without the Leatherstocking there would have been
no saga, and while his sansculotte status may represent
an impossible dream, that dream becomes the more commanding through
every successive treatment, and attracts to it other
impossible dreams - among them that of miscegenistic union of white
and red (The Last of the Mohicans and The Wept of
Wish-ton-Wish), or absolute patriarchal authority (The Prairie, and
The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish), or the reconciliation of
frontier values and unspoiled virgin land (The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer).
As Cooper’s politics become more Burkean,
his discontent with democracy the more extreme, Natty Bumppo, that
personified vindication of natural society, moves
deeper into wilderness and/or backwards in time.
Regressing, as Cooper’s greatest readers–from D H Lawrence to Yvor Winters
and Donald Davie–have said he does, Natty if
he pursues the journey far enough will rendezvous with Sigmund Freud,
analyst of Civilisation and its Discontents, and finally
recognise that:
What makes itself felt in a human community
as a desire for freedom may be their revolt against some existing
injustice, and so may prove favourable to
a further development of civilization.... But it may also spring from the
remains of the original personality, which
is still untamed by civilization and may thus become the basis in them
of
hostility to civilization. The urge for freedom,
therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of
civilization or civilization altogether...
(22)
Leslie Fiedler and D H Lawrence both intuited in Cooper such a hostility.
Lawrence’s tabulation of Cooper’s divisions is worth
quoting:
Wish Fulfilment
Actuality
THE WIGWAM
vs
MY HOTEL
CHINGACHGOOK
vs
MY WIFE
NATTY BUMPPO
vs
MY HUMBLE SELF
‘Men live by lies’, Lawrence observes:
In actuality, Fenimore loved the genteel continent
of Europe, and waited gasping for the newspapers to praise his
WORK.
In another actuality he loved the tomahawking
continent of America, and imagined himself Natty Bumppo.
His actual desire was to be: Monsieur Fenimore
Cooper, le grand écrivain américain.
His innermost wish was to be: Natty Bumppo.
(23)
And so, seduced more permanently than Burke was by the ‘original self’
or anarchic principle which ran away with the
Vindication of Natural Society, Cooper writes the Leatherstocking Saga,
which is exactly as Lawrence says, ‘a decrescendo
of reality, and a crescendo of beauty’ (317). The idealisation, which
after the attempt at a social novel in The Pioneers, sets in
throughout the Leatherstocking Saga, does indeed represent a flight
from American reality. In subsequent novels, curiously, the
American characters often refer to themselves not as frontiersmen but
as ‘borderers’, as if they have walked out of a Scott
novel, or Wordsworth’s tragedy, and have not registered the new territory,
or as if to remind us of the border between reality
and the dreamscape of the books. In its positive dimension, Cooper
is a great mythmaker. His Leather-stocking, as Yvor
Winters says, becomes ‘a great national myth, with a life over and
above the life of the books in which he appears, a reality
surpassing that even of a historical figure such as Daniel Boone’.
(24) Boone, of course, was celebrated by Byron as the child
of nature and critic of artificial society, whose strength was drawn
from the very wilderness and seclusion his followers–the
William Coopers and other pioneers of the Susquehannah–destroyed.
Paradox marks Cooper’s fictional career and his political allegiances.
The creator of Natty Bumppo, that most powerful
mythological personification of natural justice, cross-cultural friendship
and love of the wild, was also a passionate supporter of
Andrew Jackson - internationally notorious for rough justice and indifference
to Indian culture or the survival of wilderness.
What I referred to as the third great theme of The Pioneers, Indian
dispossession, is only tentatively sketched in the
degeneracy of ‘Indian John’, and briefly contextualised in a Heckewelderian
account of the history of Chingachgooks’s race.
This theme will develop, in the Leatherstocking saga, into a great
national threnody for the fate of what Natty unfailing refers to
as ‘the rightful owners of the land’. In writing The Pioneers, to celebrate
his roots, Cooper was it seems surprised not only by
doubts but by guilt. Three successive novels, The Last of the Mohicans
(1826) about the French and Indian Wars of 1757,
The Prairie (1827) about American expansion after the Louisiana purchase,
and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) about
early puritan settlements, attempt to expiate that unexpectedly focused
guilt. What none of them achieves, however, is a
satisfactory answer to Burke’s complaint in a Vindication of Natural
Society, ‘In vain you tell me that Artificial government is
good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing
itself is the Abuse!’ Rather, his novels, as the Leatherstocking
saga proceeds, tend to endorse Burke’s Nattyesque utterance: ‘we will
not place the State of Nature, which is the Reign of
God, in competition with Political Society, which is the absurd Usurpation
of Man’ (A Vindication, 68, 87). Taken as a whole
they never quite escape the anxiety he seems to have uncovered in The
Pioneers, the anxiety–as expressed by Coleridge in
‘France: an Ode’–that liberty cannot breathe its soul ‘in forms of
human power’.
Cooper’s Political Progress
We must recognise Cooper, says Tony Tanner, ‘for the great cultural
ventriloquist and schizophrenic that he is’. (25) As the
son of a pioneer and Federalist–William Cooper of Cooperstown, disciple
of the great Governor De Witt Clinton–and as the
friend of Lafayette, early admirer of Washington, and belated admirer
of the ‘sansculotte’ Jefferson, (26) Cooper was never
altogether sure where to situate himself vis-a-vis the revolution debate
of the 1790s. Socially, and to some extent politically, he
belonged to the party which feared and was prone to vilify the side
of Tom Paine and William Godwin, as, for instance, did
John Quincy Adams, second President of the United States:
I know not whether any man in the world has
had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty
years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer
satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy,
begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never
before in any age of the world was suffered by the poltroonery of
mankind, to run through such a career of mischief.
Call it then the Age of Paine. (27)
Paine, who dedicated Part 1 of The Rights of Man to Washington and Part
2 to Lafayette, two of the three fixed stars in
Cooper’s firmament, must–despite his social origins–be counted among
the founders of the American republic. Yet Cooper
never identifies with Paine, either socially or ideologically. After
all, he grew up in a culture in which Burke was the culture hero.
‘There are many "manors" in New York’, Cooper explains in The Pioneers,
‘though all political and judicial rights have
ceased’. He grew up on one such manor or ‘patent’, comprising some
100,000 acres originally ceded under an Indian deed to
Colonel George Croghan, in 1770, and energetically developed by William
Cooper who took possession of what became
known as ‘Cooper’s Patent’ in 1786. The novelist, in his childhood
in Cooperstown, where William Cooper’s home was the
local meeting place of the Federalist squirearchy, had ample opportunity
to observe how in reality, political power belonged to
the great landowners and was exercised through influence over tenants
which was little diminished from pre-Revolutionary
days. (28)
Of the three authors of The Federalist, which Cooper described as ‘the
text-book for the principles of the American
government’ (29) one, Alexander Hamilton, was his father’s lawyer,
and another John Jay, was a family friend. These, with
James Madison, were the architects of the American Constitution, the
supreme legacy of the American Revolution. While their
work embodied a century or more of liberal political theory from James
Harrington and John Locke to Adam Smith and
Edmund Burke, their Revolution was a conservative one, in a sense,
Cooper admitted, ‘a civil war,’ (30) based initially upon
defending the self-governing liberties they had inherited, from the
new-fangled and ill-considered impositions of the British
Parliament, begun by George Grenville in 1763-65 and exacerbated by
Charles Townshend in 1766-67.
The determination of the landed élites– who had for several generations
run, governed with the aid of constituent assemblies,
and provided for the security of the colonies–to restore their de facto
rather than de jure independence in 1776, had little to do
with the selectively egalitarian impulses of the equally patrician
Jefferson, and nothing at all (except the common roots in
Harrington and Locke) with the Enlightenment radicalism of Paine and
Godwin. John Dickinson’s famous Letters from a
Farmer, which roused Pennsylvania in 1768, while citing such authorities
as Lord Camden on how the association of taxation
with representation is ‘An Eternal Law of Nature’, seems angered mostly
by the adverse impact of colonies in Canada on the
price of land in Pennsylvania: it is the classic statement of the bourgeois
concept of liberty which animated the War of
Independence and makes the term ‘Revolution’ so problematic. (31)
In 1820-21 Cooper still opposed the liberalisation of voting rights,
and, like his father, held aloof from the Jeffersonian
Republicans, supporting instead the more moderate faction of Governor
De Witt Clinton. As he moved away from his roots,
and mixed with the more liberal intelligentsia of New York City, to
which he moved in 1823, Cooper came to reject, as a good
Republican, and still more when he became a good Democrat, the social
stake theory into which Jay and others had perverted
the association between property and republicanism in Harrington’s
Oceana. In Europe in 1830, while working with the
American Polish Committee, he finally read Jefferson, and his European
contacts undoubtedly gave him a more liberal view of
what American democracy might mean, especially when contrasted with
hereditary Aristocratic power. (At this time he came to
deride Alexander Hamilton as a closet monarchist, taking Jefferson’s
view of this Federalist at least, as more aristocratic than
the Europeans.) (32) But Jay is still eulogised in Notions, along with
Washington and Lafayette, as symbolising the compound
of patrician breeding and republican manners which Cooper most admired,
and in some respects, particularly in their espousal
of abolitionism, the Jay family moved in directions more radical than
Cooper himself could follow.
Internationally, Cooper was of course an active partisan of liberation,
like his immediate English Romantic precursors, Shelley
and Byron, and the continental revolutionaries whose causes they and
he espoused. He had been radicalised in mid-career, in
part by his New York friendships with the Wordsworthian Bryant and
the Byronist Halleck, in part by his European
experiences with Lafayette, Mickiewicz and the English Reform Movement,
and in part by his chosen role as the American
patriot-at-large. But domestically he espoused successively the causes
of Federalism, independent Republicanism, Clintonian
Republicanism, Jacksonian Democracy, evolving his own peculiar brand
of American Conservatism. From Home as Found
(1838) to The Crater (1847) his essential role as the American Burke
predominates.
In a manuscript left at his death, ‘The Towns of Manhattan’, later published
as New York, he reflects on the unattainability of a
perfect polity. In any comparison of differing systems, he says,
We are far saying that our own, with all its
flagrant and obvious defects, will be the worst ... though we cannot
deny, not do we wish to conceal, the bitterness
of the wrongs that are so frequently inflicted by the many on the
few. This is, perhaps, the worst species of
tyranny. He who suffers under the arbitrary power of a single
despot, or by the selfish exactions of a privileged
few, is certain to be sustained by the sympathies of the
masses. But he who is crushed by the masses
themselves must look beyond the limits of his earthly being
for consolation and support. The wrongs committed
by democracies are of the most cruel character; and
... carry with them in their course all the
feelings that render injustice and oppression intolerable. (33)
The Burkean quality of this late Cooper utterance becomes evident when we place it beside what is surely its original:
Of this I am certain, that in a democracy,
the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel
oppressions upon the minority, whenever strong
divisions prevail in that kind of polity, as they often must; and
that oppression of the minority will extend
to far greater numbers, and will be carried on with much greater fury,
than can almost ever be apprehended from the
dominion of a single sceptre. In such a popular persecution,
individual sufferers are in a much more deplorable
condition than in any other. Under a cruel prince they have
the balmy compassion of mankind to assuage
the smart of their wounds ... but those who are subjected to
wrong under multitudes, are deprived of all
external consolation. They seem deserted by mankind;
overpowered by a conspiracy of their whole
species. (Reflections, p. 229)
Strikingly, Burke’s final sentence epitomises the condition of Natty
Bumppo, exhibited in the stocks, made exemplary victim of
the people’s court, and punished for taking a single deer–as a result
of the actions of an agent provocateur–within the borders
of a polity in which for chapter after chapter the most wasteful carnage
and destruction of every kind of natural resource has
been perpetrated remorselessly the Sheriff, and remorsefully by the
Judge, over the protests of that same Natty Bumppo, who
is, as Dekker has put it, ‘the only just man in sight’. (34)
Burke, famous up to the moment he published his Reflections as a liberal,
and thereafter as a conservative
counter-revolutionary makes an interesting touchstone. Today, Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France is read
almost always through the eyes of Paine, as somewhat tendentiously
represented in The Rights of Man. Its argument is thought
to be that the living are and always must be subjected to the will
of the dead, from whom we receive our liberties as an entailed
inheritance. Jefferson and Madison debated the same point, in the same
year, and it might be fairer to say, with James Madison,
that ‘The improvements made by the dead form a charge against the living
who take the benefit of them... All that is
indispensible in adjusting the account between the dead and the living
is to see that the debits against the latter do not exceed
the advances made by the former’. (35) One of the great merits of the
American Constitution, though created by a
constitutional convention at a particular moment, was, in Cooper’s
eyes, that it respected and institutionalised the received
wisdom of the participant states at that moment in time, and accepted
the theoretically absurd notion that a majority of states
containing a minority of the national population could impose its will
on the majority. The only power the federal government
possessed, or ever would possess, Cooper argued, was that explicitly
delegated to it by ‘the states then in existence’–which
alone could ratify it–and not by that vague entity enshrined in its
preamble ‘we the people’. (36) Cooper, in 1838, already
looked back upon 1788 as America’s Golden Age, and his treatise on
American democracy is an attempt to restate the
principles of The Federalist for his own brazen one. He takes considerable
comfort in the extent to which current American
practice must be circumscribed by the ‘entailed liberties’ inherited
from John Jay, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton.
It is true that he recognises that ‘no country can properly be deemed
free, unless the body of the nation possess, in the last
resort, the legal power to frame its laws according to its wants. This
power must also abide in the nation, or it becomes merely
an historical fact’ (American Democrat 112). But this apparently Paineite
principle appears so only because we have forgotten
that Burke, too, accepts that a nation must have the right, and clearly
does have the power, to abandon one system, when it has
grown oppressive, and choose another. In Reflections his specific complaint
is not that the French abandoned an absolute
monarchy for democracy. In 1789, he says explcitly, ‘the absolute monarchy
was at an end. It breathed its last, without a
groan, without a struggle, without convulsion. All the struggle, all
the dissension arose afterwards upon the preference of a
despotic democracy to a government of reciprocal controul. The triumph
of the victorious party was over the principles of a
British constitution.’ (Reflections, 241). The difference between Burke
and Cooper is in their view of the reality of British
polity. To Burke, the British Constitution is the very prototype of
the principle of checks and balances, whereas to Cooper it is
an Aristocracy, tempered by franchises and masquerading as a Monarchy.
Cooper’s view of government is aligned with Burke’s simplification of
the traditional view of government from Aristotle to
Montesquieu. There are three kinds of government, according to both
The American Democrat (1838) and A Vindication of
Natural Society (1756): namely, despotisms, aristocracies and democracies.
Despotisms, or monarchies, may, if just and
benevolent, which they tend not to be, provide the most harmonious
of societies, but they suffer from flattery and vice and rely
on the unrealistic expectation that the despot will represent the perfection
of human nature. Aristocracies are as expensive as
monarchies, and tend to be more soulless and ruthless, lacking the
personal feelings of responsibility that temper despotism.
(37) Nor is pure democracy an acceptable device, because they the most
prone to the abuse of the demagogue. The Greek
democracy of Solon was soon overset because ‘an artful man became popular,
the People had power in their hands, and they
devolved a considerable Share of their Power upon their Favourite,
and the only use he made of this Power, was to plunge
those who gave it into Slavery’ (Vindication 55). In large democracies,
‘the people are peculiarly exposed to become the
dupes of demagogues and political schemers’ and ‘in a country where
opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize power’
(American Democrat, 128, 208
These are commonplace agreements, deriving ultimately, as Burke points
out from the ancients. ‘I cannot help concurring with
[the ancients], that an absolute democracy, no more than absolute monarchy,
is to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of
government. They think it rather the corruption and degeneracy, than
the sound constitution of a republic. If I recollect rightly,
Aristotle observes, that a democracy has many striking points of resemblance
with a tyranny’ (Reflections 228). What Cooper
describes in The American Democrat is the proper functioning of a stable
republic designed to guard against this corruption
and degeneration, for ‘no tyranny of the one, nor any tyranny of the
few’ is worse than that of ‘the publick’ when it assumes
‘the powers that properly belong to the whole body of the people, and
to them only under constitutional limitations’ (130).
Genuine liberty cannot exist, Cooper says, ‘without many restraints
on the power of the mass’ (117) and ‘it ought to be
impressed on every man’s mind, in letters of brass, "That in a democracy,
the publick has no power that is not expressly
conceded by the institutions, and that this power, moreover, is only
to be used under the forms prescribed by the
constitution. All beyond this, is oppression."’ (197 Cooper’s italics).
‘The very existence of government’, says Cooper, ‘infers inequality’
for ‘equality of condition is incompatible with civilization,
and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly
removed from the savage state’ (104). In fact, ‘equality of
rights’ will necessarily produce ‘inequality of condition’ (137). Nor
can such a thing as absolute equality of political rights exist
though it is clear that the purpose of society is to guarantee ‘civil
rights’ (104). Burke tallies such rights as follows: ‘Men ... have
a right to justice; as between their fellows, whether their fellows
are in politic function or in ordinary occupation. They have a
right to the fruits of their industry; and to the means of making their
industry fruitful. They have a right to the acquisitions of their
parents; to the nourishment and improvement of their offspring; to
instruction in life, and to consolation in death. Whatever each
man can separately do, without trespassing upon others, he has a right
to do for himself; and he has a right to a fair portion of all
which society, with all its combinations of skill and force, can do
in his favour. In this partnership all men have equal rights; but
not to equal things.’ (Reflections, 149).
A major distinction between Burke and Cooper is that, writing in America,
Cooper sounds a good deal hotter on the necessity
and beneficence of material and social inequality. Inheritance of parental
acquisitions is essential to a dynamic society as ‘an
inducement to great and glorious deeds’ (138). He does not quite say
in The American Democrat, that without inheritance
America would no longer have the great landed estates which alone could
produce the disinterested political leadership she
needed, but he does say that ‘social inequality ...is as much a consequence
of civilized society, as breathing is a vital function of
animal life’ (140). Unlike Burke, however, Cooper insists (at this
date) that because wealth confers its own privileges and
status, the nation must deny any ‘hereditary claims to trusts and power.’
Burke saw himself as ‘no friend to aristocracy’ which
undiluted led to ‘austere and insolent domination’, (38) but remained
persuaded that the Constitutional settlement of 1688 had
created a balance between crown, aristocracy and bourgeoisie which
reflected real interests and worked in favour of liberty.
Cooper, though believing in a democracy based, as he put it, on numbers,
not property–the faith proclaimed in The
Federalist–was already doubtful in 1838 whether a country as unstable
as the United States could really allow people without
‘permanent and fixed interests’ in their constituency an influence
on government (194). He had advocated a moderate property
qualification for France as early as 1831, (39) and within a few years
he would be advocating a restricted suffrage and fewer
elections. (40) In 1847 in The Crater he produced a dystopia in which
social collapse is brought about by the propertiless
divesting the propertied of political power–thus endorsing, implicitly,
the notion that property has a constitutional rights–and in
1850 he would argue that American democracy is not obligated ‘to admit
any but a minority of her whites to the enjoyment of
political power’. (41)
Read through the mesmerising eyes of Tom Paine, Burke’s Reflections
is based on an impossible thesis, which makes us all
slaves of the dead. Read in itself, Reflections has a rather different
thesis which may be summarised as follows. France in 1789
had the opportunity to replace a thoroughly discredited absolutism
by a carefully counterweighted constitution on the British
model. That such a model guaranteed the optimum balance of stability
and liberty was axiomatic, not only to Burke, but to such
of his disciples as Alexis de Tocqueville and John C Calhoun. (42)
Such a balance may grow, but is not easily achieved by fiat.
Like the Federalists, Burke believed that government was a complicated
contrivance for maximising ‘genuine liberty’ without
licensing government by fickle passions. The Revolutionary sympathisers
in England, he thought ‘are so taken up with their
theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his
nature’ (156). Whatever system is adopted must be based
upon the recognition that those who rule exercise a trust: ‘All persons
possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and
awefully impressed with an idea that they act in trust; and that they
are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great
master, author and founder of society.’
Both are aware that ‘all political power is strictly a trust, granted
by the constituent to the representative’ (American
Democrat, 91) and to Cooper this is the ‘leading distinctive principle’
of America. Burke’s criticism of the structure being
created in France in 1790 (even though he was writing long before this
structure gave rise to any remarkable excesses) is that it
was centred on a National Assembly ‘with every possible power and no
possible external controul’ (Reflections, 315). It was
not American enough. ‘Your all sufficient legislators, in their hurry
to do everything at once, have forgot one thing that seems
essential, and which, I believe, never has been before, in the theory
or the practice, omitted by any projector of a republic.
They have forgot to constitute a Senate, or something of that nature
and character. ...Such a body ...seems to be in the very
essence of a republican government. It holds a sort of middle place
between the supreme power exercised by the people, or
immediately delegated from them, and the mere executive’ (316).
The case is made the worse, Burke felt, because of an indirect electoral
system, based upon a scale of property qualifications,
which annulled any direct personal connection between elector and elected.
‘To elect someone you must know ‘the fitness of
your man ‘ and then ‘retain some hold upon him’ (305): the French system
made it impossible for the elector to discharge what
Cooper also felt to be ‘a sacred publick trust’, namely that of voting
only for one whom he knows, and knows to be honest
(American Democrat 142). Having done so, Cooper recognises, in a principle
indelibly associated with the name of Burke,
‘no constituency has a right to violate the honest convictions of a
representative’ (161).
While Mackintosh could temporarily persuade himself in 1791 that what
France was about was a proper division of powers, a
constitutional balance of the representatives of the people, a hereditary
first magistrate and a judiciary unconnected with either,
(43) Burke professed to be puzzled what kind of polity France was in
process of becoming. ‘I do not know under what
description to class the present ruling authority in France. It affects
to be a pure democracy, though I think in a direct train of
becoming shortly a mischievous and ignoble oligarchy’ (228). He was
confirmed in this opinion by the system of escalating
electoral qualifications. In a passage of great vehemence, which I
do not recollect seeing quoted, Burke comes remarkably
close to expressing the complex of suspicions which drove Cooper, when
he returned to America in 1833, into the arms of the
Jacksonian Democrats.
One thing only is certain in this scheme [the
escalating set of electoral qualifications], which is an effect seemingly
collateral but direct, I have no doubt in
the minds of those who conduct this business, that is, its effect in producing
an Oligarchy in every one of the republics.
A paper circulation ... must put the whole of what power, authority,
and influence is left ... into the hands of
the managers and conductors of this circulation (307).
Cooper would concur with Jackson’s populist war against the banks on
the grounds that they undermined real value (which
was agricultural) and therefore undermined the producers of real value,
or as Burke puts it a page or so later,
few can understand the game; and fewer still
are in a condition to avail themselves of the knowledge. The many
must be the dupes of the few who conduct the
machine of these speculations. ... Those whose operations can take
from, or add ten percent to, the possessions
of every man in France, must be the masters of every man in France.
...The landed gentleman, the yeoman, and the
peasant [the first two of these three terms define Cooper’s
constituency] have none of them, habits or
inclinations, or experience, which can lead them to any share in this the
sole source of power and influence now left
in France (311).
It would be absurd to suggest that this passage helped to stimulate
Jacksonian abhorrence of the Whigs, since detestation of
oligarchy is at least as old as the English Revolution, but it is very
likely, since Cooper seems to have re-immersed himself in
Burke in the year Jackson came to power (The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish,
1829, is replete with complex echoes of both the
Philosophical Enquiry and Reflections), to have stimulated Cooper to
share in that abhorrence. (44)
Cooper was nothing if not paradoxical. A firm believer that Aristocratic
power should be overthrown, and politics divorced
from heredity, he also believed in the necessity for a landed elite,
a leavening twentieth, drawing sufficient wealth from their
estates to enjoy and life of intellectual cultivation and public service,
and whose business it was to govern at the behest of a
deferential electorate. (45) Critical of Sir Walter Scott for an ingrained
deference to aristocracy, Cooper, having been born to
quasi-feudal power, married into a particularly grand strain of the
New York aristocracy and mixed as of right in almost
exclusively titled circles during his years in Europe. Believing theoretically
in the Jeffersonian and Paineite principle that
sovereignty resides in the people, who must be constitutionally free
to change their constitution, he also believed that the
Constitution as the guarantor if liberty was in all practical respects
above criticism, and that change should be gradual: ‘One of
the chief merits of all our political innovations is that they have
been gradual’, he wrote, in phrasing highly suggestive of George
Eliot, ‘and have rather followed than preceded opinion’ (Letters and
Journals, 2: 33). During the agitations of the 1840s,
which threatened the extinction of a privileged landed gentry, Cooper
could take this principle to extremes, arguing that if
righting the wrongs of tenants damages the power of the gentry, the
wrongs must remain unrighted. Mid-nineteenth-century
tenants, however impoverished, must remain bound by contracts entered
into by their ancestors a century before. As James
Grossman summarises the point, in an appropriately but unintentionally
Burkean phrase, ‘the tenants’ choice is decisive not only
for the profitable rent-free years but for all time.’ (46) Haunted
by Burke from the outset of his career, Cooper became more
Burkean than Burke himself.
Notes
(1) H Daniel Peck, A World by Itself: the Pastoral Moment in Cooper's
Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1977), and Steven Blakemore's excellent article '“Without a Cross”:
the Cultural Significance of the Sublime and Beautiful in
Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans', Nineteenth-Century Literature (1997)
27–57, are major exceptions to the critical
silence about Burke's importance to Cooper. (back)
(2) George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1967) p. 63, my emphases.
(back)
(3) The Pioneers, ed. James D. Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) pp. 15-16. (back)
(4) Notions of the Americans, ed Gary Williams (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1991) p. 375. (back)
(5) Marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès
de l'esprit humain (1794) cited in Thomas
Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) p 123, both
cited in Thomas McFarland, Paradoxes of
Freedom: the Romantic Mystique of a Transcendence (Oxford: Clarendon,
1996) p. 115. (back)
(6) It may or may not be significant that the action of the next Leatherstocking
novel is set in the year of Burke's Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,
1757. (back)
(7) Gleanings in Europe: England (1837), ed. Robert E Spiller (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1930) pp. 248-9.
(back)
(8) Obadiah Hulme, An Historical Essay on the English Constitution (London,
1771), 131. Jefferson, writing to John
Cartwright in 1824, rehearses Hulme's views with evident familiarity.
(back)
(9) Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961) pp. 135-43. (back)
(10) Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed Conor
Cruise O'Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968) p.
150. (back)
(11) Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society: or, a View of the Miseries
and Evils arising to Mankind from every
species of Artificial Society. 2nd edn. (London: Printed for R and
J Dodsley, 1757) p. 87. (back)
(12) Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) p. 111. (back)
(13) In his Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North
America (London, 1792) Imlay objects to
Jefferson's anxieties concerning unicameralism as expressed in his
Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), attributing them to
the influence of 'Burke's paradoxical book'. Since Jefferson's Notes
predate the Reflections, the 'paradoxical' book seems
likeliest, unless Imlay dates the Notes incorrectly, to be the Vindication.
(back)
(14) 'Introduction', Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origins of our Ideas on the Sublime and Beautiful,
ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) p. xiv. (back)
(15) Henry Nash Smith argues that Natty is created as a kind of antidote
to Judge Cooper: 'all the aspects of authority ... are
exhibited as radiating from the symbol of the father. But if the father
rules, and rules justly, it is still true that in this remembered
world of his childhood, Cooper figures as the son. Thus he is able
to impart real energy to the statement of the case for defiance
and revolt.' Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press, 1970) p. 62.
(back)
(16) Travels in America, tr. David Switzer( Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1969) p. 191. (back)
(17) Fiona Stafford, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from
Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1994) p. 250. (back)
(18) The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehannah, ed J F Beard,
Lance Schachterle and Kenneth M Andersen Jr
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1980) p. xlviii. (back)
(19) The Prairie, ed. Donald A. Ringe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) p. 27. (back)
(20) Donald Davie, The Heyday of Sir Walter Scott, p. 135. (back)
(21) Wyandotté, or the Hutted Knoll (1843; London: George Routledge,
1887) p. 5. To the European eye, Cooper goes on,
its scenery is 'tame and uninteresting as a whole, though it certainly
has exceptions that carry charms of this nature to the verge
of loveliness'. (back)
(22) Freud, Psychological Works, ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud et al,
24 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1966-74) vol. 21,
p. 96. (back)
(23) Studies in Classic American Literature (London: Heinemann, 1964) pp. 45-6. (back)
(24) Yvor Winters, In Defence of Reason (NY: The Swallow Press, 1947) p. 186. (back)
(25) Scenes of nature, signs of men (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) p. 10. (back)
(26) Cooper came to admire Jefferson after seeing him in Sully's portrait,
'not in red breeches and slovenly attire, but a
gentleman ... without any of the repulsive accompaniments of a political
“sans culotte”' The Letters and Journals of James
Fenimore Cooper, ed. James Franklin Beard (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press, 1960) vol. 1,
p. 95. (back)
(27) Cited by David Freeman Hawke, Paine (New York, 1974) p. 7. (back)
(28) See Robert E. Spiller , Fenimore Cooper: Critic of his Times (New
York: Minton, Balch & Co, 1931) pp. 6-23. My
general sense of Cooper's political bearings is based upon promiscuous
use of Charles Hansford Adams, The Guardian of the
Law, University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1990; James Franklin Beard, 'Cooper and the
Revolutionary Mythos', Early American Literature, 11 (1976) 84-104;
George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: the
Novelist, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967; Russell Kirk, The
Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot, 7th revised
edition, Chicago: Regnery Books, 1986; and especially John P McWilliams,
Political Justice in a Republic, Berkeley: U of
California Press, 1972. (back)
(29) Notions of the Americans, ed Gary Williams, p. 76. In pages 73-84 the 'traveling bachelor' eulogises Jay. (back)
(30) James Fenimore Cooper, History of the Navy, vol. 1, p. 90, cited
in McWilliams, Political Justice in a Republic, p. 38.
(back)
(31) John Dickinson, Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants
of the British Colonies (Philadelphia:
1768) pp. 38, 40. (back)
(32) Letters and Journals, vol. 2, p. 32, Sept 1830. (back)
(33) James Fenimore Cooper, New York (NY: Payson, 1930) pp. 58-9. (back)
(34) George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper the Novelist, p. 89. (back)
(35) Jefferson had raised the question whether 'one generation of men
has a right to bind another' and proposed as a principle
that 'the earth belongs in usufruct to the living'. The Portable Jefferson,
ed. Merrill D. Peterson (Penguin Books, 1977) p.
445. (back)
(36) James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, ed. George Dekker
and Larry Johnston (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Books, 1969) p. 84. (back)
(37) American Democrat, p. 125. (back)
(38) Burke, On Politics, Government and Society, p. 93. (back)
(39) Spiller, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of his Times, pp. 167-8. (back)
(40) The man whose most famous political act was to enter public controversy
in France over the relative cheapness of the
American system as compared with monarchy (the cheapness of American
government was among its greatest virtues in the
eyes of Adam Smith, Tom Paine and Sydney Smith) protested at the end
of his life that 'the cost of a presidential election fully
equals the expenditures of the empire of Great Britain, liberal as
they are known to be, for the maintenance of the dignity of its
chief magistracy. Nor is this the worst of it; for while much of the
civil list of a monarch is usefully employed in cherishing the
arts, and in fostering industry ... not a dollar of the millions that
are wasted every fourth year among ourselves in the struggles of
parties can be said to be applied to a purpose that has not a greater
tendency to evil than to good' (New York, p. 47). (back)
(41) McWilliams, Political Justice, p. 394. (back)
(42) Calhoun's discussion of the three estates—'the king; the lords
temporal and spiritual; and the commons'—concludes that
the acts of the British government 'may be fairly considered as the
result of the concurrent and joint action of the three estates'.
A Disquisition on Government (NY: Peter Smith, 1943) pp. 101-103. (back)
(43) James Mackintosh, Vindiciae Gallicae (1791) p. 223. Mackintosh
rapidly changed his mind. Wollstonecraft, too,
critiques the failure to move swiftly enough to a balanced constitution
as the Americans had done. An Historical and Moral
View of the French Revolution (1795) pp. 399-400. Jefferson, who in
1789 thought that the French would retain an
executive monarchy confessed to Adams that he had been wrong and that
the false dawn had cost 'eight or ten millions of
human beings' (Portable Jefferson, pp. 443, 551). (back)
(44) See Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957) pp.
12-20 for an appraisal of the Jacksonian case against bank-led oligarchy.
(back)
(45) In mid-career he could satirise the 'social stake' theory as he
found it in Europe (see The Monikins (1835); London:
George Routledge, n.d., p. 66), but at the beginning and the end of
his life he was himself a social stake man, doubtful about a
wide franchise, and even more doubtful about frequent elections. (back)
(46) James Grossman, James Fenimore Cooper (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1967)
p. 207. Grossman, however, attributes this
not to Burkean affinities but to 'secular Calvinism'. (back)
Richard Gravil
College of St. Mark & St. John
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