JAMES FENIMORE COOPER
TWO NOVELS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
The Spy
Lionel Lincoln
Alan Taylor, editor
LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER:
TWO NOVELS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
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eISBN 978–1–59853–588–4
Contents
Introduction by Alan Taylor
THE SPY: A TALE OF THE NEUTRAL GROUND
LIONEL LINCOLN; OR, THE LEAGUER OF BOSTON
About the Illustrations
The eight color plates reproduce the paintings by
American illustrator C. LeRoy Baldridge (1889–1977)
created for the 1924 Minton, Balch edition of The Spy.
Chronology
Note on the Texts
Notes
Introduction
BY ALAN TAYLOR
BORN IN 1788, James Cooper (the Fenimore would come later, in 1826) was an heir to the American Revolution. His father, William Cooper, lived through the conflict, but remained Quaker enough to avoid fighting against the British and their Loyalist supporters. Ambitious and resourceful, the elder Cooper exploited the turmoil to become rich through speculation in frontier lands. With Alexander Hamilton as his lawyer, Cooper wrenched from a Loyalist family, the Prevosts, thousands of acres around Otsego Lake in central New York. There he founded a village, Cooperstown, and retailed farms to settlers from New England. Emerging as the dominant figure in the region, he built a mansion, “Otsego Hall,” and raised a family, which included the future novelist.1
Probated in 1809, William Cooper’s will described an immense and apparently secure fortune bestowed upon his widow and six surviving children. On paper, each child received lands and securities worth at least $50,000, but within fifteen years, the estate collapsed into financial ruin. By the mid-1820s, the heirs were dead or bankrupt or, in James’s case, had become a novelist. The heirs contributed to the collapse through lavish living and mismanagement, but they had inherited overvalued assets further undercut by a severe depression, which began in 1819. William Cooper had conveyed an illusion of secure wealth to heirs raised to expect a life of luxury.2
Upon receiving his apparently lavish inheritance, James left his naval career and married Susan Augusta De Lancey, the eighteen-year-old daughter of John Peter De Lancey of Westchester County. The De Lanceys had been one of the two wealthiest and most powerful families in colonial New York. Remaining loyal to the British empire during the Revolution, the De Lanceys paid a high price for choosing the losing side. The victorious Patriots confiscated most of the family’s properties. After the war, De Lancey returned to Westchester and managed to rescue a fraction of his former estate—but little of his family’s political clout. Consequently, the marriage of James Cooper and Susan Augusta De Lancey matched new money with old status. The match seemed to recoup the De Lancey losses with the fruits of William Cooper’s appropriation of property from another Loyalist family, the Prevosts.3
For the first two years of their marriage, the couple lived on the De Lancey estate in Westchester, where Cooper learned about the Revolutionary War at its worst. From mid-1776 to the end of the war in the spring of 1783, Westchester had been a bloody, burning no-man’s-land between the British and Loyalist army occupying New York City and the Patriot forces to the north. A Patriot chaplain, Timothy Dwight, pitied the civilians caught between two foraging, looting armies: “Their furniture was extensively plundered or broken to pieces. The walls, floors, and windows were injured both by violence and decay. . . . Their cattle were gone. Their [fences] were burnt.” Robbers completed their ruin by torturing farmers to force the revelation of hidden property. Most of the inhabitants became refugees, fleeing away from one army or the other. According to Dwight, those who stayed “feared everybody who they saw and loved nobody. . . . Fear apparently was the only passion in which they were animated.” The survivors learned to speak no politics and to traffic in the information they could gather about either army. Thirty years after the Patriot victory, Cooper resided in Westchester, where he gathered old war stories. He recognized the rich narrative possibilities of hidden identities in a chaotic war zone that tested everyone’s principles. First, however, he had to teach himself to write a novel.4
Cooper began to write fiction in 1820, at the same time that his familial estate crumbled into lawsuits and foreclosures. According to his daughter, Susan Fenimore Cooper, her father took up a parlor-room challenge from his wife to do better than an English novelist he had derided. Writing from dawn to evening, day after day, he rapidly fabricated a novel of manners set in England and entitled Precaution. Vain and sensitive, Cooper longed to publish his manuscript but dreaded the mockery of failure—particularly if identified as dabbling in the rather feminine genre of the novel. As a test, he sought approval from the gentleman whom he most admired: the aging Patriot leader and former New York governor, John Jay, who lived nearby in Westchester County. Pretending to present the work of an anonymous friend, Cooper read his manuscript to an intimate group of friends in Jay’s parlor. Relieved by their interest and approval, Cooper hired a New York City publisher to produce Precaution in November.5
The novel sold poorly, but Cooper had fallen in love with crafting and controlling characters, plots, and morals in an imagined world. And he delighted in the gamesmanship and business of publishing and marketing a novel. In a letter to his publisher, Cooper confessed that he had written Precaution as a lark and experiment because he “merely wish’d to see myself in print—and honestly own [that] I am pleased with my appearance.” He added, “I can make a much better one—am making a much better one.”6
In that new novel, Cooper took inspiration from the great British novelist, Sir Walter Scott, by mixing history with fiction to create an epic tale of national origins. Exploiting medieval settings, Scott crafted appealing tales that provided heroes to triumph over villains in the English and Scottish past. Published in 1819, his most celebrated novel, Ivanhoe, had become immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. Scott’s novels were sufficiently “manly,” moral, and didactic to disarm critics of the genre in America. In his second novel, Cooper meant to emulate Scott for Americans by recovering the romance of their Revolution. Even before Precaution appeared in print, Cooper assured his publisher that he had “commenced another tale to be called the ‘Spy,’ scene [set] in West-Chester County, and time of the r
evolutionary war.”7
He took on the daunting “task of making American manners and American scenes interesting to an American reader.” No American writer had produced a popular novel explicitly set in the United States, for readers preferred English novels, which offered more romantic characters and exotic settings—lords and ladies in castles or palaces—than seemed possible in common and commercial America. Cooper wryly observed that murder “is much more interesting in a castle than in a cornfield.” And Americans regarded their Revolution as a topic for celebration in Fourth of July orations rather than for moral exploration through fiction. Lacking copyright protection, pirated English novels were cheaper and more fashionable for Americans, who still felt insecure about their own tastes and dismissive of native authors. Culturally they remained colonists. Consequently, the most talented American novelists of the previous generation, Charles Brockden Brown and Susanna Rowson, had reaped commercial failure. A British critic notoriously scoffed that no one ever read an American novel.8
In The Spy, Cooper elaborated upon a story John Jay had told him of a resourceful but misunderstood American spy active in Westchester County during the Revolutionary War. Jay had managed Enoch Crosby, a shoemaker who had gone undercover to ferret out Loyalists in the border zone. The novel’s protagonist, Harvey Birch, seems to be a lowly peddler of scant education, apparent greed, and dubious loyalty, flitting through the war zone and behind the lines of both sets of belligerents. Only at the end does the narrator reveal, in a confidential conversation between Birch and General Washington, that the peddler had suffered years of calumny and abuse to preserve his cover while, in fact, serving the commander as a Patriot spy. Selflessly committed to the new nation, Birch refuses the belated payment offered by Washington: “No—no—no—not a dollar of your gold will I touch; poor America has need of it all!”9
While Jay provided the Patriot story, the De Lanceys supplied the novel’s undercurrent of unease with the radical and violent aspects of the Revolution. Although the family had made peace with American independence, the De Lanceys retained seared memories of the popular upheaval and rough justice that common militiamen and committee members had inflicted on Loyalist gentlemen. The De Lanceys served as the model for the genteel Wharton family, Loyalists morally paralyzed by the chaos unleashed by the most vulgar Patriots, particularly the brutal, plundering gang known as “The Skinners.” While Birch serves to ennoble common men, at least those who took their lead from their superior in every way, George Washington, the brutal, plundering gang of “Skinners” exposes what happens when a revolution empowers rogues. Washington praises Birch as one of a kind, as an exception who proves the rule, as “one of the very few that I have employed who have acted faithfully to our cause.” Birch demonstrates his nobility of soul by recognizing Washington as his moral exemplar: “to know that your Excellency is my friend, is a blessing that I prize more than all the gold of England’s treasury.” Embracing a conservative reading of the Revolution, The Spy expressed relief that Patriot gentlemen ultimately preserved control over American society thanks to the inspired leadership of Jay and Washington—and the dutiful deference of Harvey Birch. After the shooting stopped, this sort of limited revolution could welcome back the De Lanceys to rebuild their estate.10
Published in two volumes, in December 1821, The Spy became the first great American bestseller in fiction. Although highly priced at $2 each, the first thousand copies sold out within a month. By the end of 1822, Cooper’s second novel had sold at least 6,000 copies—an unprecedented success for an American novelist. The New York newspapers lauded the novel as the best ever published in the United States. In March 1822, a popular play based on The Spy began a long run in New York City. Two years later, a New York newspaper recalled that the novel had “produced a sensation which ran with electric speed through every state of the Union.” Cooper had timed his subject perfectly, for Americans were conscious that the revolutionary generation was passing from the scene. Younger readers longed to experience vicariously the excitement of their national origins—especially in the wake of the recent, second conflict with Britain, the War of 1812, which had concluded in early 1815. Nodding to that interest, Cooper provided a coda for an aged Birch to die fighting the British on the Niagara frontier in 1814.11
Readers felt exhilarated by a novel that so vividly depicted American manners, characters, and settings. Cooper’s novel assumed patriotic significance as a vindication of American culture, as proof that America had a talented novelist equivalent to Scott. Warming to that role, Cooper grandly announced that he meant to “rouse the sleeping talents of the nation, and in some measure clear us from the odium of dullness.” Heady with success, he moved to New York City and founded the Bread and Cheese Club, a society of notable artists, jurists, and poets. He was already at work on his third novel, The Pioneers, set in Otsego County and introducing what would become his most celebrated character, the frontier hunter Natty Bumppo.
Frustrated in his earlier ambition of playing the landed gentleman, Cooper exulted in his newfound prestige and fame as a novelist and literary statesman. Publishing fulfilled his deep longing to exercise public influence. Unable to match his father’s success as a politician and developer, Cooper found prestige and clout in the most unlikely way, as a novelist. For no American before had succeeded at the most implausible and risky of ventures: writing and publishing novels set in America. Indeed, he was the only American to achieve wealth as an author before 1850. With the money, he repurchased “Otsego Hall,” the Cooper family mansion, from one of William Cooper’s creditors.12
The Spy launched Cooper as the most influential popular American novelist of his century. In Harvey Birch, Cooper created the prototype for the essential American hero. Like Cooper’s greatest character, Natty Bumppo of the “Leatherstocking” novels, Birch is a common man of scant education but profound inner dignity, a marginal and rootless loner operating in a violent no-man’s-land beyond the rule of law with only his own code of justice as a guide. In his 1831 introduction to the novel, Cooper described the prototype for Birch as “poor [and] ignorant so far as the usual instruction was concerned; but cool, shrewd, and fearless by nature.” Ever since, American writers and filmmakers have reimagined the heroic loner as the quintessential American archetype in innumerable novels, stories, and films. Cooper and his most popular characters cast a long shadow. Ultimately, we owe Sam Spade, Dirty Harry, Han Solo, Django, and countless other variants on the archetype to his innovation.13
Cooper planned to follow the success of The Spy with a series of novels exploring the American Revolution and the theme of divided, difficult loyalties. Only one of these novels would materialize, Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston, published in 1825. Sent to England for schooling, the American-born Lincoln secures a commission in the British army and ascends to the rank of major. At the start of the Revolution, Lincoln joins the garrison occupying Boston. When war erupts, he must choose between official duty and the tug of his local family. As the novel unfolds, he is unable fully to commit to either side.
Washington’s dominance in The Spy vindicates the Patriot cause as ultimately worth the short-term nastiness of a civil war. In Lionel Lincoln, Cooper takes a contrasting, more conflicted point of view, making the two novels especially interesting to read together, as a diptych of revolution. As in The Spy, the new novel offers a key character, Ralph, in disguise, but this one is less of a credit to the Patriot cause. Throughout, Ralph preaches patriotism forcefully and apparently lucidly, but in the end he is revealed to be both Lincoln’s father and an escapee from an insane asylum. In its purest form, Cooper implies, the Revolution was madness. To reiterate the point, another defiant Patriot character, Job Pray, is identified as Lincoln’s half brother and an “idiot.” Lincoln marries a Loyalist woman and returns to Britain in military defeat, but consoles himself with an aristocratic inheritance: a title with a seat in Parliament—far from the mad Patriot crowd.14
The novel was a commercial dud, a great reversal of Cooper’s success with The Spy and The Pioneers. Based on substantial research, Lionel Lincoln provided a keenly imagined sense of place and vividly narrated battle scenes, particularly the iconic early clashes at Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill. But few American readers wanted to devote time to a protagonist who could not rally immediately to the cause of the new country and who ultimately preferred an aristocrat’s life in Britain. Bitter at the novel’s commercial failure, Cooper became less overtly historical in his later writings, preferring directly didactic messages or exotic romances set on the frontier or on distant seas.
The Spy and Lionel Lincoln continue to warrant our attention for their psychological exploration of the ambivalence that so many Americans felt when caught up in the civil war that we call the American Revolution. From his De Lancey connections, Cooper learned much about the brutality and divisions of the Revolution. A congenital contrarian, Cooper could not recycle the popular myth of a united and heroic American people rallying, insistently and consistently, against the “tyranny” of British rule, a melodramatic story of spontaneous, unifying patriotism that trivialized and dismissed Loyalists as a few vicious and misguided traitors. The mythic version makes patriotism an easy, natural choice—obscuring the true difficulties and dangers of political choices in a civil war. More than most of his fellow Americans, Cooper was sensitive to the moral ambiguities of a war many wanted simply to celebrate. With the voices of the revolutionary generation falling silent, he understood that fiction could reveal these uncertainties with a force and immediacy that no other medium could match.15
1 Alan Taylor, William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
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