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AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS.
Edited By
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER.
[Illustration: J. Fenimore Cooper]
AMERICAN MEN OF LETTERS.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.
By
THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY,
Professor Of English In The Sheffield Scientific School,
Yale College.
BOSTON:
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY.
New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street.
The Riverside Press, Cambridge.
1884.
Copyright, 1882,
By THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY
_All rights reserved._
_The Riverside Press, Cambridge_:
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
PREFATORY NOTE.
When Cooper lay on his death-bed he enjoined his family to permit no
authorized account of his life to be prepared. A wish even, that was
uttered at such a time, would have had the weight of a command; and
from that day to this pious affection has carried out in the spirit as
well as to the letter the desire of the dying man. No biography of
Cooper has, in consequence, ever appeared. Nor is it unjust to say
that the sketches of his career, which are found either in magazines
or cyclopædias, are not only unsatisfactory on account of their
incompleteness, but are all in greater or less degree untrustworthy in
their details.
It is a necessary result of this dying injunction that the direct and
authoritative sources of information contained in family papers are
closed to the biographer. Still it is believed that no facts of
importance in the record of an eventful and extraordinary career have
been omitted or have even been passed over slightingly. A large part
of the matter contained in this volume has never been given to the
public in any form: and for that reason among others no pains have
been spared to make this narrative absolutely accurate, so far as it
goes. Correction of any errors, if such are found, will be gratefully
welcomed.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. (p. 001)
Chapter I.
1789-1820.
In one of the interior counties of New York, less than one hundred and
fifty miles in a direct line from the commercial capital of the Union,
lies the village of Cooperstown. The place is not and probably never
will be an important one; but in its situation and surroundings nature
has given it much that wealth cannot furnish or art create. It stands
on the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake, just at the point where the
Susquehanna pours out from it on its long journey to the Chesapeake.
The river runs here in a rapid current through a narrow valley, shut
in by parallel ranges of lofty hills. The lake, not more than nine
miles in length, is twelve hundred feet above tide-water. Low and
wooded points of land and sweeping bays give to its shores the
attraction of continuous diversity. About it, on every side, stand
hills, which slope gradually or rise sharply to heights varying from
two to five hundred feet. Lake, forest, and stream unite to form a
scene of quiet but picturesque beauty, that hardly needs the
additional charm of romantic association which has been imparted to
it.
Though it was here that the days of Cooper's childhood were (p. 002)
passed, it was not here that he was born. When that event took place
the village had hardly even an existence on paper. Cooper's father, a
resident of Burlington, New Jersey, had come, shortly after the close
of the Revolutionary War, into the possession of vast tracts of land,
embracing many thousands of acres, along the head-waters of the
Susquehanna. In 1786 he began the settlement of the spot, and in 1788
laid out the plot of the village which bears his name, and built for
himself a dwelling-house. On the 10th of November, 1790, his whole
family--consisting, with the servants, of fifteen persons--reached the
place. The future novelist was then a little less than thirteen months
old, for he had been born at Burlington on the 15th of September of
the year before. His father had determined to make the new settlement
his permanent home. He accordingly began in 1796, and in 1799
completed, the erection of a mansion which bore the name of Otsego
Hall. It was then and remained for a long time afterward the largest
private residence in that portion of the State. When in 1834 it came
into the hands of the son, it still continued to be the principal
dwelling in the flourishing village that had grown up about it.
On his father's side Cooper was of Quaker descent. The original
emigrant ancestor had come over in 1679, and had made extensive
purchases of land in the province of New Jersey. In that colony or in
Pennsylvania his descendants for a long time remained. Cooper himself
was the first one, of the direct line certainly, that ever even
revisited the mother-country. These facts are of slight importance in
themselves. In the general disbelief, however, which fifty years ago
prevailed in Great Britain, that anything good could come out of (p. 003)
this western Nazareth. Cooper was immediately furnished with an
English nativity as soon as he had won reputation. The same process
that gave to Irving a birthplace in Devonshire, furnished one also to
him in the Isle of Man. When this fiction was exploded, the fact of
emigration was pushed merely a little further back. It was transferred
to the father, who was represented as having gone from Buckinghamshire
to America. This latter assertion is still to be found in authorities
that are generally trustworthy. But the original one served a useful
purpose during its day. This assumed birthplace in the Isle of Man
enabled the English journalists that were offended with Cooper's
strictures upon their country to speak of him, as at one time they
often did, as an English renegade.
His mother's maiden name was Elizabeth Fenimore, and the family to
which she belonged was of Swedish descent. Cooper himself was the
eleventh of twelve children. Most of his brothers and sisters died
long before him, five of them in infancy. His own name was at first
simply James Cooper, and in this way he wrote it until 1826. But in
April of that year the Legislature of New York passed an act changing
the family name to Fenimore-Cooper. This was done in accordance with
the wish of his grandmother, whose descendants in the direct male line
had died out. But he seldom employed the hyphen in writing, and
finally gave up the use of it altogether.
The early childhood of Cooper was mainly passed in the wilderness at
the very time when the first wave of civilization was beginning to
break against its hills. There was everything in what he saw and heard
to impress the mind of the growing boy. He was on the border, if (p. 004)
indeed he could not justly be said to be in the midst of mighty and
seemingly interminable woods which stretched for hundreds of miles to
the westward. Isolated clearings alone broke this vast expanse of
foliage, which, covering the valleys and clinging to the sides and
crowning the summits of the hills, seemed to rise and fall like the
waves of the sea. The settler's axe had as yet scarcely dispelled the
perpetual twilight of the primeval forest. The little lake lay
enclosed in a border of gigantic trees. Over its waters hung the
interlacing branches of mighty oaks and beeches and pines. Its surface
was frequented by flocks of wild, aquatic birds,--the duck, the gull,
and the loon. In this lofty valley among the hills were also to be
found, then as now, in fullest perfection, the clear atmosphere, the
cloudless skies, and the brilliant light of midsummer suns, that
characterize everywhere the American highlands. More even than the
beauty and majesty of nature that lay open to the sight was the
mystery that constantly appealed to the imagination in what might lie
hidden in the depths of a wilderness that swept far beyond glance of
eye or reach of foot. This, indeed, may have affected the feelings of
only a few, but there were numerous interests and anxieties which all
had in common. The little village had early gone through many of the
trials which mark the history of most of the settlements in regions to
which few travelers found their way and commerce seldom came. Remote
from sources of supply, and difficult of access, it had known the time
when its population, scanty as it was, suffered from the scarcity of
food. Sullivan's successful expedition against the Six Nations did not
suffice to keep it from the alarm of savage attack that never came.
The immense forest shutting in the hamlet on every side had (p. 005)
terrors to some as real as were its attractions to others. Its
recesses were still the refuge of the deer; but they were also the
haunt of the wildcat, the wolf, and the bear. All these characteristics
of his early home made deep impression upon a nature fond of
adventure, and keenly susceptible to the charm of scenery. When
afterward in the first flush of his fame Cooper set out to revive the
memory of the days of the pioneers, he said that he might have chosen
for his subject happier periods, more interesting events, and possibly
more beauteous scenes, but he could not have taken any that would lie
so close to his heart. The man, indeed, never forgot what had been
dear to the boy; and to the spot where his earliest years were spent
he returned to pass the latter part of his life.
The original settlement, moreover, was composed of a more than usually
singular mixture of the motley crowd that always throngs to the
American frontier. The shock of convulsions in lands far distant
reached even to the highland valley shut in by the Otsego hills.
Representatives of almost every nationality in Christendom and
believers in almost every creed, found in it an asylum or a home. Into
this secluded haven drifted men whose lives had been wrecked in the
political storms that were then shaking Europe. Frenchmen, Dutchmen,
Germans, and Poles, came and tarried for a longer or shorter time.
Here Talleyrand, then an exile, spent several days with Cooper's
father, and, true to national instinct, wrote, according to local
tradition, complimentary verses, still preserved, on Cooper's sister.
An ex-captain of the British army was one of the original merchants of
the place. An ex-governor of Martinique was for a time the village (p. 006)
grocer. But the prevailing element in the population were the men of
New England, born levelers of the forest, the greatest wielders of the
axe the world has ever known. Over the somewhat wild and turbulent
democracy, made up of materials so diverse, the original proprietor
reigned a sort of feudal lord, rather by moral qualities than by any
conceded right.
Cooper's early instruction was received in the village school, carried
on in a building erected in 1795, and rejoicing in the somewhat
pretentious name of the Academy. The country at that time, however,
furnished few facilities for higher education anywhere; on the
frontier there were necessarily none. Accordingly Cooper was early
sent to Albany. There he entered the family of the rector of St.
Peter's Church, and became, with three or four other boys, one of his
private pupils. This gentleman, the son of an English clergyman, and
himself a graduate of an English university, had made his ways to
these western wilds with a fair amount of classical learning, with
thorough methods of study, and as it afterwards turned out, Cooper
tells us, with another man's wife. This did not, however, prevent him
from insisting upon the immense superiority of the mother-country in
morals as well as manners. A man of ability and marked character, he
clearly exerted over the impressionable mind of his pupil a greater
influence than the latter ever realized. He was in many respects,
indeed, a typical Englishman of the educated class of that time. He
had the profoundest contempt for republics and republican institutions.
The American Revolution he looked upon as only a little less monstrous
than the French, which was the sum of all iniquities. Connection with
any other church than his own was to be shunned, not at all (p. 007)
because it was unchristian, but because it was ungentlemanly and low.
But whatever his opinions and prejudices were, in the almost absolute
dearth then existing in this country of even respectable scholarship,
the opportunity to be under his instruction was a singular advantage.
Unfortunately it did not continue as long as it was desirable. In 1802
he died. It had been the intention to fit Cooper to enter the junior
class of Yale College; that project had now to be abandoned.
Accordingly he became, at the beginning of the second term of its
freshman year, a member of the class which was graduated in 1806. He
was then but a mere boy of thirteen, and with the exception of the
poet Hillhouse, two weeks his junior, was the youngest student in the
college.
Cooper himself informs us that he played all his first year, and
implies that he did little study during those which followed. To a
certain extent the comparative excellence of his preparation turned
out a disadvantage; the rigid training he had received enabled him to
accomplish without effort what his fellow-students found difficult.
Scholarship was at so low an ebb that the ability to scan Latin was
looked upon as a high accomplishment; and he himself asserts that the
class to which he belonged was the first in Yale College that had ever
tried it. This may be questioned; but we need not feel any distrust of
his declaration, that little learning of any kind found its way into
his head. Least of all will he be inclined to doubt it whom extended
experience in the class-room has taught to view with profoundest
respect the infinite capability of the human mind to resist the
introduction of knowledge.
Far better than study, Cooper liked to take solitary walks about (p. 008)
the wooded hills surrounding New Haven, and the shores of the bay upon
which it lies. These nursed the fondness for outdoor life and scenery
which his early associations had inspired. In these communings with
nature, he was unconsciously storing his mind with impressions and
images, in the representation and delineation of which he was afterward
to attain surpassing excellence. But the study of scenery, however
desirable in itself, cannot easily be included in a college
curriculum. No proficiency in it can well compensate for failure in
studies of perhaps less intrinsic importance. The neglect of these
latter had no tendency to recommend him to the regard of those in
authority. Positive faults were in course of time added to negative. A
frolic in which he was engaged during his third year was attended by
consequences more serious than disfavor. It led to his dismissal. The
father took the boy's side, and the usual struggle followed between
the parents and those who, according to a pretty well worn-out
educational theory, stand to the student in place of parents. In this
particular case the latter triumphed, and Cooper left Yale. In spite
of his dismissal he retained pleasant recollections of some of his old
instructors; and with one of them, Professor Silliman, he kept up in
later years friendly personal relations and occasional correspondence.
It had been a misfortune for the future author to lose the severe if
somewhat wooden drill of his preparatory instructor. It was an
additional misfortune to lose the education, scanty and defective as
it then was, which was imparted by the college. It might not and
probably would not have contributed anything to Cooper's intellectual
development in the way of accuracy of thought or of statement. It (p. 009)
would not in all probability have added materially to his stock of
knowledge. But with all its inefficiency and inadequacy, it would very
certainly have had the effect of teaching him to aim far more than he
did at perfection of form. He possibly gained more than he lost by
being transferred at so early an age to other scenes. But the lack of
certain qualities in his writings, which educated men are perhaps the
only ones to notice, can be traced pretty directly to this lack of
preliminary intellectual drill.
His academical career having been thus suddenly cut short, he entered
in a little while upon one better suited to his adventurous nature.
Boys are sent to sea, he tells us in one of his later novels, for the
cure of their ethical ailings. This renovating influence of ocean life
he had at any rate a speedy opportunity to try. It was decided that he
should enter the navy. The position of his father, who had been for
several years a representative in Congress, and was a leading member
of the Federalist party, naturally held out assurances that the son
would receive all the advancement to which he would be legitimately
entitled. At that time no naval school existed. It was the custom, in
consequence, for boys purposing to fit themselves for the position of
officers to serve a sort of apprenticeship in the merchant marine.
Accordingly in the autumn of 1806, Cooper was placed on board a vessel
that was to sail from the port of New York with a freight of flour to
Cowes and a market. The ship was named the Sterling, and was commanded
by Captain John Johnston, of Wiscasset, Maine, who was also part owner.
Cooper's position and prospects were well known; but he was employed
regularly before the mast and was never admitted to the cabin. The (p. 010)
vessel cleared from the port of New York on the 16th of October. The
passage was a long and stormy one; forty days went by before land was
seen after it had once been left behind. The ship reached the other
side just at the time when the British Channel was alive with vessels
of war in consequence of one of the periodical anticipations of
invasions from France. It went to London, and stayed for some time
there discharging its cargo and taking in new. Cooper embraced the
opportunity to see all the sights he could of the great metropolis.
"He had a rum time of it in his sailor rig," said afterward one of his
shipmates, "but hoisted in a wonderful deal of gibberish, according to
his own account of the cruise."
The Sterling sailed with freight in January, 1807, for the Straits of
Gibraltar. It took on board a cargo of barilla at Aguilas and Almeria,
and returned to England, reaching the Thames in May. Both going and
coming the voyage was a stormy one, and during it several of the
incidents occurred that Cooper worked up afterward into powerful
passages in his sea novels. In London the vessel lay several weeks,
discharging its cargo and taking in more, which this time consisted of
dry goods. Towards the end of July, it left London for America, and
reached Philadelphia on the 18th of September, after another long and
stormy passage of fifty-two days.
This was Cooper's introduction to sea life. During the year he had
spent in the merchant vessel he had seen a good deal of hard service.
His preparatory studies having been completed after a fashion, he now
regularly entered the navy. His commission as midshipman bears (p. 011)
date the 1st of January, 1808. On the 24th of the following February
he was ordered to report to the commanding naval officer at New York.
But the records of the government give little information as to the
duties to which he was assigned during the years he remained in its
service. The knowledge we have of his movements comes mainly from what
he himself incidentally discloses in published works or letters of a
later period. The facts we learn from all sources together, are but
few. He served for a while on board the Vesuvius in 1808. During that
year it seemed as if the United States and Great Britain were about to
drift into war. Preparations of various kinds were made; and one of
the things ordered was the dispatch to Lake Ontario of a party, of
which Cooper was one, under the command of Lieutenant Woolsey. The
intention was to build a brig of sixteen guns to command that inland
water; and the port of Oswego, then a mere hamlet of some twenty
houses, was the place selected for its construction. Around it lay a
wilderness, thirty or forty miles in depth. Here the party spent the
following winter, and during it the Oneida, as the brig was called,
was finished. Early in the spring of 1809 it was launched. By that
time, however, the war-cloud had blown over, and the vessel was not
then used for the purpose for which it had been constructed. More
permanent results, however, were accomplished than the building of a
ship. The knowledge and experience which Cooper then gained was
something beyond and above what belonged to his profession. It is to
his residence on the shores of that inland sea that we owe the vivid
picture drawn of Lake Ontario in "The Pathfinder" and of the
wilderness which then surrounded it on every side.
After the completion of the Oneida, Cooper accompanied Lieutenant (p. 012)
Woolsey on a visit to Niagara Falls. The navy records show that on the
10th of June, 1809, he was left by his commander in charge of the
gunboats on Lake Champlain. They further reveal the fact that on the
27th of September of this same year he was granted a furlough to make
a European voyage. This project for some reason was given up, as on
the 13th of November, 1809, he was ordered to the Wasp, then under the
command of Lawrence, who afterwards fell in the engagement between the
Shannon and the Chesapeake. To this officer, like himself a native of
Burlington, he was very warmly attached. The next notice of him
contained in the official records is to the effect that on the 9th of
May, 1810, permission was granted him to go on furlough for twelve
months. Whether he availed himself of it is not known. An event soon
occurred, however, that put an end to his naval career as effectively
as one had previously been put to his collegiate. An attachment had
sprung up some time before between him and a Miss DeLancey. On the 1st
of January, 1811, the couple were married at Mamaroneck, Westchester
County, New York. Cooper was then a little more than twenty-one years
old; the bride lacked very little of being nineteen.
His wife belonged to a Huguenot family, which towards the end of the
seventeenth century had fled from France, and had finally settled in
Westchester. During the Revolutionary War the DeLanceys had taken the
side of the crown against the colonies. Several of them held positions
in the British army. John Peter DeLancey, whose daughter Cooper had
married, had been himself a captain in that service. After the
recognition of American independence he went to England, but, (p. 013)
having resigned his commission, returned in 1789 to this country, and
spent the remainder of his life at his home in Mamaroneck. The fact
that his kinsmen by marriage had belonged to the defeated party in the
Revolutionary struggle led Cooper in his writings to treat the Tories,
as they were called, with a fairness and generosity which in that day
few were disposed to show, at least in print. This tenderness is
plainly to be seen in "The Spy," written at the beginning of his
career; it is still more marked in "Wyandotte," produced in the latter
part of it, when circumstances had made him profoundly dissatisfied
with much that he saw about him. One of the last, though least heated,
of the many controversies in which he was engaged was in regard to the
conduct on a particular occasion of General Oliver DeLancey, a cousin
of his wife's father. This officer was charged unjustly, as Cooper
believed, with the brutal treatment of the American General Woodhull,
who had fallen into his hands. The discussion in regard to this point
was carried on in the "New York Home Journal" in the early part of
1848.
It seldom falls to the lot of the biographer to record a home life
more serene and happy than that which fell to the share of the man
whose literary life is the stormiest to be found in the history of
American men of letters. Cooper, like many persons of fiery temperament
and strong will, was very easily managed through his affections. In
theory he maintained the headship of man in the household in the
extremest form. He gives in several of his works no uncertain
indication of his views on that point. This only serves to make more
conspicuous the fact, which forces itself repeatedly upon the
attention, that his movements were largely, if not mainly, (p. 014)
by his wife. This becomes noticeable at the very beginning of their
union. She was unwilling to undergo the long and frequent separations
from her husband that the profession of a naval officer would demand.
Accordingly, he abandoned the idea of continuing in it. The acceptance
of his resignation bears date the 6th of May, 1811. He had then been
regularly in the service a little less than three years and a half.
After quitting the navy Cooper led for a long time a somewhat unsettled
life. For about a year and a half he resided at Heathcote Hall,
Mamaroneck, the residence of his wife's father. He then rented a small
cottage in the neighborhood, and in this remained about a year. His
early home, however, was the spot to which his heart turned. To
Cooperstown, in consequence, he went back in 1814, taking up his
residence at a place outside the village limits, called Fenimore. He
purposed to devote his attention to agriculture, and accordingly began
at this spot the building of a large stone farm house. While it was in
process of construction his wife, anxious to be near her own family,
persuaded him to go back to Westchester. Thither in 1817 he went,
leaving his dwelling at Fenimore unfinished, and in 1823 it was
completely destroyed by fire. In Westchester, a few months after his
return, he took up his residence, in the town of Scarsdale, on what
was called the Angevine farm, from the name of a French family that
had occupied it for several generations. The site of his dwelling was
a commanding one, and gave from the south front an extensive view of
the country about it and of Long Island Sound. It remained his home
until the literary profession, upon which he unexpectedly entered, (p. 015)
forced him to leave it for New York city.
Great changes had occurred during these years, or were occurring, in
his personal surroundings. His father had died in 1809, and his mother
in 1817. Before 1820 five daughters had been born to him. The first of
these did not live to the age of two years; but the others all reached
maturity. The second, Susan Augusta, herself an authoress, became in
his later years his secretary and amanuensis, and would naturally have
written his life, had not his unfortunate dying injunction stood in
the way. A son, Fenimore, born at Angevine, in 1821, died early, and
his youngest child, Paul, now a lawyer at Albany, was not born until
after his removal to New York city. Surrounded by his growing family,
he led for the two or three years following 1817 a life that gave no
indication of what was to be his career. His thoughts were principally
directed to improving the little estate that had come into his
possession. He planted trees, he built fences, he drained swamps, he
planned a lawn. The one thing which he did not do was to write.