1820

 __________ 

“We have the wolf by the ear.”

Thomas Jefferson

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NOTE TO TEACHERS: I always cited this quote for students, and asked what Jefferson meant. For classroom purposes, I changed it slightly to, “by the ears,” and would mimic holding a wolf at arms’ length. What’s the problem with slavery, then – the wolf – in regard to the nation?

February: The questions revolving around the admission of Missouri as a slave state quickly fester. “Who would have thought, Senator James Barbour commented, “that the little speck we…saw [last session] was to be swelled into the importance that it has now assumed, that upon its decision depended the duration of the Union.” (24/450) 

It seemed to President Monroe that restricting slavery would place the control of the nation permanently in the hands of the Northern states. Since, to his way of thinking, the real objective of these Northern leaders was power, he believed that they were willing to accept disunion, if their plans could not be achieved in any other fashion.

Slaves picking tobacco.

 

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March 6: The Missouri Compromise is passed. The vote to delete the clause forbidding slavery passes the Senate, 90-87. Even John Quincy Adams used his influence to convince friends to vote in favor. A second dispute, over whether the new state could ban the migration of free Negroes, was solved by a vaguely worded compromise, asserting that the new state would honor the privileges and immunities citizens enjoyed under the U.S. Constitution. (24/454)

 

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March 22: Commodore Stephen Decatur dies from wounds received in a duel.

 

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May: President Monroe explains why he was reluctant to help the Spanish colonies in their revolts: “I am satisfied that had we even joined them in the war, we should have done them more harm than good, as we might have drawn all Europe on them, not to speak of the injury we should have done to ourselves.” (24/410)

 

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THE RUSSIANS still have a colony in Alaska and had establish themselves on the Farallon Islands, right off the bay of San Francisco, where they had a small fort. Van Loon notes that “the Tsar suddenly forbade all foreign vessels (including all American vessels) to come within a hundred miles of his American possessions.” (124/304)

 

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James Fenimore Cooper.

IN THIS YEAR, James Fenimore Cooper first turns to writing. The following description is from Halleck’s History of American Literature. 

 

“One of the outposts of civilization.” 

YOUTH. … He was born in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1789, the year made memorable by the French Revolution. While he was still an infant, the Cooper family moved to the southeastern shore of Otsego Lake and founded the village of Cooperstown, at the point where the Susquehanna River furnishes an outlet for the lake. In this romantic place he passed the most impressionable part of his boyhood.

 

At the close of the eighteenth century, Cooperstown was one of the outposts of civilization. Few clearings had been made in the vast mysterious forests, which appealed so deeply to the boy’s imagination, and which still sheltered deer, bear, and Indians. The most vivid local story which his young ears heard was the account of the Cherry Valley massacre, which had taken place a few miles from Cooperstown only eleven years before he was born. Cooper himself felt the fascination of the trackless forests before he communicated it to his readers.

 

He entered Yale in 1802 [note that he was only 13], but he did not succeed in eradicating his love of outdoor life and of the unfettered habits of the pioneer, and did not remain to graduate. The faculty dismissed him in his junior year. …

 

Cooper’s father sent him off to serve a year on a merchant vessel. The future writer then joined the U.S. Navy as a midshipman. He resigned from the service in 1811, when he married. 

BECOMES AN AUTHOR.—Cooper had reached the age of thirty without even attempting to write a book. In 1820 he remarked one day to his wife that he thought he could write a better novel than the one which he was then reading to her. She immediately challenged him to try, and he promptly wrote the novel called Precaution.

 

Critics of that period, often British, “considered American subjects commonplace and uninteresting.” Cooper decided to write about English life, knew nothing about local color, and the book was a fizzle. 

 

A patriotic duty to make American subjects fashionable. 

This book was soon forgotten, and Cooper might never have written another, had not some sensible friends insisted that it was his patriotic duty to make American subjects fashionable. A friend related to him the story of a spy of Westchester County, New York, who during the Revolution served the American cause with rare fidelity and sagacity. Cooper was then living in this very county, and, being attracted by the subject, he soon completed the first volume of The Spy, which was at once printed. As he still doubted, however, whether his countrymen would read “a book that treated of their own familiar interests,” he delayed writing the second volume for several months. When he did start to write it, his publisher feared that it might be too long to pay, so before Cooper had thought out the intervening chapters, he wrote the last chapter and had it printed and paged to satisfy the publisher. When The Spy was published in 1821, it immediately sold well in America, although such was the bondage to English standards of criticism that many who read the book hesitated to express an opinion until they had heard the verdict from England. When the English received the book, however, they fairly devoured it, and it became one of the most widely read tales of the early nineteenth century. Harvey Birch, the hero of the story, is one of the great characters of our early fiction.

 

Cooper now adopted writing as a profession. In less than thirty years, he wrote more than thirty romances, in most cases of two volumes each. When he went to Europe in 1826, the year of the publication of The Last of the Mohicans, he found that his work was as well known abroad as at home. Sir Walter Scott, who met Cooper in Paris, mentions in his diary for November 6, 1826, a reception by a French princess, and adds the note, “Cooper was there, so the American and Scotch lions took the field together.” 

 

A series of libel cases. 

Halleck notes that the author’s later years were marred by an “unfortunate incident.” He returned from Europe in 1833. Four years later, some of his neighbors in Cooperstown aroused his anger. 

Here in the summer of 1837 there occurred an unfortunate incident which embittered the rest of his life and for a while made him the most unpopular of American authors. Some of his townspeople cut down one of his valuable trees and otherwise misused the picnic grounds on a part of his estate fronting the lake. When he remonstrated, the public denounced him and ordered his books removed from the local library. He then forbade the further use of his grounds by the public. Many of the newspapers throughout the state misrepresented his action, and he foolishly sued them for libel. From that time the press persecuted him. He sued the Albany Evening Journal, edited by Thurlow Weed, and received four hundred dollars damage. Weed thereupon wrote in the New York Tribune:—

 

“The value of Mr. Cooper’s character has been judicially determined. It is worth exactly four hundred dollars.” 

Cooper promptly sued The Tribune, and was awarded two hundred dollars. In the heat of this controversy Thurlow Weed incautiously opened Cooper’s The Pathfinder, which had just appeared, and sat up all night to finish the book. During the progress of these suits, Cooper unfortunately wrote a novel, Home as Found, satirizing, from a somewhat European point of view, the faults of his countrymen. A friend, trying to dissuade him from publishing such matter, wrote, “You lose hold on the American public by rubbing down their shins with brickbats, as you do.” Cooper, however, published the book in 1838, and then there was a general rush to attack him. A critic of his History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839), a work which is still an authority for the time of which it treats, abused the book and made reflections on Cooper’s veracity. The author brought suit for libel, and won his case in a famous trial in which he was his own lawyer.

 

Cooper’s reputation suffered greatly and “diminished the circulation of Cooper’s books in America during the rest of his life.” 

Even on his deathbed he thought of the unjust criticism from which he had suffered, and asked his family not to aid in the preparation of any account of his life. He died in 1851 at the age of sixty-two, and was buried at Cooperstown. Lounsbury thus concludes an excellent biography of this great writer of romance:—

 

“America has had among her representatives of the irritable race of writers many who have shown far more ability to get on pleasantly with their fellows than Cooper…. But she counts on the scanty roll of her men of letters the name of no one who acted from purer patriotism or loftier principle. She finds among them all no manlier nature and no more heroic soul.”

 

NOTE TO TEACHERS: My students always found it interesting when I noted that inanimate objects, such as ships, and here the nation itself, controlled by men, were referred to by use of the feminine pronoun. 

It was amusing to tell the young ladies in class that some feminists had suggested a new word, “womyn,” not based on men, to describe their sex. We started throwing our arms up in the air to make a “Y.” I’d see female students in the hall, etc. and throw up the “Y” and we had fun with it. 

 

The Leatherstocking Tales. 

Back to Halleck: 

GREATEST ROMANCES.—Cooper’s greatest achievement is the series known as The Leatherstocking Tales. These all have as their hero Leatherstocking, a pioneer variously known as Hawkeye, La Longue Carabine (The Long Rifle), and Natty Bumppo. … Leatherstocking embodies the fearlessness, the energy, the rugged honesty, of the worthiest of our pioneers, of those men who opened up our vast inland country and gave it to us to enjoy. Ulysses is no more typically Grecian than Leatherstocking is American.

 

The Leatherstocking Tales are five in number. The order in which they should be read to follow the hero from youth to old age is as follows:—

 

The Deerslayer; or The First War Path (1841).

The Last of the Mohicans; a Narrative of 1757 (1826).

The Pathfinder; or the Inland Sea (1840).

The Pioneers; or the Sources of the Susquehanna (1823).

The Prairie; a Tale (1827)

 

… These books are the prose Iliad and Odyssey of the eighteenth-century American pioneer. Instead of relating the fall of Ilium, Cooper tells of the conquest of the wilderness. The wanderings or Leatherstocking in the forest and the wilderness are substituted for those of Ulysses on the sea. This story could not have been related with much of the vividness of an eye-witness of the events, if it had been postponed beyond Cooper’s day. Before that time had forever passed, he fixed in living romance one remarkable phase of our country’s development. The persons of this romantic drama were the Pioneer and the Indian; the stage was the trackless forest and the unbroken wilderness.

 

The Last of the Mohicans has been the favorite of the greatest number of readers. In this story Chingachgook, the Indian, and Uncas, his son, share with Hawkeye our warmest admiration. The American boy longs to enter the fray to aid Uncas. Cooper knew that the Indian had good traits, and he embodied them in these two red men. Scott took the same liberty of presenting the finer aspects of chivalry and neglecting its darker side. Cooper, however, does show an Indian fiend in Magua.

 

Cooper’s work in this series brings us face to face with the activities of nature and man in God's great out of doors. Cooper makes us realize that the life of the pioneer was not without its elemental spirit of poetry. We may feel something of this spirit in the reply of Leatherstocking to the trembling Cora, when she asked him at midnight what caused a certain fearful sound:—

 

“‘Lady,’ returned the scout, solemnly, ‘I have listened to all the sounds of the woods for thirty years, as a man will listen, whose life and death depend so often on the quickness of his ears. There is no whine of the panther, no whistle of the catbird, nor any invention of the devilish Mingos, that can cheat me. I have heard the forest moan like mortal men in their affliction; often and again have I listened to the wind playing its music in the branches of the girdled trees; and I have heard the lightning cracking in the air, like the snapping of blazing brush, as it spitted forth sparks and forked flames; but never have I thought that I heard more than the pleasure of him, who sported with the things of his hand. But neither the Mohicans, nor I, who am a white man without a cross, can explain the cry just heard.’” 

 

Mark Twain’s takedown of Cooper’s writing. 

Halleck admits that some of Cooper’s other works “are almost unreadable,” but admits the writer’s central place in American literature. Mark Twain later provided a hysterical analysis of Cooper’s flaws as a writer. 

A sampling: 

In his little box of stage properties [Cooper] kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.

 

Twain can’t help himself in lambasting Cooper. My favorite example involves a rather large boat and a rather narrow stream: 

In the Deerslayer tale Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it flows out of a lake; it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along for no given reason; and yet when a stream acts like that it ought to be required to explain itself. Fourteen pages later the width of the brook's outlet from the lake has suddenly shrunk thirty feet, and become “the narrowest part of the stream.” This shrinkage is not accounted for. The stream has bends in it, a sure indication that it has alluvial banks and cuts them; yet these bends are only thirty and fifty feet long. If Cooper had been a nice and punctilious observer he would have noticed that the bends were oftener nine hundred feet long than short of it. 

 

Six Indians in one sapling. 

Cooper made the exit of that stream fifty feet wide, in the first place, for no particular reason; in the second place, he narrowed it to less than twenty to accommodate some Indians. He bends a “sapling” to the form of an arch over this narrow passage, and conceals six Indians in its foliage. They are “laying” for a settler's scow or ark which is coming up the stream on its way to the lake; it is being hauled against the stiff current by a rope whose stationary end is anchored in the lake; its rate of progress cannot be more than a mile an hour. Cooper describes the ark, but pretty obscurely. In the matter of dimensions “it was little more than a modern canal-boat.” Let us guess, then, that it was about one hundred and forty feet long. It was of “greater breadth than common.” Let us guess, then, that it was about sixteen feet wide. This leviathan had been prowling down bends which were but a third as long as itself, and scraping between banks where it had only two feet of space to spare on each side. We cannot too much admire this miracle. A low-roofed log dwelling occupies “two-thirds of the ark's length” – a dwelling ninety feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us say a kind of vestibule train. The dwelling has two rooms – each forty-five feet long and sixteen feet wide, let us guess. One of them is the bedroom of the Hutter girls, Judith and Hetty; the other is the parlor in the daytime, at night it is papa's bedchamber. The ark is arriving at the stream's exit now, whose width has been reduced to less than twenty feet to accommodate the Indians – say to eighteen. There is a foot to spare on each side of the boat. Did the Indians notice that there was going to be a tight squeeze there? Did they notice that they could make money by climbing down out of that arched sapling and just stepping aboard when the ark scraped by? No, other Indians would have noticed these things, but Cooper's Indians never notice anything. Cooper thinks they are marvelous creatures for noticing, but he was almost always in error about his Indians. There was seldom a sane one among them.

 

The ark is one hundred and forty feet long; the dwelling is ninety feet long. The idea of the Indians is to drop softly and secretly from the arched sapling to the dwelling as the ark creeps along under it at the rate of a mile an hour, and butcher the family. It will take the ark a minute and a half to pass under. It will take the ninety foot dwelling a minute to pass under. Now, then, what did the six Indians do? It would take you thirty years to guess, and even then you would have to give it up, I believe. Therefore, I will tell you what the Indians did. Their chief, a person of quite extraordinary intellect for a Cooper Indian, warily watched the canal-boat as it squeezed along under him, and when he had got his calculations fined down to exactly the right shade, as he judged, he let go and dropped. And missed the house! That is actually what he did. He missed the house, and landed in the stern of the scow. It was not much of a fall, yet it knocked him silly. He lay there unconscious. If the house had been ninety-seven feet long he would have made the trip. The fault was Cooper's, not his. The error lay in the construction of the house. Cooper was no architect.

 

There still remained in the roost five Indians.

 

The boat has passed under and is now out of their reach. Let me explain what the five did – you would not be able to reason it out for yourself. No. 1 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water astern of it. Then No. 2 jumped for the boat, but fell in the water still farther astern of it. Then No. 3 jumped for the boat, and fell a good way astern of it. Then No. 4 jumped for the boat, and fell in the water away astern. Then even No. 5 made a jump for the boat – for he was a Cooper Indian. In the matter of intellect, the difference between a Cooper Indian and the Indian that stands in front of the cigarshop is not spacious. The scow episode is really a sublime burst of invention; but it does not thrill, because the inaccuracy of the details throws a sort of air of fictitiousness and general improbability over it. This comes of Cooper's inadequacy as an observer. 

 

In any case, Halleck writes: 

The English critic’s query, “Who reads an American book?” could have received the answer in 1820, “The English public is reading Irving.” In 1833, Morse, the inventor of the electric telegraph, had another answer ready – “Europe is reading Cooper.” He said that as soon as Cooper’s works were finished they were published in thirty-four different places in Europe. American literature was commanding attention for its original work.

 

Halleck admits Cooper’s faults. In his opinion, however, writing in 1911, those faults did not, 

seriously interfere with the enjoyment of his works. A teacher, who was asked to edit critically The Last of the Mohicans, said that the first time he read it, the narrative carried him forward with such a rush, and bound him with such a spell, that he did not notice a single blemish in plot or style. A boy reading the same book obeyed the order to retire at eleven, but having reached the point where Uncas was taken prisoner by the Hurons, found the suspense too great, and quietly got the book and read the next four chapters in bed. Cooper has in a pre-eminent degree the first absolutely necessary qualification of the writer of fiction – the power to hold the interest. In some respects he resembles [Sir Walter] Scott, but although the “Wizard of the North” has a far wider range of excellence, Leatherstocking surpasses any single one of Scott’s creations and remains a great original character added to the literature of the world. These romances have strong ethical influence over the young. They are as pure as mountain air, and they teach a love for manly, noble, and brave deeds. “He fought for a principle,” says Cooper’s biographer, “as desperately as other men fight for life.”

 

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IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION of 1820, there was only one dissident vote in the Electoral College. And yet, turmoil over the admission of Missouri as a slave state meant the era of good feelings was soon ended. 

Monroe’s reelection was foreordained. In Virginia, only 4,321 men out of a white population of 600,000 bothered to go to the polls. 

“Mr. Monroe has just been reelected with apparent unanimity,” Henry Clay warned, “but he has not the slightest influence in Congress. His career was considered as closed. There was nothing further to be expected by him or from him.” (24/472)