__________
“We have the wolf by the ear.”
Thomas Jefferson
__________
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. Picture not in blogger's possession. |
*
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)
*
March 22: Commodore Stephen Decatur dies from
wounds received in a duel.
*
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)
*
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)
*
 |
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.”
*
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)
*
A LETTER in the Indiana Centinel, a paper in Vincennes, offers praise for Tecumseh:
“Every schoolboy in the union now knows that Tecumseh was a great man. He was truly great – and his greatness was his own, unassisted by science or the aids of education. As a statesman, a warrior and a patriot, take him all in all, we shall not look upon his like again.”
William Henry Harrison would say of his foe, that he was “one of those uncommon geniuses, which sprang up occasionally to produce revolutions and overturn the established order of things. If it were not for the vicinity of the United States, he would perhaps be the founder of an empire that would rival in glory that of Mexico or Peru.”
According to his biographer, Glenn Tucker,
He was a brilliant orator and warrior
and a brave and distinguished patriot of his people. He was learned and wise,
and was noted, even among his white enemies, for his integrity and humanity.
But his unique greatness lay in the fact that, unlike all previous native
leaders, he looked beyond the mere resistance by a tribe or group of tribes to
white encroachments. He was a Shawnee, but he considered himself first an
Indian, and fought to give all Indians a national rather than a tribal
consciousness, and to unite them in defense of a common homeland where they
might all continue to dwell under their own laws and leaders. (125/131, 133)
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