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Resurrecting Leather-Stocking
RESURRECTING LEATHER-STOCKING
Pathfinding in Jacksonian America
Bill Christophersen
© 2019 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/ .
ISBN 978-1-61117-960-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-961-3 (ebook)
Front cover illustration:
Francis Parkman, by N. C. Wyeth,
courtesy of Alamy.com
In memory of my parents, George and Isabel Christophersen, who taught me to love books; Prof. Joseph V. Ridgely and Prof. Robert A. Bone, my mentors in American literature; and Madeleine Edmondson, friend and colleague—and a writer’s writer
Mabel: Pathfinder!
Pathfinder: So they call me, young woman, and many a great lord has got a title that he did not half so well merit, though, if truth be said, I rather pride myself in finding my way, where there is no path, than in finding it where there is.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Pathfinder, or, The Inland Sea
We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true, though, happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen relieving its deformities, and mitigating if not excusing its crimes.

James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, or, The First War-Path
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1
The Ghost of Leather-Stocking
CHAPTER 2
The Pioneers: Leather-Stocking in the Rough
CHAPTER 3
The Last of the Mohicans: History’s Bloody Pond
CHAPTER 4
The Prairie: A Reckoning in the Desert
CHAPTER 5
The Home Novels: Abroad and at Home, 1826–1838
CHAPTER 6
The Pathfinder: Trailblazing in a Democracy
CHAPTER 7
The Deerslayer: A Trial by Fire
CHAPTER 8
E Pluribus Unum: The Leather-Stocking Tales
Appendix: Bibliographical Overview of The Last of the Mohicans Scholarship
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
When readers encountered James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder (1840), in which Leather-Stocking and Chingachgook shepherd a sergeant’s daughter and her entourage through woods made dangerous by the French and Indian War, most were doubly delighted: first to see the wily scout of The Last of the Mohicans (1826) back from the dead and in his prime; and second, to see what looked to be a pure adventure tale, instead of another of the social critiques Cooper had been writing since he had laid Natty Bumppo to rest in The Prairie (1827). The novelist, said reviewers—and critics still echo the line—had set aside crankiness and gone back to his strong suit, frontier melodrama.
Yes and no. In Resurrecting Leather-Stocking: Pathfinding in Jacksonian America , I argue that Cooper resurrected Natty Bumppo not out of frustration with social criticism but rather to write smarter social critiques. The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer (1841), written in the wake of Andrew Jackson’s presidency and the economic panics of 1837 and 1839, are indeed romances of the woods and lakes. But they are also novels of ideas, experimental fictions that ask, in effect, whether the common man might not redeem a country that had, Cooper believed, lost its republican backbone, its moral compass. A genteel hero had been de rigueur in his previous fiction; in The Pathfinder he jettisons that model, making Leather-Stocking the protagonist, then lets the character struggle to find the moral and political path in a modern world of violence, betrayal, and flux. Pathfinder stumbles, then, learning from his mistakes, goes on to exemplify the values Cooper believed were needful if the Republic was to withstand the vices—materialism, prejudice, demagoguery, a sheepish conformity—that he saw threatening its soul. The tale, in effect, fictionalizes precepts Cooper had set forth in his political treatise The American Democrat (1838). But the cautious optimism The Pathfinder displays was short-lived: The Deerslayer dramatizes the near impossibility of cleaving to virtuous ideals, even when fortified by Christian precept. The young Leather-Stocking’s increasingly ironic attempts to tread a moral path, moreover, are linked with and amplified by America’s lofty myths and violent history. The result is a broad cultural critique.
The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer are not exceptional among the Leather-Stocking tales in the social concerns they exhibit. Although set mainly in the eighteenth century, all five novels engage themes vital to Jacksonian America. Chief among these is a concern with racial prejudice and its consequences. Investigating this concern led Cooper to revamp the captivity narrative. Though opposed to abolitionism, he understood that slavery and prejudice were time bombs. In The Last of the Mohicans , he projects the fear of a racial Armageddon onto the massacre of whites by reds outside Fort William Henry. In The Prairie —a Southern tale in the guise of a Western—he images slaveholding and manumission in a fiction that scrutinizes assumptions of racial purity and hierarchy that were gaining currency in the 1820s. The Pathfinder abstracts the vice of prejudice, presenting it in a context removed from the racial and sectional hatreds that rendered the subject contentious. The Deerslayer substitutes forthrightness for indirection: two characters debate racial prejudice openly. These fictions seek for a middle ground between Northern and Southern extremes but do so in ways calculated to avoid the automatic disapproval that, at the time, attended literature featuring social themes.
Sociohistorical motifs aside, the tales’ literary merits remain underappreciated. Cooper worked more extensively than is commonly understood with allegory, symbol, and synecdoche, with ironic parallel plots and dramatic contrasts. His tales are often palimpsests on which prior literary and artistic influences can be seen. Employing such symbols as the path, fire, the ship of state, the eagle, and the “inland sea” (as Pathfinder is subtitled), as well as such subtexts as Dante’s Commedia , Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly , the Bible, Shakespeare’s The Tempest , and Thomas Cole’s five-canvas The Course of Empire , Cooper broadened the relevance or qualified the implications of his melodramas. The Leather-Stocking tales show surprising continuities, cumulative arguments, and revisions of ideas, in addition to their republican concerns. Read without the bias toward romanticism that mid-nineteenth-century critics shared, the bias toward realism that Mark Twain’s critique was premised on, or the bias toward myth that mid-twentieth-century critics exhibited—read, that is to say, closely and historically—the series speaks astutely to its times and, alarmingly, to our own.
Acknowledgments
A portion of chapter 3 was published by Early American Literature as “ The Last of the Mohicans and the Missouri Crisis” and is reprinted with permission from EAL 46, no. 2 (2011).
A portion of chapter 4 , titled “Cooper’s The Prairie as a Southern Tale,” appeared in Literature in the Early American Republic 7 (2015): 1–30. It is reprinted here with LEAR ’s permission.
Portions of Jared Gardner’s Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (pp. 85, 108–10, 112, 114; ©1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press) have been reprinted with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
In preparing the manuscript of this book, I received—and wish to acknowledge gratefully—critical feedback on select portions from professors Wayne Franklin, Jason Berger, and Sandra M. Gustafson.
CHAPTER 1
The Ghost of Leather-Stocking
John Effingham: If you will ply the oars, gentlemen, we will now hold a little communion with the spirit of the Leather-Stocking.

James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found
Halfway through Home as Found (1838), James Fenimore Cooper’s staid novel of manners slips abruptly into a twilight zone. As its protagonists, the Effinghams—descendants of the characters whose estate is the setting of Cooper’s first Leather-Stocking novel, The Pioneers (1823)—show friends around the same Otsego countryside, Leather-Stocking’s ghost is heard grumbling. His voice seems to boom from on high as their boat descends a tributary to Lake Otsego. The episode occurs moments after they have been eulogizing the frontier scout and hunter who united “the simplicity of a woodsman, the heroism of a savage, the faith of a Christian, and the feeling of a poet” and after Squire John Effingham has remarked: “Alas! The days of the ‘Leather-Stockings’ have passed.… I see few remains of his character in a region where speculation is more rife than moralizing, and emigrants are plentier than hunters.” 1
The voice is illusory—an echo of the Effinghams’ own voices reverberating from the stream’s rocky banks. But the incident is more than a nostalgic cameo and a nod to Cooper’s longtime readers; more, even, than a focusing device for the novel’s theme of America’s wilting social values. The echo from the past adumbrates a key moment in Cooper’s writing career: his resurrection of Natty Bumppo, the Leather-Stocking. Natty, after his debut as a gap-toothed, badgered squa