Cooper and the Conservative Democrat

Abstract

ness,5 as Grossman pointed out, it also has the merits of these alleged defects: logic, concision and challenging political generalities. My intent is not to praise; Cooper knew too well that what he called puffing was odious. Rather, I hope that close examination of The American Democrat will show that Cooper's tract is not so much an exposition of political convictions as it is an attempt to thrash out certain ideological dilemmas that, by 1838, were threatening to upset those political convictions. I contend that The American Democrat cannot be viewed as Cooper's definitive statement of his political beliefs. Because it was designed as a formal textbook, a didactic guide to government, The American Democrat declares its truths with ringing finality. Yet it remains, in Cooper's canon, a transitional, unsure and even contradictory assessment of the national polity. In order to measure those changes, and the problems which the years of absence and return had wrought in Cooper's view of the Republic, I shall compare The American Democrat with its forerunner, Notions of the Americans. The two books were admittedly written for different purposes. Both purport to be objective treatises but in fact were addressed to different readers in response to different provocations. Notions of the Americans was intended as a reply to critical European accounts of America in general, and to Hall's Travels in particular. The American Democrat was surely influenced by the attack on Cooper begun by Whig editors shortly after Cooper's return to America in 1833. Cooper's impulse was to defend and glorify American political institutions in the earlier book and to criticize them in the later one. We should expect, therefore, a change from eulogy to faultfinding. In neither work, however, did Cooper falsify the complexity of his opinions for the sake of a stronger statement. Notions of the Americans does not portray an untroubled utopia, nor does The American Democrat resort to an easy or unqualified despair. The significance of The American Democrat in the context of Cooper's career is not that it reveals a change of political faith, but that it shows us Cooper's struggle to maintain his earlier political convictions in the midst of the changed conditions of his