Fathering the Son: The Cultural Origins of James Fenimore Cooper

Abstract

Born in 1789, James Cooper grew up in a large, well-to-do family on New York’s expansive frontier. He was schooled there first, then privately tutored with the sons of the state’s elite in Albany as preparation for Yale, which he entered at the age of thirteen. Bright, but neither bookish nor retiring, “Jem” Cooper (the last name pronounced short, with the vowel sound of “cooker”) was expelled in his junior year for retaliating against another student who had viciously attacked him. 1 An older brother, already rusticated from Princeton for his part in the fire that destroyed Nassau Hall, was forced to study the law as a kind of homeopathic punishment. James, simply exiled for a year to the eponymous Cooperstown, himself might have drifted into a similar career, something that would have pleased his modestly educated but savvy father, Judge William Cooper, a self-made land developer and Federalist politician who had counted Alexander Hamilton among his attorneys. Instead, James wanted a naval career, and to learn the basics went off to sea on a merchant ship in 1806. It was an ambition formed in the midst of a great naval age. The outstanding British victory at Trafalgar had occurred just after Cooper left Yale, and even as his merchant vessel returned to port in 1807 there were British frigates prowling America’s technically neutral coast. The infamous attack on the Chesapeake, which was broadsided by the British for no good reason at all, in fact had occurred only a short time earlier—word of it reached an enraged Cooper and his shipmates with the pilot boat that met them as they neared the capes of the Delaware that September. Once Cooper received his midshipman’s warrant early in 1808, the navy gave him a focus for his emergent patriotism and his anti-British anger. But it gave him little else. Stationed first at the freshwater port of Oswego, New York, where he helped oversee construction of a small war vessel, he later was put to recruiting duty in Manhattan—the worst conceivable fate—while his vessel, the Wasp, underwent lengthy repairs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He spent a good deal of his time debating whether to resign, and after Oswego tried a halfhearted furlough as a protest against the lack of opportunities. Then