Notes on Cooper's Debt to John Jay

Abstract

C OOPER S FRIENDSHIP with the family of John Jay is well known, as is Cooper's debt to John Jay for the story of the historical personage who provided him with the idea for Harvey Birch of The Spy (I82I). Jay, as James Franklin Beard chronicles it, had lived at Bedford, his country house near Katonah, since his retirement from active political life in i8oi. Here Cooper was a frequent visitor; and here, some years before, Jay told the story of the patriot spy which inspired Cooper's first successful, though as yet [Sept. 6, I82I] uncompleted, romance.' Cooper waited until Jay's death in I829 to acknowledge publicly this debt in the preface to Bentley's edition of The Spy (I83I). A letter of John Jay's to Colonel John Laurens, recently purchased by Mrs. Walter L. Weil and on loan to the John Jay Homestead in Katonah, contains some information which suggests that The Spy may not have been the only novel of Cooper's influenced by John Jay's conversation. The letter is dated Madrid, May 2, 178I, and concerns itself in part with a scheme to capture prisoners on the coasts of Great Britain in order to exchange them for Henry Laurens, John's father, who had been captured by the British while on a diplomatic mission in the fall of I780. We recall from The Pilot (I824), that the Ariel, commanded by Captain Barnstable, and a frigate, commanded by Captain Munson, the leader of the expedition, have entered a bay on the northeastern coast of England to pick up Mr. Gray, the pilot, who is to help them on a mission the purpose of which is as yet unknown to any but Captain Munson. This was soon after the events of the revolution had involved the kingdoms of France and Spain, and the republics of Holland, in our quarrel. ...2 The