Six Early James Fenimore Cooper Letters

Abstract

James Franklin Beard's monument of postwar American literary scholarship, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper (1960-68), made available some twelve hundred documents from James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) dating mostly from between 1820 and 1851, the period of Cooper's active literary work. By contrast, the three decades from Cooper's birth in 1789 to the year before the publication of his first novel, Precaution (1820), are represented by a mere twenty-one items occupying thirteen pages in Beard's six-volume collection. Among the more than 120 new items that turned up from 1960 to 2000, the story is virtually the same: none predates 1825.1In the course of my work on James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (2007), I had the good fortune to find a few more early letters. The six presented here, dating from the years 1817 to 1820, significantly expand our view of Cooper's concerns in that sparsely covered period. These letters are especially revealing because all arose from the ultimately unsuccessful efforts by Cooper and his brothers to resolve very serious issues linked to the estate of their father, Judge William Cooper (1754-1809). Because the resulting collapse of James Cooper's own finances played a crucial role in his turn toward various new speculations-among them authorship-these documents yield fresh insight into the origins of his career. Annotations to the letters identify key individuals and explain important references not otherwise discussed in this introductory essay, which is intended to cover more general issues. These issues include the underlying relationship of Cooper with the estate's key adversary and the possible relevance of the financial crisis (and that adversary) to a cluster of loosely autobiographical novels Cooper published in the mid-1840s.Cooper's father, born to a nonpracticing Quaker couple in Pennsylvania in 1754, learned the wheelwright's trade in his youth but soon became a land developer in New Jersey and central New York. His most famous accomplishment centered on a large tract bordering beautiful Otsego Lake some seventy miles southwest of Albany, where Yankee families abandoning the poorer, overpopulated soils of New England made a fresh start immediately after the Revolution. At the foot of the lake, Cooper founded a village, eventually bearing his name, where his youngest son moved with his mother, Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper (1752-1817), and the rest of the large family from New Jersey in 1790. James Cooper (who adopted his mother's maiden name as part of his own in 1826), spent much of his childhood in and about Cooperstown and not surprisingly would set the most personal of his early novels, The Pioneers (1823), in fictional Templeton, a stand-in for his father's village.That novel is no filiopietistic confection, but rather the author's commemoration of his many losses. By the time it was written and published, the Cooper family had been devastated. Judge Cooper, his wife, and all but two of their twelve children were dead. The great brick mansion the family had built early in the century had been seized and sold by the Otsego sheriff to cover an omnivorous court judgment. By 1817, before most of these general reversals took place, James Cooper was beginning to face severe financial troubles of his own. Deserting the unfinished and never-occupied stone mansion he was building on the shores of Otsego, he went into a kind of self-exile from Cooperstown that year, temporarily moving in with his in-laws in faraway Westchester County. He made two short business trips back to Otsego later in 1817-during the second of which his mother died-but thereafter would not return to the haunted ground for seventeen years. Cooper appears to have begun work on The Pioneers just when he learned, in September 1821, that his father's mansion was to be sold.The legal judgment directing the sale of the mansion came in response to an 1821 bill filed in New York's Chancery Court by a young Albany lawyer named Thomas Bridgen (1786/7-1826). …