New York

New York
by James Fenimore Cooper
{Text transcribed and annotated by Hugh MacDougall, Founder and Secretary/Treasurer of the James Fenimore Cooper Society, who will appreciate corrections and comments at jfcooper@wpe.com. All material not from Cooper's text is enclosed in {curly} brackets.
{Introductory Note: In 1851, just before his death on the eve of his 62nd birthday, James Fenimore Cooper was working a history of New York City, for which he planned the title of The Towns of Manhattan. Cooper never completed it, and most of the parts of the manuscript that he did complete were destroyed in a fire at the printers after his death. The Introduction to the work, however, survived, and was published during the Civil War in The Spirit of the Age (New York: April 5-15, 1864), a fund-raising publication of the American Sanitary Commission (predecessor of the American Red Cross). Substantial excerpts were reprinted, as James Fenimore Cooper on Secession and States Rights in the Continental Monthly: Devoted to Literature and National Policy, Vol. 6, No. 1 (July 1864), pp. 79-83.
The Spirit of the Age text was much later reprinted in book form under the title of New York (New York: William Farquhar Payson, 1930) in a limited edition of 750 copies, with an introduction by Dixon Ryan Fox, and was later re-issued in facsimile form (Folcroft: PA., Folcroft Library Editions, 1973) in a limited edition of 100 copies — from which this text is taken.
{A few other surviving fragments from The Towns of Manhattan were compiled in James F. Beard, Jr., The First of Greater New York: Unknown Portions of Fenimore Cooper's Last Work (New York Historical Society Quarterly, Vol. XXXVII, No. 2, pp. 109-45, April 1953).
{The text has been transcribed as written, except that because of the limitations of the Gutenberg format, occasional words in italics have been transcribed in ALL CAPITALS. Annotations (identified by {curly} brackets, have been occasionally added—identifying allusions, translating foreign terms, and correcting a few obvious typographical errors.