Considering the results of the experiments with native material outlined in the preceding chapter, Cooper might well have entered with diffidence upon the task of writing an “American” novel. That he was in any definite sense aware of the work of his predecessors in the field of the American novel seems doubtful. His had been a frontiersman’s boyhood, followed, after an erratic two years at Yale, by apprenticeship at sea and a decade as a country squire. Then by the merest chance he fell into authorship. To make good his boast that he could write a better book than the novel of English society life which he was at that time reading, he wrote Precaution, a story of earls and dukes. But knowing how devout an American Cooper was, some of his friends made it a matter of reproach that he should have written a novel foreign in substance and feeling. He acknowledged the justice of the imputation and resolved to atone by inflicting upon the world and himself, as he said, a second book,[4] The Spy, the patriotic nature of which should admit of no cavil.
From the writing of Precaution, Cooper carried over very little save ability to manipulate a story. It taught him nothing in the way of adapting the formula of the current novel to the treatment of native material. He had still to learn to conform to the principles of the Waverley novels and at the same time to find a tractable American theme. What was the nature of the historical novel then current?
“Scott had gathered up,” says Dr. Loshe,[5] “and recombined, according to formulas of his own, many elements present in the fiction of his day,—the tendency to localized or national tales with that interest in humble personages on whom local characteristics are most deeply impressed, which appears most plainly in Miss Edgeworth’s Irish stories; the interest in romantic landscape and word-painting of natural scenery which found its most striking expression in Mrs. Radcliffe’s theatrical yet impressive scenes; the tale of adventure reinforced by the revived interest in travel and antiquarian taste for old buildings and trappings; and the eagerness for an imaginative interpretation of history which had expressed itself in many would-be historical tales, whose hopeless inaccuracies had a naive honesty of good intention.”
These ingredients which Scott had mixed in varying proportions in his different works, it occurred to Cooper, might be adapted to native manners and conditions.
The essential requirement of the Scottish novels—conflict, patriotic association, and difference in social manners—obviously suggested to Cooper the American Revolution as the scene for his novel. The details of that warfare, particularly as they were related by the aged participants in Westchester County, New York, where he was at this time living, Cooper had listened to with that intelligent interest with which a seaman may follow strategy on land as well. He knew this neutral ground, between the British in New York City and the American army in the highlands of the Hudson, over which the tide of battle had ebbed and flowed, as Scott knew his native heath. As he turned over in his mind the possibilities afforded by this setting he recalled an anecdote which his neighbor John Jay had related years before concerning a shrewd, unselfishly patriotic spy employed by him during the war. This “legend” became the nucleus of his story. Judging from internal evidence, Cooper must have been delighted with the possibilities of the subject for was it not still a matter of record how the sensibilities of the public had been wrought upon by the fate of Hale and of Andre?[6] Was not his friend, Dunlap attracting multitudes to his play, entitled Andre? It next occurred to him to present his spy in the guise of a pedlar such as Edie Ochiltree, who had fascinated readers of The Antiquary. So vividly did Cooper realize his conception of Harvey Birch that the romance had all the semblance of a memoir.
The public veneration for Washington required that he be introduced somehow. In 1780 the patriot army, under General Washington, occupied a line of connecting positions extending from Philadelphia across northern New Jersey, to the fortified post of West Point on the Hudson. Along the Hudson River, the American lines extended to Peekskill, and outposts patrolled the country as far south as Tarrytown. From this point to the channels which separate Manhattan Island from the mainland, a distance of about forty miles, lay the “neutral ground,” the No Man’s Land of the Revolution. It was the object of the patriot army to prevent the British forces from drawing supplies from this region, but Congress would not permit devastation. Consequently, the “neutral ground,” swept by constant raids, and exposed to the unchecked evils of civil war, became the abode of the lawless and adventurous spirits who flourish best in times of upheaval and disorder. The fall of Charleston, the treason of Arnold, and dissensions among officers of the Continental Army made a general disintegration of that military force which was the sole support of the patriot cause seem at hand. The Revolution was in danger, not only from avowed Tories but from lukewarm followers anxious to keep on the winning side. This combination of circumstances suggested to Cooper the military situation in 1780 in the Neutral Ground as the most suitable background for his story.
Romantic themes were for Cooper more important and interesting than restoration of the historic past. The instinctive Toryism that made it natural for Scott to poetize history had no counterpart in Cooper’s rationalized liberalism.[7] But it was not necessary for his mind to be saturated with history as was that of Scott. Compared with Europe, America had little history, and that little Cooper knew, particularly as it pertained to New York. In the present instance, he had his information from eye-witnesses and from nine years’ residence on the scenes. It was decidedly to Cooper’s advantage to have a “legend,” or the outline of a plot, suggested to him, since, with this in mind, he could in unfolding a story give to it all the illusion of reality. “Perhaps by chance,” says Carl Van Doren, “Cooper here hit upon a type of plot at which he excelled, a struggle between contending forces, not badly matched, arranged as a pursuit in which the pursued are, as a rule, favored by the author and reader.”[8] High and low characters could easily be borrowed, in fact, his public expected that. The Wharton family, consisting of a high-spirited young blond, a faded elder daughter, a young officer, and a feeble father was the conventional novel family; the pedlar as the central link of the action came from The Antiquary; Dr. Sitgreaves was an imitation of Scott’s pedants; Betty Flanagan, the sutler, partook of the nature of Miss Edgeworth’s Irish characters of low life; the negro was an adaptation of the court fool; the remaining characters were be-captained and be-majored as was fitting in a tale of love and war.
As much of his public was Tory, and as even English readers might be appealed to, Cooper faced the problem of writing his story so as to please the patriot and to enlist the interest of these others besides. Fortunately for Cooper, and for art in American historical fiction, his training under an Anglican tutor and his marriage into a Tory family restrained him from such partiality for the Americans as the first historical novelist might easily have indulged in and thereby set the standard for succeeding writers. Cooper’s solution in taking a house divided against itself, in a section supposedly neutral but actually overrun by skirmishing parties of either side, supplied also the essential element of conflict. He added suspense by the uncertainty he created in the reader’s mind as to which party the spy served and by having him persecuted equally by bands of Skinners and by Cowboys. With the sketch of the depredations of the Skinners he enlisted Tory approval of the veracity of the picture. The first volume was in fact as inviting to loyalist as to patriot. The mysterious Harper, though he inspired considerable awe, had little in his reticent demeanor to indicate that he was the commander-in-chief of the continental troops. But the patriotic purpose of the book was not to be lost sight of. In his very persecutions the spy was becoming heroic, and there could be no mistake as to his position in the outcome. By making the heroine, regardless of her Tory family, espouse the American cause, and by exposing as a bigamist the English colonel, with whom her sister was in love, the author further won the favor of the patriot. Here and there he added touches of piety which might bring his fable into favor with the reader.
The handling of historical matter, particularly the treatment of Washington, presented a problem of peculiar difficulty. According to Scott’s practice up to this time, an historical character must have a minor role. This should have simplified the problem but Washington was too much venerated to be simply disposed of. Cooper hit upon the solution of introducing him as the shadowy Mr. Harper, who looms somewhat gigantically through his disguise, and is revealed, in the end, as the ally of the spy and the patriot leader. While Cooper displayed a gift for historical portraiture, he fell victim to the contemporary notion of Washington and portrayed him as the sobered and aged President rather than as the General of the Continental Army. His stiffness en famille and his melodramatic skulking about the highlands and in caves were later by Cooper himself acknowledged a mistake. But to the general historical facts of his story Cooper was true. Truer, in fact, than the historians. And this, as has never been pointed out, constitutes The Spy a document of historical value. For the Whig historians, following the Revolution, had misrepresented the war as a united uprising against the mother country instead of the civil conflict, which, according to the best modern criticism, it in large part was. The intense Whig tradition begun by Andrews and Gordon, who based the earliest histories of the Revolution on Burke’s yearly summaries of the events in the Annual Register, persisted not only in Weem’s Life of Washington but in Marshall’s also, and was influential through the ten editions of Botta’s translation. The federalism of Hildreth (1849) carried on this bias; and when Bancroft in 1852 reached the Revolution, he broke all records for a violently partisan and timorously defensive history of the Revolution.[9] For leaving a distinct impression of the fratricidal nature of the strife, when a just version of the struggle seemed impossible, Cooper deserves credit hitherto not accorded him.
The Spy, as I have tried to indicate, was in every sense an experiment. If it succeeded, others of its kind might follow; if it failed, the American novel would have to wait, for Irving, Cooper’s only possible competitor, “deliberately chose short stories to avoid any rivalry with Scott.”[10] But so well had Cooper estimated the tastes of the public that the experiment was from the first a success. In three months it was in its third edition. It won the “respect of the generally contemptuous English critics,[11] and the American press, which had liked the book by instinct, was pleased with the mild praise as though it were a national tribute.”[12] The happy issue of the experiment inspirited other native writers; it encouraged Cooper in particular.