The American historical novel (on American themes) before 1860

by Ernest Erwin Leisy

For the first time in his treatment of American history, Cooper had a subject in which he was obliged to substitute for personal experience painstaking research. Not having been very successful in handling character that required adherence to historical fact, it was a question whether his mind could assimilate the results of his investigations in a way to stimulate rather than to hamper his imagination. For better or for worse, he made no attempt to delineate an historical character. Warren, Gage, and Putnam he mentioned but their possibilities as literary material he did not recognize; Burgoyne, Howe, and Clinton he misrepresented in the few pages he allotted to them. With the historical background in and about Boston he was more successful, giving according to Bancroft, an effective and truthful rendering. As heretofore, his sympathy with the losing side equalized the contest and made it a worthy struggle. For the critical reader none of his books has a more inviting opening. But Cooper soon found the attempt to blend his complicated plot of domestic intrigue with history irksome, and shifted attention to the melodramatic fortunes of his hero. It is difficult to understand why he should have made an unheroic English Major the hero of an American story. It can hardly be explained on the ground of Cooper’s established antipathy to the New England character, although the fact that he was too little at home in Massachusetts may have caused him to piece out the story by giving it a melodramatic turn in keeping with what was popular on the stage of the day. Mr. Van Doren’s remark[30] that the book “failed to please as his earlier novels had done” must be accepted with qualification, as contemporary reviews vouch for its own popularity as well as for that of The Leaguer of Boston, a play based upon it.[31] It would seem that the “Gothicism” of the story as manifested in the character of Ralph with his sudden and apparently unaccountable appearances and his almost supernatural power over the Byronic Lionel, the spectacular apparition of an overshadowing arm on the wall of King’s Chapel during the marriage ceremony, and the sudden death of the simpleton at the hands of his maniac father who dies with him, was an element in the historical novel that gave it a contemporary appeal which has been lost in an age of other critical standards.

When Cooper abandoned after the first attempt his cycle of thirteen romances of the Revolution, he did not give up his career in the field of historical fiction. In his next work, The Last of the Mohicans, a Narrative of 1757 (1826), he went back even farther into his country’s past. In The Pioneers he had sharpened his tools at frontier material and he now wished to execute a design in which Indian life should be presented in detail. But comparatively little was known about the red man at the time. Before the Revolution he had inspired terror but more recently his melancholy fate was to a greater or less degree upon the white man’s conscience. Chateaubriand had given currency to the tradition of the noble savage, but only an ethnologist like Gallatin or Duponceau had inquired into his origin, language, religion, ethics, government, habits and manners, with a sense of their scientific value. Cooper’s own knowledge of the race was limited to an occasional meeting with an Indian at Otsego Hall, or a delegation at New York or Washington. This personal acquaintance he now supplemented, according to his daughter, by a study of Heckewelder, Colden, Penn, and Smith.[32]

The setting of his story came to Cooper while in 1824 with a party of English friends he was on a visit to the Lake Champlain region. At Glenn Falls one of the party directed his attention to the caverns in the river as a suitable location for a romance. The suggestion pleased the novelist, and when the ruins of Fort William Henry nearby came to mind, it occurred to him to use the episode of the siege and massacre at the fort during the French and Indian War as the basis of the story. For the adventures of his fictitious characters with which Cooper came more and more to occupy the second volume of his novels, he here fell back upon his “pursuit-rescue” scheme. He managed this scheme with sufficient adroitness to display, incidentally, a great variety of Indian customs and traditions.

It is not generally known that Cooper’s Indian was drawn in large part from Heckewelder.[33] This venerable man had been a Moravian missionary among the Delawares and published some years later an account which rather idealized them. In view of this fact, Cooper deserves credit for representing the Indian as cunning and treacherous as well as generous. When it was objected that he gave a more favorable picture of the red man than he deserved, Cooper said:

“It is the privilege of all writers of fiction, more particularly when their works aspire to the elevation of romances, to present the beau-ideal of their characters to the reader. This it is which constitutes poetry and to suppose that the red-man is to be represented only in the squalid misery or in the degraded moral state that certainly more or less belongs to his condition, is, we apprehend, taking a very narrow view of an author’s privileges. Such criticism would have deprived the world of even Homer.”[34]

What Cooper noted about the red men was their acute senses, developed through woodcraft and warfare, their belief in omens and their tortoise and beaver worship, their mummery, their stoiclism, especially when enduring torture at the stake, their “gift” of revenge, their war dance, their love of baubles, their respect for the feeble-minded or the aged, their chaste attitude toward female captives, the silence of the young, their funeral customs and deference to the mound for the dead, their councils of war and fierce tribal pride, their use of metaphorical speech, and the crafty eloquence of their orators.

In order to show the antitheses in Indian character, Cooper created in Uncas a noble savage, in conformity with the philosophy of nature then in vogue, and bestowed upon Magua the deceit and treachery associated with the Indian when he was a menace. With his customary repetition of types,[35] Cooper was inclined to reintroduce the hunter and his Indian comrade from The Pioneers. But they were old there and had fallen upon evil days. Yet he resolved to take the risk. It was a stroke of genius not only to set them back nearly forty years, but to shown them in the vigor of manhood undeniably the same individuals. The other characters—an old man with his motherless two daughters, one of whom is given in marriage to a representative of the British army for his devoted services to the family and the other, a quadroon, whose kidnapping by the Indian villain motivates the pursuit of the second volume—were redolent of the make-up box and the property-room. The bore, however, represents a variation from type, as Cooper intended the half-witted Connecticut psalm-singer for a modern adaptation of the ministrel of medieval romance.[36] The character whose possibilities Cooper now first realized and upon whom he lavished his devotion was Natty Bumppo. Upon his Christian stock he grafted many of the virtues of savage life. It seems to me as if, without consciously doing so, he has blended in him reminiscences of Sir Charles Grandison and the natural man of Chateaubriand. In him the historical novel gained a new type of hero with whose simplicity, downrightness, competence, unsophistication, and virgin prejudice the natural American has for Europeans come to be identified.[37] How indigenous he was appears when he is compared with Rip Van Winkle and the characters of Irving. Thackeray declared La Longue Carabine one of the great prizemen of fiction. “He ranks,” said he, “with your Uncle Toby, Sir Roger de Coverley, Falstaff ... and the artist has deserved well of his country who devised them.”[38]

The historical element centering about the siege of Fort William Henry and the subsequent massacre, Cooper might have gotten up in an hour’s reading. Perhaps its scant basis of fact accounts for the truth of the picture. Colonel Munro, the English commander, was “elaborated according to the needs of the plot and Cooper’s idea of the British soldier of the period,” says Erskine. “As a soldier he is of course brave, but not astute. Cooper lets him stand for the usual British incapacity to cope with the Indians which Braddock so fatally illustrated.”[39] It is not likely that any of Cooper’s readers would have impugned the conception. The portrait of Montcalm is, in my judgment, Cooper’s best picture of an historical character.[40] Deeply regretting that history would perpetuate only his glorious death on the Plains of Abraham,[41] Cooper without pronouncing final judgment upon his conduct, represented Montcalm as putting policy above moral principle when he did not, by restraining his Indian allies, prevent the massacre which followed the capitulation of the English. In this position he was in accord with Timothy Dwight,[42] a careful historian, who remembered the event as a child and expressed the view which prevailed in New England and New York. The massacre itself, with its opportunity for pageantry in Scott’s vein, did not fire Cooper’s imagination.

What Cooper did in The Last of the Mohicans that he had not done so well in his previous historical novels, was to make the central theme, the conquest of the Indian by the white, turn upon and be explained by the chief historical event of the book, the savagery of the red men at Fort William Henry. He achieved a skillful blend of research and fabrication that has resulted in its being regarded the best treatment of the ominous theme of race conflict. Whatever case the critics may have made against his Indians, and of late they have rather deferred to him, his conception of the red man has been effective and is not likely now to be replaced. When people wish to know what it was to live in the days when the aborigines were in power, it is to this story of disastrous chances, of hair-breadth ’scapes, and moving accidents by flood and field, that the imagination naturally turns.

So well was The Last of the Mohicans received at home and abroad that Cooper was moved to write at once another tale of the Indians. The character of Leatherstocking had grown upon him and he was ready to hazard a third venture with him. The popular mind had followed the removal of his prototype, Daniel Boone, to the plains beyond the Mississippi and the report of his recent death there. In that mysterious Louisiana Purchase, moreover, new pioneers were seeking to satisfy their hunger for land. Cooper also knew, though this has not been pointed out before, that the public mind was further directed to this frontier by the proposal by act of Congress to remove the Indians to this territory. These considerations caused Cooper, although he had never seen the plains, to determine upon a western setting for his next story, The Prairie (1827).