James Fenimore Cooper / American Men of Letters

by Thomas Raynesford Lounsbury

The appeal was to deaf ears. Neither contracted East nor boundless West affected Cooper's resolution. As fast as the articles were republished, they were carefully examined, and prosecutions begun against the "Evening Journal" for those of them containing libelous matter. By the middle of December five suits had been commenced, and more were under consideration. A little later, if contemporary newspaper reports can be trusted, the number had swelled to seven. The editor began to appreciate the difficulty and danger of the situation. His courage, however, did not falter. In fact he looked upon himself as manfully standing in the gap for freedom of speech. "These suits," he said "will determine whether an Independent Press is to be protected in the free exercise of honest opinion, or whether it is to be overawed and silenced by the persecutions of an inflated, litigious, soured novelist, who, in his better days by the favor of the Press, made the money with which he now seeks to oppress its conductors, and sap its independence." He did not purpose to flinch from his duty. Accordingly he announced that he should continue publishing these attacks until Cooper ceased prosecuting.

In this determination he was encouraged by the result of two suits tried in April, 1842, in the Otsego County Court. Though he was beaten in both, the verdict was for small amounts. In one case it was fifty-five dollars, in the other eighty-seven dollars. This convinced the press that the tide was turning. Again the country newspapers were filled with libelous paragraphs. Again the novelist was denounced for his heartless abuse of his country, and his soulless and contemptible vanity. Again these strictures were carefully collected from every quarter, no matter how insignificant, and republished in the columns of the "Evening Journal." But these cheerful anticipations were speedily dissipated. Another suit, tried at Fonda in the Supreme Court in May, 1842, resulted in a verdict of three hundred and twenty-five dollars for the plaintiff. The country papers were indignant. One of the editors sagely suggested that "if judge and jury are to carry on this war on the press to gratify individual malignity much further, it would be well for all editors to unite in petitioning the legislature to pass a law that judges should discharge their duties impartially, and juries be composed of honest and intelligent men." This profound suggestion marks pretty plainly the intellectual grade to which most of the writers of these paragraphs had attained. Before it could be acted upon another suit had been decided. In the September term of the Supreme Court held at Cooperstown, a further verdict of two hundred dollars was awarded. In the following month a new suit was begun.

Weed had fought his fight manfully. But the business of publishing libelous paragraphs at these rates, low as they were, was ceasing to be either pleasant or profitable. Besides his own counsel fees, the adverse verdicts carried with them heavy costs. He concluded to let the liberty of the press take care of itself. Accordingly, on the 14th of December, 1842, he published, though with a grumbling comment, a retraction of all his previous statements. It had been previously submitted to the eminent lawyer, Daniel Cady, and by him approved. It withdrew, first, the allegations contained the previous year in a specific article in the paper. "On a review of the matter and a better knowledge of the facts," were the words of the retraction, "I feel it to be my duty to withdraw the injurious imputations it contains on the character of Mr. Cooper. It is my wish that this retraction should be as broad as the charges. The 'Albany Evening Journal' having also contained various other articles reflecting on Mr. Cooper's character, I feel it due to that gentleman to withdraw every charge that injuriously affects his character."

The course of instruction had been protracted and expensive, but the lesson had been learned at last. The independence of the press had been crushed by the domineering despot of Cooperstown. The controversy threatened to break out again in 1845, but it seems never to have got beyond words. There is a comic element introduced into the whole affair by the fact that the editor of the "Journal" was a profound and even bigoted admirer of his adversary's novels. So fond was he of quoting from them, that according to Greeley, jokers at that time gravely affirmed that Weed had never read but three authors,--Shakespeare, Scott, and Cooper. In the very heat of the controversy he was said to have sat up all night reading "The Pathfinder," which had come out a little while before. Greeley also asserts that the paragraphs which appeared in the "Evening Journal" were merely designed as gentle reminders to the novelist of the folly of the course he was pursuing. This might find belief in a society in which telling a man that he was an object of universal contempt would be deemed an expression of friendly interest in his welfare. When he says, in addition, that there was no shred, no spice of malice in these assaults, he takes away the sole ground on which a plea of palliation can be brought. If not due to that they had not even the poor excuse of weak human nature. They were the wanton acts of a man who attacks another, not from indignation or wrath, but from the mere desire of inflicting annoyance or pain.

The controversy with the "Commercial Advertiser" belongs not here but to the account of the "Naval History." It has already been said that the "Tribune" had been sued for the publication of Thurlow Weed's letter describing the trial at Fonda in November, 1841. In December, 1842, this case came off at Ballston. Greeley assumed the conduct of the defense. He was unsuccessful. The jury brought in against him a verdict of two hundred dollars and costs. "We went back to dinner," he wrote, "took the verdict in all meekness, took a sleigh and struck a bee-line for New York." No sooner had he reached the city than he published a most entertaining account of the whole trial. It filled eleven columns of the "Tribune," and the demand for it became so great that it was found necessary to publish it in pamphlet form. For some expressions in it Cooper began another suit. In this instance Greeley gave up the plan of defending himself and intrusted the conduct of his side to Seward. The case dragged on for years in the New York courts, and, so far as I have been able to discover, had not been brought to a final trial before the plaintiff's death.

By the end of 1843, Cooper had pretty well reduced the press to silence, so far as comments on his character were concerned. It was insignificance or remoteness alone that protected the libeler. The leading newspapers of the state, however much they might abuse his writings, learned to be very cautious of what they said of him personally. But it was a barren victory he had won. He had lost far more than he had gained. That such would be the result, he knew, while he was engaged in the controversy. It affected, at the time, his literary reputation, and, as a result, the sale of his writings; and since his death it has been a principal agency in keeping alive a distorted and fictitious view of his personal character. A common impression came to be of him something like the description which Greeley's lawyers gave of the estimation in which he was held in Otsego County, in some legal papers bearing the date of July, 1845. This was to the effect that he had acquired and had among his neighbors "the reputation of a proud, captious, censorious, arbitrary, dogmatical, malicious, illiberal, revengeful, and litigious man." This one-sided and hostile view of a strongly-marked character had just enough of truth in it to cause it to be widely received as an accurate and complete picture. In a similar way the notion became current that he sought to ape the manners of the English aristocracy. Whatever Cooper's foibles were, they were none of them imported. He was too proud in feeling and too self-centred in opinion ever to think of aping anything or anybody. But on these points the prejudices and misrepresentations of that day have lasted down to this.

The account given makes it clear that the occasion of bringing the first of these libel suits was accidental. But as time went on the prosecution of them assumed to Cooper the shape of a duty. When once it had taken on that character, no possible degree of unpopularity or odium could have prevented him from persisting in his course. He treated with disdain the common arguments used to persuade him to abandon them. To one of these he referred directly in a novel published in 1844. He was insisting upon the superiority of the past to the present, a sentiment which became a favorite burden of his latter-day utterances. "The public sense of right," he said, "had not become blunted by familiarity with abuses, and the miserable and craven apology was never heard for not enforcing the laws that nobody cared for what the newspapers say." He certainly had some justification for the hardest things he thought and said of the press. The newspapers which circulated the false reports about his father's disposition of the property at Three Mile Point never corrected them after the precise facts had been published. Many of them continued to repeat the original statements after they must have known them to be untrue. Nor did they stop here. As the British press had in his case done all it could to justify the charge Cooper made against it of ferocious blackguardism of personal and political foes, so many of the American editors seemed anxious to realize, so far as it lay in their power, the picture that had been drawn of them in the character of Steadfast Dodge. Papers containing offensive paragraphs about Cooper were carefully sent, not directed to him personally, but to his wife and daughters. The fear of punishment is the only motive by which those who commit acts of this kind can possibly be influenced. On the other hand, it is an idle claim that the character of the press has been elevated by libel suits that Cooper or any one else has ever brought. Such prosecutions may be both justifiable and necessary; but the agencies that form and build up intelligence and taste and high principle are not of this negative and restraining character.

CHAPTER X.

1839-1843.

On the 10th of May, 1839, appeared Cooper's "History of the United States Navy." The work was one which he had long contemplated writing. As far back as 1825 there were newspaper reports that he had the undertaking in mind. He himself, in his parting speech at the dinner given him in May, 1826, just before his departure for Europe, had publicly announced his determination of devoting himself to this subject during his absence abroad. "Encouraged by your kindness," he said, "I will take this opportunity of recording the deeds and sufferings of a class of men to which this nation owes a debt of lasting gratitude--a class of men among whom, I am always ready to declare, not only the earliest, but many of the happiest days of my youth have been passed." The necessity of providing for his family and of paying off debts incurred by others, but for which he was responsible, had prevented the immediate carrying out of this resolution. But it had always been in his thoughts. The delay in the preparation probably added to the value of the history; but its reception would unquestionably have been far different had it been brought out in the height of his popularity.