James Fenimore Cooper and the Spectre of Edmund Burke

James Fenimore Cooper, who disliked being called the American Scott, would, one imagines, take no more kindly to being called the American Burke. Yet without the writings of Edmund Burke, Cooper's Leatherstocking Saga, and its by-product The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, would be of a very different character, if indeed they had been undertaken at all. Nor is this surprising. Two of Burke's essays on American rights—'On American taxation', 'On Conciliation with the Colonies'—were schoolroom texts, and he was associated with the Federalist component of Cooper's early milieu. His works were published instantaneously in American editions, and a major six volume edition was published in Boston in 1806. Cooper's first success, The Pioneers, reflects the paradoxes expressed by Burke both in the early essay A Vindication of Natural Society (which opens the collected works) and in his Reflections upon the Revolution in France. The subsequent Leatherstocking saga is quite as Burkean: the formative aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful resonates throughout The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer. Cooper's most thoughtful historical novel, The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, is conspicuously permeated by both Reflections and the Philosophical Enquiry, and his own political treatise The American Democrat shares surprisingly many of his assumptions. Yet because Cooper refers to Burke just twice in his voluminous writings, Cooper scholars do so hardly at all. The confident opening note is perhaps a little shadowed by Cooper's reference, in the following paragraph, to the swelling population of 'a million and a half inhabitants' (that is, in 1823) 'who are maintained in abundance, and can look forward to ages before the evil day must arrive, when their possessions shall become unequal to their wants'. As it happens, for much of the novel, the leading citizen, Judge Temple, founder of Templeton, will be in ineffectual dispute with his Sheriff and his Law Officers and Deputies, who cannot be brought to see what Temple and Natty can see very clearly, that what Natty calls their 'wasty ways' already threaten the destruction of the paradise whose bounty they exploit with all possible speed and the least possible restraint. The irony is deepened when one remembers that the action of the novel is set in 1793, when Europe 'was in the commencement of that commotion which afterwards shook her political institutions to the centre ... and a nation, once esteemed the most refined among the civilized peoples of the world, was changing its character, and substituting cruelty for mercy' (chapter 8, 96). In 1794, inspired by this commotion, Condorcet would ask: 'Must there not arrive a period ... When the increase in the number of men surpassing their means of subsistence, the necessary result must be either a continual diminution of happiness and population, a movement truly retrograde, or, at least, a kind of oscillation between good and evil?' Citing this passage in 1798 while discussing the inequality between population and production Malthus would find that 'the argument is conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind'. It is perhaps stretching a point to note that in 1793 one Tom Paine, author of Common Sense and of The Rights of Man, was imprisoned for ten months in Paris for displeasing the Directory. Natty Bumppo spends merely an afternoon in the stocks for colliding with the new edicts of Judge Temple. M. Le Quoi, who is in Templeton as a refugee from the Terror, finds it safe to make his way back to French possessions in the milder climate of late …