Chapter Eleven

HANNAH

“Then, sir,” said Elizabeth, with an air that was slightly affected, as if submitting to her father’s orders in opposition to her own will, “it is your pleasure that [Oliver] be a gentleman.”

“Certainly; he is to fill the station of one; let him receive the treatment that is due to his place, until we find him unworthy of it.”

“Well, well, ‘duke,” cried the Sheriff, “you will find it no easy matter to make a gentleman of him. The old proverb says, ‘that it takes three generations to make a gentleman.’ ”

—James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, 205

ALTHOUGH POLITICALLY DEFEATED and publicly dishonored, Cooper was still a very wealthy man after 1799, collecting the annual revenues from hundreds of settlers living on thousands of acres that he had sold or rented. According to tax assessments, in 1800 his property within Otsego Township alone amounted to $33,260—more than six times as much property as the next richest man in town. Adding Cooper’s extensive real estate in Butternuts ($68,000), Burlington ($10,710), Milford ($1,085), Otego ($13,750), and Pittsfield ($4,915) raises his total wealth within Otsego County to $131,720. According to his own records, Cooper possessed an additional $77,429 in real estate elsewhere in New York and Pennsylvania, as well as bonds and mortgages from settlers to secure $162,312 in principal. Although politically disgraced, William Cooper could still dress in fine silk clothes, ride in a carriage, drink imported wines, and dwell in the grandest house in New York west of Albany. Contrary to the Federalists’ paranoia, the advent of white male democracy did not bring about any leveling of property, any dispossession of the wealthy, any redistribution of land. Cooper exemplified the overt separation of public authority from private wealth that was the great transformation wrought in the northern states by the Republicans’ “Revolution of 1800.” He remained wealthy, but political honor passed to upstarts such as Jedediah Peck: a new breed of professional politicians, full-time Friends of the People.¹

Painful experience gradually taught Cooper that the cultivation of personal gentility required at least two generations. After his political debacle, Cooper increasingly looked to his seven children to complete the social ascent that he had begun but could not finish. In 1800 his offspring were two daughters, Hannah (b. 1777) and Ann (b. 1784), and five sons: Richard Fenimore (b. 1775), Isaac (b. 1781), William Jr. (b. 1786), Samuel (b. 1787), and James (b. 1789). The judge would provide the money, education, and contacts while they were to acquire the proper social style and acceptance that still eluded him. They began with the advantages that Cooper had to accumulate through economic struggle. By investing his wealth in their education, Cooper hoped to repurchase for his lineage the public authority and prestige that he had lost so suddenly in 1799. He expected his children to redeem his dream of uniting all forms of power—social, economic, political, and cultural—as Otsego’s reigning family. “Nothing can be more interesting to me than to make you Happy,” William Cooper assured his son Isaac in 1804.²

However, by training his children in gentility Judge Cooper unwittingly produced a cultural distance between the generations. They made their way into genteel circles that regarded William Cooper with condescension or suspicion. As Cooper’s children mastered refined mores and manners, they began to see their father as a bumptious upstart, as well-meaning but lamentably common. The patronizing portrayal of Marmaduke Temple in The Pioneers was the fruit of William Cooper’s investment in the genteel education of his son James. The novelist longed to assert his superior gentility by demonstrating that he recognized the moral and cultural flaws of his arriviste father. Marmaduke Temple appears well-intentioned, but inconsistent and ineffectual; and his estate appears suspect until entrusted, at the conclusion, to the next generation who more truly deserve to be rich and influential.³

The novelist described the interior of Temple’s thoroughly bourgeois mansion as manifesting wealth without taste. Determined to impress, without knowing the importance of restraint, Temple overstuffs the rooms with garish ornaments and clumsy furniture characterized by “diversity of taste and imperfection of executions.” His ill-trained servants overset the dining table so that “there was scarcely a spot where the rich damask could be seen, so crowded were the dishes, with their associated bottles, plates and saucers. The object seemed to be profusion, and it was obtained entirely at the expense of order and elegance.” Closely derived from memory of Otsego Hall, the novelist’s description of Temple’s household passed derisive judgment on William Cooper’s faulty gentility.⁴

In his depiction of Judge Temple, James Fenimore Cooper expressed ambivalence and condescension, rather than anger, toward his father. As William Cooper’s heir, the novelist felt torn. On the one hand, he needed to reaffirm the legitimacy of his father’s enterprise and acquisitions as the basis for his own inheritance and status. On the other hand, he had to cope with the dilemma of the wealthy scion—that he could never match his father’s achievements. Born into riches, James Fenimore Cooper could never rise from rags. Rather than accept that implicit inferiority to his father, the novelist cultivated an aristocratic contempt for the bourgeois striving that had made the judge rich.⁵

EXPECTATIONS   

William Cooper wanted his children to master the elitist political principles that he had adopted during the 1790s. Determined to preserve his sons from democratic notions, in 1802 Judge Cooper took offense at something said or done by Oliver Corey, the village schoolteacher (at that time Samuel Cooper was probably studying with Corey). Recognizing his dependence on Cooper’s patronage, Corey quickly apologized, adding: “[However,] as I have ever been invariably a sincere friend, and wellwisher to you, and your worthy family (admitting that I have done wrong in this instance,) I think I have a just claim to your pardon; if not to a share in your future friendship. As to my political principle, I can assure you, that I ever have been and still continue to be as true a Federalist, as is possible for a poor person to be.” The Cooper papers also include a child’s penmanship exercise with a political moral: “If I had a dog that had not more modesty than a Democrat, I would shoote him. There is not one of them but thinks himself fit for any Office in the United States—a devilish likely set of fellows to be sure aint they? ha! ha!! ha!!! 1801.” The hand is probably that of the youngest son, and future novelist, James, then an eleven-year-old boy. Twenty-two years later James Cooper explained to a friend, “You know my antipathies, as you please to call them, to Mr. Jefferson. I was brought up in that school where his image seldom appeared, unless it was clad in red breeches, and where it was always associated with the idea of infidelity and political heresy.” All five of the judge’s sons became Federalists active in electioneering letters, meetings, and committees. But none ever ran for office, recognizing the lingering unpopularity of their family name in Otsego politics.⁶

Much of the children’s education in gentility occurred at home, in the Manor House and Otsego Hall. The surviving evidence suggests an affectionate and playful but teasing household that took its cues from their sociable father’s delight in jokes, poetry, and stories. James Fenimore Cooper fondly recalled his “noble looking, warm hearted, witty father, with his deep laugh, sweet voice and fine rich eye, as he used to lighten the way, with his anecdote and fun.” Discussing the strong Yankee accent that he encountered at Yale College, James Fenimore Cooper recalled an incident characteristic of life in Otsego Hall:

When I was a boy, I was sent from a middle state, for my education, to Connecticut. I took with me, of course, the language of my father’s house. In the first year I was laughed out of a great many correct sounds, and into a great many vulgar and disagreeable substitutes. At my return home to pass a vacation, I almost threw a sister into fits by calling one of her female friends a “virtoous angel,” pronouncing the first syllable of the last word like the article. It was in vain that I supported my new reading by the authorities of the university. The whole six weeks were passed in hot discussion between my sister and myself, amidst the laughter and merriment of a facetious father, who had the habit of trotting me through my Connecticut prosody by inducing me to recite Pope’s Temple of Fame, to the infinite delight of two or three waggish elder brothers, who had got their English longs and shorts in a more southern school.

The Cooper household was usually a setting of comfort, laughter, and sociability. “To be good and happy is what we live for,” daughter Hannah explained in 1799. Two years later James Kent spent a week at Otsego Hall “in the midst of agreable company & amusement.”⁷

Richard R. Smith fondly recalled his stay in the Cooper household as the best four years of his life. In 1794 he departed the Manor House and Cooperstown for Philadelphia to pursue his interest as a merchant. Thereafter, he rued his decision and dreamed in vain of returning. From his new home he assured his old friend, “I believe I shall make more money by the exchange of place, but hang me if I expect more happiness….I often think of Mrs. C[ooper]’s kindness to me with gratitude and pleasure. I hope she enjoys health.” Smith especially missed the Cooper boys: “Kiss the dear little Children for me. Tell them I certainly shall remember to send them something whenever I have an opportunity. It grieves me that I can’t stop and help you eat a Turkey or so of a Sunday. Remember me most affectionately to the Lads, tell them I often think of them and wish I could take a Rubber or two.”⁸

Determined to construct a genteel setting, Cooper accumulated refined clothing, dishes, furniture, ornaments, books, food and drink, servants and slaves. The family’s most prized possession was a large upright mechanical organ that Cooper bought in New York City and had transported over rivers and hills to Cooperstown. Like a player piano, the organ piped loud, cheerful music whenever someone inserted one of its long, heavy wooden rolls and turned the handle. The organ’s arrival caused a sensation as its music first wafted through the compact little village, which had never before known any mechanically produced music. Oliver Corey quickly adjourned his class at the village academy to hasten with his students to the bounds of Otsego Hall, the better to hear the astonishing new sound. Placed in the central hall and played almost every evening, the organ became central to the Coopers’ social activity at Otsego Hall. On July 12, 1800, Hannah wrote to her younger brother William Jr., then away at college: “It is very late at night, nobody in the House up save myself and Mama, who is playing upon the Organ. This amusement engages her every night after the family have seperated, and a very pretty effect it has being not unlike a Serenade.” She added, “Our Fourth of July passed very brilliantly away….The Lads and Lasses repaired in the evening to our House and we had quite a large party to dance,” apparently to the organ’s music.⁹

During the summers Judge Cooper entertained genteel friends venturing out from Philadelphia, Burlington, Albany, and New York City to see the countryside. He relished these visits as occasions to delight his friends and as opportunities to introduce his children to urbane people. Their visits usually occasioned a “lake party,” a day trip in the family boats to their favorite picnic grounds: Myrtle Grove, located at Three Mile Point on the lake’s western shore, where William Cooper had the underbrush cleared and a small cottage erected. There the Coopers, the guests, and their servants took in the clear air, green hills, and translucent waters; ate and drank; napped and fished; and cut their initials in a large and cherished beech tree. Writing from Philadelphia in 1802, Richard R. Smith fondly recalled his summers with the Coopers: “I sometimes fancy myself of a warm day, upon a lake excursion, partaking of the social Sap Cyder under the Shady Trees—But this is a kind of ranting.”¹⁰

The labor of slaves made much of this comfort, ease, and pleasure possible for the Coopers and their guests. New York’s gradual emancipation law of 1799 did not entirely free the state’s slaves until July 4, 1827. Enslaved African-Americans were few in Cooperstown: only seven in 1803, approximately 2 percent of the village population; and only five of the village’s sixty-two households included a slave. Despite William Cooper’s origins among the Quakers, who denounced and worked against slavery, he owned enslaved Blacks: one in 1790 and three in 1803 according to village censuses. The one of 1790 was probably the “wench” Rachel, who, according to a shoemaker’s bill, obtained a new pair of shoes in December of 1792. James Fenimore Cooper recalled the three of 1803 as Joseph Stewart, a butler; “Sarah, the cook; and Betty, the chambermaid.” The Coopers prized their slaves as domestic servants and status symbols rather than as agricultural workers.¹¹

The best known of the Coopers’ Black servants was Joseph Stewart, who eventually became free but continued to serve the family for over twenty years as a butler and valet. He may have been the “negro boy Joseph” whom William Cooper rented from Abraham C. Ten Broeck for $76 to $80 a year between late 1799 and mid-1802. The Coopers called Stewart “the Governor” in mock honor of his dignified manner. A tall, slender, and well-dressed Stewart appears on the background fringe of the 1816 George Freeman portrait of Elizabeth Cooper in Otsego Hall. Paying homage to Stewart in death, the Coopers permitted his burial in their own family plot rather than in the corner reserved in the segregated village cemetery for Blacks.¹²

Apparently at least one of the slaves resented and resisted her status. In August 1799 William Cooper placed an anonymous advertisement in the Otsego Herald:

A YOUNG WENCH FOR SALE. She is a good Cook, and ready at all kinds of housework—None can exceed her if she is kept from Liquor. She is twenty-four years of age—No Husband or Children. Price two hundred dollars. Inquire of the Printer.

Determined, like Judge Temple in The Pioneers, to mask his slaveholding, Cooper carefully kept his name out of the newspaper, using the printer as a broker in the sale. Only Elihu Phinney’s account billing for this notice identifies the judge as the woman’s owner. The surviving evidence does not reveal her name or whether and when she was sold, merely that the advertisement ceased to run after the October 3 issue. Perhaps the threat of sale served to intimidate her into docility. In January of 1800 Hannah Cooper assured her absent father that order had been restored in the household: “The servants conduct themselves with unusual propriety—we have had no squabbles since you left us.”¹³

TRAINING   

Servants, fine possessions, and genteel visitors were not sufficient to give the Cooper children the full social polish and knowledge they needed for elite status. Because genteel families were few in Cooperstown and because its academy had failed to become more than a country grammar school, the children had to go away for schooling in more urbane towns and cities: Burlington, Philadelphia, New York, Albany, and Schenectady. Ambitious for his children, Cooper had to sacrifice their company for several months a year, usually during the long winters, when gentility rarely visited Otsego. Not sharing her husband’s social aspirations, Elizabeth Cooper was uneasy with the prolonged absences of one or more of her sons and daughters at almost any given time. Moreover, her husband often got to see the absent children during his visits to the cities for business and politics, while Elizabeth remained behind in Cooperstown.

The children left home at an early age. Hannah Cooper spent the winters of 1791-92 and 1792-93 in New York City, apparently boarding with the family of the merchant William Wade. She was fourteen going on fifteen. Isaac had just turned thirteen in late 1794, when he first went away to school in Burlington, staying with the old family friend, Andrew Craig. On the way south, escorted by Richard R. Smith, Isaac saw his sister Ann, who was wintering with friends in New York City. She was ten years old. Homesick, she wrote: “I hope my dear papa will soon write to me, for I am very anxious to hear from home.”¹⁴

By mastering genteel manners and learning, the children were supposed to win applause from elite families of discernment, which would reflect well on their father. Diligent and endearing, the Cooper children pleased the judge by delighting their urban hosts and teachers. In 1794 ten-year-old Ann wrote home from New York City: “Dear Papa, I have begun to learn dancing, and am very much pleased with it. I hope to improve in this and every part of my education. I remain dear Papa and Mama, your dutiful daughter.” After visiting Ann (who was commonly called Nancy), Richard R. Smith reported to her father: “She has grown to be a charming Girl….I mean that she has improved.” He added that in the city, “everybody is pleased with Nancy.”¹⁵

Because the Cooper children went away so early for such prolonged sojourns, their teachers and hosts assumed much of their upbringing. In October 1791 Josiah Ogden Hoffman, a prominent New York City attorney, lavished praise on Hannah in a letter to his friend William Cooper:

We had your charming daughter to pass the day with us yesterday. My good Lady & her two sisters are greatly pleased with her. Her manners are easy, her conversations lively, and her deportment ingratiating….We consider her entirely as one of the family and you would have smiled to have seen our quick intimacy. Mr. and Mrs. were soon changed into Papa and Mama. We have adopted her and she us. Take care, lest we truly supplant you. I know not what arrangements you made here, as to her supplies, cash, clothes, &c. I can only say [that] I, in this respect, proffer to you my services. I should then be in reality her second Parent.

Nothing could have delighted Cooper more than Hannah’s success at dazzling her elite host and hostesses, but there was a price: he had to share her with distant, surrogate parents who might displace him in her affections.¹⁶

Because the essence of gentility was the keen perception of, and sharp disdain for, the common, the Cooper children learned to see the social flaws in their father and his village. In 1795 the celebrated duc de Talleyrand, then a refugee from the French Revolution, visited Cooperstown, lodging in the Manor House. Taken with young Hannah Cooper’s charm and mind, he penned a poem that exalted her as too refined for her frontier setting (the poem is also an acrostic; read down, the first letter of each line spells Anna Cooper, as Hannah often called herself):

Aimable philosophe au printemps de son age,

Ni les temps ni les lieux n’alterent son esprit.

Ne cedent qu’a ces gouts, simple et sans etalage

Au milieu des deserts, Elle lit—pense—ecrit.

Cultivez, Belle Anna, votre gout pour l’etude;

On ne saurait ici mieux employer son temps.

Otsego n’est pas gai—mais tout est habitude;

Paris vous deplairait fort au premier moment.

Et qui jouit de soi dans une solitude,

Rentrant au monde, est sur d’en faire l’ornement.

Absorbing this message, Hannah wrote a revealing letter to a friend in Philadelphia in September 1799. After years of schooling and sociability in urban centers, Hannah feared that she would be stranded for the approaching winter in remote Otsego. Her dutiful attempts to put the best face on the prospect only convey her real unhappiness:

I do not know when I shall again emerge from these northern forests. My sister sets a noble example. She is willing to remain at home through the winter provided I will. Upon mature consideration, perhaps a more perfect knowledge of society is not very necessary to her happiness. By being insensible to her own deficiencies, she will be less observant of the deficiencies of those around her.

Gentility was the art of seeing the common in others and of repressing it in yourself.¹⁷

SENSIBILITY   

By all accounts Hannah was the most lovely, graceful, charming, accomplished, and cherished of the Cooper children. She had an ethereal quality. “Her cheeks were usually colorless, her hair was almost flaxen, and her form was the extreme of lightness and delicacy,” recalled her brother James. To virtual perfection she learned, embodied, and lived the ideals of feminine gentility: Hannah was chaste, polite, articulate, empathetic, pious, benevolent, and well-read, yet modest. She reached the pinnacle of gentility: such mastery of its elaborate artifices that they seemed natural and unaffected.¹⁸

When in New York City or Philadelphia, Hannah thoroughly charmed her genteel hosts—men and women, young and old. After she left, they wrote letters longing for her news and her return. Mary Daubeny of New York City wrote to William Cooper, “How is my Dear Hannah? I hope well and Happy for I really Love her, so do my Girls and every Body that knows [her].” Members of the Federalist elite looked more favorably on William Cooper because of their delight in Hannah. Cooper brought her to Philadelphia during his congressional sessions, so that he could introduce her to that city’s elite and so that her charms could reflect well upon him. Learning that Hannah was in New York City awaiting passage to Philadelphia, U.S. Senator Uriah Tracy of Connecticut wrote to her father: “I shall be very glad to oblige you & her, by any attention & assistance I can give, in her passage to Philadelphia.” Hannah looms far larger than her mother or any of her siblings in the letters received by her father.¹⁹

Talented and devoted, Hannah earned the devout affection of her female friends. In early 1800 Eliza McDonald (the daughter of Rev. John McDonald) learned that Hannah had begun to correspond with their mutual friend Chloe Fuller. Eliza quickly and enthusiastically wrote to Chloe: “Your sister tells me Miss Cooper has written to you. Fail not Chloe in answering it. Her friendship is a blessing, her correspondence an Improvement. She is, I think, a pious, sensible, amiable and accomplished woman! I admire her much. I almost envy you the privilege of her correspondence.” Eliza and Chloe considered Hannah to be their “pious pattern.”²⁰

Hannah earned a saintly reputation for her charity and piety. She exhorted herself to humility and service, “whilst there breathes an human being whom we can assist by our advice, relieve by our alms or encourage with our approbation, to whom our pity can supply comfort and our affection pleasure.” She called at the homes of the village poor, delivering donations of food and clothing, and she frequently visited the county jail to distribute religious tracts and to exhort the prisoners to adopt “the truths of morality and religion.” After helping a family who had fled to Cooperstown from a yellow fever epidemic in New York City, Hannah explained, “My heart aches for them and for every unprotected person or wanderer.”²¹

During the late 1790s, within the Cooper household Hannah increasingly filled the role of hostess and mother left void by Elizabeth Cooper’s lack of gentility and recurrent illnesses and depression. Beloved by all and dedicated to burnishing family bonds, Hannah became pivotal to the flow of letters and purchases that sustained the household during the frequent absences of the father. In her affectionate but monitory letters to younger brothers, she was at once sisterly and maternal. In 1798 she wrote to Isaac: “Pray, how do you like Albany? What are your studies? and who your Companions? The last thing is of vast consequence—and I sincerely hope you may not become intimate or acquainted with the low, vicious Boys of which you have so many around you.” She was twenty and he was sixteen. Hannah had become her father’s viceroy in promoting allegiance to the genteel and disdain for the common among her younger siblings. For the rest of his life, James Fenimore Cooper remembered Hannah as a “second mother to me” and honored her “with a reverence that surpassed the love of a brother.” She looms larger in his recorded memory than the sparse and spare references to his true mother. And it is telling that in The Pioneers he depicts Judge Temple as a widower whose daughter Elizabeth presides as the mistress of his household. In fiction, the novelist completed the disappearance of his mother and perfected her displacement by Hannah.²²

It is more than coincidence that the virtuous Hannah Cooper seems the quintessential heroine of a sentimental novel. Like so many young women in England and America, Hannah sought to define herself by emulating the heroines found in didactic fictions. Vicariously absorbed in the travails of fictional characters, readers learned and replicated genteel modes of thinking, speaking, posing, and acting. Historian Richard Bushman remarks that readers “thought of their own lives as stories, following narrative lines like the ones they so frequently read. They intermingled literature and life.” In diaries and letters young women emulated the rhetoric that they found in fictional texts. Especially systematic, Hannah kept a commonplace book in which she carefully copied, in immaculate handwriting, sentimental poetry and morally didactic stories culled from fashionable magazines and compilations, mostly of English production.²³

Like other young women of her time, Hannah looked to literature for insights into romance and marriage. Novels and stories alerted readers to the dangers of an impulsive marriage. Because husbands had almost complete legal power over their wives, and because divorce was virtually impossible, marriage to an exploitative or abusive mate usually meant lifelong misery. Deeming “the Choice of a Husband…the most important of all Subjects,” Hannah copied a fictional letter from an unhappily married woman warning her younger sister to avoid “Men of libertine principles…devoted to gambling, women and all manner of vice.” Another piece warned: “In the fate of a woman marriage is the most important crisis. It fixes her in a fate of all others the most happy or the most wretched.” The ostensibly female author assured Hannah: “It must never be forgotten that the only Government allowed on our side is that of Gentleness and attraction and that its power…must be invisible to be complete.” So much rode on the marriage choice because the culture required women to accept subordination to their husbands.²⁴

Many sentimental fictions were mournful tales of the tragically premature deaths of virtuous heroines victimized by cruel fate and predatory men. Especially fascinated by the morbid, Hannah diligently copied “Marie Antoinette’s Lamentation in her Prison,” “On the Death of an Infant Daughter,” “Anna’s Urn,” “Maria’s Grave,” and Thomas Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Church-Yard.” At least twelve of the twenty-five entries in her commonplace book are meditations upon mortality written from the perspective of the dying or the grieving. The pieces promote a passive resignation to fate, a virtual welcoming of death. The last entry in her book is an untitled poem that seems to have been composed by Hannah. It appropriately summarizes the morbidity that she constructed in her commonplace book:

Why sinks my soul beneath this leaden gloom?

What woe is this that steals my youth away?

Why wish I for thy cold embrace, my tomb,

Ere twenty suns have seen my natal day?

…

No foul dishonour stains my youthful fame,

No secret guilt appals my conscious soul;

I never ting’d my parents cheeks with shame,

Nor wish’d to wander from their just controul,

Why sink I thus beneath this leaden gloom?

What woe is this that steals my youth away?

O love! O cruel love! You write my doom,

You sign my death—and I, content, obey.

Hannah’s commonplace book suggests a private despair that accompanied her bustling public activity.²⁵

Through the mediation of her commonplace book, her morbid reading became her own speech and writing, as she was increasingly preoccupied with preparing for death. In January of 1800 she observed, “We are all mourning for our illustrious Washington, and all wish, though few aspire to it, that in death as in life we may feebly imitate him.” In August a New Jersey admirer, Congressman James H. Imlay, visited Hannah in Cooperstown. She led him on a stroll through the small cemetery south of the Cooper grounds, where she mused, “What a vapor—how insignificant compared with that state of existance which awaits me hereafter—how important that—of how little moment this.” She told Imlay and others that she did not expect to live long.²⁶

As in her commonplace book, Hannah’s resignation was closely associated with the pressure of expectations that, as she entered her twenties, she must soon decide on a husband and subordinate her wishes and abilities to his. Marriage and children would constrict her travel and access to friends in New York City and Philadelphia. Never again would she be as free as in her late teens as the unmarried daughter of a wealthy family committed to her education and contacts. She felt obliged to please family and genteel friends who expected that all her training was meant primarily to secure a husband appropriate to her class. Her choice in marriage would not only determine her life but also reflect upon her parents, siblings, and friends. In the late 1790s Hannah did not lack suitors, but she was reluctant to marry. In 1799 the then young and Republican William Henry Harrison met her in Philadelphia. Dazzled, he proposed marriage, which she respectfully declined. Years later his confidant recalled that in 1799 the future American president “was dying with love for Miss Cooper.” It eased her rejection of Harrison that her father could ill abide a Republican son-in-law. But in 1800 she faced a more serious courtship from the man her father most wanted as a son-in-law: Moss Kent, Jr.²⁷

THE SUITOR   

The letters of Moss Kent, Jr., reveal a prolonged struggle to find a wife up to the exacting standards he shared with his brother James. They understood the proper marriage as critical to sustaining a genteel social standing underwritten by a substantial estate. During the 1790s Moss Kent tried to build the fortune that would win the proper wife, who, in turn, would certify and solidify his elite status. There were many false starts. In a 1792 letter to his brother, Moss slyly announced that he had procured as a housekeeper “a likely young Widdow” with “an illegitimate Child at her Breast, a circumstance that will lead you to conclude that she is amorous as well as young.” The news alarmed James, who worried for his younger brother’s reputation and interest as a gentleman. Both would suffer from a liaison with, or marriage to, a common frontier housekeeper. James replied with a warning: “If you should suppose marriage essential to your best Interests, I trust you will reflect well on the subject. In such new, simple & unpolished Society as that in which you now live, every grace & endowment is apt to be greatly overated for want of proper objects by which to compare them.” He urged the importance of marrying “some Person whose Connections & Station would also contribute to your Interest & Pride.” Thereafter, the amorous housekeeper disappeared from Moss Kent’s letters, and probably from his household, for he quickly reassured brother James: “I expect my Choice of a Wife will perfectly coincide with your wishes.”²⁸

Deeming a wife “essential to my Interest & my happiness,” Moss Kent announced in September 1792 that he meant to marry within a year. But marriage remained elusive despite a succession of prospects who appeared in the letters only to recede, usually without explanation. Kent seemed ever on the verge of proposing to a woman whose family and fortune would satisfy himself and his demanding brother. In 1794 Kent wooed Jerusha Kirkland, the daughter of the famous and prosperous Reverend Samuel Kirkland of Herkimer County. He wrote, “The connexion, should it take place, will be most flattering to my pride. They are a genteel, literary & very respectable Family & the old Gentleman is a man in independent Circumstances.” But Jerusha politely rejected Kent’s proposal. A year later Kent had a new prospect: his cousin Sally Kane, the daughter of a wealthy merchant. Kent anticipated that she would “add to my Happiness & advance my Prosperity to many Thousand. I shall never be contented till I make the experiment.” But he subjected the choice to James Kent’s decision: “Your advice dear Brother, shall be with me conclusive,…for I mean never to take any important Step in Life without first asking the advice of so affectionate & judicious a Brother.” In reply, James Kent warned: “I have so little respect for most of her connections…that I believe your Interest would dictate against the Connection & probably your political consequence would dictate so also.” Moss Kent quickly dropped Sally Kane, assuring brother James that he too held her “family connexions” in “perfect contempt & detestation.” In 1796 Kent turned his attentions to Sally Kirkland, the younger sister of Jerusha. Kent appraised his prospects: “I shall make the same proposal to her that I did to her eldest Sister & have no great fear that it will not be accepted. It is one of the most agreable Families I ever knew. The old Gentleman is a man of large fortune. I believe him to be worth £2000…& lives like a Prince.” But in early 1797 Kent backed away, perhaps because it had become clear that Sally shared her sister’s distaste.²⁹

Kent did have an ardent admirer in Eliza McDonald, the lone daughter of his controversial friend, the defrocked Reverend John McDonald. In late 1798, after Eliza and John McDonald had left Cooperstown for Albany, she wrote in despair to her friend Chloe Fuller: “You would make me believe [that] Mr. K[ent] sometimes talks of me. I fear it is only when you remind him that there is such a person in existence.” Hoping to spark Kent’s interest, Chloe Fuller showed him one of Eliza McDonald’s letters, but he responded with “indifference.” After all, her father no longer had any money or much respectability: Kent’s chief criteria for a wife. In June Eliza sadly concluded, “He is however a worthy character and a sincere friend of my Father’s. He therefore merits my esteem & gratitude.”³⁰

Given his longing to marry wealth, Moss Kent was remarkably slow to settle on the obvious and proximate choice: the elder daughter of Judge William Cooper, the greatest landlord in Otsego County. Sharing the Manor House with the Coopers from mid-1794 to late 1797, Kent knew Hannah as she matured from age sixteen to twenty and became eligible for marriage. Ever inclined to think that parents were eager for their daughters to marry him, Kent insisted that the Coopers were especially keen: “I am not without my suspicions that I am an object of Love. I know that her Parents are desirous of a connection. The Mother has recommended her Daughter to me in the Presence of her Husband.” Although self-interested, Kent’s insistence is plausible given William Cooper’s manifest longing to make a son of the dashing young lawyer. And what better way to subdue Kent’s troublesome ambitions than to bring him into the family?³¹

Although initially attracted to Hannah, Kent backed away in mid-1795, shortly after he began to break with Cooper politically. Increasingly contemptuous of the judge as a distasteful vulgarian and political enemy, Kent did not relish becoming his son-in-law. Determined to deny the match deemed so obvious by others, Kent expressed private contempt for Hannah in a July 1795 letter to his brother: “I am not at present in Love notwithstanding the young Lady is at Home of whom I spoke so highly when I saw you. To the eye of my reason, unobscured by Passion, what little natural Grace she possesses is distorted by affectation, whatever smattering of Learning she has, is turned into disgust & Ridicule by her pedantic display of it.” Wedded to his own sense of superiority, Kent refused to believe that William Cooper was capable of raising a truly genteel daughter.³²

Kent alone detected flaws in a young woman deemed perfect by every other gentleman and lady in New York and Philadelphia. Indeed, James Kent urged his brother to reconsider, insisting: “Hannah is agreable & well informed.” James shared his brother’s distaste for William Cooper: “The judge, you know, is always facetious & trifling.” But, dazzled by the judge’s wealth if not by his manners, James insisted that Moss should not so quickly throw away his chance to acquire Cooper’s money: “Such an Union would place you in a most happy Independence.” Although he had, at last, found a prospect who satisfied his demanding brother, Moss rejected her, preferring to prosecute his political struggle against her father through the late 1790s.³³

Kent rediscovered his love for Hannah in the summer of 1800, after her father had accepted his political demise and resigned as judge the previous October. Less than a year after helping Joseph Strong hound Cooper from office, Kent resolved to become his son-in-law. With the judge’s public authority and prestige in ruins, Kent could, at last, enter the Cooper family on his own terms: as the county’s preeminent Federalist. Returning to Cooperstown from a trip in late August 1800 Kent wrote:

Never was a Person more affectionately welcomed than I was by the judge’s family, particularly by Mrs. Cooper & Miss Nancy & Mrs. Kelley, the judge’s Sister. I have spent a very considerable part of my time since my arrival with Miss [Hannah] C[ooper] & if I do not obtain her, which is the supreme desire of my Heart, it will not be owing to my diffidence, my want of perseverance & my good Generalship, but because the Fates have decreed otherwise.

Indeed, the fates decreed that Hannah would be dead within two weeks.³⁴

DEATH   

On Wednesday morning, September 10, 1800, Hannah set out with her brother Richard Fenimore and a few friends on a twenty-four-mile ride southwest to visit the mansion and family of Gen. Jacob Morris in Butternuts. Proud of her equestrian skills, Hannah insisted, over her brother’s protests, on riding a newly acquired and especially spirited thoroughbred. The party rode along a road filled with mud holes and tree roots, passing through a hilly and heavily forested countryside interspersed with new clearings filled with blackened stumps, rail fences, and log cabins. Late in the afternoon, within two miles of their destination, Hannah’s horse took fright from the racket made by men threshing buckwheat with wooden flails near the road. Just as she brought her horse under control, a barking dog rushed from the yard on the east side of the road, leaping over a fence. Her horse reared violently, throwing Hannah. Her head smashed against a stump, shattering her skull. According to Jacob Morris, the blow terminated

her precious life as instantanious as if she had been shot through the heart with a Cannon Ball. I reached her in about 8 minutes after the fatal catastrophe. Nothing of life remained but the throbbing of the pulse. She appeared lovely even in death. I immediately had a Bier made in a few minutes, put a bed on it, lay her decently on it, & brought her down on our shoulders [to my house] where she was laid out [and] put into a coffin.

That night his son, Richard Morris, raced to Cooperstown, bearing to Otsego Hall the shocking news.³⁵

The next day William Cooper, Moss Kent, Jr., and several family friends rode to Butternuts with a wagon to retrieve the corpse. That afternoon and evening they returned, James Kent later reported, “over Hills & thro deep woods. The moon rose an Hour before they reached Cooperstown & gave the Procession of a dozen Mourners following the Waggon an awful Solemnity.” A day later an Episcopalian priest, Rev. Daniel Nash, conducted the funeral service in the central hall of “the judge’s large & agonizing House.” The mourners included dozens of villagers as well as her parents, her sister Ann (Nancy), and her brothers James, Samuel, and Richard Fenimore. Brothers Isaac and William Jr. were away in Philadelphia and Princeton, respectively. The service concluded, thirteen pallbearers shouldered the mahogany coffin and exited the house through the front door to a waiting hearse. A “very large concourse of weeping citizens” joined the procession around the block to the Cooper family burial plot, located behind Otsego Hall, where Hannah found her grave.³⁶

Hannah’s dramatic death at the peak of good health and in the midst of every comfort, universal acclaim, and brilliant prospects stunned her many friends and admirers. Her death and funeral were reported in the New York City and Philadelphia newspapers. Editors and friends paid tribute to her perfected gentility and virtue. Reporting the “Melancholy Catastrophe,” Elihu Phinney credited Hannah with “every amiable quality which could endear her to society, every worldly blessing which could render her desirable, and every pious sentiment which could disarm death of its terrors.” James Kent regretted his brother’s loss: “This Miss Hannah Cooper was a most elegant, lovely & accomplished Woman & united Beauty, Taste, Learning, Virtue & Religion.” Her many good works and prominent public presence left her mourned by hundreds in Otsego County. Gen. Jacob Morris lamented, “No young woman of her age, 23 years, had more highly cultivated her understanding which she had been enabled to do from the advantages of a good education and a strong mind. She was kind, benevolent, charitable & virtuous and our whole community is over whelmed with grief on account of our loss.” Reading the news in a Philadelphia newspaper, Elizabeth Drinker wrote in her diary: “a very good Character….Poor W[illiam] C[ooper], it will be a great blow to him.” Many of the mourners referred to Hannah as a precious possession, an immaculate jewel—words with a special resonance for her father. Another Philadelphian, Catherine Wistar Bache, tried to console William Cooper: “When time has mellowed your present feelings it will be to you, Sir, I have no doubt, a source of delightful recollection that you were once in the possession of such a Child; and to me that I possess’d the friendship of such a Woman.” Anne Francis assured Cooper, “She was a jewel of immense value to you & to her Friends.” Eliza McDonald exhorted her friend Chloe Fuller, “I have hardly a fonder desire for you or for myself than that we might be and live like her, whose memory I trust we shall ever cherish.” Friends in Albany and New York requested and received, as mementos, locks of Hannah’s hair cut from her head by the family before sealing her coffin.³⁷

Hannah’s death seared William Cooper. Already reeling from his precipitous political downfall of the year before, Cooper suddenly had to deal with the loss of the person he most loved, the daughter who had been the proof of his true worth. The judge was, he said, “bowed down to the very dust.” To cope with his grief, Cooper created two monuments to his daughter and her tragic death. First, he composed verses for inscription on her tombstone:

Adieu! thou Gentle, Pious, Spotless, Fair,

Thou more than daughter of my fondest care,

Farewell! Farewell! till happier ages roll

And waft me Purer to thy kindred Soul.

Oft shall the Orphan and the Widow’d poor

Thy bounty fed, this lonely spot explore,

There to relate thy seeming hapless doom,

(More than the solemn record of the tomb,

By tender love inscribed can e’er portray,

Nor sculptured Marble, nor the Plaintiff lay,

Proclaim thy Virtues thro’ the vale of time)

and bathe with grateful tears thy hallowed shrine.

The verses express a unique identification with Hannah, a very personal, rather than a collective and familial sense of loss. In death as in life, William Cooper claimed Hannah as especially his daughter. In early 1801 he also designed a marble monument to mark the spot where she died. Assisted by the similarly grief-stricken James H. Imlay, Richard R. Smith, Catherine Wistar Bache, and Jacob Morris, William Cooper acquired the monument in Philadelphia for transport to Otsego and erection near Butternuts Creek, where it still stands.³⁸

The Cooper family also memorialized Hannah by turning into relics those items most closely associated with her life and death. The dining table on which Hannah’s coffin lay during her funeral service became an especially cherished heirloom that James Fenimore Cooper later kept in his library, ever near as he wrote. The family converted Hannah’s commonplace book into a monument by appending copies of the letters of condolence and tribute received from family friends and by adding an epitaph: “the within selection of elegant Poetry and Scraps reflect honor on the hand which is now mouldering in the dust.” William Cooper similarly memorialized Hannah’s Bible by inscribing a poem and preserving the volume for presentation to a granddaughter who would bear her name. The poem began:

In years to come, when aged grown,

May some sweet grandchild of my own,

Bearing my Hannah’s name,

With female love on me attend,

And be her aged Grandpa’s Friend,

Then he’ll be blest again.

With hopes like those I hail the morn,

On which the lovely babe was born,

The seraph place to fill,

On whose dear lips sweet accents grew,

More gentle than the morning dew,

To comfort every ill.

On November 15, 1808, Hannah’s younger sister, Ann, gave birth to a baby named Hannah Cooper Pomeroy, who received the cherished Bible from her grandfather. William Cooper’s will stipulated that, after his widow died, the surviving children were to divide the furniture in Otsego Hall with one exception: he reserved the contents of the northern bedroom on the second floor—Hannah’s room—for his eldest granddaughter, named Hannah, born in 1802, the daughter of Richard Fenimore Cooper. Unable to bear the thought that Hannah was gone forever, the Cooper family preserved an almost mystical hope that a granddaughter would reembody her spirit.³⁹

AFTERSHOCKS   

Moss Kent, Jr., was shattered by the catastrophe, so devastating to his hopes. On September 12, 1800, he informed his brother James, “I am one of her most afflicted Mourners & long shall I bear her in melancholy remembrance.” Moved by his loss, James Kent appended a note to the letter: “His attachment to her had been growing for six years past & there was every solid reason to conclude [that] she had an equal attachment to him & that they would shortly have been married.” Given the frequency with which Moss Kent, Jr., had erroneously predicted his impending matrimony, perhaps we should be skeptical that they were about to marry—but it is significant that William Cooper included Kent in the party that retrieved Hannah’s body. In the following months grief debilitated him with fever and ague: “I have not been perfectly in health since the Loss of my invaluable Friend. I was not sensible of the extent of my affection & esteem for her till death had snatched her from my Society.” Her sudden death seems to have shocked Kent into an unprecedented feeling for someone other than himself or his older brother. Permanently stunned by his loss, Kent remained a bachelor for life. In late 1804 he departed Cooperstown, emigrating north to Jefferson County in the St. Lawrence valley.⁴⁰

Kent was not alone in his devastation: her other ardent suitor, James H. Imlay, continued for years to mourn Hannah. He helped fund and arrange the marble monument to her, and he referred with melancholy to her tragedy in his every letter written to the Coopers over the next decade. Like Kent, he never married, explaining, “I have not since the summer of 1800 felt much like getting in love.”⁴¹

Elizabeth Cooper coped with the tragedy by turning inward. Hannah’s death deepened her disengagement from the world beyond the picket fence surrounding the Cooper grounds. Making a cocoon of Otsego Hall, she rarely ventured out and usually disliked letting outsiders in. She lavished care on the house and gardens but was uninterested in entertaining her husband’s many visitors, abdicating the formal role of hostess to her daughter Ann or to a daughter-in-law. In February of 1809 Alexander Coventry visited Otsego Hall and reported:

The judge received me kindly. His lady appears rather odd: is an active, stirring little woman, rather plain in her manners and a little contradictory withal, but a notable housekeeper. A very genteel and accomplished daughter-in-law, formerly Miss Clason, did the honors of the table, and by her sweet amiableness, filled the place beautifully, and the mother-in-law, although seeming a little outre [sic] at first, improves much upon acquaintance.

A family tradition insists that the mansion once caught on fire, attracting the village’s volunteer fire company. Rather than permit them in, Elizabeth Cooper locked the doors and repelled the firemen with boiling water while her servants subdued the blaze. In December of 1813 her son Isaac and his family moved into a new house around the corner from Otsego Hall; in June of 1814 he recorded astonishment in his diary: “Mother actually came to see us. First time she ever saw the House.” Isaac was more surprised that she had come at all than that it had taken her six months to travel one block.⁴²

She was most at peace when withdrawn within Otsego Hall, surrounded by flowers, and lost in a novel. Her granddaughter Susan Fenimore Cooper provides our most vivid and sympathetic description of Elizabeth Cooper:

Occasionally I was taken to the Hall to see my Grandmother. I have a dim recollection of her sitting near a little table, at the end of the long sofa seen in her picture, with a book on the table. She always wore sleeves to the elbow, or a little below, with long gloves. She took great delight in flowers, and the south end of the long hall was like a greenhouse in her time. She was a great reader of romances. She was a marvellous housekeeper, and beautifully nice and neat in all her arrangements.

Susan Fenimore Cooper referred to George Freeman’s painting made in 1816 depicting Elizabeth Cooper in Otsego Hall. She sits in the foreground thoroughly encased by walls, floor, ceiling, and furniture, and by layers of clothing that leave only her kind but mournful face exposed to the viewer. Orange trees in boxes fill the back wall, and a flowering plant nestles at her feet, as a protective sentry.⁴³

While his wife turned inward, William Cooper characteristically dealt with his grief by throwing himself into a new enterprise that pulled him away from Otsego with its tragic associations. In February 1803 Cooper plunged into an ambitious new land speculation in DeKalb, a wilderness township in the distant St. Lawrence valley near the Canadian border. Thereafter Cooper spent most of his time in DeKalb or in New York City, where he cultivated partners for his new speculation. In New York City he lodged at the fashionable boardinghouse on Wall Street kept by the widow Mary Daubeny. She and her children became Cooper’s second, surrogate family. In 1803 Charlotte Daubeny closed a letter to Cooper, “I remain your affectionate daughter by adoption.” In December 1805 Cooper addressed Mary Daubeny as “Dear Mother” and promised to spend the approaching winter in New York City: “I shall see you every day.” Among the Daubenys, Cooper temporarily forgot the painful memories associated with his family in Otsego.⁴⁴

ELIZABETH TEMPLE   

The person longest affected by Hannah’s death was her younger brother James. He sought renewed communion with Hannah by three paths: via spiritualism, through his own daughter, and by creating a fictional heroine given immortality. Intrigued by spiritualism, the novelist attended a seance in New York City in 1850, communicating with a spirit he identified as Hannah. Of his many dead friends and relatives, she was the one he most longed to reach, even fifty years after her death.⁴⁵

In 1849 James Fenimore insisted that his daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper replicated the lost Hannah: “How I love that child! Her countenance is that of a sister I lost, by a fall from a horse, half a century since, and her character is very much the same. They were, and are, as perfect as it falls to the lot of humanity to be. I am in love with Sue, and have told her so, fifty times.” Terrified of losing Hannah a second time, James Fenimore Cooper discouraged Susan’s suitors and dissuaded her from marriage; she remained in his household for life—hostage to a tragedy of 1800.⁴⁶

But Cooper’s most successful strategy for reclaiming and perpetuating Hannah was as a fictional character. In The Pioneers he reanimated her as Elizabeth Temple, the daughter of Judge Temple and the perfection of feminine virtue and gentility. The novelist completed the transformation of Hannah into a fictional heroine, a process she had begun by emulating the virtuous but tragic characters whom she copied into her commonplace book. As in the novel’s recall of Judge Cooper’s political downfall, James Fenimore Cooper both exercised and exorcised his pain in remembering Hannah. In a transparent reference to Hannah’s fatal accident Cooper describes Elizabeth Temple mounted on a spirited horse, riding aggressively over a rough frontier road, disdaining the caution of her worried father (as Hannah had ridden a powerful thoroughbred to the Butternuts, probably over the objections of her anxious brother). Temple warns, “If thou venturest again, as in crossing this bridge, old age will never overtake thee, but I shall be left to mourn thee, cut off in thy pride, my Elizabeth.” In 1832 James Fenimore Cooper added a footnote alerting readers that this episode referred “to facts”: “More than thirty years since, a very near and dear relative of the writer, an elder sister and a second mother, was killed by a fall from a horse, in a ride among the very mountains mentioned in this tale. Few of her sex and years were more extensively known, or more universally beloved, than the admirable woman who thus fell a victim to the chances of the wilderness.”⁴⁷

Obsessed with Hannah’s fatal accident, James Fenimore Cooper imagined Elizabeth exposed to three deadly dangers, all set in the Otsego hills: a falling tree, a panther’s attack, and a forest fire. In all three episodes the novelist credited Elizabeth with the passive resignation to death that Hannah had constructed in her commonplace book. When a rotting tree begins to fall toward Elizabeth’s skull, she looks up “with an unconscious but alarmed air,” rather than spurring her horse forward. Later, when a panther prepares to spring, “Miss Temple did not, or could not move. Her hands were clasped in the attitude of prayer, but her eyes were still drawn to her terrible enemy….The moment seemed now to have arrived for the fatal termination, and the beautiful figure of Elizabeth was bowing meekly to the stroke.” Finally, she prepares for death as a forest fire surrounds her and Oliver on the slope of Mount Vision. “ ‘This mountain is doomed to be fatal to me!’ she whispered,—’we shall find our graves on it!’ ” “For me there is no hope!” She faces death with the “resigned composure” expected of “the most delicate of her sex,” announcing, “We must die; yes—yes—we must die—it is the will of God, and let us endeavour to submit like his own children.” The novelist simultaneously honored his sister’s memory and promoted the passivity and morbidity that he deemed the proper ideals of genteel women.⁴⁸

In all three crises Elizabeth’s morbid passivity invites the saving intervention of a man. Judge Temple rescues his daughter from the falling tree by pushing her forward, yelling “God protect my child!” Natty Bumppo suddenly appears to shoot the panther dead, sparing Elizabeth and her companion Louisa Grant: “The death of her terrible enemy appeared to Elizabeth like a resurrection from her own grave.” Later, when the forest fire closes in on Elizabeth and Oliver, Natty bursts through the flames and leads them through smoke, cinders, burning logs, and falling branches to safety. The pure resignation of the perfect woman brings out the best in the best of men, empowering them to act as the protectors of female vulnerability and virtue.⁴⁹

Of course, the real savior was the novelist, who created and employed the characters who spare Elizabeth. By thrice rescuing Elizabeth at the last possible moment, James Fenimore Cooper exercised in fiction a power that he devoutly wished he had enjoyed in life. At the forest fire, Oliver speaks for the novelist to Elizabeth/Hannah: “ ‘Die!’ the youth rather shrieked than exclaimed, ‘No—no—there must yet be hope—you at least must not, shall not die.’ ”⁵⁰

In The Pioneers the novelist’s kindest service to his father is the homage paid to his grief for Hannah and to her love for him. At each escalation of the forest fire, Elizabeth thinks primarily of her father’s anguish. When the fire encloses her refuge, she sobs, “My father—my poor, my distracted father!” As the fire draws nearer, she looks out from the mountain to see Judge Temple in the distant village: “This sight was still more painful than the approaching danger.” “ ‘My father!—My father!’ shrieked Elizabeth. ‘Oh!—this surely might have been spared me—but I submit.’ ” Preparing for death, she instructs Oliver Edwards:

“You will see my father; my poor, my bereaved father! Say to him, then Edwards, say to him, all that can appease his anguish. Tell him that I died happy and collected; that I have gone to my beloved mother; that the hours of this life are as nothing when balanced in the scales of eternity. Say how we shall meet again. And say,” she continued, dropping her voice, that had risen with her feelings, as if conscious of her worldly weaknesses, “how dear, how very dear, was my love for him. That it was near, too near, to my love for God.”

The angelic Elizabeth validates the judge, who for all his faults has trained her and won her enduring love.⁵¹

During the forest fire scene, the novelist three times calls attention to the dangerously flammable dress worn by Elizabeth: “Those flowing robes, that gave such softness and grace to her form, seemed now to be formed for the instruments of her destruction.” (Of course, being a perfectly genteel and virtuous heroine, she cannot think of disrobing in front of Oliver, even to escape a burning death.) The author’s preoccupation with her combustible dress almost certainly draws from another painful memory: the death in 1811 of Miss Elizabeth Cooper, his seven-year-old niece and Richard Fenimore Cooper’s daughter. She died “in consequence of her clothes having accidentally taken fire from a candle.”⁵²

In The Pioneers, James Fenimore Cooper indulged himself, first with the melancholy of recall, but ultimately with the pleasure of allowing his lost sister (and a measure of his dead niece) to enjoy a better fate by surviving danger to marry and inherit the judge’s estate. In life young James Cooper identified with Moss Kent, Jr., who had courted his beloved older sister and “second mother.” In The Pioneers Cooper recalled that courtship, encoding Kent as Oliver Effingham—the personification of male, aristocratic honor. By ultimately marrying Oliver to Elizabeth, Cooper realized the unconsummated match of Moss Kent, Jr., and Hannah Cooper. Moreover, because the Effingham of fiction, like the Kent of life, represents James Cooper’s self-idealization, the marriage is the novelist’s vicarious opportunity to espouse his sister’s memory. In his 1851 preface to The Pioneers, Cooper explained that he regarded Hannah “with a reverence that surpassed the love of a brother.” The literary critic Stephen Railton concludes, “Oliver’s…uncontested possession of Elizabeth and the judge’s estate fulfill[s] Cooper’s most heartfelt wishes. He could not have conceived of a happier ending.”⁵³

In The Pioneers, Richard Jones, Hiram Doolittle, Jotham Riddel, and Marmaduke Temple seek precious ores in the Otsego hills, but the real treasure, kept at the Mansion House, is Elizabeth. She is not only the judge’s fondest possession but his sole heir who will bring to her successful suitor and husband all that her father possesses. Better still, because she is the perfection of feminine gentility, her favor will validate the man who merits her love and esteem—will prove him, above all others, the worthiest of gentlemen. Through the mediation of Oliver Effingham, James Fenimore Cooper won his sister’s complete love and approval, proving himself the complete gentleman. And he secured in fiction the inheritance that was, he felt, his due.⁵⁴