William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic

Ill-educated wheelright William Cooper (1754-1809), father of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, rose to power and influence as a judge, land speculator, promoter of frontier settlement, U.S. congressman from upstate New York and owner of the Iroquois' former homeland. The boisterous, rough-hewn Pennsylvania-born Quaker, trying to reinvent himself as a genteel aristocrat, erected his Manor House in Cooperstown, N.Y., the village he founded in 1786. Aligned with the Federalists, who sought to curb the American Revolution's egalitarian implications and favored a stronger central government, Cooper faced opposition from a new class of professional politicians who posed as friends of the common people. After he resigned his judgeship and retired from Congress in 1799, debts and faulty land titles virtually wiped out the family fortune. As his inheritance vanished, youngest son James Fenimore became a novelist, and, in The Pioneers (1823), a fictionalized account of his father and Cooperstown, he attempted to restore the authority of an idealized gentry. This extraordinary saga charts the partisan battles for supremacy in the new American republic, the heated rivalry of diverse religious denominations for the souls of frontier people and the struggle by American writers to create a distinctive national literature. Taylor is a history professor at UC-Davis. Illustrated. (Sept.)