James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

Introduction 

 

It is almost impossible to separate politics, class and landownership principles in Post-

Revolutionary New York; there was a complicated combination of factors was still being sorted 

out. Indians had been supplanted by European settlers under royal grants, and those grants had 

subsequently been nullified by the Confiscation Act of 1779, which seized private property of 

Loyalists as well as any property that “did vest in, or belong, or was, or were due to the crown of 

Great Britain.”

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 In addition, the rights of squatters also were a factor to be considered in the 

frontier lands of America. 

 

Land was also inextricably entwined with notions of class and political leanings in Post-

Revolutionary New York. The war “violently disordered society and property,” Taylor wrote, 

opening the door for men like William Cooper to amass land and wealth.

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 Yet putting a 

republic into practice was a radical step and one that many were hesitant to rush into too 

strongly. The result was the schism between Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans. 

 

Federalists lacked the boundless faith in human nature that Jeffersonians seemed to 

possess, and were far more conservative in their approach to leveling class systems. According to 

Linda Kerber, “All the famous Jeffersonian rhetoric about man’s capacity to construct a better 

world from new blueprints was so much high-flown nonsense. It was given to man only to 

remodel his world, not to remake it, and then only with the greatest caution.”

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This schism reflects a fundamental identity crisis in early America. This was a period in 

which new principles were being applied to a new land while vestiges of old orders and old 

peoples still remained. The conflict between the old and the new is reflected in The Pioneers. 

Richard Slotkin, meanwhile, argues that Jefferson’s egalitarianism was rather qualified, and that 

Cooper’s perspective on the classes was actually in keeping with it: “The Cooperian status 

system thus accords quite well with Jeffersonian theory, which held that while one might find 

                                                 

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 The New York Act of Attainder, or Confiscation Act; Chapter XXV of the Laws of the Third Session of the New 

York Legislature; October, 22, 1779 

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 Taylor 57 

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 Kerber, Federalists 22 

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some “natural aristoi’ among the common people, on the whole the existing aristoi would ‘breed 

true…’”

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