James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

 

Introduction 

 

When the townspeople attend their Christmas service at the church, “the two sexes were 

separated by an area in the center of the room.”

107

 While this is one of the few times when 

Cooper demonstrates a physical or even class-system division between the genders, he does 

convey an insight into the social roles of the sexes in regard to American virtues and morality.  

 

Virtue and morality were considered essential conditions for the republic to flourish. As 

George Washington said in his farewell address, “it is substantially true that virtue or morality is 

a necessary spring of popular government.”

108

 This notion applied to both men and women. 

While women were entering a new role as “republican mothers,” political philosophers were 

looking for men to exercise natural virtues and morality to be good citizens of the new nation. 

However, as we see in The Pioneers, innate morality could come into conflict with institutions in 

a nation of laws, especially a nation of new laws in a land with previously established codes of 

behavior. As Natty tells Temple, “I think one old law is worth two new ones…Your titles and 

your farms are all new together…but laws should be equal, and not more for one than 

another.”

109

 

 

Again, the settlers were imposing a new set of institutions and beliefs not onto a blank 

canvass, but rather onto a land where informal codes and long-standing beliefs already existed.