James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

 

Introduction 

 

Jefferson’s contention that morality lies in sentiment and not in science is an important 

one, especially since religious beliefs at the time were to an extent intertwined with science. 

Many of the founding Fathers were deist, believing in a rational order of the universe in which 

man could continuously improve his lot through understanding nature and the physical world.  

As Wood wrote, “most of the founding fathers had not put much stock in religion, even 

when they were regular churchgoers…they abhorred ‘that gloomy superstition disseminated by 

ignorant illiberal preachers’ and looked forward to the day when ‘the phantom of darkness will 

be dispelled by the rays of science...’”

148

 Cooper even allows Richard to boastfully describe the 

town’s house of worship as “the most scientific church in the country.”

149

 

It is very important not to underestimate the importance of science, or at least practical 

reason, in the young republic. Science and reason were needed to understand and tame a new 

continent in a new political – and economic - system. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “those who 

cultivate the sciences amongst a democratic people are always afraid of losing their way in 

visionary speculation. They mistrust systems; they adhere closely to the facts, and study facts 

with their own senses.”

150

 

But science was also just coming into its own in America, and then only truly in the 

cities. For example, Philadelphia would become an important center for the study of “vertebrate 

paleontology,’’ but “the institutional developments that would make this possible were still in 

embryo in 1815,” according to John C. Greene.

151

 Until roughly the end of the 18

th

 century and 

early 19

th

 century, Greene wrote, American science was essentially “a branch of British science” 

                                                 

148

 Wood, Radicalism 330 

149

 Cooper 51 

150

 Heffner 163 

151

 John C. Greene, “American Science Comes of Age, 1780-1820,” 

The Journal of American History

, Vol. 

55, No. 1. (Jun., 1968):39 

---

 

37 

that depended on Europe for everything other than “native talent and the raw data provided by 

nature.”

152

  

Yet American science had its own distinct flavor. As I. Bernard Cohen wrote, “the 

American nation was conceived in a historical period that is generally known as the 

Enlightenment, or the great Age of Reason, and science was then esteemed as the highest form of 

human rationality.”

153

 According to de Tocqueville, this American flavor was decidedly practical 

in nature and “hardly anyone in the United States devotes himself to the essentially theoretical 

and abstract portion of human knowledge.”

154

 

Instead, Americans were more enamored with applied science, with putting knowledge 

into practical effect. In The Pioneers, particularly applied science and knowledge, is the 

underpinning of Temple’s desire to produce a self-sustaining, profitable and rationally ordered 

community. Cooper shows us not only the budding reliance on science, reason and education in 

the new republic to create practical systems, but also the infancy and shortcomings of some of 

the ventures it supported. Although the systems were imperfect, that did not deter the settlers 

from trying to apply them to their new home, regardless of what stood in their way.