James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

Conclusion 

                                                 

103

 Cooper 177 

104

 Cooper 401 

105

 Cooper 149 

106

 Cooper 430 

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24 

 

Religion on the frontier, as we have seen, was not necessarily a central or guiding force 

among settlers, but it was an institution through which they could come together, despite their 

differences. And although it did not act as the imperative guiding their own morality, that did not 

keep settlers from trying to impose it on others. Even if they could not agree about Christianity 

themselves, that would not stop them from spreading it forward among the former tenants of 

their new home.  

Again, the settlers were bringing new institutions into a new land to impose them there, 

but they also were undergoing a metamorphosis of their own. Americans still had a covenant 

with God to create a Christian nation, but there own versions of Christianity were being blended 

or blunted by practical logistics. On the fringe of society, each sect could not maintain a minister 

or its own church, so different sects learned to come together and to share, so that the more 

radical versions each was “softened in its denominational rigor,” as Bailyn put it. And, although 

religion remained an important cultural institution, we have seen how it may have lost some of 

its moral imperative in frontier communities like Cooperstown/Templeton. So, the question 

remains, if religion was not the basis for morality, then what was? 

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25 

 

CHAPTER 2: VIRTUE and MORALITY