James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

Conclusion 

 

 

In early America, there was a division of labor between the sexes, both physically and 

morally. Women like Elizabeth are the caretakers of the home just as they are the caretakers of 

republican morality. While men may be able to resolve differences according to innate moral 

codes, women are also there to insure that these codes are nurtured and put into practice. They 

tame and educate the men - Kirby, Natty and Ben can sometimes resolve their differences 

between themselves as men, based on simple fairness or loyalty, but at other times a woman’s 

voice is needed to arbitrate, as in the case of the turkey shoot, or to counsel, as in when Elizabeth 

forces her father to consider the rectitude of punishing Natty. 

 

Wood wrote that this idea of separate spheres of influence between men and women 

“became the dominant line of thinking on women’s issues in the early Republic.”  

Women, it was said, possessed the crucially important talents of civilizing their sons 

and husbands and of teaching the new republican virtues of affection and 

benevolence. They had a special responsibility in the home as wives and mothers, 

which the men could not undertake, for cultivating the moral feelings necessary to 

hold this sprawling commercial American society together.

146

 

 

 

Cooper’s men were not completely lost without women’s help. He clearly endowed 

Natty, Kirby and Ben with inherent moral values, recognizing that such innate morality was of 

paramount importance to a republican society. Even though the notions of the new society were 

predicated both on innate morality and adherence to laws, Cooper is unafraid to explore how 

these two concepts can be at odds in a new land. The innate morality of the frontier individualist 

                                                 

146

 Wood, Rising Glory 175-176 

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and the laws of “civilization” clearly were at odds in Cooper’s Templeton. Again, we see the 

clash of a new and unfinished social order being imposed on existing norms of behavior. Natty 

could not exist in the framework of the new laws. 

 

 

While Cooper himself was Federalist-leaning and ultimately resigned to the imposition of 

new laws and republicanism in America, it seems clear that he also subscribed to the Jeffersonian 

belief that “morals were too essential to the happiness of man, to be risked on the uncertain 

combinations of the head. [Nature] laid their foundation, therefore, in sentiment, not in 

science."

147

                                                 

147

 Letter from Jefferson to Maria Cosway, 1786, quoted in Merrill D. Peterson, Ed.; The Portable Thomas Jefferson 

(New York: Penguin Books, 1977) 400 

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CHAPTER 3: PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE and EDUCATION