James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

Introduction 

 

It is fitting that first several hundred pages or so of the book span only a day and a half 

period encompassing Christmas Day, 1793, as The Pioneers provides important insights into the 

religious fabric of the fringe settlements in the late 18

th

 century.  

Bernard Bailyn wrote that while historical interpretations of the Revolutionary period 

based on religious theories of a “covenant with God” are somewhat limited because by the late 

18

th

 century, Puritanism had been “softened in its denominational rigor by many hands until it 

could be received, with minor variations, by almost the entire spectrum of American 

Protestantism.” Still, he continues, there was an inherent and shared sense of a divine mission in 

the minds of the settlers “that the colonization of British America had been an event designed by 

the hand of God to satisfy his ultimate aims.”

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The Pioneers reflects both halves of this equation. On one hand, it shows a backwater of 

American religion that is often overlooked by historians who tend to focus on the fiery 

egalitarian ministers and evangelical communities of the day rather than those areas where a 

minister of any denomination was a luxury and people were willing to overlook differences in 

religious forms in order to observe their faiths. In areas like Cooper’s Templeton, a common 

ground had to be reached between denominations, necessitating the dilution of any radical or 

controversial tenets. 

On the other hand, The Pioneers also starkly depicts efforts by white settlers to impose 

their religious beliefs on indigenous peoples. Chingachgook’s tepid acceptance of Christianity, 

and his ultimate rejection in favor of his own tenets of faith sheds light on this important tension 

between settlers and natives. 

Between these two seemingly contradictory elements, we see a picture of a society that is 

attempting to imprint its institutions on a new land and old peoples, even as they have not yet 

established the changing and evolving meaning of those institutions among themselves. 

 

                                                 

68

 Bailyn 32 

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