James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The Pioneers as History

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Florida State University Libraries

Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations 

 The Graduate School

2004

James Fenimore Cooper's Frontier: The

Pioneers as History

Thomas Berson

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ii 

The members of the Committee approve the thesis of Thomas Berson defended on July 1, 

2004. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Frederick Davis 

Professor Directing Thesis 

 

 

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John Fenstermaker 

Committee Member 

 

 

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Ned Stuckey-French 

Committee Member 

 

 

 

 

Approved: 

 

 

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John Fenstermaker, Chair, Program in American and Florida Studies 

 

 

 

 

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Donald Foss, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 

 

 

 

 

The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee 

members.

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iii 

 

 

 

For My Parents 

 

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iv 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

 

 

 

Special thanks to John Fenstermaker, who gave me the opportunity to come back 

to school and to teach and to Fritz Davis, who helped me find direction in my studies. 

 

Additional thanks to the aforementioned and also to Ned Stuckey-French for 

taking the time out of their summers to sit on the committee for this paper.  

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v 

TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 

 

 

Abstract ................................................................................................................. vi. 

 

INTRODUCTION ...................................................................................................1  

 

 

LITERATURE REVIEW ........................................................................................6 

 

1. RELIGION.........................................................................................................15 

 

2. MORALITY AND VIRTUE .............................................................................25 

 

3. PRACTICAL SCIENCE AND EDUCATION..................................................36 

 

4. A CHANGING LAND ......................................................................................47 

 

CONCLUSION......................................................................................................62 

 

APPENDICES .......................................................................................................66 

 

REFERENCES ......................................................................................................75 

 

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .................................................................................80 

 

 

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vi 

ABSTRACT 

 

 

 

This thesis examines aspects of American culture and society in Post-

Revolutionary upstate New York through the lens of James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The 

Pioneers. While scholars have looked to The Pioneers as an object of literary criticism or 

for overarching American themes such as manners or authority, I examine The Pioneers’ 

value as a historical document.  

Specifically, I examine the clash between a new culture still in its infancy and an 

existing one in its last days. The frontier settlers in Cooper’s work, as in reality, imposed 

their religion, science, and land-ownership principles on the remnants of native 

Americans and pre-revolutionary “squatters” even as their own understandings of those 

institutions were changing. 

In this paper I examine how, although settlers attempted to impose their religion 

on native Americans, religion did not play as major a role in guiding frontier morality, 

but that Jeffersonian notions of republican motherhood and innate morality did. At the 

same time, these notions of morality came into conflict with the new laws that were being 

enforced while settlers were imposing Christianity onto the indigenous residents of 

America. These topics are the subject of Chapters One and Two. 

Fledging notions of applied science were brought to bear in an attempt to create a 

sustainable long-term development, but that scientific institutions in America, such as 

medicine, were notably deficient. These issues are the subject of Chapter Three. 

Following that, I also discuss how land-ownership issues were complicated by pre-

existing claims on the land, by Indians, Loyalist settlers and squatters. Finally, I explore 

how Cooper presciently staked out proto-environmentalist themes long before modern 

notions of conservation were developed, and how his portrayal of these themes is 

valuable to understanding ideas of the Turnerian “frontier.” 

 

The paper examines all these ideas by comparing Cooper’s writing to that of 

historical scholars and Cooper’s contemporary cultural observers, as well as by utilizing 

other primary source materials.   

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1 

INTRODUCTION 

 

 

 

In the introduction to The Pioneers, or Sources of the Susquehanna, James Fenimore 

Cooper acknowledges that the book is meant to provide a “descriptive tale” of the area of upstate 

New York in which he lived as a boy. However, he wrote,  

[T]hey who will take the trouble to read it may be glad to know how much of its 

contents is literal fact, and how much is intended to represent a general picture. 

The author is very sensible that, had he confined himself to the latter, always the 

most effective, as it is the most valuable, mode of conveying knowledge of this 

nature, he would have made a far better book. But in commencing to describe 

scenes, and perhaps he may add characters, that were so familiar to his own 

youth, there was a constant temptation to delineate that which he had known, 

rather than that which he might have imagined.

1

 

 

In other words, The Pioneers is not simply a work of fiction, nor is it pure autobiography. 

Rather, it is a hybrid of the two, a colorized and perhaps romanticized recollection of 

Cooperstown, New York in the late 18

th

 century. As such, it offers value not only as a work of 

literature but also as a primary source for historical analysis. Unlike writers such as James 

McCullough or Michael or Jeff Shaara, who might create historical fiction from research done a 

century or more later, or a Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth, who offer history through 

literal accounts of their own experience, Cooper has left us with history through the equivalent of 

a soft-focus lens: the picture is true, but the outlines are blurred. It is a recollection of a time and 

place, but it is not autobiography. Real themes and characteristics are explored, but under the 

liberating style of fiction. The Pioneers is also unique in another way: according to Terence 

Martin, only 60 to 80 novels were written in America between 1789 and 1820 a figure of less 

than three per year!

2

 Hence The Pioneers, written in 1823, stands virtually alone in the canon of 

American literature: contemporary historical fiction for the immediate post-Revolutionary 

period. 

“In order to prevent mistake,” Cooper reminds us, “it may be well to say that the 

incidents of this tale are purely a fiction. The literal facts are chiefly connected with the natural 

                                                 

1

 

James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (New York: Signet Classic Books, 1964) v. 

2

 Terence Martin, “Social Institutions in the Early American Novel,”