The Sea Lions: James Fenimore Cooper's Antebellum Jeremiad

Abstract

James Fenimore Cooper was one of America’s most socially engaged authors. His treatises Notions of the Americans (1828) and The American Democrat (1838) make this involvement plain, as do such fictions as Home As Found (1838) and The Redskins (1845), both of which treat democratic excesses in New York State. Several of his adventure tales too address contemporary social themes, albeit less explicitly. His sea tales begin as venues for swashbuckling and displays of seacraft (The Pilot, 1824) but soon feature ships that, as Thomas Philbrick has noted, constitute social microcosms.1 Jacksonian America emerges, for instance, as the gale-lashed packet in Homeward Bound (1838), whose upstart democrats affront the more genteel passengers. Several of Cooper’s frontier tales likewise mull contemporary concerns. I have argued elsewhere that The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), and The Pathfinder (1840) allegorize nineteenth-century American racial and political dilemmas.2 The Deerslayer (1841) directly critiques rapacity and racial prejudice in colonial America, previewing a Republic in whose slave economy both evils would entwine. Cooper, this essay suggests, revisits these themes with new urgency born of the times in his penultimate fiction, The “‘We are at the end of Ameriky. . . .’”