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The Last of the Mohicans and the Missouri Crisis

2011; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/eal.2011.0020

1534-147X

Bill Christophersen,

American History and Culture

The Last of the Mohicans and the Missouri Crisis Bill Christophersen (bio) A sense of racial doom is present in this novel as it is in no other Leatherstocking tale. —George Dekker, James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 (1826), set against the backdrop of a wilderness across which European powers and Native American tribes skirmish, famously dramatizes an episode from the French and Indian War. As the novel opens, a British major and his young female charges are traveling warily between forts. Guided by an Indian scout the major does not trust and who is behaving suspiciously, they become bewildered at dusk on “a narrow and blind . . . a dark and tangled path-way” (21–22). The dramatic situation alone conveys something of the Dantesque terror that defines this work about a colonial world riven by betrayals, ruthless warfare, and the violent winnowing of an indigenous people, a world in which civil usages seem quaint and Christian principles quixotic. Cooper’s world, of course—early-nineteenth-century America—though different in so many respects, was embroiled in its own dramas of ethnic violence, made anxious by its own racial nightmares. Indigenous tribes clung to homelands on the southern frontier—tribes the expanding republic skirmished with and, at the time Mohicans was published, verged on forcibly displacing. A concentrated population of black slaves waxed restive even as Congress sanctioned the expansion of slavery beyond the Mississippi. Confident though the nation was in some respects, it understood that the stakes concerning these social problems were high. Mohicans’ exploration of the “Indian problem,” as it was called, is manifest. John McWilliams has posited that, besides representing the decline of the Native American populations as a whole that had been taking place over generations, the novel constituted a response to the controversial Indian Removal legislation that James Monroe brought before Congress in 1825, which, when enacted five years later, banished eastern aboriginal tribes to [End Page 263] lands beyond the Mississippi River (102–03; 120). This essay, by contrast, speculates about the novel’s engagement with the era’s other racial conundrum, that “most dangerous of all questions,” as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has called it—slavery (157). Starting from Ezra F. Tawil’s hypothesis that the frontier romance of the 1820s, by the very remoteness of its setting, “could engage issues central to the crisis of slavery without discussing it as such . . . and generate narrative solutions to political problems” (“Romancing History” 98), I suggest that Cooper’s French and Indian War drama resonates against the backdrop of two watershed national events that occurred during Monroe’s administration, the Missouri Crisis and the Denmark Vesey rebellion; that the specter of black insurrection hovers behind scenes of rampaging Hurons; and that the tiresome rescue sequence set in the Huron camp—a sequence critics typically downplay or treat ahistorically1—conveys a comic parable of emancipation and racial reconciliation. In developing this thesis, I try to peer not only through a historical lens but beyond it to the literary sleight of hand involved in representing race and racial anxieties in a republic that, by the mid-1820s, was waxing increasingly hysterical on the subject. From the early twentieth century on, critics have detailed Cooper’s lifelong engagement with the social issues of his time. His two primers on American mores and politics, Notions of the Americans (1828) and The American Democrat (1838), make that engagement plain, as do his novels Homeward Bound (1838) and Home as Found (1838), which deal with the excesses of Jacksonian democracy; the Littlepage trilogy (1845–46), which treats the Anti-Rent Rebellion in New York State; and two allegories—The Monikins (1835), which satirizes the British and American political and social systems, and The Crater (1847), a tale of a fallen utopia that constitutes, Donald A. Ringe has suggested, a parable of the United States in decline from republican glory and virtue (James Fenimore Cooper 130–31). The extent to which this engagement with social issues permeates the oeuvre has taken longer to establish, owing in part to midcentury critical trends. Cooper’s impulse toward social analysis had, in...