Sailor's Hope: The Life and Times of William Cooper, Agrarian Radical in an Age of Revolutions (review)

Rusty Bittermann examines the ideological undercurrents of William Cooper (1786-1867), who is best known as a leading advocate of land reform in nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island (PEI). Bittermann sets Cooper in the context of his broader career as a man of the Atlantic World in an age of revolutions. Sailor's Hope rests on extensive research in manuscript collections, government records, parish records, mercantile records, diaries, and newspapers in thirty-four archives, record offices, and libraries in the Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Bermuda. Of particular interest are the private papers held by William Cooper's descendant Edward Cooper of New Mexico, which shed light on the fate of the Cooper family's emigration to California in the early 1850s.

It is significant that Cooper chose Sailor's Hope as the name for the farm he founded in PEI in 1818; maritime life shaped his experiences as a settler and radical. The child of a Scottish artisan family, Cooper went to sea, first in the navy in 1797 and then in mercantile shipping, to earn his living. By 1808, Cooper was a sea captain, whose voyages included the Gulf of St Lawrence. For most mariners, work at sea was a young person's way of earning enough to build a life ashore with a family and household. Marriage in 1817, in the context of deepening postwar recession in Britain, led Cooper to pursue the opportunities of PEI.

While Cooper had little formal education, his captaincy suggested a thorough grasp of the accounting and leadership skills that were necessary to successfully command a vessel in trade. Cooper used these skills to develop the family farm and also to become the land agent for Lord James Townshend, an absentee proprietor who controlled much of the land neighbouring Cooper's farm. Cooper was a responsible agent, but he believed that reciprocity should govern the relationship between landlords and tenants, and built a mill to serve Townshend's tenants, but without his employer's permission. Town-shend eventually dismissed Cooper, believing that his former agent was not squeezing enough income out of the proprietor's grant.

Bittermann suggests that Cooper's experience as a captain allowed him to take a leading role in the fight for escheat that built through the 1830s, earning a seat in the House of Assembly. Although Bittermann does not explore the possibility, one might speculate that the intertwining traditions of paternalism and radical seafaring egalitarianism, which so many historians have identified as being important to British maritime life during Cooper's lifetime, also animated his politics. Cooper adhered to a labour theory of value, arguing that the tenants who actually improved the lands of PEI had more rights in property than did the proprietors. He combined this theory with a more general sense that labouring people had rights to justice and the rule of law. Arguing that all British subjects had the right to a fair application of the law, Cooper's position was that most of PEI's proprietors had not lived up to the terms of improvement specified in their original grants. The British Crown, consequently, should have used escheat to force the proprietors to yield their grants to the farmers who worked them.

Cooper's politics earned him some political persecution, but he had no interest in the insurrectionary sentiments abroad in the Canadas. By the early 1840s, he turned to mercantile pursuits with his sons in shipping and the timber trade. Put off by their more speculative approaches to capitalist ventures, Cooper eventually supported his sons' desire to seek their fortunes in California, but deterred by the hardscrabble life of San Francisco during the gold rush, Cooper returned to PEI, although most of his family did not. Some, like Cooper's wife Sarah, succumbed to cholera, while others perished in settler conflicts with...