New Light on the Old Frontier

Modeling the Cooper story on patterns for success established in studies of the other colonies and states, Alan Taylor’s contribution begins with an engaging synthesis of an abundant and emerging body of scholarship on the economic landscape of North America during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. That platform provides context for a first analysis and exposition of the William Cooper collection at Hartwick College, offering a fresh perspective on the settlement of the northern Atlantic backcountry. Convincingly melding in fictional characterizations from the classic American novels of James Fenimore Cooper, William Cooper’s widely celebrated son, Taylor has produced a substantial historical study that has some moments as a compelling piece of literature. This nicely nuanced, textured story of settlement, setback, and sequel during a period of rapid change also represents the first comprehensive examination of the political and economic dynamics of pioneering the New York frontier. Scholarship and literary quality combine to make William Cooper’s Town a magnificent book that has been honored with the Bancroft Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

Reaching beyond James A. Frost’s Life on the Upper Susquehanna, 1783–1860 (1951) and Peter C. Mancall’s Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture along the Upper Susquehanna, 1700–1800 (1991), which followed the drainage pattern school of settlement history advocated by Paul Gates at Cornell University, the author has employed an enhanced life-and-times biographical approach to take his subject from the proscribed opportunity of mid-eighteenth-century Delaware Valley towns to the wide-open but wild hills and forests of the New York backcountry. This was to be William Cooper’s arena and Taylor’s landmark study brings new focus to important but understudied topics as it moves through time on five complimentary tracks. First, it is an overview history of the opening of the frontier from the late colonial period to the nineteenth century, and of the half-baked and unfortunate plans of the first investors and developers—in this case, George Croghan, John Christopher Hartwick, and William Franklin—who are subverted by new men of the Revolutionary era like Cooper who managed to by-pass established interests and gain tenuous title to extensive wilderness acreage. Second, it is a story of the settlement of the land in which the author establishes William Cooper as a preeminent developer with an authoritative account of his formula for pioneering success. Here the reader is left with little doubt that this gifted entrepreneur could have successfully planted Yankee settlers on any wilderness tract. Third, it is a study of the psyche of an insurgent’s ambition—as the boisterous and rough Cooper strives to acquire gentility, achieve respectability, and to be loved as the legitimate patriarch of the town. Throughout the book, but especially in regard to William Cooper’s mentalité and motivation, the literary observations of James Fenimore Cooper are invoked to provide more insight. Fourth, it is old-time economic and political history—a detailed case study of opportunity economics and of how competing elites used the backcountry political systems to gain power and maintain hegemony. Finally, on top of all this, William Cooper’s Town is a penetrating and essential biographical study.

Born to a large but modest Philadelphia-area Quaker family, young William Cooper (1754–1809) left the farm to find his future as a journeyman wheelwright. The gregarious and impetuous teenager took a first step forward in 1774 when he married Elizabeth Fenimore, daughter of a wealthy Burlington farmer. Although the new couple had sidestepped conventional Quaker protocols, the bride’s father warmed to the unexpected union after the birth of his grandson just nine months later. Settling on nearby land granted by Richard Fenimore, Cooper established a commercial hamlet with a tavern and store he named “Cooperstown.” By 1782, he had outgrown the country crossroads and moved his family into Burlington city where he opened a store and began soliciting wealthy...