Killing Tom Coffin: Rethinking the Nationalist Narrative in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot

[T]hese waves, to me, are what the land is to you; I was born on them, and I have always meant that they should be my grave.

—James Fenimore Cooper, The Pilot

Set during the Revolutionary War, James Fenimore Cooper’s first maritime novel, The Pilot (1824), is a historical romance that follows a nascent American navy’s fictitious attempt to bring the battle to England. “Long” Tom Coffin, whose words appear in the epigraph, is Cooper’s romantically charged natural sailor—a sea-born Nantucket native and whaler who stands nearly six feet tall and carries his harpoon into battle. These lines, spoken aboard the sinking Ariel along the rock-strewn coast of England, are soon borne out with Coffin’s self-imposed death—a death, I will argue, that Cooper’s nationalist intent makes necessary.

Tom Coffin’s death can be viewed as intricately bound to the vexed relationship between labor, class, and national identity in the nineteenth century of Cooper’s historical moment, as well as the eighteenth century of which he writes. Indeed, Cooper obliquely raises this issue at the opening of the novel, when a troupe of English peasants on a field above the coast avoid what turn out to be two American vessels because “the intelligence of the hot press was among the rumours of the times” (12). Opening the book with peasants’ vivid fear of impressment, which entails the forceful transference from private activity to military service often irrespective of national identity, is an apt exergue, in a sense, for themes that permeate the rest of the novel.¹ Considering the broad implications of these themes, especially in light of contemporary Americanist scholarship’s interest in borders and national crossings,² it is surprising that besides Thomas Philbrick’s seminal 1961 James Fenimore Cooper and the Development of American Sea Fiction, few scholars have taken Cooper’s early maritime romances—or any of his nautical fiction, for that matter—seriously enough to deem them worthy of sustained analysis.³ Despite this dearth of critical attention, both traditional and recent scholarship on The Pilot has addressed some of these topics. For example, H. Daniel Peck’s 1976 “Repossession of America: The Revolution in Cooper’s Trilogy” productively explores Cooper’s political ambivalence about the American Revolution and how his early sea narratives attempt to “solve the problems that the Revolution posed for him” (590). Yet, his analysis is limited by use of reductive binaries such as sea/land and modern present/traditional past. More recently, Margaret Cohen’s 2003 “Traveling Genres” includes a cogent analysis of maritime fiction and its depiction of labor as “know-how.”⁴ Yet her discussion of labor in The Pilot is cursory at best and includes, as I will try to show, the problematic assertion that “[w]hat sets The Pilot apart . . . is the way it connects know how to skilled work that is a common denominator across class” (488). In this essay, I build on the topics that Peck and Cohen raise by combining their themes of nationalism and labor and by centering the presentation of Tom Coffin in the narrative. In other words, I explore The Pilot in terms of how Cooper’s anxiety about the American Revolution and nationalism proper influence his figuration of labor and the depiction of maritime heroism. Why would Cooper, as Wayne Franklin aptly puts it, make the “hasty decision” to kill off the most colorful character in the novel so soon in the action? (James 412). Moreover, what are the social motivations and implications of this apparent literary dilemma? While Susan Fenimore Cooper explains that toward the end of his life her father regretted precipitously killing off Coffin and reducing him to a “sketch,” I argue that in the context of Cooper’s other maritime fiction and his political and historical writings, this sailor’s death may be more of a prerequisite for the national narrative Cooper envisions than an unfortunate oversight of character development.⁵

The complex and competing social elements in The Pilot, one of Cooper’s earliest...