Cooper's Revolution: The Language of Law and Love in The Pilot

A generation after the American colonies' violent rupture with Great Britain, the intellectual leaders of the fledgling United States struggled to balance their call for political independence with their desire to maintain certain continuities with the English common law. An emerging American literature likewise struggled with its British legacy and the implications of a revolution that many colonists experienced as a civil war.¹ Not surprisingly, authors like James Fenimore Cooper used their fiction to explore the American Revolution's fraught political implications.² What may be more surprising, however, is that a number of authors turned to the English Civil War to answer their concerns about whether a violent revolution could be a legitimate political solution. Lydia Maria Child's novel The Rebels (1825) depicts the turmoil leading up to the Revolution and forecasts the impending break with England with a reference to Charles I's execution in 1649 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688: "Arbitrary principles, like those against which we now contend, have cost one King of England his life, another his crown,—and they may yet cost a third his most flourishing colonies."³ Catharine Maria Sedgwick sets her novel Hope Leslie (1827) during the English Civil War, at the historical moment when Parliament was actively at war with the king and the outcome of the civil unrest remained uncertain. Sedgwick explicitly references the English Civil War no fewer than six times during her characters' debates over political authority.⁴ These authors looked to a British past to understand the contradictions of their own revolution.⁵

The most widely read American novelist of his time, James Fenimore Cooper likewise wrestled with the implications of the American revolt against England and the Revolution's political contradictions in several of his novels.⁶ The Spy (1821) depicts the American Revolution as a civil war that divides families, destroys the social fabric of local communities, and forces authorities to choose between their consciences and rigid martial law. His novel The Pioneers (1823) resolves its central conflict by returning a vast estate to a Loyalist family who fled to Britain during the Revolution. Similarly, the protagonist of Cooper's Lionel Lincoln (1825) ultimately abandons the American revolutionary cause for wealth and status in England, and the Revolution's patriotic spokesman turns out to be a lunatic. As these novels imply, Cooper's objections to the Revolution centered on the disruption of law and order, especially the loss of property. Indeed, the family of Cooper's wife, Susan Augusta DeLancey, remained Loyalist during the war and as a result suffered their property's confiscation.⁷ In The Pilot (1824), Cooper's strongest and most explicit engagement with the political theories that justified or challenged revolution, the American Revolution repeatedly requires a discussion of the English Civil War's contested legality. In Cooper's novel, the Revolution's legal ambiguities ultimately destabilize the very terms that give law meaning.

Despite recounting the daring exploits of US naval heroes during the Revolutionary War, The Pilot reveals deep ambivalence toward revolution as a form of political action. The novel follows the adventures of two American captains as they rescue their lovers from the dominion of their Loyalist uncle, Colonel Howard, a Carolina landowner who abandons his estate and relocates to England during the "rebellion" that he believes his sovereign king will soon defeat. As the plot develops, Cooper demonstrates the threatening implications of political tactics that unsettle law and order by drawing attention to the way the Revolution creates ambiguity in the meaning of legal terms, including murder, rebel, and civilian, among others. Colonel Howard's hired guard, Captain Borroughcliffe, draws a historical parallel between the English Civil War and the American Revolution when he remarks, "[F]or the first time since the days of the unlucky Charles Stuart, there shall be a campaign in the heart of England."⁸ Colonel Howard's reply turns the American Revolution into a "rebellion": "Ah! rebellion, rebellion! accursed, unnatural, unholy rebellion, caused the calamity then and now!" (176). As the Colonel and his personal garrison respect...