Deerslayer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Free Page A

him. William Cooper made a fortune in land speculation by acquiring the rights to a 40,000-acre land grant (known as the Croghan Patent) that adjoined Lake Otsego. Cooper became the first judge for the Court of Common Pleas for Otsego County. In 1795 and 1799 he was elected to Congress. Throughout the 1790s he was a formidable figure in Federalist politics in New York State, and was virtually the political boss of the western counties of the state. 7
    Judge Cooper, however, made a series of critical mistakes at the end of the decade in fighting his political adversaries, and these mistakes led to his retirement from politics and also contributed to the dramatic reversal of the Federalists’ fortunes in New York State. Judge Cooper thereafter turned his energies to new land ventures farther upstate that ultimately proved to be ruinous to his heirs. After the death of his beloved daughter Hannah in 1800, Judge Cooper became more and more absorbed in his ill-fated new land speculations and business ventures. The business activities increasingly consumed his time and made him less and less accessible to his family. He died in Albany in 1809 of pneumonia—not from being struck on the head from behind by a political opponent, as the legend has it. 8
    Judge Cooper was unquestionably the patriarch of his family, and he sought to rule Cooperstown in much the same way that he ran his family. He provided generous and benevolent, if slightly dictatorial, leadership and expected deference in return. It appears that James Cooper’s relations with his father were somewhat strained, though the issue has not been completely resolved. William Cooper was a remote figure to his youngest son, and he apparently had not placed his highest hopes on James for bettering the family’s fortunes. Yet all of his children, including James, were given the benefit of private tutoring and educational opportunities. Judge Cooper, although not well-educated himself, had bettered himself by marrying an heiress, and believed strongly in raising his children to be genteel in the fashion of his wife’s well-to-do family and in the tradition of the privileged British landed gentry.
    Although young James spent much of his childhood roaming the woods with his favorite brother William, he received private tutoring from the local schoolmaster his father hired to run the village school. At age ten he was sent to Albany to live with his father’s friend, the Reverend Thomas Ellison, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, to study the classics and to attend school. Among the small number of other pupils were the sons of wealthy Federalists—a Jay, a Livingston, and two Van Rensselaers. William Jay, the son of John Jay, was James’s roommate and became a lifelong friend. James Cooper loved Virgil and became highly proficient in Latin. After the death of Reverend Ellison, James went to New Haven to prepare for matriculation at Yale. When he entered Yale at the age of thirteen, he was far ahead of most of his classmates in his knowledge of Latin and the classics. This may help account for the boredom he felt at college. Cooper was expelled in his junior year in 1805 after blowing off a classmate’s door with gunpowder. The classmate had earlier assaulted Cooper (and Cooper won a judgment against him in court) . Several boys implicated with Cooper in the door escapade were later allowed to reenter Yale and complete their studies. But Cooper did not seek readmission, possibly because the Yale authorities were aware of the troubles that James’s brother William had experienced at Princeton. William had been expelled from Princeton after being suspected, probably falsely, of involvement in the setting of two fires, one that burned down Nassau Hall and another that destroyed a local tavern.
    James’s mother was a lover of music and an avid reader, mostly of novels and romances, and often read aloud to James the latest books she was able to get from England. James’s