Race Traitor: Cooper, His Critics, and Nineteenth-Century Literary Politics

Abstract James Fenimore Cooper did not set out to become the target of the racist movement with his Leatherstocking Tales. Indeed, when he first set pen to paper, he could have anticipated only a warm welcome from the American literary elite, which initially saw him as one of its own. The story of his slide into the bad graces of his political enemies has already been told, but there remains one large, and largely unexplored, patch of ground that modern critics have gingerly skirted. It is none other than the staging point of attack on Cooper by his Antebellum critics: his honorary position as a “race traitor.” In the rush to condemn Cooper as the racist of the drama, modern critics of the Leatherstocking Tales betray their ignorance of what true racists acted and sounded like between 1823 and 1841. Instead of grounding their criticism in historical and cultural knowledge, especially of Native America, they indulge in what I call Cry-Baby Criticism.