ABSTRACT

Throughout his career James Fenimore Cooper had deplored the evils of party politics, and during the last twenty years of his life he consistently denied that he belonged to either of the great national parties of that era. Virtually every book Cooper wrote between 1834 and the year of his death was Jacksonian in the broad sense that it was the work of a man who saw himself as 'the guardian of a threatened republican tradition which demanded not adjustment or revaluation but right action taken from a solid moral stance'. This is true not only of such openly anti-Whig works as Home as Found and The Autobiography of a Pocket Handkerchief, but also of works like The Redskins and The Crater, which, because of their irreverent handling of 'the people', might appear to be anti-Jacksonian.