“William Cooper’s Town” isn’t a great book – it’s three great books.
As the author, Alan Taylor, spells out in the introduction, “‘William Cooper’s Town’ is a hybrid of three usually distinct genres: biography, social history, and literary analysis.” The first is a fascinating biography of an eighteenth century social climber and speculator, William Cooper. An indigent wheelwright from New Jersey who conveniently sat out the American Revolution, Cooper possessed workhorse determination and insatiable ambition, two basic traits that usually lead to big things in this country. An autodidact with a keen spirit of self-improvement and appreciation for gentility, he sought wealth, power and status – but most of all status.
Cooper earned a reputation as the foremost entrepreneurial settler in the United States in the years immediately after the Revolution. But as Taylor shows it may have been more a matter of luck than skill. “Far from having been a consistent success as a developer, Cooper enjoyed one initial triumph in Otsego followed by a string of failed speculations everywhere else [Beech Woods in Pennsylvania and the Military Tract and DeKalb lands in northern New York].” Much of the biography reads like an early American version of the David Mamet play “Glengarry Glen Ross,” as Cooper skillfully acquires (steals?) and then sells large tracts of land in the undeveloped, frontier land around Lake Otsego in central upstate New York. The presumed secret to Cooper’s success as a land speculator was that he targeted the right market — hardworking New England farmers accustomed to tilling weak, rocky soil — and offered them unique and compelling financial terms: no money down and a full decade to repay the principle. It was a deal many upwardly mobile Yankees couldn’t refuse. (One of the many interesting things I learned from reading this book was that there existed on the frontier something like the modern “home flippers” of today, men who would take ownership of an undeveloped lot, clear the pastures, put up fences and generally make the farm “move-in-ready” and then flip the lot at a profit to settlers not willing to do the grunt work, just like a contractor today who buys an old home, puts in hardwood floor and granite counter tops in the kitchen, and then moves on.)
Indeed, by the late 1790s, Cooper was widely recognized as the most skilled frontier developer in the country, something like the Donald Trump of his day. And he had the overbearing personality to match. But, in the end, Taylor argues that much of Cooper’s success was due to the unique economic and social circumstances of the post-War years when hordes of settlers were pushing westward and Otsego represented the limits of the frontier. “In the last analysis,” Taylor writes, “settlers did not need speculators as much as speculators needed settlers.” Never able to recapture the success of his first venture, Cooper’s fortune would be lost in additional speculative ventures almost as quickly as it was acquired.
The second type of book represented in “William Cooper’s Town” is a political history of post Revolutionary America, a tumultuous time when the country made the painful transition from a republic led by the aristocratic economic and social elite to one of a more broad based democracy. Although his humble roots and lack of formal education should have made him a staunch Republican, Cooper was perhaps the most committed Federalist in New York. I’ve read other books on this period of American history, including the brilliant “The Age of Federalism” by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, but never before have the passions, the violence, and the rhetoric of the period come so alive, so personal and tactile, as Taylor delivers here. The reader gets the living, breathing sense of what it meant to be a partisan for the Federalist John Jay or the Republican George Clinton in the fiercely contested New York gubernatorial election of 1792. Like a great man in the Roman Republic, Cooper had a large set of clients (the settlers to whom he had extended easy mortgages and served as a friend and benefactor) and he fully expected them, to a man, to publicly demonstrate that allegiance and deliver their vote at the ballot box. Taylor puts flesh and blood on this now distant history, which is the highest praise one can give to a historian.
Taylor shows how Cooper was determined to be a Father of the People in the classical republican sense, just as the Republicans were making success in their electoral approach as running as a Friend of the People. It was a role exemplified by Jedediah Peck, a short, dumpy, humble and pious Yankee lawyer who arrived in Cooperstown as a Federalist but who emerged as upstate New York’s leading Republican. He ran as a man of the people in Otsego county in the late 1790s, suffering arrest under the Sedition Acts because of it, but who ultimately triumphed decisively over his social superiors in a string of elections beginning around 1800, essentially stealing (from Cooper’s view) that political authority and prestige that was rightfully due the great settler of the land. In the end, Taylor concludes, “it was Cooper’s public tragedy that he missed his opportunity as a popular leader by clutching after a genteel persona and elite acceptance that were just beyond his grasp.”
Finally, this book provides a literary analysis of James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Pioneers,” an idealized roman a clef about his childhood and his father’s founding of Cooperstown on the Lake Otsego. Taylor deconstructs the leading characters in the book – Marmaduke Temple (William Cooper), Elizabeth Temple (Hannah Cooper), Natty Bumppo (David Shipman) – and how Cooper’s idealized memory of his father and sister and the early days of Cooperstown founding shaped the narrative.
One final note of praise is warranted: this book is tremendously well researched. The best example is Taylor’s convincing argument that William Cooper died in Albany in 1809 of natural causes, rather than the traditional story that he had been murdered in a politically inspired attack. What is most impressive is how thoroughly and expertly Taylor shreds the previous historical work claiming he had been murdered, including that of David Hackett Fischer, one of the foremost academic historians in the country and the author of “Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought,” the American Bible of historiography.
All told, a supreme and inspiring work of biography, political history and literary analysis.
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