Lionel Lincoln; or, The leaguer of Boston .. Volume 1

Lionel Lincoln, or The Leaguer of Boston is James Fenimore Cooper’s 1825 historical novel, set in Boston during the early months of the American Revolutionary War in 1775. The novel was Cooper’s third major historical work, written between The Pilot and The Last of the Mohicans, and represents one of his more ambitious early engagements with the American Revolutionary period. Volume 1 covers the opening situation of the novel, with the wider plot continuing into the second volume.

The central character Lionel Lincoln is a young British officer of American ancestry who returns to Boston in 1775 to settle a family inheritance just as the political tensions between the American colonists and the British government are reaching the breaking point. The novel covers the major early events of the war that occurred in and around Boston, including the Battle of Lexington and Concord in April 1775 and the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, with Cooper rendering the historical events with the kind of detailed attention that he brought to his serious historical fiction. Lionel’s complicated position as a British officer of American background gives Cooper room to explore the moral complications of the Revolution from a perspective that the more straightforwardly American novels of the period could not always offer.

Cooper had spent significant time in Boston as a young naval officer in the early 1800s, and his depictions of the city, the harbor, and the wider Massachusetts geography draw on his own observations alongside the documentary research that he undertook for the historical material. The novel includes various invented characters whose stories interweave with the historical events, a wider plot involving family secrets and inherited wealth, and a romantic subplot involving Lionel and the young American woman Cecil Dynevor that runs alongside the political and military material.

Cooper’s prose is in the formal style of his time, which can take some getting used to. The dialogue is long, the descriptions of Boston and the wider Massachusetts setting are extensive, and the historical context that drives the wider plot would have been more familiar to nineteenth century American readers than it is today. Modern readers may find the political and moral framing more directly stated than the more atmospheric Leatherstocking Tales, with Cooper using the Revolutionary setting to develop the kind of national moral arguments that his early career was particularly committed to.

For Cooper completists, for students of early American historical fiction, or for readers interested in how American writers of the early nineteenth century thought about the Revolutionary moment, Lionel Lincoln is essential. The two volume structure rewards being read in order. Volume 1 establishes the situation. Volume 2 carries the story to its conclusion through the events of 1775 and after.