The Chainbearer; Or, The Little page Manuscripts Vol. I

This is another volume of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Chainbearer, the second novel in his Littlepage Manuscripts trilogy. The trilogy is one of Cooper’s most ambitious projects, taking the Littlepage family of upstate New York across more than seventy years of American history, from the colonial period through the early nineteenth century. Cooper used the family story to engage with the political controversies that were tearing apart the upstate New York rural economy in his own time, particularly the Anti Rent War of the 1840s when tenant farmers organized against the manor system and demanded the breakup of the great hereditary estates.

The Chainbearer is set in the immediate post Revolutionary period, when the original Littlepage family of the colonial era has aged into the next generation. The novel centers on the figure of the chainbearer, a surveyor named Andries Coejemans who works the wilderness lands that the Littlepages have inherited from their colonial era patents. The plot turns on the conflicts between the chainbearer, the Littlepage heirs trying to manage their inherited lands, the squatters who have been illegally occupying the wilderness tracts, and the rising political movements that were challenging the legitimacy of the old colonial era manor system.

Cooper, himself a member of the landlord class through inheritance, was deeply hostile to the Anti Rent movement and used the Littlepage trilogy to argue against what he saw as the disorderly mob action that threatened both property rights and the wider American social order. Modern readers will find his political framing more directly conservative than his Leatherstocking Tales had been. The novel is in the formal style of Cooper’s late period, with long passages of political and social commentary that interrupt the narrative.

For Cooper completists, for students of American political fiction, or for readers interested in the Anti Rent War and the wider history of upstate New York rural conflict, The Chainbearer is essential. For new readers, the Littlepage trilogy is best read in order starting with Satanstoe, then The Chainbearer in both volumes, then The Redskins. The pacing is slower than modern historical fiction and the prose is in the formal mid nineteenth century style, but the political and social material that Cooper was working with retains real historical interest.