The Chainbearer; or, The Littlepage Manuscripts

The Chainbearer is the second novel in James Fenimore Cooper’s Littlepage Manuscripts trilogy, published in 1845 and continuing the multigenerational saga of the Littlepage family of upstate New York that he began with Satanstoe and would complete with The Redskins. The trilogy is one of Cooper’s most ambitious projects, taking the same family across more than seventy years of American history, from the colonial period through the early nineteenth century, and using the family story to engage with the political controversies that were tearing apart the upstate New York rural economy in Cooper’s own time.

This novel is set in the immediate post Revolutionary period, when the original Littlepage family of the colonial era has aged into the next generation, and 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 was writing during the Anti Rent War of the 1840s, the upstate New York political crisis in which tenant farmers organized against the manor system and demanded the breakup of the great hereditary estates that the colonial era patents had created. 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.