Abstract While the political and cultural discourse of the United States tended to denigrate the mariner during the revolutionary and early national periods, the maritime novels of James Fenimore Cooper labored assiduously to counteract this rhetoric, imagining his sailors as ideal citizens for the early republic. This project reaches its apotheosis in Cooper’s late diptych, Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingford (1844). Yet his seamen hardly challenge the political orthodoxies of the era, even as they skirt the tendencies described by elected officials and the popular press. Instead they anticipate figures that would play a central role in an emergent imperial nation. Reflecting the contemporary US Exploring Expedition, the journeys charted in Cooper’s late sea novels present to readers sailors who embody a mode of civic participation and belonging central to the nation’s tentative first steps into developing itself as a terraqueous rather than a terrestrial empire.
Schuyler J. Chapman (Fri,) studied this question.