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Title: William Cooper's Town : Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic by Alan Taylor ISBN: 0-679-77300-2 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 27 August, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00

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Average Customer Rating: 4.6 (5 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: The Struggle for Gentility on the Frontier
Comment: William Cooper lived through the most prolific time of change in American history. And in telling the story of his time and life Alan Taylor has delivered to his audience a compelling documentation and narrative of how this period of remarkable transformation affected one individual and his family, the settlement of the New York frontier, and the political landscape of the frontier. William Cooper's Town is, first and foremost, a biography, yet it also functions as a regional history, and a literary analysis of James Fennimore Cooper's the Pioneers. With respect to these three features, Taylor divided his book into three sections: ascent, power, and legacies. Each tells a different story of William Cooper and exposes disparate characteristics of his personality and his success as a land owner and speculator, politician, and father (both of the people and of his children). Most important, each section of Taylor's unique book relates to Cooper's ambition for gentility, something which he vehemently strived for both in himself and his children. The reader gains a keen sense of the difficulty and unpredictability of frontier settlement from William Cooper's Town. Cooper acquired and lost his entire fortune in twenty-five demanding and challenging years. In addition, Cooper exemplifies the restraints left on social mobility even after the American Revolution. Cooper never obtained the greatly sought after gentry status.
Taylor's story of William Cooper widens our perspective of the early Republic. The era dominated by elite political figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams, also included important characters on the periphery. While much of the United States early success is owed to the "founding fathers" its expansion must also be credited to men like William Cooper even if he was not a political genius and erudite.
Taylor's book is not a survey; rather it is mostly William Cooper's story. It is not the complete social, political, and economic history of the New York frontier. The closest Taylor comes to this is his discussion of political debates within Otsego County which effected the entire state's political status. Still, Taylor's book will certainly support anyone who researches a broader study in the future.

Rating: 4
Summary: A fascinating, if detailed account of early American life
Comment: I bought this because my family tree has major roots in Cooperstown and I wanted to envision what it was like for my ancestors there. The book did that, but it also gave larger insight into some very human and interesting characters, and I was impressed by how, simultaneously, life then was as sophisticated in terms of relationships and politics but far more brutal and austere. The author writes well, perhaps a little too detailed and scholarly at times for some of us, but overall it's tough to put it down once started. It centers on the father of author James Fenimore Cooper and how a poor craftsman from the Philadelphia, PA area founds a town in the wilds of upstate NY and goes on to become a judge and Congressman, endure tragedies, and ultimately get brought down. William Cooper is treated a little critically at times by the author, while I came to see Cooper to be a passionate and vulnerable person who tried hard to be what he thought he should be but failed by letting the opinions of others drive his actions sometimes to excess. If you're into history at all or how life was in pioneer, post-Revolution times, this is an excellent book. The people come alive for us.

Rating: 5
Summary: FATHER WAS THE PIONEER
Comment: The tale of James Fenimore Cooper's father on the New York frontier in the 1790s is an Horatio Alger story run amuck. Born to a poor Quaker farm family, William Cooper learned the craft of making and repairing wheels before reinventing himself as a land speculator, founder of Cooperstown, judge, congressman, patrician farmer and Federalist party powerhouse.

Alan Taylor's WILLIAM COOPER'S TOWN: POWER AND PERSUASION ON THE FRONTIER OF THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC is an outstanding biography of an archetypical American character, an extraordinary social history of life and politics on the late eighteenth-century frontier and a brilliant exercise in literary analysis.

This is a wonderful read. Taylor's lively prose, compelling narrative and original, fresh story sustained my interest from cover to cover. I never would have imagined such a dull title could cover such a marvelous book. WILLIAM COOPER'S TOWN certainly deserves the Pulitzer Prize it was awarded.

Taylor not only describes William Cooper's rise from rags to riches and even more meteoric fall but analyzes Cooper's political odyssey in America's frontier democratic workshop.

"As an ambitious man of great wealth but flawed gentility, Cooper became caught up in the great contest of postrevolutionary politics: whether power should belong to traditional gentlemen who styled themselves 'Fathers of the People' or to cruder democrats who acted out the new role of 'Friends of the People.'"

Taylor argues "Cooper faced a fundamental decision as he ventured into New York's contentious politics. Would he affiliate with the governor and the revolutionary politics of democratic assertion? Or would he endorse the traditional elitism championed by...Hamilton." "Brawny, ill educated, blunt spoken, and newly enriched," writes Taylor, "Cooper had more in common with George Clinton than with his aristocratic rivals." "For a rough-hewn, new man like Cooper, the democratic politics practiced by Clinton certainly offered an easier path to power. Yet, like Hamilton, Cooper wanted to escape his origins by winning acceptance into the genteel social circles where Clinton was anathema." Taylor concludes "Cooper's origins pulled him in one political direction, his longing in another."

James Fenimore Cooper's third novel, THE PIONEERS, is an ambivalent, fictionalized examination of his father's failure to measure up to the genteel stardards William Cooper set for himself and that his son James internalized. The father's longing became the son's demand.

Taylor analyzes the father-son relationship, strained by Williams decline before ever fully measuring up to the stardards he had set, and the son's fictionalized account of this relationship.

James Fenimore Cooper spent most of his adult life seeking the "natural aristocrat" his father wanted to be and compensating for his father's shortcomings. It is ironic that the person James Fenimore Cooper found to be the embodiment of the "natural aristocrat" his father had longed to be and that he had created in THE CRATER and his most famous character, Natty Bumppo, was the quintessential "Friend of the People"--Andrew Jackson.

I enjoyed this book immensely and give it my strongest recommendation!