Which Effinghams Do We Choose?

By Hugh C. McDougall (James Fenimore Cooper Society)

Presented at the 21ˢᵗ International James Fenimore Cooper & Susan Fenimore Cooper Conference: Watersheds at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, September, 2017.

Originally published in The James Fenimore Cooper Society Journal 29.2 (Whole No. 82, Fall 2018): 45-55.

[May be reproduced for instructional use by individuals or institutions; commercial use prohibited.]

Picking the Choice

How many of you here recall the name of Effingham? To begin with, you will almost certainly remember Major Effingham, the old British Army Officer who is sheltered by Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers, 1 and whose grandson Oliver (known in most of the book as Oliver Edwards) marries Elizabeth Temple at its end.

You should also remember Cooper’s twin novels of 1838, Homeward Bound 2 and its sequel, Home as Found, 3 in which the descendants of Oliver and Elizabeth, after a dozen years touring Europe, return home in 1835 to New York City and then to Templeton — still based, of course, on Cooperstown — only to find that America has changed for the worse.

But there is yet a fourth novel, called The Effinghams; or Home asI Found It, 4 a parody of Home as Found written expressly to attack James Fenimore Cooper himself, in the person of the novel’s Edward Effingham (re-named for the purpose Sir James Effingham). It is one of three anonymous books, all published in New York in 1841, and linked primarily because all three were copyrighted by one Frederick Jackson.

After considerable genealogical research, I don’t think that Frederick Jackson is a real person. My own best genealogical research suggests that no such person ever existed. The only scholarly article I know about The Effinghams; or Home as I Found It, written in 1963, confesses that: “The author ... left no biographical traces behind him.” 5 The reference books its author cites, as well as other books discussing it, 6 all assume that a real Frederick Jackson was the author.

It is my present belief, after consideration of a number of other candidates, that “Frederick Jackson” was in fact James Watson Webb, longtime publisher and editor of the populist Morning Courier and New York Enquirer. 7 He was one of the first journalists to condemn Cooper’s Home as Found at length and in hostile detail. Of the numerous publishers Cooper sued for libel, often successfully, he was the only one to be the subject of criminal, and not just civil proceedings. 8 Born in 1802 from an old Connecticut family, Webb had lived in Cooperstown from 1811 to 1819 — first with his sister Maria, and then in his brother Henry’s general store. 9

Aside from a local newspaper publisher, only two others involved in Cooper’s libel suits had lived in Cooperstown. Thurlow Weed was only there from April to July in 1814, working for the Phinney publishers — and ended up under arrest. 10 William Leete Stone was there [46] longer, working from 1809 to 1813 for the Impartial Federalist newspaper (which is now the Freeman’s Journal), 11 but he — quite unlike Webb (and Frederick Jackson) — was an ardent abolitionist.

Cooper’s letters make only one brief reference to Home as I Found It, stating in a letter to his wife in 1842 that “The Effingham book produces no talk — It is said to be contemptable, by some journals, which I fancy is the real fact.” 12 This suggests that Cooper had not read it himself.

Cooper Comes Home

One of the themes for this year’s Cooper Conference is that of a “Watershed: A Critical Point That Marks a Change of Course.” In the case of James Fenimore Cooper, his twin 1838 novels Homeward Bound and Home as Found marked just such a change. The Effingham family, whose marriage had formed the triumphant conclusion of the best-selling Pioneers of 1823, would cause Cooper’s temporary literary downfall a decade or so later.

In 1833 Cooper had returned to America with his family after a seven-year sojourn in Europe. Angry at the reception given his three so-called European novels 13 by the Whig press, he rejected the welcome offered him by his old New York City literary friends and in 1834 published an angry Letter to his Countrymen. 14 He returned to Cooperstown, bought back and remodeled his father’s Otsego Hall, and resolved to write novels no more.

Publication in 1835 of The Monikins, 15 a strange satiric novel of humanoid monkeys in Antarctica, on which he had long been working, didn’t help his reputation. Instead, between 1836 and 1838, Cooper wrote five books about his European travels, 16 which received only chilly welcomes, and, closer to home, published in Cooperstown a local history of the village, 17 as well as a guide to American culture 18 that he hoped, without success, would become a New York school text.

Homeward Bound

By 1838, however, Cooper changed his mind and published Homeward Bound; or The Chase describing the voyage home of the Effingham family — Edward Effingham, his daughter Eve Effingham, and his cousin John Effingham, descendants of the Effinghams of The Pioneers — after a dozen years in Europe.

Homeward Bound, with its mixed collection of passengers, may well have been the first literary treatment of a passenger ship as a microcosm of society. However, Cooper’s story got tangled in nautical adventures, including being chased by a British warship, becoming shipwrecked off [47] the northwest coast of Africa, and fighting with the Arabs who lived there. By the time the good ship Montauk reaches New York, the manuscript was already too long. So Cooper wrote “The End” and continued the story in Home as Found, telling about the Effinghams, and a few of their shipmates, after they landed in New York in 1835.

Home as Found

Home as Found carried over a few characters from Homeward Bound. Captain Truck, the blunt but kindly master of the Montauk, will find Lake Otsego very different from the high seas. Sir George Templemore, a young, intelligent, but at first prejudiced British Baronet, has come to view the New World for himself. Steadfast Dodge is the crooked editor of The Active Inquirer, more concerned with pleasing his public than publishing the truth. Mademoiselle Viefville is a faithful family servant who speaks only French, which annoyed American readers who couldn’t read French. And finally, there is Paul Powis, an American with a mysterious past.

Cooper begins with a meaningful epigraph taken from Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I. It reads, simply, “Thou art perfect,” 19 in an obviously ironic comment on the home the Effinghams are going to find.

And, he adds in his preface that “The American nation is a great nation ... but ... it is very far behind most polished nations in various essentials, and chiefly, that it is lamentably in arrears to its own avowed principles.” 21 In the book, Cooper adds, “one or two of our portraits will be recognized by the lookers-on, although they will very likely be denied by the sitters themselves.” Among these, I believe, was James Watson Webb, as represented by the newspaperman Steadfast Dodge, the “pretentiously vulgar” journalist who “did not know his own meaning, except as he felt envy of all above him.” 21

On arrival in New York, the Effingham family meet the orphaned Grace Van Cortlandt, a childhood friend of Eve Effingham, who shares Eve’s intelligence and beauty but who, as an un-travelled American, seems to Eve a bit uncultured. They then go on to visit a lengthy series of New York City social and literary gatherings, often accompanied by Grace and their old shipmates, and most of them demonstrating America’s failings. They also visit the Exchange on Wall Street. The story then recounts the Great Fire, which burned much of downtown Manhattan in 1835.

Sir George Templemore makes a planned trip to Washington, but Cooper gives no details of his visit. After his return to New York in the spring, most of the characters, including a few new friends from New [48] York, proceed to Templeton, on the shore of Lake Otsego. They move into Otsego Hall (here called the Wigwam) which had been built by William Cooper and remodeled (in the novel) by John Effingham.

There the Effinghams find a mostly crude, money-focused, society — largely of New Englanders — including the family’s ambitious local agent, Aristabulus Bragg, and the gossip-hungry Mrs. Abbott and her numerous children. 22

At Templeton, the village’s tough apprentices play a game of bat and ball on the grounds of the Wigwam (next to today’s Baseball Hall of Fame), in deliberate violation of Cooperstown’s 1816 ordinance banning ball playing on what are now Main and Pioneer Streets. Is not this literature’s first reference to baseball?

Home as Found comes to its end as Sir George Templemore marries Grace Van Cortlandt, and Paul Powis (suddenly revealed to be a lost son of John Effingham) marries Eve Effingham, and the Effingham family decides to return to Europe. 23

Unlike The Monikins, however, Home as Found is not an arguably humorous satire about monkeys at the South Pole, but a deliberately hostile satire about the Americans of the 1830s. Edward Effingham, the leader of his family, seemed to many to be James Fenimore Cooper under a different name. If Cooper’s readers thought The Monikins was silly, many Americans were outraged by Home as Found, which seemed to attack themselves.

Thus, the New York Mirror said: “No Plot, of no interest, and it deserves to be censored.” 24 New York’s Knickerbocker Magazine wrote: “The worst book yet to come from Cooper’s pen. A plotless, arrogant, and vain caricature.” 25 The Southern Literary Messenger described Home as Found as “A complete failure that does nothing to redeem Cooper’s reputation. It is dull, ungrammatical, poorly constructed. ...” 26 James Watson Webb’s own Morning Courier and New York Enquirer said, “Cooper has written Home as Found only as a means of making a profit in England. As such, he is a traitor to his country and should leave it.” 27 Even Cooper’s first real biographer, Thomas Lounsbury, was reduced to writing: “Never was such an unfortunate work written by any author.” 28

Making matters worse, Cooper wrote into the book the so-called Three Mile Point controversy, with Edward Effingham taking the role of Cooper. Cooperstown villagers had defiantly used, and mistreated, a Cooper property on the Western side of Lake Otsego. Cooper had them ordered off the place, but many strongly objected, and even suggested that his books be removed from the local library. In doing so, Cooper [49] confirmed his identification with the fictional Edward Effingham, and ensured that the beloved writer of the American frontier and of the sea, would for a time be seen as an aristocratic snob.

Newspapers picked up the story, especially papers sympathetic to the Whig Party that James Watson Webb had recently founded. Webb’s own paper, and its journalistic friends, followed his lead in denouncing Cooper. Hostile reviews of Home as Found led to a long series of libel suits brought by Cooper, many of them successful, against newspapers which attacked him personally.

I do not here have time or room to go into these suits, but scholars have explored them in detail. 29 But among Cooper’s principal targets was James Watson Webb, and his Morning Chronicle and New York Enquirer.

The Effinghams; or, Home as I Found It

In 1841 there appeared a fourth novel about the Effinghams, titled The Effinghams; or, Home as I Found it, the third and last book copyrighted by the mysterious Frederick Jackson.

The first of the three was A Week in Wall Street, 31 a tale about how two stock-brokers ruin a naive investor.

The second was The Victim of Chancery: or a Debtor’s Experience, 31 “by the author of ‘A Week in Wall Street,’” about a debtor’s “sufferings, hardships, and privations ... and the cruelty, oppression and villainy of lawyers and men of business.” 32 Its hero, ruined by the Financial Panic of 1837, is wrongfully sent to jail for debt through the chicanery of the law firm of Gammon and Gouge, and eventually rescued by the perseverance of his wife.

James Watson Webb was an active opponent of American bankruptcy laws, which could still put its victims in jail, 33 and still decided in Courts of Chancery.

In Chapter Three of The Victim of Chancery, however, the author strays from his story to discuss the characters of novelists, with scarcely veiled personal attacks on James Fenimore Cooper and the Effinghams of his Home as Found:

It is undoubtedly the duty ... of all readers, to receive as gospel whatever [novelists] may choose to write; but ... nobody must tell the truth about them, the authority of the editor of the Courier and Enquirer [that is Webb] to the contrary notwithstanding; otherwise what would become of the great luminary of the north?

His light [that is, Cooper’s] would be extinguished forever — he would be stricken out of existence, and pass at [50] once into annihilation. ... Any writer of novels, if he would save his friends the trouble of grappling for his body in the Otsego lake, or the expense of a habeas corpus, to relieve his mortal part from the durance of a prison; it being now settled ... that whoever is guilty of such incontinence of tongue or pen, shall either be drowned in the said lake, or have his pocket picked and be sent to prison or to Texas, all for the benefit of the rising generation of Effinghams. ..

[Novelists] are of the fungus species ... they spring up in a night, and flourish for a day. ... It embraces...[those] who make themselves the hero of their own story, and being ashamed of their egotism, deny their own portrait of themselves. ... 34

And finally we come to the third book copyrighted in 1841 by Frederick Jackson: a two-volume novel titled The Effinghams; or, Home as I Found It, a deliberate parody of Home as Found. It often closely follows Cooper’s original text, but sometimes wanders off into territory that Cooper would never have approved.

However, it rarely strays from one main theme. A snobbish, selfish, anti-American, and generally nasty Edward Effingham, carefully re-named Sir James Effingham so nobody will miss the point, is repeatedly contrasted with the decent and honorable Sir George Templemore, who gradually learns to appreciate America’s virtues.

Though including most of Cooper’s characters, it alters the crooked editor Steadfast Dodge, the ambitious New Englander Aristabulus Bragg, and the snooping Mrs. Abbott, into worthy people, while the well-traveled Eve Effingham trades moral places with the purely American Grace Van Cortlandt. Moreover, Grace’s aunt and uncle, who do not appear at all in Home as Found, are introduced as active paragons of good sense and advice.

Like Home as Found, the plot follows the Effinghams, and some of their friends to Templeton, and as in Cooper’s story, it ends with the dual marriage of Sir George Templemore with Grace Van Cortlandt, and of Paul Powis with Eve Effingham, though Paul is not, as in Cooper’s story, suddenly found to be really an Effingham himself.

The plot of The Effinghams; or, Home as I Found It differs from Home as Found in two significant ways. In Cooper’s story, Sir George Templemore pays a substantial visit to Washington, but readers learn nothing about it. In the parody of it, the last five chapters of Volume I, are devoted to his visit there and to slave-holding Virginia. 35

On his train trip south from New York, Sir George meets and talks at length with a Yankee from Maine, who demonstrates, says the author, [51] that New Englanders are “as honorably known, and as justly esteemed for their intelligence, accomplishments, patriotism and hospitality, as the people of any other section, or any other country. ...” 36 This, of course, is in deliberate opposition to Cooper’s persistent anti-Yankee bias, found in Home as Found in characters like Aristabulus Bragg, Steadfast Dodge, and Mrs. Abbott, as well as in the Newcomb family in his Littlepage Trilogy. 37

James Watson Webb, though born in New York State, was the son of Brigadier Samuel Webb, a distinguished hero of the American Revolution and from a long-established Connecticut family, 38 and the author of Home as I Found It at least once refers to himself as a Yankee.

Washington strikes Sir George as strangely lacking in pomp and ceremony. He visits the Senate and House of Representative, and is astonished that the House includes John Quincy Adams, a former President. Finally, a Virginian plantation owner, Mr. Harrowsmith, offers to escort him through Virginia, and show him how the slaves really live.

Within an hour after his arrival, Sir George found himself completely domesticated ... with a servant devoted to his especial call. ... To be sure the servants were all black, but they were well mannered, all neatly and comfortably clad for the season, and appeared to know their places. ... On looking out of the window, [he saw] a little village of huts ... inclosed by a pale[wooden] fence. ... The huts ... were low and small — they must be incommodious and unhealthy; but he ... forgot that in the great city of London, and in every city of Europe, thirty poor people would content themselves with the room that was allotted to six slaves. Here, too, are gardens appropriated to the use of the slaves, that in England a poor man would think a fortune if he possessed one of them. ...

Sir George approached the subject of slavery the next day, as all Englishmen and many Americans do, when they first enter a slave country, thinking that they have refined notions, and expansive knowledge, and fine feeling on the subject, yet really knowing nothing about it. ... 39

This is only a small part of Sir George’s experiences with slavery, and what he comes to think of it during his Virginia tour — none of which is to be found in Cooper’s Home as Found.

James Watson Webb believed that abolition was worse than slavery. “To free the negroes of the South, and leave them where they are will be to lay the foundation of a struggle that can only end in the [52] extermination of one or another colour. ...” 41 His solution was to send slaves back to Africa, and he and his newspaper relied on the American Colonization Society to accomplish this end. 41

But then comes a surprise that dominates the last three chapters of Home as I Found It. Members of the Templeton party are exploring a “wild road that wound around the brow of one of the Otsego mountains” where Eve Effingham — in imitation of Elizabeth Temple in The Pioneers — is attacked by a Panther. Suddenly appears “an old man, bent down with the weight of years,” and kills the panther with a rifle he calls Kill-deer. 42

It is, of course, Natty Bumppo, who (ignoring his own death in Cooper’s The Prairie) has returned to his old haunts. The author explains:

[Since 1836] this extraordinary man had been, as it were, buried in the western forest for nearly twenty years ... and it was feared, was forever lost to the good people of the village, and to the world, except as his character lived in history. ...

Sir James ... clasping him in his arms, exclaimed ‘The Leather Stocking, — Natty Bumppo. ... My old friend, my much loved friend,’ and he nearly smothered the old man with his kisses on his rough, time worn, and weatherbeaten cheek.

Old Natty stood ... with a look of inquisitive wonder and delight, as if to assure himself of the truth. As he became satisfied ... he clasped Sir James in his arms, and ejaculated ‘Effingham! thank God! you, too, are alive — to-morrow I will be ready to die;’ and [he] wept. ... 43

While Sir James communes with the dying Natty Bumppo at the Fairy Spring, the others go off to Saratoga to learn about warfare with Indians in the Old Days. 44 They return to Templeton, where Sir James has presided over Natty’s final death. 45

Near the close of Home as I Found It, the author comments on Natty Bumppo that “The character of an American hunter has been drawn with fidelity by Mr. Cooper, in his Pioneers, and it is a character unique in the world. ...” 46 Later, on the final page, the author concludes, “[He] has given his early life to the world in the character of ‘The Deer-slayer,’ a species of composition in which he stands unrivalled, and unapproached.” 47

If Cooper likely never read The Effinghams; or, Home as I Found It, it seems probable — if my identification is right — that James Watson Webb had read, and enjoyed, The Deerslayer far better than Home as Found. He had certainly changed his course, at least temporarily.48 [53]

Notes

Author's note: Original editions of Cooper Novels rarely had his name on the title page, but emulated Sir Walter Scott in referring to him as “by the author of” [earlier novels]. I have here used the original 1838 edition of Cooper’s Home as Found, and modern facsimile editions, produced in India, of the works of “Frederick Jackson.”

1 James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, or the Sources of the Susquehanna; A Descriptive Tale. 2 vols. New York: Charles Wiley, 1823.

2 James Fenimore Cooper, Homeward Bound; or, The Chase. 2 vols., Philadelphia: Lee and Blanchard, 1838.

3 James Fenimore Cooper, Home as Found. 2 vols., Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1838.

4 The Effinghams, or Home as I Found It. 2 vols., New York: Samuel Colman, 1841, by the Author of “The Victim of Chancery, &c.” Copyright by Frederick Jackson. Hereafter generally referred to as Home as I Found It.

5 William Bryan Gates, “A Neglected Satire on James Fenimore Cooper’s HOME AS FOUND,” American Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1 (March 1963), p. 14. Gates (1897-1983) goes on to draw biographical information from another novel, Riches and Honor; A New England Story, Founded on Fact. “By the author of ‘The Victim of Chancery,’ Etc.,” New York: Josiah Adams, 1847, copyright 1846 by Josiah Adams. Josiah Adams (1781-1854) was a New York publisher and bookseller, and, after examining the book, I strongly doubt that it had any connection with Frederick Jackson, who is nowhere mentioned in it.

6 See, e.g., the Reference Books cited by William Bryan Gates, supra; Thomas R. Lounsbury, James Fenimore Cooper. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1889, p. 150; María Carla Sánchez, Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Iowa Press, 2008, pp. 47-57; Susan M. Ryan, The Moral Economics of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Marketplace . Oxford University Press, 2016, pp. 41-42.

7 The only full-length biography of Webb is James L. Crouthamel, James Watson Webb; A Biography. Wesleyan University Press, 1969. Neither he, nor Wayne Franklin in his magisterial two-volume biography of Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (2007) and The Later Years (2017), Yale University Press, mention Frederick Jackson or Home as I Found It.

8 Crouthamel, op. cit, p. 4.

9 Crouthamel, op. cit, p. 4.

10 Harriet A. Weed (daughter), ed., Autobiography of Thurlow Weed. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1883. pp. 31. Weed (1797-1882) worked for Phinney, in Cooperstown, from April-July 1814.

11 William Leete Stone, Sr. (1792-1844) was a printer at the Cooperstown Federalist (later the Freeman’s Journal) from 1809 until 1813. The Historical Magazine, Vol. IX, No. 9 (September 1865), p. 61. See also, on slavery, The Life and Times of Sa-go-yeh-wat-ha, or Red Jacket, by the Late William L. Stone, with a Memoir of the Author, by his Son . Albany: J. Munsell, 1866, p. 39-44. [54]

12 James Franklin Beard, ed., The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 6 volumes, 1960-1968, Letter No. 661, February 5, 1842, p. 231.

13 The Bravo (1831), set in 18ᵗʰ century Venice; The Heidenmauer; or, The Benedictines, set in 16ᵗʰ century Germany, and The Headsman; or, The Abbay des Vignerons, set in 18ᵗʰ century Switzerland.

14 J. Fenimore-Cooper , A Letter to his Countrymen. New York: John Wiley, 1834.

15 James Fenimore Cooper, The Monikins. 2 vols., Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, & Blanchard, 1835:

16 Sketches of Switzerland [Gleanings in Europe: Switzerland] (1836); Sketches of Switzerland, Part II [Gleanings in Europe: The Rhine] (1836); Gleanings in Europe [France] (1837); Gleanings in Europe: England (1837); Gleanings in Europe: Italy (1838).

17 J. Fenimore Cooper, The Chronicles of Cooperstown. Cooperstown: H. & E. Phinney, 1838.

18 J. Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat; or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America. Cooperstown: H. & E. Phinney, 1838.

19 William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, Act 2, Scene 4, a remark by Prince Henry.

20 Cooper, Home as Found, Vol. I, pp. iii-v.

21 John McWilliams, “Bragging and Dodge-ing in America, or Domestic Manners as Found,” James Fenimore Cooper Miscellaneous Papers, No. 21, July 2005, pp. 1-4.

22 Namely: Alzuma Ann Abbott, Orlando Furioso Abbott, Rinaldo-Rinaldini-Timothy Abbott, and Roger-Demetrius-Benjamin Abbott.

23 Cooper, Home as Found, Vol. II, pp. 236-240.

24 New York Mirror, December 8, 1838.

25 Knickerbocker Magazine, No. 12, December 1838.

26 Southern Literary Messenger, No. 5, March 1839.

27 Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, November 22, 1838.

28 Thomas R. Lounsbury, James Fenimore Cooper. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882, p. 150.

29 Ethel R. Outland, The “Effingham” Libels on Cooper; A Documentary History of the Libel Suits of James Fenimore Cooper Centering Around the Three Mile Point Controversy and the Novel HOME AS FOUND, 1837-1845 . University of Wisconsin Studies, Madison, 1929. Another useful book on the Effingham affair is Dorothy Waples, The Whig Myth of James Fenimore Cooper. Yale University Press, 1938.

30 A Week in Wall Street. By One Who Knows. New York: Published for the Booksellers, 1841. Copyrighted by Frederick Jackson.

31 The Victim of Chancery: or a Debtor’s Experience, by the author of “A Week in Wall Street”. New York: 1841. Copyrighted by Frederick Jackson.

32 The Victim of Chancery, pp. 8-9. [55]

33 On Webb and bankruptcy, see Crouthamer, James Watson Webb., pp. 53, 74-75, 87 (in 1842 Webb took personal advantage of the Federal Bankruptcy Law), 96.

34 The Victim of Chancery, pp. 23-25.

35 Home as I Found It, Vol. I, pp 149-222.

36 Home as I Found It, Vol. I, p. 155.

37 Satanstoe; or, the Littlepage Manuscripts (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin (1846).

38 Crouthamel, James Watson Webb., p. 1.

39 Home as I Found It, Vol. I, pp. 207-211.

40 Quoted in Crouthamel, James Watson Webb,, p. 56.

41 The American Colonization Society was founded in 1817 by people like Bushrod Washington, and Francis Scott Key of national anthem fame, with the purpose of convincing free Blacks to move back to Africa. It was largely responsible for the founding of Liberia, and it lasted until 1964, but attracted very little support among African-Americans. Though originally gaining White supporters throughout the United States, it became essentially an organization of the American South.

42 Home as I Found It, Vol. II, pp. 192-193.

43 Home as I Found It, Vol. II, pp.197-199.

44 Home as I Found It, Vol. II, pp.217-232.

45 Home as I Found It, Vol. II, p. 235.

46 Home as I Found It, Vol. II, pp.191-192.

47 Home as I Found It, Vol. II, p. 236.

48 In any case, The Deerslayer was published in Philadelphia on August 27, 1841, and on November 19 Webb retracted the article from 1839 on which a second indictment against him had been based. Although trials on a first indictment continued, after two trials with hung juries, a third found Webb not guilty in 1843.