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JAMES Fenimore Cooper's novels-famous for their pairings of Indians and European Americans-also represent numerous affiliations among Americans and English, French, Dutch, and African characters, among others. In his Revolutionary War stories, sea tales, and travel narratives, Cooper returns again and again to characters who form strong attachments across national lines. Critics such as Leslie Fiedler and Ivy Schweitzer have argued persuasively for the importance of friendship to both Cooper's fiction and the shifting social and political landscape of the early national period.1 However, the significance of Cooper's emphasis on international friendships, in particular, remains unexplored. While these relationships clearly have sources in the colonial American setting that his historical romances often depict, friendships between Americans and foreigners took on particular significance during the early national period when Cooper first emerged as a novelist. Following the War of 1812 and the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, Americans sought to establish new policies articulating the nation's relation to Europe, such as the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which warned against European interference in North and South America. Cooper proves an important figure for examining the America of the 1820s because his work reflects a profound engagement with the interrelationship of domestic and foreign politics. In novels such as The Pilot; A Tale of the Sea (1823) and The Prairie: A Tale (1827), Cooper responds to anxieties about foreign influence by asserting that the nation is capable of navigating affiliations with an array of peoples, even profiting from such relationships, while preserving its recently established independence.
In Cooper's work, friendship provides readers with a metonym for international affiliations. The affinities that emerge in his novels consistently define Americans through their encounters with the foreign. Notably, friendship was a popular trope of literature in the early national period, often used to consider what connects the members of a society or nation. For example, Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) is told largely through the exchange of letters among friends. The protagonist's correspondence links her to a social sphere as she shares her opinions and receives advice from loved ones. Her friendships prove so intimate that she fears any other attachment will interrupt them, declaring, "Marriage is the tomb of friendship."2 Likewise, Catharine Maria Sedgwick imagines powerful friendships, representing these relationships as a...