New York

by James Fenimore Cooper




{Text transcribed and annotated by Hugh MacDougall, Founder and
Secretary/Treasurer of the James Fenimore Cooper Society, who
will appreciate corrections and comments at jfcooper@wpe.com. All
material not from Cooper's text is enclosed in {curly} brackets.

{Introductory Note: In 1851, just before his death on the eve of
his 62nd birthday, James Fenimore Cooper was working a history of
New York City, for which he planned the title of "The Towns of
Manhattan." Cooper never completed it, and most of the parts of
the manuscript that he did complete were destroyed in a fire at
the printers after his death. The Introduction to the work,
however, survived, and was published during the Civil War in "The
Spirit of the Age" (New York: April 5-15, 1864), a fund-raising
publication of the American Sanitary Commission (predecessor of
the American Red Cross). Substantial excerpts were reprinted, as
"James Fenimore Cooper on Secession and States Rights" in the
"Continental Monthly: Devoted to Literature and National Policy,"
Vol. 6, No. 1 (July 1864), pp. 79-83.

The "Spirit of the Age"text was much later reprinted in book form
under the title of "New York" (New York: William Farquhar Payson,
1930) in a limited edition of 750 copies, with an introduction by
Dixon Ryan Fox, and was later re-issued in facsimile form