Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: July 27, 2025
As I now looked at him, I remembered what I had heard in boyhood of his history. There had ever been a mystery about the life of the Onondago. If any one of our set had ever been acquainted with the facts, it was Andries Coejemans, a half-uncle of my dear grandmother, a person who has been known among us by the sobriquet of the Chainbearer.
In his Preface to "The Chainbearer" he says, "In our view, New York is at this moment a disgraced State; and her disgrace arises from the fact that her laws are trampled under foot, without any efforts at all commensurate with the object being made to enforce them."
"The Chainbearer," second of the anti-rent series, was published early in 1846, and continues the story of "Satanstoe" in the person of the hero's son, who finds in the squatters on his wilderness inheritance the first working of the disorderly spirit of anti-rent the burning question of New York at that time.
The villain of the tale is, of course, a New Englander, in this instance a long, ungainly pedagogue from Danbury, Connecticut. He does not, however, blossom out into the full perfection of his rascality until he makes his appearance in "The Chainbearer," the next novel of the series. This tale, though decidedly inferior to "Satanstoe," contains passages of great interest.
Not one of them has the slightest pretension to be termed a work of art. There are, at times, passages in them that thrill us, and scenes that display something of his old skill in description. But these are recollections rather than new creations. Cooper's fame would not have been a whit lessened, if every line he wrote after "The Chainbearer" had never seen the light.
My grandmother had told me that "uncle Chainbearer," as we all called the old relative, did know all about Susquesus, in his time the reason why he had left his tribe, and become a hunter, and warrior, and runner among the pale-faces and that he had always said the particulars did his red friend great credit, but that he would reveal it no further.
After the publication of these, he became much interested in the well-known Anti-Rent agitation by which the State of New York was so long shaken; and three of his novels, "Satanstoe," "The Chainbearer," and "The Redskins," forming one continuous narrative, were written with reference to this subject.
The scene in which he is shrived by the Carmelite monk, in his boat, under the midnight moon, upon the Lagoons, is one of the finest we know of in the whole range of the literature of fiction, leaving upon the mind a lasting impression of solemn and pathetic beauty. In "The Chainbearer," the Yankee squatter, Thousandacres, is a repulsive figure, but drawn with a powerful pencil.
It was about this time that Cooper's reputation touched the lowest point to which it has ever fallen, so far, at least, as it depends upon the opinion of critics and of men of letters. The two anti-rent novels which appeared in 1845 were "Satanstoe," published in June, and "The Chainbearer," published in November. They may have had a large sale.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking