The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts   By: James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)

REDSKINS;

OR,

INDIAN AND INJIN:

BEING THE CONCLUSION OF THE

LITTLEPAGE MANUSCRIPTS.

BY THE

AUTHOR OF "THE PATHFINDER," "DEERSLAYER," "TWO ADMIRALS," ETC.

In every work regard the writer's end; None e'er ran compass more than they intend. POPE.

IN TWO VOLUMES.

VOL. I.

NEW YORK:

PUBLISHED BY BURGESS & STRINGER,

1846.

Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1846, by

J. FENIMORE COOPER,

in the clerk's office of the District Court for the Northern District of New York.

STEREOTYPED BY J. FAGAN, PHILADELPHIA.

PREFACE.

This book closes the series of the Littlepage Manuscripts, which have been given to the world, as containing a fair account of the comparative sacrifices of time, money and labour, made respectively by the landlord and the tenants, on a New York estate; together with the manner in which usages and opinions are changing among us; as well as certain of the reasons of these changes. The discriminating reader will probably be able to trace in these narratives the progress of those innovations on the great laws of morals which are becoming so very manifest in connection with this interest, setting at naught the plainest principles that God has transmitted to man for the government of his conduct, and all under the extraordinary pretence of favouring liberty! In this downward course, our picture embraces some of the proofs of that looseness of views on the subject of certain species of property which is, in a degree perhaps, inseparable from the semi barbarous condition of a new settlement; the gradation of the squatter, from him who merely makes his pitch to crop a few fields in passing, to him who carries on the business by wholesale; and last, though not least in this catalogue of marauders, the anti renter.

It would be idle to deny that the great principle which lies at the bottom of anti rentism, if principle it can be called, is the assumption of a claim that the interests and wishes of numbers are to be respected, though done at a sacrifice of the clearest rights of the few. That this is not liberty, but tyranny in its worst form, every right thinking and right feeling man must be fully aware. Every one who knows much of the history of the past, and of the influence of classes, must understand, that whenever the educated, the affluent and the practised, choose to unite their means of combination and money to control the political destiny of a country, they become irresistible; making the most subservient tools of those very masses who vainly imagine they are the true guardians of their own liberties. The well known election of 1840 is a memorable instance of the power of such a combination; though that was a combination formed mostly for the mere purposes of faction, sustained perhaps by the desperate designs of the insolvents of the country. Such a combination was necessarily wanting in union among the affluent; it had not the high support of principles to give it sanctity, and it affords little more than the proof of the power of money and leisure, when applied in a very doubtful cause, in wielding the masses of a great nation, to be the instruments of their own subjection. No well intentioned American legislator, consequently, ought ever to lose sight of the fact, that each invasion of the right which he sanctions is a blow struck against liberty itself, which, in a country like this, has no auxiliary so certain or so powerful as justice.