ed against
palpable rights and sacred family feelings their gossiping facts, their
grasping rapacity, and their ruthless disposition to destroy whatever
they could not control. "There is but one legal public," he defiantly
concluded his first letter, "and that acts under the obligation of
precise oaths, through prescribed forms, and on constitutional
principles. Let 'excitement' be flourished as it may, this is the only
public to which I shall submit the decision of my rights. So far as my
means allow, insult shall be avenged by the law, violence repelled by
the strong hand, falsehood put to shame by truth, and sophistry exposed
by reason."

It is perfectly clear that on the merits of this controversy Cooper was
wholly in the right. The bluster of these resolutions exhausted (p. 148)
all the courage of his opponents. The question of ownership was at once
settled definitely and forever. No one on the spot ever questioned the
point any farther, though the original falsehood was steadily repeated
by newspapers at a distance, and apparently never once contradicted
after its untruth had been shown. Some may think the result might have
been reached by milder means, but the spirit shown at the meeting
renders this more than doubtful. Cooper even had to pay for the
insertion of his letters in the village newspaper. Unfortunately the
ill-feeling aroused did not stop here. It gave rise to what may be
described as a semi-political controversy--that is, a controversy in
which one party attacks a man, and the party to which he belongs does
not think it expedient or worth while to defend him. The libel suits to
which it directly or indirectly led with the Whig newspapers of the
state will demand a separate chapter. Before they were well under way,
however, the novelist made up his mind to right himself in another
manner, and brought out a work of fiction which seemed expressly
contrived to meet the thought of the sacred writer who wished his
adversary had written a book.

Cooper determined to write a story in which he would set forth the
principles involved in the controversy about the Point. There is perhaps
no subject that cannot be made interesting by the right treatment. But
he was now in a state of mind that would not have permitted him to
discuss any matter of this nature in the spirit that belongs to the
composition of a work of the imagination. The dispute had embittered his
feelings already sore. It had tended to give h