Man with a Cross: Hawkeye Was a “Half-Breed”

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Passing, United States on 2011-05-12 02:24Z by Steven

Man with a Cross: Hawkeye Was a “Half-Breed”

Cooper Panel
American Literature Association Conference
San Diego, California
May 1998

James Fenimore Cooper Society

Barbara Mann, Lecturer of English
University of Toledo

Originally published in James Fenimore Cooper Society Miscellaneous Papers No. 10, August 1998

Natty Bumppo—Hawkeye of James Fenimore Cooper’s five Leather-Stocking Tales—is indelibly inscribed in the critical mind as the “man without a cross,” that prototypical “white Indian” of American literature. So accustomed are they to Natty’s “man-without-a-cross” mantra that critics take it at face value, never asking the obvious question: Was Natty really a man without a racial cross? I say, “Not a chance.” Seen against the backdrop of Native history, of which Cooper was intimately aware, Natty could only have been a mixed blood.

Now for a little primer: Modem critics tend to assume that the one-drop rule of racial identity was always in force in America, legally disallowing any wiggle room to people of racially mixed ancestry. Not so. There were in actuality three rules of racial identity, each competing with the others between 1750 and 1850: generational passing; the rule of recognition; and the rule of descent. Generational passing, the British rule under colonialism, allowed third generation cross-bloods to pass as “white,” regardless of how Native or African they might look. By 1825, racist theory was gaining ground in America, positing two new, conflicting “rules” of race, those of recognition and descent. The rule of recognition was the eye-test of identity: whoever could pass, might; while the rule of descent—the infamous “one-drop” rule—forbade passing at all times, regardless of generation or appearance. After 1825, only the rules of recognition and descent remained to vie for social control and, from 1850 on, the one-drop rule alone applied. Note that, in Natty’s lifetime, the generational rule and the rule of recognition were in force. Under either, Natty was legally “white,” even though in modem, more racist America, he would not be so categorized…

Read the entire paper here.

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