Title: Cooke, John Esten
(photo)
Source: Special Collections,
University of Virginia
More informationJohn Esten Cooke was a
novelist, biographer, and veteran of the American Civil War (1861–1865). One of the most important literary figures
of nineteenth-century Virginia, Cooke was the prolific author of historical
adventures and romances in the tradition of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper.
His most famous and perhaps best work, The Virginia Comedians: or,
Old Days in the Old Dominion (1854), follows the aristocratic cad Champ
Effingham in Virginia before the American Revolution (1775–1783). In fact, Cooke saw
himself as a critic of aristocracy, but that criticism was rarely particularly sharp,
and after the Civil War, his work unselfconsciously glorified the Confederacy in the
tradition of the Lost Cause.
"Come!" Cooke wrote in Surry of Eagle's-Nest (1866). "Perhaps
as you follow me, you will live in the stormy days of a cavalier epoch: breathe its
fiery atmosphere, and see its mighty forms as they defile before you, in a long and
noble line." A relative by marriage to Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart, Cooke served with the cavalryman during
the war and wrote hagiographic biographies of generals Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson and Robert E. Lee.
Cooke was born on November 3, 1830, in Winchester and was the son of Maria W. Pendleton Cooke and John Rogers Cooke, an attorney and member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–1830. His twelve siblings included the poet Philip Pendleton Cooke, and he was also a cousin of the writer and Maryland congressman John Pendleton Kennedy. Cooke spent his early childhood at Glengary, his family's Frederick County farm. After the house burned late in the 1830s, the family moved to Charles Town, in Jefferson County (now West Virginia), and shortly thereafter to Richmond, where Cooke lived until the Civil War. He hoped to attend the University of Virginia, but he repeatedly had to defer his plans because his father—perpetually in debt—could not afford the tuition. Although Cooke studied law with his father and began to practice in 1851, he was, in his own words, "dragged by literature," and he read voraciously works by Thomas Carlyle, Sir Walter Scott, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Washington Irving, among other British and American writers.
Title: Cooke, John Esten
(engraving)
Source: Special Collections,
University of Virginia
More informationCooke became friends with John Reuben Thompson, who
in November 1848 published Cooke's poem "Avalon" in the Southern Literary Messenger. Thereafter Cooke's stories and essays regularly appeared in southern as
well as northern periodicals, including Harper's New Monthly
Magazine and Putnam's Monthly magazine. In 1854
Harper and Brothers published anonymously the first of his many historical
romances, Leather Stocking and Silk; or, Hunter John Myers and
His Times, a novel with title and characters inspired by James Fenimore
Cooper and set in the Shenandoah Valley early in the nineteenth century. Cooke also
anonymously wrote The Youth of Jefferson; or A Chronicle of
College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 (1854). A few
months later the New York publishers D. Appleton and Company brought out The Virginia Comedians: or, Old Days in the Old Dominion, a
historical romance set in pre-Revolutionary Virginia and chronicling the romantic
pursuits of Champ Effingham, an aristocrat and sometime cad. The widely praised
novel went through several printings during Cooke's lifetime and continues to be
considered his best work.
Cooke's literary successes allowed him to abandon his moderately successful law practice in the mid-1850s. He published three more novels, Ellie: or, The Human Comedy (1855), an experiment with the contemporary social-problem novel; The Last of the Foresters: or, Humors on the Border; A Story of the Old Virginia Frontier (1856); and Henry St. John, Gentleman, of "Flower of Hundreds," in the County of Prince George, Virginia (1859), a sequel to The Virginia Comedians. Even though modern critics view his 1850s fiction as romanticizing colonial gentry and perpetuating the myth of the Virginia cavalier, Cooke saw himself as a critic of aristocracy. As at least one literary historian has pointed out, however, Cooke's view of the aristocracy was conflicted. Champ Effingham, who at the novel's beginning stalks the actress Beatrice Hallam and acts dishonorably, has been rehabilitated by the end.
Cooke joined the Richmond Howitzers, an artillery unit raised at the time of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859. He became a sergeant after the unit mustered into Confederate service as Captain R. M. Anderson's Company, Virginia Light Artillery (1st Company Richmond Howitzers), but he was discharged on January 31, 1862. That spring Cooke served as a volunteer aide-de-camp to Confederate general J. E. B. Stuart, who had married Cooke's first cousin. Cooke received a commission as first lieutenant of artillery on May 19, 1862, joined Stuart on his celebrated ride around the Union army on June 12–16, and won promotion to captain on August 8, to rank from July 25. He became chief of ordnance for Stuart's cavalry division later that year. Stuart may have recommended Cooke for promotion to major, but Cooke remained a captain until the end of the war. In October 1863 he was temporarily assigned to duty in the adjutant general's department of Stuart's command, and beginning in May 1864 he served as assistant inspector general of the Army of Northern Virginia's artillery corps. Cooke was paroled at Appomattox Court House following Robert E. Lee's surrender on April 9, 1865.
More informationWhile fighting in the major eastern
campaigns from the First
Battle of Manassas (1861) to Appomattox Court House, Cooke continued to
write prolifically. His Civil War diaries fill four notebooks, and his war
dispatches appeared under the pseudonym Tristan Joyeuse, Gent., in Richmond's Southern Illustrated News, among other periodicals. Later he
collected and edited these accounts for Wearing of the Gray
(1867). In 1863 Cooke published The Life of Stonewall
Jackson, which he later revised and issued as Stonewall
Jackson: A Military Biography (1866).
After the Civil War, Cooke moved to Clarke County. The war had temporarily shifted his literary focus from colonial Virginia to the recent past and to the northern literary market. Cooke's three Civil War novels—Surry of Eagle's-Nest; or The Memoirs of a Staff-Officer Serving in Virginia (1866), Mohun; or, the Last Days of Lee and His Paladins (1869), and Hilt to Hilt; or, Days and Nights on the Banks of the Shenandoah in the Autumn of 1864 (1869)—mixed imaginative scenes with historical military figures. A compilation of his articles on Virginia battles appeared as Hammer and Rapier (1870). Cooke's war experience also inspired his biography A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee (1871).
Although he is recognized as one of the first writers to treat the Civil War in fiction, critics lament that he did not exploit his war experiences to explore the subject in more depth and with more forthrightness. This is especially true because Cooke's war diaries and various statements suggest that he understood war to be quite different from the romantic adventures of his books. "I never liked the business of war," he told an interviewer after the Civil War.
Gold lace on my coat always made me feel as if I were a child tricked out in red and yellow calico with turkey-feathers in my headgear to add to the gorgeousness. There is nothing intellectual about fighting. It is fit work for brutes and brutish men. And in modern war, where men are organized in masses and converted into insensate machines, there is really nothing heroic or romantic in any way calculated to appeal to the imagination!
Cooke's books, it seems, were an attempt to refashion modern war in the romantic, intellectual image of Cooke himself. This transformation served an important purpose. Cooke's tales "resisted Reconstruction and glorified the Confederacy while at the same time slowly fueling the spirit of reunion," the historian David W. Blight has written. "Cooke demonstrated how easily for some the horrible memory of combat and campaigning could be converted into purposeful nostalgia."
Title:
Source: Special Collections,
University of Virginia
More informationOn September 18, 1867 in Millwood, in
Clarke County, Cooke married Mary Francis Page, who died on January 15, 1878.
Their one daughter and two sons included Robert Powel Page Cooke, a physician who
participated in Walter Reed's
experiments to determine the cause of yellow fever. The family lived at the
Briars, their Clarke County estate, where Cooke wrote, entertained, and farmed.
His new agricultural knowledge informed the plot of one of his best novels from
the postbellum years, The Heir of Gaymount (1870). The
productive Cooke published more than a dozen other novels and novellas, and two
historical works, as well as many essays for various periodicals. He was an early
member of the American Historical Association.
Cooke's work holds a significant place in Virginia's literary history and in nineteenth-century American literary culture. He was arguably the most famous Virginia writer of his period, a skilled historical romancer in the tradition of Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Gilmore Simms who repeatedly turned to Virginia's past as his inspiration for fiction. Although sometimes viewed as derivative and careless, and especially faulted for inadequate revision, Cooke's writings embraced a breadth of subject matter, from colonial Virginia history to class in contemporary Richmond, in a wide variety of genres that gives his work enduring interest. In part because of his success in gaining recognition from northern editors and readers, his career illustrates connections between northern and southern publishing in the nineteenth century.
John Esten Cooke died, probably of typhoid fever, at the Briars on September 27, 1886. He was buried in the Old Chapel Cemetery, in Clarke County.
First published: April 6, 2009 | Last modified: January 18, 2012
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