he completion of the Oneida, Cooper accompanied Lieutenant (p. 012)
Woolsey on a visit to Niagara Falls. The navy records show that on the
10th of June, 1809, he was left by his commander in charge of the
gunboats on Lake Champlain. They further reveal the fact that on the
27th of September of this same year he was granted a furlough to make
a European voyage. This project for some reason was given up, as on
the 13th of November, 1809, he was ordered to the Wasp, then under the
command of Lawrence, who afterwards fell in the engagement between the
Shannon and the Chesapeake. To this officer, like himself a native of
Burlington, he was very warmly attached. The next notice of him
contained in the official records is to the effect that on the 9th of
May, 1810, permission was granted him to go on furlough for twelve
months. Whether he availed himself of it is not known. An event soon
occurred, however, that put an end to his naval career as effectively
as one had previously been put to his collegiate. An attachment had
sprung up some time before between him and a Miss DeLancey. On the 1st
of January, 1811, the couple were married at Mamaroneck, Westchester
County, New York. Cooper was then a little more than twenty-one years
old; the bride lacked very little of being nineteen.

His wife belonged to a Huguenot family, which towards the end of the
seventeenth century had fled from France, and had finally settled in
Westchester. During the Revolutionary War the DeLanceys had taken the
side of the crown against the colonies. Several of them held positions
in the British army. John Peter DeLancey, whose daughter Cooper had
married, had been himself a captain in that service. After the
recognition of American independence he went to England, but, (p. 013)
having resigned his commission, returned in 1789 to this country, and
spent the remainder of his life at his home in Mamaroneck. The fact
that his kinsmen by marriage had belonged to the defeated party in the
Revolutionary struggle led Cooper in his writings to treat the Tories,
as they were called, with a fairness and generosity which in that day
few were disposed to show, at least in print. This tenderness is
plainly to be seen in "The Spy," written at the beginning of his
career; it is still more marked in "Wyandotte," produced in the latter
part of it, when circumstances had made him profoundly dissatisfied
with much that he saw about him. One of the last, though least