uits extended over the period from 1838 to 1844. Cooper acted
almost wholly as his own lawyer, and argued his own cases in court. He
was pitted against leaders of the bar in the greatest State in the
Union. He had become personally unpopular, and was engaged in an
unpopular cause. He won his verdicts from reluctant juries, but, in
nearly every case, he won. The libel law of the State of New York was
made, to a great extent, by the Fenimore Cooper cases.

To complete the story, the final disposition of Three-Mile Point, the
innocuous cause of all this controversy, must here be anticipated. In
1899 Simon Uhlman, a wealthy hop merchant, purchased a summer home on
the lakeside nearest to Three-Mile Point, and, desiring to acquire this
tongue of land for his own use, made inquiries of Samuel M. Shaw, the
veteran editor of the _Freeman's Journal_, to ascertain from whom the
purchase might be made. Shaw learned from G. Pomeroy Keese that under
the terms of Judge Cooper's will, the Point was then owned by William
Cooper of Baltimore, and hastily arranged for the purchase at a
moderate price, not for Uhlman, but for the village of Cooperstown. Thus
Uhlman lost a desirable water front, and William Cooper a big price for
his land, but the citizens of Cooperstown gained a playground, the
denial of which to their forebears had nearly caused a riot. Uhlman
afterward sold his place, Uncas Lodge, to Adolphus Busch of St. Louis.

Cooper's reputation as an author suffered from his success as a litigant
in an unpopular cause, and his prosecution of the libel suits injured
the sale of his books, not only then, but for some years after his
death. In 1844, just after Cooper had reduced the newspapers of the
State to silence, Edward Everett Hale visited Cooperstown, and says that
when he tried to buy a copy of _The Pioneers_ at a local bookseller's
the dealer coolly declared that he had never heard of the book.[113]

While public attention was engaged by the libel suits, Cooper was
occupied with much else. It was during this period that he published his
important _Naval History_, besides ten of his novels. Nor was there any
loss of interest in his various avocations, among which, in 1840, he
found time to plan and supervise extensive alterations in Christ Church,
of which he had become a vestryman in 1835. With his mind full of the
Gothic splendor of churches that he had seen in England, he set out to
beautify the village church at home. The