THE REDSKINS; OR, INDIAN AND INJIN: BEING THE CONCLUSION OF THE LITTLEPAGE MANUSCRIPTS. BY THE AUTHOR OF "THE PATHFINDER," "DEERSLAYER," Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1846, by J. FENIMORE COOPER, in the clerk's office of the District Court for the Northern District of New York. PREFACE. THIS book closes the series of the Littlepage Manuscripts, which have been given to the world, as containing a fair account of the comparative sacrifices of time, money and labour, made respectively by the landlord and the tenants, on a New York estate; together with the manner in which usages and opinions are changing among us; as well as certain of the reasons of these changes. The discriminating reader will probably be able to trace in these narratives the progress of those innovations on the great laws of morals which are becoming so very manifest in connection with this interest, setting at naught the plainest principles that God has transmitted to man for the government of his conduct, and all under the extraordinary pretence of favouring liberty! In this downward course, our picture embraces some of the proofs of that looseness of views on the subject of certain species of property which is, in a degree perhaps, inseparable from the semi-barbarous condition of a new settlement; the gradation of the squatter, from him who merely makes his pitch to crop a few fields in passing, to him who carries on the business by wholesale; and last, though not least in this catalogue of marauders, the anti-renter. It would be idle to deny that the great principle which lies at the bottom of anti-rentism, if principle |