The Spy

The Spy is a novel by the American writer James Fenimore Cooper, published in 1821, the second of his books and the one that first made his name.

Its full title is The Spy: a Tale of the Neutral Ground, and the ground in question is Westchester County, where the Wharton family lives at The Locusts with the war moving around them. The household is Loyalist, which means every knock at the door is a decision: a traveller named Harper is taken in out of the storm, and then the peddler Harvey Birch, who is suspected by nearly everyone of selling information to the British. Cooper was prompted by the case of Major John André, the British officer hanged as a spy in 1780, and by the accusations of venality made against the men who captured him. His answer is Birch, a common man whose motives the well-born characters keep misreading, and part of the novel's argument is that the Revolution depended on people whose worth could not be read off their class. George Washington appears in the story and offers to pay the peddler for what he knows, and the book uses that scene and the border country it is set in to ask what loyalty costs. The plot crosses and re-crosses the neutral ground between the armies, and the question of which side the peddler is on is answered only slowly.

It was published in New York by Wiley and Halsted, and its success established Cooper as a popular and important American writer.