In Chapter 17, Magua shows Cora and Alice the total destruction of Fort William Henry, which Montcalm has stood back and allowed to happen. Cooper uses pathos to further emphasize the moral differences between the heroes and the villains of the novel:
On every side the captured were flying before their relentless persecutors, while the armed columns of the Christian king stood fast in an apathy which has never been explained, and which has left an immovable blot on the otherwise fair escutcheon of their leader.
Cooper has just depicted an utter massacre at the hands of the Hurons, who are allied with the French. The Hurons have brutally murdered families, including babies, and celebrated over the carnage. Montcalm could intervene. He has no tactical reason for allowing this level of violence to be enacted against the occupants of the fort, which General Webb has effectively abandoned. In fact, the Hurons have seized the opportunity to attack as the families who have been living in the fort file out in surrender. Instead of doing what Cooper suggests would be the moral, "Christian" thing, Montcalm has sat back "in an apathy which has never been explained."
This chapter pulls on the reader's sympathy for the murdered families to establish Montcalm and the Hurons as heartless beings incapable of human sympathy. Cooper's racist depiction of the Hurons throughout the chapter is utterly dehumanizing. For example, when the violence first erupts, Cooper writes:
The flow of blood might be likened to the outbreaking of a torrent; and, as the natives became heated and maddened by the sight, many among them even kneeled to the earth, and drank freely, exultingly, hellishly, of the crimson tide.
Cooper is drawing on the mythical binary between "good Indians," such as the loyal Mohicans, and "bad Indians" who are murderous and even cannibalistic. By suggesting that Hurons relish in killing white people and drinking their blood, Cooper makes the ill-fated Mohicans seem exceptional in that they are basically decent humans. The implicit point is that "good Indians" stand no chance of surviving when "bad Indians" are willing to resort to these cruel practices to establish dominance in the forest. Real American Indian politics are and were far more complex than this, but Cooper's novel is focused on mourning the "last of the Mohicans."
But the passage makes Montcalm appear, if anything, even less humane than the Hurons. Cooper carefully points out that he represents a "Christian king." In the 19th century, many white readers had misguided pity for American Indians who did not have Christianity as a moral guidepost. There was a huge social and political movement to convert American Indians to Christianity to "save their souls" and train them out of cultural practices white colonists feared and hated. Montcalm, on the other hand, already has Christianity. The idea that he can represent Christianity and still allow this massacre to happen reflects not ignorance, but cruel indifference and failure to put morals into practice. Cooper wants readers to see not only the Hurons, but also the French as the immoral villains of history.
