At a critical moment in James Fenimore Cooper's Revolutionary War novel The Spy , Caesar Thompson, a black slave, and Henry Wharton, his white master, trade identities.  The real life slave named Caesar who may have prompted Cooper to create his own Caesar once defied his influential masters by running away to sea. Cooper's racial and historical sleight-of-hand in the 1821 novel that launched his enduring literary fame drew strands of history and memory together as part of a complicated tale about loyalty and facades.  My talk explores how conflicting narratives of national, personal, and racial identity shaped culture and politics during a dynamic period in the history of abolition and race relations.