But as critic Donald Donnell points out, the obstinate loyalty to the Crown which results in Lincoln's return to England at the end of the war, seems to be a deliberately negative trait with which Cooper endows many of Loyalist characters.

[3] In his dissertation, Paul Jonathan Woolf examines the effect the decision for these aristocratic characters to leave the United States at the end of the novel: Arguably, though, Cooper wrote himself into a corner.

If Lionel and Cecil, whose own branch of the Lincoln family is tainted by her grandmother’s diabolical scheming, remained in America, the new nation would not be rid of what Cooper depicts as the endemic insanity, sexual deviancy and deceit of the English aristocracy.

According to Steinbrink, however, the novel's failure resulted from Cooper's inability to integrate character and plot development into the history of the American Revolution.

To Neal, Lionel Lincoln was an unrealistic imitation of the Scottish historical novelist Sir Walter Scott, and was completely unsatisfactory.

[6] Modern critic Joseph Steinbrink points out that the historical retelling of battles and events by Cooper is very good, but that this is obscured by both a very weak character of Lionel Lincoln and too much "gothicism and sentimentality".