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Crèvecoeur Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Marcus Cunliffe
Marcus Cunliffe
Affiliation:
University of Sussex
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Extract

Almost every twentieth-century discussion of American history, literature, culture or character makes reference to J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, a book first published in 1782. Anthologies usually find space for an excerpt from Crèvecoeur. A particular favourite is the third chapter, ‘ What Is An American? ’ Here is the best-known, the most-quoted, the almost tediously familiar paragraph from that chapter:

What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither an European nor the descendant of an European … He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle … The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , August 1975 , pp. 129 - 144
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1975

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References

1 Three random mentions and excerpts out of many:

(a) Commager, Henry S., ed., America in Perspective: The United States Through Foreign Eyes (New York, Mentor, 1948), p. 25Google Scholar. Commager reproduces the third chapter of Letters, and says: ‘Crèvecoeur, who lived half his mature life in America, can scarcely be classified as a foreigner, and indeed … he knew his adopted country better than most native-born Americans did – knew it, understood it, and loved it.’

(b) Chute, William J., ed., The American Scene, 1600–1860 (New York, Bantam Matrix, 1964), p. 73Google Scholar: ‘No book of readings in American history could be considered complete without Crèvecoeur's essay, “What Is An American? ”.’

(c) Morris, Richard B., The American Revolution: A Short History (New York, Van Nostrand, 1955), p. 139Google Scholar: ‘Embraced in the new spirit of nationalism which pervaded the Revolutionary movement was an idyllic concept of America as a land of opportunity … No one expressed these ideas with greater fervor nor gave a more lucid account of the effects of the melting pot on the molding of the American character than did … Crèvecoeur.’

2 de Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Stone, Albert E. Jr, (New York, Signet, 1963), pp. 60–64Google Scholar. All subsequent quotations from Letters or Sketches are drawn from this admirable edition – the only one that prints both books in one volume. There is another paperback edition of the Letters (New York, Dutton Everyman, 1957)Google Scholar with some interesting editorial comment by Warren B. Blake. The most detailed biographies of Crèvecoeur are by Julia Post Mitchell (New York, Columbia U.P., 1916), and Rice, Howard C., Le Cultivateur Américain: étude sur l'oeuvre de Saint John de Crèvecoeur (Paris, Champion, 1933)Google Scholar – a most useful work. A good brief recent study is Philbrick, Thomas, St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York, Twayne, 1970)Google Scholar.

3 Washington to Henderson, Richard, 19 06 1788, in The Washington Papers, ed. Padover, Saul K. (New York, Harper, 1955), p. 358Google Scholar.

4 Savelle, Max, in Problems in American History, ed. Leopold, Richard W. and Link, Arthur S. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, 2nd edn., 1957), pp. 32–3Google Scholar, describes Crèvecoeur as ‘a Frenchman who lived for a time in Pennsylvania’. Furnas, J. C., The Americans: A Social History of the United States, 1587–1914 (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1969), pp. 239–40Google Scholar, refers to Crèvecoeur as ‘ a middle-aged Norman … who had spent much of his life in the Middle Colonies …’

5 ‘Behold, sir, an humble American planter, a simple cultivator of the earth, addressing you from the farther side of the Atlantic and presuming to fix your name at the head of his trifling lucubrations.’ Letters, ed. Stone, , pp. 29–30Google Scholar.

6 Chasles, Philarète, Etudes sur la littérature et les moeurs des Anglo-Américains au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1851), p. 11Google Scholar.

7 See for example Nelson, William H., The American Tory (repr. Boston, Beacon Press, 1964)Google Scholar, and Brown, Wallace, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York, Morrow, 1969)Google Scholar.

8 ‘Crèvecoeur portait partout un front sombre, un air inquiet … Jamais il ne se livrait aux épanchements, il paraissait même quelquefois effrayé du succés de son ouvrage, il semblaitenfin qu'il eût un secret qui lui pesât sur l'âme et dont il craignait la révélation.’ Brissot, quoted in Rice, p. 4311.

9 Lawrence's essay on Crèvecoeur first appeared in the English Review (January 1919). It is longer than the version printed in Studies in Classic American Literature but equally off-hand about the actual circumstances of Crèvecoeur. See Arnold, Armin, D. H. Lawrence in America (London, Linden Press, 1958), pp. 50–3Google Scholar. The two sides of Crèvecoeur are well brought out in Parrington, Vernon L., Main Currents in American Thought (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1927–1930), vol. 1 pp. 140–7Google Scholar.

10 Sketches, ed. Stone, , pp. 342–3Google Scholar.

11 See Zeichner, Oscar, ‘The Loyalist Problem in New York after the Revolution,’ New York History, 21 (07, 1940), 284–302Google Scholar.

12 Sketches, ed. Stone, , pp. 450–8Google Scholar.

13 Major-General James Pattison, quoted in Rice, pp. 57–8.

14 Sketches, ed. Stone, , p. 399Google Scholar.

15 Rice, pp. 166–70; Sketches, ed. Stone, , p. 422Google Scholar. This particular dialogue anticipates the complex responses to the Revolution, and to American democracy, of James Fenimore Cooper – for instance in his Littlepage Manuscripts trilogy. See Cunliffe, Marcus, The Literature of the United States (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970 edn.), pp. 68–70Google Scholar.

16 Available in an English edition, as Journey into Northern Pennsylvania and the State of New York, transl. Bostelmann, Clarissa (Ann Arbor, U. of Michigan P., 1964)Google Scholar.

17 Rice, pp. 63–6.

18 Thomas Jefferson attended the wedding of America-Francès. See Dictionary of American Biography (New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1943), iv, p. 543Google Scholar.

19 Quoted in Rice, p. 162.

20 Jordan, Winthrop D., White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, U. of North Carolina P., 1968), pp. 335–41Google Scholar, argues that Crèvecoeur's melting-pot vision was not representative of American thinking in Crèvecoeur's own day, nor of the state of affairs in subsequent decades. His, says Jordan, was the hopeful attitude of a non-British, though distinctly Anglophile, settler. Most other works of the period, more accurately predictive than Crèvecoeur's, stressed the dominant influence of the English (or at any rate Anglo-American) culture in subjugating other cultural strains – a dominance that persisted through the nineteenth century. Jordan also detects another limitation: that Crèvecoeur's melting-pot allowed no place for the Negro American. Apart from his one chapter on the fate of the slaves in the South, Crèvecoeur refers without embarrassment to the supposedly happy and submissive blacks whom he himself owns.

21 In addition to the works cited in note 2, there are signs of a more knowledgeably sophisticated approach to Crèvecoeur in a number of recent books and articles. See for example Rapping, Elayne Antler, ‘Theory and Experience in Crèvecoeur's America’, American Quarterly, 19 (1967), 707–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mohr, James C., ‘Calculated Disillusionment: Crèvecoeur's Letters Reconsidered’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 69 (1970), 354–63Google Scholar.