SOURCE: “Community and Utopia in Crèvecoeur's Sketches,” in American Literature, Vol. 62, No. 1, March, 1990, pp. 17-31.

[In the following essay, Robinson examines Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America as a text that illuminates some of the contradictions often cited in Letters from an American Farmer.]

I

By the end of the eighteenth century, Leo Marx tells us, the idea that “the American continent may be the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics.”¹ Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer is perhaps the best articulation of this utopian impulse, embodying in its third letter an agrarian version of the American dream. There he presents a vision of a society of social and economic equals, made independent through their economic dependence on the land alone yet bound together in a supportive and compassionate community. The agrarian values that James embodies in the book's opening—familial rootedness, reverence for nature, diligent work, economic egalitarianism, and an openness to those in need—are utopian in essence. They project an ideal society, the image of which becomes a stance for social criticism.² Although Crèvecoeur's presentation of the dream has only a peripheral relation to historical truth, something of the utopian impulse of the work has survived history, continuing to present a powerful image of what America might have become before it veered into the Industrial Age. The power of Crèvecoeur's book is its utopian thrust, and as historical developments have rendered it more assuredly utopian, they have augmented the very source of its power.

But what call can Crèvecoeur's agrarian utopia legitimately have upon us? This essentially political question has been the unacknowledged subtext of much conflicting literary interpretation of the book. Recent readers of the Letters have been divided over the implications of the dramatic change of tone, some seeing the tragic later chapters as intentional deflation of the earlier optimism, and others finding grounds in the book's conclusion to preserve at least some of the values, though perhaps transmuted, of the earlier chapters.³ Certain textual questions bear directly on these conclusions, principally the fact that Letters was a chosen arrangement from a much wider variety of Crèvecoeur's manuscripts.⁴ Other of the manuscripts, discovered in France by Henri Bourdin in 1925, were published as Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, a revealing miscellany of commentary on early American society.⁵ Thomas Philbrick has rightly called the Sketches a “non-book,” seeing it as “an anthology of heterogeneous pieces that lacks a controlling form, a coherent point of view, and a coherent theme” (p. 109). Seen in isolation, and as an aesthetic artifact, it is indeed a book of limited value. But as a shadow text to the Letters, it has enormous significance. The book's diversity adds to its importance as a barometer of the conflicting ideas and experiences that Crèvecoeur was attempting to work through in its composition. The book highlights the tensions and contradictions that are inherent in the Letters, and suggests that the “utopian mentality” embodied in the book is best regarded as a form of social criticism.⁶ It thus confirms the core of cultural criticism in Crèvecoeur's work, amplifying our understanding of his struggles with America's utopian possibilities. One of the most crucial of these struggles is the problem of community formation. While the promise of material gain was a significant factor in the settlement of the frontier, the excessive pursuit of wealth posed a serious obstacle to the formation of a genuine community there. Crèvecoeur depicts this obstacle clearly, but his Sketches leaves an implied rather than a fully articulated critique of this pervasive and caustic American materialism. His troubled recognition of the new nation's vulnerability to the transformation of economic opportunity into exclusionary greed is thus mapped in the Sketches. Since the new economic opportunity was the fuel of his utopian expectations, its perversion was of serious concern to him. His utopian expectations were tragically deferred as the communities of the New World were formed, and his witness to that deferral made him one of our first cultural critics.

II

Despite the continuing and probably irresolvable differences of interpretation of the Letters, one consensus seems to be emerging in the recent criticism. Whether one sees the book's ending as intentionally undercutting its earlier optimism or refining its earlier vision, there is a conscious utopian design and serious social criticism implied by the chosen structure of the work. As James's vision moves from the effusive praise of the possibilities of American life to the threatened destruction of those possibilities in the violence of the Revolution, he constructs a lost paradise, leaving us with the faint hope of its recovery as he moves West to live among the Indians. James's future plans have long been controversial, seeming to some like the purest escapist fantasy. This escape to the West, an “earplug to the siren song of primitivism” as John Hales has recently called it, underscores the seriousness of the tragedy that has gone on before.⁷ Either Crèvecoeur himself has lost his grip on the truth, or he has depicted his narrator James as having done so to augment the shock of the collapse of James's world. In either case, Crèvecoeur has left us with a vision of a crumbling American dream.⁸ Is that in itself a conscious political statement? Those who regard James's plan of escape as “less quixotic than it might appear,” as Myra Jehlen put it (p. 209), can also find in it an affirmation of at least some elements of the original agrarian vision that gives Letter Three its strength of appeal. In this view, James's escape represents the persistence of hope and the continuing capacity to enact it historically.⁹

James's escape to the West results from his victimization by political forces beyond his control, but he is not the only political victim in Crèvecoeur's work. Certain parts of the Sketches multiply and deepen the images of tragedy that resulted from the political dislocations of the Revolution. What may have seemed to be Crèvecoeur's rather mild Tory sympathies in the Letters are shown instead to be a deep suspicion of the motives of the revolutionaries and a despairing and sometimes savage attack on their intolerance for dissenting views. His opposition to the Revolution would later soften, as he established himself in France, but portions of the Sketches were written at the height of personal and social turmoil that manifested itself in a blistering critique of the Revolution.¹⁰ Ironically, this pro-loyalist perspective is of a piece with Crèvecoeur's progressive cultural criticism.

James's powerful statement of the injustice of his situation in Letter Twelve transcends its immediate political context in the Revolution and makes him a representative voice of a populace exploited for the gain of those vying for power. He senses that he is being duped into taking part in the conflict in order to serve the unacknowledged interests of those more powerful than he, and finds this a disturbing pattern of the political relations among the classes. “It is for the sake of great leaders on both sides that so much blood must be spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing. Great events are not achieved for us, though it is by us that they are principally accomplished, by the arms, the sweat, the lives of the people.”¹¹ Recognizing that he may be doomed no matter which side he chooses, and having little or no stake in the outcome, James adopts the principle of self-preservation in his decision to flee to the West. In one sense it is a decision to opt out of the political, and now military, conflict that has engulfed the colonies. But on another level, it is fundamentally a political decision, in which James embraces what little alternative to the entrenched warring powers remains. It is less a pro-loyalist stance than a statement of agrarian self-determination.

The book offers other corroborating evidence of the hardship that the Revolution visited upon the innocent. “The Man of Sorrows” adds dramatic detail to the context of James's own predicament as described in Letter Twelve. The sketch attempts to personalize the evil of the war and show it “more visible, more affecting” (p. 342) because of its direct harm to ordinary individuals. The unnamed narrator of the piece describes the transformation of the American frontier into a nightmare of instability and violence for those who have settled there. “No imagination can conceive, no tongue can describe their calamities and their dangers. The echoes of their woods repeat no longer the blows of the axe, the crash of the falling trees, the cheerful songs of the ploughman” (p. 345). Whipsawed between revolutionary and loyalist militia and vulnerable to Indian attack, the frontier settlers epitomize the victimization of the lowly by the powerful. Although the frontier had represented to many of them an escape from political turmoil and violence, it has now become the place where violence is most terribly played out.

The sketch focuses on the fate of a farmer victimized by vigilante justice after being accused of harboring a band of loyalists and Indians. He is accosted while he is working in his field, a scene that epitomizes the disruption of the agrarian utopia by political forces. The man is hastily condemned to hang, and in the presence of his family the execution is actually begun before he is given a last-second reprieve. The incident accentuates the absolute powerlessness of an individual confronting larger political events and reinforces James's argument in the Letters about the victimization of the innocent and the powerless. While in this case the revolutionaries are more clearly the target of Crèvecoeur's attack, and the sketch therefore has a more definite loyalist orientation than the Letters, both texts share a populist sense of betrayal by larger political forces. There is no escape to the West for this farmer, and it is one of several instances in which the Sketches paints a much bleaker picture of frontier conditions and leaves much less room for hope than the Letters. But the comparison of this sketch with Letter Twelve underscores that James's plan to flee to the West is a form of political defiance.

James's planned escape raises one serious question that goes to the heart of the agrarian values that are the book's utopian center. James and his family go to the West alone. Certainly this restricts the political significance of his act and suggests one of the key limitations of Crèvecoeur's political vision, its extreme individualism. “Because personal worth for him was measured by autonomy,” Jehlen notes, “any area of mutual definition amounted to a sort of entail on the self” (p. 207). Crèvecoeur's depictions of innocent individuals persecuted by large groups or institutions suggest that he regarded social relations as inevitably restrictive of personal freedom. But it should be remembered that these are images of individual autonomy that, again and again, is shown to fail. In this sense, they are less an affirmation of individualism than an implied critique of the myth of individual autonomy. His portrayal of the individual gripped by social violence is best regarded as a nascent attempt to refine the image of agrarian autonomy by showing that it can never be absolute.

Crèvecoeur's ambivalent presentation of the relation of the individual to the larger community is therefore evidence of his groping toward a critique of a failing or destructive individualism. In Letter Twelve, James plans to flee to the West because of the destruction of the community around him. His settlement, a “thinly inhabited” area “inclosed by a chain of mountains,” cannot be secured from the marauders who are sheltered by the wilderness, “a door through which they can enter our country whenever they please.” The attacks, which “seem determined to destroy the whole chain of frontiers,” leave James and his family in continuous fear (pp. 201-02). He does not regard himself as abandoning a community; it has rather collapsed around him. Nor does he see himself launching out entirely on his own; he has aligned himself with a secure and stable new community, an Indian village with which he has had some prior contacts. It is a place of refuge to which James can transport the essential values of his agrarian life.

Similarly, the central figure in “The Man of Sorrows” is the victim of a community which has gone awry, victimized by its own uncontrollable emotions. When the vigilantes hear the accusation that the farmer has lodged potential enemies, they are “suddenly inflamed … with the most violent resentment and rage” (p. 346). As they proceed to question and torture the man, they are nearly persuaded to show him compassion until they are reminded of their own past losses. “But all of a sudden one of the company arose, more vindictive than the rest. He painted to them their conflagrated houses and barns, the murder of their relations and friends. The sudden recollection of these dreadful images wrought them up to a pitch of fury fiercer than before.” This is an image of violence begetting violence and of the dangerous emotions that can be unleashed when a community breaks down. The mob is a group working in concert but not a community, and the sketch emphasizes the extent to which a wholesome autonomy is ultimately dependent on a stable community and social order.¹² Crèvecoeur does not suggest that the individual can exist outside any community but rather that the health of the community is vital to the health of the individual.

Ambivalence about the relation of the individual to the community is not, needless to say, an unusual dilemma for an American thinker, and in this respect, Crèvecoeur's problem is representative for American culture. Caught between the impulse to affirm autonomy and a felt need for a supportive community, he is driven to present the primal American cultural experience of starting anew as both an individual and a communal act. James's solid network of friends and neighbors, the various forms of support given to the new immigrant Andrew in Letter Three, and the closely knit communities on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard are all examples of a regeneration of community that parallels the regeneration of the individual. “From nothing to start into being” (p. 83) is James's description of the regenerative effect of American social conditions on the individual, whose past is effectively swept away in the new world. But something of the same process occurs for American communities as well, as they form anew from the network of needs among the new settlers.

III

The possibility of renewed communal values on the frontier, and not the immediate circumstances of the Revolution, posed the gravest question to Crèvecoeur's utopian vision. While he was concerned to report what he felt were the abuses of the Revolution, his subtext is the birth and evolution of communities: could they flourish in America? Two particularly impressive meditations on this question can be found in the Sketches, each of which offers a strikingly similar depiction of the failure of community in America. “The American Belisarius” is the story of an individual farmer who settles new land and prospers, and eventually finds a new community growing up around him. “Reflections on the Manners of Americans” is a similar portrait of a successful pioneer farmer who also finds himself gradually enmeshed in community relations. In both cases, the frontier is a testing ground for the development not only of self-reliance but of effective community. The essential work of individual settlement precedes the growth of the community in each case, and the successful farmer is challenged by his relation to the community that has grown up around him and is in some sense dependent on him.

“The American Belisarius” describes the rise and fall of S. K., who embodies the best values of the American immigrant experience. The sketch contains a politically didactic message about the harm done to one individual by the Revolution, but it also ironically affirms the utopian vision of an interdependent community through its depiction of the unravelling of such a community. The community fails, but the failure is less the result of the politics of the Revolution than of greed and competition for material wealth—the real shadow over Crèvecoeur's agrarian ideal.

S. K.'s rise is the archetype of the American regeneration as Crèvecoeur had expounded it in the Letters. Having seen unsettled land beyond the frontier on a hunting expedition, he recognized its potential fertility and claimed it, and thus prepared “to begin the world anew in the bosom of this huge wilderness, where there was not even a path to guide him” (p. 409). With a combination of skill and determined hard work, he made a productive farm, and word of his success spread. Crèvecoeur is careful to note that S. K. had recognized and claimed the most fertile parts of the area and that he was a uniquely talented and disciplined farmer. Those who followed him, however, lacked this combination of circumstances and personal qualities. “Soon after these first successful essays, the fame of his happy beginning drew abundance of inferior people to that neighborhood. It was made a county, and in a short time grew populous, principally with poor people, whom some part of this barren soil could not render much richer” (p. 409). Even at the inception of this community, a loose structure of economic classes had been created. S. K. furthers that process by buying the two remaining parcels of fertile land for his brothers-in-law. “They all grew rich very fast,” the narrator tells us, in a tone that celebrates the success as a fulfillment of American promise. “This part of the scene is truly pleasing, pastoral, and edifying: three brothers, the founders of three opulent families, the creators of three valuable plantations, the promoters of the succeeding settlements that took place around them.” But this agrarian utopia is strictly limited, principally by the availability of land, and Crèvecoeur's sketch describes a benign form of feudalism taking root as a result.¹³ For one who had praised America in the Letters precisely because it was an escape from such feudalism, this is deeply ironic. While America represented some important differences to the immigrants, there were also strict limitations to the number of possible success stories. S. K.'s rise to prosperity was thus shadowed by numbers of others who did not thrive and who, in the harder seasons, found themselves in extreme difficulties.

S. K. is a figure of benevolence, preventing many of the newcomers from falling into absolute destitution. “In their extreme indigence, in all their unexpected disasters, they repair to this princely farmer.” As the community develops, he becomes “a father to the poor of this wilderness” (p. 411), almost single-handedly holding the community together. S. K. is a different version of the American hero and in many respects an important counter to the mythical hero who was by then taking shape in the national ideology. He finds his strength less in acquiring than in sharing, less in autonomy than in community. Of course he is an American hero with a distinctly patrician cast, and the contradiction of Crèvecoeur's sketch is that it presents the rebirth of feudalistic, not democratic, institutions.¹⁴

S. K.'s story contains elements of fable, as his generosity seems only to increase his wealth. “What he gave did not appear to diminish his stores; it seemed but a mite, and immediately to be replaced by the hand of Providence” (p. 413). But the fable has a dark turn; his generosity and prosperity become the means of his fall. “His brothers-in-law had long envied his great popularity, of which, however, he had never made the least abuse. They began to ridicule his generosity, and, from a contempt of his manner of living, they secretly passed to extreme hatred.” The envy seethed impotently for a while, but the Revolution unleashed it. “Fanned by the general impunity of the times, they, in an underhanded manner, endeavoured to represent him as inimical.” The last part of the sketch details S. K.'s unjust persecution and fall, in which he is hunted by the militia like an animal, saved only by his thorough knowledge of the countryside. Readers might be inclined to focus on the polemic against the excesses of the Revolution and the motives of many of the revolutionaries, but Crèvecoeur's description of the relation between frontier settlement and community building has more far-reaching implications. S. K. enacts on a grander scale the utopian success that James has expounded in the Letters, but his story also suggests the limits to that vision.

IV

“Reflections on the Manners of Americans” has important affinities with “The American Belisarius” in its presentation of a frontier farmer around whom a community develops. But the subject of this sketch is less consciously conceived as a hero. He is rather “an epitome” of an individual's “progress towards the wilderness” (p. 250), one who can explain through his own experience the nature of frontier development. Significantly, Crèvecoeur proposes economic calculation as the basis of his decision to move west. He is “determined to improve his fortune by removing to a new district and resolves to purchase as much land as will afford substantial farms to every one of his children” (p. 254). It should be noted that this economic calculation is not economic necessity in the strictest sense. The protagonist begins his quest from a secure financial position, and the struggle for the frontier is presented less as a battle with nature and the Indians than as a risky capital venture.

In purchasing land, he must protect himself by a thorough knowledge of the land that is available. “What a sagacity must this common farmer have, first to enable him to choose the province, the country, the peculiar tract most agreeable to his fortune; then to resist, to withstand the sophistry of these learned men armed with all the pomp of their city arguments!” The farmer makes a thorough study of the maps and descriptions of available land and then travels into the frontier to inspect it personally, drawing on his extensive woodsmanship and knowledge of farming to make a profitable selection. After further negotiations with the landowner and legal research on other claims to the land, he makes the purchase. The obstacles to this westward movement arise from the marketplace: “This is a land-merchant who, like all other merchants, has no other rule than to get what he can.” Even after successfully locating and negotiating for his land, the farmer begins his new enterprise carrying a significant economic burden. “He purchases fifteen hundred acres at three dollars per acre to be paid in three equal yearly payments. He gives his bond for the same, and the whole tract is mortgaged as a security.” The primal engagement of the farmer with uncleared land is thus predated by an economic and legal arrangement that will color his entire career on the land.

That life requires an absolute self-reliance, the capacity to become “master of that necessary dexterity which this solitary life inspires.” But for Crèvecoeur, this complete self-sufficiency, though necessary and in many ways edifying, is incompatible with social life in its best sense. “Thus this man devoid of society learns more than ever to center every idea within that of his own welfare. To him, all that appears good, just, equitable has a necessary relation to himself and family. He has been so long alone that he has almost forgot the rest of mankind, except it is when he carries his crops on the snow to some distant market” (p. 260). Such social forgetfulness, combined with his experience of economic combat in purchasing his farm, makes him a problematic founder for an emerging community. One suspects that this farmer may have represented a more objective account of the course of American social development than S. K., whose heroic magnanimity has something of the quality of wish-projection. But in a similar pattern, the increase in settlement that overtook S. K. repeats itself, and the new community begins to place demands on him. “His granary is resorted to from all parts by other beginners, who did not come so well prepared.” But his reaction to these conditions is tellingly different. “How will he sell his grain to these people who are strangers to him? Shall he deduct the expense of carrying it to a distant mill? This would appear just; but where is the necessity of this justice? His neighbours absolutely want his supply; they can't go to other places. He therefore concludes upon having the full price. He remembers his former difficulties; no one assisted him then. Why should he assist others?” Self-sufficiency shows its other face in this instance and suggests the inherent problem of frontier community-building. In a disturbing reversal, the successful farmer is transformed into a version of his own former adversary, the land merchant. “Perhaps he takes a mortgage on his neighbour's land. But it may happen that it is already encumbered by anterior and more ponderous debts. He knows instinctively the coercive powers of the laws: he impeaches the cattle; he has proper writings drawn; he gets bonds in judgment.” This description of the development of a frontier community hardly bears the weight of utopian expectation. Even the proto-feudalistic vision that had surrounded S. K. is denied here; further removed is the utopian conception at the basis of Crèvecoeur's thought, the democratic egalitarianism of a society of yeoman freeholders.

This potential hero of the American frontier thus becomes a troubling anti-hero, enmeshed in the very marketplace that he seemed earlier to have conquered. In a further irony, the marketplace robs him of his identity as a farmer. “He becomes an innholder and a country merchant. This introduces him into all the little mysteries of self-interest, clothed under the general name of profits and emoluments.” He is further tarnished by an ethical slackening in his business dealings. “He sells for good that which perhaps he knows to be indifferent because he also knows that the ashes he has collected, the wheat he has taken in may not be so good or so clean as it was asserted. Fearful of fraud in all his dealings and transactions, he arms himself, therefore, with it.” There is a striking contrast between this portrait of the successful farmer become unscrupulous businessman and that of S. K. refusing high prices for his grain in order to protect his poorer neighbors. Although Crèvecoeur presents the farmer without explicit moral judgement, he gradually transforms his career into a negative object-lesson, implying that the farmer's transformation was the inevitable result of his social context. The sketch thus delineates the dystopic conditions of the American frontier.

The problematics of Crèvecoeur's agrarian utopia are thus attributed not to the Revolution but to the structure of frontier experience. This deepens the problem of conceiving of the loose community of the frontier in ideal terms. The arrival of the population which transforms a frontier into a civilized settlement and secures each farmer's economic status is also the process by which the agrarian dream is deferred. In “The American Belisarius” the test of S. K.'s success was “economic” in more than one sense. He was able to prosper as a farmer through the right application of his knowledge and diligence under favorable environmental conditions. But he was also economically successful in that he did not allow his economic status to rob him of his essential humanity in a posture of exclusionary greed. This was a moral success, but the essential moral question concerned the acquisition and disposal of wealth. Similarly, S. K.'s downfall was caused by the greed of his brothers-in-law, who were also envious of his popularity with the community. Their resentment arose from their inability to accept his very different sense of the appropriate stewardship of wealth. They “ridicule[d] his generosity” and felt “contempt of his manner of living” (p. 413), for he exposed by contrast their own impoverishment as social beings. Their revenge, a punishment much in the American grain, was to ostracize one who called the motive for profit into question or in any way limited it. The Revolution only gave them a pretext for their persecution. The warning implicit in “Reflections on the Manners of Americans” is similar then to that of “The American Belisarius.” This farmer shared S. K.'s economic success but failed principally because he allowed economic ambition to usurp a commitment to community in his scale of values. S. K. was victimized by those who had the same failing. The farmer in “Reflections on the Manners of Americans” has thus become a captive of his economic success. While this may seem to be a moral criticism aimed at the value system of a particular individual, that individual, we must realize, is representative of the larger society and is crucially shaped by it.

V

The cumulative evidence of Crèvecoeur's work suggests that he labored on the edge of a profound critique of the formation of American culture, seeing its course as a failure to realize his utopian projections. An interpretation of the cultural significance of his work must recognize that his projection of agrarian values onto the formative conditions of the nation gave him the standpoint from which these elements of social tragedy could begin to be identified. If the evidence that Crèvecoeur left seems contradictory, it at least strikes us as frank in its incomplete attempt to report on the survival of utopian hopes in America. And certainly, some of the fragmentary nature of the analysis is the direct result of Crèvecoeur's own shattered life during the late 1770s. But despite the frank and even at times dispiriting criticism of American life, there remains a core of hope in Crèvecoeur's writings that accounts for its initial impact on the reader and its continuing claim. How can we account for it?

Crèvecoeur's projection of the ideal condition of the freehold farmer loosely bound to a supportive community of social and economic equals has powerfully rendered to Americans a best image of themselves. It has proved so potent, in fact, that at times it has been taken as a report on what America is, not what it could or ought to be. The real achievement of his agrarian writing is an enduring critical perspective on the development of American society. Thus James's third letter, read in isolation from the book's later qualifications and critiques, has been seen as an articulation of the success of the American egalitarian melting-pot, rather than an incompletely realized projection of social success. Such cultural misreading has made it particularly important to recognize the way in which Crèvecoeur used his utopian model as a stance from which the course of American culture could be criticized. Perhaps he did not realize how durable that stance might be. In describing the agrarian experiment, he formulated a state of mind “incongruous with the state of reality in which it occurs,” and thus inimical to that reality.¹⁵

Notes

1. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 74.

2. See Elayne Antler Rapping, “Theory and Experience in Crèvecoeur's America,” American Quarterly, 19 (1967), 707-18, who discusses “agrarian democracy” as “an ideal social structure” (p. 707) which Crèvecoeur's Letters explores.

3. Thomas Philbrick has argued that the change of tone in the book establishes a criticism of any overly optimistic version of the American myth and portrays James and his family as trying to “survive as parasites on the Indian community.” See St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York: Twayne, 1970), pp. 81-88. Other excellent arguments which stress the importance of the tragic nature of the ending, or distrust the viability of James's escape at the end, are Rapping, “Theory and Experience in Crèvecoeur's America”; James C. Mohr, “Calculated Disillusionment: Crèvecoeur's Letters Reconsidered,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 69 (1970), 354-63; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 263-67; and Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1975), pp. 52-66. For the perspective that sees certain values of the opening chapters preserved even through the change of tone at the end, see Myra Jehlen, “J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur: A Monarcho-Anarchist in Revolutionary America,” American Quarterly, 31 (1979), 204-22; and David Robinson, “Crèvecoeur's James: The Education of an American Farmer,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 80 (1981), 552-70.

4. Crèvecoeur's papers have recently been acquired by the Library of Congress, and a new edition of his work by Everett Emerson is in progress.

5. Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Henri L. Bourdin, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Stanley T. Williams (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1925).

6. See “The Utopian Mentality” in Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Harcourt Brace—Harvest, 1936), pp. 192-263.

7. “The Landscape of Tragedy: Crèvecoeur's ‘Susquehanna,’” Early American Literature, 20 (1985), 39. D. H. Lawrence made a persuasive case for this point of view in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; rpt. New York: Penguin, 1977).

8. For information on the personal difficulties that Crèvecoeur underwent during the Revolution, see Gay Wilson Allen and Roger Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer (New York: Viking, 1987), pp. 46-68.

9. J. A. Leo Lemay has argued that Crèvecoeur's Letters marked a significant turning point in the cultural reconception of the frontiersman. See “The Frontiersman from Lout to Hero: Notes on the Significance of the Comparative Method and the Stage Theory in Early American Literature and Culture,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 88, Part 2 (1978), 187-223.

10. For the details of Crèvecoeur's career in France after the Revolution, see Allen and Asselineau, pp. 68-101. “The American Belisarius” and “Landscapes” are the most blistering anti-revolutionary pieces in the Sketches.

11. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York: Penguin, 1986), p. 204. Further quotations from the Letters and the Sketches will be cited parenthetically.

12. Jehlen also notes that Crèvecoeur's individualism is dependent on a stable and secure social order, which the British government in the colonies had represented.

13. See Kolodny's discussion of this sketch in The Lay of the Land, in which she notes that the initial representation of the success of the community was tied to a conception of the landscape as feminine (pp. 55-56).

14. For a different perspective on the question of feudalism, see Jehlen, who argues that S. K.'s generosity is an extension of the role of family patriarch to the community as a whole. He represented a “democratic familialism, whose enobling patriarchism had neither the source nor the purpose of the feudal aristocratic variety” (p. 215).

15. Mannheim, p. 192. I would like to acknowledge the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend in completing this essay.