SOURCE: “Revolution, Domestic Life, and the End of ‘Common Mercy’ in Crèvecoeur's ‘Landscapes,’” in William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 2, April, 1998, pp. 281-96.

[In the following essay, Richards explores the contrast between the idyllic image of American life in Letter III of Letters from an American Farmer and the nightmare of Revolutionary cruelty depicted in “Landscapes.”]

Few Revolutionary-era writers defy categorization as resolutely as Michel Guillaume Jean-de-Crèvecoeur. Best known for his book Letters from an American Farmer (1782),¹ Crèvecoeur wrote several essays, sketches, and other short works in English that remained in manuscript until 1925 or, in a few cases, until 1995. One of those fugitive pieces, a collection of dramatic scenes entitled “Landscapes” (1776 or 1777), is a bitter, deeply ironic denunciation of the Revolution that raises critical questions about the idealized America depicted in the famous Letter III, “What Is an American?”² Although there is very little scholarship on “Landscapes”—indeed, on most of the originally unpublished short works—the play engages a number of significant themes raised in different contexts by Letters.³ For Crèvecoeur, the Revolution proved, at least in its early stages, to be a deeply disappointing, even horrifying event. In “Landscapes” the collapse of whig ideals, the perversion of local control over public affairs, and most especially, the dangers for domestic life in a world torn by political tumult reflect darkly the more buoyant depiction of American life in the first half of Letters.

In Letter III, Farmer James, the politically neutral narrator of Letters, seeks or promotes conditions that ensure the happiness of the individual family.⁴ “Landscapes,” by contrast, shows a world where whig cruelty destroys the hopes of neutrals and loyalists to recreate anything like home again. Privacy, domestic tranquility, individual religious liberty, freedom of political opinion, even master-slave relations all become casualties of a revolution that in Crèvecoeur's drama has no moral purpose. In the end, the play casts serious doubt on the ability or desire of a new republican regime to continue the policy of prosperity and tolerance to which Farmer James pays eloquent homage in Letters.

The basic narrative of “Landscapes” features as main character the chairman of a patriot committee of safety, Deacon Beatus, who oversees the wartime interrogation of suspected tories and the confiscation of their properties. Other characters include Beatus's wife, Eltha; Potter, a tavern keeper, who is being put out of business by the strife; various citizens and partisans; two slaves; and loyalist victims of the purge. The play contains an introduction; some stage directions; six interconnected scenes, each a numbered “landscape”; and a description at the end of four “plates” (not pictured in the manuscript) that may have been intended to serve as illustrations for the scenes. Although not unique among his works in having dialogue, “Landscapes” is the only piece Crèvecoeur constructed entirely as a drama.

The introduction, written in a mode of address similar to that of Farmer James, argues that the Revolution is “unnatural,” that citizens have been “allured” by “poisons and subtle sophisms” to cast off every “ancient prejudice” or allegiance.⁵ The narrator proposes to show scenes that are “genuine copies of originals” he has witnessed, and he asks to be judged by their fidelity to truth (pp. 426, 427). In the first landscape, the Deacon, his wife, and their son Eliphalet discuss the previous night's harassment of local tories by another son, Anthony.⁶ The family is suddenly visited by Squire Rearman, a suspected loyalist who has just been released from prison. Rearman complains of his treatment, his separation from his family, and the general terror instituted by the committee of safety. After Rearman leaves, Eltha announces that, despite the Sabbath, she and her husband will visit the condemned estate of a loyalist fugitive (Francis Marston) to get an early look at the household goods to be auctioned. Of Mrs. Marston, Eltha remarks, “I want to see how the woman looks with all her little Tory bastards about her” (p. 438). The next, brief scene shows Eltha and Beatus on the road as they converse with a militia officer who has tried unsuccessfully to catch Marston.

The third and fourth landscapes take place in a tavern owned by Potter, a “landlord.” The chairman and “chairwoman” have stopped on their way to Marston's and try to convince Potter that life is better under the whigs. The landlord speaks of his obedience to the new regime while indicating that his sentiments lie with the monarchical governance and Anglican worship that he associates with the region's onetime prosperity. After the couple leave, others arrive in the long fourth scene to debate the issues of the day. Some, like Colonel Tempelman and Aaron Blue-Skin (whose surname is slang for a rigid Calvinist), are warm patriots; others, like Ecclestone and the foreigner, Iwan, cast doubts on the nobility of the whig cause. The climactic moment occurs when Captain Shoreditch, a committee militia officer, brings in three Quakers as enemies of the people. That such peaceable folk have become anathema provides Crèvecoeur with a powerful illustration of the reversal of order that is the unnatural dimension of the Revolution.

Scenes five and six show martyred loyalists. In five, Beatus and Eltha examine Mrs. Marston on the whereabouts of her husband, while she takes a principled stand against the destruction of her family and civil order. In six, the committee officers meet “the woman in despair,” Martha Corwin, on the road. With her child dead and herself homeless, this victim of patriot justice gives a final voice to the suffering caused by what she sees as committee persecutions.

“Landscapes” rarely refers to the military conflict or, in any serious philosophical way, the ideological struggles of the 1770s. Rather, it focuses almost entirely on the consequences of a hostile invasion of the private domain by an anarchic instrument of terror, the committee of safety. The play's power derives from the contrast of the woeful present with the idyllic past, which Crèvecoeur had framed in Letters as a vision of “felicity” (p. 52). This type of happiness depends on the skill of the farmer's hands, the richness of his soil, and the silken bands of a “mild government” (p. 67) whose chief purpose, it appears, is to protect the intimate space of individual families from intrusion. This happiness is grounded in domesticity. The metamorphosis of the European peasant into the American farmer culminates at the happy hearth; the chief emblem of this classic transformation is the picture in Letter II of the farmer at home:

When I contemplate my wife, by my fireside, while she either spins, knits, darns, or suckles our child, I cannot describe the various emotions of love, of gratitude, of conscious pride, which thrill in my heart and often overflow in involuntary tears. I feel the necessity, the sweet pleasure, of acting my part, the part of an husband and father, with an attention and propriety which may entitle me to my good fortune.

(p. 53)

Thus the end of the American experiment is the farmer's tender contemplation of the domestic scene that is the result of his material success—and his leisure, won by agricultural labor, to write about it.⁷

The paean to domestic felicity comes at the beginning of Crèvecoeur's originally published text. Later letters raise disturbing issues connected to slavery (IX) and to the outbreak of wartime violence in the agricultural district (XII). The future of the happy domestic life is left in doubt when, at the end of the last letter, Farmer James thinks about retreating with his family from the chaos of revolution and living in the wilderness among the natives. Even then, however, James believes it possible to reconstitute the pre-Revolutionary family, albeit in diminished circumstances.

By and large, the prose pieces left unpublished in 1782—including “Landscapes”—are a far darker set of writings even than the last chapters of Letters. While a few, such as “Various Rural Subjects” and “Snow Storm,” continue the lighter epistolary mode made familiar in the early part of Letters, combining detailed observation of American natural and social life with commentary on the relative merits of America vis-à-vis Europe, several—“The English and the French,” “The Man of Sorrows,” “The Wyoming Massacre,” “The History of Mrs. B,” “The American Belisarius,” and “The Frontier Woman” among them—record the savagery of war, largely from the standpoint of a tory sympathizer. For its part, “Landscapes” skewers patriot laws, heroes, and politics with an irony that rivals Jonathan Swift's in intensity and loyalist propagandists' such as Jonathan Sewall in antagonism to a popular regime. It is a long distance from the elegiac yet qualifiedly hopeful tone of Letter XII to the enmity for the Revolution and the satiric vitriol contained in “Landscapes.”⁸

As one of the last pieces written by Crèvecoeur before he fled to New York City, “Landscapes” reveals the wider implications of the vision of America that precedes it.⁹ Gone is any overt reference to the process of personal transformation that Farmer James describes in Letter III: “the progressive steps of a poor man, advancing from indigence to ease, from oppression to freedom” through good habits and “emigration” (p. 90) to English America.¹⁰ Instead, we have episodes of hypocrisy, cruelty, and shocking violence in the farmer's home region, the likes of which are matched in Letters only by the horrific image of the slave dying in the cage.

Letters offers a picture of the good life, grounded in liberty and individual autonomy, where personal and familial independence are maintained by honest labor, property ownership, civil rights, mutual respect, peace, and the institution of marriage. Farmer James equates this American package of English liberties with domestic tranquility, rendered as home and polity, yet he refuses to engage in any partisan political rendering of the life he depicts. In “Landscapes,” each of the interlocking components of civil and personal felicity is blasted by the Revolution. The enemies are not outsiders but neighbors—the very whigs whose political doctrine embraces the liberties that James undogmatically affirms. For Crèvecoeur, whig practices defeat whig principles. In the name of peace, the partisans conduct terror; for domestic bliss, the patriots substitute political success. No invader could more resolutely destroy whig principles than the whigs themselves. Letter XII shows a world tilted; “Landscapes” pictures that world upside down.

The depiction of committee terror in “Landscapes” shows this reversal immediately. Beatus (no last name is given), variously called “Deacon,” “Mr. Chairman,” and “Colonel,” is presented as a Presbyterian hypocrite whose intrusive execution of laws enacted by the Continental Congress ruins the lives of the innocent. Victims of Beatus's intimidation—Squire Rearman, Landlord Potter, and Mrs. Marston—decry the loss of property that gave them some measure of happiness in the past. If there is to be politics at all, Crèvecoeur suggests, then government ought to maintain the rights of citizens to live without intrusion in domestic tranquility. The true commonwealth is in the home. Unfortunately, the relative absence of government in America makes domesticity the first target when local authority steps into the vacuum left by a doctrine of personal autonomy.

The nature of authority, particularly in the application of domestic models to the political sphere, is complexly rendered in “Landscapes.” In the introduction, Crèvecoeur's narrator invokes analogies to painting to describe what he is about to portray in dramatic terms. Crèvecoeur is known to have sketched his own farm in 1778; he probably had some awareness of European art traditions.¹¹ The scene that shows Farmer James gazing contentedly on his wife and infant by the fire is cast in a pose reminiscent of the French rural domestic scenes painted by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and others that fix, in the manner of a stage tableau, an intensely sentimentalized bond among the family members depicted.¹² The narrator calls his readers' attention to subjects and textures that would escape those who would gaze on “the pompous, the captious, the popular, the ostensible, the brilliant part of these American affairs” (p. 424). In a revealing shift of metaphor, the narrator remarks, “'Tis not the soaring eagle, rivaling the clouds in height and swiftness, I mean to show you; 'tis only the insignificant egg from which it is hatched” (p. 424). It is not the magnificent bird, also the symbol of the patriots, that he wishes to limn, but the egg and, as he adds later, “the nest in which it was hatched” (p. 425)—that is to say, the originating domicile.

But painting may not be adequate as a medium to portray all the shades of contrast between eagle and egg. To capture the desired landscape—a word that can mean “faint or shadowy representation” or “the depiction or description of something in words” as well as scenic picture—the narrator turns to drama. Reflecting the analogies drawn by Diderot in the 1750s between art and the theater and anticipating the general thrust of stage entertainments in the nineteenth century, the prospective painter becomes distressed dramatist, who turns to a genre more fully suited to represent the scenes he claims to have witnessed.¹³ In his own Letters II and III, as in French paintings of humble interiors, the domestic scene is rendered as a sentimental moment, a congeries of emotions, satisfactions, even wonders that, in Michael Fried's term, leads to a powerful “absorption”—in the case of Farmer James, the result of contemplating his own home-centered bliss. Crèvecoeur's earlier writing anticipates the predominating doctrine that motivates the French origination of melodrama: the establishment of a cohesive set of values rooted in home and hearth whose potential or actual disruption creates highly charged images of the ruin of virtue.¹⁴

The implications of this choice can be seen in the way Crèvecoeur represents domestic life. Where Letters focuses largely on the farmer himself as proud husband and father, “Landscapes” makes much of women as emblems for the presence or absence of home-centered virtue. As Dennis Moore rightly affirms, the primary female figures in “Landscapes” are “among Crèvecoeur's most vivid creations.”¹⁵ In fact, unlike Farmer James's wife, a woman usually seen through the filtering gaze of the farmer himself, the women in the scenes speak in their own voices, offering themselves as subjects. Yet the author was certainly aware that the depiction of the female in popular art of the time—notably the political cartoon—amounted frequently to iconographic transferral: the body of the woman was the body of the state—and thus too a symbol of the domestic sphere or, as Judith Sargent Murray called the family, “a well regulated Commonwealth.” Because women are focal for the drama, their characterization especially reflects Crèvecoeur's conception of domestic values in the farming region.¹⁶

The principal female character is Eltha, the wife of the chairman and a prototype of the vindictive Jacobin woman most memorably rendered in the figure of Charles Dickens's Madame de Farge. Eltha behaves consistently throughout the scenes; she is venal, political, calculating, and finally ruthless.¹⁷ As a woman without feeling, she implies the defeat of order in the world. Without a compassionating center—figured in the later ideology of Republican motherhood as the woman of both reason and feeling—the family becomes a dangerous force whose unrestrained desires find power in the politically destabilized world outside the home. While the chairman falsely claims to be above the cupidity of the arch-partisans, Eltha makes no such assertions and no apologies for her persecutions of loyalists.

For Crèvecoeur, whiggish republicanism destroys the home and robs its inhabitants of private life. With the sentimental centrality of the female as an icon for domestic tranquility, any alteration in the image of a woman carries symbolic weight. The woman who, through a vacuum created by the expulsion of the benevolent squirearchy, abandons attachment to home for Machiavellian maneuvering comes to represent dramatically the perversion of Lockean authority in a landscape of revolution. Unlike the loyalist women figured later in the play, Eltha appears as a perversion of female power under the old system; she trades her normal sphere, the care of those in her household, for another, the careless reordering of others' homes. Her character is not so much the cause of the Revolutionary attack on privacy as a reflection of it.

In the first landscape, Eltha, Beatus, and one son, Eliphalet, are introduced as they gather for Sunday morning prayer. When Beatus asks after another son, Anthony, Eltha excuses him by claiming, “He was all night a-Tory-hunting and did not get home till 'most break of day” (p. 428). Eltha seems to play a sentimental role, as excuser of children's lapses to the punishing father, yet because the son has been busy abusing the innocent, his mother's advocacy reveals the decay of familial values in the radical whig home. Shortly after this exchange, Squire Rearman enters, freed from a patriot jail through the protective intervention of an unnamed citizen. When Rearman criticizes the arbitrary power of the committees, Eltha urges him to court popularity by relinquishing such protection. Should the protector himself become a political liability, Rearman would be more exposed to arbitrary justice: “The chairman, to be sure, has got power, but he can't always do as he pleases. I'd have you, good sir, take notice of that. My husband is too good, and were he to follow my advice, some people would not have to reproach him, as they do, with tenderness of heart” (p. 433). Thus, even if Beatus were to show tenderness—not likely in Crèvecoeur's satire—he would find no approval for it from the mother of his children. Again, as with her son, she plays what seems to be a mediating role: defending her husband against criticism from the outside world. Nevertheless, she insists that whatever indulgence he grants his son for hunting tories not be turned toward the enemies of the state. In Crèvecoeur's vision of a whig world gone mad, domestic tenderness has no place in political relations.

In a later scene, Eltha confronts the woman whose wealthy husband, hounded by the whigs, has escaped into British-controlled territory. As a victim of the charges against her husband, Mrs. Marston is to lose her lands and home. Eltha does not sympathize with a woman who defends her husband's honor and her children's interests—what she herself has done in the first landscape—but beats her down with argument after argument, all the while picking out choice Marston family belongings for herself. Where the ideal whig, in the Stoic language of Revolutionary rhetoric, sacrifices self-interest to providential cause, Eltha inverts the formula to suggest that self-interest and cause are one and the same. When a mother gives in to an appetite for personal wealth, her inability to identify with the interests of others represents how far domestic tranquility has been perverted. Eltha's claims to represent her own family's interests become, instead, a source for fresh brutality—ironically, against the domestic world of the other—not the rightful desires of an American household.

In wartime, only the example of the widowed or violently estranged woman trying desperately to protect her brood has the possibility—such as it is—of sparking the humanity that once flourished in the countryside.¹⁸ This situation likewise prefigures the supplicating woman of nineteenth-century melodrama who evokes feeling from blunt male characters but is unable herself to right wrongs. The heroic widow here is Mrs. Marston. Eltha attacks her for being “too high” (p. 472), that is, arrogant and unrepentant before the committee. Mrs. Marston replies,

Oppression rather inflates me; misfortunes animate me. How else should I bear their weight? What precaution have I need to take? You have insulted and treated my husband worse than a slave these six months. You have hired myrmidons to hunt him, to kill him if possible; if not, to threaten setting fire to his house that he might fly to save it; and that, by flying, his extensive estate might become a sweet offering to the rulers of this county. Now you are going to strip me and his children of all we possessed, and pray, what can you do more?

(p. 472)

Mrs. Marston has heretofore regulated her home to the benefit of all, under the benign authority of her husband and, more distantly, the king. Eltha, by contrast, has not run her home with the same care, but in fact, if the actions of her sons be the proof, has shown herself to be arbitrary in use of authority. When misused domestic power spreads into the political vacuum created with the loss of the monarch, tyranny results.

Domestic life suffers further in revolution when black servants and slaves find themselves with corrupt white masters. In “Landscapes,” Crèvecoeur shows some daring as one of the first American writers to include African-American characters in a play.¹⁹ We know already from Letters that race is problematic in Crèvecoeur's rural space. As Doreen Alvarez Saar notes, in Letters both Africans and Native Americans “have been covertly excluded from the process of Americanization: they remain outside the melting pot process open to the English and the Europeans.”²⁰ In the early pieces, Farmer James, in both his own voice and that of his wife, comments on his fat, happy slaves. In Letter IX, James cries out against the cruelties of southern slavery, which he lays at the feet of the planter class, who parade their wealth among the beau monde of the corrupt urban landscape. Most notable is the end of that letter, when James, visiting friends in South Carolina, comes across a black man caged as a punishment for wrongdoing. The man's eyes are pecked out by birds, and he is desperately thirsty; after getting water from James, he asks, in dialect, that he be poisoned and put out of his pain. James cannot oblige that last desire; instead, he must go to dinner with the slave's abusers. Symbolically, the exile and treatment of the slave can be traced in part to moral rot at the domestic core of the white household.²¹

In “Landscapes,” black people appear as characters or in references on several occasions but always in connection with a white household. Crèvecoeur complicates the issue of black loyalty by showing what happens to a domestically stable slave system under a whig regime.²² The first African character who enters is Tom, slave to the Deacon's family.²³ At the end of the first landscape, Eltha charges Tom to ready the horses for the ride she and Beatus will take to interrogate tories. Her way of encouraging his execution of the task is to offer him whiskey on Sunday morning, to which he replies, “Tanke you, Missy. Wisky is good these cold weather for Negro” (p. 439). Not only does this add to the picture of Eltha as a religious hypocrite, but it also shows that black loyalty to patriot families must be bought through the corruption of the slave's otherwise loyal and good nature. Proper management of blacks comes from the property owner who makes it his duty to care for benighted slaves. Eltha's offering Tom alcohol shows she does not have the moral authority, grounded in her role as sentimental center of the household, to gain his natural compliance.

By contrast, Nero, the slave of Mrs. Marston, remains at his post for better reasons than Tom. Eltha asks Nero if he would come live with her son, the tory-hunting Anthony: “They say you are a good fellow, only a little Toryfied, like most of your colour” (p. 472). Nero rejects the bribe: “No, Missy, me stay and help Massa children. What do here without Nero, you been by, take all meat, all bread, all clothes?” When Eltha counters that he must be sold and might as well live with Anthony as anyone, Nero again refuses on moral grounds; “me never live with a white man who shot my master.” Responds Eltha, “You are a liar, you black dog, and I'll soon make [you] sing a new song” (p. 472). Crèvecoeur's awareness of color as a sign can be seen later. Mrs. Marston, in a long speech denouncing the overthrow of all previously revered order, remarks, “Everything is strangely perverted; black is become white, and white is become black” (pp. 478-79). For her, black means the loyal servant who contributes to the happiness of the white squire and family; for Eltha, black is nothing more than an extension of white vice, venal and corrupt.

This linkage of black characters with loyalty, in its several senses, is maintained even at the very end, after all the black characters have departed from the scene. Eltha blisters Martha Corwin for her charges against whigs: “These Tories are just like the Negroes; give them an inch, they will take an ell” (pp. 487-88). Thus the final marginalization of tories is to think of them in racial terms: the alliance between blacks and tories is one of apparent natural loyalty (and natural class distinction) and must be suppressed through the destruction of the loyalist home. Crèvecoeur's patriots here see elimination of “natural” forms of relationships, including loyal black slave to “kind” master, as key to the success of their rebellion.²⁴

Slaves may have suffered greatly from whig attitudes, but they were not alone. Certainly, the play details cruelties that are intended to make its readers revile the perpetrators. The most pathetic victims are those who have children and the children themselves. Like melodramatists a half century later, Crèvecoeur maximizes the distress created by violence against the family by surrounding the moaning adults with suffering innocents. In the sixth landscape, the Deacon and Eltha come upon Martha Corwin, the widow of a man hanged by Lord Sterling, the patriot commander. She is mad, or so the others interpret her raving speech, but she has clearly been driven to distraction by the loss of her husband and her world. She reproves the hypocrites, as she calls them, for persecuting the defenseless and allowing her child to die, while it now lies unburied. Her last speech, the penultimate one in the play, serves as a remonstrance against the rapine spawned from seeking violent change: “Great God, give me strength and patience to wait with resignation for that day when the restoration of government shall restore to us some degree of peace and security” (p. 488). This heartrending cry resonates with Crèvecoeur's position on government: only distant and established authority, not local and upstart power, can ensure the tranquility necessary for families to live in peace.

Behind the violence that leaves the innocent dead is another casualty of war, religious toleration. Crèvecoeur, whose farmer all along has been suspicious of state religion, seeing America as that place where one is free not only to profess but also from profession, identifies his villains as Presbyterians with a marked taste for George Whitefield's sermons. Although Whitefield was an Anglican with Methodist leanings, the play voices the fear, grounded in a generic distrust of New Light enthusiasm, that an ideologically rigid Calvinism will be imposed as a state doctrine and thus intrude on the private choices made by the family. The object of his satire is clear from the first scene. After the Deacon's sons have returned home from tory hunting and Eliphalet has regaled the family with Anthony's adventures in persecution, Beatus offers up thanks:

(Here he fetches a deep sigh, and with a quivering voice, [thus] goes on.) Gracious God, pour Thy blessings on Thy favourite people. Make [us thy] chosen race to increase and prosper by the influence of Thy heavenly showers——.

(p. 429)²⁵

The play identifies the American Calvinist rhetoric of the chosen people as a source of revolutionary violence, for it justifies acts against helpless and innocent civilians. As Squire Rearman declares, in a speech that might serve as a motto for all of Crèvecoeur's wartime essays, “Common mercy is departed (p. 431).

Crèvecoeur privileges no sect, although he clearly excoriates the Presbyterians. Rather, religion serves society only insofar as it encourages a form of social interaction that relies on mercy and tolerance. The Deacon cannot recognize that, as the squire chides him, “Tories are men as well as yourself” (p. 432); at the same time, judicial proceedings conducted under the Deacon's authority as chairman of the committee of safety are without “the least show of humanity or even reason” (p. 433). Beatus and Eltha play right into those charges in a following scene, when Eltha prophesies the new Jerusalem and the Deacon claims, “God is good; God is great; His mercy is immense. If we serve Him faithfully, I am sure, He tells my heart, that He will reward us with the spoil of our enemies” (p. 441). These “pretended saints, veteran Puritans” (p. 451), as another character, Ecclestone, calls them, are in fact inadequate interpreters of truth. Acting from passion and not from reason, ill-educated religious fanatics force a narrow Calvinism on society, destroying, in the name of God's mercy, the sustaining doctrine of family life—common mercy.²⁶

The hypocrisy of the Revolutionaries and their self-justifying faith appears most tellingly in the long fourth landscape at the tavern. Although colonial inns sometimes had reputations for disorder, the tavern in “Landscapes” makes another house, a refuge whose internal order has been violated by the imposition of arbitrary laws of condemnation and confiscation. Once the symbol of a rightly ordered society—a place of tolerance for a variety of backgrounds and beliefs—Landlord Potter's establishment now becomes an emblem, the gathering point, for clashing voices and irreconcilable attitudes. One visitor, committee of safety member Aaron Blue-Skin, enters to denounce tories and praise God. After he leaves, Iwan, a foreign visitor, takes his measure:

This is a curious fellow, admirably well-fitted for the time. No wonder he stands so high in the estimation of the people. Profligate yet apparently religious, conceited and stubborn, he can do mischief with all the placidity of a good man and carefully avoid the ostensible parts of the sinner.

(p. 459)

Another example of social division occurs in the tavern scene at the entrance of Captain Shoreditch, his militiamen, and three Quakers, the latter tied up and under arrest for noncompliance with the laws of military support and service. Their peaceable manners and courtesy contrast with the patriot Colonel Tempelman's hotheaded denunciations of their creed; Tempelman, like the Deacon and his wife and like Aaron Blue-Skin, speaks a policy of political-sectarian cleansing. We will have an orderly society, he says, as soon as these “Toryfied gentry” (p. 467) and “pernicious” (p. 466) Quakers are expelled. Set up “New Pennsylvania” (p. 466)—a social experiment based on peace and tolerance—on the moon, says the colonel.

While the bound Quakers argue for something like Farmer James's earlier ideal of a polity in which all sects are encouraged—perhaps as checks to each other—“under the benign shadow of a just and upright government” (p. 464), the text promises affliction for the advocates of peace. The upshot of a world in which religiously inspired violence is sanctioned by law and directed primarily against the family is a choice between death or exile. The very differences between neighbors celebrated in Letters II and III as elements of a peaceful society based on mutual respect now become intolerable forms of persecution. Landlord Potter, whose establishment has mimicked the domestic in accommodating those harmless little quarrels that occur in all households, can only give away his wares and look to expulsion from his own tavern. Public spaces, once mirrors of the domestic situation of the American farmer, now become sites of the counter-domestic in which loyalty is political, not familial, and tolerance a sign of weakness, not the precondition to human metamorphosis. Given a Quaker-like refusal to join in intolerance, characters are left with flight or death as the last principled option for those who believe in common mercy. It is not much of a choice.

Throughout “Landscapes,” the language of exile makes itself felt. Mrs. Marston reminds the committee leaders that her husband has done what he can to protect his family and home, but with whig patrols out hunting and threatening to kill him, he has no choice but to flee. Perhaps laying the groundwork for his own flight from spouse and farm, Crèvecoeur portrays Francis Marston as a man of deep suffering, who must abandon those he loves to give them any chance at peace. Yet the whole effort proves futile. Mrs. Marston argues with Beatus and Eltha that forcing her husband to decide among hateful alternatives makes a mockery of his supposed free will:

They sent word that if he did not quit in three hours, the whole should be in flames. He roused himself up once more and with streaming eyes and a bleeding heart he bade me farewell. Yet this is the man you proclaim a traitor. He would have been a traitor to himself had he stayed any longer. 'Tis for my sake and that of his children, 'tis to preserve these buildings and what they contain, that he quitted. Can you in the face of that pure sun, can you say he went away out of choice?

(p. 480)

Mrs. Marston's cry reflects Crèvecoeur's locus philosophy, delineated in such sunny fashion only a few years before. Where once voluntary flight from Europe led the wanderer to the welcoming American landscape—that asylum, as Farmer James calls it—now that ground is itself spoiled, and those who remain risk treachery to themselves to stay. The domestic refuge cannot survive in a corrupted world.

In Letters, James ends by planning to flee his farm for the frontier. Although in Letter III he criticizes frontiersmen as depraved, by Letter IX he declares that, in terms of comparative corruption, cities are worse than the backwoods. Thus in Letter XII, “Distresses of a Frontier Man,” he imagines taking his family to live with the Indians, not without regret, but as a measure that will allow him some freedom to hold the hearts and minds of his children to some part of civility, even in the heart of the forest. No such possibility exists in “Landscapes.” By the time he writes the play, Crèvecoeur knows that the backwoods are full of renegade tories and Indians—the very people who attack his own home when he flees to New York City. For the exiles in the drama, wandering is all that is left.

This fate is most ruefully depicted in the sixth and final landscape, which features Martha Corwin. Her husband hanged, a child recently dead and unburied, Martha wanders the roads, a person whose sufferings ought to spur the conscience of any feeling human being. In prophetic language, Crèvecoeur puts in her mouth the most powerful accusations of the play. Responding to the cruelty of Beatus and Eltha, she cries, “Gracious God, why dost Thou suffer these rulers to plunder the widows and their children and call their rags their country's inheritance—a miserable one, which, to feed and pamper a few, leaves hundreds desolate, a prey to death and despair? And you are the chairman!” The Deacon's only response is to deny her authority: “You are mad” (p. 486).

But madness is relative. When Eltha later repeats the charge of “mad” against Martha, the victim regales her antagonist with the crux of Crèvecoeur's complaint against the Revolution, the despoliation of the domestic realm. In an ironic reversal of Letter II, which shows Farmer James admiring his wife as she nurses their child, Martha cries out to her calumniators that her milk has gone, “and my poor baby, by still suckling the dregs, fed awhile on the dregs of sorrow.” She turns on Eltha, who, in a world where domestic bliss feeds on the cozy sentiments of the heart, should be sympathetic to a suffering woman:

Aye, ma'am, that's spoken like yourself. Mingle religion with obduracy of heart, softness of speech with that unfeeling disposition which fits you so well for a chairman's wife. Despise the poor; reject the complaints of the oppressed; crush those whom your husband oversets; and our gazettes shall resound with your praise. Mad woman! Yes, I am mad to see ingratitude and hypocrisy on horseback, virtue and honesty low in the dirt.

(pp. 486-87)

Once political power hardens the heart, children may be starved, widows condemned, and all justice overturned. It is a bleak ending, promising not a good thrashing of the whigs, as an earlier anonymous pro-British play, The Battle of Brooklyn, does, but only foreseeing a long continuation of conflict, bigotry, and the destruction of domestic peace in the middle ground. In its anticipation of the melodramatic situation—the threat to domestic expressions of sentiment by implacable enemies to feeling—“Landscapes” serves as forerunner of the plays that would hold American dramatic audiences until nearly the twentieth century. Yet unlike those plays—such Anglo-American vehicles of middle-class domestic value as Douglass Jerrold's Black-Ey'd Susan or George Aiken's version of Uncle Tom's Cabin or Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight—where salvation comes at the last minute, Crèvecoeur's play offers little hope that threats to hearth and home will, by a timely entrance, be overcome in favor of middling manners.²⁷

Crèvecoeur cannot resist one parting shot. After the last scene, he adds four numbered paragraphs, three of which augment or repeat what has been described in the landscapes. The first paragraph describes a “copper plate” (p. 488) that shows two chained men on horseback, falling after being shot, perhaps suggesting the kind of violence perpetrated by the Deacon's son Anthony. The second illustrates the persecution of the tied Quakers by Captain Shoreditch and the militiamen. The third portrays Martha Corwin leaning against a tree, talking with Eltha and Beatus. The fourth, which may have been intended for an unwritten scene,²⁸ reads: “A stallion rushing from the woods and covering the mare on which Eltha rides; she stoops on the neck; her husband [behind whipping] the horse, but in vain” (p. 489).²⁹ This symbolic rape of Eltha by the backwoods stallion is the only indication of some kind of justice in the play; as such, it is crude and perplexing. The narrator's vengeance on the Revolution is to imagine the bestial humiliation of the woman, Eltha, whose corruption personifies the destruction of domestic stability. As with cartoons that displayed Britannia or America being raped or abused by leering representatives of contending countries, Crèvecoeur here makes the rape of the female emblematic of historical retribution. Omitting the scene as part of his dramatic text, he renders it at the last as a landscape of perverse violence. In this form, Crèvecoeur offers a picture of the anti-Columbia. Inverting the rape-mutilation cartoons, this final picture leaves a reader with no sympathy for the victim—and no hope for the restoration of the domestic ideal short of the violent return of the old order.

Crèvecoeur is not, at the end of his American essay-sketch-play-writing career, Farmer James. If he is to be identified with any one of his characters, it is Francis Marston, the escaping tory, who abandons his home in a futile attempt to save it. Shortly after writing his protest play against the Revolution, the author himself fled to New York, leaving family behind, perhaps hoping that his absence would increase the likelihood of mild treatment for the rest. Yet unlike Letters, in which Farmer James posits at least the possibility of a reconstructed domestic sphere among the denizens of the frontier, the voice of “Landscapes” offers a pessimistic rejection of the idea that a system of independent, well-regulated households can ensure an ordered society. In its protest, the play reveals the fundamental error behind a vision of society that relies on domestic tranquility as the end of political life. The lesson of “Landscapes,” then, is this: No society constructed on the belief that venality will be tempered by a commodious farm and fertile soil can resist the implacable surge of human passions. In other words, prosperity alone cannot combat the appeal to power fostered by revolutions. The man who gave Americans for many generations the picture of themselves they most wanted to see—the tolerant, prosperous, landholding, peaceable, and domestic people outlined in Letter III—also gave them in “Landscapes” the image of its opposite, a nightmare of popular cruelty and personal despair. And that landscape, in Crèvecoeur's time and for many years, could not be shown on any literal American stage.

Notes

1. Originally published under his adopted American name, J. Hector St. John, Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782; 2d ed., 1783). Most modern editions are based on the 1783 edition, which includes largely nonsubstantive corrections whose authority is difficult to identify. Editions in French, published as Letters d'un Cultivateur Américain (Paris, 1784; 1787), include material not in the 1783 English edition, but in some cases the French essays differ from the equivalent pieces in the long unpublished manuscripts in English. An authoritative edition of Letters, based on the Crèvecoeur manuscripts now owned by the Library of Congress, is being prepared by Everett Emerson and Katherine Emerson.

2. “Landscapes” first appeared in Sketches of Eighteenth Century America: More “Letters from an American Farmer” by St. John de Crèvecoeur, ed. Henri Bourdin, Ralph Gabriel, and Stanley Williams (New Haven, 1925). Albert E. Stone, ed., Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York, 1981), 424-89, reprints the 1925 version and for purposes of readability is the source of all quotations from Crèvecoeur cited parenthetically in this article. Dennis D. Moore, ed., “Landskapes,” More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crèvecoeur (Athens, Ga., 1995), 230-93, reproduces the literal text of the manuscript in modern typography. Moore includes a more complete version of Crèvecoeur's introduction to the play and prints a few other prose pieces (separate from “Landskapes”) not found in the 1925 or 1981 versions. All passages from Stone have been checked against the text established by Moore, and significant differences are so noted.

3. One of the first critics to take the Sketches seriously was John Brooks Moore in “The Rehabilitation of Crèvecoeur,” Sewanee Review, 35 (1927), 216-30, but few others have followed up. See, however, Emerson, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and the Promise of America,” Forms and Functions of History in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Ursula Brumm, ed. Winfried Fluck, Jürgen Peper, and Willi Paul Adams (Berlin, 1981), 44-55; John Hales, “The Landscape of Tragedy: Crèvecoeur's ‘Susquehanna,’” Early American Literature, 20 (1985), 39-63; and David M. Robinson, “Community and Utopia in Crèvecoeur's Sketches,” American Literature, 62 (1990), 17-31.

   “Landscapes” is discussed in the context of other works by Crèvecoeur in Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York, 1970), 126-28; Manfred Putz, “Dramatic Elements and the Problem of Literary Mediation in the Works of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 3 (1985), 111-30; Norman S. Grabo, “Crèvecoeur's American: Beginning the World Anew,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 48 (1991), 164-65; and Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxvii, xxxvii, xxxviii, xl, xlii-xlvii. There is almost nothing on “Landscapes” in studies of American drama. Two recent histories of early drama, including one that covers the 18th century quite comprehensively, ignore it entirely. See, for example, the appropriate period study in Walter J. Meserve, An Emerging Entertainment: The Drama of the American People to 1828 (Bloomington, Ind., 1977), 60-91.

4. The use of familial language in the works of other writers has been documented by Edwin G. Burrows and Michael Wallace, “The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation,” Perspectives in American History, 6 (1972), 167-306; and Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, 1982). For Crèvecoeur, the literal family's fortunes become symbolic of the national fate.

5. The matter of voice in Crèvecoeur is complex and not easily resolved. Philbrick thinks the voice of “Landscapes” is “inappropriate” for Farmer James in St. John de Crèvecoeur, 120. Moore implicitly distinguishes the “narrator” of “Landskapes” from Farmer James in More Letters from the American Farmer, xli. However, the very format of a play makes determination of a voice in a deliberately multivocal performance problematic. Crèvecoeur includes an introduction to the play that, as will be noted, casts a grim look at the American scene. While this voice is not entirely consistent with the more naive-sounding James of Letters, a theme of declension pervades both Letters and the play. On his portrayal of a declining world in the former see Grantland S. Rice, “Crèvecoeur and the Politics of Authorship in Republican America,” EAL, [Early American Literature] 28 (1993), 91-119.

6. As Moore's edition of the manuscript shows, Crèvecoeur inconsistently labels each part as either a “landskape” or a “scene.” Stone's edition, following the 1925 transcription, labels each part a “landscape.”

7. For an intriguing discussion of the act of writing letters and the consequent tensions between public and private see Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, 1996), chap. 5.

8. The tendency in Crèvecoeur criticism has been to see him as a hopeful, if not utopian, writer on America. This view has been promoted by decades of anthologizing Letter III, but even among scholars who see darker elements in his 1782 collection, the consensus is that there is some hope in the vision of an agrarian paradise. See, for example, Russel B. Nye, “Aristocrat in the Forest,” in American Literary History, 1607-1830 (New York, 1970), 154-59; James C. Mohr, “Calculated Disillusionment: Crèvecoeur's Letters Reconsidered,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 69 (1970), 354-63; Emerson, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur”; Grabo, “Crèvecoeur's American”; and Joseph Fichtelberg, “Utopic Distresses: Crèvecoeur's Letters and Revolution,” Studies in the Literary Imagination, 27 (1994), 85-101. The problem of anthologizing Crèvecoeur is succinctly analyzed by Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986), 257.

9. Biographical information on Crèvecoeur drawn from Stone, Introduction, Letters, 7-25; Gay Wilson Allen and Roger Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer (New York, 1987); and Everett Emerson and Katherine Emerson, private correspondence, citing their manuscript article on Crèvecoeur for the forthcoming American National Biography.

10. Scholars have recently tended to read Letters as an epistolary novel in order to reconcile contradictions in the text. Stephen Carl Arch, for example, makes use of the quoted passage to indicate the wholeness of Letters in “The ‘Progressive Steps’ of the Narrator in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer,” Studies in American Fiction, 18 (1990), 145-58. By reading “Landscapes” and other pieces that were not included in Letters, however, one can see that the attempts to find unity do not fully account for Crèvecoeur's thoughts on Revolutionary America.

11. Allen and Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 21-22, 35. In addition to his knowledge of French and other European painting, Crèvecoeur may also have seen engravings of works by the American Benjamin West, who had set up in London. See Dorinda Evans, Benjamin West and His American Students (Washington, D. C., 1980), and James Thomas Flexner, American Painting: First Flowers of Our Wilderness (Cambridge, Mass., 1947), 194-243. The painted landscape of Pine Hill is reproduced in the frontispiece of Howard Rice, Le Cultivateur Américain: Etude sur l'oeuvre de Saint John de Crèvecoeur (Paris, 1933).

12. The relation between painting and theater for these works is discussed fully in Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, 1980).

13. Definitions 4d, 4g, OED. Although the staging of plays during the middle 18th century was uncommon in America, writers during the Revolution often turned to drama as a genre suited to political topics. See Jeffrey H. Richards, Theater Enough: American Culture and the Metaphor of the World Stage, 1607-1789 (Durham, N. C., 1991), 247-91; Jared Brown, The Theatre in America during the Revolution (Cambridge, 1995); and Ginger Strand, “The Many Deaths of Montgomery: Audiences and Pamphlet Plays of the Revolution,” American Literary History, 9 (1997), 1-20.

14. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, esp. 7-70; Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven, 1995; orig. pub. 1976), 82-93.

15. Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer, xlv. On the matter of Farmer James's wife in view of other comments by Crèvecoeur, literal and metaphorical, on women see Anna Carew-Miller, “The Language of Domesticity in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer,” EAL, 28 (1993), 248-51. D. H. Lawrence typified James's wife as the “Amiable Spouse” in his Studies in Classic American Literature (New York, 1964; orig. pub. 1923), 24.

16. Murray, “On the Domestic Education of Children” (1790), Heath Anthology of American Literature, ed. Paul Lauter et al. (Lexington, Mass., 1990), 1:1030. A number of works have looked at the iconographic representation of females in the Revolutionary era, among them Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980), and Lester C. Olson, Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Washington, D. C., 1991). A recent formulation that identifies the domestic implications of the use of the abused, mutilated, violated, and fetishized body in late 18th-century images is Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York, 1996), 3-22.

17. Eltha does not fit the characterization of “Crèvecoeur's women [as] stereotypes of domestic enterprise but frailty under stress” maintained by A. W. Plumstead, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,” in American Literature, 1764-1789: The Revolutionary Years, ed. Emerson (Madison, 1977), 223.

18. In another Crèvecoeur sketch, “The History of Mrs. B.,” a tory fighter recounts to the narrator the haunting story of a patriot woman with two nursing children whose heroic acceptance of her fate causes him some pangs. More famously, the image of the butchered domestic woman coalesced in the story of Jane McCrea some months after Crèvecoeur wrote “Landscapes.” See June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (Chapel Hill, 1993), 117-44.

19. Two earlier contenders for the honor of first do not hold up under scrutiny. Both Thomas Forrest, The Disappointment (1767), and Robert Munford, The Candidates (1770 or 1771), have characters who are referred to in the literature as black but are likely not. See David Mays, Introduction, The Disappointment; or, The Force of Credulity by Thomas Forrest (Gainesville, 1976), and Rodney M. Baine, Robert Munford: America's First Comic Dramatist (Athens, Ga., 1967), 64-65. A better candidate for first is John Leacock, The Fall of British Tyranny: Or, American Liberty Triumphant (Philadelphia, 1776).

20. Saar, “The Heritage of American Ethnicity in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer,” in A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York, 1993), 245.

21. Letters, 49, 53. In Letter XI, 188-89, 195-97, Farmer James quotes a traveler, Iwan, who listens with approval as the botanist John “Bertram [Bartram]” describes how he has freed slaves and admitted them to his table as freemen. Thus Crèvecoeur dodges the question of equality by reincorporating former slaves into the domestic space ruled over by a benevolent, home-centered landholder. Since he uses an Iwan in “Landscapes,” Crèvecoeur may also be saying that this foreign visitor can see the problems of race in America more clearly than an Anglo-American.

22. In Leacock's play, the blacks in Virginia identify their interests as allied to Lord Dunmore's forces and thus are seen in the whig politics of The Fall of British Tyranny as enemies of American “freedom.” This use of the slave issue to attack patriot interests can be seen in another episode from 1776. In Westmoreland County, Va., Henry Glass's complaint to the local committee of safety that patriots' slaves were “ill used” led to his “Censure.” See Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed., The Committees of Safety of Westmoreland and Fincastle: Proceedings of the County Committees, 1774-1776 (Richmond, 1956), 52-53.

23. The precise status of blacks in the play, as servants or slaves, is not entirely clear. In Letters, blacks routinely appear as slaves unless Crèvecoeur is trying to make a point, as in the account of John Bartram's farm. Without evidence to the contrary, I assume that Tom and Nero are slaves.

24. Crèvecoeur's attitudes toward blacks in the letters and sketches have not yet been adequately explained. Despite his impassioned plea through Farmer James in Letter IX for the humanity of blacks, Crèvecoeur nowhere else asserts the picture of independent African-American lives that are the equivalent of whites. Blacks become part of the white domestic identity; he grants them human nature but sees them only as reflections of white treatment. Sentimentalized victims of extreme wealth in South Carolina, an easily bought drunk in “Landscapes,” utterly loyal slaves turned servants in the portrait of Bartram in Letter XI—the overall picture of black people in Crèvecoeur emphasizes control of their subjectivity through benevolent-seeming white patronage in the home. See, however, Cook, Epistolary Bodies, 164-67.

25. Words in brackets indicate the actual words, if not spelling, of Crèvecoeur's original, replacing incorrect transcription from 1925 text. See Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer, 236.

26. Crèvecoeur's narrator also inveighs against the disruptive and, finally, antidomestic ardor of true believers in “Liberty of Worship,” one of the essays omitted in 1782.

27. The Battle of Brooklyn. A Farce … (New York, 1776); Jerrold, Black-Ey'd Susan; or, “All in the Downs.” A Nautical and Domestic Drama … (1829), in Nineteenth-Century Plays, ed. George Rowell (London, 1953), 1-43; Aiken, Uncle Toms's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, a Domestic Drama … (1852), in Early American Drama, ed. Richards (New York, 1997), 373-443; Daly, Under the Gaslight; or, Life and Love in These Times (1867), in American Melodrama, ed. Daniel C. Gerould (New York, 1983), 135-81.

28. Because he only refers to violence in speeches, never showing it on stage, I do not think Crèvecoeur really intended to write the rape into the play itself. But see Moore's note to this passage in More Letters from the American Farmer, 375.

29. For other slight variants from the Penguin edition compare ibid., 293.