SOURCE: “Crèvecoeur's Farmer James: A Reappraisal,” in Essays in Literature, Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall, 1976, pp. 206-13.

[In the following essay, Kehler takes issue with some twentieth-century critics who suggest that Crèvecoeur's Farmer James is merely a straw man for demonstrating the inadequacies of Enlightenment principles.]

Recent criticism of Letters from an American Farmer has focused more and more closely on the gradual psychological dissolution of St. John de Crèvecoeur's paradigmatic New World Man, Farmer James, seeing in it a case study in the souring of the American Dream. The concomitant trend has been to characterize James's observations in the pre-Charles Town Letters (I-VIII) as unrealistically optimistic and as ironic by intention in the overall design of the work. One commentator has gone so far as to call James “Crevecoeur's straw man” for proving the inadequacy of “reason,” “self-interest,” “agrarianism,” “the law of nature,” and other concepts dear to Enlightenment thought as bases of social order.¹ This view assumes a “strategy” on Crèvecoeur's part of undercutting James's characteristic thought as offering a false view of the world which will not stand the test of experience and which can only serve to wither the promise of the American Garden.²

Certainly Crèvecoeur's literary intention is intimately bound up with the intellectual integrity of his American Farmer. If James's mind is no more than soft wax, begging uncritically to be impressed with the faddish bywords of eighteenth-century thought, then he is unworthy of our respect, and we have good reason to suspect that Crèvecoeur does not subscribe to his vision of American life. If, as I believe, James's intellectual integrity remains intact, we have far less reason to suspect huge ironies on Crèvecoeur's part. It is true that James's thoughts are often couched in familiar, even trite-sounding terms and that he makes no particular efforts at consistency. A speculatively inclined farmer whose strongest constitutional element is nevertheless his “feeling,” James is no philosopher. But neither is he a “straw man” stuffed with nonsense and set up only to be knocked down. If he does not seem troubled by what may sound like contradictions (even when they are easily reconcilable), it is perhaps because the narrative mode provides scant plausible opportunity to explore them. James is writing letters not treatises.

Notwithstanding his tendency to become emotional, James, a specimen of the eighteenth-centry “man of sensibility,” is at bottom a solid pragmatist. By any reasonable standards his views are neither wildly optimistic nor absurdly uninformed. He habitually looks for the good and the bad, the credible and the incredible, in any issue to which he addresses himself. It makes only marginal sense to speak of James as if he were a theoretician, for he is certainly no ideologue. Still, his ideas bear the impress of a distinct outlook and personality—his own—and unfold with discernible method from concepts and experiences that James has proved on his own pulses. This method of unfolding has much to tell us about the author's true “strategy” in the Letters.

To get to the core of Crèvecoeur's thematic intention it is necessary first to demonstrate James's intellectual self-sufficiency and to vindicate him from the charge of slavish adherence to the letter of contemporary doctrine; then to find the organizing thread in the web of James's thought and to show how it has been spun from his own local experience. That James (and undoubtedly Crèvecoeur, as well) eventually has reason to be disillusioned with certain aspects of American life is undeniable. But the fault is not traceable to James or to the invalidity of his beliefs, and his “distress” in the final Letter results from the misguided actions of others not from his own folly. That our own age no longer finds the blush of promise in his intellectual stock is insufficient grounds for supposing that Crèvecoeur feels the same.

Some commentators have singled out Mr. F. B., James's European visitor, as responsible for the many familiar echoes of popular eighteenth-century thought in his rhetoric.³ Has James allowed the tabula rasa of his untutored mind to be scribbled upon by an educated foreigner? Some of the echoes, certainly, may be imputed to Crèvecoeur, the author, who obviously has read things the unsophisticated James has not. But if James has gotten some of his ideas from a source within the fictional scope of Letters, he has more likely gotten them from a source closer to home: the minister whom he seeks out for advice in the introductory Letter. Crèvecoeur pokes a good deal of benign fun at the provincial pedantry of the good minister, who clearly “has opinions” and readily expounds them to James throughout Letter I. He even offers to “help” James “whenever I have any leisure” with the composition of the letters James has agreed to write to his European friend.⁴

But to allow for a certain influence of one more educated man over another is scarcely to make a case for intellectual tyranny. The minister has a generous respect for James's native sagacity, noting that the latter often “extract[s] useful reflections from objects which present none to my mind” (p. 40). James, furthermore, absolutely assures his European correspondent that his epistolary observations “will all be the genuine dictates of my mind” (p. 43). Even when it is said that the correspondent will supply the “subjects” for James's discourse, we need not imagine that anything more than a vague prompting is being suggested: Write me a letter on the native fauna of a given region, or Write me a letter on the general situation of the American farmer. There is no reason to suppose that James has been brainwashed by anyone.

James makes clear the nature of his intellectual debt at the beginning of Letter II, when he pointedly notes that his correspondent's “observations have confirmed me in the justness of my ideas, and I am happier now than I thought myself before” (p. 45). Whatever ideas James has about man and nature are his own and existed before they were “confirmed” by the European. What James in fact says is that he is flattered at having his views endorsed by so distinguished and so cultured a personage. If the language of James's views is often on the bookish side, his characteristic form of expressing them shows how they have been arrived at: by observation of his native surroundings.

Granting the parabolic function of James's anecdotes as central to Crèvecoeur's literary purpose, we should not lose sight of the fact that they are offered as observations. Commentators often seem to assume that James tailors his observations to fit his theories. Is not the reverse at least as plausible? Certainly “nature,” for example, has less reality for James as an abstraction than it has for the European correspondent. The former lived with nature long before he knew it was a subject for theoretical speculation. In his observations on Nantucket, it is not the parallel of what he sees to a preconceived model that accounts for James's favorable commentary; it is the fact that Nantucket strikes him spontaneously as resembling his own favorite kind of community, a bee-hive. Bee metaphors abound throughout Letter VII because the people of Nantucket seem to James to act like bees.

James's pragmatism also tempers his devotion to such eighteenth-century bywords as “reason.” He never labors under the delusion that the constructs of human thought represent the highest ordering principles. Late in Letter II James notes that “the whole economy of what we proudly call the brute creation is admirable in every circumstance; and vain man, though adorned with the additional gift of reason, might learn from the perfection of instinct how to regulate the follies, and how to temper the errors which this second gift often makes him commit” (p. 56). Somewhat paradoxically, this passage has also been used as an instance of James's unreasonable optimism in fancying that natural law can always supply the pattern for human society.⁵ But in pursuing his line of thought, James, speaking of the “imperfect systems of men” and of the embarrassing disparity between them and nature's perfect order, surely means us to keep this in mind, as well: nature's system is indeed perfect if by perfect one means not just and benign in every instance but comprehensive and efficient. Justice and benignity are concepts supplied by the imperfect but necessary systems of men.

In so far as reason is systematic, abstract, and divorced from the test of experience and the needs of men, James has little use for it. To him such reason is synonymous with Solon and Lycurgus and with the kind of sophistical argumentation he finds justifying slavery in Charles Town, and political oppression by the British. Sophistry, James says in speaking of the British, is the “bane of freemen” (p. 198). James's version of right reason is “plain judgment,” a concept which he associates most fully with the simple folk of Nantucket, who must daily make use of it in confronting the problems of a harsh existence. Barren logic may be imposed on the order of nature, but “plain judgment,” he believes (with some reservations, as we shall see later), grows from the perception of that order.

James's attitude toward “self-interest” as a basis for social order likewise shows the pragmatic order of his own thought. Certainly it is desirable that any social system satisfy as many self-interests as possible without violating the higher dictates of justice. This much James maintains. But nowhere, either before or after his southern excursion, does he claim that the pursuit of self-interest is an infallible principle of social order. On the contrary, the whole thrust of James's barnyard example of good government in Letter II is to demonstrate that where no force for justice exists, self-interest will inevitably produce injustice for the weak. That Charles Towners, moreover, justify slavery as in their self-interest and as rationally based on the natural principle of self-preservation, does not mean that the two principles in fact coincide. Obviously, slavery is not necessary to the self-preservation of Southerners or of anyone else. They have simply argued that it is. Slavery is necessary to the preservation of a certain social system, not of human life.

Even James's cherished belief in the superiority of agrarianism to industrialism as social and economic modes has its limit. James's agrarianism, like Jefferson's, is at bottom moral not economic in character, the desired goal being to produce good men rather than wealthy ones.⁶ Yet James, despite his devotion to the principle of each man's natural right to ownership of the land, acknowledges from the beginning that the so-called “freehold concept” by itself guarantees no beneficial results.⁷ Some, he notes in Letter III, “have been led astray by this enchanting [American] scene; their new pride, instead of leading them to the fields, has kept them in idleness; the idea of possessing lands is all that satisfies them” (p. 78). This observation is made long before the southern excursion in Letter IX and shows that James does not have to be shocked into realistic appraisals by the gross inequities of plantation life.

What commentators have generally failed to note is that Crèvecoeur's focus is less on programmatic agrarianism than on the elemental concept of property, first given a central place in social theory by John Locke. Locke's analysis profoundly influenced French and American thought throughout the eighteenth century. In his Two Treatises of Government (1690), Locke contends that man in a state of nature is free within the bounds of natural order but that the state of nature is an order for individuals rather than communities. The ever more complicated contact of men as a result of their impulse to labor makes a social order based only on the state of nature inadequate. Whatever a man removes from a state of nature “he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.” The rights of property become the new organizing principles for human society, principles which Locke extends to embrace “the mutual Preservation of … Lives, Liberties and Estates.” The sanctity of property is made as much a psychological as a social necessity, a requisite of contentment as well as of order. But since it is labor that gives rise to the idea of property, labor must be its arbiter: “Nay, the extent of Ground is of so little value, without labour, that I have heard it affirmed, that in Spain itself, a Man may be permitted to plough, sow, and reap, without being disturbed, upon Land he has no other Title to, but only his making use of it.”⁸

The Lockean notion of the natural right to property is an eighteenth-century commonplace echoed by such American contemporaries of Crèvecoeur as George Logan, Hugh Brackenridge, and Tom Paine.⁹ What is not common is the pragmatic arrangement of thought Crèvecoeur brings to the “idea of property” itself. Through Farmer James he explores the timeless contradiction of the human impulses to set boundaries and to remain uninhibited. The episode in Letter II, in which the wren attempts quite perversely to expropriate the nests of the swallow and the phoebe, indicates the depth of the conflict. James recognizes a sort of proto-instinct for property even in nature, noting as well its potential for creating disorder and injustice: “Where did this little bird learn that spirit of injustice? It was not endowed with what we term reason! Here, then, is a proof that both those gifts border very near on one another; for we see the perfection of the one mixing with the errors of the other” (p. 57). Since the wren's seemingly rational appreciation of its unjust triumph can only be ascribed to instinct, the perfection of instinct mimics the imperfection of reason. The order of nature, therefore, is patently not synonymous for James with the idea of rational justice.

This perception shows the pragmatic approach of James's thinking and further shows how the idea of property lies at the center of his thought. In this instance the touchstone of property suggests the complex relation of reason to instinct. In a state of nature, instinct and reason are virtually synonymous, and man as a creature of nature can share in that perfection. But man is also apart from nature and, thus, can be victimized by his instincts. Property, arising naturally from labor, exerts an attraction with the force of instinct, and the desire for it drives a wedge between reason, which demands justice, and instinct, which demands the gratification of desire. The French physiocrats, for instance, tend to identify reason entirely with the order of nature and refuse to admit that man's natural rights may be modified by any form of social contract.¹⁰ James's perceptions would make both propositions unacceptable to him.

That the idea of property is essential to complete human fulfillment Crèvecoeur leaves no doubt. James pays tribute to its psychological force in noting how the “instant I enter on my own land, the bright idea of property, of exclusive right, of independence exalts my mind” (p. 48). James subscribes to the Lockean notion that freedom implies the setting of boundaries and that, therefore, the ownership of property is a necessary condition of social and political freedom. The southern slave has no property but is himself property. Such a circumstance, James finds in Charles Town, produces terrible abuses to the natural rights of life and liberty.¹¹ The Charles Town lawyers treat the land as the overseers treat the slaves, abstractly with no thought for justice or humanity. At this extreme, property becomes an instrument of tyranny. At the opposite extreme, however, the result can be just as gruesome. The primitive Indians of Nantucket, in the absence of any formal idea of property, once preyed upon one another almost to the point of extinction. Only the reasoned decision to divide their island in two, an elementary creation of property, set limits to their license and saved them from self-annihilation. Property is revealed to be a two-edged sword, a source of fulfillment and of misery. Nowhere does either Crèvecoeur or James imply a solution to this dilemma.

James's guiding principles are few and simple, embodying a practical approach to the complex problem of property. He understands that the pull of the land will, in the absence of reasoned property rights, lead to serious disorder and injustice, even as abstract property rights detached from the reality of the land will lead to tyranny and oppression. Even his beloved agrarianism must be tempered by the principles of limitation and confrontation. Like Locke, he believes that the test of property rights is use. As James sees it, a man must not have too much land—so much, that is, that he becomes more interested in possessing the land than in tending it. A man must confront the land himself, not erect systems whereby others work the land for him. The southern plantations violate both of these principles. “Place mankind where you will, they must always have adverse circumstances to struggle with” (p. 210), says James in his final Letter. This view is an outgrowth of his powers of observation and his native good sense, rather than a newfound pessimism resulting from his experiences in the South or from fear of impending revolution.

The James who reappears in the final Letter (XII) is a sad and desperate man, but far from being a hysterical fool grasping at the straws of blasted theories, he remains rational and pragmatic. Certainly there is no reason to read a strong irony into his intention to foster agriculture among the savages he intends to live with after his flight from the coming Revolution. James has already said in Letter IX that “evil preponderates in both” the woods and in more improved situations. If the vices of the latter exceed those of the former, the apparently ingrained desire to “see the earth peopled” (p. 171), of which he also takes note, redresses the balance by making flight to the wilderness a temporary escape at best from the woes of civilization. As pitiful as James's desire to hold on to the agricultural mode of existence may appear, his course of action has the wisdom of inevitability. Agriculture, historically, has been a necessary condition for a high order of culture and for the maintenance of a large, stationary population. Although James professes admiration for some aspects of Indian life, his intellectual and moral commitment is to the idea of civilization, and he understandably has no desire to raise a family of noble savages.

James's fatalism in the final Letter, while intensified by his emotional ambivalence, is likewise a facet of his normal outlook and not a symptom of intellectual defeat. As early as Letter II he notes that “we are machines fashioned by every circumstance around us” (p. 92). His surmise in the final Letter that his “fate is determined” (p. 211) by the oncoming conflict is both accurate (given his lengthy account of his reasons for being unable to take sides) and consistent with his general outlook. His fatalism in no way represents a complete reversal from the “optimism” of the early Letters. It is the mark of James's mental soundness and resiliency that the two attitudes can coexist in his mind. Like everyone, he is a mixture of the light and the dark.

Perhaps the most frequently overlooked facet of the final Letter is the strong emphasis on British oppression, a legacy perhaps of Crèvecoeur's readings in Abbé Raynal's Philosophical and Political History. The Abbé, to whom Crèvecoeur dedicated the first edition of Letters, is especially critical of British economic oppression of the colonies, foreseeing their eventual independence.¹² Farmer James hopes only for peace, but the oblique emphasis on British oppression is crucial because James's barnyard parable of good government in Letter II specifies that “the law is to us precisely what I am in my barn yard …” (p. 51). Now the direct interference of British political and military force circumvents this metaphorical model entirely by ignoring the customary order of things. While the King has always been the titular ruler of the colonies, James has always thought of them as a separate unit of order. Implicit in the barnyard parable is the just and benevolent supervision of the farmer-governor, adjudicating property disputes through the exercise of his moral and common sense. Such supervision cannot take place without a thorough knowledge of the barnyard, and that is precisely why James's discussion of British interference addresses the “great personage” of the King specifically.

James's implied distinction between opposing British actions in the colonies, and rebelling against the King, is firmly rooted in the social-contract theory of the day. The illegal acts of officers inferior to the King and acting in his name but without his direct instructions may be opposed at any time; the King may be opposed only if he sets himself in a virtual state of war with his own people.¹³ James is sure that the cause of the present problem must be the ignorance of the King about the “circumstances of this horrid war.” A “good king” would want to “spare and protect as she [Nature] does” (p. 201). If the final Letter suggests the death of New World promise, the causes are not internal—are not in any cast of mind or model of social organization that James has had foisted upon him—but are external. A farmer cannot order his barnyard from three thousand miles away.

That James is psychologically traumatized by his experiences is beyond question. Any objective estimate of Farmer James's mind and its development must recognize Crèvecoeur's intention to dramatize the New World Man's “desperate struggle,” as Albert Stone has put it, “to hold” a vision of the American Eden “in the face of discord.”¹⁴ The apocalyptic atmosphere of the final Letter is real and significant. Linked with James's despair is a certain historical consciousness of the new forever being jeopardized by the old, of outworn institutions such as slavery and despotism threatening Paradise from within and from without. In this regard, James is indeed the prototypical American Adam, forced to solve his problem through flight, the characteristic expedient of this archetypal figure in American fiction. But James remains deserving of our respect throughout, and whether we subscribe to it or not, his world-view has coherence. There is no evidence that James's expulsion from Eden is a consequence of his own sins, real or figurative. Paradise has been lost not as a result of his having eaten the apple but of someone else's having shaken the tree.

Notes

1. Elayne Antler Rapping, “Theory and Experience in Crèvecoeur's America,” American Quarterly, 19 (1968), 708-15: “it becomes clear that Farmer James is Crèvecoeur's straw man. He has carefully built a world for himself on the basis of certain principles which have all proved false” (p. 713).

2. For other recent studies treating Farmer James as an ironically conceived figure, see James C. Mohr, “Calculated Disillusionment: Crèvecoeur's Letters Reconsidered,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 69 (1970), 354-63; Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York: Twayne, 1970), pp. 80-106. For Mohr, James is a rationalizing dupe, and by “playing upon his readers' fondest hopes for social progress, Crèvecoeur perpetrates something of a calculated hoax” (p. 358). Philbrick claims that James's “expulsion from the Eden of his farm is no less the result of an inner failure than was Adam's banishment” (p. 106).

3. Cf. Rapping (p. 709) and Philbrick (p. 67), in whom the assumption is implicit rather than explicit.

4. Letters from an American Farmer & Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: New American Library, 1963), p. 39. This edition of Letters is based on the London edition of 1783 with spelling and punctuation modernized. Cited hereafter by page number within the text itself.

5. Philbrick, p. 99.

6. The point has been made with reference to Jefferson by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 126.

7. For a rehearsal of the major tenets of the “freehold concept,” see Chester E. Eisinger, “The Freehold Concept in Eighteenth-Century Letters,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 4 (1947), 42-59.

8. Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 306, 368, 311.

9. Eisinger, pp. 47-48.

10. Henry Higgs, The Physiocrats (1897; rpt. New York: Kelley, 1968), p. 142.

11. Mohr (p. 359n) calls into question James's sincerity on the matter of slavery by alluding to his “unconvincing attempt to explain away the slavery which existed in the North.” Given the frequent disparity between theory and reality on the slavery issue among many great names of his day, James's remarks are as sensible as one might hope for. He looks for the time of eventual emancipation but rejoices in the relative health and liberty of those Northern slaves not yet emancipated (p. 165).

12. A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. J. Justamond, 3rd ed. rev. (London: T. Cadell, 1777), V, Bk. 16.

13. Cf., e.g., Two Treatises, p. 402.

14. Albert E. Stone, “Forward” to Letters from an American Farmer & Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, p. xviii.