[In the following essay, Cunliffe explores the contrasting tone and content of Crèvecoeur's two major publications about America: Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. The first is optimistic and patriotic; the second is pessimistic and critical.]

I

Almost every twentieth-century discussion of American history, literature, culture or character makes reference to J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, a book first published in 1782. Anthologies usually find space for an excerpt from Crèvecoeur.¹ A particular favourite is the third chapter, ‘What Is An American?’ Here is the best-known, the most-quoted, the almost tediously familiar paragraph from that chapter:

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

A little earlier in the same chapter Crèvecoeur says:

We are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be, nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are.²

Crèvecoeur is then a standard exhibit: the man who analyzed the essence of Americanness, including the famous melting-pot, at the very period two centuries ago when the United States was in the act of achieving independence. And there are other almost equally familiar passages in Crèvecoeur's Letters that serve to establish him as a prime early generalizer about the United States. Again and again he conveys the liberation, the enlargement, the wonder felt by men when they arrive in the New World and enter into ‘that great field of action everywhere visible’. They undergo, says Crèvecoeur, a ‘resurrection’. The new land transforms them. For one thing it is amazingly fertile. ‘Men are like plants, the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil … in which they grow’. If they will take off their coats and set to work they are bound to succeed.

Again, the new country is so big. When the European gets to America, he therefore ‘suddenly alters his scale: … he no sooner breathes our air than he forms schemes and embarks in designs he would never have thought of in his own country’. Environment, it would seem, is almost everything. In Crèvecoeur's view such a settler does not lose his identity in exchanging for the tight social order of Europe the shifting, amorphous American situation. On the contrary: the settler now assumes for the first time a genuine personal identity. He is no longer a vagrant or a ‘nobody’, left outside the respectable enclosure of Europe; for in America he swiftly acquires a home, land, neighbours, a district, a country. Acquires is the proper word—an active verb. The settler gains his identity in the act of acquiring property and improving it. This is his stake in society: his stake, not one that he has been ‘staked to’ by somebody else. Nor does Crèvecoeur fail to distinguish between the various regions of America. He provides an affecting and gruesome account of a Negro slave, locked up in a cage in South Carolina, to die of starvation and be tormented by voracious birds and insects. Crèvecoeur has an eloquent section on the hardy, self-reliant whalers of Nantucket. He writes circumstantially and charmingly on farming in the middle states. He praises the Quakers for one kind of simplicity, and the Indians for another.

We need not dwell further on this accessible Crèvecoeur: Crèvecoeur the agrarian, the optimist, the expounder of the preordained American success story. Here, it would appear, is an eighteenth-century chronicle whose elements have been absorbed into the United States' cosier beliefs about itself. We might feel that George Washington summed up the virtues and limitations of Crèvecoeur in a letter of 1788, replying to someone who sought advice on whether to leave Europe and come to the United States. Among published guides to the new nation he recommended a treatise by Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson's Notes on Virginia. Washington ended his letter by adding that the book by Crèvecoeur, a person who had ‘actually resided twenty years as a farmer …, will afford a great deal of profitable and amusive information, respecting the private life of the Americans, as well as the progress of agriculture, manufactures, and arts, in their country. Perhaps the picture he gives, though founded on fact, is in some instances embellished with rather too flattering circumstances’.³

II

Crèvecoeur is however a more complicatedly dubious witness than General Washington could have realized. True, some of the artifices in his book were obvious to, and perfectly acceptable to, Americans of his day. Many of them knew, as Washington no doubt did, that the man Washington referred to as ‘Mr Crevecoeur (commonly called Mr St John)’, was by birth and upbringing a Frenchman. They may not have been precisely aware that he was a gentleman of Normandy, born in 1735, who had fought as an army officer in Canada under Montcalm; who had been wounded in the battle for Quebec in 1759; and who, entering the American colonies in that year, had eventually bought a farm a few miles west of the Hudson River in Orange County, New York. Contemporaries would not have been amazed to learn that Crèvecoeur had spent some time in England, before going to Canada, and had come near to marrying an English girl. These details—or his naturalization under the name of John Hector St John, or his actual marriage to a lady in Orange County named Mehetable Tippet—were arguably of no great consequence. Perhaps it was not important that in the Letters he posed as a native-born Anglo-American, self-taught, ignorant of Europe, who was farming in Pennsylvania—even if these supposed ‘facts’ have misled some twentieth-century scholars.⁴ Such expedients, including the pretence that he was writing to an acquaintance in England, did not make him a liar. He was merely adopting the common authorial devices of his era. Pennsylvania, the home of the Quakers and of the renowned Benjamin Franklin, had a greater symbolic attractiveness than New York. Exaggerating his own lack of education enabled him to heighten the literary contrast between the virtuous innocence of the American country-dweller and the somehow less virtuous sophistication of his imaginary English correspondent. Eighteenth-century readers would not have been alarmed to discover that certain passages in the book (for example on the deep South, which Crèvecoeur seems never to have visited) had been borrowed from other writers. In that epoch, plagiarism was only a minor offence and had not yet become a moral crime. For this reason they may not have thought it odd that the central themes in Crèvecoeur—such as the dislike of cities, the praise of rural life, and the sentiments on slavery—probably derived from a European work, the Histoire philosophique et politique by the Abbé Raynal, to whom indeed Crèvecoeur dedicated the first edition of his own book.⁵

Again, it was not exactly Crèvecoeur's fault that the book soon ceased to be popular. Tastes change, after all. So the first, London edition of 1782, brought him some fame. So did the revised French editions of 1784 and 1787 (Lettres d'un Cultivateur Américain). But an American edition of 1793 fell flat; and for the next hundred years Crèvecoeur dropped out of sight. In 1851, for instance, the French literary historian Philarète Chasles made only brief mention of Lettres d'un Cultivateur, ‘un livre … peu connu aujourd'hui’, and seemed to assume the author was an Englishman, ‘Sir John Crevecoeur’.⁶ The Letters did not come back into print again until editions (in English) of 1904 and 1912. The explanation for this revival appears to relate to the famous chapter already quoted. He had, in other words, stumbled upon the melting-pot metaphor long before it came into vogue. In the opening years of the twentieth century, at a time of polyglot mass immigration, Crèvecoeur's vision of ‘individuals of all nations … melted into a new race of men’ was suddenly apposite: and reassuring to Americans of the liberal persuasion. It had thus an accidental and rhetorical value: hence its place in the conventional anthologies of the twentieth century, as a convenient and impressive early statement of American heterogeneity.

Yet the more explanations we offer for the career of Crèvecoeur and of his book, the more we involve ourselves in puzzle and paradox. Here is a supposedly classic text that described and predicted the shaping of the American character. Yet it was practically forgotten, on both sides of the Atlantic, throughout the nineteenth century. Crèvecoeur's book is for example not mentioned at all in Charles Sumner's Prophetic Voices Concerning America (Boston, 1874), though there are several pages on the Abbé Raynal, and accounts of various other ‘prophets’ whose names are less familiar than Crèvecoeur's to the present-day reader. Here is a man whom some commentators have taken for an American, and some for an Englishman, but who was not really either. Here is a man often cited as a sort of Founding Father of American cultural patriotism, but who also figures in specialist histories of the American Revolution as a Loyalist: that is, a person who sided not with the colonists but with the British.⁷

These mysteries are worth unravelling, both for their own sake and for things they may tell us about the whole realm of transatlantic generalizations. We can make a start with an intriguing speculation by an unfriendly English reviewer of the 1782 edition. This reviewer found Letters from an American Farmer so peculiarly uneven in tone that he maintained it must have been composed by two different men. His guess was perceptive, Crèvecoeur was two different men inside one physiognomy—at least two, if not more. As far as citizenship went, he was never an American, Crèvecoeur was naturalized in 1765 as an Englishman. He left the colonies in 1780, half way through the War of Independence, in a British ship, and made his way from London to his native France. When he returned to New York in 1783 he came as French consul, having resumed his French citizenship. In 1790 he left New York again for France, and in the remaining twenty-three years of his life never revisited the United States. Brissot de Warville, a compatriot who knew him well in the 1780s, described Crèvecoeur as a gloomy person, sometimes apparently ‘appalled’ rather than pleased by the success of his book. Crèvecoeur, said Brissot, behaved like a man with ‘a secret which weighed down upon his soul and whose disclosure he dreaded’.⁸

Other evidence, including Crèvecoeur's own testimony, confirms that he was miserable in those consular years from 1783 to 1790. This is in a sense easily understandable. When he set foot in America at the end of the war, after a three-year absence, he had had no news for even longer than that of the family he had left behind. What he learned seemed to fit only too justly the French surname, Crèvecoeur, that he had taken up again. He learned, heart-breakingly, that his wife was dead; his children had barely survived, thanks to the kindness of a stranger; and his beloved farmhouse, Pine Hill in Orange County, had been burned down in an Indian raid. The ‘American Farmer’ had no more appetite for agriculture in the New World: he sold his property in 1785.

But the full force of his misery, a semi-secret misery, was not revealed until 1925, when some further literary endeavours of his, dating back to his first American sojourn, were at last released from the obscurity of a French attic and printed as Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. The Sketches make strange reading when set beside the Letters. Only at the end of the 1782 book did Crèvecoeur touch upon the strife of the Revolutionary War. He declared then that he would seek refuge by abandoning his farm, in fact by renouncing civilization altogether, to go and live among the Indians. It was so fanciful a project that no casual reader could take it seriously. In fact, as D. H. Lawrence derisively noted in his Studies in Classic American Literature (1922), Crèvecoeur had done the exact opposite. He had retreated into civilization by going to Paris, where he mingled with salon intellectuals.

To underline the contradiction, Lawrence stressed the discrepancy between the Frenchman's real passion for nature in America, which Lawrence called ‘blood knowledge’, and his artificial enthusiasm for Nature in the abstract. Lawrence wrote before the publication of Sketches. And in any case, being magnificently egocentric, Lawrence was more interested in his own idea of Crèvecoeur than in Crèvecoeur's actual predicaments. Lawrence therefore missed the truly remarkable discrepancy between what Crèvecoeur proclaimed in print and what he inwardly felt.⁹

In the Letters, remember, Crèvecoeur announces: ‘We are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be, nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are.’ But in the Sketches he speaks in another voice altogether:

Could I ever have thought that a people of cultivators, who knew nothing but their ploughs and management of their rural economies, should be found to possess, like the more ancient nations of Europe, the embryos of these propensities which now stain our society? … The range of civil discord hath advanced among us with an astonishing rapidity. Every opinion is changed; every prejudice is subverted; every ancient principle is annihilated; every mode of organization, which linked us before as men and as citizens, is now altered. New ones are introduced, and who can tell whether we shall be the gainers by the exchange? …

But why should I wonder at this political phenomenon? Men are the same in all ages and in all countries. A few prejudices and customs excepted, the same passions lurk in our hearts at all times …¹⁰

The difference of course is that in the meantime the American Revolution had begun. Worse than that, the mild, Quakerish Crèvecoeur could not bring himself to rejoice at the rebellion. His ‘secret’, to use Brissot's term, may have been that certain patriots had regarded him as pro-British during the conflict. Here and there surprise was expressed that the French should have appointed such a dubious person to represent them as consul, so soon after the war. Back in New York, where the courts were full of cases involving the property of former Loyalists,¹¹ Crèvecoeur may have lain awake worrying that some malicious enemy would denounce him as a collaborator.

Loyalist is probably too strong a word to define Crèvecoeur's position; and so is collaborator. His agony was that he had no defined position. He was, rather, a neutralist or a quietist, in a situation that did not permit quiet or neutrality. He therefore got the worst of both worlds during the Revolution. His neighbours expected active proof of his support for the American cause. His oddities as a part-time man of letters aroused suspicion. Why did he shut himself up and scribble? What was he writing about, and to whom? His half-fictional, half-autobiographical essays became, one guesses, an essential release. He could not stop committing them to paper. But they now contained dangerous sentiments. He could envisage no satisfactory outcome for the Revolution. For him, living in an area of exceptionally confused allegiances, the immediate reality was violence, bloodshed, hypocrisy; the suppression of free speech; intimidation and robbery in the name of high-sounding ideals. So Crèvecoeur composed frantic sketches with titles such as ‘The Man of Sorrows’ and ‘The American Belisarius’ (an allusion to the Roman general who, having been disgraced, blinded, and deprived of all his property, was reduced to begging by the roadside). Crèvecoeur, portraying himself or his friends or his wife's Loyalist kinfolk under various disguises, poured out his soul in bitter anecdotes of persecution and confiscation. His emotion found vent too in a number of remarkable dialogues or playlets that he called ‘Landscapes’. In these the patriots are shown as sanctimonious thugs. Their victims, on the other hand, are harmless Quakers, decent farmers, upright gentlemen. One of the victims, a woman whose husband has been hunted like a wild beast, wearily observes that ‘the world was created round to convince us that nothing therein is stable and permanent’. She says of a patriot colonel, who is also a deacon: ‘As a county canting, religious hypocrite I had always known thee; now as Congress delegate, and in that service dost thou use thy former qualifications.’¹²

These heartbroken essays, together with some more cheerful earlier ones, accompanied Crèvecoeur to New York City at the beginning of 1779, when he at length set out to quit the colonies. Leaving was easier said than done. New York was in the hands of the British. A local official in Orange County reported: ‘the people of our country are much alarmed at their apprehensions of St John's being permitted to go to New York’. The British did not quite trust him either. They opened up the little trunk in which he guarded his papers. A British officer testified that it contained ‘a great Number of Manuscripts, the general purport of which appear to be a sort of irregular Journal of America, & a State of the Times of some years back, interspersed with occasional Remarks, Philosophical & Political; the tendency of the latter is to favor the side of Government and to throw Odium on the Proceedings of the Opposite Party, and upon the Tyranny of their Popular Government.’¹³ In other words, two types of essay: the optimistic ones that made up the volume of Letters from an American Farmer, and the pessimistic ones that were to remain unprinted until the Sketches volume of 1925.

An anonymous informer denounced Crèvecoeur to the British authorities in New York as a patriot spy. They put him in jail—from which he was only released, after three months, on the pleading of an impeccably Loyalist friend. Some of his papers went astray. A portion of the remainder he sold to a pair of booksellers, on arrival in London. Hence the publication of the Letters in London in 1782—by which time Crèvecoeur was in France.

He did not think the British completely blameless for the Revolution. Perhaps, he conjectured, their appetite for conquest had disturbed the balance in North America. Crèvecoeur was much more positive that, whatever the long-distance workings of history, the Revolution was without rational justification. The colonists had no real complaint. ‘It is to England’, says Crèvecoeur in one of his pre-Revolutionary essays, ‘we owe this elevated rank we possess, these noble appellations of freemen, freeholders, citizens; yes, it is to that wise people we owe our freedom.’ In a later essay he gropes for an understanding of what has gone wrong. ‘Ambition’, he suggests,

an exorbitant love of power and thirst of riches, a certain impatience of government, by some people called liberty—all these motives, clad under the garb of patriotism and even of constitutional reason, have been the … foundations of this, as well as of many other revolutions. But what art, what insidious measures, what … masses of intricate, captious delusions were not necessary to persuade a people happy beyond any other on earth, … receiving from Nature every benefit she could confer, enjoying from government every advantage it could confer, that they were miserable, oppressed and aggrieved, that slavery and tyranny would rush upon them from the very sources which before had conveyed them so many blessings.¹⁴

Consider the ironies of Crèvecoeur's situation. When he speaks in his lyrical, pre-Revolutionary writings of ‘government’, he means the benevolent, far-off yet powerful British government, the guarantor of the colonists' contentment. The American, ‘this new man’, is actually an Anglo-American; ‘the new government he obeys’ is actually an Anglo-American government. And when Crèvecoeur talks of government in his subsequent essays, he refers to the truculence of patriot Congressmen, or the spleen of the New York board of commissioners established in 1777 to smell out un-American activities in Orange County and elsewhere.

Before the troubles came, Crèvecoeur's dual allegiance—to old England and the New World—involved no strain. He was doing well in British America. He was writing essays, no doubt with a view to publication, that ought to gratify English citizens on both sides of the Atlantic. Then his world split apart. He still contrived to salvage the book, or some of it, and to appeal to a now-divided double audience. But when his book reached the public it was already anachronistic, and he was a changed man. Letters from an American Farmer glows with a ruddy optimism. The narrator is the architect of his own fortune; his latchstring is always out for visits from neighbours and strangers alike. But by 1782, as the author must have been more painfully aware than anyone, the optimism of the Letters was absurd. The latchstring had proved to be out for visits from commissioners and raiders. Literally and metaphorically, the structure of Crèvecoeur's farmhouse lay in ruins.

He tried, we can see, in the later work (published eventually as the Sketches) to re-order his mind, to arrive at philosophical detachment, to admit irony into his mental scheme: to turn, so to speak, from Rousseau into Voltaire. The task was too difficult. He could manage only an occasional gleam of humour or a half-hearted effort at philosophical detachment. Never a systematic thinker, he wrote incoherently about the incoherence of human history.

Crèvecoeur also tried to reshape his Anglo-American into a Franco-American identity. Soon after reaching France, in August 1781, he wrote to Benjamin Franklin, expressing himself ‘glad … as a good Frenchman and a good American to contribute my Mite towards the Success of this grand, this useful revolution’. After the Franco-American victory at Yorktown he wrote again, to congratulate Franklin as the representative of the United States on an event that must ‘convulse with joy the hearts of every loyal American as well as those of every good Frenchman’. In the next couple of years things improved for Crèvecoeur. By the end of 1783 the War of Independence was over; his English edition was being discussed and on the whole applauded; he was respected among some of the philosophes of Paris; and he had prepared a French version of his book. But these consolations were offset. His own part in the Revolution may now have struck him as inglorious and even cowardly. He had been proved too pessimistic; and ought he to have left his family behind in America? He experienced more subtle anxieties. The London edition of the Letters contained no hostile comment on the mother country. The French edition, however, introduced many partisan interpolations, so as to present the English as the villains of the story and the Americans as heroes. The old dedication to the Abbé Raynal was gone: the Abbé's advanced opinions had put him out of favour with the French court. Instead, the Paris edition of 1784 was dedicated to that fashionable new Franco-American idol, the Marquis de Lafayette. Crèvecoeur, though, can hardly have forgotten the manuscripts still in his possession—unpublished and now unpublishable. In one of them, ‘an American gentleman’ observes:

When the accounts of this mighty revolution arrive in Europe, nothing will appear there but the splendid effects. The insignificant cause will be overlooked; the low arts, this progressive succession of infatuations which have pervaded the whole continent will be unknown.¹⁵

When Crèvecoeur was installed as French consul in New York, in 1783, he discovered that nearly all his former friends and connexions had departed into Loyalist exile. Silence about those old ties was his only recourse. Then and for the rest of his days, Crèvecoeur busied himself as conscientiously as he could with Franco-American exchanges. Most of them had to do with plants, which he perhaps found safer than people to deal with. He produced pamphlets recommending the cultivation in France of the potato and the false acacia. Scientific societies elected him to membership. He refurbished some old notes to make a book of his bygone travels, Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie et dans l'Etat de New-York (1801)—dedicated to Napoleon.¹⁶ On the title page he described himself as an adopted member of the Oneida Indian tribe: a detail that would have amused D. H. Lawrence. Silence, and discreetly timed absences from France, enabled him to survive a second revolution there, followed by the marchings and countermarchings of the Napoleonic wars.

III

What then is this Crèvecoeur? Is he an American, or a European, or an unhappy hybrid? I described him earlier as a would-be neutralist, or quietist. Does the additional evidence make him seem more like a Vicar of Bray, one of those ‘trimmers’ of chameleon-like adaptability who modified their attitudes according to circumstance? It is clear that he was a romantic rather than a political ideologue. He never showed much interest in constitutions or manifestos. I think quietist is a fairer description than trimmer. He appears more bewildered than agile; he reveals anguish rather than relish when he has to change his line, and he is clumsy at covering his tracks. But perhaps in most cases a trimmer is merely a quietist who has been forced out into the open. Such sudden and cruel exposure is a feature of revolutions, civil wars and military occupation. It is not my concern to indict Crèvecoeur for inconsistency, still less for insincerity. The only charge against him, perhaps, is that the Letters are full of attitudinizing: that is to say, of self-deception. This argument, to which we can return later, is that Crèvecoeur adopted fashionable notions of life in the New World and convinced himself they were as powerful as a creed, when in fact they were only a conception. If so, he paid quite a heavy psychological price.

In any case, fate was fairly kind to him after the shock of the war years in America. A good many Loyalists came back to New York when peace was restored, and most of them were able to come to terms with the new régime. They were not harassed unduly; Crèvecoeur seems to have gone unscathed. He was treated as a respectable, well-informed foreign diplomat. He corresponded now and then with such American dignitaries as Thomas Jefferson. There was no disposition in Britain to attack his record. His few English critics, agreeing with George Washington, merely complained that the Letters painted too rosy a picture of American life, and hinted that his motive was to encourage emigration.¹⁷ Otherwise, the British gradually forgot him. So, as we have seen, did the French. If they wanted to read about America, Chateaubriand and later Tocqueville and Beaumont were more to their taste. Crèvecoeur may have been frightened that someone would take the trouble to compare the British and the French edition of the Letters. It appears that nobody did. People had other things to worry about in the tumult of the time. His death in France, in 1813, went almost unnoticed.

But that is not to say he is unimportant to us. Looking behind the twentieth-century Crèvecoeur of the textbooks and anthologies, we can use him to shed light on various reactions of people who leave their own country for some other one. Such departures are either voluntary or involuntary. The voluntary leavers are usually called settlers or emigrants. The involuntary leavers are often labelled as exiles or—in the English usage of the French word—émigrés. Which of these was Crèvecoeur? A mixture, I think. The mood of the Letters is in general that of the voluntary voyager. The mood of the Sketches is that of the involuntary one. But the story goes further back. For some reason his brother officers were eager to push him out of the French regiment in which he was serving in Canada in 1759. In this respect his arrival in the British colonies makes him appear an exile or émigré from France. When he came back to his native land in 1781 he had almost forgotten how to speak French.

But let us focus for the moment on the voluntary leavers. Perhaps the rather blurred association between the two categories, settler and immigrant, helps to explain why the Letters, though popular for a while, lapsed into obscurity and were then resurrected. It is mainly as a spokesman for emigration (to put the emphasis on arrival), that we read Crèvecoeur today. An immigrant—in my sense of the word—is a man who severs his connexion with the past. He transfers to another sovereignty, another flag, another loyalty, and in so doing must repudiate his previous existence. For Crèvecoeur, to come to British America probably involved a quite complete repudiation of France: of French citizenship, and possibly of the whole atmosphere of exclusion and oppression of Continental Europe. Whether this was total we cannot know. It may be significant that he named a daughter America-Francès.¹⁸ Recalling that as a young man he lived in England and nearly married an English girl, we may regard him as an example of the Anglomania professed by various French philosophes.

The important point, I believe, is that if his French origins and his repudiation of them made him an immigrant to America, his Anglophile instincts made him a settler. Defining that term in a restricted sense, a settler is a person who despite his territorial movement remains under the same flag, the same dispensation. He does not swap allegiances, he amplifies them. He takes pride in the mother country and in its new, extended universe. So Crèvecoeur, in his celebrated chapter ‘What Is an American?’, pictures an ‘enlightened Englishman’ landing in America and delighted to find what his countrymen, even the disadvantaged and lowly, have been able to accomplish. ‘They brought along with them’, he says, ‘their national genius. Here [the enlightened Englishman] sees the industry of his native country, displayed in a new manner … What a train of pleasing ideas this fair spectacle must suggest!’ Crèvecoeur to some extent visualized himself as an English settler-citizen: an Englishman and an Anglo-American. His literary persona, significantly, was that of an Englishman, and the son of an Englishman, though also American by birth. He pretends in the Letters that it was his grandfather who came from England to British America. Crèvecoeur, in short, intended to write as a settler, for a European audience. The twentieth century, somewhat misreading him, has interpreted him as an immigrant, writing for an American or would-be American audience.

His personal trauma was a double one. During the War of Independence he was required to affirm that he was not an Anglo-American but an American: not a settler but an immigrant. New York State demanded a loyalty oath from what it called ‘persons of neutral and equivocal character’. They were to acknowledge that New York was ‘of right, a free and independent state’. Crèvecoeur could not at that stage bind himself to agree. His second tragedy was to be thrust back into the dispossessed plight of the exile or émigré, and to feel that none of the possible roles was satisfactory.

Among the elements that the settler and the immigrant have in common is a disposition to be optimistic, and to think in the future tense, of what is to be. If, says Crèvecoeur, the new American ‘is a good man, he forms schemes of future prosperity … He thinks of future modes of conduct’. Such men have gambled on tomorrow. Being newcomers, they are also extremely reluctant to criticize their new environment. Their enthusiasm may thus be both sincere and oddly circumspect, even artificial. In Crèvecoeur's case, he was compelled for a while to renounce this optimistic mode. As an exile or émigré, he faced the irony of having lost England as well as America, and of having to strive to renew an allegiance to France that he had almost abandoned. Far from gaining a habitation and an identity, the exile or émigré are deprived of theirs. Not the future but the past is their tense: not I shall be but I was is their avowal. It is terrible for a man to be shifted from one extreme to the other, as was Crèvecoeur's lot. ‘I am no longer the old me’ (l'ancien moi) ‘that you knew in the days of my happiness and my liberty’, he lamented to a friend. ‘Before this fatal era’, he wrote (c. 1778), ‘no man was happier than I was, I … was full of hopes and confidence …’ But the previous three years had brought ‘nothing but … acrimonious reflections which have made me a very different man from what I was’.¹⁹What I was … Hence the almost schizophrenic difference of outlook between the genial Letters and the gloomy Sketches.

Obviously Crèvecoeur's problems were peculiar. His difficulties of national identity were compounded during the Revolution because his farm happened to be in a chaotic debatable zone between the British and the American forces. His wife's family seems to have been chiefly Loyalist. But fascinating though his story is in its own right, we can seek some broader lessons. In some respects Crèvecoeur reveals himself as a typical man of the pre-Revolutionary Enlightenment. Like a good many of his European contemporaries, he was not sure whether America was fundamentally different from Europe, or fundamentally similar; whether, that is, the effects of environment outweighed the effects of heredity. His answers are not always consistent: a comment that can also be made about Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, written sixty years later. In places, Crèvecoeur seems to think that, for good and for ill, America's characteristics are entirely environmental. Elsewhere, especially in the Sketches, the argument tends to be that human nature is everywhere the same. Elsewhere again, Crèvecoeur appears to be saying that America is a melting-pot of all nations (the assumption of his mentor Raynal), and yet that its character has been formed on the basis of the colonies' British origins.²⁰

This range of possibilities has continued to underlie nearly all subsequent discussion of the America-Europe relationship. As a man of the Enlightenment, Crèvecoeur probably did not feel the need for any greater analytical rigour. He does not wave the flag chauvinistically for any one nation, including the United States. He attempted to deal in universals, to look upon the world with a transnational benevolence. On the whole he did not see America and Europe as distinct, rival civilizations but as societies bound by a principle of complementarity. In praising America so highly he was imparting a message of hope for mankind everywhere. The intended moral of the Letters was that simple prosperity was the best guarantee of human happiness, and that such a goal could be universally attainable.

Up to the time of the American Revolution, most of the big generalizations about America had come from Europe, or were identical with American formulations. In this respect, Crèvecoeur summed up two or three centuries of the more favourable kinds of comment on America, in the Letters: the Sketches, consciously or unconsciously, recapitulate some of the unfavourable views, according to which America was a disorderly, degenerate place. For a century and more after the Revolution, the America-Europe relationship tended to become polarized into a principle of stark contrast. The gentle and rather ambiguous messages of Letters from an American Farmer, in an era of nationalistic scholarship, failed to excite the imagination of readers on either side of the Atlantic.

The Letters, as we know, were given a new lease of life at the beginning of the twentieth century. Not only did they appear to describe the conditions of melting-pot America: in general the book provided a welcome additional item to augment the none too abundant shelf of early American literary sources. Crèvecoeur ministered to the cultural and academic nationalism of the twentieth-century United States, as typified by the American Studies movement. Portions of the Letters—the bits to be found in the anthologies—are so fitting for the purpose that one almost thinks they would have had to be invented if they did not already exist.

Such an interpretation of course depends upon a highly selective reading of Crèvecoeur. With the exception of his biographers, few scholars seem to have taken the trouble to search for the real Crèvecoeur. They are content for the most part to reproduce a few paragraphs from the Letters, to ignore the Sketches, and to accept the persona of the Letters as an essentially accurate portrait of the author.

The result is a grossly oversimplified rendering. It prevents us from recognizing that the European-American relationship contains all sorts of nuances, with a considerable element of mythologizing. Crèvecoeur's writings, the Sketches no less than the Letters, are even more relevant for the twentieth century than conventional interpretations claim. They help us to grasp the ambivalences of departure from one society and arrival in another, and therefore of the whole drama of New World settlement. Crèvecoeur also has become relevant because our time is more aware of the similarities between the New and Old Worlds than was the nineteenth century. We are once again inclined to think transnationally. In the perspective of the 1970s, the United States and western Europe, in spite of their many dissimilarities, are seen to be running on more or less parallel lines. In the context of world history, both communities are relatively rich, relatively sophisticated, relatively urbanized and industrialized. They share common heritages, though admittedly eclectic ones. The New World is in some ways now old, the Old World in some ways new. One of the many advantages to be gained from a close reading of Crèvecoeur is the realization that this interplay between Europe and America has been going on for a very long time, and that it has never been straightforward. Crèvecoeur's essays offer an excellent text for a fresh re-assessment of the past, present and future of the Euro-American relationship.²¹

Notes

1. Three random mentions and excerpts out of many:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. ‘Crèvecoeur portait partout un front sombre, un air inquiet … Jamais il ne se livrait aux épanchements, il paraissait même quelquefois effrayé du succès de son ouvrage, il semblait enfin qu'il eût un secret qui lui pesât sur l'âme et dont il craignait la révélation.’ Brissot, quoted in Rice, p. 43n.

9. Lawrence's essay on Crèvecoeur first appeared in the English Review (January 1919). It is longer than the version printed in Studies in Classic American Literature but equally off-hand about the actual circumstances of Crèvecoeur. See Armin Arnold, D. H. Lawrence in America (London, Linden Press, 1958), pp. 50-3. The two sides of Crèvecoeur are well brought out in Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1927-30), vol. i pp. 140-7.

10. Sketches, ed. Stone, pp. 342-3.

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

12. Sketches, ed. Stone, pp. 450-8.

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

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

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

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

17. Rice, pp. 63-6.

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

19. Quoted in Rice, p. 162.

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

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