SOURCE: “J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur: A Monarcho-Anarchist in Revolutionary America,” in American Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 204-22.

[In the following essay, Jehlen analyzes the apparent contradiction between Crèvecoeur's admiration for America and his opposition to the American Revolution.]

The author of Letters from an American Farmer boasted that in America “we have no princes, for whom we toil, starve and bleed: we are the most perfect society now existing in the world.”¹ But he opposed the American Revolution and remained loyal to the English crown, though his French origin alone should have made him its opponent. Before the war he had declared that immigrants to America could never be expected to remain committed to European societies that condemned them to “involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour.” His dignity as well as the fruits of his labors secured here, the new American must inevitably “love this country much better than that wherein he or his forefathers were born.” (p. 50) It was only natural and right for a man to owe his first loyalty to the land that he tilled. But having thus argued, and in the process provided perhaps the best known definition of “the American,” J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur then found himself, overnight, pleading with hostile neighbors to be allowed to return to France. His lands expropriated and his family scattered, Crèvecoeur fled the New World in September 1780. How did this come about, and why?

His sincerity and loyalty to America were beyond question. The cited passages were written before the confiscation of his farm, but he published them afterwards nonetheless, in 1781-82, when he was back in France and helping American prisoners escape across the Channel, to return home. Thomas Jefferson praised the Letters enthusiastically, and recognizing their remarkable propaganda value, endorsed their agrarian vision as altogether in accord with his own. In Europe Crèvecoeur was dubbed “The American Farmer.” By the close of the war, the country he had left as an ignominious fugitive honored him on his return as French consul.² But this reinstatement should not be taken to mean that his loyalism had been a mere misunderstanding. Crèvecoeur's opposition to the Revolution was as serious and principled as his commitment to America. Making sense of this requires that we distinguish between two historical developments usually treated as one: the achievement of national independence on one hand, and the evolution of American democracy on the other.

These two developments have been linked through an interpretation of the Revolution that tends toward the teleological, in viewing it as fought essentially to achieve nationhood. This view was bolstered for a long time by the general agreement that “American society in the half century after 1775 was substantially what it had been in the quarter century before.”³ In the absence of significant social change in the new nation, it was reasonable to suppose that the Revolutionaries were politically motivated and sought independence from external control rather than any internal resolution or transformation. But recent studies have uncovered more social flux and conflict in colonial America than had been suspected, and rather less consensus about the overall national purpose. It is in this context of closer attention to the internal complexities and contradictions of early American society that I will be attempting to explain Crèvecoeur's political decision against the Revolution. In coming to this decision, however expressive it was of larger principles, Crèvecoeur responded specifically to his local experience in rural Pennsylvania.⁴

In the period before the Revolution, that society seemed to Crèvecoeur very nearly a paradise which, best of all, anyone could enter. For this is what he valued above all about America, the opportunity he saw it providing everyone to achieve abundant self-sufficiency, and the dignity of equal status among his neighbors and before the law. In America, he wrote, society “is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing.” Here is “no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one.” (p. 46) Instead everyone had equally complete control of his life, and none had power over another's. The early Letters celebrate the resurrection of Europe's wretched, hopeless poor, to whom America promised:

“If thou wilt work, I have bread for thee; if thou wilt be honest, sober and industrious, I have greater rewards to confer on thee—ease and independence, … the immunities of a freeman. … Go thou and work and till; thou shalt prosper, provided thou be just, grateful and industrious.”

(p.73)

One such happy story, the ascent of Andrew the Hebridean from emigrant to American, was a New World Pilgrim's Progress, depicting “the progressive steps of a poor man, advancing from indigence to ease; from oppression to freedom, from obscurity and contumely to some degree of consequency—not by virtue of any freaks of fortune, but by the gradual operation of sobriety, honesty, and emigration.” (p. 74) This was a parable for the aspiring middle class of course; “the rich,” Crèvecoeur noted, “stay in Europe, it is only the middling and the poor who emigrate.” (p. 63) But “for men of middle stations or labourers,” America held out infinite possibilities; this was the familiar vision which has endured down to today, and Crèvecoeur articulated its ethic with notable precision: “we are all animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained,” he exulted, “because each person works for himself.” (p. 46)

That all this constituted a revolution in the politics of the individual and society was something which Crèvecoeur both understood and applauded. The American, he proclaimed, “is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions.” (p. 50) Then why not a new nation? Curiously, given his enthusiasm over the newness of the New World and what must have been the currency of such speculations, this question seems not even to have occurred to Crèvecoeur until the Revolution was upon him. In other respects he was as visionary as any, rhapsodizing, for instance, that “Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them the great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle.” (p. 49) So his failure to imagine America's future as a separate nation is the more striking. Indeed, in retrospect, Crèvecoeur himself wondered how he could have ignored the larger issues of state and society for so long: “I lived on, laboured and prospered, without having ever studied on what the security of my life, and the foundation of my prosperity were established: I perceived them just as they left me.” (p. 204) Amid the ruins of that prosperity, he saw that he had given too little thought to its external guarantees. His personal life had occupied all his energies, because for him only the private world mattered. “The instant I enter on my land,” he had written in happier days, “the bright idea of property, of exclusive right, of independence exalt my mind.” (p.30) Too late, he came to ask himself, “what is man when no longer connected with society; or when he finds himself surrounded by a convulsed and a half dissolved one?” But even as he expanded on this awakening social consciousness, he revealed in the terms by which he sought to define community why he had earlier overlooked it.

Man “cannot live in solitude,” Crèvecoeur explained, because “men mutually support and add to the boldness and confidence of each other; the weakness of each is strengthened by the force of the whole.” (p. 204) But he still missed the point, able to envision a social model only as inorganic arithmetical linkage. Because personal worth for him was measured by autonomy, any area of mutual definition amounted to a sort of entail on the self. Thus all relations between free men were properly foreign relations and society had to do only with external affairs.

The problem of reconciling individual independence with mutuality was not Crèvecoeur's alone. It occupied his entire century and, for that matter, the next; we are still not clear what the concept of community means in a society of individualists. Moreover, this is an ontological question, and not merely an ethical one. For Crèvecoeur, the private citizen need be neither selfish nor unsociable. He himself was apparently the most benevolent of men. “I have at all times generously relieved what few distressed people I have met with,” (p. 217) he reported, judging this one of his proudest achievements. He considered neighborliness not only desirable but absolutely necessary. The Andrew parable in the third Letter cites prominently the unstinting aid of already established farmers. One of these employed the immigrant until he worked out his indenture, while at the same time disinterestedly preparing him for the day he would have his own farm; then others leased him land, lent tools and seeds, raised his barn, transported his crops. Andrew could not and should not have done it alone; like Jefferson, Crèvecoeur valued farming for the social bonds as well as for the independence it fostered. It is when Andrew is made overseer of the county road and serves on petty juries that we know he was successful. He had arrived at his goal himself only when the land surrounding his farm was also finally settled; “instead of being the last man towards the wilderness, [he] found himself in a few years in the middle of a numerous society.” And the process was to continue, for “he helped others as generously as others had helped him.” (p. 90)

For Crèvecoeur, loners, as opposed to self-reliant individualists, threatened civilization itself. He condemned as the dregs of American society those isolated inhabitants of the wilderness become idle, licentious hunters who hated their neighbors and, living alone far from churches and schools, had themselves become wild, “ferocious, gloomy and unsociable.” (p. 57) Neither a Rousseau nor a Chateaubriand, Crèvecoeur sought to disabuse his European readers of romantic notions about man in the state of nature. In the backwoods of America, he told them, there reigns “a perfect state of war”;

that of man against man … that of man against every wild inhabitant of these venerable woods, of which they are come to dispossess them. There men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them …

(p. 52)

and on pilfering from each other when they can't. So that when he regretted his insufficient attention earlier to the social connection, he did not mean that he had ever thought that men should or could live alone. Far from it: isolation had always been for him not merely inconvenient, but a threat to his identity as a rational civilized being. Finding himself cut off from his community by the advent of the Revolution, he would become aware that the houses in his settlement lay “at a considerable distance from each other,” (pp. 204-5) and that the wilderness, the “hideous wilderness,” (p. 222) was all about. In the contemplation of this wilderness he wrote poignantly, “I feel as if my reason wanted to leave me, as if it would burst its poor weak tenement.” (p. 204)

To be human, one needs human ties; to be a man, one must be entirely independent. Crèvecoeur resolved this paradox to his own satisfaction through his family. Having found farming dull in his youth, he came with maturity to appreciate its solid virtues. He reported having for a time considered leaving the land, but then

I married, and this perfectly reconciled me to my situation; my wife rendered my house all at once cheerful and pleasing; it no longer appeared gloomy and solitary as before; when I went to work in my fields I worked with more alacrity and sprightliness; I felt that I did not work for myself alone, and this encouraged me much. My wife would often come with her knitting in her hand, and sit under the shady trees, praising the straightness of my furrows, and the docility of my horses; this swelled my heart and made everything light and pleasant, and I regretted that I had not married before.

(p. 28)

It is not what is included in this idyll that is striking, so much as what it leaves out, which is any suggestion of going outward from the familial nucleus, of ties or activities beyond the family. Instead, the economic sphere for one is subsumed to the domestic; Crèvecoeur's wife is more often pictured coming out to the fields than he home to her, the metaphorical point of these meetings being to project the structure of his world and to measure its extent, which world is amply co-extensive with his family. Ideally society could be made up of such families related to each other by analogy and proximity while remaining separate and self-defined. To achieve this ideal state, those who are already established have a social duty, which works also in their own interest, to help others through temporary and reversible familial relations to achieve equal status, one mature family aiding another weak or fledgling as a father would his son. Such aid is a recurrent motif in the Letters. Andrew rises by being raised by parental figures who educate, equip, and stake him as he will do equally for the next “generation” of immigrants and for his sons. For America's brightest promise to the worthy is prosperity for their children, which “to every good man … ought to be the most holy, the most powerful, the most earnest wish he can possibly form, as well as the most consolatory prospect when he dies.” (p. 73)

Therein lay Crèvecoeur's social vision of a benevolent America which nurtured each immigrant to a fulfilled manhood he then manifested by nurturing his children in turn. It is important that this fusion of private and public realms in one code of personal behavior not invoke medieval associations. If there were signs in the eighteenth century of a feudal revival in America, Crèvecoeur would have had none of it.⁵ For him, the private and the public came together not in any external common domain, but in the inner man, whence they were projected into a politics of private morality generalized. So the excellent Bertram of the eleventh letter, a botanist exemplifying Crèvecoeur's notion of the social good as validated by nature, is a kindly but firm father to his brood of children, women, and blacks, all of whom he will try to raise to fulfill their potentials. Conversely when the Revolution seemed to have destroyed all hope of peace and order, Crèvecoeur's survival plan was, by his lights, less quixotic than it might appear. Gathering his distraught wife and children, taking with him husbands for his daughters, he planned to settle among the Indians and there, reconstituting his family and even ensuring its descendance, he would regenerate a micro-civilization. Civilization, in short, was the family writ large.

The contrast with Robinson Crusoe is compelling: when Defoe wanted to recreate society, he provided Crusoe with his man Friday; Crèvecoeur took a wife. Though there is a certain analogy between the captive worker and the subservient wife, the difference between them nonetheless has significant ideological implications. For Defoe, the world was a marketplace organized around the basic relation of propertied and propertyless whose hired labor enriches the former and maintains them in their status. Thus property owners benefit from the relative poverty of the lower classes. To put it simply, if Friday's share were to grow as fast as, or faster than Crusoe's profits, Crusoe would lose by it. He extends his holdings only when Friday gets back less than the wealth he generates. However productive, and whether or not beneficial for Friday or for society as a whole, this is an intrinsically competitive situation. But Crèvecoeur's relationship to his wife was not so overtly competitive. Indeed for his part, he perceived the relation as entirely complementary, between himself and just another aspect of himself. (How his wife saw it, of course, may be another story, or another history.) By the shift in Crèvecoeur's eighteenth-century world from the extended family to the individual as the unit of social identification, married women became more than ever identified with and through their husbands. It never occurred to Crèvecoeur that his wife might have interests other than his own, let alone competing interests. Thus there is a profound difference within middle-class thinking, between defining society in familial or in economic terms. In Defoe's world view, the economic model was all pervasive and defined family relations well. But as a projection directly of the family, in the way Crèvecoeur envisioned society, that model appeared far less competitive, if also less dynamic, than it did either on Addison's Royal Exchange or in the shops of Franklin's Philadelphia. Both Exchange and shops, as well as Crusoe's island, would have appalled Crèvecoeur, whose social ideal reigned instead on another island, in peaceful, quiet, and cooperative Nantucket.

For a book about farmers, the Letters spends a surprising amount of time on Cape Cod. Five of the twelve are about Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, and their repetitiveness suggests that their real meaning for him may have lain deeper than Crèvecoeur could quite articulate. Overall, he seems to have seen Nantucket as the essence of American-ness, as it abjured the corruption and decadence of Europe. “How happy are we here, in having fortunately escaped the miseries which attended our fathers,” he exclaimed in the opening of the Cape Cod letters. He predicted that as the tyrants of Europe raged on, “this country, providentially intended for the general asylum of the world, will flourish by the oppression of their people; they will every day become better acquainted with the happiness we enjoy, and seek for the means of transporting themselves here. …” Now, if the theme is already familiar from other contemporary writings, its treatment was somewhat unusual, for Crèvecoeur's “asylum” was a rocky sand-bar “barren in its soil, insignificant in its extent, inconvenient in its situation, deprived of materials for building. …” The significant point is that he regretted none of these shortcomings, on the contrary seeing them as the source of Nantucket excellence. It seemed to him that the island had “been inhabitated merely to prove what mankind can do when happily governed.” With “freedom … skill … probity … and perseverance,” by their own “vigorous industry,” unhindered but unaided, the people of Nantucket “have raised themselves from the most humble, the most insignificant beginnings, to the ease and the wealth they now possess.” Crèvecoeur insisted on the arduousness of their effort, appearing gratified even that poor soil had kept them from farming. Instead of a nurturing earth, “they plough the rougher ocean, they gather from its surface, at an immense distance, and with Herculean labours, the riches it affords; they go to hunt and catch that huge fish which by its strength and velocity ought to be beyond the reach of man.”

What they have shown is that nothing is beyond the reach of men free to pursue their dreams. This was Crèvecoeur's creed:

Give mankind the full rewards of their industry, allow them to enjoy the fruits of their labour under the peaceable shade of their vines and fig-trees, leave their native activity unshackled and free like a stream without dams or other obstacle. …

(pp. 94-98)

Such eloquence is far from his usual style, however, and he was at his most reserved in describing those rewards. Then he spoke of “decent plainness” (p. 119), neatness, and simplicity, several times describing the dress and houses of Nantucket's Herculean labourers as “simple, useful and unadorned.” (p. 116) Earlier he had praised, as a happy contrast to the showy luxury of European houses, “the pleasing uniformity of decent competence [that] appears throughout our habitations.” (p. 46) Finally, this insistence on plain living comes to exceed the standards of middle-class prudence and we begin to realize that he objected not only to spending but to having as well: only the process of getting aroused his enthusiasm, the labor more than its fruits. He had no interest in superabundance, or in accumulation per se, were it of goods or profits; “living with decency and ease” in “plentiful subsistence” (p. 95) was the decidedly limited goal of Crèvecoeur's model American, and his own:

I have never possessed, or wish to possess any thing more than what could be earned or produced by the united industry of my family. I wanted nothing more than to live at home independent and tranquil, and to teach my children how to provide the means of a future ample subsistence, founded on labor, like that of their father.

(p. 217)

Thus despite unlimited willingness to work, and his rejection of any external limits to the self, Crèvecoeur might almost be said to have lacked ambition. He had enlarged his definition of subsistence and ease to the American scale, but he neither looked nor aspired much beyond the strict fulfillment of necessity. In speaking of the unceasing activity he saw all around him, Crèvecoeur referred to it approvingly as “restless industry” (p. 19), a phrase with no progressive implications, projecting only continual hard work. With his family as his world rather than a home-base for forays into the world, Crèvecoeur's was a truncated, partial kind of middle-class ethos. According to this ethos, individualism manifests itself through independence and self-assertion but not (yet) in social power or accumulated wealth. (We should recall Crèvecoeur's context among Pennsylvania farmers whose sense of equality sprang from respective self-sufficiency, to appreciate how resonant this distinction between self-assertion and social power may have been.)

In Crèvecoeur's logic, equality had egalitarian implications, for how could a man be independent if he were not actually as well as potentially equal? But for all its idealism, this primitive individualism was necessarily transitory, for it became impractical in even the most fledgling of market societies. Indeed Crèvecoeur found all markets repugnant. They were inevitably theaters for theft: “if it is not (in that vast variety of bargains, exchanges, barters, sales, etc.,) bellum omnium contra omnes, 'tis a general mass of keenness and sagacious action against another mass of equal sagacity, 'tis caution against caution. Happy when it does not degenerate into fraud against fraud!” I cited earlier his description of the wilderness as a “perfect state of war … of man against man.”

In any case, the hustle and bustle of the marketplace had no charms for him, as his essay on “Manners of the Americans” makes very clear. It was not published in the Letters but with the more ambivalent Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America. Like the first letters, it depicts the evolution of an American settler from initial step into the wilderness to prosperous establishment as a foremost citizen of the region. But unlike Andrew and his kind, this farmer acts alone; no paternal neighbors help him and he has no intention of helping others. When he arrives at the point of selling crops or leasing land, he will drive the hardest bargain he can and not balk at a little cheating. He gouges interest and forecloses on mortgages; eventually he expands to become a general merchant, and “this introduces him into all the little mysteries of self-interest, clothed under the general name of profits and emoluments.”

He sells for good that which perhaps he knows to be indifferent because he also knows that the ashes he has collected, the wheat he has taken in may not be so good or so clean as it was asserted. Fearful of fraud in all his dealings and transactions, he arms himself, therefore, with it.

Crèvecoeur would have had difficulty with our nostalgia for the country-store. “Very probably,” he warned, the farmer-merchant will be “litigious, overbearing, purse-proud,” and irreligious because religion is neither convenient nor useful; he cares only about himself, and in this setting, even his devotion to his family takes on an equivocal character. “To him,” Crèvecoeur wrote, “all that appears good, just, equitable has a necessary relation to himself and his family.”⁶ He would have reversed the formula in describing farmer James or Andrew the Hebridean: all that was related to the welfare of their families was good, just, and equitable. The difference seems to lie between the self and the family in the non-competitive, egalitarian terms of farming, and the same concepts qualified by the necessities of a mercantile context.

The figure of the farmer-merchant retrospectively highlights a peculiar aspect of the yeoman hero in the earlier letters. One wonders whether Crèvecoeur then had excluded all trading and market activities from his account of the farmer's life in order not to taint his ideal vision. Otherwise the lack of any commerce in the agrarian idylls of the Letters, where neighbors exchange goods and services but never seem to sell them, remains puzzling. The issue is not money, which we would expect to be scarce in a rural economy, but profit. Crèvecoeur's model farmers achieve ease and plentiful subsistence, they gain respect and standing in the community, they earn their way, but they do not earn profits: for Crèvecoeur, this would have amounted to profiteering.

Thus anyway he argued in a sketch called “The American Belisarius,” significantly written after the outbreak of the Revolution. The original Belisarius rose from the rank of servant to become the Emperor Justinian's chief general. He enjoyed something of a vogue in the late eighteenth century and was said by Sir William Temple to have been one of seven men in history who were worthy to be monarchs but weren't. The victim of endless intrigue, he reportedly refused to abuse his power to punish his enemies, while maintaining an unswerving loyalty to his Emperor. Gibbon was not certain whether the patience with which Belisarius endured his rivals' insults proved him more or less than a man; but for Crèvecoeur, the Roman's endurance and loyalty and withal the inherent superiority he refused to exploit—so that he lost his home and fortune finally without ever losing his temper—clearly made him the beau idéal of the American Loyalist.⁷ His worthy American counterpart, S. K., had gone out to the frontier as a young man and built up a remarkably flourishing farm. As he grew rich, he did not forget his family, and duly settled his two brothers-in-law on neighboring lands where, with his help, they too were soon thriving. “Their prosperity, which was his work, raised no jealousy in him,” wrote Crèvecoeur, finding it all a “pastoral and edifying spectacle: three brothers, the founders of three opulent families, the creators of three valuable plantations, the promoters of the succeeding settlements that took place around them.” Here was the fulfillment of Crèvecoeur's ideal, the family generating a community of equals who progress through the kind of mutual assistance which leaves each one freely possessive of his own home and hearth. With the coming of more settlers to the region, however, certain complications do develop. “It was not to be expected that they could all equally thrive. Prosperity is not the lot of every man; so many casualties occur that often prevent it.” How can the familial model deal with such casualties? What can a democratic society do with its inevitable inequalities? S. K. again points the righteous way. In hard times he opens his granary to his neighbors:

he lends them hay; he assists them in whatever they want; he cheers them with good counsel; he becomes a father to the poor of this wilderness. They promise him payment; he never demands it.

For Crèvecoeur what was most telling is his not demanding payment, for this is the touchstone of S. K.'s morality. He refuses to enter the marketplace. He has the largest stock of grain in the area, prices are soaring and traders approach him with tempting offers, but he rejects them saying,

“I have no wheat … for the rich, my harvest is for the poor. What would the inhabitants of these mountains do were I to divest myself of what superfluous grain I have?”⁸

We will pay you at once, they argue, while these poor will make you wait indefinitely. He answers that he cannot let his neighbors starve.

If S. K. will not sell, neither does he buy. At harvest time he requires no hired help, for the grateful folk come from all around to gather in the “patriarchal harvest.” S. K.'s patriarchism is in no sense feudal though Crèvecoeur's use of traditional terms to suggest the deeper validity of this moral code may obscure its anti-aristocratic assumptions. But just as the Roman Belisarius was a model because he was born a commoner, S. K. is called “princely” only to suggest that none on earth is more deserving of the title than a “good substantial independent American farmer,” such as he is and remains to the end. His aim in helping his indigent fellows is not to earn their fealty but their friendship, by freeing them into self-sufficiency. He is no better than his neighbors except in the sense that he represents their common type at its best, and when he rejects the merchants' offer, it is not out of a sense of noblesse but of common humanity. There is nothing contradictory to democratic thought in this stance as such. Familial patriarchs after all are as congruent with middle-class societies as a patriarchal nobility was with the feudal system, the modern family being essentially a small fiefdom, as the old adage has it that proclaims a man's home as his castle. What is unusual about S. K. is that he plays the role of noble father not only to his family but to the community at large. In this way he represents Crèvecoeur's democratic familialism, whose ennobling patriarchism had neither the source nor the purpose of the feudal aristocratic variety. In modern terms, the alternative of such a kindly father would be neither wicked king nor faithless lord, but just such a gouging, thieving merchant as the one featured in “Manners of the Americans.”

Indeed, Crèvecoeur's earlier list of the European evils that America has averted included, in addition to aristocrats, kings and bishops, “great manufacturers employing thousands.” (p. 46) The old aristocracy was not the only one that he deplored. In a discussion of the unfortunate spread of tea drinking in America (when native herbs are plentiful and better for you), he shook his head over a newer breed of lords:

It was necessary that our forefathers should discover and till this country in order that their prosperity might serve to enrich a parcel of London merchants who though but citizens in England, yet are nabobs in India; who though mighty fond of liberty at home for themselves and their children, yet do not choose that other people should enjoy these great benefits in their Indian dominions. The idea of merchants becoming sovereigns, lords and tyrants … but a poor American farmer must not say all he thinks.⁹

What he saw as best about America—or more to the point, what had been best about it before the Revolution—was that a good man could become wealthy without engaging in imperialism or even commerce: without having to deprive his equals of the substance he acquires.

Crèvecoeur's agrarianism may have been based on the view that only farming could produce wealth without exploitation. Like the Physiocrats by whom he was influenced, he believed that only the land produces value, so that all other means of acquiring it must amount to theft—hence the fraudulent merchant. Quesnay and the Physiocrats envisioned a stable, rationalized France of cultured farmers who leased their lands and derived a comfortable subsistence, with enough over to feed the minority necessarily engaged in non-agricultural tasks. But in the American context of expansion and open-ended growth, even the modest Crèvecoeur sensed that something more was needed. Though his aspirations were limited, they were still grander than those of his European counterparts. He recognized as much with satisfaction. He therefore modified the Physiocrat program by having American farmers eventually own their land, explaining that Europe was crowded and its lands long since taken up, but that the New World remained accessible to all.

But he knew too that this concept of “equal divisions of the land offered no short road to superior riches.” To speak to the American situation, he needed to represent a possibility for even larger expansion which would still remain free of the mercantile taint. That is why Nantucket was so important to him. It seemed to embody a solution to the otherwise pervasively corrupting paradox of equality and competition. For the sailors who “plough the rougher ocean,” do have thereby a “short road to superior riches,” which is as free from fraud as is agriculture. Like a plentiful harvest too, the sudden windfall of a good catch neither derives from nor generates pernicious social inequalities. Among the people of Nantucket,

the gradations [of wealth] are founded on nothing more than the good or ill success of their maritime enterprises, and do not proceed from education; that is the same throughout every class, simple, useful, and unadorned like their dress and their houses.

But having an equal start and maintaining a relatively equal lifestyle does not yet comprise the fundamental equality which Crèvecoeur was after. He realized that this had to do more with the structure of the economy itself than with the way individuals entered into it. Not only do the free men of Nantucket begin their accumulation of property as equals, none having significantly more than any other, but the property they seek is such that it is continually accessible to each of them. The “necessary difference in their fortunes” does not cause among Nantucketers “those heart burnings, which in other societies generate crime,” because “the sea which surrounds them is equally open to all, and presents to all an equal title to the chance of good fortune.” (pp. 116-17) They get their riches from the sea, not from each other, so that no one person's income, however large, in any way lessens another's. Moreover, by using the limitless ocean to represent capital, Crèvecoeur avoided all the implications of scarcity, and could reconcile the inequalities generated by the unregulated individualistic enterprise that he considered the expression of freedom, with his moral conviction that the means for such enterprise must be equally available. In Nantucket one doesn't need to engage in fierce competition in order to grow rich; one grows rich beside one's neighbors, working hard privately but in harmony with them.

This unique instance of transcendent enterprise, however, only underlined Crèvecoeur's general rejection of the commercial nexus. For him the marketplace did not make for a better product, but for the ferocities of the jungle. Just such a jungle (to return to the case of the unhappy American Belisarius) was what the Revolution seemed to Crèvecoeur to be creating in America. The story of S. K. ends sadly. Having rejected the blandishments of usurious commerce, and having sought only to mind his farm and to assist others in minding theirs, that good man still tries to keep his private counsel when the fighting breaks out. But privacy is no longer allowed; “as a citizen of a smaller society,” Crèvecoeur wrote in the throes of the war, “I find that any kind of opposition to its now prevailing sentiments, immediately begets hatred.” (p. 207) The envious and greedy gather, S. K.'s brothers-in-law see an opportunity to vent their jealousy, local merchants want to see him forced to buy and sell, less advantaged farmers just want his land. Eventually he is driven from his burned-out farm into the wilderness. The leaders of the Revolution may have had more inspired motives, Crèvecoeur speculated, but the effect of their bid for freedom was to enslave everyone else. Shortly before he is totally despoiled, S. K. receives a group of local yeomen who come as usual to ask him for help over the long winter. Among them he recognizes some who have been persecuting him. They haven't wanted to, they explain, but what could they do? The weakness which has brought them to his door also makes them subject to all the petty tyrants the war has unleashed. S. K. understands their plight, and distributes the last of the grain.

What we come to understand is the necessity for a strong overall authority, equally restrictive of all to keep each man free of his equals. Crèvecoeur had hoped once that a benevolent environment would render its inhabitants equally benevolent. He had thought then that men might live together virtually without external authority. Again Nantucket represented the best of all governments, one which simply left people alone:

solemn tribunals, public executions, humiliating punishments, are altogether unknown. I saw neither governors, nor any pageantry of state; neither ostentatious magistrates, nor any individuals cloathed with useless dignity: no artificial phantoms subsist here either civil or religious; no gibbets loaded with guilty citizens offer themselves to your view; no soldieries are appointed to bayonet their compatriots into servile compliance.

(p. 115)

The positive advantages of such governance are all negative, and Crèvecoeur would rather have done without it altogether. Unfortunately, even in the New World, many men have remained like those cattle who, “conscious of their superior force, will abuse it when unrestrained by any law, and often live on their neighbors' property.” (p. 237) Therefore, “the law is to us precisely what I am in my barn yard, a bridle and check to prevent the strong and greedy, from oppressing the timid and weak.” (p. 34) In Nantucket as everywhere, there are times when the weak must be protected from the strong, and thus “the law at a distance is ever ready to exert itself in the protection of those who stand in need of its assistance.” (p. 115)

“At a distance”: the phrase was all-important to Crèvecoeur, it was the key to his outlook. If we recall that he defined personal identity entirely in terms of self-possession and property, it becomes evident that he must have viewed external authority per se as inevitably problematical. It had to be all-inclusive and absolute; it also had to be non-interfering, indeed non-engaging. Across a dangerous ocean, thousands of miles away, the crown of England was the best solution imaginable. It was “the law at a distance” incarnate.

Earlier Crèvecoeur had made the ideal explicit:

Where is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of American farmer, possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little from us. …

(pp. 28-9)

Pre-revolutionary America, therefore, enjoyed the “general Happiness” which “proceeds from a government which does everything for us and requires little or nothing in return.”¹⁰ And Crèvecoeur's personal situation represented that blissful state perfectly: “I owe nothing, but a peppercorn to my country, a small tribute to my King, with loyalty and due respect.” (p. 28) If the Whigs found English intrusion in America unbearable, Crèvecoeur clearly did not share their view. A few taxes seemed to him to mean relatively little compared to the secure freedom of the Nantucket sailors who ply the seas as they will:

a collector from Boston is the only King's officer who appears on these shores to receive the trifling duties which this community owe to those who protect them, and under the shadow of whose wings they navigate to all parts of the world.

(p. 117)

His ideal government had little impact on the local activities of individuals; its role was global, and on that scale, absolute.

This notion that maintaining equal freedom requires a strong central authority did not originate with Crèvecoeur, of course. The case had long since been made by Hobbes, among others, whose account of man in the state of nature Crèvecoeur essentially echoed, while capturing also in his barnyard image the flavor of Hobbes' view of civilized man. Moreover, Hobbes was not alone in believing that this authority was best embodied in an absolute monarch. In the next century and in another country Giambattista Vico considered it only logical that societies desiring to institutionalize “natural equity” would be ruled typically by

monarchs who have accustomed their subjects to attend to their private interests, while they themselves have taken charge of all public affairs and desire all … subject to them to be made equal by the laws, in order that all may be equally interested in the state.¹¹

These founding theoreticians of modern liberal society thus projected a concept of monarchy which was neither that of feudalism nor the Renaissance. This monarchy is subject-centered, justifying itself as the guarantor of the subjects' rights. Such a concept in no way precludes liberal democracy. On the contrary, the extent of that democracy—its potential for including more and more people like Andrew the Hebridean, who work their way from indenture to a full-fledged property-owning selfhood—seems to depend on the monarch's being altogether absolute, and thus out of reach of manipulation: hence Crèvecoeur's enthusiasm for King George.¹²

It was Locke who introduced the possibility that a democratic society might instead govern itself. The base of that governance would rest on the ordering force of the market, now conceived as an arena of class rather than of purely individual activity. Having accepted the accumulation of larger amounts of property than one could use on the grounds that its translation into capital and subsequent reinvestment redounded to the general welfare, Locke foresaw this process generating a consensus among the investors which might be institutionalized contractually, and generalized into government. The participants in this consensus should be able to agree on the rules of the game.

This is where one sees the relationship between S. K.'s refusal to deal with the grain merchants and his vulnerability to the greedy mob. Crèvecoeur himself was only vaguely aware of this relationship, not quite seeing that S. K. needs the King but that the merchants do better without him, their rights safeguarded by contracts, and by a contractual society whose law and order is suited to their entrepreneurial needs. Crèvecoeur's failure to understand the function of local laws and contracts was expressed more clearly in his hatred of lawyers. “What a pity,” he exclaimed, “that our forefathers who happily extinguished so many fatal customs, and expunged from their new government as many errors and abuses, both religious and civil, did not also prevent the introduction of a set of men so dangerous.” (p. 146) They plagued America like the clergy did Europe. This was an acute comparison, lawyers being the interpreters of the new order as the clergy were of the old. Crèvecoeur, who had hoped that the world might at last be free of all impingements of personal freedom, but for a small set of permanent injunctions, saw lawyers reweaving entanglements all around.

The crux, then, of his disaffiliation with the Lockean compromise so well represented by the American Constitution was his rejection of the ethic of the marketplace. For the American revolutionaries, enlightened self-interest reflected the natural moral order, but to Crèvecoeur its mercantile expression was little better than theft. The sort of economic order he envisaged instead was evident in his appeal to American farmers to recognize the benefits of monarchy. Secure in your holdings and master of its fruits, he reminded the yeoman,

thou needs't not tremble lest the most incomprehensible prohibitions shall rob thee of that sacred immunity with which the produce of thy farm may circulate from hand to hand until it reaches those of the final exporter.¹³

Once again, he defined freedom as being left alone; the right to trade is a “sacred immunity” from restraint. So might any merchant argue against restraints, but he would not do so just to have his product “circulate”: what he would be after would be an increase in value at each transition, that increase not to be limited by “incomprehensible prohibitions.” This view of the farmer's stake in the national economy translated the patriarchal-familial ethic into a paradoxical ideology we might term “monarcho-anarchism.” Crèvecoeur was an anarchist in the sense that he carried the notion of the political integrity of the individual to its logical conclusion. His definition of self-determination was thus more radical or more absolute than that which is commonly implied by democracy, because he could see in the accommodations of majority rule no advantages but only a loss of freedom for each individual.

Both in this libertarian aspect and in its egalitarianism, Crèvecoeur's thinking reflected his eighteenth-century agrarian experiences, but it might be seen also as a sort of pre-history to one important strain of nineteenth-century dissent. Populism invoked the yeoman ideal as the core of its program, associating the vision with Jefferson as powerful validation of its Americanism; but a loyalist Frenchman the Populists had probably never heard of would have been far more sympathetic both to their resentment of the rich and their conviction that markets were where the rich became ever richer. Although historians of the United States' War of Independence have long recognized that the patriots differed sharply among themselves about even the basic definition of democracy, by and large they have assumed that, as a group, those who favored the Revolution were more democratically inclined than those who opposed it.¹⁴ The case of Crèvecoeur puts this assumption in doubt, and highlights such findings as those of Jackson Turner Main, that the largest single group of Loyalists were, like Crèvecoeur, small independent farmers.¹⁵ Yet these were the same “self-reliant, honest and independent” yeomen who became “the backbone of Jeffersonian democracy” and later “the common man of Jacksonian rhetoric.”¹⁶ Though such yeomen also swelled the Patriot ranks, some significant number of them rejected Jefferson's promise of a country of their own and, if Crèvecoeur is at all representative, they did so because they feared it would be less free than colonial America, at least for their kind.

What all this indicates, I think, is a need to reconsider the structure of the Revolutionary debate that now represents the winners' assumptions. Crèvecoeur's usefulness lies in his accepting none of these and yet still making perfect sense. As a result he raises basic questions about the component values and ideas which the successful Revolution fused into one apparently organic whole. Crèvecoeur was independent while refusing to compete; a seeker after plentiful subsistence who rejected profits, and a supporter of the King because monarchy was for him the corollary of social equality. His opposition to the American Revolution was grounded in the principle that all men are created equal—and that so should they remain.¹⁷ It was a basically localist, familial impulse which committed him to absolute monarchs. In these ways, he may be seen as representing an intermediate stage in the evolution of America's liberal political philosophy, or as a case in point for its paradoxical nature at any stage.

Notes

1. J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, (Garden City: Dolphin, n.d.), 46-7. Subsequent references to the Letters appear parenthetically in the text.

2. See the biography by Julia Post Mitchell, St. Jean de Crèvecoeur (New York: AMS Press, 1966).

3. Rowland Berthoff and John M. Murrin find this to be the general historical consensus in their seminal essay, “Feudalism, Communalism and the Yeoman Freeholder,” in Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson, eds., Essays on the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1973), 261.

4. Despite his protestations to the contrary in the first letter, or rather because of the very language in which these are couched, it is clear that Crèvecoeur was no simple farmer, but a highly educated gentleman whose social and intellectual connections extended far beyond Pine Hill. But if his observations were thus unusually well-informed, this does not mean they were not as linked to the realities of Pine Hill and its environs as those of farmers who knew little of the world beyond. It is an interesting problem whether the greater sophistication of one member of a community undermines his representativeness, or perhaps heightens it, by enabling him to articulate what his neighbors may only feel.

5. Such a revival, interrupted by the Revolution, is discussed by Berthoff and Murrin, “Feudalism, Communalism and the Yeoman Freeholder,” 264-76. Indeed the experience of this revival and his opposition to it may well have contributed to Crèvecoeur's loyalism, for, led in Pennsylvania by Benjamin Franklin, the opponents of feudalism sought to persuade the English crown to rule the colony directly in lieu of large proprietors: thus would the monarchy protect the equality of its subjects.

6. Crèvecoeur, Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America (New York: Signet, 1963), 260-63.

7. William Smith, ed., Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Myth (Boston and London, 1849), 479-80.

8. Sketches, 384-86.

9. Ibid., 308-09.

10. Ibid., 253.

11. The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated from the Third Edition (1744) by Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1970), 8.

12. James Henretta has made the interesting suggestion that another model for Crèvecoeur's notion of a distant monarch might be found in contemporary Deism. Again the issue addressed by the model is the assurance of order without intrusive controls.

13. Sketches, 259.

14. This seems to be the assumption even of those scholars such as Jesse Lemisch in his essay, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3 (July 1968), 371-407, who challenge the view that such men as Washington and Jefferson represented a revolutionary consensus that included all classes. The discovery that certain groups dissented from this consensus and sought to change the character of the Revolution to better represent their interests and social vision might suggest the possibility that some who felt misrepresented by its leadership may have demurred from the Revolution altogether.

15. Jackson Turner Main, The Sovereign States, 1775-1783 (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), 272-73. For a more complete treatment of the Loyalists see Chap. V, “The Tory Rank and File,” in William H. Nelson, The American Tory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971). Nelson argues that “Taking all the groups and factions, sects, classes, and inhabitants of regions that seem to have been Tory, they have but one thing in common: [being neither unusually rich, nor English, nor colonially connected] they represented conscious minorities, people who felt weak and threatened.” (p. 91)

16. Essays on the American Revolution, 276.

17. What Crèvecoeur feared from the Revolution, what he had hoped America would never become, is just that Yankee society Richard L. Bushman describes emerging in Connecticut and setting the scene for the coming Revolution. It was a society in which “the avid pursuit of gain” had become an acceptable goal of life, which “found an honorable place for self-interest in the social order,” and which interpreted that order as orderly competition. See Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: Norton, 1970), 287.