[In the following essay, Grabo suggests that Letters, taken as a whole, not only celebrates America's seemingly endless possibilities, but also expresses the disillusionment accompanying the failure of those possibilities to be realized.]

In 1779, Mr. James Hector St. John—a French-born New York farmer of loyalist sympathies, but suspected of being a Revolutionary spy—lay sick, hungry, impoverished, and terrified in the New York City prison. Born in Caen, Normandy, in 1735, the forty-four-year-old St. John found himself thrust by circumstances into one of the many bizarre corners of his remarkable career. Educated at the fine Jesuit Collège du Mont, he had spent a year or so with relatives in Salisbury, England, before emigrating to Canada in 1755. There he served with the French army until wounded at Quebec in 1759. Oddly, he cast his lot with the British Americans later that year and, after several years of traveling the frontier as a surveyor and trader (during which period he was formally adopted into the Oneida), married an American woman and purchased 120 acres of farmland in Orange County, New York. The farm—called Pine Hill—thrived, as did his family of three children.

But as hostilities between Revolutionaries and loyalists intensified, St. John, perhaps fearing for his continued control over his American property, decided to return to France to lay good legal claim to his patrimony there (not least for the sake of ensuring that his Normandy properties would pass to his elder son). In New York, awaiting passage, he suddenly found himself a victim of the times, separated from his family, and enjoying only sporadic control over the trunkload of essays and sketches he had been scribbling at over the years.¹

More than thirty essays—some only a few pages in length, others more fully developed—brilliantly bespoke a new and arresting voice in American letters. While the young Yale poet Joel Barlow was reasoning himself carefully beyond a provincial American literary nationality, St. John leaped boldly into an international republic of enlightened letters for which the world of real politics was not quite ready. St. John's sketches distribute themselves according to two thematic emphases: first, the confident celebration of Arcadian possibilities under a political system that was essentially mild and enabling; second, the horror that accompanied the irrational repudiation of that system. Put somewhat differently, St. John's sketches depicted both the American dream and its brutal subversive nightmare.

Numerous echoes resound through these essays, both European and American—British poets Thomson and Cowper, the ancients Hesiod and Virgil, the French Du Bartas, and colonials Anne Bradstreet's “Quaternions” and Edward Johnson's Wonder-Working Providence. But their prose is mainly that of the newspaper essayists of the time—the many hermits, travelers, friends, and the like who by living apart from settled communities could comment wisely upon social matters. St. John assumes the same kind of dignity in his prose, an almost foreign formality of grammar and diction—long sentences, highly subordinated, heavily Latinate. It is the voice of a complacent, successful, and thankful man of means, a simple farmer, yes, but deeply read in and articulate about the book of nature on which his good feelings depend. He is not an abstruse philosopher, and his opinions on government or religion pretend a closeness to what a thoughtful farmer might generate from his very work.

Twenty years of hard traveling throughout the colonies, from the Carolinas to Maine and from Nova Scotia to the Great Lakes, and nine years of developing his New York farm had taught this farmer the pleasures of property. They were not pleasures gained without cost. Living directly off nature was precarious. Natural forces moving with majestic seasonal rhythms drove any sensible person into feverish activity. The sketch of “A Snow-storm as It Affects the American Farmer” opens on that note:

No man of the least degree of sensibility can journey through any number of years in whatever climate without often being compelled to make many useful observations on the different phenomena of Nature which surround him and without involuntarily being struck either with awe or admiration in beholding some of the elementary conflicts in the midst of which he lives. A great thunder-storm, an extensive flood, a desolating hurricane, a sudden and intense frost, an overwhelming snow-storm, a sultry day—each of these different scenes exhibits regular beauties even in spite of the damage they cause. Often whilst the heart laments the loss to the citizen, the enlightened mind, seeking for the natural causes, and astonished at the effects, awakes itself to surprise and wonder.

[p. 231]

In this sketch of the first blizzard of winter, the farmer needs more than astonishment and surprise. Indeed, surprise is a luxury he cannot afford. Animal pens have to have been prepared and fodder laid down for the stock, firewood made ready and brought in, food preserved, warm clothing and bedding readied. Then let Nature bring down her snows. All that is left is to gather the children from school and the stock from the fields.

The farmer of feelings also looks out for his neighbors when Nature shows its force, for nothing can be accomplished entirely by one's own efforts. In a new land everything requires mutual dependence—the farmer on his “amiable spouse,” farm laborers and even slaves upon the farmer's agreeable conditions. People work and play together hard because all see that groups are necessary not only for frolics, songs, and merriment (“Thoughts of an American Farmer on Various Rural Subjects,” p. 282), but also for barn raisings, swamp drainings, and rock and stump removal. Mutual interest generates both hard work and good feelings. In “On the Susquehanna: The Wyoming Massacre,” St. John wonders at the capacity of tiny communities—sometimes single families—to flourish happily in extreme isolation and in the constant danger of “fire, sickness or enemy” (pp. 360-361).

But against the dangers of Nature and isolation the American farmer who is prudent, observant, tolerant, sagacious, diligent, and industrious can, with a little help from his friends, prevail. No Tintern Abbey ruins thrilled St. John, but neat fields burgeoning with grain, grass, and orchards did. Fatted stock would stick to one's ribs all winter; dried apples came back to luscious life with a little water; the cider warmed one's bones against the blasts. There was constant cost—having to do everything yourself, having to be a bricoleur or ingenious jack-of-all-trades, having to attend to differences of soil and the plant life it would support, having to avoid killing the land. American farming in the eighteenth century was different from European, for in Europe land was limited, had been cleared for centuries, was strictly regulated, and worked by peasants ruled over by tyrannical overseers. In America the farmer had to fight rough and overgrown terrain, swamps, frosts that threw his fences over every spring, and hosts of insects, particularly mosquitoes. Labor was expensive and demanding, and quite willing to go elsewhere if treated without dignity. The land was there, but to buy it required going deeply in debt; an economy based entirely on futures was necessarily unstable; failure, a driving threat. The American farmer, St. John was fond of saying, paid his taxes in sweat and worry (“Thoughts,” pp. 266-316).

But when he succeeds—not least because of a mild British government and easy credit, as well as by unending industry—the American farmer does what seems to St. John to be natural. He builds a new house out of solid stone to manifest his rock-hard solidity, turning his original crude dwelling into a general store or tavern. Knowing that everyone else is out to mind the main chance and look out for himself, he cheats a little. “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. Strict integrity is not much wanted, as each is on his guard in his daily intercourse; and this mode of thinking and acting becomes habitual” (“Reflections on the Manners of the Americans,” p. 262). Believing that religious tolerance in America had bred a religious apathy that made moral and ethical corner cutting acceptable social behavior, St. John says that American farmers put their trust instead in the legal system and litigation: “The law, therefore, and its plain meaning are the only forcible standards which strike and guide their senses and become their rule of action” (p. 262). This judgment is put with neither scorn nor satire. And whatever one may think of the implied Snopesism or Babbittry of St. John's depiction, this is the class of men “who in future will replenish this huge continent, even to its utmost unknown limits, and render this new-found part of the world by far the happiest, the most potent as well as the most populous of any. Happy people! May the poor, the wretched of Europe, animated by our example, invited by our laws, avoid the fetters of their country and come in shoals to partake of our toils as well as of our happiness” (“A Snow-storm,” p. 238).

In a world of natural pests—insects, birds, lightning, serpents, mosquitoes, town rats and barn mice, grasshoppers, and who knows how many others we see not—St. John's “Man is a huge monster who devours everything and will suffer nothing to live in peace in his neighborhood” (“Thoughts,” p. 294). Nature, if not quite red in tooth and claw, is nonetheless an economy of evil, providing nothing for nothing: “Thus one species of evil is balanced by another; thus the fury of one element is repressed by the power of the other. In the midst of this great, this astonishing equipoise, Man struggles and lives” (“Thoughts,” p. 297). It seems then that the self-interest that turns the American farmer into a litigious opportunist is often in St. John's thought merely an instinctual expression driven by interlocking chains of natural parasitism. If this is Jeffersonian agrarianism, it is hardly an attractive image of either natural or social life, but it is one upon which St. John gazes open-eyed.

Throughout the sketches, man does not control or master Nature; at best he rides its capricious powers, coaxing it like the sap of maples or the swarming of bees into honeyed nurture. The most he can do is divert its evils: tarns can be drained, provision in moments of plenty can outwait the exigencies of want, and men of genius like Benjamin Franklin can devise lightning rods to drain off the vicious excesses of natural disaster:

Corn-cribs are indispensable because this grain is preserved there longer than anywhere else. You well remember their peculiar structure. Some people are, and all should be, furnished with electrical rods. The best way to place them, in order to save expense, is on a high cedar mast situated between the house and the barn. Its power will attract the lightning sufficiently to save both. Mine is so. I once saw its happy effects and blessed the inventor. My barn was then completely full. I valued it at about seven hundred pounds. What should I have done, had not the good Benjamin Franklin thought of this astonishing invention?

[“Thoughts,” p. 314]

There are moments, however, when the successful farmer, aided by devices like Franklin's, comes to feel that he is in charge, is actually managing Nature by appearing to manage his farm. Crops and livestock, slaves, servants, children, and wife become his, all of Nature becomes his, and man is what but a god in little?²

Lulled into complacent security by his material opulence, St. John's farmer is not ready for social and political upheaval. Crops can be stolen, houses and barns burned to the ground, families rousted from their beds in the middle of the night and terrorized by thugs, homes looted of all valuables, and entire farms confiscated in the name of a new self-declared revolutionary government. At least eight essays and sketches, including one lengthy play, among those in the trunk seized by the British in New York, recorded St. John's recoil in horror and confusion from the scenes of warfare. All were presumably composed between 1774 and 1779: “The English and the French Before the Revolution” adverts back to his Canadian experiences in the 1750s; “The Man of Sorrows” portrays the torture and terrorism of an innocent farmer by a gang of angry Sons of Freedom; “On the Susquehanna: The Wyoming Massacre” places the sudden, vicious destruction of that community at Wilkes-Barre against the long series of hardships by which it had been wrested from the wilderness; “History of Mrs. B.,” a short report rather like a captivity narrative, describes the consequences for a family turned from happy farmers to displaced war refugees; “The Frontier Woman” lives a nightmare of disguises, terror, distress, and barbarity; “The American Belisarius” traces the fall from prosperity of a sensible farmer at the hands of greedy, ignorant, hypocritical, and self-important patriots; “The Grotto” describes the desperate attempts of loyalist landowners to hide from the Revolutionaries; the play, “Landscapes,” shows six episodes of the frustration, humiliation, shame, and insult added to the injury of property loss; and “Distresses of a Frontier Man” abstracts the main features of the preceding sketches.

St. John's clear tory sympathies at least kept both the sketches and their author intact in British New York. His own estate was not confiscated, although the house would be lost to fire during the war. He seems to have been a man of no very deep political convictions or principles. He had apparently signed an oath of allegiance to the Revolutionary government, while at the same time he imagined himself (in “The Grotto”) bellowing out “Rule Britan[n]ia” from the bowels of a buried hideout in the forests.³ He might be considered what the satirists of the period called a “trimmer,” one who cut his politics to fit whichever party ruled at the moment.⁴ But he also seems indifferent to power, which he frequently condemns as a social motive (e.g., “Landscapes,” pp. 452, 473). If property conferred education, leisure, acceptance by learned men of means such as his friend Cadwallader Colden, the student of Iroquois culture and sometime lieutenant governor of New York, if it meant handsome meals and fine wines, well it did, and they were his right. He had earned them, and he failed to imagine how others might resent his superior station and manners.

His images of outrage, although cast in terms of sentimental stereotypes—brutalized innocence, lamenting women, terrified children, the homeless and hungry, petty and ignorant officialdom, thoughtless mobs of vigilantes, and venal greedy hypocrites who justified their inhuman seizures by false patriotic slogans and sentiments—are therefore tainted by his political naiveté. Property and the law by which it is secured—that law on which the shrewd farmer had relied—were both more malleable and even transferrable than St. John had appreciated. In “Landscapes,” a prominent farmer named Marston has been driven into hiding by suspicion of his British sympathies. Because he has fled his home, it is confiscated by the newly constituted local committee under the authority of militiaman Col. Templeman. Mrs. Marston, with no alternative but to accept her bitter loss, challenges the colonel's humanity and honesty. The exchange, clearly favoring Mrs. Marston's fiery prose, is very telling:

Colonel: … Where the crime lies, the lawful revenge should take place. Your husband from the beginning has been a supporter of the oppressive acts of Parliament, that venal body which wants freedom at home and loves to spread tyranny abroad. They have not to deal with the inhabitants of Bengal, I promise you. Mr. Marston has been, in short, exceedingly inimical and a bad man in the true sense of the word.

Mrs. Marston: You have so subverted the course and order of things that no one knows what is a bad man in your new political sense; but in spite of modern definition the true meaning of that word stands yet on its old foundation. A bad man is he, sir, who tears up the bowels of his native country; who subverts its best laws; who makes tyranny, informing, injustice, oppression of every kind, the cause of God; who arrests people without cause; imprisons them for whole months and seasons without hearing or inquiries; and leaves them to languish under the accumulated weight of want, despair, and disease. A bad man, sir, is he who when he had it in his power to prevent it, suffered an innocent young man to perish in a suffocating gaol, panting for breath, burnt and scorched by the most excessive fever; and yet would not release him …

[pp. 466-467]

Because each side sees the other in the wrong, each sees the other as perverting, and since both use the same language, no reconciliation between the sides seems possible. If St. John gives the nod to the impassioned rhetoric of the distraught woman, he also allows the colonel his pride of resistance to what he sees as injustice.

Indeed, what one sees from the loose collection of sketches is a writer alert to the merits of too many contrary kinds of human beings and principles for his own political good. Finally released from prison, St. John underwent several fairytalelike transformations while sailing from New York to Dublin, thence to London and, after almost a year, to France. In London he contracted with Davies and Davis for publication of a selection of his sketches, which appeared early in 1782 to immediate acclaim. J. Hector St. John had fled America in a large convoy carrying thousands of other war refugees, an ignominious and destitute scribbling farmer. Two years later, in France, he resumed his original patronymic, “de Crèvecoeur,” and under that name emerged as full-fledged author of the much read and widely esteemed Letters from an American Farmer. He had left a British-American and was now again a Frenchman at war with the British. The once American farmer was now a French knight, honored at many intellectual salons, and introduced to the leading French intellectuals of his time as the foremost authority on American life lived as Rousseau might have imagined it, and indeed enjoying the patronage and friendship of Rousseau's former mistress, Madame d'Houdetot. By 1782 Crèvecoeur was a celebrity.

He was immediately identified with his creation, the mythic American farmer, despite his strong efforts to distance himself from his narrator. If we suppose that St. John worked with his publishers on the concept of his book, several observations leap to attention. The first is that the farmer as distressed frontiersman was fully in St. John's head, written out in other sketches if not quite in the form given in Letter XII. Second, St. John knew where the trajectory of the American Farmer's career would end—in ruin, desolation, and misery. Third, that would mean that the optimism and good feelings of the first three letters were purposely enhanced—even their naiveté made especially beguiling—in the knowledge that they would be undermined or subverted by the end of the book. Letter I, especially, presumably was composed after the material of Letter XII had been thoroughly worked out and after the device of arranging the sketches as a series of epistles to a sophisticated English reader had been decided upon.

Perhaps more than any other, that first letter illustrates St. John's artistic abilities—three near-caricatures (the happy and sentimental farmer of feelings, his rustic timidity overcome by a flattering invitation; his wife the gentle scold, cynical and sharp without shrewishness; and the somewhat pompous Yale-trained minister) engage in mildly satiric dialogue that slips from narrative to dramatic presentation almost imperceptibly—all incorporated within the fiction of a letter. Comparison with his earlier play “Landscapes” illustrates at once the greater complexity of his dramatic technique in Letter I. Between the wife's warnings and the minister's judicious flattery, simple-minded Farmer James accepts the invitation to explain America to England. The debate is delicately and mildly comic, masking its own ominous foreshadowings.

What Mistress James tries to do is to keep her husband from playing the fool, putting on airs, rising above his station, trying to appear better than he is, better than their neighbors are (pp. 47-49): “Some would imagine that thee wantest to become either an assemblyman or a magistrate, which God forbid, and that thee art telling the king's men abundance of things. Instead of being well looked upon as now, and living in peace with all the world, our neighbours would be making strange surmises. … [L]et it be as great a secret as if it was some heinous crime” (p. 48). Goody James's gentle teasing seems innocent, even though it treats writing as a form of disturbing the peace. But as the letters take on an increasingly somber and melancholy tinge, the notion of scribbling as disturbing the peace deepens. In Letter XI the concept expands from writing to any kind of intellectual activity. When the simple plowman John Bertram discovered his calling as a botanist by contemplating a daisy, he generated a similar alarm in his wife: “I mentioned it to my wife, who greatly discouraged me from prosecuting my new scheme [to study plants systematically], as she called it; I was not opulent enough, she said, to dedicate much of my time to studies and labours which might rob me of that portion of it which is the only wealth of the American farmer. However, her prudent caution did not discourage me …” (p. 195). When in the apocalyptic Letter XII the American Farmer's dream is shredded by distrust and suspicion, we see the ambiguous justness of St. John's early planting.

St. John's design for Letters from an American Farmer is thus the most complex and ambiguous since William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, a resemblance that has not escaped notice.⁵ The minister reminds Farmer James that they are on the edge of a vast wilderness with an equally vast sea behind them (p. 44). James also echoes Bradford's amused astonishment at “how quick men will learn when they work for themselves” (pp. 102-103). And when the war drives him to seek refuge in a foreign society, one of his chief worries is how to keep his family together and his children from losing their English ways and manners (pp. 211, 219). But primarily it is the parallel action of watching all one's earthly hopes crumble before new political forces that pulls these books together, along with their disjunctive form.

Letters from an American Farmer is an example of the American tradition of book-as-anthology and authorship-as-editing. As in Bradford's rhapsody, the medley of subjects masks an underlying coherence. That is part of St. John's fiction, of course: Farmer James will not presume to undertake a systematic treatise on America; he will not soar to a grand overview like a majestic eagle. No, he says, “I, a feebler bird, cheerfully content myself with skipping from bush to bush and living on insignificant insects” (p. 90). The book's casual character and superficial disconnections—even the presentation of the sketches as discontinuous letters—go to justify its formal discontinuities. This rhapsodic character achieves another level of justification more consciously than it had with previous writers. That is, in describing the new American, Farmer James emphasizes diversity and variety—different things coming together not in a total blend but in an aggregate like a mosaic. Thus, he maintains, talking about frontier religion, “in a few years this mixed neighbourhood will exhibit a strange religious medley that will be neither pure Catholicism nor pure Calvinism” (p. 75). Languages will likewise mix, as will nationalities and cultures—a veritable hodgepodge of differences. So, too, is the book selected and arranged—a purposeful mosaic, not a smooth and continuous surface.

The ostensible subsurface of St. John's design seems clear enough: the happy farmer resolves to take up the task of describing his life in the New World (Letter I), he describes how it feels to be a successful freeholder (Letter II) and proceeds to generalize about “the true American freeholder” as a class (Letter III). That class could with simple industry and unadorned manners be happily productive farming stone or even plowing the ocean, as the Quakers of Nantucket prove (Letters IV-VIII). These stand in startling contrast to the southern planters near Charleston, who enjoy “all that life affords most bewitching and pleasurable, without labour, without fatigue, hardly subjected to the trouble of wishing” (p. 168). But one sees even in the fierce beauty of hummingbirds or the mortal battle of snakes Nature's lesson that appearances mislead in the struggle for survival (Letter X). The ideal plowman is—like the Quaker botanist John Bertram—he who keeps the simple virtues, continues to clear and bank his swamps, but also achieves a scientific and intellectual grasp of the Nature he cultivates, harvesting the world's respect and admiration (Letter XI). All the work and benevolence and hope, however, can explode into horror and distress in an instant, leaving the farmer in ruin and confusion (Letter XII).

Deeper still is another level of coherence that explains why the dream must turn to horror. That is St. John's underlying conviction of the universal presence of evil. The action of the Letters is at that level Farmer James's growth in consciousness of the fundamental ugliness of human existence and the falsity of any system of values and principles that pretends otherwise. This conviction wells up in one of the book's most powerful passages in Letter IX, the wrenching acknowledgment of the pellucid fragility of any human happiness. But it is coyly exposed throughout the earlier letters, which are studded with curiously wrong notes.

Take, for example, Farmer James's story of screwing a seat to his plow so that he can carry his baby son with him as he works—“its motion and that of the horses please him; he is perfectly happy and begins to chat” (p. 54). How Emersonian or Wordsworthian that pleasant image, but what educated reader would not recognize Odysseus plowing with his infant Telemachus and its ancillary associations: Odysseus's refusal to fight against Troy, his feigning madness to escape conscription by plowing with an ox and a horse, his deep ambivalence toward the Achaean campaign? These associations were age-old proverbs by the eighteenth century. And behind them, at least for more learned readers, reverberates Odysseus's descent from Sisyphus, a relationship not without pertinence to St. John's deepest purpose. Other signals of a negative side to Farmer James's insistently beamish portrayal include the havoc wreaked among the republics of bees (pp. 58-60) and massive flights of pigeons (pp. 60-61), in both of which man gains by inducing lower orders of being to betray themselves. Vermillion dye attracts the bees but stains them, allowing the observant Farmer to trace them to their honey; the birds are lured to destruction by a stool pigeon casually blinded and “fastened to a long string.” We remember Mrs. Marston's inclusion of informing among the sins of Revolutionary politics. When Fenimore Cooper replicated St. John's pigeon hunting in The Pioneers, he left no doubt about its wanton and wasteful character and the sheer blood lust it inspired. Farmer James sees merely prudence, ingenuity, and good fortune. In addition to the ominous images of the backwoods hunter in Letter III there is again a kind of thoughtless or careless disregard in the act of killing the great owl so as to send its talons with candle holders mounted on them to Mr. F. B. “Pray keep them on the table of your study for my sake” (p. 93), he writes of this bit of frontier kitsch, the sort of object that would decorate the Grangerfords' parlor.

More troubling in this set of subverting gestures is the treatment of the Nantucketers. The Quaker simplicity and industry that make the desolate island flourish delight Farmer James. Theirs is a life stripped bare of ornament and adornment—in their clothing, their food, their homes, their worship, and even their unaffected speech. The appearance of natural gaiety and good feeling won in the thundering shudders of the constant surf looks entirely admirable to James, especially as he himself experiences a sharp psychological disorientation in the presence of such constant, indefinite, and powerful force (pp. 163-164). Letter VIII somewhat undercuts this “diffusive scene of happiness”:

A singular custom prevails here among the women, at which I was greatly surprised and am really at a loss how to account for the original cause that has introduced in this primitive society so remarkable a fashion, or rather so extraordinary a want. They have adopted these many years the Asiatic custom of taking a dose of opium every morning, and so deeply rooted is it that they would be at a loss how to live without this indulgence; they would rather be deprived of any necessary than forego their favourite luxury. This is much more prevailing among the women than the men, few of the latter having caught the contagion, though the sheriff, whom I may call the first person in the island, who is an eminent physician beside and whom I had the pleasure of being well acquainted with, has for many years submitted to this custom. He takes three grains of it every day after breakfast, without the effects of which, he often told me, he was not able to transact any business.

[p. 160]

Letter IX drops the pretense almost completely—“almost,” because Farmer James views it even more as an outsider than he is in Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. Despite Charleston's Frenchified elegance and what one supposes would have been its natural and ethnic attraction to St. John, Farmer James treats it as an exotic and sinister place. None of the values celebrated among the Quakers—health, labor, strenuous activity (p. 148)—matters. The Carolinas call into question all that Farmer James has been maintaining. Charleston is the new land with all the constraints of natural hardship removed. The ease with which opulence becomes luxury is astonishing. Where Nantucket was an extreme of natural deprivation, Carolina is an extreme of natural surplusage. Fecundity and fertility do not corrupt man; they merely provide the occasion for his inherently corrupt nature to manifest itself. At heart, St. John's man is as keenly dark as Joseph Conrad's Kurtz. Remove any need for self-restraint in a condition where there are as well no external constraints and the outcome is predictable—an unquenchable aspiration for power and an attendant social misery.

Profusion is ever the mother of wretchedness, as the history of mankind shows. Provoked by the bitter evidence of black slavery in the south, St. John writes as if he were Jonathan Edwards expounding Original Sin, a deeply embarrassed Gulliver trying to explain to common horse sense why human beings behave as badly as they do, a satanic Philip Traum sick and disgusted with human nature (pp. 173-174). But if J. Hector St. John pushes this conception of an inherent perverseness in human nature beyond even what the Jesuits taught him in Caen, if fertility is inevitably the source of misery instead of happiness—its chief example, black slavery in general, encapsulated in the emblem of the blinded, caged slave Farmer James accidentally encounters on his Charleston visit—then the ideal American Farmer is trapped in a terrible bind. The more successful he becomes, the more certain his misery.

Inside the doctrine of works St. John allows Farmer James to preach is a grim and inevitable comeuppance, a curse if not a damnation. As we can see in the visionary efforts of Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow at about the same time, the American dream is temporary and fleeting, a steppingstone to another and transcending condition.⁶ Where Dwight foresees a glorified millennium and Barlow a trans national order, St. John envisions a perpetual return to beginnings. We remember that Farmer James's Minister—like Barlow and Dwight, Yale trained—has announced something like this at the very beginning. Europe is the study of the past; America, the future. The traveler to Europe submits his imagination “to the painful and useless retrospect of revolutions, desolations, and plagues,” while in America “he might contemplate the very beginnings and outlines of human society” (p. 43). What could be happier? In a visit to Bertram, however, the Russian traveler intuits an uncomfortable identity between past and future:

I view the present Americans as the seed of future nations, which will replenish this boundless continent; the Russians may be in some respects compared to you; we likewise are a new people, new, I mean, in knowledge, arts, and improvements. Who knows what revolutions Russia and America may one day bring about; we are perhaps nearer neighbours than we imagine. I view with peculiar attention all your towns. … Though their foundations are now so recent and so well remembered, yet their origin will puzzle posterity as much as we are now puzzled to ascertain the beginning of those which time has in some measure destroyed. Your new buildings, your streets, put me in mind of those of the city of Pompeii …

[p. 189]

In Letter XII St. John shows us that revolutions are eternal and internal, that going back to beginnings is itself the revolution most painful.

When Farmer James bursts upon that encaged slave, he recoils in horror from himself. “We are machines” (p. 98), he had said earlier, but now he sees directly what it means to be a machine with feelings, the victim of forces within himself as well as without. His first reaction is panic and confusion, followed by paralysis of will.⁷ His later personal calamity finds him tied like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, “fastened by numerous strings” (p. 205). The suspense of imagined evils locks him into a fascinated terror the way victim-birds are hypnotized by blacksnakes (pp. 180, 183). Gone are the farm and house, and with them all happiness (p. 200). Fright, horror, and shuddering anxiety alone remain, pushing Farmer James to the edge of madness (pp. 201-203). How can creatures of sentiment and reason so quickly become instruments of brutality and bloodshed (p. 204)? Of course, he has already (in Letter IX) generalized from a comfortable distance upon the monstrous character of mankind. The difference now is that personal experience has brought those generalizations home; under the immediate and personal threat of annihilation and torment he finds his social ideals and his political principles vanish (pp. 205-207).

Under the erasure of terror Farmer James is ready to consider the unthinkable. He will yield to the wild and savage, live with and like the Indians, turn to hunting, acknowledge but resist the lure of the primitive, and hope nonetheless to keep the family intact (pp. 211-214). With only this desperate alternative before him, Farmer James consciously closes his series of letters: “this is … the last letter you will receive from me” (p. 216). Had his design ended there we would not be surprised. But it did not.

Unlike his parallel Belisarius (p. 417) or the Frontier Woman (pp. 402-406), Farmer James will be with the Indians but not of them. Like Andrew the Hebridean he will accept the use of Indian lands to sustain his family. But almost at once he imagines himself improving Indian village life by the introduction of mechanical devices, prudent management, an increased emphasis upon agriculture, and regulations of trade (p. 221). One minute feeling like an ancient European ruin—“I resemble, methinks, one of the stones of a ruined arch, still retaining that pristine form which anciently fitted the place I occupied, but the centre is tumbled down” (p. 211)—he is the next undertaking “to begin the world anew” (p. 409) like the swallow driven from its nest by a wren: “The peaceable swallow, like the passive Quaker, meekly sat at a small distance and never offered the least resistance; but no sooner was the plunder carried away than the injured bird went to work with unabated ardour, and in a few days the depredations were repaired” (p. 63). The New American Farmer James can no more resist rebuilding his world than can the swallow.

But again the book's subtle organization hints at eternally renewed disaster. This new grandson of Sisyphus is doomed to ambivalent activity that ends in uncertain hope rather than assurance. When Farmer James announces that he is going to the aborigines “determined industriously to work up among them such a system of happiness as may be adequate to my future situation and may be a sufficient compensation for all my fatigues and for the misfortunes I have borne” (p. 226), we wince with the recognition that he has revealed more about “the moral evil with which we are all oppressed” (p. 227) than he himself can comprehend.⁸

St. John, now de Crèvecoeur, basked in the warmth of French intellectual and social approval. Letters from an American Farmer won swift praise, though often for inappropriate reasons, throughout western Europe. He prepared a French translation, which appeared in Paris at the very end of 1784, and began work on a larger French version, Lettres d'un cultivateur américain, which appeared in Paris during the summer the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia, the year of The Anarchiad, whose antidote some readers must have been sure it was. Between 1783 and 1785 Crèvecoeur served energetically and effectively to further French interests in the United States as consul in New York. But when Mathew Carey brought out the first American edition of the Letters in Philadelphia in 1793, the year of French Terror and the great yellow fever epidemic, it fell on deaf ears and did not sell.

Notes

1. The most recent and most complete biography is Gay Wilson Allen and Roger Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer (New York, 1987). The strongest literary interpretation of the writings is Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York, 1970). One should also see A. W. Plumstead, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,” in Everett Emerson, ed., American Literature, 1764-1789: The Revolutionary Years (Madison, Wis., 1977), 213-231. D. H. Lawrence's essentially appreciative commentary—a welcome piece of critical history but not one of Lawrence's best essays—is so keen to plow its own furrows that it does not much speak to Crèvecoeur's general achievement; see D. H. Lawrence, “Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur,” The Symbolic Meaning: The Uncollected Versions of Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Armin Arnold (London, 1962), 53-70. See also Dennis D. Moore, “More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of Unpublished and Uncollected Essays in English by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1990); those sketches are described in Plumstead, “Crèvecoeur,” 225-227.

   James C. Mohr anticipated some of my observations in “Calculated Disillusionment: Crèvecoeur's Letters Reconsidered,” South Atlantic Quarterly, LXIX (1970), 354-363, but confines himself to the Letters and resists the logic of his own perceptions. That Mohr's view of the critical issue remains unchanged may be seen in J. A. Leo Lemay's introduction to Crèvecoeur in An Early American Reader (Washington, D. C., 1989), 116-117, which avoids any challenge to the widely assumed optimism of Crèvecoeur, echoing, just to choose one example, Russel B. Nye, American Literary History: 1607-1830 (New York, 1970), 154-159. Jack Salzman, William L. Hedges, and Mason I. Lowance likewise share Mohr's discomfort with what Philbrick calls Crèvecoeur's ironic and “bitter pathos” in their remarks in the Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York, 1988), 549-550, 187-188, 68, 150-151, respectively. None faces what Mohr called “disillusionment” squarely.

2. Perhaps the best example of this is the Farmer's Swiftian stance, towering above an entire Virginia republic in the sketch “Ant-Hill Town,” particularly pp. 246-249.

3. H. L. Bourdin and S. T. Williams, eds., “Crèvecoeur the Loyalist: The Grotto: An Unpublished Letter from an American Farmer,” Nation, CXXI (Sept. 23, 1925), 330.

4. See, for example, Bruce Ingham Granger, Political Satire in the American Revolution, 1763-1783 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1960), particularly the section on “Trimmers and Traitors,” pp. 250-269, and the fate of Benjamin Towne, pp. 262-263.

5. Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 88; Plumstead, “Crèvecoeur,” 227.

6. Dwight, “The Conquest of Canaan,” Book X, in The Major Poems of Timothy Dwight, ed. William J. McTaggart and William K. Bottorff (Gainesville, Fla., 1969), 259-270; Barlow, “The Vision of Columbus,” Book IX, in The Works of Joel Barlow, vol. 2, ed. William K. Bottorff and Arthur L. Ford (Gainesville, Fla., 1970), 339-358. Benjamin Franklin had talked in similar terms as early as 1731, when he projected “an united Party for Virtue, by forming … the Virtuous and good Men of all Nations into a regular Body”; The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin: A Genetic Text, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay and P. M. Zall (Knoxville, Tenn., 1981), 91-92.

7. Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 79.

8. In his belated review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Mosses from an Old Manse, Herman Melville found this “power of blackness” the driving force of literary art that joined Hawthorne to Shakespeare, implying that high art is only possible if built upon an acknowledgment of evil in the world. Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Jay Leyda, ed., The Portable Melville (New York, 1952), 406-408. This dismal side of the American Farmer finds a counterpart in the “dark Thoreau” described by Richard M. Bridgman in Dark Thoreau (Lincoln, Neb., 1982). Its tradition is traced brilliantly in Michael Kammen, People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York, 1972).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations and references in the text are to the Penguin Classics edition of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York, 1986), which supplants all previous editions.