St. John de Crevecoeur

## Biography

Hector Saint John de Crèvecoeur or (especially in America) J. Hector St. John, (born January 31, 1735, Caen, France—died November 12, 1813, Sarcelles), French American author whose work provided a broad picture of life in the New World.

In 1754, de Crevecoeur joined the French army in Canada during the French and Indian War. After having been wounded in battle in 1759, he resigned his position and travelled across Pennsylvania and New York. Once in New England, he established in New York, becoming an official resident in 1765. He bought a farm in New York, got married and had children.

Crevecoeur, anxious about establishing his children’s right to inheritance, sailed to France in 1780. The letters were sold for publication in 1781; two years later, he returned to his American farm to find his house burned, his wife murdered, and his children missing.

## Historical & Cultural Context

### New England 17th and 18th Century

When Crevecoeur began writing his Letters, his notion of a new sort of human being might have been derived from any number of sources: in religion, the Protestant Reformation; in economics, a rising middle class; in the history of ideas, the legacies of early modern humanism and the Enlightenment. All of these historical developments promised, in differing ways, that human beings could think for themselves, rise above the circumstances of their birth, and use reason to manage and understand their environment.

Nevertheless, it is not too much to say that during this era the relationship between individuals and the institutions that dominated most lives in western Europe – the king, the church, the landowning master – evolved in ways that opened up the possibilities for self-determination. America as a place and as an idea became and has remained a symbolic site for the working out of those possibilities.

### The American Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a European intellectual movement in the 18th century which had its epicenter in France. This movement also influenced the United States.

Emphasis on rational thinking, the capacity to reason and not just thinking with emotions. The point of view of the Enlightenment is that emotions do not lead to discovery of knowledge.

Influencers of the Enlightenment include John Locke and Isaac Newton. Both of these thinkers were very influential during the American Revolution. Locke's political theories and his ideas of natural rights (life, liberty and property), religious toleration and empiricism. Newton believed that the universe is governed by natural laws.

In America, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine were the main contributors to the American Enlightenment. Jefferson was a politician and philosopher best known for writing the Declaration of Independence, Franklin was an inventor and wrote about his ideas of self-development and self-determination. Paine was a professional revolutionary, his influence comes from his writings on common sense, the rights of man and the age of reason.

**Deism:** a common religious view during the Enlightenment. A deist does not have faith in God, but has observed the universe and is convinced that they live in a rational universe governed by natural law. God is discovered through nature rather than a sacred text or the intervention of clergy. With its emphasis on rationality and nature, and moving away from faith, Deism had a lot of appeal to Enlightenment thinkers.

### French and Indian War (1754-1763)

The English and the French battled for colonial domination in North America, the Caribbean, and in India. The English did ultimately come to dominate the colonial outposts, but at a cost so staggering that the resulting debt nearly destroyed the English government. It was that debt that caused the escalation of tensions leading to the Revolutionary War. Parliament was desperate to obtain two objectives; first, to tax the colonies to recover money expended on the battle over North America, and second to restore the profitability of the East India Company in an effort to recover money spent on the battle over India.

The French and Indian War, as it was referred to in the colonies, was the beginning of open hostilities between the colonies and Gr. Britain. England and France had been building toward a conflict in America since 1689. These efforts resulted in the remarkable growth of the colonies from a population of 250,000 in 1700, to 1.25 million in 1750.

The colonies were wholly interested in overcoming the French in North America and appealed to the King for permission to raise armies and money to defend themselves. Despite sincere petitions from the royal governors, George II was suspicious of the intentions of the colonial governments and declined their offer. English officers in America were also widely contemptuous of colonials who volunteered for service. A few of the men who signed the Declaration had been members of volunteer militia who, as young men, had been dressed down and sent home when they applied for duty. Such an experience was not uncommon. It led communities throughout the colonies to question British authorities who would demand horses, feed, wagons, and quarters — but deny colonials the right to fight in defense of the Empire, a right which they considered central to their self-image as Englishmen.

## *Letters from an American Farmer*

The United States had yet to constitute itself as a nation when Hector St. John de Crevecoeur began writing *Letters from An American Farmer*

*Letters From an American Farmer* is a series of letters first published in 1782. The letters, the writer and the addressee are fictional. The letters were never sent and no responses to them are included.

The fictional premise of *Letters* is that the learned “Mr. F. B.” has requested the farmer “James” to correspond with him regarding the particulars of his life, work, and surroundings. James warns him to expect only the plain writing of “a simple citizen.” He must rely upon the authenticity of his experience to make up for the lack of literary or scientific expertise to which Mr. F. B. is accustomed.

The authenticity of the letters derives not from the absence of literary convention, then (the epistolary form itself is such a convention), but from Crevecoeur’s occupation as a farmer in New York’s Hudson Valley from 1769 until the American Revolutionary War.

Charting a portion of the history through which he lived, Crevecoeur’s narrative registers the painful dilemma of a man who loves both his birth country and his adopted country and cannot choose between “these jarring contradictory parties.” The final letter (XII) begins, “I wish for a change of place; the hour is come at last that I must fly from my house and abandon my farm!”

Despite its distance in time from the twentieth century, Letters from an American Farmer, as a document of conflicting allegiances and violent change, is richly relevant to the study of twentieth-century America.

### Letter III

Letter III What is an American? Explores what it was like to be an American and what it took to become one.

**Verosimilitude**: Combination of fiction and non-fiction. Crevecoeur includes realist, faithfull representations of New England's society.

**Setting**: 18th C. Colonial Britain (America), years leading to the American Revolution, Quaker colony in Pennsylvania.

**Narrator**: 1st and 3rd person.

#### Themes

* **American Identity**: “Sober”, “industrious”, “honest”, “laborious”, “respectable”, and “free”.

“Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men…” (pp. 31).
“He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good citizen: William Penn himself would not wish for more.” (pp. 34)

* **Religious “indifference”**: “This is the visible character, the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody's business." (pp. 34)

“Thus all sects are mixed as well as all nations; thus religious indifference is disseminated from one end of the continent to the other; which is at present one of the strongest characteristics of the Americans.” (pp. 35)

* **Roots of the American Identity**: Colonial, Unity and unrest, Patriotism: *Ubi panis ibi patria* (Where there is bread, there is my country)

* **Humans and the Environment**: Relationship with the environment. “Men are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow.” (pp. 32)

* **The promise of progress (The American Dream)**: “…because each person works for himself.” (pp. 30)

“Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, SELF-INTEREST: can it want a stronger allurement?” (pp. 32)
“This great continent must in time absorb the poorest part of Europe.” (pp. 43)

* **Contrast to Europe**: “Formerly they were not numbered in any civil lists of their country, except in those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. ...The laws, ...protect them as they arrive, stamping on them the symbol of adoption; they receive ample rewards for their labours; these accumulated rewards procure them lands; those lands confer on them the title of freemen, and to that title every benefit is affixed which men can possibly require. This is the great operation daily performed by our laws. From whence proceed these laws? From our government. Whence the government? It is derived from the original genius and strong desire of the people ratified and confirmed by the crown. This is the great chain which links us all, this is the picture which every province exhibits” (pp. 31)

* **Asylum**: “In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have ... met together.”

“Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men…” (pp. 31).

* **European “identities”**: “The Scotch are frugal and laborious, but their wives cannot work so hard as German women, who on the contrary vie with their husbands, and often share with them the most severe toils of the field, which they understand better.” (pp. 41)

“The Irish do not prosper so well; they love to drink and to quarrel; they are litigious, and soon take to the gun, which is the ruin of everything; they seem beside to labour ... perhaps it is that their industry had less scope, and was less exercised at home.” (p. 41)

#### Quotes

“He is an American, who, leaving behind him his antient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds”

## Intro Paragraph

Literature in America saw a contrast between religious principles and Enlightenment ideals in the 18th century. While Puritan writers embraced religious doctrine, Enlightenment authors brought ideas of freedom, individuality and equality, which greatly shaped social, philosophical and artistic aspects of life in America. French-born author J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813) described these ideals in *Letters from an American Farmer*, a collection of twelve narrative essays written in epistolary format. This series of letters by a fictional Pennsylvanian farmer were addressed to an Englishman. Published in 1782 in Europe, de Crevecoeur’s essays provide Europeans with an optimistic perspective of the British colonies in America. In “Letter III: What is an American?” (“Letter III” from now onwards), de Crevecoeur presents his depiction of the American colonies and the values of the American citizen.

### MLA citation

St. John de Crèvecoeur, J. Hector. “Letter III: ‘What is an American?”. *Letters from and American Farmer…*. Project Gutenberg, 2003. pp. 29-53.

## Sources

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 McDonald, Gail. *American Literature and Culture 1900–1960*. Blackwell Publishing, 2007.