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Letters from an American Farmer
Written by an emigrant French aristocrat turned farmer, the Letters from an American Farmer (1782) posed the famous "What, then, is the American, this new man?", as a new nation took shape before the eyes of the world. Addressing some of American literature's most pressing concerns
and identity issues, these Letters celebrate personal determination, freedom from institutional oppression, and the largeness and fertility of the land. They also address darker and more symbolic elements, particularly slavery. This book is the only critical edition available of what is seen by many
as the first-ever work of American literature.
and identity issues, these Letters celebrate personal determination, freedom from institutional oppression, and the largeness and fertility of the land. They also address darker and more symbolic elements, particularly slavery. This book is the only critical edition available of what is seen by many
as the first-ever work of American literature.
288 pages, Paperback
Published July 22, 1999
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871 people want to read
About the author
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur
40 books9 followersMichel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur (December 31, 1735 – November 12, 1813), naturalized in New York as John Hector Saint John, was a French-American writer. He was born in Caen, Normandy, France, to the comte and comtesse de Crèvecœur.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
March 22, 2022
A priceless book on how people lived and thought during the colonial and revolutionary periods of the United States. Learned about this book from author Victor Davis Hanson.
November 3, 2020
Addressing his letters to a British correspondent Crevecoeur, in the person of 'Farmer James', writes glowingly of the conditions of American agrarian life and if the virtue, independence, industry, and prosperity of American farmer.
April 5, 2018
As this is widely considered to be the first work of what could be termed American Literature, I am appalled that I have not heard of it before a month ago. Is this my failing or the failure of my education? I don't know. Let's blame my education. I'm juggling enough regret and self-loathing right now.
The book attempts to answer the question, "What is an American?" But it is answering it in the early aftermath of revolution. An astonishingly acute and prescient work with a ending that will leave the reader unsettled for days. The personal tale of the author (which this is not) is no less astonishing as far as what is known of it suggests.
The book attempts to answer the question, "What is an American?" But it is answering it in the early aftermath of revolution. An astonishingly acute and prescient work with a ending that will leave the reader unsettled for days. The personal tale of the author (which this is not) is no less astonishing as far as what is known of it suggests.
January 13, 2024
Letters from an American Farmer
By J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (1735 – 1813)
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur drew inspiration from both personal experience and existing literature in crafting "Letters from an American Farmer." While the work is presented as a series of fictional letters from an American farmer named James, it reflects Crèvecoeur's observations and experiences as a French settler in North America during the 18th century.
Crèvecoeur lived in the American colonies for many years, working as a farmer himself. His interactions with various communities and exposure to the diverse cultures in the region influenced the content of his letters. He used his first-hand experiences to describe the landscape, society, and the emerging American identity.
However, it's important to note that Crèvecoeur also incorporated elements of existing literature and philosophical ideas into his work. He was well-read and familiar with Enlightenment thinkers, and this is evident in the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of his writing. The letters contain reflections on human nature, society, and the potential for a unique American culture.
In summary, "Letters from an American Farmer" is a combination of Crèvecoeur's personal experiences as a farmer in America and his engagement with existing literary and philosophical ideas. The work is a blend of observation, reflection, and imaginative construction, providing a unique perspective on the early American experience.
By J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (1735 – 1813)
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur drew inspiration from both personal experience and existing literature in crafting "Letters from an American Farmer." While the work is presented as a series of fictional letters from an American farmer named James, it reflects Crèvecoeur's observations and experiences as a French settler in North America during the 18th century.
Crèvecoeur lived in the American colonies for many years, working as a farmer himself. His interactions with various communities and exposure to the diverse cultures in the region influenced the content of his letters. He used his first-hand experiences to describe the landscape, society, and the emerging American identity.
However, it's important to note that Crèvecoeur also incorporated elements of existing literature and philosophical ideas into his work. He was well-read and familiar with Enlightenment thinkers, and this is evident in the intellectual and philosophical underpinnings of his writing. The letters contain reflections on human nature, society, and the potential for a unique American culture.
In summary, "Letters from an American Farmer" is a combination of Crèvecoeur's personal experiences as a farmer in America and his engagement with existing literary and philosophical ideas. The work is a blend of observation, reflection, and imaginative construction, providing a unique perspective on the early American experience.
February 14, 2017
It might sound odd to call such a ubiquitous text underrated, but I think Letters from an American Farmer is just that. While most people who have taken a course in American literature or possibly even history have probably encountered this 1782 book's third chapter, which provides a utopian answer to the question "What Is an American?", the full extent of Crèvecoeur's literary invention and ambition is generally unappreciated. The Letters, often treated as an informative nonfiction tract like Franklin's Autobiography or Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, might be better understood as an intricate philosophical fiction akin to Utopia, Candide, or Gulliver's Travels.
Crèvecoeur, a somewhat shadowy Frenchman born to the minor nobility and educated by Jesuits, found himself in North America in the 1750s, fighting for his homeland in the French and Indian War. Eventually, he settled in New York and became a farmer—the experience lightly fictionalized in his letters, written ostensibly in response to a former European guest's query about the state of American society. Fleeing the Revolution as a Tory sympathizer, Crèvecoeur ended up back in France, and his American book became a European success as a proto-Romantic utopian vision of an organic, egalitarian society that would later delight Godwin and Shelley.
The Letters are framed as the literary production of a simple Pennsylvania farmer named James, not that of a well-educated and upper-class traveler from Catholic Europe; its wittily metafictional and faux-diffident opening chapter shows him arguing with his wife and the local minister over whether or not such a humble and busy man should even take up the pen. The minister's suggestion that James's untutored literary style, if not learned, "will smell of the woods, and be a little wild," helps to inaugurate an aesthetic of the natural and homemade in American literature that looks forward to everything from Thoreau to Dickinson to Hemingway. Crèvecoeur's style—and it is the consciously chosen style of a literary artist, writing in an adopted language, no less—is accordingly simple and eloquent, especially in the second letter's pastoral and quietly allegorical description of life on the farm, among the birds and the bees.
The famous third letter defines the American as a freeholding farmer, made fit for civil freedom by self-sufficient rural labor, and unbothered by the paraphernalia of a caste-bound, priest-ridden, crowded, and incorrigibly inegalitarian Europe:
Crèvecoeur is not a mechanist of society; he holds, rather, a Romantic and organic view that "[m]en are like plants," seeing climate and locale (and, implicitly, what the next century will call, with a botanical metaphor, "culture") as wholly determining human character. Unlike the biological racist Jefferson, Crèvecoeur suggests that humanity can be reformed if they are placed in new and healthy environments. Despite his physiocratic encomium to farming, Crèvecoeur allows that America is an ecosystem made up of diverse regions: seafaring coastal dwellers make trade possible and move the goods produced by the farmers' inland labor, while dangerous and dissolute frontier dwellers do the necessary work of clearing the land for further agricultural incursion. James even claims—emphasizing this work's fictional status—that his own father was such a frontiersman, a statement implying that even the degraded hunter will eventually produce sound American offspring as the settlement of the continent progresses.
Having described and hymned rural labor, the book's long middle section, a kind of prologue to Moby-Dick, takes us to an idealized Nantucket; the editors note that Crèvecoeur's geography, not unlike Shakespeare's, is largely imaginary, possibly a signal to readers to take the book as a philosophical fantasia rather than a literal report. The Nantucket whalers of the middle five chapters, like the Pennsylvania farmers of the opening three, are trained by their natural environment to become fit for American freedom: earnest in deportment, simple in religion, sedulous in labor. Like Franklin, Crèvecoeur singles out Quakers for special praise as the most Enlightened of America's sects in their austere and pacific faith.
In the ninth letter, however, the utopia sours to dystopia as Crèvecoeur goes south for a visit to Charles-Town, where he encounters no plain-spoken laborers but rather parasitic lawyers, pleasure-bloated planters, and a mix of decadence and inequality that he sees as replicating the crimes of Europe. Early in the book, James had described himself, in the period's sentimental idiom, as "the farmer of feelings"; the remainder of the ninth letter is accordingly taken up with a long and despairing lament, inspired by the suffering of enslaved Africans and the hard-heartedness of their masters, on the persistence and extent of human folly, brutality, and oppression, a state of affairs that makes him question human nature itself:
In subsequent letters, James regains his equanimity with pages of limpid nature description and an interpolated narrative by a Russian visitor to the eminent botanist John Bertram; the latter is particularly prescient:
D. H. Lawrence characteristically heckles Crèvecoeur in Studies in Classic American Literature for posing as a natural man without acknowledging nature's (and thereby his own) darkness. But this is only true if you neglect the Letters as a fictional design, a set of carefully-wrought missives from a utopia gone wrong, narrating the breakdown of an ideal man in an ideal world, Franklin's wisdom and Jefferson's idyll (and something of Rousseau's philosophy) giving way to Brockden Brown's and Poe's perversity, neoclassical pastoral darkening to Gothic horror. The book's own doubleness—its guise of plain-spoken truth concealing its status as fiction—tells us that its values and its politics cannot be taken at face value. It should be read as a novel: the first attempt, and a persuasive one, at a great American novel.
Crèvecoeur, a somewhat shadowy Frenchman born to the minor nobility and educated by Jesuits, found himself in North America in the 1750s, fighting for his homeland in the French and Indian War. Eventually, he settled in New York and became a farmer—the experience lightly fictionalized in his letters, written ostensibly in response to a former European guest's query about the state of American society. Fleeing the Revolution as a Tory sympathizer, Crèvecoeur ended up back in France, and his American book became a European success as a proto-Romantic utopian vision of an organic, egalitarian society that would later delight Godwin and Shelley.
The Letters are framed as the literary production of a simple Pennsylvania farmer named James, not that of a well-educated and upper-class traveler from Catholic Europe; its wittily metafictional and faux-diffident opening chapter shows him arguing with his wife and the local minister over whether or not such a humble and busy man should even take up the pen. The minister's suggestion that James's untutored literary style, if not learned, "will smell of the woods, and be a little wild," helps to inaugurate an aesthetic of the natural and homemade in American literature that looks forward to everything from Thoreau to Dickinson to Hemingway. Crèvecoeur's style—and it is the consciously chosen style of a literary artist, writing in an adopted language, no less—is accordingly simple and eloquent, especially in the second letter's pastoral and quietly allegorical description of life on the farm, among the birds and the bees.
The famous third letter defines the American as a freeholding farmer, made fit for civil freedom by self-sufficient rural labor, and unbothered by the paraphernalia of a caste-bound, priest-ridden, crowded, and incorrigibly inegalitarian Europe:
It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess every thing and of a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe. Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida.He praises America as the asylum of Europe's poor, who otherwise have no country as they owe no loyalty to their landlords and oppressors, and he further claims that America's vastness will dissipate Europe's religious controversies by inducing a mild tolerance and a simple faith in a nation of self-reliant workers. Looking forward to the peoples of Europe's diverse nations and sects coming together to form a "new man," he describes America as a rational utopia of free labor.
Crèvecoeur is not a mechanist of society; he holds, rather, a Romantic and organic view that "[m]en are like plants," seeing climate and locale (and, implicitly, what the next century will call, with a botanical metaphor, "culture") as wholly determining human character. Unlike the biological racist Jefferson, Crèvecoeur suggests that humanity can be reformed if they are placed in new and healthy environments. Despite his physiocratic encomium to farming, Crèvecoeur allows that America is an ecosystem made up of diverse regions: seafaring coastal dwellers make trade possible and move the goods produced by the farmers' inland labor, while dangerous and dissolute frontier dwellers do the necessary work of clearing the land for further agricultural incursion. James even claims—emphasizing this work's fictional status—that his own father was such a frontiersman, a statement implying that even the degraded hunter will eventually produce sound American offspring as the settlement of the continent progresses.
Having described and hymned rural labor, the book's long middle section, a kind of prologue to Moby-Dick, takes us to an idealized Nantucket; the editors note that Crèvecoeur's geography, not unlike Shakespeare's, is largely imaginary, possibly a signal to readers to take the book as a philosophical fantasia rather than a literal report. The Nantucket whalers of the middle five chapters, like the Pennsylvania farmers of the opening three, are trained by their natural environment to become fit for American freedom: earnest in deportment, simple in religion, sedulous in labor. Like Franklin, Crèvecoeur singles out Quakers for special praise as the most Enlightened of America's sects in their austere and pacific faith.
In the ninth letter, however, the utopia sours to dystopia as Crèvecoeur goes south for a visit to Charles-Town, where he encounters no plain-spoken laborers but rather parasitic lawyers, pleasure-bloated planters, and a mix of decadence and inequality that he sees as replicating the crimes of Europe. Early in the book, James had described himself, in the period's sentimental idiom, as "the farmer of feelings"; the remainder of the ninth letter is accordingly taken up with a long and despairing lament, inspired by the suffering of enslaved Africans and the hard-heartedness of their masters, on the persistence and extent of human folly, brutality, and oppression, a state of affairs that makes him question human nature itself:
The history of the earth! doth it present any thing but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other? We observe avarice, rapine, and murder, equally prevailing in all parts. History perpetually tells us, of millions of people abandoned to the caprice of the maddest princes, and of whole nations devoted to the blind fury of tyrants. Countries destroyed; nations alternately buried in ruins by other nations; some parts of the world beautifully cultivated, returned again to the pristine state; the fruits of ages of industry, the toil of thousands in a short time destroyed by a few! If one corner breathes in peace for a few years, it is, in turn, subjected, torn, and levelled; one would almost believe the principles of action in man, considered as the first agent of this planet, to be poisoned in their most essential parts.The chapter ends with a devastating scene wherein James encounters a black man in a cage, exposed for having killed a planter, and vainly tries to assist the dying, tortured victim; while James elsewhere argues that slavery in the north is a noble enterprise with freedom for African-Americans as its goal, the implicit condemnation of slavery as such and the plea for sympathy, so characteristic of the period's fiction, is starkly memorable.
In subsequent letters, James regains his equanimity with pages of limpid nature description and an interpolated narrative by a Russian visitor to the eminent botanist John Bertram; the latter is particularly prescient:
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.But the book ends in total collapse as the divisive Revolution politicizes everyday life, breaks up the organic community of the farmers, and drives the peaceable, non-ideological James to plan a move to the frontier, there to live with the Indians. As James's very language becomes as disordered as his situation, we realize that we have been reading a kind of novel all along, the epistolary expression of a fictional sensibility as it encounters a variety of emblematic situations:
…I am seized with a fever of the mind, I am transported beyond that degree of calmness which is necessary to delineate our thoughts. I feel as if my reason wanted to leave me, as if it would burst its poor weak tenement…Trying to maintain his peaceable equanimity in a situation demanding he take sides and take up arms, a time when those calling for peace are denounced as traitors and appeasers (but when is it not such a time?), he decries war as the business of the powerful and the sorrow of the poor:
As to the argument on which the dispute is founded, I know little about it. Much has been said and written on both sides, but who has a judgement capacious and clear enough to decide? The great moving principles which actuate both parties are much hid from vulgar eyes, like mine; nothing but the plausible and the probable are offered to our contemplation. The innocent class are always the victim of the few; they are in all countries and at all times the inferior agents, on which the popular phantom is erected; they clamour, and must toil, and bleed, and are always sure of meeting with oppression and rebuke. It is for the sake of the great leaders on both sides, that so much blood must be spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing.The European American utopia having failed, James sets out for a Native American utopia; while his praise of the Indians reflects idealizing and troubling stereotypes, his flight from an encroaching civilization to a supposedly simpler nature is prophetic of so many later ambiguous fictional heroes and heroines in American literature, from Hester Prynne and Ishmael and Huck Finn all the way to the creation of another bilingual Old World savant fleeing revolution—Humbert Humbert.
D. H. Lawrence characteristically heckles Crèvecoeur in Studies in Classic American Literature for posing as a natural man without acknowledging nature's (and thereby his own) darkness. But this is only true if you neglect the Letters as a fictional design, a set of carefully-wrought missives from a utopia gone wrong, narrating the breakdown of an ideal man in an ideal world, Franklin's wisdom and Jefferson's idyll (and something of Rousseau's philosophy) giving way to Brockden Brown's and Poe's perversity, neoclassical pastoral darkening to Gothic horror. The book's own doubleness—its guise of plain-spoken truth concealing its status as fiction—tells us that its values and its politics cannot be taken at face value. It should be read as a novel: the first attempt, and a persuasive one, at a great American novel.
January 27, 2013
No, I would never have read Letters From An American Farmer had it not been assigned reading for an English class. No, I never plan on reading it again. But I might as well be pleased that I did read it. I just need a few minutes to figure out why.
The historical significance of this book is much greater than its literary merit. It’s not much of a story, after all, but more of a report on the nascent American nation, with Crevecoeur taking up the thin disguise of Farmer John to send letters to the Frenchman known as “Mr. F.B.” The language used is colorful in imagery and descriptive almost to a fault, but there’s no plot, no over-arching conflict, no character development save the change in attitude Farmer John undergoes during the concluding letter. The epistolary format only exacerbates this lack of narrative cohesion, but, then again, not many people sit down to read Letters From An American Farmer because they’re looking for a rip-roaring yarn.
So I guess I won’t complain too much about the format or the paucity of any traits that resemble modern fiction. Hell, novels were still a fairly shaky concept in the latter half of the 18th century, so I’ll forgo most of my bitching about the book and try to find something positive to discuss. Hmmmm.
For starters, it’s old. That makes it important. And Crevecoeur’s history of being kind of a weirdo helps to maintain my interest in his reports on the goings-on in this wild and new country. Crevecoeur—er, I mean, Farmer John holds a kind disposition towards Indians, seems not to harbor much resentment towards the various religions he encounters, and makes a good case for abolition, even if he does believe that a northern-colony slave is a happy slave.
Some of the images are enjoyable, such as when Farmer John kills a kingbird to save the lives of 54 bees, or when he reveals he keeps an active hornets’ nest in the living room of his parlor to rid his house of flies (not the smartest form of pest control, but definitely a way to keep the damn kids quiet.) The story of Andrew the Hebridean and his run-in with Indians is a funny diversion. Plus, my love for Nathaniel Philbrick’s In The Heart Of The Sea made Crevecoeur’s letter on Nantucket whalers fairly interesting.
But Letters From An American Farmer grows long and repetitive, and the only interesting section in the latter half of the book is the letter on Charleston and slavery, which concludes with a truly horrific description of a doomed slave Farmer James encounters on the way to visit a friend. The neutral tone Crevecoeur uses for the final letter, “Distresses of a Frontier-Man,” proves frustrating as he struggles to understand the wants of the revolutionaries and the English crown, and his proposed solution to his reticence—I’m gonna go live in the woods with the Indians—greatly undermines the sincerity of the previous eleven letters.
I’m happy I read this book—hell, I’m happy anytime I finish a book—but I’ve developed no profound sense of love or respect for Letters From An American Farmer. It’s an old book I never would have read except that a grade depended on it. Still, it makes for better reading than a James Patterson novel.
The historical significance of this book is much greater than its literary merit. It’s not much of a story, after all, but more of a report on the nascent American nation, with Crevecoeur taking up the thin disguise of Farmer John to send letters to the Frenchman known as “Mr. F.B.” The language used is colorful in imagery and descriptive almost to a fault, but there’s no plot, no over-arching conflict, no character development save the change in attitude Farmer John undergoes during the concluding letter. The epistolary format only exacerbates this lack of narrative cohesion, but, then again, not many people sit down to read Letters From An American Farmer because they’re looking for a rip-roaring yarn.
So I guess I won’t complain too much about the format or the paucity of any traits that resemble modern fiction. Hell, novels were still a fairly shaky concept in the latter half of the 18th century, so I’ll forgo most of my bitching about the book and try to find something positive to discuss. Hmmmm.
For starters, it’s old. That makes it important. And Crevecoeur’s history of being kind of a weirdo helps to maintain my interest in his reports on the goings-on in this wild and new country. Crevecoeur—er, I mean, Farmer John holds a kind disposition towards Indians, seems not to harbor much resentment towards the various religions he encounters, and makes a good case for abolition, even if he does believe that a northern-colony slave is a happy slave.
Some of the images are enjoyable, such as when Farmer John kills a kingbird to save the lives of 54 bees, or when he reveals he keeps an active hornets’ nest in the living room of his parlor to rid his house of flies (not the smartest form of pest control, but definitely a way to keep the damn kids quiet.) The story of Andrew the Hebridean and his run-in with Indians is a funny diversion. Plus, my love for Nathaniel Philbrick’s In The Heart Of The Sea made Crevecoeur’s letter on Nantucket whalers fairly interesting.
But Letters From An American Farmer grows long and repetitive, and the only interesting section in the latter half of the book is the letter on Charleston and slavery, which concludes with a truly horrific description of a doomed slave Farmer James encounters on the way to visit a friend. The neutral tone Crevecoeur uses for the final letter, “Distresses of a Frontier-Man,” proves frustrating as he struggles to understand the wants of the revolutionaries and the English crown, and his proposed solution to his reticence—I’m gonna go live in the woods with the Indians—greatly undermines the sincerity of the previous eleven letters.
I’m happy I read this book—hell, I’m happy anytime I finish a book—but I’ve developed no profound sense of love or respect for Letters From An American Farmer. It’s an old book I never would have read except that a grade depended on it. Still, it makes for better reading than a James Patterson novel.
August 4, 2016
"Men are like plants. The goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment" (45).
March 11, 2019
This is a strange little Colonial-era book that, nonetheless, tells us something about America today. It was written by a protean Frenchman, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. Born French, in Caen, he fought on the Plains of Abraham for Montcalm, and was wounded. He then became a British citizen, married, and settled down to farm in the Hudson Valley in 1769. But he did not want to take sides in the War of Independence, so he went back to France, and returned to America only in 1783. This book was published to wide acclaim in 1782, and the most interesting part of it, by far, is Crèvecœur’s anguished description of how, despite his hopes for the Enlightenment making all men better, it didn’t, as shown by the hatreds and violence engendered by the war.
The facts of Crèvecœur’s life are in dispute, since he was a very hard man to grasp. A British magistrate in New York described him in 1779 as “violent” and “capricious,” and much is opaque about him—including why he left the French army, under some type of cloud. For our purposes, though, the specifics of the truth of his life don’t much matter. The frame of the book is twelve undated letters from an imaginary American farmer to an English gentlemen of his acquaintance. The English, not Americans, were the audience for the book, which is presumably why the unnamed Englishman at whom the Letters are directed is treated with some degree of obsequious flattery, masked behind putatively plainspoken humility. The Farmer, named “James,” is depicted as modestly educated, but not sophisticated. He is generally assumed to be a partial stand-in for Crèvecœur’s opinions, though not his background (despite Crèvecœur’s stint at farming, he came from a family of minor nobility, and after the war served as consul for Louis XVI in New York). Therefore, the Letters are not as the actual letters of an American farmer would likely have been, instead, they are shot through with aggressive seasoning of the French Enlightenment, covered with a gloss of Americanism.
The first Letter is an Introduction; it describes the Farmer’s life and touches on some characteristics he sees as common in America. Notably, these include “the restless industry which is the principal characteristic of these colonies.” Similarly, the Farmer notes that in America “he that is near ending his career, drudges on as well as he who has just begun it; nobody stands still.” James describes his life as essentially idyllic, and contrasts it to supposed life in Europe, crowded, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He lives in Pennsylvania, so there is much talk of Quakers. Optimism crowds the page, though the reader keeps being jarred by the juxtaposition of paeans to the happy American life with casual references to the Farmer’s “negroes,” that is, his slaves, who are all, we are told, just as happy as him, the first of numerous unlikely claims that intrude into the book.
The second Letter goes into more detail about farming and the farming life. James describes an agrarian libertarian paradise—productive land, no overlord, almost non-existent taxes, and minimal local government. There are also more unlikely passages, like the description of how he loves to have a hornet’s nest in his dining room, where the hornets eat flies and never bother anyone, “because kindness and hospitality have made them useful and harmless,” which I doubt. Much of this is simply a description of nature, a topic of great interest to Enlightenment thinkers, giving the book, to this point, a somewhat romantic feel, Rousseau-lite.
But it is the third Letter that is most famous (though, as I say, not the most interesting—that is the twelfth, and last). This is an attempt to describe American identity. James notes very low levels of inequality, high levels of agrarianism, and “mild government,” as characteristic of America. He talks about how “here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,” perhaps the first use of that term in the American context. His point is not that all Americans are identical, or even that similar (as a read of "Albion’s Seed" will easily show in more detail), but that they have certain core principles in common, which he views as principles of the Enlightenment. True, some of the backwoods types (by which he means Scots-Irish) are violent and nasty, hardly enlightened, but, soon enough, they will become well-mannered or they will die off, “after the arrival of a second and better class, the true American freeholders.” Crèvecœur spends a great deal of time repeating that while there is limitless land, and limitless opportunity, in America, only the “sober” and “industrious” will succeed—not in isolation, either, but with mutual volunteer help from similar individuals and families, in a type of peaceful Jeffersonian agrarian paradise. The Farmer specifically calls out the Germans as the most industrious and the Irish as the least (“they love to drink and quarrel”). Generally, though, he sees a bright future for Americans, all emancipated from unchosen bonds, and all pulling, and improving, together.
In keeping with French Enlightenment principles, the Farmer denigrates actual religion of any type. But what Crèvecœur describes in this regard is much more the aspiration of the philosophes than actual religious practice of late eighteenth-century America. In his vision, which tends to confuse early American religious tolerance with unbelief, “strict modes of Christianity, as practiced in Europe, are lost also.” Because parents will, or do, fail to instruct their children in religion, which Crèvecœur sees as a good thing, “Their children will therefore grow up less zealous and more indifferent in matters of religion than their parents.” Religion is to become, in essence, fungible, and therefore meaningless. While the Farmer’s description is anachronistically premature, this is certainly a good description of late American modernity, where, for the vast majority of people, their only “religion” is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which is not a religion at all. No doubt Crèvecœur would be happy with this result, and to be fair, he did predict it.
The next five letters are pretty boring. They are about Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, when they were hardscrabble fishing settlements, before they became the playground of America’s dubious rich. The Farmer offers a lot of talk about how the local flora, fauna, and geography shapes the islanders. The shape given is, according to the Farmer (who supposedly visited there, though the geographic descriptions are wildly inaccurate), excellent, as the result of “a system of rational laws founded on perfect freedom.” In James’s Enlightenment belief system, more freedom leads to more good behavior, with no need of any external guidance, merely welling up from the natural goodness inside every man.
On a practical level, “Idleness and poverty, the causes of so many crimes, are unknown here.” This is because of what would today be called “human capital,” since the physical resources of the islands are small, and there is little way to make a living other than fishing, which is difficult and dangerous. There are few lawyers in the islands, too, which makes them much better places to live (the Farmer frequently complains that lawyers are a typically American plague, and that it is “a pity that our forefathers . . . did not also prevent the introduction of a set of men so dangerous!”). There are no extremes of wealth. Again, there are weird passages, such as the allegation that all the islanders, men and women, take opium every morning, and cannot function without it. Maybe, but again, I doubt it. With good reason, this part of the book is little remarked upon today.
The ninth letter is the second-most-famous letter; it is a brief one, about Charleston, seat of planter wealth. Crèvecœur contrasts the lack of virtue and corruption of Charleston with the firm virtue of Pennsylvania and New England, though he does not tell us why the regions differ in virtue, other than noting contrasts in wealth, and the huge numbers of lawyers in Charleston. Most of all he bemoans the terrible lot of the slaves, ending with a well-known and gruesome description of a protracted slave execution by exposure. It’s hard to say if Crèvecœur really visited Charleston, but his descriptions are accurate enough, historically speaking. Still, the reader finds it hard to ignore that the Farmer sees little or no contradiction between his owning slaves and the planters owning slaves; in his mind, his own slaves are little distinct from free, and happy, hired hands. Again, this is very unlikely to have been true.
This slippery treatment of slavery highlights, and to an extent explains, how the Enlightenment not only tolerated, but essentially ignored, slavery, something about which I have wondered in the past. It seems odd that the Enlightenment project was all about emancipation, on paper, but the Enlightenment’s main figures, both in America and in England and France, were not concerned with addressing slavery, though occasionally they paid lip service to it being less than wholly desirable. In truth, all the actual work of ending the slave trade was done by English Christians, as Christians, not as heralds of the Enlightenment. I think it’s a little unfair, perhaps, to give Christianity all the credit, since the flavor of the times, spiced with the Enlightenment, probably moved abolitionists to more aggressively turn the focus of their Christian belief onto slavery. But if one grasps that, as the Farmer does, Enlightenment thinkers effectively divided their beliefs about slavery into “good slavery” and “bad slavery,” their failure to do anything about slavery becomes a bit more comprehensible, though that does not explain their unwillingness to lift a finger to end the type of slavery on display in and around Charleston. Maybe it was just personal economic interest, since many Englishmen profited, directly or indirectly, from the slave trade. Such hypocritical and self-interested behavior has always been characteristic of the Left; it finds its modern equivalent, in intellectual soundness at least, in progressives who shriek how global warming is going to kill us all in twelve years, while they jet around the world on luxury vacations and are chauffeured in their giant SUVs. It appears that leftist virtue signaling, especially the kind that imposes all costs on others while making leftists feel superior, isn’t just a modern phenomenon, but was there when the Left was spawned in the eighteenth century.
It is in this ninth letter that the Farmer starts being less pleased with America, bewailing the fate of mankind, making numerous comments about the irredeemably brutal lot of all human life. In the context of slavery, this is perfectly apt, but he is reaching much further, undermining the sunny Enlightenment optimism of the earlier Letters. The tenth and eleventh letters revert to descriptions of nature. The tenth makes more strange and overtly false statements, such as that rattlesnakes are less poisonous than copperheads, that efficacious antidotes to rattlesnake venom were generally available to American colonists, and that rattlesnakes could be tamed and trained to come when they are called. The eleventh is a letter-within-a-letter, supposedly from a Russian who visited the (real) botanist John Bertram (actually Bartram), at the Farmer’s request. The main point of the letter is, though, to contrast the supposed superiority of American plain acting to fancy manners and “polite expressions,” a point the letter writer beats like a kettledrum, presumably another example of early leftist virtue signaling.
In this last Letter, the Farmer changes his tone completely, to one of anguished emotion. He is writing to tell his English friend that the violence and havoc of the Revolutionary War has swept over his homestead, in western Pennsylvania. Mostly this involves Indians allied with the English killing American farmers and their families, but beyond that, the Farmer’s point, and the immediate cause of his anguish, is that neutrality is not an option. The Indians don’t care, and the Americans won’t tolerate it. “As a citizen of a now-smaller society [than England]; I find that any kind of opposition to its now-prevailing sentiments immediately begets hatred.” He notes that in such situations, all that matters to a man is the safety of his family.
James’s horror seems to be largely at the failure of his beloved Enlightenment principles to avoid violence. He now realizes, even if he does not explicitly admit it, that it is false that emancipatory freedom fixes the faults of men. It is quite apparent to him now that more violence is coming for Americans, and that only violence can decide the questions at hand, yet James shrinks from that conclusion, since his ideology tells him emancipation and unfettered freedom prevents war, because human nature is good. But reality has intruded on his ideology, the constant failing of leftist ideology for three hundred years.
His faith in European man ruined, James plans to flee with his family to a remote Indian village, where they will live as Indians, with a tribe not allied with the English, far in the interior. While he expects to be safe, the Farmer expresses great concern that his children may go native. As Sebastian Junger notes in "Tribe," such going native was surprisingly common among even adult Europeans, and almost exclusively one-way; the Indians did not return the interest. Of course, there are many people, such as James C. Scott, who hold, in essence, that despite its drawbacks, the simple tribal life is preferable for most people. Still, that this is a good solution for the Farmer’s dilemma seems like excessive optimism: the Enlightenment myth of the noble savage is one myth that James has not yet let go of, though he may well when he reaches the village—after all, the woodlands Indians of North America were extremely violent, even by Continental standards, and actively involved themselves in the wars of the white man, both for protection and gain. Whatever the wisdom of his choice, that’s the despairing end of the Letters; we are left to wonder whatever became of the Farmer and his family.
Of course, the Farmer is correct about the tensions and hatreds of the American Revolution, which we tend to view through a gauzy haze. True, such hatreds were expressed, for the most part, much less violently than in any Continental war, probably due to superior English culture (despite some recent revisionist attempts, such as Holger Hoock in Scars of Independence, to claim the contrary). Any war is going to have not just winners and losers, but a range of people who attached themselves to a range of opinions in the run-up and execution of that war. The resolution of the war will determine the reward and punishment assigned to those opinions, and concomitant actions. Civil wars are even worse for engendering hatred of neighbors, since people with different opinions are, by definition, intermingled. The American Civil War was the same thing as the War of Independence in this regard, writ large.
So what the Farmer’s anguish tells us, other than that the Enlightenment doesn’t offer solutions to man’s problems, is that civil life in America is a cycle, where divisions are healed by the permanent defeat of one side. First the War of Independence. Then the Civil War. And now, the war, only spottily violent as of yet, launched by the American Left to solidify their position beyond all the commanding heights of our culture and economy that they already control, and stamp out all opposition, such that they may, or so they hope, attain permanent hegemony in their fully emancipated and forced-egalitarian utopia. Sure, that’s silly in the long-run, since like all Left movements, ultimately their reach exceeds their grasp and reality returns to hit them in the head. But in the meantime, they could defeat the Right to the same degree that the revolutionaries defeated the Loyalists, leaving it for a later generation, after the inevitable collapse, to rebuild something grounded in reality. The takeaway here is that America has never been without irresolvable internal conflict for more than a hundred years, and not only are we due for another round of resolution, its beginnings are obvious all around us. There can be only one.
Crèvecœur’s real life after this book offered him yet more proof of the defectiveness of Enlightenment principles, because, like the Farmer, he had to flee. Not to the Indians, in his case; rather, he went home to France. He left his wife and children behind; the former died, and his children were scattered, though he recovered them. The second time he went back to France, he arrived just in time for the Terror, getting his full exposure to the logical end of the philosphes’ musings. Somehow he managed to avoid getting killed, apparently by hiding and then laying low. Ultimately he died in relatively comfortable provincial obscurity. He got lucky, but lots of other people didn’t have, or didn’t make, the choice to flee. They faced the music instead, which is, no doubt, what most of us will have to do too.
The facts of Crèvecœur’s life are in dispute, since he was a very hard man to grasp. A British magistrate in New York described him in 1779 as “violent” and “capricious,” and much is opaque about him—including why he left the French army, under some type of cloud. For our purposes, though, the specifics of the truth of his life don’t much matter. The frame of the book is twelve undated letters from an imaginary American farmer to an English gentlemen of his acquaintance. The English, not Americans, were the audience for the book, which is presumably why the unnamed Englishman at whom the Letters are directed is treated with some degree of obsequious flattery, masked behind putatively plainspoken humility. The Farmer, named “James,” is depicted as modestly educated, but not sophisticated. He is generally assumed to be a partial stand-in for Crèvecœur’s opinions, though not his background (despite Crèvecœur’s stint at farming, he came from a family of minor nobility, and after the war served as consul for Louis XVI in New York). Therefore, the Letters are not as the actual letters of an American farmer would likely have been, instead, they are shot through with aggressive seasoning of the French Enlightenment, covered with a gloss of Americanism.
The first Letter is an Introduction; it describes the Farmer’s life and touches on some characteristics he sees as common in America. Notably, these include “the restless industry which is the principal characteristic of these colonies.” Similarly, the Farmer notes that in America “he that is near ending his career, drudges on as well as he who has just begun it; nobody stands still.” James describes his life as essentially idyllic, and contrasts it to supposed life in Europe, crowded, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. He lives in Pennsylvania, so there is much talk of Quakers. Optimism crowds the page, though the reader keeps being jarred by the juxtaposition of paeans to the happy American life with casual references to the Farmer’s “negroes,” that is, his slaves, who are all, we are told, just as happy as him, the first of numerous unlikely claims that intrude into the book.
The second Letter goes into more detail about farming and the farming life. James describes an agrarian libertarian paradise—productive land, no overlord, almost non-existent taxes, and minimal local government. There are also more unlikely passages, like the description of how he loves to have a hornet’s nest in his dining room, where the hornets eat flies and never bother anyone, “because kindness and hospitality have made them useful and harmless,” which I doubt. Much of this is simply a description of nature, a topic of great interest to Enlightenment thinkers, giving the book, to this point, a somewhat romantic feel, Rousseau-lite.
But it is the third Letter that is most famous (though, as I say, not the most interesting—that is the twelfth, and last). This is an attempt to describe American identity. James notes very low levels of inequality, high levels of agrarianism, and “mild government,” as characteristic of America. He talks about how “here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men,” perhaps the first use of that term in the American context. His point is not that all Americans are identical, or even that similar (as a read of "Albion’s Seed" will easily show in more detail), but that they have certain core principles in common, which he views as principles of the Enlightenment. True, some of the backwoods types (by which he means Scots-Irish) are violent and nasty, hardly enlightened, but, soon enough, they will become well-mannered or they will die off, “after the arrival of a second and better class, the true American freeholders.” Crèvecœur spends a great deal of time repeating that while there is limitless land, and limitless opportunity, in America, only the “sober” and “industrious” will succeed—not in isolation, either, but with mutual volunteer help from similar individuals and families, in a type of peaceful Jeffersonian agrarian paradise. The Farmer specifically calls out the Germans as the most industrious and the Irish as the least (“they love to drink and quarrel”). Generally, though, he sees a bright future for Americans, all emancipated from unchosen bonds, and all pulling, and improving, together.
In keeping with French Enlightenment principles, the Farmer denigrates actual religion of any type. But what Crèvecœur describes in this regard is much more the aspiration of the philosophes than actual religious practice of late eighteenth-century America. In his vision, which tends to confuse early American religious tolerance with unbelief, “strict modes of Christianity, as practiced in Europe, are lost also.” Because parents will, or do, fail to instruct their children in religion, which Crèvecœur sees as a good thing, “Their children will therefore grow up less zealous and more indifferent in matters of religion than their parents.” Religion is to become, in essence, fungible, and therefore meaningless. While the Farmer’s description is anachronistically premature, this is certainly a good description of late American modernity, where, for the vast majority of people, their only “religion” is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, which is not a religion at all. No doubt Crèvecœur would be happy with this result, and to be fair, he did predict it.
The next five letters are pretty boring. They are about Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, when they were hardscrabble fishing settlements, before they became the playground of America’s dubious rich. The Farmer offers a lot of talk about how the local flora, fauna, and geography shapes the islanders. The shape given is, according to the Farmer (who supposedly visited there, though the geographic descriptions are wildly inaccurate), excellent, as the result of “a system of rational laws founded on perfect freedom.” In James’s Enlightenment belief system, more freedom leads to more good behavior, with no need of any external guidance, merely welling up from the natural goodness inside every man.
On a practical level, “Idleness and poverty, the causes of so many crimes, are unknown here.” This is because of what would today be called “human capital,” since the physical resources of the islands are small, and there is little way to make a living other than fishing, which is difficult and dangerous. There are few lawyers in the islands, too, which makes them much better places to live (the Farmer frequently complains that lawyers are a typically American plague, and that it is “a pity that our forefathers . . . did not also prevent the introduction of a set of men so dangerous!”). There are no extremes of wealth. Again, there are weird passages, such as the allegation that all the islanders, men and women, take opium every morning, and cannot function without it. Maybe, but again, I doubt it. With good reason, this part of the book is little remarked upon today.
The ninth letter is the second-most-famous letter; it is a brief one, about Charleston, seat of planter wealth. Crèvecœur contrasts the lack of virtue and corruption of Charleston with the firm virtue of Pennsylvania and New England, though he does not tell us why the regions differ in virtue, other than noting contrasts in wealth, and the huge numbers of lawyers in Charleston. Most of all he bemoans the terrible lot of the slaves, ending with a well-known and gruesome description of a protracted slave execution by exposure. It’s hard to say if Crèvecœur really visited Charleston, but his descriptions are accurate enough, historically speaking. Still, the reader finds it hard to ignore that the Farmer sees little or no contradiction between his owning slaves and the planters owning slaves; in his mind, his own slaves are little distinct from free, and happy, hired hands. Again, this is very unlikely to have been true.
This slippery treatment of slavery highlights, and to an extent explains, how the Enlightenment not only tolerated, but essentially ignored, slavery, something about which I have wondered in the past. It seems odd that the Enlightenment project was all about emancipation, on paper, but the Enlightenment’s main figures, both in America and in England and France, were not concerned with addressing slavery, though occasionally they paid lip service to it being less than wholly desirable. In truth, all the actual work of ending the slave trade was done by English Christians, as Christians, not as heralds of the Enlightenment. I think it’s a little unfair, perhaps, to give Christianity all the credit, since the flavor of the times, spiced with the Enlightenment, probably moved abolitionists to more aggressively turn the focus of their Christian belief onto slavery. But if one grasps that, as the Farmer does, Enlightenment thinkers effectively divided their beliefs about slavery into “good slavery” and “bad slavery,” their failure to do anything about slavery becomes a bit more comprehensible, though that does not explain their unwillingness to lift a finger to end the type of slavery on display in and around Charleston. Maybe it was just personal economic interest, since many Englishmen profited, directly or indirectly, from the slave trade. Such hypocritical and self-interested behavior has always been characteristic of the Left; it finds its modern equivalent, in intellectual soundness at least, in progressives who shriek how global warming is going to kill us all in twelve years, while they jet around the world on luxury vacations and are chauffeured in their giant SUVs. It appears that leftist virtue signaling, especially the kind that imposes all costs on others while making leftists feel superior, isn’t just a modern phenomenon, but was there when the Left was spawned in the eighteenth century.
It is in this ninth letter that the Farmer starts being less pleased with America, bewailing the fate of mankind, making numerous comments about the irredeemably brutal lot of all human life. In the context of slavery, this is perfectly apt, but he is reaching much further, undermining the sunny Enlightenment optimism of the earlier Letters. The tenth and eleventh letters revert to descriptions of nature. The tenth makes more strange and overtly false statements, such as that rattlesnakes are less poisonous than copperheads, that efficacious antidotes to rattlesnake venom were generally available to American colonists, and that rattlesnakes could be tamed and trained to come when they are called. The eleventh is a letter-within-a-letter, supposedly from a Russian who visited the (real) botanist John Bertram (actually Bartram), at the Farmer’s request. The main point of the letter is, though, to contrast the supposed superiority of American plain acting to fancy manners and “polite expressions,” a point the letter writer beats like a kettledrum, presumably another example of early leftist virtue signaling.
In this last Letter, the Farmer changes his tone completely, to one of anguished emotion. He is writing to tell his English friend that the violence and havoc of the Revolutionary War has swept over his homestead, in western Pennsylvania. Mostly this involves Indians allied with the English killing American farmers and their families, but beyond that, the Farmer’s point, and the immediate cause of his anguish, is that neutrality is not an option. The Indians don’t care, and the Americans won’t tolerate it. “As a citizen of a now-smaller society [than England]; I find that any kind of opposition to its now-prevailing sentiments immediately begets hatred.” He notes that in such situations, all that matters to a man is the safety of his family.
James’s horror seems to be largely at the failure of his beloved Enlightenment principles to avoid violence. He now realizes, even if he does not explicitly admit it, that it is false that emancipatory freedom fixes the faults of men. It is quite apparent to him now that more violence is coming for Americans, and that only violence can decide the questions at hand, yet James shrinks from that conclusion, since his ideology tells him emancipation and unfettered freedom prevents war, because human nature is good. But reality has intruded on his ideology, the constant failing of leftist ideology for three hundred years.
His faith in European man ruined, James plans to flee with his family to a remote Indian village, where they will live as Indians, with a tribe not allied with the English, far in the interior. While he expects to be safe, the Farmer expresses great concern that his children may go native. As Sebastian Junger notes in "Tribe," such going native was surprisingly common among even adult Europeans, and almost exclusively one-way; the Indians did not return the interest. Of course, there are many people, such as James C. Scott, who hold, in essence, that despite its drawbacks, the simple tribal life is preferable for most people. Still, that this is a good solution for the Farmer’s dilemma seems like excessive optimism: the Enlightenment myth of the noble savage is one myth that James has not yet let go of, though he may well when he reaches the village—after all, the woodlands Indians of North America were extremely violent, even by Continental standards, and actively involved themselves in the wars of the white man, both for protection and gain. Whatever the wisdom of his choice, that’s the despairing end of the Letters; we are left to wonder whatever became of the Farmer and his family.
Of course, the Farmer is correct about the tensions and hatreds of the American Revolution, which we tend to view through a gauzy haze. True, such hatreds were expressed, for the most part, much less violently than in any Continental war, probably due to superior English culture (despite some recent revisionist attempts, such as Holger Hoock in Scars of Independence, to claim the contrary). Any war is going to have not just winners and losers, but a range of people who attached themselves to a range of opinions in the run-up and execution of that war. The resolution of the war will determine the reward and punishment assigned to those opinions, and concomitant actions. Civil wars are even worse for engendering hatred of neighbors, since people with different opinions are, by definition, intermingled. The American Civil War was the same thing as the War of Independence in this regard, writ large.
So what the Farmer’s anguish tells us, other than that the Enlightenment doesn’t offer solutions to man’s problems, is that civil life in America is a cycle, where divisions are healed by the permanent defeat of one side. First the War of Independence. Then the Civil War. And now, the war, only spottily violent as of yet, launched by the American Left to solidify their position beyond all the commanding heights of our culture and economy that they already control, and stamp out all opposition, such that they may, or so they hope, attain permanent hegemony in their fully emancipated and forced-egalitarian utopia. Sure, that’s silly in the long-run, since like all Left movements, ultimately their reach exceeds their grasp and reality returns to hit them in the head. But in the meantime, they could defeat the Right to the same degree that the revolutionaries defeated the Loyalists, leaving it for a later generation, after the inevitable collapse, to rebuild something grounded in reality. The takeaway here is that America has never been without irresolvable internal conflict for more than a hundred years, and not only are we due for another round of resolution, its beginnings are obvious all around us. There can be only one.
Crèvecœur’s real life after this book offered him yet more proof of the defectiveness of Enlightenment principles, because, like the Farmer, he had to flee. Not to the Indians, in his case; rather, he went home to France. He left his wife and children behind; the former died, and his children were scattered, though he recovered them. The second time he went back to France, he arrived just in time for the Terror, getting his full exposure to the logical end of the philosphes’ musings. Somehow he managed to avoid getting killed, apparently by hiding and then laying low. Ultimately he died in relatively comfortable provincial obscurity. He got lucky, but lots of other people didn’t have, or didn’t make, the choice to flee. They faced the music instead, which is, no doubt, what most of us will have to do too.
July 3, 2020
This is an interestingly uneven text, whose Letter 3 is well-known for its exceptionalist praise of America as a land free of the tyranny and oppression of Europe, where diverse immigrant populations melt together. The author lays it on pretty thick, and people that review the book negatively react against this, sometimes mistakenly calling him racist.
I think Crèvecoeur is better viewed as an American weirdo, a French nobleman who tended a farm in New York state for some years. If you are looking for an exciting plot this is not the book for you. The style is meandering and contemplative. Some of the letters were hard to get through, such as letter 4, describing Nantucket. I struggled to grasp the point of the description here and elsewhere.
What I found interesting in some of the letters (such as letters 1 & 2) was the way that Farmer James (the fictional narrator that serves as a mouthpiece for Crèvecoeur) describes a set of attitudes that still appear in America -- a pride in unpretentious simplicity and straight dealing, a pragmatic valuation of hands-on skills over book learning, an off-kilter mysticism about the natural landscape, an attentive eye for the world around him on his farm, describing a battle between bees and birds, or trying to imagine what kind of chicken would have grown from the egg that he eats for breakfast, if he had not eaten it. His American weirdness reminded me of the later writer Thoreau, one of my favorites.
Later letters complicate the rosy picture of America painted in the earlier ones. He comes across a slave who has been left to die in a cage in the woods because he murdered one of his overseers. The description here is vivid and gruesome, and even though Farmer James feels compassion, all he can do is give him some water, which only prolongs his slow death.
The last letter, 12, takes an interesting turn. Fearing the imminent loss of his home and family by the invading revolutionary forces, Farmer James rethinks many of the ideas that came before, abandoning interest in politics and opinions, and only hoping that his family will survive. The book ends with pages of overwrought, prayerful vows to abandon civilization and join the Native Americans, claiming somewhat ridiculously that he will live his days in a wigwam. I can sympathize with this urge, even if it romanticizes the Native American society.
I think Crèvecoeur is better viewed as an American weirdo, a French nobleman who tended a farm in New York state for some years. If you are looking for an exciting plot this is not the book for you. The style is meandering and contemplative. Some of the letters were hard to get through, such as letter 4, describing Nantucket. I struggled to grasp the point of the description here and elsewhere.
What I found interesting in some of the letters (such as letters 1 & 2) was the way that Farmer James (the fictional narrator that serves as a mouthpiece for Crèvecoeur) describes a set of attitudes that still appear in America -- a pride in unpretentious simplicity and straight dealing, a pragmatic valuation of hands-on skills over book learning, an off-kilter mysticism about the natural landscape, an attentive eye for the world around him on his farm, describing a battle between bees and birds, or trying to imagine what kind of chicken would have grown from the egg that he eats for breakfast, if he had not eaten it. His American weirdness reminded me of the later writer Thoreau, one of my favorites.
Later letters complicate the rosy picture of America painted in the earlier ones. He comes across a slave who has been left to die in a cage in the woods because he murdered one of his overseers. The description here is vivid and gruesome, and even though Farmer James feels compassion, all he can do is give him some water, which only prolongs his slow death.
The last letter, 12, takes an interesting turn. Fearing the imminent loss of his home and family by the invading revolutionary forces, Farmer James rethinks many of the ideas that came before, abandoning interest in politics and opinions, and only hoping that his family will survive. The book ends with pages of overwrought, prayerful vows to abandon civilization and join the Native Americans, claiming somewhat ridiculously that he will live his days in a wigwam. I can sympathize with this urge, even if it romanticizes the Native American society.
March 29, 2023
Interesting quote "[An American] is either an European (sic) or the descendant of a European, hence the strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country." + Something about leaving behind "ancient prejudices and manners" (obviously excluding many immigrants and enslaved people)
September 17, 2025
Surprisingly interesting. “farmer james” attempts to define what an American is: what he calls the “new man.” also anti-slavery rhetoric which was fascinating to read.
October 8, 2025
Long live the white, privileged man! (sarcastic because bro is just ridiculing slavery help me)
September 15, 2025
I hated this book, if I could give it zero stars I would. I don’t believe in censorship unless it’s for this book. This book should be called Letters From A Dumb Frenchman Impersonating an American Farmer, because oh yeah he’s not even American! I’d rather watch paint dry than read this book again.
July 24, 2015
I don't remember how I fell over this book but I had never heard of it despite it's apparent fame and historical import.
It is painful to read both for its language and its topic. The last 26 pages are the equivalent of "Can't stay here. Leaving soon to live with the Indians. Revolution imminent." Given that my desire for a little more brevity, particularly when nothing new is being provided and there is no "poetry" to the language, is most likely due to my 21st century sensibilities but surely there is a common ground somewhere in the middle. (I kind of remember it from the 1900s.)
At times these letters feel very much like propaganda and bravado - America is so wonderful! We have all the land we could want (just ignore the "natives") and we are all self-made men with no vices! Come on over!
But just as quickly it becomes an embarrassing portrayal of the founding of the country. Within 100 years of being a refuge for the religiously persecuted, it's already come back around to the British way or the highway - although a bit of a fuss is made about the ability for everyone to worship in the Christian church of their choice. Other Europeans are tolerated, mostly because they are rather amusing, but they'd better be abiding by British law and customs. Natives are simply to be dealt with in the same way as a pesky fly - unless they have something of value. And slaves? Oh, wonderful slaves! They are treated quite well as long as they do what they are asked to do. In fact, in the Northern states they are just as happy as free white men and given nearly all the same freedoms.
Who knew?
It's too hard to even get angry at such blatant ego, ignorance, and justifications - it's just shameful.
I can't help comparing this book to the dystopian literature I've come to love - a world found, ravaged, spoiled, and gone mad. Unfortunately, I don't know how this one is going to end.
It is painful to read both for its language and its topic. The last 26 pages are the equivalent of "Can't stay here. Leaving soon to live with the Indians. Revolution imminent." Given that my desire for a little more brevity, particularly when nothing new is being provided and there is no "poetry" to the language, is most likely due to my 21st century sensibilities but surely there is a common ground somewhere in the middle. (I kind of remember it from the 1900s.)
At times these letters feel very much like propaganda and bravado - America is so wonderful! We have all the land we could want (just ignore the "natives") and we are all self-made men with no vices! Come on over!
But just as quickly it becomes an embarrassing portrayal of the founding of the country. Within 100 years of being a refuge for the religiously persecuted, it's already come back around to the British way or the highway - although a bit of a fuss is made about the ability for everyone to worship in the Christian church of their choice. Other Europeans are tolerated, mostly because they are rather amusing, but they'd better be abiding by British law and customs. Natives are simply to be dealt with in the same way as a pesky fly - unless they have something of value. And slaves? Oh, wonderful slaves! They are treated quite well as long as they do what they are asked to do. In fact, in the Northern states they are just as happy as free white men and given nearly all the same freedoms.
Who knew?
It's too hard to even get angry at such blatant ego, ignorance, and justifications - it's just shameful.
I can't help comparing this book to the dystopian literature I've come to love - a world found, ravaged, spoiled, and gone mad. Unfortunately, I don't know how this one is going to end.
February 11, 2026
Glowing review of the time??? I mean.. I guess... There is importance of his notice of what it is to be an american as an immigrant. I just the inclusion of only white immigrants is interesting. applauded for all they do but no notice of the native populations and slaves... you didn't do it alone... you did it with large amount of slave work.
January 29, 2026
(3/5)
An interesting picture of what colonial America might have been like.
An interesting picture of what colonial America might have been like.
March 31, 2019
I must be reading too many early american English texts, because I'm starting to understand them too easily. Ha ha!
Though written mostly from the imagination of Crevecoeur, it is based upon his experience and understanding of various aspects of life in the colonies in the years preceding the American Revolution. His closeness with, and observations of nature are clear and provide some of the more interesting stories involving bees, birds and even snakes.
It also seems surprising to learn that many people were living free and happy lives in the colonies before the war broke out. It had to be hard to know what to do under those circumstances, without knowing what to expect from either possible outcome.
Though written mostly from the imagination of Crevecoeur, it is based upon his experience and understanding of various aspects of life in the colonies in the years preceding the American Revolution. His closeness with, and observations of nature are clear and provide some of the more interesting stories involving bees, birds and even snakes.
It also seems surprising to learn that many people were living free and happy lives in the colonies before the war broke out. It had to be hard to know what to do under those circumstances, without knowing what to expect from either possible outcome.
February 27, 2024
2/5 Stars (%40/100)
When I read this back in 2016, I was harsh and gave it 1 star only. I'm guessing I hated it because it was obligatory during my BA. Now I reread it for my MA class and I admit I was too strict. It is still not very good in my opinion mainly because it is boring but I can see Crevecoeur's point. I mean it's one of the earliest books about America. The use of such terms like "melting pot" was revolutionary at that time. It still doesn't change the fact that it is quite long and repetitive. If you are not really interested in American history or studying American history/literature, you should probably skip it.
When I read this back in 2016, I was harsh and gave it 1 star only. I'm guessing I hated it because it was obligatory during my BA. Now I reread it for my MA class and I admit I was too strict. It is still not very good in my opinion mainly because it is boring but I can see Crevecoeur's point. I mean it's one of the earliest books about America. The use of such terms like "melting pot" was revolutionary at that time. It still doesn't change the fact that it is quite long and repetitive. If you are not really interested in American history or studying American history/literature, you should probably skip it.
September 23, 2017
If it weren't for my American lit course, I wouldn't even get to this. Basically the author describes how America is the best country in the world, free from royalty, no social stratification and all that jazz. Not exactly an easy read, and I wouldn't read it again.
December 2, 2012
θελω η σχολη μου να κατεδαφιστει!!γινεται??????????
August 16, 2023
Review title: Between the devil and the deep blue sea
American Farmer is an interesting amalgam of influences and a fitting artifact of life in the pre-united colonies of the mid-18th century. The first ingredient in the mix is the French-born farmer, a minor nobleman who emigrated to the Americas, renamed himself James Hector St. John, married a pastors daughter, and in 1765 bought land in New York which he turned into a working farm by his own labor (see A New Literary History of America, p. 88-93, which gave me the impetus to add this to my reading list). He writes a series of "letters"--basically informal essays with pages-long paragraphs and run-on sentences (if that style bothers you as it does me, you are forewarned)--purporting to be from a rustic Pennsylvania farmer to a visiting English guest. An upper class Frenchman writing in English (his second language) as a lower class American to a visiting Englishman is an appropriate representation of the cultural and ethnic mix of the colonies at that time and place. That all of these characteristics were already at conflict in a world wide war and just a decade later would ignite the Age of Revolution remains unsaid but on paper by the end of this short collection.
This new American is quite content in his new role as farmer. "I felt myself happy in my new situation, and where is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of a American farmer, possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little from us?" (p. 8-9). He proceeds to p delineate the typical roles and lifestyles of the colonies, moving inland from the coastal dwellers, to the farmers in the settled piedmont regions, to the frontier woodsmen then pushing westward through Penn's woods to Fort Duquesne and beyond to the distant Mississippi. He is a proto-Jefferson in his focus on and admiration for the small landholders, giving little attention to cities and manufacturing except as negative examples. He delineates the immigration population by their country of origin, ranking Germans ahead of Scotsmen ahead of the Irish (p. 62), who apparently are notable only because they "love to drink and to quarrel ; they are litigious, and soon take to the gun". And, like Jefferson, he seems to accept and expect that black people would be slaves, and praises the typical yeoman Farmer slaveholder for "how fat and we'll clad their Negroes are." (p. 16). This early assumption of white privilege is only questioned in a later letter when he encounters and describes southern society in "Charles-Town", where the "three principal classes of inhabitants are, lawyers, planters, and merchants" (p. 170) and "their ears by habit are become deaf, their hearts are hardened; they neither see, hear, nor feel for the woes of their poor slaves, from whose painful labours all their wealth proceeds." (p. 171). The modern reader, knowing the Farmer's Jeffersonian agrarian leaning, wonders if he is more critical of the Southern slaveholder because of a new-found sense of racial justice, or because the slaveholder were from the business class Jefferson denigrated.
Similarly, our Farmer overlooks the sufferings of the Native American population. "In the year 1764, above half of the Indians of this island [Nantucket] perished by a strange fever, which the Europeans who nursed them never caught. " (p. 109) As we know now, there was nothing strange about the fever or the European immunity, as it was the Europeans who brought and infected the Native population with diseases for which they had no protection. And just as he seemed to adjust his racial thinking related to slavery, by the last letter here on "The Distresses of a Frontier man" St. John shows more admiration and respect for the native Americans than before. In fact this letter finds the Farmer in distress between the deep wilderness to his west and the broiling political controversies encroach from the east and beyond as the colonies approach open war with England. He expresses these distresses without ever using the word "revolution" or mentioning the struggle by name, but he clearly debated in his own mind (in very long paragraphs and sentences) what he felt was best for him and his family. While describing the physical dangers of life on the western frontier, he blames the risk of native attacks on foreign instigation and praises the lifestyle and culture of the native woodsmen versus that of the "civilized" armies to the east:
Given his amalgam of European influences, we can sense the heartfelt anguish that leads him to throw in his lot with the native "devils" over the civilization attacking across the deep blue sea.
This is an interesting and enigmatic contemporary first-hand account of 18th century America, that as the Literary History writes, "helped create an abiding myth of America."
American Farmer is an interesting amalgam of influences and a fitting artifact of life in the pre-united colonies of the mid-18th century. The first ingredient in the mix is the French-born farmer, a minor nobleman who emigrated to the Americas, renamed himself James Hector St. John, married a pastors daughter, and in 1765 bought land in New York which he turned into a working farm by his own labor (see A New Literary History of America, p. 88-93, which gave me the impetus to add this to my reading list). He writes a series of "letters"--basically informal essays with pages-long paragraphs and run-on sentences (if that style bothers you as it does me, you are forewarned)--purporting to be from a rustic Pennsylvania farmer to a visiting English guest. An upper class Frenchman writing in English (his second language) as a lower class American to a visiting Englishman is an appropriate representation of the cultural and ethnic mix of the colonies at that time and place. That all of these characteristics were already at conflict in a world wide war and just a decade later would ignite the Age of Revolution remains unsaid but on paper by the end of this short collection.
This new American is quite content in his new role as farmer. "I felt myself happy in my new situation, and where is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of a American farmer, possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little from us?" (p. 8-9). He proceeds to p delineate the typical roles and lifestyles of the colonies, moving inland from the coastal dwellers, to the farmers in the settled piedmont regions, to the frontier woodsmen then pushing westward through Penn's woods to Fort Duquesne and beyond to the distant Mississippi. He is a proto-Jefferson in his focus on and admiration for the small landholders, giving little attention to cities and manufacturing except as negative examples. He delineates the immigration population by their country of origin, ranking Germans ahead of Scotsmen ahead of the Irish (p. 62), who apparently are notable only because they "love to drink and to quarrel ; they are litigious, and soon take to the gun". And, like Jefferson, he seems to accept and expect that black people would be slaves, and praises the typical yeoman Farmer slaveholder for "how fat and we'll clad their Negroes are." (p. 16). This early assumption of white privilege is only questioned in a later letter when he encounters and describes southern society in "Charles-Town", where the "three principal classes of inhabitants are, lawyers, planters, and merchants" (p. 170) and "their ears by habit are become deaf, their hearts are hardened; they neither see, hear, nor feel for the woes of their poor slaves, from whose painful labours all their wealth proceeds." (p. 171). The modern reader, knowing the Farmer's Jeffersonian agrarian leaning, wonders if he is more critical of the Southern slaveholder because of a new-found sense of racial justice, or because the slaveholder were from the business class Jefferson denigrated.
Similarly, our Farmer overlooks the sufferings of the Native American population. "In the year 1764, above half of the Indians of this island [Nantucket] perished by a strange fever, which the Europeans who nursed them never caught. " (p. 109) As we know now, there was nothing strange about the fever or the European immunity, as it was the Europeans who brought and infected the Native population with diseases for which they had no protection. And just as he seemed to adjust his racial thinking related to slavery, by the last letter here on "The Distresses of a Frontier man" St. John shows more admiration and respect for the native Americans than before. In fact this letter finds the Farmer in distress between the deep wilderness to his west and the broiling political controversies encroach from the east and beyond as the colonies approach open war with England. He expresses these distresses without ever using the word "revolution" or mentioning the struggle by name, but he clearly debated in his own mind (in very long paragraphs and sentences) what he felt was best for him and his family. While describing the physical dangers of life on the western frontier, he blames the risk of native attacks on foreign instigation and praises the lifestyle and culture of the native woodsmen versus that of the "civilized" armies to the east:
Were they to grow up where I am now situated, even admitting that we were in safety; two of them are verging toward that period in their lives, when they must necessarily take up the musket, and learn, in that new school, all the vices which are so common in armies. Great God! close my eyes for ever, rather than I should live to see this calamity! May they rather become inhabitants of the woods. (p. 246)
Given his amalgam of European influences, we can sense the heartfelt anguish that leads him to throw in his lot with the native "devils" over the civilization attacking across the deep blue sea.
This is an interesting and enigmatic contemporary first-hand account of 18th century America, that as the Literary History writes, "helped create an abiding myth of America."
January 9, 2025
Read letters 3 and 9 for American lit. They offer an interesting perspective on early colonial history in America, but they are kinda boring to read.
August 29, 2025
I had to read this book for APUSH. It was good, not my style though.
Read
January 22, 2026not finished/
February 5, 2017
I began this book on a whim, recalling that I had taught an excerpt from it--the third letter--in an American literature course that focused on rural writings a few years ago. I had enjoyed that letter immensely, but had always heard that the book had some dark overtures, and was curious to see what those were like. And so, as my bedside reading for a week or so, these Letters were my companion, and I've been mulling over them constantly over the last several days.
First of all, what is this book? That in itself is a strange, and revealing, question. These are a series of fictional letters, written in the voice of an humble Englishman, living and farming in the Pennsylvania backcountry, to a wealthy friend back in England. But yet, only the self-deprecating, funny and naively silly first letter and the exasperated, yet darkly optimistic, last letter provide anything in the way of the "life-events" content we would expect to find in letters. The rest, though set up as letters, works as a travel journal, study of the natural landscape, ethnography, general political theorizing, social commentary and critique, agricultural treatise, and general rumination on "the good life." Despite its fictive conceit, it's far from being an epistolary novel, but is rather something like one would have expected to see produced by one of the Roman writers--Cato the Elder or Cicero, perhaps--for its wide-ranging subject matter, interests, and rhetorical styles within the conceit of the larger, unified work.
In a way, Crevecoeur seems to be providing a work that sits between--both chronologically and conceptually--the two most significant pre-1800 works in American letters: Franklin's Autobigoraphy and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Crevecoeur shares their strongly-Enlightenment religious and political principles of freedom, liberty, and mild religiosity as moralistic instructor rather than deposit of transcendent Truth claims, and he gives us an extension of Franklin's inventive, creative industriousness that points towards Jefferson's fixation on land, agriculture, self-sufficient yeoman virtue, and suspicion of market capitalism and centralized government. Yet unlike those two lions of the Revolution, Crevecoeur presents a political vision that echoes the feelings of the common man everywhere: to be left alone, as he must do the work of caring for his family and doing the labours that have been presented to him, rather than to engage in the confusing, chaotic political controversies of his day.
This is especially apparent in the closing letter, in which we see farmer "John" lamenting the destructive excesses of the nascent Patriot movement while admitting to his love for his fellow Americans and his understanding of their criticisms of the Crown. "John" will not raise a finger against either his neighbour or his King, his present nor his past. Rather, he will remove himself to live with the Natives, where a virtue parallel to the "American" virtues he describes in earlier letters continues to be practiced, until the shooting is over. Then, he will return and rebuild his life--a life that does not depend on government of any sort, but on the blessings of a Deistic Providence, the labour and economy of he and his family, and, most especially, the cultivation of virtue.
And thus this book, which in many ways is meant to be a work of ethnography, social commentary, and natural history, becomes a meditation on the meaning of America and how we define Americans. And in an age of increased tension and conflict, its answers to these questions, its unflinching examinations of national failings (especially slavery), and the vision of the American who just can't bring himself to engage in the fratricide in which his neighbours are participating, and who simply tends his own garden while the world burns (and struggling over whether this is cowardice or not), is a vision that is especially prescient now.
First of all, what is this book? That in itself is a strange, and revealing, question. These are a series of fictional letters, written in the voice of an humble Englishman, living and farming in the Pennsylvania backcountry, to a wealthy friend back in England. But yet, only the self-deprecating, funny and naively silly first letter and the exasperated, yet darkly optimistic, last letter provide anything in the way of the "life-events" content we would expect to find in letters. The rest, though set up as letters, works as a travel journal, study of the natural landscape, ethnography, general political theorizing, social commentary and critique, agricultural treatise, and general rumination on "the good life." Despite its fictive conceit, it's far from being an epistolary novel, but is rather something like one would have expected to see produced by one of the Roman writers--Cato the Elder or Cicero, perhaps--for its wide-ranging subject matter, interests, and rhetorical styles within the conceit of the larger, unified work.
In a way, Crevecoeur seems to be providing a work that sits between--both chronologically and conceptually--the two most significant pre-1800 works in American letters: Franklin's Autobigoraphy and Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Crevecoeur shares their strongly-Enlightenment religious and political principles of freedom, liberty, and mild religiosity as moralistic instructor rather than deposit of transcendent Truth claims, and he gives us an extension of Franklin's inventive, creative industriousness that points towards Jefferson's fixation on land, agriculture, self-sufficient yeoman virtue, and suspicion of market capitalism and centralized government. Yet unlike those two lions of the Revolution, Crevecoeur presents a political vision that echoes the feelings of the common man everywhere: to be left alone, as he must do the work of caring for his family and doing the labours that have been presented to him, rather than to engage in the confusing, chaotic political controversies of his day.
This is especially apparent in the closing letter, in which we see farmer "John" lamenting the destructive excesses of the nascent Patriot movement while admitting to his love for his fellow Americans and his understanding of their criticisms of the Crown. "John" will not raise a finger against either his neighbour or his King, his present nor his past. Rather, he will remove himself to live with the Natives, where a virtue parallel to the "American" virtues he describes in earlier letters continues to be practiced, until the shooting is over. Then, he will return and rebuild his life--a life that does not depend on government of any sort, but on the blessings of a Deistic Providence, the labour and economy of he and his family, and, most especially, the cultivation of virtue.
And thus this book, which in many ways is meant to be a work of ethnography, social commentary, and natural history, becomes a meditation on the meaning of America and how we define Americans. And in an age of increased tension and conflict, its answers to these questions, its unflinching examinations of national failings (especially slavery), and the vision of the American who just can't bring himself to engage in the fratricide in which his neighbours are participating, and who simply tends his own garden while the world burns (and struggling over whether this is cowardice or not), is a vision that is especially prescient now.
July 13, 2015
April 26, 2015
A few weeks ago, I began reading an Everyman edition of this book that's almost 90 years old as background information for a piece of fiction I hope to write,
I was surprised at how clearly and economically Crevecoeur wrote this book -- like a good text from the present day. It's like fiction in some ways. The author's father was a French nobleman, while the narrator-farmer says that he inherited his holdings from his father. He moves away from farming at times and brings his readers to places like Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.
The narrator is a free man, happy with his lot in life. He celebrates the benefits that come from honesty and hard work, with no aristocracy to suck up the wealth of the country. No shame is connected with moderate means. The key is to find something interesting to do that benefits others.
He writes passionately and convincingly about the evils of slavery. He is also an early observer of similarities between Russia and North America. Tocqueville made the same point.
With one chapter left to read, I have the impression that this work will hold its place among the classics of writing about America.
April 29
Finished the last chapter yesterday, which calls attention to the fictionalized nature of the text. According to Wikipedia, Crevecoeur went back to Europe during the American Revolution to be with his ailing father. The narrator, however, takes a lot of time working up a plan to bring his wife and family to a native village to escape the miseries of the fighting. The best part of the chapter for me was the reminder that the American Revolution wasn't a storybook war with inspiring pictures and little suffering.
I still have a lengthy end-note to read about Crevecoeur's correspondence with people like Benjamin Franklin.
A few weeks ago, I began reading an Everyman edition of this book that's almost 90 years old as background information for a piece of fiction I hope to write,
I was surprised at how clearly and economically Crevecoeur wrote this book -- like a good text from the present day. It's like fiction in some ways. The author's father was a French nobleman, while the narrator-farmer says that he inherited his holdings from his father. He moves away from farming at times and brings his readers to places like Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.
The narrator is a free man, happy with his lot in life. He celebrates the benefits that come from honesty and hard work, with no aristocracy to suck up the wealth of the country. No shame is connected with moderate means. The key is to find something interesting to do that benefits others.
He writes passionately and convincingly about the evils of slavery. He is also an early observer of similarities between Russia and North America. Tocqueville made the same point.
With one chapter left to read, I have the impression that this work will hold its place among the classics of writing about America.
April 29
Finished the last chapter yesterday, which calls attention to the fictionalized nature of the text. According to Wikipedia, Crevecoeur went back to Europe during the American Revolution to be with his ailing father. The narrator, however, takes a lot of time working up a plan to bring his wife and family to a native village to escape the miseries of the fighting. The best part of the chapter for me was the reminder that the American Revolution wasn't a storybook war with inspiring pictures and little suffering.
I still have a lengthy end-note to read about Crevecoeur's correspondence with people like Benjamin Franklin.
October 22, 2023
I understand that this is considered one of the founding documents of American literature. It is certainly one of the earliest works that I have read that puts forth the myth of American exceptionalism that we are a frugal, industrious, sober and prosperous people who have rightly exploited the bounties of a rich land. There are no real class or religous distinctions. Hard work, common sense, ample resources and a light touch from government make us rich. Yes, some people have bad luck, life on the frontier is sometimes rough, and slavery is a shameful institution, but we can put all of that aside. I don't know. Some of this is true, but there is a lot a of mythology, and much of this idealized world was rich white man's privilege.
My favorite part of the book was the description of his life as a farmer in the beginning - clearing and planting the land, raising animals, interacting with the natural world around him. I particularly liked the bit about beekeeping. In later chapters/letters, he goes off in seemingly random directions, devoting many pages to life on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and the whaling business and then giving us a chapter on Charleston and life in the southern colonies with their slave-based plantation economies. There's no consistent through line. Toward the end there is a letter in the voice of a Russian emigre about his interactions with a Pennsylvania botanist, and then finally a letter that felt out of place with the rest where the letter writer talks about taking his family off to live with the Indians to escape the travails of the Revolutionary War. I didn't see that one coming. Or maybe there were clues in the rest of it that I missed.
My favorite part of the book was the description of his life as a farmer in the beginning - clearing and planting the land, raising animals, interacting with the natural world around him. I particularly liked the bit about beekeeping. In later chapters/letters, he goes off in seemingly random directions, devoting many pages to life on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard and the whaling business and then giving us a chapter on Charleston and life in the southern colonies with their slave-based plantation economies. There's no consistent through line. Toward the end there is a letter in the voice of a Russian emigre about his interactions with a Pennsylvania botanist, and then finally a letter that felt out of place with the rest where the letter writer talks about taking his family off to live with the Indians to escape the travails of the Revolutionary War. I didn't see that one coming. Or maybe there were clues in the rest of it that I missed.
July 2, 2011
As a primary source document from the immediately pre-Revolutionary War period, this book is naturally of interest to history buffs, but - speaking as a member of that tribe myself - I did not love it. The letters have a very desultory character, describing the history of Nantucket, the character of Charleston, and local hummingbirds and snakes, to give just a sample. There is no attempt at a comprehensive study of the American colonies in any sense, and those topics upon which the author alights seem completely random. Moreover, he treats them with such a childlike guilelessness that makes the reader seriously wonder just how reliable a source Mr. St. John de Crèvecœur is. He is so taken in by the opportunity in America that his descriptions of the universal quality of life there at this time would border on the unbelievable even if more objective histories of the same period that I have read didn't induce me to that feeling. For me, what was most interesting about these letters is Crèvecœur's discussions of the Native Americans at this time. It was fascinating for me to read how highly he esteemed these people, even higher than his fellow European-descendants in many cases, and yet still believes in their ultimate inferiority to Whites. I wish he had spent more time on this tension, explaining how (or indeed if) he resolved it for himself. If he had, I think that kind of insight into the colonial mind would have been the greatest value of this collection of letters.
January 12, 2026
With all the leisure that comes with dining on literature, no book that I have read as of late has challenged this sentiment more than Letters from an American Farmer. Letters does have merit yes, but merely to the obscure canon of early American literature. There are far better descriptions of late colonial life and far greater foundational pieces written from this time period. The epistolary method of prose I would say drives this across the most, not to mention the excessive use of run-on sentences that utilize boatloads of colons and semicolons. I was truly excited to indulge this piece as I have read excerpts and notes over the years relating to Crèvecoeur's work, but overall I cannot help but feel disappointed and dissatisfied. There were some good sections: of course the most famous "What is an American?" Letter will continue to serve as an anthem for the US' values(with some key notable alterations to ring true to the present), the small fables drizzled about regarding bees and other creatures are enjoyable, the horrors of slavery divulged are crucial to understanding the early republic, and the description of Cape Cod that is immersed in enchanting imagery. But, all in all, I wish I was ripping opium like the Nantucket populace were when I was reading this, because this was truly a grind.
(P.S. This republication also just sucks, the printer is busting copies out the wazoo, I would recommend the Penguin Classics edition if you are willing to spend a little more)
(P.S. This republication also just sucks, the printer is busting copies out the wazoo, I would recommend the Penguin Classics edition if you are willing to spend a little more)
January 25, 2019
I would like to preface this review that I read this book for an American lit class and that the review may be tainted by the professor. While the symbolism in it is as thorough and deep as Farmer James’ furroughs- it isn’t exciting. Maybe it was the first of it’s kind, but at this point in American history I find that there are much more interesting narratives to read than one of a racist torrie farmer. It was propaganda for the time but is now outdated and we have real problems ( like actual nazis) and are too busy to listen to James drone on about his love of cultivation of land that isn’t his. Can you tell I didn’t like it?
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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