American Antipathy and the Cruelties of Citizenship in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer

"[N]othing exists but what has its enemy," writes Farmer James in the second of his Letters from an American Farmer, "On the Situation, Feelings, and Pleasures of an American Farmer" (55). Interjected as a prelude to his famous anecdote about the king-bird's tussle with the bees, this particular maxim lies uneasily alongside the more optimistic and picturesque renderings of Letters. Taken into consideration along with his naturalizing rhetoric, his tendency to characterize America and Americans as radically new and original, as having left behind "all . . . ancient prejudices and manners" (70), this blunt universal statement points to a profound tension operating at the philosophical heart of the text. Traditional readings of Letters discover in its unfolding a Turneresque American character—the rustic farmer-author doing the hard Enlightenment work of linguistically cultivating and, thus, civilizing in textual form the American landscape. Such readings, however, miss the way Crèvecoeur's text historicizes (and, thus, politicizes) James's often overblown rhetoric of man's essentially good nature. Recent scholarly returns to his work have begun to tease out the historical context of James's universalizing and ahistorical epistolary descriptions of America and Americans and the extent to which Crèvecoeur himself may have intentionally staged this tension.¹ Grantland Rice, for instance, suggests that it may be profitable to read Letters as a kind of bildungsroman in which Crèvecoeur "challenges James's acclamatory epistemology with empirical and historical realities" such that "James gradually becomes aware of how the physical and social environments . . . fail to live up to his utopian panegyrics" (101–2). James's conceptual contradiction is especially evident in those passages where he attributes unjust social relations and practices not to repressive forms of human intention but to what he calls the "cruelty" of nature. For Farmer James "Cruel Nature" is the primary creative force in human affairs, and human interaction and structures of feeling are merely its derivatives.

By contradicting James's liberalist utopianism, Crèvecoeur assays a scathing indictment of social theories grounded in ideal principles of Nature that ignore the violence of American social and economic structures. Critiquing liberal notions like contract, sympathy, and fraternity as inadequate concepts to explain and inform American social relations, Crèvecoeur demonstrates how these concepts, like the social relations they aim to describe, occlude—at the same time they are grounded in—antagonism, violence, and human cruelty. Rendered by James's myopic sympathy, the bodies of Eastern European peasants and American slaves emerge in Letters to negate his sentimental liberalism and undermine his call to embrace democratic fraternity. They stand ultimately as uncanny rhetorical examples of Cruel Nature, which in turn provides a naturalizing and, thus, rational foundation for cruel social hierarchy. Letters ultimately suggests that the fraternal communion of shared human sentiment James imagines himself participating in as he writes is rendered untenable by the social effects the ideological construction of sympathy obscures and perpetuates.

James's very first letter, for instance, does not celebrate the power of writing to transcend the social divisions of organic society. Engrossed as it is in anxieties of identity and social position (class identity, regional identity, occupational, gender, and racial identity), it pointedly illustrates the overwhelming power of the ideology of a natural human hierarchy. James frets about the pretensions involved in writing, a practice which threatens the integrity of his identity as farmer and man of common sense: "If this scheme of thine was once known," his wife tells him, "travellers as they go along would point to our house, saying, 'Here liveth the scribbling farmer.' Better hear them as usual observe, 'Here liveth the warm substantial family that never begrudgeth a meal of victuals or a mess of oats to any one that steps in'" (49). And because writing's role in James's version of an organic society ought to be left to those with the artistic talent and learning suited for it—"those men of letters with which our cities abound" (50)—it threatens the nature of his relationship with his ostensible addressee, Mr. F...