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12 The Quaker Antislavery Commitment and How It Revolutionized French Antislavery through the Crèvec
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12 The Quaker Antislavery Commitment and How It Revolutionized French Antislavery through the Crèvecoeur–Brissot Friendship, 1782–1789 Marie-Jeanne Rossignol Slavery and Antislavery at the Heart of the Letters J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer was long seen as the first expression of American literary consciousness.1 Ending with a letter titled “What Is the American, This New Man?,” the first three letters in a book that contains twelve could understandably be seen as praising the new American nation at the time the book was published, and later at the heyday of American studies in the United States. But contemporary critics are now challenging this view, placing the book in its proper historical perspective and assessing Crèvecoeur’s personality in a more nuanced way.2 My own point in this chapter is that an essential key to interpreting Letters is to read it from an antislavery angle. Crèvecoeur’s admiration for Quakers and their commitment is obvious throughout the book. It is all the better understood when one knows of his antislavery activities in the United States and France between 1785 and 1787, and how Jacques-Pierre Brissot, later to found the first French antislavery society, was deeply influenced by the older man. The historical record does not sustain an interpretation of Letters as favorable to the new American nation: Crèvecoeur left a war-ridden United States under suspicion of loyalism in 1781.3 Letters, as they were first published in 1782, praise the British colonies in North America, and Britain itself as a benevolent power.4 The “frontier” is described as a haven for disreputable characters, while Indians (against whom the patriots warred in the West) are depicted in preromantic hues. As a former soldier in the French army, which eventually lost Canada to the British in 1760, Crèvecoeur may have been skeptical of the unnatural wartime alliance between George Washington, a former officer in the British militia, and his Seven Years’ War enemies, the French.5 Only later, in the 1784 French edition of the Letters, did Crèvecoeur The Quaker Antislavery Commitment 181 position himself as a pro-American author, dedicating the revised version of the Letters to Lafayette.6 This was a time when he was trying to reinvent himself as an expert on North America, hoping to gain employment through his aristocratic contacts in the French civil service. Indeed, after a brief stay in France between 1781 and 1783 during which he renewed his long-severed family relations and developed connections with the enlightened liberal nobility , Crèvecoeur returned to New York as the French consul in the United States capital, eventually dying in France after his final return in 1790. While Crèvecoeur’s national and political allegiances do not require much further research, a fresh look at his writings is nevertheless still necessary. Indeed, his focus on Quakers and slavery has not been the source of much interest on the part of literary critics and biographers, even the most recent ones.7 Although they usually highlight the letter explicitly devoted to slavery (Letter IX “Description of Charles Town; Thoughts on Slavery; On Physical Evil; A Melancholy Scene”), and note the positive references to Quakers (Letters IV to VIII), they have not examined these two subjects in conjunction, as I believe they should be. Howard Crosby Rice analyzed the many references to the Quaker sect and community as a mere attempt to conform to a French fashion in “philosophical circles,” which according to him explained why Quakers were given even more prominence in the 1784 French-language edition. However, the English-language edition was not meant for the French public and already contained vast sections focusing on Quakers and slavery. Bernard Chevignard also underlined Crèvecoeur’s interest in Quakers. He connected it neither to any kind of antislavery activity on the part of the former French exile, however, nor to the many references to slavery in the book. According to him, Crèvecoeur was merely mythologizing North American Quakers. Most recently, Dennis D. Moore has underlined the positive references to Quakers, tracing the origin of such mentions to Voltaire’s Lettres philosophiques (1732), as is often done. He has not connected these references to Crèvecoeur’s potential antislavery convictions. The Abbé Raynal is mentionned neither in his bibliography nor in the index to the book.8 Yet the dedication of the English publication to the Abbé Raynal, who popularized...