Farmer versus Lawyer: Crevecoeur's Letters and the Liberal Subject

Here we have in some measure regained the ancient dignity of our species. Our laws are simple and just. We are a race of cultivators; our cultivation is unrestrained; and therefore everything is prosperous and flourishing.

—(Letter I)

Lawyers are so numerous in all our populous towns that I am surprised they never thought before of establishing themselves here; they are plants that will grow in any soil that is cultivated by the hand of others; and once they have taken root, they will extinguish every other vegetable that grows around them.

—(Letter VII)

The reputations of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and his literary alter ego, the American Farmer, have risen and fallen dramatically over the past two centuries. Greatly admired in Europe in the years following its publication in London in 1782 and initially enjoying only a slightly lesser vogue in America, Letters from an American Farmer nevertheless had plunged into obscurity by the turn of the nineteenth century.¹ Although Crèvecoeur himself became both an honorary philosophe and a darling of French society, English-speaking critics of his work grew tired of what they saw as its excessive sentimentality and distorted portrayal of American life. As a result, the text faded from public consciousness; it was not until the twentieth century that Crèvecoeur's writings again began to receive wide attention from critics and readers.² Gauging with certainty the reasons for the text's resurgent popularity is a bit difficult, but it seems clear that the explanation is not to be found in a reborn artistic admiration for the late eighteenth century "man of feeling." Not aesthetics, but the politics of nationalism appears to have been the primary force behind Crèvecoeur's critical resurrection. Most widely recognized as the place where the (often-criticized) image of the American "melting-pot" first appeared, Letters from an American Farmer continues to strike a keynote in the national mythology of the United States; it advances the idea that liberal legal and political institutions provide the best mechanisms for effacing ethnic differences and producing a cohesive society of individual citizens. During the twentieth century, Crèvecoeur's model of the citizen, the American Farmer, established himself as one of the nation's most potent and seductive cultural archetypes. In my view, it is precisely this archetypal status that makes Farmer James an important object for continued scrutiny.

Admittedly, in considering Crèvecoeur's text, the line needs to be drawn clearly between the mythology of American nationalism and historical fact.³ Notwithstanding its semi-autobiographical dimensions, Letters remains a work of fiction, an offshoot of the eighteenth-century philosophical novel written by authors such as Samuel Johnson, Montesquieu, and Voltaire.⁴ Yet at the same time, if we take seriously the notion that popular myth encodes some significant aspect of a culture's ideological underpinnings, it follows that Crèvecoeur's remarkable work does record something real about America (both in the late eighteenth and the twentieth centuries). In this essay, I hope to uncover some of those ideological dimensions by focusing on a subtle (and generally unnoticed) pattern in Farmer James's use of legal language. Paying attention to this pattern suggests that James may best be understood as a kind of legal subject—the possessive individual of social contract theory, in its dominant early American form (rooted in Lockean political theory). Such a character is indeed an archetypal, mythic figure—a legal fiction of the "representative" American citizen—that exists to this day. Farmer James embodies the legal consciousness and subject-position still called forth by modern liberal society. It is that model of subjectivity, I would suggest, that Crèvecoeur sets out to examine most rigorously in his text.

Exploring the way that legal ideology is embedded throughout Letters can also enable us to revisit the recurrent critical debate about the apparent contradictions within Crèvecoeur's text.⁵ As a corollary to my initial claim about his legal subjectivity, I would argue further that Farmer James's idealistic aspirations and distresses are both rooted...