Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (review)

In J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), James the Farmer extols the simplicity and virtues of agrarian life, while also casting a critical eye on what he deems callous behaviors, especially those associated with slavery in the southern colonies and lawlessness on the frontier. Although initially unsure of his ability to comply with Mr. F. B.’s request for these letters, James is encouraged by the Englishman’s assertion that “writing letters is nothing more than talking on paper” (5). And so, James takes up his pen and records his observations from Pennsylvania and Nantucket to Charles Town and the western frontier. From the optimism inspired by industriousness to the anguish fueled by war, Crèvecoeur’s Letters and essays invite examination of an American identity as it is imagined and tested during this tumultuous transition from colony to Republic. A new, scholarly edition of these writings, Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays, edited and with an introduction by Dennis D. Moore, aids this examination in important ways with extensive context that provides valuable resources for reading, studying, and teaching Crèvecoeur’s writings and early American literature.

The edition includes the twelve letters along with thirteen essays that together present a dramatic narrative about early America. This drama is particularly evident in eight of the essays that as Moore explains “describe the turmoil that was, at ground level, the Revolution” (xx). They are “A Happy Family Disunited by the Spirit of Civil War,” “The Commissioners,” “Ingratitude Rewarded,” “Susquehannah,” “The Grotto,” “The Frontier Woman,” “History of Mrs. B.,” and “The Man of Sorrow.” With families torn apart, mysterious disappearance of friends into a subterranean cavern, clandestine interrogations, embattled settlements, stalwart women and despairing men, these portraits counter the bucolic harmony found in many of the letters. In “A Happy Family,” the narrator nostalgically marks this contrast: “It was then the age of peace and innocence.” In “Ingratitude Rewarded,” he regretfully observes the current state of affairs: “’Tis human nature unchecked, nonrestrained in its most dangerous career of wealth and power” (186, 233). The other five essays offer equally compelling portrayals of travel, colonialism, slavery, military hospitals, and industriousness.

For this edition, Moore has worked closely with the Crèvecoeur manuscripts at the Library of Congress and archival material from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to make corrections to earlier editions, including restoring original titles and providing complete versions of both the letters and the essays. The introduction, “Moving beyond ‘The Farmer of Feelings,’” provides extensive background and surveys a variety of critical approaches to these writings. Among many topics, Moore discusses shifts in “tone and perspective,” from the “ebulliently utopian Letter III” to Letter IX “with its grisly, up-close representation of slavery” (x). In doing so, Moore notes how reading Letters in and out of sequence may affect perspective: “When readers encounter Letter III out of context, its many resonances of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century promotional writings about the so-called New World make it sound too good to be true” (x). In “Letter III, What Is an American?” Farmer James imagines “the feelings and thoughts” of “an enlightened Englishman when he first lands on this continent”: “Here he beholds fair cities, substantial villages, extensive fields, an immense country filled with decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, and bridges where, a hundred years ago, all was wild, woody and uncultivated!” (28). All of this grandeur leads James to announce: “we are the most perfect society now existing in the world” (29). James also observes transformations of a different kind: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world” (31); “[m]en are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow” (32). Moore notes that these two passages, in particular, from Letter III “are crucial to the pattern that scholars have recognized as American exceptionalism, the notion that there is something unique—and, supposedly, uniquely privileged—about being from America” (xix...