On Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America

I first picked this up out of a desire to read historical American literature alongside important works of American historical scholarship. On a number of the lists that I read, this was considered the starting point for American literature, and it’s easy to see why.

Although not narratively driven, this short epistolary novel highlights some of the major themes that will come to be foregrounded in American culture and literature over the course of the next 250 years. Written in 1782, a year after the Battle of Yorktown, and a year before the signing of the Treaty of Paris, Crèvecoeur frames the “American character” as exuberant, diligent, and hospitable. Through the lens of his fictional narrator, a New York farmer named James, we see Crèvecoeur’s interest in the way Americans accept Native American life, lack a social class structure, and the first stirrings of the “American dream”—success and prosperity dependent on hard work alone. At the same time, Crèvecoeur recoils in horror over the conditions that enslaved Africans are forced to face every day—one notable scene is when the narrator comes across a black man in a cage in Charleston, South Carolina, having been forced out there for days as punishment. In this scene, Crèvecoeur’s African slave has had his eyes picked out by birds, and the slave owner has little care for his slaves beyond their utility as labor. This tension between American egalitarianism and the conditions faced by marginalized peoples (read: everybody except white men) will eventually come to define American sense of identity.

When reading this, it’s important to keep in mind that the entire text is an idealization written for a predominantly European, especially French, audience, and I’d put it in the same genre as texts like Montesquieu’s Persian Letters or Diderot’s Supplément au voyage de Bougainville. The text has little interest in the reality of American life, but transforms American society into an Platonic ideal type. Should the most noble instincts of America succeed at every turn, American society would look a lot like Crèvecoeur’s depiction of Nantucket here. However, the US has never had such great successes and, if things continue as they are, they never will. That is not to detract from Crèvecoeur’s writing, but to remind us that these are not real accounts.