Letters from an American farmer

Front matter

CORNELL

UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

Prefatory Note

There are at least two good reasons why I should have the honor and pleasure of writing a short preface to this new edition of Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, which makes a tardy appearance one hundred and eleven years after Matthew Carey's homely reprint of the first London edition. It was partly in consequence of some praise of mine that the present publishers made an examination of the book and determined to try to give it a new lease of life; it was also in consequence of my interest in the matter that Mr. Lewisohn undertook the task of editing the volume.

That such a task should be undertaken has been very clear to me since I read an article by Professor Selden L. Whitcomb on 'Nature in Early American Literature,' which was published in The Sewanee Review for February, 1894. Professor Whitcomb paid such a tribute to Crevecoeur's merits as a poet-naturalist that I could not rest satisfied until I had secured

a copy

PREFATORY NOTE.

a copy of the Letters and read them for myself. Since then, although I have been permitted to add my mite to the slowly accumulating critical testimony with regard to the enduring charm of one of the few early American books that fairly deserves to be ranked as a minor classic, I have not been able to rest satisfied because, owing to the rarity of Crevecoeur's volume, the pleasure I had received could not be shared with many others. There is no reason now, however, why the sane, sympathetic, open-eyed Norman-American of a century and a quarter ago should not make as fast, if not almost as many friends among modern readers as he won for himself during his lifetime by his genial Letters and, we cannot doubt, by his genial manners. Surely the latter-day public ought to be willing to welcome an author who can no longer lure them to take up their abodes in the wilderness, but may lure them to forget in the ideal past the cares of the real present.

But even should his Letters in this new form be most kindly received, one regret must still remain to all admirers of Crevecoeur, a regret connected with the man himself. Despite his efforts, Mr. Lewisohn has been able to add but little to our knowledge of Crevecoeur's life and character. French antiquaries have been consulted, the records of the French

Consulate

PREFATORY NOTE.

Consulate in New York have been searched, and various masses of correspondence have been examined; but nothing of special biographical value has been found save the letters from Mme. d' Houdetot and Crevecoeur printed at the end of the volume. For knowledge of these, permission to use them, and other help, our hearty thanks are due to Professor Albert H. Smyth of Philadelphia.

To enter here upon any discussion of Crevecoeur's merits as a writer would be not only to intrude upon Mr. Lewisohn's province, but to repeat myself. I cannot forbear, however, calling attention to the probability that Crevecoeur's ideal American of 1780, although nowhere to be seen in the provincial republic of those days, was an actual presence through the formative influence he exerted. Crevecoeur's imagination ^odied forth such an ideal citizen of an ideal land as some old-time Americans fancied themselves to be and as most of them wished to be. In other words, the literary farmer gave early expression to an ideal \Khich has been. held up to us in one way or another for more than a century — an ideal which is still efFective save upon sophisticated communities and individuals. Such a service is easily misunderstood and underestimated, but Crevecoeur's services as a lover and interpreter

of.

PREFATORY NOTE.

of nature are fortunately in no danger of being overlooked to-day. Indeed, as a pioneer poet-naturalist he could not well be revived in a more propitious season, and time has lent interest and historical value to his observations of primitive Americans and their institutions. Washington was right when he declared that the French consul's book would "afford a great deal of profitable and amusive information"; he also showed his customary prudence when he added that perhaps the picture, "though founded on fact, is in some instances embellished with rather too flattering circumstances."

In short, Crevecoeur's Letters is both a book worth reading for its own sake, and one worth remembering as an excellent illustration of the truth that American hterature has always been and must always be a product of old-world culture modified by new-world conditions. In its pages literary tradition blends with the buoyant spirit of a new nation in the making and with the charm of virgin rivers and hills and plains.

W. P. Trent.

Columbia University, New York.

I

There is a charming passage in Hazlitt's essay "On Going a Journey" in which he tells how, on a day ever memorable to him, he first read Rousseau in the parlor of a country inn, and thus phghted faith with one of his favorite books and authors. In many things Rousseau appealed to this restless and impetuous spirit, in nothing perhaps more than in the note of joy and peace in Nature, which sounds again and again in the literature of the succeeding years, not always with such largeness, yet sometimes with an almost equal charm. Among other books in which this note could be heard there fell into Hazlitt's hands a little volume of double interest to him by reason of his own early sojourn in America, and in a fitting connection he gave it a word of praise. In the Edinburgh Review for October, 1829, he speaks of it as giving one an idea "how American scenery and manners may be treated with a lively poetic interest. . . The pictures are sometimes highly colored,

but

INTRODUCTION.

but they are vivid and strikingly characteristic." "The author," he continues, "gives not only the objects, but the feelings of a new country." Hazlitt had read the book and had been delighted with it nearly a quarter of a century before he wrote of it, and in the earliest years of the century he had commended it warmly to his friends. In November, 1805, Lamb wrote: "Oh, tell Hazlitt not to forget the American Farmer. I dare say it is not so good as he fancies; but a book's a book."* And it is this book, which not only gained the sympathies of Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, but also by its idealized treatment of American country life may possibly have stirred, as Professor Moses Coit Tyler thought, the imaginations of Byron and Coleridge, of which a reprint is here undertaken after the passing of more than one hundred years.

The little volume had made its mark on both sides of the Atlantic not many years before Hazlitt noticed it. It appeared in London in 1782 with this somewhat ponderous title-page: "Letters from an American Farmer, Describing Certain Provincial Situations, Manners and Customs, and Conveying Some Idea Of The State Of The People Of North America, Written

INTRODUCTION.

ten to a Friend in England, By J. Hector St. John, A Farmer In Pennsylvania." A new English edition appeared in the year following, and an American reprint of the editio princeps was brought out by Matthew Carey in Philadelphia in 1793. In the meantime its author, whose full name was J. Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur, had himself translated the book into French, adding to it very considerably, and publishing it in Paris in 1784.* A second French edition, still further enlarged and containing excellent maps and plates, appeared in 1787. These bibliographical facts are significant. They show that for at least twe nty years^_ probably for a much longer period, the "Lette-r-s-frora-an._Am£rix:aii_Farnaer-^— was an important interpreter ofjhe^New World to the Old. It seems to liave been in answer to a demand aroused by his first book that Crevecoeur ventured to treat the same theme once more. But the three bulky volumes of his "Journey in Upper Pennsylvania" (1801) contain little that is now or illuminating.f

For

* "Lettres D'un Cultivateur Americain. Ecrites A. W. S. Ecuyer, Depuis L'Annee 1170 jusqu'al 1781. Traduites de I'Anglois par

t The full title is: "Voyage Dans La Haute Pennsylvanie, Et Dans L'Etat de New- York, Par un Membre adoptif de la nation Oneida. Traduit et publiee par I'auteur des Lettres D'Un Cultivateur Americain." There has been no reprint. It is needless to add that Crevecoeur merely pretended to have translated the book, xi

INTRODUCTION.

For many years after Hazlitt had sounded his note of praise, Crevecoeur and his work remained practically unknown. The ideas for which he stood, the Hterary atmosphere that he created, were both old-fashioned. Few people took Rousseau from their upper shelves, and the dust gathered on the tomes of Chateaubriand. Even Werther was more talked about than read. And so no one cared for this Earthly Paradise of the Age of Reason dashed with Rousseau's sentimentality, filled with his love of Nature, and prophetic of the whole Emigrant literature of France.* It was not until Americans stopped to consider the origins \ of their national culture that Crevecoeur was Vagain remembered and mentioned. The late Professor Moses Coit Tyler gave an appreciative account of the man and the book in his "Literary History of the American Revolution," and since then no competent historian of American literature has omitted a notice of Crevecoeur and the "Letters from an American Farmer."

* See Georg Brandes' "Main Currents of 19th Century Literature," vol. i. passim.

IJNTKODUCTION.

J. Hector Saint John de Crevecoeur was bom at Caen on January 31, 1735, of a noble family which had played some part in Norman history as early as the eleventh century. In 1747, in his sixteenth year, Crevecoeur was sent by his family to England In order to complete his education. But the young man was of an adventurous spirit, and after a sojourn of about seven years in England, he set sail for Canada, where for the years 1758-59 he served in the French army. In 1764, after some residence in Pennsylvania, he became a naturalized citizen of New York, and five years later settled on a farm in Ulster County. Here, with his wife, Mahetable Tiffet of Yonkers, he lived the peaceful life of many idyllic years during which he gathered the materials for his book. Obviously enough he did not always remain on his farm, but viewed many parts of the country with a quietly observing eye. These journeys are recorded in his pages. He explored pretty thoroughly the settled portions of the States of New York and Pennsylvania, saw something of New England, and also penetrated westward to the limits of the colonies. He went as far South as Charleston, and may have visited Jamaica. Beyond such journeyings we may imagine these years to

have

INTRODUCTION.

have been quite barren of events, serene and peaceful, until the storm of the Revolution began to break. It is not until 1779 that anything of import is again recorded of Crevecoeur. In that year he made an attempt to return to Normandy, but the sudden appearance of a French fleet in the harbor of New York causing him to be suspected as a spy, he was imprisoned for three months. He was then permitted to sail, and, on his arrival in England, sold for thirty guineas his "Letters from an American Farmer," which were published at London in 1782, the year after he reached France.

The success of his book and his efforts to improve the agricultural conditions of Normandy made Crevecoeur a welcome guest in France. He spent some pleasant months in French literary society, into which he was probably introduced by Mme. de Houdetot, one of the many heroines of Rousseau's "Confessions." To this lady, an old friend of his father, he also owed his introduction to Franklin.* He returned to America at the end of 1783.

Here sorrow and desolation awaited him. His wife had died a few weeks before his arrival, his farm had been ravaged, his children were in the care of strangers. But as he had been appointed French Consul in New York with the especially expressed approbation of

Washington

*Cf. Appendix pp. 331-332.

INTRODUCTION.

Washington he remained in America six years longer, with only one brief interval spent in France. Notwithstanding the disastrous practical influence of his book, through which five hundred Norman families are said to have perished in the forests of Ohio, he was now an honored citizen in his adopted country, distinguished by Washington, and the friend of Franklin. In these later years Jie accompanied Franklin on various journeys, one of which is recorded in the "Voyage Dans La Haute Pennsylvanie." In 1790 he returned to France, living now at Rouen, now at Sarcelles, where he died on November 12, 1813. He was a man of "serene temper and pure benevolence," of good sense and sound judgment; something also of a dreamer, yet of a rhetorical rather than a poetical temperament; typically French, since there were in him no extremes of opinion or emotion. He followed the dictates of his reason tempered by the warmth of his heart, and treated life justly and sanely.

III. Crevecoeur's book differs from other works I

descriptive of early conditions in America in /

that '

INTRODUCTION.

/that it should be regarded primarily as a piece I of literature. Beyond the information that is » given by it there is the more permanent significance of its tone and atmosphere, of its singularly engaging style, and of the fact that / it forms part of a great literary movement. / This literary movement, of which the masterpieces are Rousseau's "Confessions," Ste. Pierre's "Paul et Virginie," Goethe's "Sorrows of Werther," and Chateaubriand's "Les Natchez," has an American representative in these letters of a Pennsylvania farmer.

Crevecoeur sought and found, or imagined that he had found, that land of plain living and high thinking, of simple virtue and untrammeled manhood, which was one of the dreams of his age. Here were none of those social distinctions against which Werther so bitterly rebelled. The restraints of law were reduced to a minimum and in Crevecoeur's favorite Society of Friends (of which he gave a long account to his French countrymen) there were not even priests. In a word, the spiritual rebellion of that period was essentially a rebellion against institutions, and the real corresponded very nearly to the ideal in colonial America. Beyond the limits of the colonies, moreover, the absolute ideal hovered. This was the Indian ; not the red man of actual flesh

and

INTRODUCTION.

and blood, but the Tenewissa of Crevecoeur, and the Atala of Chateaubriand. The pressure of the tyrannous centuries drove men to an ideal of extreme liberty. It was the Indian, living in uninterrupted communion with Nature, and within the most flexible of societies, whom they contrasted with the European held in the iron vise of a complex and traditional social order. All the undeniable charm of this ideal of freedom, of simphcity, of a life close to Nature, Crevecoeur embodied in his booj^. From the exaggerations into which many of tKfc men of his time had fallen, he was saved by his sane and practical turn of mind. But fully conscious as he was of the actual work-a-day America in which he lived, he was more profoundly moved by the fact that he had indeed found a country,

"In happy climes the seat of innocence, Where Nature guides and virtue rules,"

and it is this country, half-real, half-ideal, which he sets, out to describe.

But here a qualification should be made. Crevecoejir-was a lover of Nature like Rousseau ; he united in himself, as did the members of the Emigrant group, revolutionary ideas with romantic tendencies; but in the melancholy xvii

INTRODUCTION.

choly of his time and in its weariness of life he had no share. He was an indomitable > optimist. In the value and joy of that phase of life which he described he believed heartily, ' as well as in the future of the colonies, and in the beneficent effect of that future on the fortunes of mankind. To him the meaning of "Weltschmerz" was unknown, as it must be to every one, who finds, as he did, a continual source of pure joy In the ordinary duties of life's working-day. In this respect, indeed, the I "Letters from an American Farmer" is a Kook of tonic quality. To extract joy from /common duties, to clothe them with a real dig- V,nity, not to weary of them in the slow process I of the years — this is no easy or unworthy \task, and to have described its performance With power and charm is a service at once literacy and ethical.

The twelve letters of the volume here reprinted have but slight logical sequence. The simple American farmer who is supposed to have written them selects certain phases of colonial life, inner and outer, and talks about them easily and gracefully, rising only now and then to any real intensity of utterance. The introductory letter is quaint and garrulous, but Is immediately followed by the admirable bit of literature furnished by the second letter,

"On

xviii

INTRODUCTION.

"On the situation, feelings, and pleasures of an American farmer."

The broadly simple, elementary emotions/ of humanity do not often find their way into literature as they do in this second letter of Crevecoeur. He is proud of his essential priyileges as a mere man. He is moved by the sight of his wife and children, for they are his, and^ the objects of his protecting care. He love§ the acres which he tills and which had been cleared and tilled before him. The daily labors of his farm are saturated for him with sentiment, and his life is filled with love. His cattle, his chickens, above all his bees, and they wild doves that circle above his house — all these he surrounds with an emotional atmosA phere. Without fail he captures the aroma of] hfe.

But Crevecoeur was after all a Frenchman, with the strong social instinct of his race. And so he proceeds to analyze and define the political conditions of America. It fills him with a quiet but deep satisfaction to be one of a community of "freeholders, the possessors of the soil they cultivate, members of the government they obey, and the framers of their own laws by means of their representatives." Thus he rises to a consideration of this new type of social man and seeks to answer the question:

What

INTRODUCTION.

/ What is an American ? His answer is delight- I ful literature, but fanciful sociology. Had the Colonial farmers all been Crevecoeurs, had they all possessed his ideality, his power of raising simple things into true human dignity, of connecting the homeliest activity with the ultimate social purpose which it furthers in its own small way, his description of the American would have been fair enough. As a matter of fact, the hard-working colonial farmer, cut off from the refining and subduing influences of an older civilization, was probably no very delectable type, however worthy, and one fears that Professor Wendell is right in declaring that Crevecoeur's American is no more human than some ideal savage of Voltaire. But in this fact lies much of the literary charm of his work, and of its value as a human document of the age of the Revolution.

The five letters on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard are illustrative of one of Crevecoeur's favorite theses. "All," he says, "is local with man, his virtues and his vices, his tastes, and even his prejudices." And this inhospitable rock must have produced either "health, temperance, and a great equality of conditions, or the most abject misery." And then he relates that homely epic of brave fishermen and farers of the sea. Did these fishermen feel such romance

INTRODUCTION.

mance in their fate and calling as Crevecoeur would have us believe? It hardly matters. The romance is recorded here not unworthily; recorded, too, with that blending of two seemingly discordant notes so characteristic of Crevecoeur. He is full of the wild and advent urous atmospheres of_j J»s barren rock that sends out its intrepid Whalers to hunt over all oceans. But on the okher hand, he never loses sight of the e cQngtniclsignific^ riCf of their pursuit. Perhaps EenSneriteHnis sense for mystery and romance; from remote Norman ancestors, toil- ''ers ot the sea, but he never lets us forget long that he is a colonial American, capable of regarding things with the shrewd eyes of a Franklin.

Then comes a sudden change of tone and feeling. In the ninth letter, which contains a description of Charleston, Crevecoeur tells of conditions that were entirely repugnant both to his natural temperament and to his acquired opinions. He loved measure, order, a (juiet prosperity, theTTomely virtues of Me. He was hafdly~the man to regard with sympathy the life of Charleston. In all probability his remarks on slavery are particularly untrustworthy. A humanitarian of the Age of the Revolution, a member of the Society of Friends, or, at least, closely connected with it — he was as incapable

of

INTRODUCTION.

of approaching the slavery problem dispassionately as was some friend or follower of Wilberforce. At the same time, the powerful though repressed emotion with which he relates the almost incredible incident of the negro left to perish in a cage, bears witness in a man of Crevecoeur's sincerity, to the fact that he must have seen not a little of callousness and inhumanity.

The tenth letter, "On Snakes and on the Humming-Bird," comes in the form of a charming interlude after the tense atmosphere of the description of Charleston. As a matter of pure literature the fight between the two snakes is one of the two or three best things in the whole book. Every stroke in the description tells, yet there is not the slightest appearance of effort. In the next letter, the account of a visit to the Pennsylvania botanist Bartram, we return to the idyllic atmosphere, to the note of peace and homely joy, of the earlier letters. The man self-made and self-taught, who has since become almost a terror in the land, is here portrayed most attractively. He has not yet learned to boast of his lack of culture or to despise all things that are not his. He looks upon his advance with a quiet pride Ahat needs no expression; he lives with simplicity and dignity.

Finally

INTRODUCTION.

Finally comes the powerful twelfth letter, y"On the Distresses of a Frontierman," in / which Crevecoeur at last breaks his reticence ! with regard to the Revolution. The letter is : of the highest interest for more than one reason. Wars and revolutions as they fade away in the distance of time acquire a form that is well-nigh artistic. The imagination casts aside the non-essential aspects of great events. All details are indistinguishably massed about some central man or idea. The suffering, doubting, distracted individual is forgotten. Such an individual, the writer of the letter, Crevecoeur shows us. The bitter, hopeless agony of this one victim, at least, is brought home to the heart. One of the many human tragedies of that day survives, told with a quiet but intense power, and with an immediacy of appeal that it would be hard to praise too highly. The letter is a dramatic monologue in prose put into the mouth of the frontierman, and with this cry of pain, so different from the I note of peace with which it opens, the book I ends. The end is to a certain extent symbolic. ; The quiet, simple colonial days were over; the great upheaval had come, and the future was as yet unknown.

As to Crevecoeur's style in the narrower sense, his translations into French and his original

INTRODUCTION.

inal work in that language show that he had to some extent unlearned his native speech during his many years of residence in England and America. His English is of singular purity, and is, upon the whole, quite idiomatic. Its I slight formality and stiffness are to be attributed rather to the influence of late eighteenth century prose than to his foreign birth. /His sense for the effects of English prose style is of an unusual delicacy. His diction is, as a rule, conventional enough, though rarely inadequate, but in the rhythm of his easily gliding sentences, often, though never obtrusively, balanced, there is genuine charm, ^^revecoeur's French writings are of no great importance. The best part of the "Lettres d'un Cultivateur Americain" consists of the twelve letters of the English work, which lose considerably in the translation. The additional chapters are occupied with descriptions of the character and resources of the several provinces, and yield only one passage — a picture of the city of New York as it appeared in the last quarter of the eighteenth century — that is of real interest to-day. The three large volumes of the "Voyage Dans La Haute Pennsylvanie" have, as we have seen, but slight literary value. They deal to a large extent, and quite fancifully, with the American Indian, and the somewhat disconnected

INTRODUCTION.

connected narrative runs on at great length. The historian may glean a suggestion or two from the work; the student of literature may safely disregard it. It is on the "Letters from an American Farmer" that Crevecoeur's reputation must rest, and safely, for the book is so admirable in many ways that it is likely to become better known as time goes on, and to occupy a somewhat more conspicuous place than it now does in the history of American literature and life.* Ludwig Lewisohn.

*The accessible sources for Crevecoeur's biography are very meagre and conflicting. In several details the careful note given in Bigelow's Franklin, ix., 4, has been followed, for example, with regard to the date of Creve- /

coeur's birth which is generally put in 1^31. Use has also "^ / been made of the articles in Duyckinck's Cyclopedia of ' American Literature and in the Nouvelle Biographic Universelle. A work cited by Mr. Bigelow, St. John de Crevecoeur: sa. vie et ses Ouvrages, has unfortunately not been accessible.

XXV

LETTERS

FROM AN

DESCRIBING

CERTAIN PROVINCIAL SITUATIONS, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS, NOT GENERALLY KNOWN;

AND CONVEYING

SOME IDEA OF THE LATE and PRESENT INTERIOR CIRCUMSTANCES

OF THE

BRITISH COLONIES

I N

NORTH AMERICA.

WRITTEN FOR THE INFORMATION OF A FRIEND IN ENGLAND,

By J. HECTOR ST. JOHN,

A FARMER IN PENNSYLVANIA.

LONDON,

GARDEN, AND LOCKYER DAVIS IN HOLBORN.

M DCC LXXXII.

ADVERTISEMENT.

[To the first edition, 1782. J

rHE following Letters are the genuine production of the American Farmer whose name they bear. They were privately written to gratify the curiosity of a friend; and are made public, because they contain much authentic information, little known on this side the Atlantic: they cannot therefore fail of being highly interesting to the people of England, at a time when every body's attention is directed toward the affairs of America.

That these letters are the actual result of a private correspondence, may fairly be inferred (exclusive of other evidence) from the stile and manner in which they are conceived; for though plain and familiar, and sometimes animated, they are by no means exempt from such inaccuracies as must unavoidably occur in the rapid effusions of a confessedly inexperienced writer.

Our

ADVERTISEMENT.

Our Farmer had long been an eye-witness of transactions that have deformed the face of America: he is one of those who dreaded, and has severely felt, the desolating consequences of a rupture between the parent state and her colonies: for he has been driven from a situation, the enjoyment of which, the reader will find pathetically described in the early letters of this volume. The unhappy contest, is at length however, drawing toward a period; a^d it is now only left us to hope, that the obvious interests and mutual wants of both countries, may in due time, and in spite of all obstacles, happily re-unite them.

Should our Farmer^s letters be found to afford matter of useful entertainment to an intelligent and candid publick, a second volume, equally interesting with those now published, may soon be expected.

TO THE

BEHOLD, Sir, an humble American Planter, a simple cultivator of the earth, addressing you from the farther side of the Atlantic; and presuming to fix your name at the head of his trifling lucubrations. I wish they were worthy of so great an honour. Yet why should not I be permitted to disclose those sentiments which I have so often felt from my heart ? A few years since, I met accidentally with your Political and Philosophical History, and perused it with infinite pleasure. For the first time in my life I reflected on the relative state of nations; I traced the extended ramifications of a commerce which ought to

unite,

Dedication

unite, but now convulses the world; I admired that universal benevolence, that diffusive goodwill, which is not confined to the narrow limits of your own country; but on the contrary, extends to the whole human race. As an eloquent and powerful advocate, you have pleaded the cause of humanity in espousing that of the poor Africans : you viewed these provinces of North America in their true light, as the asylum of freedom; as the cradle of future nations, and the refuge of distressed Europeans. Why then should I refrain from loving and respecting a man whose writings I so much admire ? These two sentiments are inseparable, at least in my breast. I conceived your genius to be present at the head of my study: under its invisible but powerful guidance, I prosecuted my small labours: and now, permit me to sanctify them under the auspices of your name. Let the sincerity of the motives which urge me, prevent you from thinking that this well meant address contains aught but the purest tribute of reverence and affection. There is, no doubt, a secret communion among good men throughout the world ; a mental affinity connecting them by a similitude of sentiments: then why, though an American, should not I be permitted to share in that extensive intellectual consanguinity? Yes, I do : and though the name of a man who