J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur: Essential or extra to an American education?

Why I believe everyone should read Letters from an American Farmer

From Lapham’s Quarterly

Earlier this year I started a new series for The Recovering Academic on what we lose in national identity and civic engagement when we push the humanities aside. I return to the subject with some defiance today after reading about the cuts at West Virginia University, where the Modern Languages Department and the creative writing program have been eliminated. E. Gordon Gee, president of WVU and coauthor of an op-ed that I challenged last November, argues that branding is the way to save flailing institutions. Like Dickie Pope in Lucky Hank, Gee won’t even ask his state legislature for help in closing WVU’s budget gap. Perhaps he thinks that a leaner institution that has shed a little more culture and art will win back the public. But a university hemorrhaging programs can only offer diminished value, a smaller universus. As Wendell Berry writes, “‘[T]he modern university has grown, not according to any unifying principle, like an expanding universe, but according to the principle of miscellaneous accretion, like a furniture storage business.” 

But I am not content to say, “So it goes.” My first essay in this series featured Anne Bradstreet, an author that every American should know, but that few would ever come across without a traditional survey course. Today I want to think a little about J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur, a foundational yet elusive figure in American literary history. Maybe Crévecoeur will recede to the margins of American memory, known only to students in prep schools and the Ivy League once the E. Gordon Gees have their way with public universities. But this does not have to be so.

If his sprawling name is unfamiliar, it’s more likely that you’ve heard of Crévecoeur’s classic text, Letters from an American Farmer, which

Heather Cox Richardson

adapted as the title of her hit series,

Letters from an American

. At the very least, you know the most enduring trope of Crévecoeur’s work: America as a melting pot. But like the man himself, that metaphor is not what it seems. 

Letters from an American Farmer is essential reading because it expresses many national myths in such contradictory ways that it fails to answer the core question driving the text: What is an American? And so readers must, after puzzling over Crévecoeur’s unresolved narrative, answer that question for themselves. This is a good exercise for us all in the Age of AI, when nothing can be taken at face value, when even pillars like flagship universities seem to be crumbling before our eyes. 

I used to send questions like these to my students before our discussions, so I’ll include them here in case you’d like to keep them in mind as you read.

• Based on your own reading of Letters from an American Farmer, or the limited glimpse of it that I offer below, how do you read Farmer James’s character? Is he an innocent who gradually gains maturity throughout the text? Or is he just as much of a dreamer at the end as he was at the beginning? Is he a character to celebrate, sympathize with, avoid emulating, or…?

• If neither the melting pot nor contact zone seem to capture American life adequately, what is your own metaphor for American identity?

• This post began in part as a reaction to the NY Times headline about WVU asking “What is essential?” as it slashes programs in the arts and humanities. I’m not sure if there ever has been a time when Crévecoeur was required reading for even a majority of college graduates. You could complete an English major at most institutions now without ever reading him once. So perhaps my feeling that American literary history is growing increasingly irrelevant, even to university leaders, is much like James’s nostalgia for a farming idyll that never was true. But I still have to ask: What place (if any) do you think a text like Letters from an American Farmer ought to have in a secondary or post-secondary curriculum? Is Letters essential or extra to an American education?

Who is Farmer James?

Crévecoeur was an American farmer for a time, and much of the material in Letters draws upon his own experience. But his narrator — one Farmer James — is a fictional persona. Whether this makes Letters an epistolary novel, a work of auto fiction, or some other hybrid genre is an open question. But the distinction between the author and his first-person speaker is an important one because it reveals a yearning for innocence that is fundamental to the American imagination. 

Letters was published in 1782, after American independence had essentially been won, but is set in the years before the Revolutionary War. You might think that the story would thus be burning with patriotism, a kind of post-hoc freedom fighter’s manifesto. You would be wrong. In fact, Crévecoeur published the volume in France, after fleeing the war, and his primary audience was European. Depending on your sympathies, you might even say that the melting pot metaphor was coined by an American traitor. 

Letter I establishes the premise for the narrative. In it, Farmer James answers a letter from an Englishman who we only know by his initials, F.B. We understand that James hosted Mr. F.B. while he was touring the American colonies. The Londoner has written to express his thanks and to ask that James might continue explaining America to him through their correspondence. After a lot of eloquent hand-wringing about his lack of eloquence, and an admonition from his minister to see the letters as nothing more than “talking on paper,” James accepts F.B.’s invitation. 

I love Letter I as a fictional conceit. It establishes a clear narrative problem to resolve: What is America? What is an American? The sophisticated European has no answers to these questions, so the American provincial must educate him. Brilliant.

But Letter I haunts me because it is dishonest. Serious fiction is supposed to lie in order to tell the truth. But Farmer James paints a misleading picture of American life at a time when the author knew better. Did Crévecoeur intend to dash James’s innocence against reality, as he seems to do near the end of Letters? Is James a more literal embodiment of Crévecoeur’s own fantasy about starting over in the New World? Or is the noble yeoman a propagandistic symbol for Crévecoeur’s European audience, a conciliatory version of the American farmer meant to replace the Minuteman (and thus help Crévecoeur win friends and influence people)? 

The farm versus the frontier

Like many Europeans, Crévecoeur prefers the garden to the wilderness. I’ll return to his suspicion of mountain men presently, but for now I want to linger on the echoes of Eden in his agrarian scenes. 

In Letter II, James might as well be Adam, and his wife Eve, before either had tasted of the forbidden fruit.

My wife would often come with her knitting in her hand, and sit under the shady trees, praising the straightness of my furrows, and the docility of my horses; this swelled my heart and made everything light and pleasant, and I regretted that I had not married before.

James is also a model father, incorporating play into his work. I don’t know how many hippies cited Crévecoeur as an influence, but my parents were motivated by a dream like the one James describes in their own return to the land. 

Often when I plough my low ground, I place my little boy on a chair which screws to the beam of the plough--its motion and that of the horses please him; he is perfectly happy and begins to chat. As I lean over the handle, various are the thoughts which crowd into my mind. I am now doing for him, I say, what my father formerly did for me, may God enable him to live that he may perform the same operations for the same purposes when I am worn out and old! I relieve his mother of some trouble while I have him with me, the odoriferous furrow exhilarates his spirits, and seems to do the child a great deal of good, for he looks more blooming since I have adopted that practice; can more pleasure, more dignity be added to that primary occupation? The father thus ploughing with his child, and to feed his family, is inferior only to the emperor of China ploughing as an example to his kingdom. 

Crévecoeur served in the French and Indian Wars, so he knew the bloody history that haunted every farm in New England. Many of those farms had been battlegrounds just 5-10 years prior, and virtually no country estate in America in the mid-1700s could have been thought of as a safe place. Even if we concede that Letters was written before the Revolutionary War, and that it might be unfair to expect Crévecoeur to have revised the whole thing before publishing it, there is a great deal that the author knew that Farmer James blithely forgets.

No one pops Crévecoeur’s bubble better than D.H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, which I think of as a very sophisticated version of The Onion. “Crevecoeur's Letters are written in a spirit of touching simplicity, almost better than Chateaubriand,” Lawrence writes. “You'd think neither of them would ever know how many beans make five. This American Farmer tells of the joys of creating a home in the wilderness, and of cultivating the virgin soil. Poor virgin, prostituted from the very start.”

Maybe more students would choose an English major if they knew they could write their research papers the way Lawrence writes his criticism. I was pleased to see A.O. Scott giving Lawrence some love in the NY Times recently. Who knew that close reading could be so damn funny? Here’s Lawrence again on Letter II.

The Farmer had an Amiable Spouse and an Infant Son, his progeny. He took the Infant Son - who enjoys no other name than this -

What is thy name?
I have no name.
I am the Infant Son -

to the fields with him, and seated the same I. S. on the shafts of the plough whilst he, the American Farmer, ploughed the potato patch. He also, the A. F., helped his Neighbours, whom  no doubt he loved as himself, to build a barn, and they laboured together in the Innocent Simplicity of one of Nature's Communities. Meanwhile the Amiable Spouse, who likewise in Blakean simplicity has No Name, cooked the dough-nuts or the pie, though these are not mentioned. …I don't know whether her name was Lizzie or Ahoolibah, and probably Crevecoeur didn't. Spouse was enough for him. 'Spouse, hand me the carving knife.'...

I used to admire my head off: before I tiptoed into the Wilds and saw the shacks of the Homesteaders. Particularly the Amiable Spouse, poor thing. No wonder she never sang the song of Simple Toil in the Innocent Wilds. Poor haggard drudge, like a ghost wailing in the wilderness, nine times out of ten.

Hector St John, you have lied to me. You lied even more scurrilously to yourself. Hector St John, you are an emotional liar.

Crévecoeur’s American farm represents the paradox of drawing close to the earth while trying to rise above it. You can hear the echoes of Rousseau in Letter II, the notion that we are born free and pure, that we are corrupted by the world, not from base impulses within. It’s a complete pendulum swing away from Calvinism and the notion of original sin. Farmer James tries to live in the sweet spot between the city, that unholy crucible of wealth and politics and greed, and the frontier, not quite the devil’s playground in Crévecoeur’s mind, but a place where wildness draws a little too close. The farmer is the opposite of the mountain man, that “ferocious, gloomy, and unsociable” hunter who hates his neighbors “because he dreads the competition.” The situation, feelings, and pleasures of the American farmer are not so different from those of Abraham, with milk and honey close at hand and ferocious beasts kept comfortably at bay.

You might even say that there is no true understanding of Paul Harvey’s “So God Made a Farmer” without at least a cursory introduction to Crévecoeur. Letters is where Harvey’s mythopoesis begins.

What is an American? 

Crévecoeur is most famous for two excerpts from Letter III, an otherwise rambling meditation on American life that is nearly as idyllic as James’s portrait of his farm. James reassures his pen pal F.B. that there are no religious disagreements in America, at least not like there are in Europe, no fixed class differences, no racism, really few limitations of any kind on personal freedom. 

What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. 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.

This passage, more than any other in American literature, captures the nostalgia that many express for a more unified period in our national history. Many now speak of America in binary terms — red states and blue states. But I’d wager that a strong majority of both liberals and conservatives would happily claim the second half of the passage above as foundational to their views. In fact, you could read the following lines just as easily at a MAGA rally as you could at the Democratic National Convention. 

The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. – This is an American.

It perhaps goes without saying that Farmer James does not regard Indians as Americans, even though he seems to respect them. In one scene, he describes a misunderstanding between Andrew, a newly immigrated Scot who has been left to care for a minister’s house on Sunday, and nine warriors who nonchalantly enter and begin eating and drinking at will. They see Andrew as no threat, despite his protestations. It turns out that the warriors have an understanding with the minister, and they all end up smoking a peace pipe together. But this comical scene elides the racial contradictions that bedevil American identity from the start. 

It is also clear in Letter IX, where James describes a hideous scene — a man left in a cage, where he is slowly eaten alive by vultures because he had murdered a plantation owner — that James sees no place for Black people, either, in his national melting pot. Whatever is cooking in that pot, and the new American that emerges from it, is unmistakably white. 

Crévecoeur’s metaphor feels contradictory now — and I’ve often taught it alongside Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of America as a contact zone where competing cultures and ideologies clash and grapple for influence. Yet I have a hard time shaking that sense of newness and transformation in my own understanding of American citizenship. Perhaps the individual American is not melted together with all others; perhaps this never was true. But Pratt’s idea of rigid competition between identities and value systems ignores how many distinct groups in America influence one another while still preserving their autonomy. I think of

Sherman Alexie

’s essay about his father’s preference for black dress socks. I think of Kao Kalia Yang’s anecdote, in her oral history for Mid-Americana, of coming back to Minnesota from Columbia University, wearing a fancy white coat that she had purchased in New York into a meat market where her father intended to buy a freshly butchered hog to celebrate her homecoming, and thinking “both of these things are my world.”

New ideas, new principles, toils of a different nature. Hard to argue, Hector St. John. The notion has staying power despite its flaws.

The farmer on the frontier

James’s bliss in Letter II is shattered in Letter XII, the final missive to F.B. The farmer walking his furrow with his son happily bouncing atop the plough is transformed into a refugee. James is what Thomas Paine would call a “summer soldier” or “sunshine patriot.” In fact, he expresses more loyalty to England, despite its betrayal, than he does to the American cause. But he is no Tory, either. 

Must I then bid farewell to Britain, to that renowned country? Must I renounce a name so ancient and so venerable? Alas, she herself, that once indulgent parent, forces me to take up arms against her. She herself, first inspired the most unhappy citizens of our remote districts, with the thoughts of shedding the blood of those whom they used to call by the name of friends and brethren. That great nation which now convulses the world; which hardly knows the extent of her Indian kingdoms; which looks toward the universal monarchy of trade, of industry, of riches, of power: why must she strew our poor frontiers with the carcasses of her friends, with the wrecks of our insignificant villages, in which there is no gold? 

Many pages in Letter IX are devoted to the impossible predicament that James and his family face. I remember thinking, near the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, how clarifying it would be if an enemy attacked the town where I live. What choice would there be but to fight? Maybe Janis Joplin is right — freedom (or courage) is just another name for nothing left to lose. But James is right that defending his farm — or trying to save it as a British loyalist — would likely only get his wife and children killed. Would that really be such a noble sacrifice? 

In the end, James concludes that self-preservation, the “rule of nature,” overrides national loyalty. And so he plans to flee his farm, moving his family to an unnamed Native village where the chief has graciously offered to share a parcel of land and half of his wigwam until James can build his own shelter. 

This part of the narrative is purely fictional. In fact, Crévecoeur’s ethic of self-preservation was much more selfish: he left his family alone on the farm while he returned to France. Crévecoeur may have been driven to see his ailing father one last time, but he wouldn’t have packed his lengthy manuscript all that way if he didn’t intend to publish it. And when he returned to America three years later, conveniently after the war had ended, he found his wife dead, his children scattered, and his farm burned to the ground. He hadn’t spared them from anything at all. He left them wide open to threats on every side.

But Farmer James imagines an escape from all that sorrow. In fact, you might say that James’s retreat to the frontier simply reenacts the original settlement of New England by people fleeing persecution. Nearly two hundred years after the fiasco at Jamestown, and more than a hundred years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, Crévecoeur’s Farmer James has not learned a damn thing. He is still an entitled European, imagining that Native people will willingly hand over their land, welcome James’s family into the community, and even give them indigenous names. 

This is how Farmer James imagines that his children will grow up innocently — protected from the violence and corruption of Europe on the one hand and by utter wildness on the other. James’s safeguard against his children completely assimilating into indigenous life or turning into uncivilized mountain men is to give them farm chores. “As long as we keep ourselves busy in tilling the earth,” he claims, “There is no fear of any of us becoming wild; it is the chase and the food it procures, that have this strange effect.” 

I find myself irresistibly drawn back to Letters from an American Farmer because it is such a lyrical work and because I hear so many echoes of Farmer James’s idealism in my own thinking. I want to believe that there is an anchor somewhere way back in our national history that will bring sense to the present. But most of what we learn about America is cherry picked. We accept the melting pot metaphor without realizing that the phrase was coined before the American Revolution blew that fantasy of unity apart. Crévecoeur was right to point to hybridity as fundamental to American life, but he learned the hard way that newness breeds uncertainty, that once you’ve forsaken the Old World, you can’t predict how the New World will turn out. The farm isn’t an anchor at all. It is a symbol of transformation. The forest is cut down to make way for the furrows, but those furrows don’t last forever. Something else takes their place. 

So it is fitting that Letters from an American Farmer ends with a prayer. Many of us, regardless of our ideological sympathies, might have found ourselves uttering a similar plea recently. Perhaps it is not an American prayer at all, but a universal one — a cry for peace, which seems so elusive the world over. What I can’t decide is whether to read James’s prayer with compassion, knowing that it likely expresses much of Crévecoeur’s own grief and guilt after abandoning his family, or whether to see it as yet another emotional lie that ignores James’s contributions to his own misery — a dangerous fantasy of unity that Americans would do well to guard against.

O Supreme Being! if among the immense variety of planets, inhabited by thy creative power, thy paternal and omnipotent care deigns to extend to all the individuals they contain; if it be not beneath thy infinite dignity to cast thy eye on us wretched mortals; if my future felicity is not contrary to the necessary effects of those secret causes which thou hast appointed, receive the supplications of a man, to whom in thy kindness thou hast given a wife and an offspring: View us all with benignity, sanctify this strong conflict of regrets, wishes, and other natural passions; guide our steps through these unknown paths, and bless our future mode of life. If it is good and well meant, it must proceed from thee; thou knowest, O Lord, our enterprise contains neither fraud, nor malice, nor revenge. Bestow on me that energy of conduct now become so necessary, that it may be in my power to carry the young family thou hast given me through this great trial with safety and in thy peace. Inspire me with such intentions and such rules of conduct as may be most acceptable to thee. Preserve, O God, preserve the companion of my bosom, the best gift thou hast given me: endue her with courage and strength sufficient to accomplish this perilous journey. Bless the children of our love, those portions of our hearts; I implore thy divine assistance, speak to their tender minds, and inspire them with the love of that virtue which alone can serve as the basis of their conduct in this world, and of their happiness with thee. Restore peace and concord to our poor afflicted country; assuage the fierce storm which has so long ravaged it. Permit, I beseech thee, O Father of nature, that our ancient virtues, and our industry, may not be totally lost: and that as a reward for the great toils we have made on this new land, we may be restored to our ancient tranquillity, and enabled to fill it with successive generations, that will constantly thank thee for the ample subsistence thou hast given them.

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Questions:

• Based on your own reading of Letters from an American Farmer, or the limited glimpse of it that I’ve offered above, how do you read Farmer James’s character? Is he an innocent who gradually gains maturity throughout the text? Or is he just as much of a dreamer at the end as he was at the beginning? Is he a character to celebrate, sympathize with, avoid emulating, or…?

• If neither the melting pot nor contact zone seem to capture American life adequately, what is your own metaphor for American identity?

• This post began in part as a reaction to the NY Times headline about WVU asking “What is essential?” as it slashes programs in the arts and humanities. I’m not sure if there ever has been a time when Crévecoeur was required reading for even a majority of college graduates. You could complete an English major at most institutions now without ever reading him once. And I know of no metric that a student (or that I) could add to a resume to show the ROI of knowing Letters from an American Farmer well. So perhaps my feeling that American literary history is growing increasingly irrelevant, even to university leaders, is much like James’s nostalgia for a farming idyll that never was true. But I still have to ask: What place (if any) do you think a text like Letters from an American Farmer ought to have in a secondary or post-secondary curriculum? Is it essential or extra to an American education?