First Summit of Early Anglo- and Ibero Americanists
Tucson, Arizona, May 18
Larry Kutchen
Panel: “New World Landscapes, American Incarnations”
Crčvecoeur: Letters From an American Farmer
A central irony of the Letters from an American Farmer—published in London, 1782—is that although for two generations after the American Revolution it was one of the books that most influenced Europeans’ perceptions of the United States, it nevertheless is a text that at once celebrates the regenerative capacity of the British Empire and mourns the violent creation of the new nation. The opening Advertisement to the London edition characterizes Farmer James, the persona and central character of the Letters, as an “eye witness of the transactions which have deformed the face of America,” “one of those who dreaded and has severely felt the desolating consequences of a rupture between the parent state and her colonies” (Crčvecoeur, 35) In the book’s closing sentences, the rustic writer, writing back to imperial center from a colony in the throes of revolution, warns his aristocratic London correspondent that “he cannot avoid mourning with me over that load of physical and moral evil with which we are all oppressed. My own share of it I often overlook when I minutely contemplate all that had befallen our native country” (227). Note here that the question of just where the “native country” is—whether in the American colonies or in England—is left suspended. Nevertheless, the rupture between “parent state and her colonies” is temporarily mended in closing by the shared melancholy of two Britons; the felt consequence of revolution is less the birth of a nation than a collapse into imperial ruin.
In the Letters from an American Farmer, hitherto regarded more narrowly and more provincially as a proto-national text expounding the virtues of the virtuous republican freeholder, this ominous sense of ruin, of the historical devolution of empire, operates as both a productive anxiety and as a sort of melancholic undertow within the book’s transatlantic historical consciousness. Against this awareness of imperial dissolution, The Letters from an American Farmer constructs and reconstructs its New World landscapes—landscapes that would seem to issue, on a fundamental level, from a metropolitan culture that, as W. J. T. Mitchell observes, “could imagine [its] destiny in an unbounded ‘prospect’ of endless appropriation and conquest” (Mitchell, 20) [Refer to handouts: copies of pp. 42-43 from Letters] In these excerpts we see how the imperial gaze is turned, or redirected, from ruin to regeneration.
This English Atlantic text was penned by J. Hector St. John de Crčvecoeur (born. Michel-Guillame-Jean de Crčvecoeur), a profoundly Anglophilic Frenchman born into the Norman nobility in 1735. Coming of age during the Great War for Empire in North America, he served as engineer and mapmaker for Montcalm and took part in the siege of Fort William Henry. He then traveled extensively in North America as a surveyor, trader, and cartographer. Naturalized as a British citizen in 1765, he became J. Hector St. John de Crčvecoeur; all of his children were given the surname “St. John,” including the daughter he named “America.” Her name itself—“America St. John”—resonates with her father’s sense of his imperial identity as a British American. Crčvecoeur married a New Yorker, and raised his flourishing farm and family at Pine Hill in Orange County, in upstate New York. The imminent ruin of that idyll lived along the imperial periphery is powerfully recorded in the last of the farmer’s Letters; the fortunes of Crčve-coeur—of “Monsieur” Broken-Heart—rose and fell with those of the First British Empire in North America.
The Letters are woven from the copious notes Crčvecoeur compiled in his travels and explorations of the eastern seaboard and the Old Northwest. They are organized as a series of 12 letters that strive to celebrate the miraculous cultivation of the New World. Eleven of these letters are written from a simple Quaker Farmer to a London aristocrat (a “Mr. F. B”.) in fulfillment of the latter’s request for homespun descriptions of the topography, lifestyle, institutions, problems, and values of Americans living along the eastern seaboard. The remaining letter, written by a Russian gentleman on his visit to the botanist John Bartram, focuses not on his scientific achievements but on his exemplary agriculture. To fully describe the land and labor of the colonies, Farmer James must venture out—like Rasselas leaving Happy Valley for the first time—from the farm that hitherto had circumscribed his life. His voyaging in a rough circle—from Pennsylvania to the commercial seaports of New England, down to confront slavery in Charleston (“Charles Town”) South Carolina, and back up to a war-torn Pennsylvania—charts a progressive disillusionment with empire as he discovers the violence, exploitation, and avarice on which his idyllic life has been based. The path of his degeneration may be described as a descent from a colonial replication of the celebrated pastoral image of Britain’s “empire of virtue” (that of “Farmer” King George as the benevolent nurturer) into a traumatic retracing of the empire’s own rise and fall.
That degeneration is at once apprehended and arrested in an imperial extension of the English picturesque landscape. I refer to the figure of the “ruined arch” in the second handout (Crčvecoeur, 201). The rustic in ruins compels what Suvir Kaul describes as the “traumatized focus on the causes of imperial decline,” characteristic of eighteenth-century British imperial poems (Kaul, 109). The ruin represents (as it issues from) the dissolution of the conventional reconciliation between Britain’s traditional agrarian-domestic and ever-expanding trading interests—the reconciliation that had been achieved by earlier British imperial poems and that the epistolary relation between colony and imperial center had sought to reinforce. The ruin of that harmony at the end of the Farmer’s Letters at once echoes and points forward to similar representations of this dissolution in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village (1770) and Cowper’s The Task (1785). But we need to note that consistent with this book’s scopic drive, with its commitment to the imperial prospect, the ruin that is compounded of Rome, England, and Anglo-America provokes a future orientation by being set before the imperial gaze.
While allowing this final image to resonate, I will conclude with these questions:
1. What sort of historiography is legitimated by the imperial prospects Crčvecoeur constructs?
2. Does the frontier he imagines suggest a temporal aspect? May his “frontier” represent the precise point at which imperial memory is deferred?
3. What forms of violence are suppressed in these landscapes—what forms may be legitimated and unrecognized through the very effort of that suppression?
Crčvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of
Eighteenth-Century America. Ed. Albert E. Stone. New York: Penguin, 1981.
Kaul, Suvir. Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long
Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2000)
Mitchell, W. J. T.. “Imperial Landscape.” Landscape and Power. Ed. W. J. T.
Mitchell. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994. 5-34.