Letters from an American Farmer | Page 3

his own account. Not until 1764,
however, have we any positive evidence of his whereabouts; it was in
April of that year that he took out naturalisation papers at New York.
Some months later, he installed himself on the farm variously called
Greycourt and Pine-Hill, in the same state; he drained a great marsh
there, and seems to have practised agriculture upon a generous scale.
The certificate of the marriage of Crevecoeur to Mehitable Tippet, of
Yonkers is dated September 20, 1769; and of this union three children
were the issue. And more than children: for with the marriage
ceremony once performed by the worthy Tetard, a clergyman of New
York, formerly settled over a French Reformed Church at Charleston,
South Carolina, Crevecoeur is more definitely than ever the "American
Farmer"; he has thrown in his lot with that new country; his children
are to be called after their parent's adopted name, Saint-John; the
responsibilities of the adventurer are multiplied; his life in America has
become a matter more easy to trace and richer, perhaps, in meaning.

II
One of the historians of American literature has written that these
Letters furnish "a greater number of delightful pages than any other
book written in America during the eighteenth century, save only
Franklin's Autobiography." A safe compliment, this; and yet does not
the very emptiness of American annals during the eighteenth century
make for our cherishing all that they offer of the vivid and the
significant? Professor Moses Coit Tyler long ago suggested what was
the literary influence of the American Farmer, whose "idealised
treatment of rural life in America wrought quite traceable effects upon
the imaginations of Campbell, Byron, Southey, Coleridge, and
furnished not a few materials for such captivating and airy schemes of

literary colonisation in America as that of 'Pantisocracy.'" Hazlitt
praised the book to his friends and, as we have seen, commended it to
readers of the Edinburgh Review. Lamb mentions it in one of his
letters--which is already some distinction. Yet when was a book more
completely lost to popular view--even among the books that have
deserved oblivion? The Letters were published, all the same, at Belfast
and Dublin and Philadelphia, as well as at London; they were recast in
French by the author, translated into German and Dutch by pirating
penny-a-liners, and given a "sequel" by a publisher at Paris. [Footnote:
Ouvrage pour servir de suite aux Lettres d'un cultivateur Americain,
Paris, 1785. The work so offered seems to have been a translation of
John Filson's History of Kentucky (Wilmington, Del., 1784).]
The American Fanner made his first public appearance eleven years
before Chateaubriand found a publisher for his Essai sur les
Revolutions, wherein the great innovator first used the American
materials that he worked over more effectively in his travels, tales, and
memoirs. In Saint-John de Crevecoeur, we have a contemporary--a
correspondent, even--of Franklin; but if our author shared many of poor
Richard's interests, one may travel far without finding a more complete
antithesis to that common-sense philosopher.
Crevecoeur expresses mild wonderment that, while so many travellers
visit Italy and "the town of Pompey under ground," few come to the
new continent, where may be studied, not what is found in books, but
"the humble rudiments and embryos of society spreading everywhere,
the recent foundations of our towns, and the settlements of so many
rural districts." In the course of his sixteen or seventeen years'
experience as an American farmer he himself studied all these matters;
and he gives us a charming picture of them. Though his book has very
little obvious system, its author describes for us frontier and farm; the
ways of the Nantucket fishermen and their intrepid wives; life in the
Middle Colonies; the refinements and atrocities of Charleston.
Crevecoeur's account of the South (that he knew but superficially
and--who knows?--more, it may be, by Tetard's anecdotes than through
personal knowledge) is the least satisfactory part of his performance.
One feels it to be the most "literary" portion of a book whose beauty is

naivete. But whether we accept or reject the story of the negro
malefactor hung in a cage from a tree, and pecked at by crows, it is
certain that the traveller justly regarded slavery as the one conspicuous
blot on the new country's shield. Crevecoeur was not an active
abolitionist, like that other naturalised Frenchman, Benezet of
Philadelphia; he had his own slaves to work his northern farms; he was,
however, a man of humane feelings--one who "had his doubts."
[Footnote: In his Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie (sic) et dans l'Etat
de New York (Paris, 1801) slavery is severely attacked by Crevecoeur.
His descendant, Robert de Crevecoeur, refers to him as "a friend of
Wilberforce."] And his narrative description of life in the American
colonies in the years