Letters from an American Farmer

by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

"Me to sequestred scenes, ye muses, guide,
Where nature wantons in her virgin-pride;
To mossy banks edg'd round with op'ning flow'rs,
Elysian fields, and amaranthin bow'rs. …
Welcome, ye shades! all hail, ye vernal blooms!
Ye bow'ry thickets, and prophetic glooms!
Ye forests hail! ye solitary woods. …"

and the "solitary woods" (rhyming with "floods") are a good place to leave the "young gentleman educated at Yale College." Livingston was, plainly enough, a poet of his time and place. He had a fine eye for Nature—seen through library windows. He echoed Goldsmith and a whole line of British poets—echoed them atrociously.

That one finds no "echoes" in Crevecoeur is one of our reasons for praising his spontaneity and vigour. He did not import nightingales into his America, as some of the poets did. He blazed away, rather, toward our present day appreciation of surrounding nature—which was not banal then. Crevecoeur's honest and unconventionalised love of his rural environment is great enough to bridge the difference between the eighteenth and the twentieth century. It is as easy for us to pass a happy evening with him as it was for Thomas Campbell, figuring to himself a realisation of Cowley's dreams and of Rousseau's poetic seclusion; "till at last," in Southey's words, "comes an ill-looking Indian with a tomahawk, and scalps me—a most melancholy proof that society is very bad." It is the freshness, the youthfulness, of these Letters, after their century and more of dust-gathering, that is least likely to escape us. And this "Farmer in Pennsylvania" is almost as unmistakably of kin with good Gilbert White of Selborne as he is the American Thoreau's eighteenth-century forerunner.

III

It is time, indeed, that we made the discovery that Crevecoeur was a modern. He was, too, a dweller in the young republic—even before it WAS a republic. Twice a year he had "the pleasure of catching pigeons, whose numbers are sometimes so astonishing as to obscure the sun in their flight." There is, then, no poetic licence about Longfellow's description, in Evangeline, of how—

"A pestilence fell on the city Presaged by wondrous signs, and mostly by flocks of wild pigeons, Darkening the sun in their flight, with naught in their craws but an acorn."

Longfellow could have cited as his authority for this flight of pigeons Mathew Carey's Record of the Malignant Fever lately Prevalent, published at Philadelphia, which, to be sure, discusses a different epidemic, but tells us that "amongst the country people, large quantities of wild pigeons in the spring are regarded as certain indications of an unhealthy summer. Whether or not this prognostic has ever been verified, I cannot tell. But it is very certain that during the last spring the numbers of these birds brought to market were immense. Never, perhaps, were there so many before."

Carey wrote in 1793, the year, as has been noted, of the first American reprint of the Letters, that had first been published at London. Carey was himself Crevecoeur's American publisher; and he may well have thought as he wrote the lines quoted of Crevecoeur's earlier pigeons "obscuring the sun in their flight." Crevecoeur had by this time returned to France, and was never more to ply the avocations of the American farmer. In the interval, much had happened to this victim of both the revolutions. Though the Letters are distinguished by an idyllic temper, over them is thrown the shadow of impending civil war. The Farmer was a man of peace, for all his experience under Montcalm in Canada (and even there his part was rather an engineer's than a combatant's); he long hoped, therefore, that peaceful counsels would prevail, and that England and the colonies would somehow come to an understanding without hostilities. Then, after the Americans had boldly broken with the home government, he lent them all his sympathy but not his arms. He had his family to watch over; likewise his two farms, one in Orange County, New York, one in New Jersey. As it was, the Indians in the royal service burned his New Jersey estate; and after his first return to France (he was called thither by his father, we are told, though we know nothing of the motives of this recall) he entered upon a new phase of his career. "After his first return to France," I have said, as if that had been an entirely simple matter. One cannot here describe all its alleged difficulties; his arrest at New York as a suspected spy (though after having secured a pass from the American commander. General MacDougal, he had secured a second pass from General Clinton, and permission to embark for France); his detention in the provost's prison in New York; the final embarkation with his oldest son—this on September 1, 1780; the shipwreck which he described as occurring off the Irish coast; his residence for some months in Great Britain, and during a part of that time in London, where he sold the manuscript of the Letters for thirty guineas. One would like to know Crevecoeur's emotions on finally reaching France and joining his father and relatives at Caen. One would like to describe his romantic succour of five American seamen, who had escaped from an English prison and crossed the Channel in a sloop to Normandy. A cousin of one of these seamen, a Captain Fellowes of Boston, was later to befriend Crevecoeur's daughter and younger son in the new country; that was after the Loyalists and their Indian allies had destroyed the Farmer's house at Pine Hill, after his wife had fled to Westchester with her two children, and had died there soon after, leaving them unprotected. But all this must, in nautical phrase, "go by the board," including the novel founded upon the episode. Nor can we linger over Crevecoeur's entry into polite society, both in the Norman capital and at Paris. Fancy the returned prodigal—if one may so describe him—in the salon of Madame d'Houdetot, Rousseau's former mistress! He was fairly launched, this American Farmer, in the society of the lettres.

"Twice a week," he wrote, some years after, "I went with M. de Turgot to see the Duchesse de Beauvilliers, his sister; and another twice-a-week I went with him to the Comte de Buffon's. … It was at the table of M. de Buffon, it was in his salon, during long winter evenings, that I was awakened once more to the graces, the beauties, the timid purity of our tongue, which, during my long sojourn in North America, had become foreign to me, and of which I had almost lost command—though not the memory."

Madame d'Houdetot presented Crevecoeur to the families of La
Rochefoucauld, Liancourt, d'Estissac, Breteuil, Rohan-Chabot,
Beauvau, Necker; to the academicians d'Alembert, La Harpe, Grimm,
Suard, Rulbriere; to the poet-academician Delille. We have in the
Memoires of Brissot an allusion to his entrance into this society,
under the wing of his elderly protectress:—