J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur

The construction of Crevecoeur’s name. How does his name indicate the hybrid nature of his identity, his construction of self as a person not French, not English, but in many ways uniquely “American”?

Susan Manning, in her Introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, argues that Crevecoeur’s text is “deservedly known as the first work of American literature” (viii). Many texts have had this accolade attached to them by scholars. What is it about Crevecoeur’s text that makes this a justifiable claim?

Recall Crevecoeur’s biography. What sort of life did he lead before he settled in America as a “farmer”? What kind of farmer is he? How is this farmer “more than” simply a person who works the soil? Does a farmer, as Crevecoeur describes him, have a certain social role and class consciousness? How is the “American farmer” different from the farmer in Europe?

Manning compares Crevecoeur’s story of how one “becomes an American” to Franklin’s, as presented in his Autobiography. Manning declares that according to Franklin, “it is part of the capacity of this new man,” this American man, “simply to leave behind his past—including his past selves—when they no longer suit his purposes” (xiv). How does Crevecoeur’s biography reflect this particularly “American” tendency? How does the image of the American farmer that he presents correlate with this notion of the American tendency towards reinvention?

We discussed in class the symbol of the plough. In what ways does the plough function as a mediator between man and nature, or between man and the land he struggles to bring it under his control?

We discussed at length Crevecoeur’s adulation for American hybridity (“[Americans] are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called American has arisen,” as he says on page 301) and his concomitant disdain for hybridity (of the “back settlers” he says “they grow up a mongrel breed, half civilized, half savage,” on page 308). How might you explain this contradiction?

The above topic is full of ideas for further discussion:

• How “American” becomes a racial category

• His diatribe against the “back settlers” and the notion that civilization fades towards the westward reaches of the colonies

• Cities and farms breed enlightenment; forests, where people hunt, breed benightedness and savagery in white settlers

We also considered the powerful notion, presented by the comte de Buffon, of “degeneration.” Crevecoeur, as Manning argues, presents the claim that America is a site of “regeneration and rebirth” (in contrast to the comte de Buffon’s thesis regarding America as a site of degeneration). Yet, in Crevecoeur’s mind, there are regions within America that contribute to the degeneration of individuals. How does the natural world, the geography of a place, cause either growth or decay – morally, spiritually, or otherwise?

Who was Crevecoeur’s audience for this text? Is there textual evidence that he crafted his narrative to appeal to the interests and attitudes of this audience?

And finally, the most obvious question: For Crevecoeur, what is an American?



Thomas Paine

Biographical information:
Born in England in 1737
At age 37, he came to America
Published Common Sense in 1776

From his early years, Paine distinguished himself as a rebel, an identity marked by his resistance to central tenets of Christianity, his endeavors to organize excisemen in England, his propensity towards scandal, and the urgency of his appeals to Americans to free themselves from Britain. As the editors of the Norton write, Paine was first a “spokesman against slavery and then . . . an anonymous author of Common Sense, the first pamphlet published in the colonies to urge immediate independence from Britain” (320-321).

Paine proclaimed that the crisis in American was a crisis of all mankind. In Part III of Common Sense, he writes that the transgressions on the rights of men in the colonies are violations of “natural rights”: “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind” (323).

Since America has “been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of Europe,” Paine argues that Britain’s claims on America are ill-founded: “Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America” (324).

In The Crisis, Paine makes an unequivocal accusation that those who are loyal to Britain, tories, are cowardly, servile, slavish, self-interested, cruel, and never brave (331).

• Consider the example Paine gives of a tory he knows, a tavern-keeper in Amboy. Paine uses the man’s hope for peace – “let there be peace in my day” – as an indicator of the unilateral selfishness and the “mean principles” of tories. What is Paine’s problem with this man’s statement?

• Paine’s language is strong in The Crisis, as he frequently describes Americans as a “suffering people” who have endured great misery at the hands of the British. He says that he would “make a whore of my soul by swearing allegiance to one whose character is that of a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, and brutish man” (333). He defends his use of such terminology by saying that the “evil” of the British “cannot be overdone by language” (333). Do you think his “extreme” language strengthens or compromises his argument? Why or why not?

• According to Paine, it is the moral imperative of those who love freedom to defy the British, to resist tendencies towards “cowardice and submission” (334). What evidence does Paine offer to support his claim that the British are morally corrupt?

Paine claimed, as your introduction in the Norton reveals, that his plain style was designed “to make those who can scarcely read understand” (321). After considering the above passages, how might we envision Paine as a revolutionary leader through his writing? Were the documents he produced, the pamphlets he disseminated, weaponry? How so? What is Paine trying to inspire his readers to believe regarding the individual’s “ethical obligation”?