Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 1 (2008), p. 119

This volume contains a series of extracts from a minor classic of eighteenth-century American literature. Originally published in England in 1782, the Letters were a much larger, more amorphous work, ostensibly describing rural life in Pennsylvania in the preceding decade, through the eyes of an ‘American farmer’. They covered a wide range of topics, from descriptions of the realities of mixed farming in the middle colonies, the home-spun rural economy, prospects for new settlers, the flora and fauna of the region, and some contrasting observations about other areas, such as Nantucket in the north, and Charleston in the south.

However, while these were based largely on the author’s experiences, there was more literary artifice in de Crèvecoeur’s account than first meets the eye, as the editor’s very helpful introduction makes clear. For a start, he was hardly the typical ‘American farmer’, in whose name he wrote. His name was Michel-Guillaume St Jean de Crèvecoeur. He had spent a year with English relatives in Wiltshire learning English, before leaving for the French army in Canada in 1755. There he fought against the British, until he was wounded in 1759, after which he made for New York. He took up tenant farming, became a British subject in 1765, and eventually bought land in southern New York colony, near the Pennsylvania border. He lived there, with his wife, family, and several slaves, until 1779. By this time, the War of Independence had forced him to choose sides, and he offered (tacit) support to the Loyalists. He returned to France in 1780, became an American citizen in 1783, and returned to New York as the French Consul-General until 1790, when he returned to France for good.

Similarly, while his vivid, direct descriptions of rural life were undoubtedly based on his own experience, they also conform to contemporary literary genres. The letters privileged bucolic American ‘self-reliance’, over corrupting, metropolitan consumption and dissipation. They epitomize ‘Enlightenment’ attitudes to man as the arbiter and improver of nature. They idealize the homemaking wife, the ‘noble savage’ and contrast the docile subordination of the black slave in the northern colonies, with the cruelties of the southern ‘slave’ colonies. In this respect, it is easy to understand why no less a commentator than George Washington described de Crèvecoeur’s work as ‘highly coloured’.

So, these letters refract the world through a series of preconceptions and contrivances. However, this does not necessarily make them any more or less reliable than, say, de Crèvecoeur’s contemporary Arthur Young. Instead, they are read best as an introduction to life in what Tony Wrigley has termed the ‘organic economy’, where consumption was tied directly to production, and in which the conservation of materials was more important than the minimization of effort. This world is depicted to greatest effect in chapter III, ‘Food and drink’, where de Crèvecoeur sums up the colonial subsistence economy by observing that ‘the philosopher’s stone of an American farmer is to do everything within his own family, to trouble his neighbours as little as possible, and to abstain from buying European commodities’, and chapter V, ‘Winter’, in which this self-reliance is tested. His description of the austere, whaling community of Nantucket is also fascinating, not least for his stray comment that, ‘a singular custom prevails here among the women ... of taking a dose of opium every morning’!

As the editor notes, de Crèvecoeur’s writing is most powerful when it describes the simple routines and happenings of daily life, rather than in grappling with contemporary philosophical or political generalities. It may therefore be of interest to readers of the Review, both as a contrast to the more familiar English discourses of agrarian improvement in this era, and as an engaging illustration of the waste-not, want-not realities of farming on the American frontier.