Yet It Is Quite
Certain, Says Robert De Crevecoeur, His Descendant, That He Did Not
Return To France With The Rag-Tag Of The Defeated Army.
Quebec fell
before Wolfe's attack in September 1759; at some time in the course
of the year 1760 we
May suppose the young officer to have entered
the British colonies; to have adopted his family name of "Saint
John" (Saint-Jean), and to have gradually worked his way south,
probably by the Hudson. The reader of the Letters hardly supposes
him to have enjoyed his frontier life; nor is there any means of
knowing how much of that life it was his fortune to lead. In time,
he found himself as far south as Pennsylvania. He visited
Shippensburg and Lancaster and Carlisle; perhaps he resided at or
near one of these towns. Many years later, when his son Louis
purchased a farm of two hundred acres from Chancellor Livingstone,
at Navesink, near the Blue Mountains, Crevecoeur the elder was still
remembered; and it may have been at this epoch that he visited the
place. During the term of his military service under Montcalm,
Crevecoeur saw something of the Great Lakes and the outlying
country; prior to his experience as a cultivator, and, indeed, after
he had settled down as such, he "travelled like Plato," even visited
Bermuda, by 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.
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