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.
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