Letters From An American Farmer By Hector St. John De Crevecoeur



















































































































































 -  Whether or not this
prognostic has ever been verified, I cannot tell. But it is very
certain that during the - Page 8
Letters From An American Farmer By Hector St. John De Crevecoeur - Page 8 of 154 - First - Home

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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.

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