Letters from an American Farmer | Page 3

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. His descendant, Robert de Crevecoeur, refers to him as "a friend of Wilberforce."] And his narrative description of life in the American colonies in the years immediately preceding the Revolution is one that social historians cannot ignore.
Though our Farmer emphasises his plainness, and promises the readers of his Letters only a matter-of-fact account of his pursuits, he