# J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur The Frenchman who first answered the question **"What then is the American, this new man?"** — and whose answer, that immigrants are "melted into a new race of men," is the earliest canonical statement of the idea that American identity is *made* rather than inherited. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was the pen name of Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecœur (1735–1813), a Norman aristocrat's son who became a New York farmer, a Revolutionary-era refugee distrusted by both sides, and finally a French diplomat. His *[[Letters from an American Farmer]]* (London, 1782) is the book behind every later argument about whether America is a creed or a bloodline. ## Life - **Birth.** Born in Caen, Normandy, on **31 January 1735** (Britannica; Wikipedia gives 31 December 1735), to a landowning family. Educated by the Jesuits at Caen's Collège Royal-Bourbon; sent to relatives in Salisbury, England, around 1751. - **New France.** Emigrated to New France in 1755 and served in the French and Indian War under Montcalm as a **cartographer** in the La Sarre regiment, rising to lieutenant. - **Becoming "St. John."** After the French defeat at Quebec (1759) he moved to the British colonies, anglicized his name to John Hector St. John, and took out **New York citizenship papers in 1765**. - **The farm.** Married Mehitable Tippet, daughter of a New York merchant (1769 per Britannica; Wikipedia says 1770), and settled a farm he called **Pine Hill** in Orange County, New York. Three children. - **The Revolution.** He tried to stay neutral and was, in Britannica's phrase, "persecuted by both sides" — his wife's family was Loyalist, his friends were Patriots. Trying to get to France in 1779, he was **imprisoned by the British in occupied New York City for about three months as a suspected spy**, then sailed for Europe in 1780. - **The book.** *Letters from an American Farmer* appeared in London in 1782 and was an immediate European success; he rewrote and expanded it in French as *Lettres d'un cultivateur américain* (1784; enlarged 1787). - **Return and ruin.** Appointed **French consul for New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut** in late 1783. He came back to find Pine Hill destroyed in a raid, his wife dead, and his two younger children taken in by strangers (found safe in Boston). Recalled in 1790. - **Later work and death.** Published *Voyage dans la Haute-Pensylvanie et dans l'état de New-York* (1801). Died at Sarcelles, near Paris, on **12 November 1813**. St. Johnsbury, Vermont, is named for him — reportedly at Ethan Allen's suggestion. - **The lost manuscripts.** A bundle of unpublished English essays turned up in a French attic and was published by Yale University Press in 1925 as *Sketches of Eighteenth Century America: More "Letters from an American Farmer"*. These pieces are markedly harder on the Patriot side than the 1782 book — the evidence that the celebrated voice of American freedom was, privately, a man the Revolution had broken. ## Why he matters to the KB **1. He wrote the original civic-nationalist definition of "American."** Letter III's argument is that Europeans of every origin, once they have land, law, and wages, stop being English or Dutch or German and become one new people: *ubi panis ibi patria* — where there is bread, there is one's country. That is the root of the "nation of immigrants" self-image, 126 years before Zangwill gave it a name in *[[The Melting Pot]]*. **2. His crucible was European by definition.** The same passage opens: "He is either an European, or the descendant of an European." Enslaved Africans and Native Americans are outside the category — the exclusion the KB's page on [[The Melting Pot]] identifies as the metaphor's foundational limitation was present at the moment of its first statement. It is the same line the Naturalization Act of 1790 drew into law eight years later with "free white person" (see [[US Immigration Timeline]]). **3. He also wrote the book's own rebuttal.** Letter IX — the Charles-Town letter — ends the idyll with an enslaved man left to die in a cage, and Letter XII, "Distresses of a Frontier Man," has the farmer-narrator driven out by the war. The founding text of American optimism contains its own account of what the optimism was built on. **4. Both sides of today's identity fight claim his ground.** The creedal view (America is an idea anyone can join) descends from Letter III. The rival view — [[Samuel Huntington]]'s *Who Are We?* thesis that Anglo-Protestant culture is the substance of American identity, and further right, [[Nativism]], [[Ethnonationalism]], and [[Great Replacement Theory]] — has to argue either that the melting never happened or that it only ever applied to Europeans. On the second point, the text supports them. **5. The outsider's-eye tradition.** Crèvecœur is the first of the French observers who explained America to itself; [[Alexis de Tocqueville]] is the second. ## See Also - [[Letters from an American Farmer]] — the book - [[The Melting Pot]] — Zangwill's 1908 play that named the metaphor - [[US Immigration Timeline]] — the legal history that followed - [[American Exceptionalism]] - [[Revolutionary War]]