# Letters from an American Farmer The book that first asked **"What then is the American, this new man?"** — twelve letters published in London in 1782 by [[J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur]], written in the voice of "James," a plain Pennsylvania farmer answering an English gentleman's questions about the colonies. Europe read it as a report from a new kind of society; Americans later canonized Letter III as the founding statement of the melting-pot idea. The book is also, in its last third, a record of that society's failures — which is the part that usually gets left out. ## Structure | Letters | Subject | |---|---| | I | James agrees to write to his English correspondent | | II | The situation, feelings, and pleasures of an American farmer | | **III** | **"What Is an American?"** — the melting-pot letter | | IV–VIII | Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard: Quaker society and the whale fishery | | **IX** | **Charles-Town and slavery** | | X | Snakes and hummingbirds | | XI | A Russian visitor's account of the botanist John Bartram | | **XII** | **"Distresses of a Frontier Man"** — the Revolution reaches the farm | The narrator is a persona, not Crèvecœur. The real author was a French-born, Jesuit-educated former army cartographer farming in Orange County, New York; "James" is a Pennsylvanian of modest learning. Scholars still argue over how much of the book is reportage and how much is fiction, and whether James's final disillusionment is his or his author's. ## Letter III: the argument Crèvecœur's answer to "What is an American?" has three moves: 1. **Who qualifies.** "He is either an European, or the descendant of an European." The raw material is English, Scots, Irish, French, Dutch, German, and Swedish. 2. **What changes them.** Not blood but conditions: land that a poor man can own, mild laws, no aristocracy, no tithes, wages that reward work. *Ubi panis ibi patria* — "where there is bread, there is one's country" — which he calls "the motto of all emigrants." 3. **What they become.** "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world." And: "Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour, and industry which began long since in the east; they will finish the great circle." This is identity as a *product of institutions*. You become American by owning land under American law, not by descent — which is why the passage became the charter text for the "nation of immigrants" self-image, and why Israel Zangwill's 1908 play *[[The Melting Pot]]* reads as its sequel. ## Letter IX: the cage The Charles-Town letter describes the richest city in the colonies, built on slave labor, and then walks the narrator out of town to an enslaved man left in a cage in the woods to die — the scene the book's pastoral cannot absorb. It is the only letter that closes with "Adieu." Read against Letter III, it shows who was never going into the crucible: the "new man" was a white European freeholder, and the enslaved man was the price of his freehold. ## Letter XII: the collapse The final letter drops the idyll entirely. War has reached the frontier, James is trapped between Patriots and Loyalists and between settlers and their Native neighbors, and he plans to take his family to live in a Native village rather than choose a side. It mirrors Crèvecœur's own war: suspected by both sides, jailed by the British, his farm destroyed and his wife dead by the time he came back. ## Reception - **Europe first.** Moderately successful in America, an immediate hit in Britain and France. Crèvecœur rewrote it in French as *Lettres d'un cultivateur américain* (1784; expanded 1787), dropping the James persona for a more documentary voice. - **The Romantics.** Its idealized picture of American rural life fed English Romantic dreams of emigration — Moses Coit Tyler traced its effects on Campbell, Byron, Southey, and Coleridge, and on schemes like Coleridge and Southey's "Pantisocracy." Hazlitt praised it; Lamb mentioned it in letters. - **The canon.** It became a standard text of early American literature, almost always excerpted as Letter III alone. ## KB Significance **1. The civic-nationalist charter.** Every argument that American identity is chosen rather than inherited — that you become American by joining — goes back to Letter III. It is the text the creedal side cites, knowingly or not. **2. The exclusion was there from the start.** The "new race" is explicitly European. That undercuts the progressive reading of the melting pot as universal, and it hands the restrictionist right a real point: the founding version of the melting pot did not include everyone. The honest answer is that the principle (identity from institutions, not ancestry) was broader than Crèvecœur's application of it, and American law spent the next two centuries catching up to that — the Naturalization Act of 1790's "free white person" limit lasted until 1952 (see [[US Immigration Timeline]]). **3. The counter-thesis.** [[Samuel Huntington]]'s *Who Are We?* (2004) — Anglo-Protestant culture as the substance of American identity — and the harder-edged [[Nativism]], [[Ethnonationalism]], and [[Great Replacement Theory]] all depend on denying Letter III's mechanism: that institutions, not ancestry, make Americans. **4. The selective-quotation pattern.** Letter III gets quoted; Letters IX and XII get dropped. The book's own author recorded slavery and civil war as the underside of his "new man" — the same pattern of quoting the uplifting passage and cutting the rest that the KB tracks with *[[The Melting Pot]]* and other appropriated texts. ## See Also - [[J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur]] — the author - [[The Melting Pot]] — the 1908 play that named the metaphor - [[Democracy in America]] — the next great French account of America - [[American Exceptionalism]] - [[Multiculturalism]] — the pluralist alternative to melting - [[US Immigration Timeline]]