Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he
holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of
our great _Alma Mater_. Here individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day
cause great changes in the world.[154]
Having convinced himself that economic relaxation was the creative
force in determining American institutions and psychology, he was
led to examine the working of that force in diverse portions of
America. It is neither in the older seacoast world, nor along the
extreme frontier that he discovers his representative America; but
in the broad stretches of clearings, the vigorous backcountry or
“middle-settlements,” where agriculture was followed soberly and
effectively. “Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the soil,”
he pointed out; and it is the farmer of the middle region of New York
and Pennsylvania, with his broad acres in prosperous cultivation, his
economic independence, and his manly vigor, that he most delights to
dwell upon:
Europe has no such class of men; the early knowledge they acquire,
the early bargains they make, give them a great degree of sagacity.
As freemen, they will be litigious; pride and obstinacy are often
the cause of lawsuits; the nature of our laws and governments
may be another. As citizens it is easy to imagine, that they
will carefully read the newspapers, enter into every political
disquisition, freely blame or censure governors and others. As
farmers, they will be careful and anxious to get as much as they
can, because what they get is theirs.... As Christians, religion
curbs them not in their opinions; the laws inspect our actions;
our thoughts are left to God. Industry, good living, selfishness,
litigiousness, country politics, the pride of freemen, religious
indifference, are their characteristics.[155]
The thinly settled backwoods with their restless squatter population,
Crèvecœur regards as the rough vanguard of the westward-moving
settlements. It is here, he points out, that the forces of leveling
are strongest, that the last remnants of old-world distinctions and
privileges are stript away, that the idea of individual freedom carries
furthest, sometimes to social disaster. “He who would wish to see
America in its proper light,” he says, “and have a true idea of its
feeble beginnings and barbarous rudiments, must visit our extended line
of frontiers where the last settlers dwell.”
Now we arrive near the great woods, near the last inhabited
districts; there men seem to be placed ... beyond the reach of
government, which in some measure leaves them to themselves ...
as they were driven there by misfortune, necessity of beginnings,
desire of acquiring large tracts of land, idleness, frequent want
of economy, ancient debts; the reunion of such people does not
afford a very pleasing spectacle.... The few magistrates they have,
are in general little better than the rest; they are often in a
perfect state of war; that of man against man, sometimes decided by
blows, sometimes by means of law ... men are wholly left dependent
upon their native tempers, and on the spur of uncertain industry,
which often fails when not sanctified by the efficacy of a few
moral rules. There, remote from the power of example, and check of
shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.
They are a kind of forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years
the more respectable army of veterans which come after them. In
that space, prosperity will polish some, vice and law will drive
off the rest, who uniting with others like themselves will recede
still farther; making room for more industrious people, who will
finish their improvements, convert the loghouse into a convenient
habitation, and rejoicing that the first heavy labors are finished,
will change in a few years that hitherto barbarous country into a
fine, fertile, well regulated district. Such is our progress, such
is the march of the Europeans toward the interior parts of this
continent. In all society there are off-casts; this impure part
serves as our precursors or pioneers.[156]
Crèvecœur’s chattiness and bucolic love of nature may easily obscure
for the casual reader, the solid economic core of the _Letters_. The
story of Andrew, the Hebridean, with its note of idyllic simplicity,
reads like a tale out of the French romantics; yet in its broad outline
it is the story of many an immigrant who penetrated to the hospitable
backcountry, took land, and prospered. The strong coloring of the
description is only partly French; in part it is a reflection of the
spontaneous optimism that was working like leaven in colonial society.
It is the old-fashioned phrasing rather than the matter that makes the
_Letters_ seem obsolete to modern readers. Change the wording, soften
the bucolic enthusiasm, and the sober American of earlier generations,
as he observed the arrival of the strong-armed peasant from the north
of Europe, would have discovered nothing strange in such a sentiment as
this:
After a foreigner from any part of Europe is arrived, and become
a citizen; let him devoutly listen to the voice of our great
parent, which says to him, “Welcome to my shores, distressed
European; bless the hour in which thou didst see my verdant fields,
my fair navigable rivers, and my green mountains!--If thou wilt
work, I have bread for thee; if thou wilt be honest, sober, and
industrious, I have greater rewards to bestow on thee--ease and
independence. I will give thee fields to feed and clothe thee; a
comfortable fire-side to sit by.... I shall endow thee besides
with the immunities of a freeman.... Go thou, and work and
till; thou shalt prosper, provided thou be just, grateful, and
industrious.”[157]
Andrew the Hebridean is a portrait painted by a Physiocratic
humanitarian, but the idealism that would build peace and content
on honest foundations, and would deny them to none, not even the
poorest if they proved worthy, found frequent justification in the
prosaic experience of colonial America. If many an immigrant found
“soul-drivers” awaiting them, many others like Andrew found a more
hospitable reception.
Across the peaceful scenes depicted in the _Letters_ soon fell the dark
shadow of civil war, and Crèvecœur’s content was rudely broken in upon.
As a French humanitarian he loathed war and all its works, and every
instinct and argument counseled him to stand apart from the strife
that seemed to him so meaningless. He liked peace and orderly ways and
he could not work himself into a passion over the supposed wrongs of
a people who seemed to him blessed above all others on this troubled
earth. As a philosophical farmer he held the politician in contempt and
refused to take seriously abstract theories of statecraft. The citizen
who stuck to his plow was happier, he believed, than the citizen who
talked noisily of his wrongs, and was eager to overset things. The
rough leveling of the frontier he had found distasteful, and as he
watched the development of the Revolutionary disputes, he seems to have
discovered in the Whig program an irruption of the tumultuous frontier
leveling that threatened to sweep away the common peace and well-being.
The source of the unrest he traced to New England, the feculent
wellspring of all the hypocrisies; it was inspired, he was convinced,
by a selfish demagoguery and led by unprincipled mobsters. In so far
as he held partisan sympathies, they inclined to the Loyalist side.
His education in England and his breeding as a gentleman, drew him
towards the Loyalist gentry with whom he associated in Orange County,
and repelled him from the noisy ardor of the plebeian patriots. Yet in
spirit he stood resolutely aloof, although his sympathies were cruelly
hurt by the sufferings that fell under his observation. In certain
letters only recently published (_Sketches of Eighteenth Century
America_), he narrates the misfortunes that befell innocent men and
women from the bitterness of civil strife,[158] and draws a picture of
the lawlessness and greed of patriot committeemen, and the intolerance
of the mob spirit, that is not pleasant to contemplate.[159]
Bitterness rarely exudes from his pen, but when he considers the ways
of Whig politicians he now and then indulges in a passage that reveals
his loathing of the mercenary spirit that he discovers in the new
patriotism. In the conclusion of “The American Belisarius” he gives
vent to his anger against those who outrage common morality; if it were
not for the fact that this is a moral universe, he says ironically:
I’d worship the demon of the times, trample on every law, break
every duty, neglect every bond, overlook every obligation to which
no punishment was annexed. I’d set myself calumniating my rich
neighbors. I’d call all passive, inoffensive men by the name of
inimical. I’d plunder or detain the entrusted deposits. I’d trade
on public moneys, though contrary to my oath. Oath! Chaff for good
Whigs, and only fit to bind a few conscientious Royalists! I’d
build my new fortune on the depreciation of the money. I’d inform
against every man who would make any difference betwixt it and
silver, whilst I, secure from any discovery or suspicion by my good
name, would privately exchange ten for one. I’d pocket the fines
of poor militiamen extracted from their heart’s blood. I’d become
obdurate, merciless, and unjust. I’d grow rich, “fas vel nefas.”
I’d send others a-fighting, whilst I stayed at home to trade and
to rule. I’d become a clamorous American, a modern Whig, and offer
every night incense to the god Arimanes.[160]
A lover of peace and good will, a humanitarian concerned only with
justice and the common well-being, seeking new ways to enlarge the
returns of agriculture, devoid of petty ambition and local prejudice,
a friend of man, Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was an embodiment of the
generous spirit of French revolutionary thought, a man whom Jefferson
would have liked for a neighbor. His sketchy and discursive writings
may not be notable literature, but we could ill spare them from the
library of eighteenth-century America.
Footnotes
[134] See Commons, _Races and Immigrants in America_, p. 37.
[135] Sometimes the profits were unexpectedly great, as is illustrated
by the case of a certain George Martin, who contracted with a
shipmaster to transport himself, his wife, and five children to America
for fifty-four pounds. He paid down $16, but died on the passage.
On the arrival of the vessel in port, the captain foreclosed on the
contract, sold the widow for twenty-two pounds, the three eldest sons
at thirty pounds each, and the two youngest, who were under five years
of age, he sold for ten pounds, realizing one hundred and twenty-two
pounds on a debt under fifty-one pounds. (Diffenderfer, _The German
Immigrants into Pennsylvania_, p. 268).
[136] _Ibid._, p. 229.
[137] _Ibid._, Part II, “The Redemptioners,” p. 209.
[138] For the entire diary, see _American Historical Review_, Vol. VI,
pp. 65-107.
[139] _The Private Journal, etc._, p. 40.
[140] _Ibid._, pp. 29-30.
[141] _Ibid._, p. 28.
[142] _Ibid._, p. 45.
[143] “The History of the Dividing Line,” in _The Writings of Colonel
William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esquire_, New York, 1901.
[144] At his death his library contained some four thousand volumes,
“the largest private library in the English-speaking colonies,”
according to his biographer.
[145] His father died possessed of 26,231 acres. He himself owned at
his death “no less than 179,440 acres of the best land in Virginia.”
[146] _Op. cit._, pp. 75-76.