Men are like plants
Michel-Guillaume Jean Cahioharra James Hector St John de Crèvecoer, Letters from An American Farmer (1782)
Last week: Clint Smith, “August 1619”
I have just left a day-long faculty meeting at a retreat for American studies in Middelburg at the Roosevelt Institute. Enrollments are down. One question on the table: What is it that students are looking for when they declare a major in American studies? What was I looking for, all those years ago when I signed up for graduate study in American literature? What does it mean to study “America” in the 21st century?
Meanwhile, our classroom buildings in The Hague were closed today due to credible threats against student safety.
In truth, I am not sure I ever fully understood nationalism, and it feels treacherous and warlike as I watch the news obsessively today. I have been talking about origins stories, but I don’t believe the narratives they tell. I wish for a fully decolonized, borderless future safe for all communities.
One text that we talked about in class this week was “Letter 3” from Letters from an American Farmer, easily one of the most contradictory and difficult to love by one of the most slippery of writers. The biography of this guys reads like a novel in itself. Michel-Guillaume Jean (his given name), Cahioharra (his Oneida name), John Hector St John (his American name) de Crèvecoer (his aristocratic name as son of Count and Countess of Crèvecœur) immigrated to New France in 1755 as a solider. He settled in Orange County, New York, where he built a farm for his family. During the Revolutionary War he entered British New York to catch a boat home to France, and got arrested as a spy. This text Letters from An American Farmer was with him in his trunk. Eventually, he made the ship — and then was shipwrecked in Ireland. Once his feet were back under him, he published the manuscript and in 1782 Letters hit European market in the middle of the American Revolution.
De Crèvecoer was a complex figure of multiple allegiances: aristocrat, cartographer, French lieutenant, nomad, farmer, husband and father, traitor, patriot, spy and writer. The Letters themselves also change faces and allegiances when they are published in London or Paris, or before or after the war, or in expanded editions, with new letters appearing in 1784 and 1801.
Letters takes the form of an travelogue epistolary, a genre that conventionally features letters from travelers that describe the vaunted “no place” of Utopian literature. While this text is often mistaken to be an actual account of a real place, America c. 1782, it was read as a description of an ideal place, the America of imagination, a letter from a lost paradise. It has more in common with More’s Utopia, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the like. He actually says:
“we are the most perfect society now existing in the world”
What doesn’t come across when you read only the excerpt entitled “What is an American?” is that this text, like all Utopias, harbors its own undoing. There is evil and disorder at the root of all societies and this one too will unravel. By the end of the book, Farmer James — the persona that narrates the letters — has been forced with his family from his land into exile. Chapter 12 is titled “Distresses of a Frontier Man.” It begins:
I wish for a change of place; the hour is come at last, that I must fly from my house and abandon my farm! But what course shall I steer, inclosed as I am?
And the book ends:
Restore peace and concord to our poor afflicted country; assuage the fierce storm which has so long ravaged it. Permit, I beseech thee, O Father of nature, that our ancient virtues, and our industry, may not be totally lost: and that as a reward for the great toils we have made on this new land, we may be restored to our ancient tranquillity, and enabled to fill it with successive generations, that will constantly thank thee for the ample subsistence thou hast given them.
The unreserved manner in which I have written must give you a convincing proof of that friendship and esteem, of which I am sure you never yet doubted. As members of the same society, as mutually bound by the ties of affection and old acquaintance, you certainly cannot avoid feeling for my distresses; you cannot avoid mourning with me over that load of physical and moral evil with which we are all oppressed. My own share of it I often overlook when I minutely contemplate all that hath befallen our native country.
The End
So, in short, the glorious refrains of “Letter 3: what is an American” merely detail the utopia that will unravel in 100 pages time.
Because the text was such a hit in Europe, it put forward some ideals of American life that have had a long tail. Among them:
the melting pot:
What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life 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 labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.1
and the American Dream immigrant experience:
The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.--This is an American.
and the local and geographic identity:
Men are like plants; the goodness and flavour of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment.
This land is your land, this land is my land:
We know, properly speaking, no strangers; this is every person's country; the variety of our soils, situations, climates, governments, and produce, hath something which must please everybody. No sooner does an European arrive, no matter of what condition, than his eyes are opened upon the fair prospect; he hears his language spoke, he retraces many of his own country manners, he perpetually hears the names of families and towns with which he is acquainted; he sees happiness and prosperity in all places disseminated; he meets with hospitality, kindness, and plenty everywhere; he beholds hardly any poor, he seldom hears of punishments and executions; and he wonders at the elegance of our towns, those miracles of industry and freedom.
In each of these ideals he puts forward, he suggests that it is a new fresh start that has power over the European to make him American, to destroy nationality and class. He finds tremendous honesty and dignity in digging out a new identity from the labor of breaking land into farms.
As promised by the genre there is an unraveling — a child in the basement ala Le Guin’s story “The ones who walk away from Omelas.” After travelogues describing New England towns and frontier life, readers are met with “Letter IX - Description of Charles-Town; Thoughts on Slavery; On Physical Evil; A Melancholy Scene,” and hit with the most gruesome image. At the end of chapter 9, he muses on the problem of physical evil — why, with this bounty of nature in a free society should there still be such suffering caused by man? — while walking a path through woods to dinner. “Alarmed and Surprised,” he comes into a clearing and first hears and then sees a Black man who is being punished brutally, bound and hung in a cage from a tree, birds of prey and insects surrounding him, destroying his eyes, without water or food.
I found myself suddenly arrested by the power of affright and terror; my nerves were convoked; I trembled, I stood motionless, involuntarily contemplating the fate of this negro, in all its dismal latitude. The living spectre, though deprived of his eyes, could still distinctly hear, and in his uncouth dialect begged me to give him some water to allay his thirst. Humanity herself would have recoiled back with horror; she would have balanced whether to lessen such reliefless distress, or mercifully with one blow to end this dreadful scene of agonising torture!
What scholarship has pointed out about this scene, is that the man in the cage gets a speaking part — he begs for poison.
Urged by the irresistible power of thirst, he endeavoured to meet it, as he instinctively guessed its approach by the noise it made in passing through the bars of the cage. "Tanke, you white man, tanke you, pute some poison and give me." "How long have you been hanging there?" I asked him. "Two days, and me no die; the birds, the birds; aaah me!"
Farmer James tears away and then must go to dinner with the enslavers who chose to torture this man in this way. They give their reason, but Farmer James curtly cuts them off in the Letter, refusing to report their side.
They told me that the laws of self-preservation rendered such executions necessary; and supported the doctrine of slavery with the arguments generally made use of to justify the practice; with the repetition of which I shall not trouble you at present.--Adieu.
By planting this scene in the book, we get a new definition to the question in the title of Letter 3, for these people are also European Americans.
My desire for this post was to neatly tie this text together with the enrollment in American studies issue that I have also been thinking about today. My thoughts are foggy, but in the shapes in the fog I see the phrase “men are like plants” emerge as a tagline for the damage and opportunity for identity of geographic location — that to be “from someplace,” like plants, has meaning and influences what you become and who you fight as other. And then the concept of “melted” Americans into a strange mixture looms up in the fog, offering an opportunity to think on this idea of a free and fresh start out of that entrapment of birth. And the, the man in the cage is looming just behind. Students want to understand the relationship between good and evil, ideal and the real, and they find it in American studies. These tensions are at the heart of “What it means to be an American.”
Although the language of mixed race is used here, he speaks only of mixing of European nationalities. Native and Black Americans are not included in this concept, though they are spoken of elsewhere in the letters.