J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur, 31 December 1735 – 12 November 1813) was a French-born American essayist, farmer, and diplomat whose Letters from an American Farmer (1782) — particularly the third letter, “What Is an American?” — formulated the founding myth of American identity: that America is a new world where European peoples are melted into a new race, transformed by the land, freed from the hierarchies and oppressions of the Old World. The book is one of the essential texts of early American literature and one of the first attempts to define what it means to be American.

Life

Crèvecœur was born in Caen, Normandy, to a minor noble family. He emigrated to New France (Canada) as a young man, served with the French colonial forces during the French and Indian War, and after the war moved to the British colonies. He became a naturalised British subject, married an American woman, and settled on a farm in Orange County, New York, adopting the English name J. Hector St. John.

For a decade (roughly 1769–1780), he farmed, wrote, and observed American life with the eye of a European philosophe. The American Revolution destroyed his idyll: he was suspected by both sides — the British suspected him of patriot sympathies, the patriots suspected him of Loyalism — and he was briefly imprisoned by the British. He left for France in 1780, was reunited with his manuscript, and published Letters from an American Farmer in London in 1782.

He returned to America as French consul to New York (1783–1790), discovered that his wife had died and his farm had been burned, and spent his later years in France.

Letters from an American Farmer (1782)

The book consists of twelve letters purportedly written by “James,” an American farmer, to a European correspondent. The most famous letter — the third, “What Is an American?” — asks and answers the question that has preoccupied American culture ever since:

“What then is the American, this new man?” Crèvecœur answers that the American is a European who has been transformed by the conditions of the New World — abundant land, the absence of feudal hierarchy, the mingling of nationalities — into something new. “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.”

The book’s other letters describe the pleasures of farming, the natural history of Nantucket (including whaling), the horrors of slavery in Charleston (a devastating chapter), and the author’s flight to the frontier during the Revolution.

Sketches of Eighteenth Century America

The manuscript essays that Crèvecœur did not include in the Letters were discovered in an attic in France and published in 1925 as Sketches of Eighteenth Century America. They are darker than the published letters — more honest about frontier violence, economic anxiety, and the gap between the American dream and American reality — and they complicate the optimistic portrait of the Letters.

Critical Standing

Crèvecœur is one of the foundational voices of American literature, though his work is more often quoted than read. “What Is an American?” is one of the most cited passages in American Studies. His influence extends through Tocqueville and Whitman to contemporary debates about immigration, assimilation, and American identity. Scholars have noted the tension in his work between pastoral idealism and the darker realities he witnessed — a tension that mirrors the contradictions of American self-understanding.

Collecting Crèvecœur

Letters from an American Farmer (1782, Thomas Davies and Lockyer Davis, London) in first edition is extremely rare and brings £5,000–£20,000. The 1925 Sketches brings $100–$400 in first edition.