Lamb Mentions It In
One Of His Letters - Which Is Already Some Distinction.
Yet when was
a book more completely lost to popular view - even among the books
that have deserved oblivion?
The Letters were published, all the
same, at Belfast and Dublin and Philadelphia, as well as at London;
they were recast in French by the author, translated into German and
Dutch by pirating penny-a-liners, and given a "sequel" by a
publisher at Paris. [Footnote: Ouvrage pour servir de suite aux
Lettres d'un cultivateur Americain, Paris, 1785. The work so offered
seems to have been a translation of John Filson's History of
Kentucky (Wilmington, Del., 1784).]
The American Fanner made his first public appearance eleven years
before Chateaubriand found a publisher for his Essai sur les
Revolutions, wherein the great innovator first used the American
materials that he worked over more effectively in his travels,
tales, and memoirs. In Saint-John de Crevecoeur, we have a
contemporary - a correspondent, even - of Franklin; but if our author
shared many of poor Richard's interests, one may travel far without
finding a more complete antithesis to that common-sense philosopher.
Crevecoeur expresses mild wonderment that, while so many travellers
visit Italy and "the town of Pompey under ground," few come to the
new continent, where may be studied, not what is found in books, but
"the humble rudiments and embryos of society spreading everywhere,
the recent foundations of our towns, and the settlements of so many
rural districts." In the course of his sixteen or seventeen years'
experience as an American farmer he himself studied all these
matters; and he gives us a charming picture of them. Though his book
has very little obvious system, its author describes for us frontier
and farm; the ways of the Nantucket fishermen and their intrepid
wives; life in the Middle Colonies; the refinements and atrocities
of Charleston. Crevecoeur's account of the South (that he knew but
superficially and - who knows? - more, it may be, by Tetard's
anecdotes than through personal knowledge) is the least satisfactory
part of his performance. One feels it to be the most "literary"
portion of a book whose beauty is naivete. But whether we accept or
reject the story of the negro malefactor hung in a cage from a tree,
and pecked at by crows, it is certain that the traveller justly
regarded slavery as the one conspicuous blot on the new country's
shield. Crevecoeur was not an active abolitionist, like that other
naturalised Frenchman, Benezet of Philadelphia; he had his own
slaves to work his northern farms; he was, however, a man of humane
feelings - one who "had his doubts." [Footnote: In his Voyage dans la
Haute Pensylvanie (sic) et dans l'Etat de New York (Paris, 1801)
slavery is severely attacked by Crevecoeur. His descendant, Robert
de Crevecoeur, refers to him as "a friend of Wilberforce."] And his
narrative description of life in the American colonies in the years
immediately preceding the Revolution is one that social historians
cannot ignore.
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