J Hector St John Crevecoeur

J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur , 1735-1813, American author and agriculturist, b. France as Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur. It is believed that he served under Montcalm in Canada. After traveling in the Great Lakes region and in the Ohio valley and working as a surveyor in Pennsylvania, he settled (c.1769) on a farm in Orange co., N.Y., where he wrote Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Other letters, found in 1922, were published as Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (1925). The two books give outstanding descriptions of American rural life of the period. He wrote, over the signature Agricola, agricultural articles for American newspapers. He introduced the culture of European crops, notably alfalfa, into America and of the American potato into Normandy. As French consul in New York City (from 1783) he sought to improve commercial relations between France and the United States. He lived in France from 1790.

Bibliography: See biography by T. L. Philbrick (1970).

St. John, J. Hector, pseudonym of Crèvecoeur.

Crèvecoeur, J. Hector‐St. John de (1735–1813), agronomist, cartographer, and author whose Letters from an American Farmer (1782) has often been embraced as an early testament to America as the land of opportunity and a melting pot of classes and nationalities.Born Michel‐Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur near Caen in Normandy, Crèvecoeur fought for the French in the Seven Years' War. Later, he traveled throughout the American colonies, and in 1769 he settled in Orange County, New York, where he farmed and raised a family. During the Revolutionary War, he suffered persecution by the Patriots for his Loyalist leanings and then was jailed for three months by Loyalists who suspected that he was a Patriot spy. He returned for a time to the intellectual salons of Paris and then served as French consul in New York City from 1783 to 1790, after which he returned permanently to France.

In Letters from an American Farmer, James, the fictionalized narrator, describes to a London gentleman his experiences as a third‐generation farmer in Pennsylvania. Although the much‐anthologized third letter, What Is an American? appears to argue for a new agrarian democracy, the later letters reveal that Crèvecoeur's “perfect society” endorses slavery and social class distinction and even fosters lawlessness, violence, and revolution. As the self‐indulgence and cruelty of southern slaveowners undermine the atmosphere of peaceful industry, the narrative fabric of this land of promise begins to unravel. In the final letter, the Revolutionary War brings chaos and destruction, betraying James's American dream. Additional essays, later assembled as Sketches of Eighteenth‐Century America (1925), paint an even darker picture of the suffering brought about by the Revolution.
See also Republicanism; Revolution and Constitution, Era of.

Bibliography

Thomas Philbrick , St. John de Crèvecoeur, 1970.
Gay Wilson Allen and and Roger Asselineau , St. John de Crèvecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer, 1987.

Emily Schiller