J Hector St John De Crevecoeur What Is An American

Understanding "What Is an American" by J. Hector St. John de Crévecoeur

You probably encountered this essay in an American literature survey class, maybe while trying to finish a reading list before a midterm. The full title is Letters from an American Farmer, and the third letter, often cited as "What Is an American?", is the one everyone references. It came out in 1782, during the Revolution, and it tried to answer a question that was genuinely unsettled at the time. What actually made someone American beyond just living on this soil? The core idea is straightforward. Crévecoeur argues that an American is someone who has left behind the old European system of aristocracy, inherited privilege, and religious persecution. In his view, America offered something Europe didn't: the chance to rebuild yourself through labor, property ownership, and relative equality. He describes the American as a kind of new man, transformed by the conditions of the New World. That image became influential, especially later when immigrants and civic educators needed a neat narrative about national identity. But the essay is not a simple celebration. If you read it straight through, the contradictions show up pretty quickly. The "new man" he praises mostly exists on a Pennsylvania farm, and the labor that supposedly elevates him is largely white, propertied men's labor. Enslaved people are mentioned in passing, almost as background scenery. That's the part most introductory courses skip over, and it matters if you're using the text for anything beyond a surface-level analysis.

I've used this essay in tutoring sessions and discussion sections more times than I want to count. One recurring problem I run into is students treating Crévecoeur's definition as if it's the final word on American identity, or worse, treating it as historically neutral. It isn't neutral. It's a product of its moment, written by a French-born lawyer who spent time in Quebec and then settled near New York, and who owned property including enslaved people at one point. The tension between his idealistic prose and his actual life is worth sitting with. Here's a practical workaround I use when students get stuck on that gap. Have them read Letter III alongside Phyllis Wheatley's poetry or the narrative of Olaudah Equiano. The contrast does most of the work for you. Crévecoeur's "American" suddenly looks much narrower when placed next to voices he effectively excluded. The essay's structure is built around a series of questions and answers, which is why it's so easy to quote out of context. The famous passage about America being a place where "individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men" is often lifted as proof that Crévecoeur had an inclusive vision. He did, in some sense. But his inclusion had limits that his own biography and the economic realities of the 1780s expose pretty clearly. I usually point students toward the later letters in the same volume, where he gets darker about the war and more anxious about social order. The tone shifts noticeably, and that shift tells you something important about what the essay was trying to hold together.

If you need to download or access the text, Project Gutenberg has a clean copy of Letters from an American Farmer in the public domain. Search for the title plus Crévecoeur and you'll find multiple formats. The Bartleby archive also hosts it with reliable pagination, which helps if you're citing specific passages. I tend to use the Gutenberg edition for personal reading and the Bartleby version when I need stable paragraph references for discussions. A couple of common pitfalls I see again and again. First, treating the essay as representative of all colonial or early national thought. It wasn't. It was one voice, and a somewhat unusual one for being both sympathetic to colonial life and critically observant of its flaws. Second, ignoring the political context. Crévecoeur wrote this while the Revolution was still happening, and he was technically sympathetic to the American cause but also wary of the radical egalitarianism some factions pushed. That ambivalence shapes the essay in ways that aren't always obvious on a first read. The biggest limitation of relying on Crévecoeur for understanding American identity is that his framework basically collapses if you apply it to anyone outside the propertied white male experience. It doesn't just have blind spots; the blind spots are structural. For courses or discussions that want a more complete picture, pairing it with later immigration essays, native perspectives, or critical race analyses usually fills the gaps better than trying to force this single text to do all the work.

I still assign it because it's useful, but I make sure the usefulness comes with clear boundaries. That tends to keep the conversation honest and saves everyone from the inevitable "but wait, what about this line?" follow-up that derails half a discussion section.