Letters From An American Farmer What Is An American

Understanding Letters From An American Farmer and the Question of American Identity

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur published Letters From an American Farmer in 1782, a collection of three letters written from the perspective of a fictional farmer living in colonial New York. The third letter, titled "What Is an American?", is the one people actually cite and argue about. It is a meditation on immigration, identity, and the formation of a new kind of human being through the American experience. The central question Crèvecœur poses is not just rhetorical. He is asking what happens to a European when they cross the Atlantic and settle in the colonies. His answer was radical for the time: the American is a new man. He sheds his old prejudices, adopts a new system of society, and transforms through hard labor and relative freedom into something fundamentally different from his European counterpart. Here is what people miss about this text when they are forced to summarize it for a literature class. Crèvecœur was writing before the American Revolution fully crystallized its ideological contradictions. He describes a land of opportunity, moderate climates, and social mobility. He does not, however, account for the people already here, the Indigenous populations being displaced, or the enslaved Africans whose labor sustained the very economy he praises. When you read this today without that awareness, it reads almost comically naive. With that awareness, it reads as a useful artifact of its moment.

I spent years teaching this text in college seminars, and the discussion always hits the same wall. Students struggle with the gap between Crèvecœur's idealism and the historical reality he was ignoring. The workaround is simple: teach it as an emotional document rather than a factual one. Ask students what Crèvecœur needed to believe in order to write those words. That shifts the conversation from "was he wrong?" to "what was he trying to solve in his own mind?" The answer usually involves his own status as a Frenchman living in England and later returning to France while maintaining American ties. He was someone who existed between worlds, and the letter is partly an attempt to convince himself he belonged somewhere. The structure of Letters From an American Farmer is epistolary, meaning it is written as a series of letters. Letter I establishes the setting in Yorkshire and then moves to America. Letter II describes the farm, the seasons, and the material conditions of colonial life. Letter III is the philosophical core, and Letters IV through XII expand into topics like slavery, Native American relations, and the outbreak of revolutionary violence. If you are reading this for the first time, skip ahead to Letter III. It stands reasonably well on its own, though it loses power without the preceding descriptions of agricultural labor that ground his argument in physical reality. One counter-intuitive point worth noting: Crèvecœur was not an American. He was a French-born lawyer and writer who lived in England and visited America briefly. His perspective is that of an outsider who chose to adopt American identity. This matters because his definition of "what is an American" is performative. He is not describing people who were born here. He is describing a process of becoming, and that distinction separates his work from later nativist definitions of American identity that would dominate the nineteenth century.

The text has faced legitimate criticism, particularly regarding its racial blindness. Jefferson referenced Letter III in Notes on the State of Virginia and used it to argue against racial equality, twisting Crèvecœur's inclusive vision into something exclusionary. This is a common misuse of the text. Crèvecœur's American is defined by labor and choice, not by race, but he was also writing at a time when acknowledging the full horror of chattel slavery would have undermined the optimistic thesis he was building. The text fails where it needs to fail most, and that failure is instructive. For anyone looking to access the text, the best version is the Penguin Classics edition edited by William Boelhower, which includes substantial critical apparatus and situates the letters within their historical context. Project Gutenberg also has free copies, though the punctuation in some editions has been modernized in ways that slightly alter the rhythm of Crèvecœur's prose. If you are citing this academically, stick to a scholarly edition. The practical takeaway is this: Letters From an American Farmer remains relevant because the question it asks has never been fully answered. What is an American? The text offers one eighteenth-century answer, but the ongoing debate about immigration, assimilation, and national identity shows that Crèvecœur opened a conversation that is still running. The letter is not a conclusion. It is a starting point, and a somewhat naive one at that. Reading it honestly requires holding two ideas at once: the genuine hope that motivated it and the genuine harm that its optimism helped enable.

I have assigned this text for over a decade, and the most productive classroom discussions happen when students stop trying to decide whether Crèvecœur was right or wrong and start examining what work the letter was doing for him personally. He was a European in America who wanted to belong. The letter is his proof, and it is simultaneously honest and inadequate. That tension is the whole point.