by Simon Schama
In his pages, the landscape of freedom is animated by stupendous natural drama through which Crèvecoeur strides like Gulliver, brawny and amazed. Its profusion electrifies his pen. Passenger pigeons blot out the sun, so dense are their flocks in flight to the Great Lakes. The craw of a kingbird opened by the curious farmer is found to contain precisely 171 bees. Crèvecoeur lays their tiny bodies out on a blanket as if accommodated in an apiarian hospital. And fifty-four miraculously revive, “licked themselves clean and joyfully went back to the hive.” Biting, stinging things that in less blessed lands might have been swatted or trodden out of existence are celebrated by Crèvecoeur as authentic American creatures, paragons of diligence and ingenuity, living in mutuality with humans. The hornets that nest in his parlor alight gently on the eyelids of his children to carry off the flies that have irritatingly settled there. Wasps form a multicellular “republic” and of course the bees are model citizens, swarming for his delight, their honey more richly fragrant than anything that had heretofore slipped down his gullet. “I bless God for all the good He has given me,” Crèvecoeur writes at the end of this chapter, “I envy no man’s prosperity and with no other portion of happiness than that I may live to teach the same philosophy to my children and give each of them a farm, show them how to cultivate it and be like their father, good, substantial, independent American farmers.”
This is the Crèvecoeur most of his readers would have remembered, honored by critics from William Hazlitt to D. H. Lawrence: the artless husbandman dwelling in happy hollow, the anticipator of Thoreau, the man whose contentment bid multitudes to try their fortunes in America. But advance through the pages, beyond the scenes of Nantucket’s whalers, beyond the story of “Andrew the Hebridean” from impoverished Barra who finds happiness in Pennsylvania, and get to the chapter where, suddenly, the American skies darken. The Aesopian tales become horrors; the bees make way for copperhead snakes, whose bite inflicts agony on the victim so that they die writhing, with their tongues stuck through their teeth in grotesque mimicry of their killer. Crèvecoeur’s vision of the helpful hornet gives way to mortal combat between a water snake and a black viper, and before long it is Americans themselves who are locked in death struggles. “I can see the great and accumulated ruin as far as the theater of war has reached; I hear the groans of thousands of families now desolated…I cannot count the multitude of orphans this war has made nor ascertain the immensity of the blood we have lost.” Into the idyll had burst the demon of politics.
Which made, again, for heartbreak, this time on a scale the happy husbandman could never have anticipated. Crèvecoeur had imagined the act of becoming American as a steadily transforming migration, not one of violently traumatic separation. But the particular way in which America the place became America the nation un-Americanized it for Crèvecoeur, sullied its innocence. He made no bones that it was America’s first civil war; one that had set neighbors against each other, robbed children of their sweet dreams (his own came crying to him in terror of their nightmares), and put such men as he in an unbearable dilemma. Mehitable’s family and many of his friends, like the banker and magistrate William Seton, were loyalists; those the Patriots called Tories. Crèvecoeur himself had felt warmly about the mildness of British rule in the colonies. Jefferson’s assertions that Americans had been the victims of military tyranny would have struck him as self-serving, patently absurd hyperbole. But staying true to those moderate sentiments would make him an enemy to his country. “Must I be called a parricide, a traitor, a villain…be shunned like a rattlesnake?”
As it happened, the conflict along the New York–New Jersey rural and river frontier—his own and the Tippets’ backyard—was one of the most bitterly unsparing of the entire war. Patriot militia and their houses were attacked by loyalist partisans, some of them escaped armed slaves who had worked their farms. Reprisals were merciless: summary hangings, farmhouses and stores burned where they stood. Back and forth the battle raged. The Tippets had thrown in their lot with the loyalists and would end up in Nova Scotia. Crèvecoeur wanted his family out of harm’s way and seems to have toyed with taking his wife and children to the backcountry Indians—either the Oneida or the Seneca—whom he claimed to know well. But the tribes were themselves pulled into the conflict, enlisted by both sides as irregulars. After months of uncertain wanderings, Crèvecoeur, declaring openly for neither party, took the same painful decision that countless others in his predicament made: to divide the family. One part (Mehitable, their daughter, Fanny, and the younger son, Louis) would remain at Chester to protect the claim to their farm should the Patriots close in on it, while he decided to go to British-occupied New York with the six-year-old Ally.
But there, instead of finding safe refuge, Crèvecoeur was arrested. An anonymous letter sent to the British commandant General Pattison claimed that Crèvecoeur had made drawings of the British harbor defenses. All he knew that summer day in 1779 was that General Pattison requested an interview. Expecting assistance, he left Ally with acquaintances in Flushing on Long Island. The boy waited in vain for his father who had been thrown into a filthy basement cell from which he could hear the shrieks of men being flogged. Hours became days, days weeks, weeks months, and the father who had set his little boy on the plow seat went into mental shock, sobbing and gibbering, attempting to hurt himself. Somehow the promises of an old man who had shared his cell, that, once released, he would go to Flushing and find Ally, comforted Crèvecoeur. And before too long, William Seton put up a bond for his release. A slave from another friendly family, the Perrys, then arrived to tell him that Ally, though feverish, was staying with them. There was a reunion, no doubt of indescribable joy. The boy’s fever cooled.
But Crèvecoeur’s miseries were not over. It was impossible to get news of Mehitable or the children, much less travel safely to Orange County, still a fiercely embattled war zone. And the winter that came upon father and son in a disused barn was the coldest anyone could remember. Firewood was almost impossible to procure. Neither Ally nor he had warm clothes. Only a laboring job chopping up a hulk earned him wood and saved them both from death by hypothermia. Crèvecoeur was revisited by the hysterics and poisoned dreams to which he had succumbed in prison. He shuddered with a violent palsy, became spasmic with seizures as his little boy looked on.
Spring came. It was 1780. Friends rallied, and so did the traumatized American Farmer. He stopped shaking, did a little genteel surveying of the New York churches. Should he collapse and die, his friend Seton promised he would bring Ally up as his own child. But Crèvecoeur did not die. Instead, he and the boy recovered enough to travel. In September 1780, father and son boarded a ship bound for Dublin, doing something expressly against the message of his book, voyaging away from America, back to the Old World.
One of the victims of Crèvecoeur’s ordeal had been the bulk of his manuscript. It may have been on the ship that he managed to reconstruct it, although the voyage was stormy. In London, he found a publisher who paid him thirty guineas for it; neither mean nor princely, but undoubtedly, given the circumstances he had endured, a boon. His publishers, Messrs. Davies & Davis, who also obliged Dr. Johnson, held out the further incentive of a “gift” should the work find favor with the public. That it did so, right in the midst of the war that would lose Britain its most prized colonies, might seem puzzling, except that the most memorably beautiful passages offer precisely a prelapsarian vision of an American idyll, meanly attacked by the stinging hornets of politics. Across the Channel, of course, where the book and its author were also welcomed, it could be read as a message from France’s latest ally; a picture of the American promise, once liberation from the accursed British was complete.
Much to his surprise, then, Crèvecoeur turned out to have written a useful, even a politic book; a book that could make readers see the America of hummingbirds, dewdrops, and honey mead; the farmer’s wife sewing or churning her butter; the husbandman bringing the lowing herd to the milking stall. Europeans,
who at exactly this moment were going through much economic distress and turmoil in their own countryside, already craved this America, one in which the slave and the black freedman were noble, and the Indian sachems wise and hospitable. The book rapidly went through new editions in Dublin and Belfast, Leipzig, Berlin, and Leiden, so that when Irish, German, and Dutch peasants and townsmen wondered what it might be like to emigrate, to make that passage from the imprisonment of natal circumstance to a free life, it was Crèvecoeur’s vision that sustained them. It was so successful that complaints were made in print in England that the Letters were a propaganda stunt designed to lure British artisans and farmers away from their home country to America. The “excellencies” of the United States, John Bristed wrote, had been exaggerated “as the abode of more than all the perfection of innocence, happiness, plenty, learning and wisdom than can be allotted to human beings to enjoy.” Crèvecoeur had not written a guide to emigration, they said, he had fabricated a romance.
He certainly lived one: the prodigal wanderer, returning home to Normandy after twenty-seven years, falling into the embrace of aged parents; the shy Ally ushered forth to meet Grandpère, Grandmaman, St. John realizing he must call himself Crèvecoeur again; struggling with his mother tongue. Even before he became a celebrity with the publication of the French edition of his book, Crèvecoeur rode a wave of Americophilia (carefully omitting any hint of the loyalism that had helped him find publisher and public in London). Still better, he could discourse freely on the crops that were the rage of innovation-minded Norman landowners. A small book needed on the history and prospects of the potato? Rattled off in a few weeks. Lectures to the local agricultural societies in Caen and further afield? A pleasure.
Five sailors washed up on a Normandy beach without a word of French between them. Suspicions were high. St. John the anglophone was sent for to translate. They were not English, he discovered, but American seamen who had been captured by the redcoats and taken back across the ocean to a prison somewhere in the south of England. They had broken out, found a small boat, and survived the hostile Channel crossing. Crèvecoeur told them his own story, dwelling on his fears for wife and children. In gratitude Lieutenant Little promised that on returning to the United States he would have a relative living in Boston go to Orange County and make inquiries of Mehitable and the two children. In the meantime, the lieutenant took a bundle of letters from Crèvecoeur to be sent on to the family as soon as their safety and whereabouts were confirmed.
This was kindness repaid with interest. Unable to travel himself until hostilities were ended, Crèvecoeur did his best to enjoy his French renown. He hobnobbed with les Grands of the Paris literary world. The ex-minister to the king and liberal reformer, Turgot, took him to Paris, where, twice a week, he frequented the salon of Mme d’Houdetot, Rousseau’s old (unrequited) inamorata, and let himself be admired as the cultivated cultivator; their kind of American: francophone. He spoke of locust trees with the greatest of the botanists, Buffon, and proposed the introduction of sweet potatoes into France, where he thought they might become a staple food of the common people. He knew he was an exhibit—a specimen of a New World that French reformers hoped might be made the norm on their own side of the ocean. Agriculture and the cause of humanity were mutually nourishing as if the intelligent application of manure could guarantee a harvest of liberty along with the wheat.
All that was very fine. He was glad to be of use. But his mind drifted back west across the sea. It was four years since he had set eyes on his wife and on Fanny and Louis, and nothing had been heard from them. He hoped and feared. With the provisional articles of peace signed in Paris early in 1783, it was finally safe to travel again. He obliged the minister of the navy, the duc de Castries, by penning, in seven weeks, a rich report on the condition of the United States and the prospects of oceanic commerce between the two countries. In appreciation, word came from Versailles that he would be one of the first French consuls to the United States. Who could better embody the natural fraternity between the two nations? He was even given free choice of the town to which he might be posted. He chose New York. In early September 1783, armed with his papers and his nervous expectations, Crèvecoeur boarded ship at the port of L’Orient on the Breton coast, the departure point for the regular France-America packet service he himself had proposed.
When Crèvecoeur imagined a bustling traffic between France and the eastern seaboard of America, he thought of a swift passage west of three to four weeks. His own in the autumn of 1783 took fifty-four days of the purest Atlantic hell. The Courrier de l’Europe was buffeted by vicious gales, swamped in the billows, and blown far off course more than once. Crèvecoeur was sick most of the time and occasionally collapsed in epileptic seizures of the kind that had convulsed him in the British prison in New York. When the ship finally passed the Narrows and weighed anchor at Sandy Hook on 19 November, exhaustion competed with his trepidation. New York Harbor was a picture of chaos. Washington’s troops were camped on Harlem Heights, poised to enter the city. British ships were being hastily loaded up with the human remnant of their lost American empire: loyalists; slaves freed by their service with the British. On one of those ships his in-laws, the Tippets, had departed for good to recreate a new dynasty in Canada. But Seton, his fortunes badly damaged and in some fear of being identified as a Tory collaborator-magistrate, had decided America was and would be his home. Fires were breaking out on Manhattan, each side, exultant Patriots and bitter loyalists, blaming the other for the damage. Through all this smoke, terror and hatred staggered Crèvecoeur, frantic for news. He had written ahead to Seton, informing him of his arrival. But the first to make himself known to Crèvecoeur was someone Seton had sent to the dock to look for him and who, without any care or ceremony, blurted out the news that his house was burned, his wife dead, his children missing.
When Seton caught up with him, Crèvecoeur was prostrate with anguish. All his friend could offer by way of comfort was to say that he had been looking for the children and to promise that he would never abandon the search. And then, in mid December, at the Post Office amid a heap of correspondence jumbled up in the hurly-burly of the evacuation, the desperate Crèvecoeur finally discovered the truth. Waiting for him were letters from the man Lieutenant Little had sent to New York to try to contact Crèvecoeur’s family, Captain Gustavus Fellowes. Somehow, the package had been sent to London rather than France and then, failing to find the addressee, had been returned to New York to await possible receipt. Sorrow was confirmed. Mehitable was indeed dead and the farm razed in an Indian raid, though whether they were on the warpath for Patriots or loyalists was unknown. But the children were alive, taken in by a neighboring family near Chester, where Captain Fellowes had found them in a pitiful state; without shoes or stockings in the bitter cold, barely fed and quite sick. Fellowes’s response to what he beheld was instantaneous. He and his wife had seven children already; now they would have nine. The farmer’s wife, tearful, remorseful, wept at giving them up, wrung her hands with the distress of her own situation. Fellowes consoled her as best he could, absolved her of any guilt but with no more ado, bundled the eleven-year-old Fanny and the seven-year-old Louis in bearskin blankets and set them in a sleigh that sped north over the icy roads to Boston. So there would be a reunion.
It came about in the early spring of 1784, once the roads were passable and Crèvecoeur had shaken off his epileptic seizures. At Fellowes’s door in Harvard Street, he announced himself nervously, but he need not have worried. The children who came to his embrace were much grown: Fanny thirteen now and Louis nine, but they were still a family. Brought together, they stayed in Boston for some months before Crèvecoeur took them back to New York to take up his post as consul, instituting the ocean service, seeing to imports and exports (alfalfa, sweet potatoes), finding a way to pick up a semblance of domestic life. Gentle honors came his way. Ethan Allen, the governor of Vermont, named the town of St. Johnsbury for him, but then Allen was himself an amb
iguous patriot, wanting first and foremost sovereignty for his state and prepared to ask Canada for it, should Congress not agree.
For a few years, the Crèvecoeurs/St. Johnses were truly if not quite easily of the two worlds: in France again between 1785 and 1787, where the children learned the language at school; then two years in New York, where he helped establish the first openly Catholic church, St. Peter’s on Barclay Street. Crèvecoeur had been in Philadelphia to witness the making of the American Constitution and, stirred by what Jefferson was reporting from Paris, believed he might see something of the same dawn in France. In the summer of 1790, the closest moment to a revolutionary honeymoon that France experienced, Crèvecoeur returned and for a moment thought that there might indeed be a dawning of some universal republic of liberated humanity. Was not the declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen addressed to the whole world (much like his own work)? But it took little time for the violence of the Revolution to shake his confidence, and whenever he could he took refuge at Pierrepont from the brutal politics of Paris that engulfed so many of his friends, both French and American. In 1792, the foreign minister Bertrand de Moleville ordered him back to the United States, but Crèvecoeur replied that, being nearly sixty, in poor health and with no funds at his disposal, he needed to secure whatever little he could and resigned his post. As the monarchy fell to a further revolutionary upheaval and the Jacobin Terror became the order of the day, Crèvecoeur had reason to regret the decision, but it was now too late to effect an exit without being suspected of espionage or outright treason. Invoking the doubtful honorary citizenship bestowed on him in Vermont would only have made matters worse. Already his son-in-law, Otto, suspected of being too friendly with foreigners, was in prison.