ABSTRACT
W ith a sense of timing that all successful authors require,a book was published in London in 1782 that posed a famous question: ‘what is the American, this new man?’ This was the issue
of the hour for many Britons, stung by the humiliating defeat of the great-
est military superpower on Earth by a rabble of colonists with pretensions
of national destiny. How should this upstart new nation be explained and
understood? The book, Letters from an American Farmer, was written by an
upstate New Yorker of French ancestry, J. Hector St John de Crèvecoeur. It
was a classic formulation of the argument that America was a truly excep-
tional place, severed from the rules that determined the historical devel-
opment of the Old World. In America, Crèvecoeur insisted, ‘individuals of
all nations are melted into a new race of men’. The richness and abundance
of the land, he explained, offered opportunities for even the lowliest settler,
creating a more egalitarian society than Europeans could ever imagine in
their homelands. More than that, Crèvecoeur argued that becoming an
American was an act of faith, a declaration of a commitment to a new set
of egalitarian assumptions about society. ‘He is an American’, wrote
Crèvecoeur, ‘who, leaving behind him all his antient prejudices and man-
ners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the
new government he obeys and the new rank he holds’. Making a claim that
would find many an echo in subsequent efforts to explain America,
Crèvecoeur told his readers that the passage across the Atlantic was as much
an ideological journey as a geographical one.
