"The itinerant man": Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's revolution, and the fate of Atlantic cosmopolitanism

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 61, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 201-234

  Iannini, Christopher ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950316651     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491785     Document Type: Review

References (91)

1. Peter Dubois, quoted in Bernard Chevignard, "St. John de Crèvecoeur in the Looking Glass: Letters from an American Farmer and the Making of a Man of Letters, " Early American Literature, XIX (1984), 175.
2. The anecdote and the biographical details provided below are from Gay Wilson Allen and Roger Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer (New York, 1987), 61-67.
3. Grantland S. Rice, "Crèvecoeur and the Politics of Authorshipin Republican America, " EAL, XXVIII (1993), 108;
4. Christine Holbo, "Imagination, Commerce, and the Politics of Associationism in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, "EAL, XXXII (1997), 57. Before the 1960s, readings of the Letters tended tostress the idyllic aspects of the text and to privilege the earlier letters.Since then, most critics have complicated that vision by arguing that thenarrator undergoes a profound shift in consciousness, or by establishing adistinction between a naive Farmer James and his sophisticated author, or both.Prominent contributors to the earlier consensus include Marcus Cunliffe, Henry S. Commager, Richard B. Morris, and Vernon Parrington.
5. That such views retain some currency is evidenced by the Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot et al. (New York, 1988).
6. For some representative examples of the later criticism, see A. W.Plumstead, "Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, " in Everett Emerson, ed., American Literature, 1764-1789: The Revolutionary Years (Madison, Wis., 1977), 213-231;
7. Doreen Alvarez Saar, "Crèvecoeur's 'Thoughts on Slavery':Letters from an American Farmer and Whig Rhetoric, " EAL, XXII (1987), 192-203;
8. Nathaniel Philbrick, "The Nantucket Sequence in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, " New England Quarterly, LXIV (1991), 414-432;
9. Norman Grabo, "Crèvecoeur's American: Beginning the World Anew, " William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XLVIII (1991), 159-172;
10. Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics inthe Early United States (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 18-33. Recent criticism oftenshares the focus of earlier scholars on questions of mainland society andidentity. It is interesting to note that this concern still creeps into thetransnational readings of Rice and Holbo.
11. Thus, Holbo, "Imagination, Commerce, and the Politics of Associationism, " EAL, XXXII (1997), 33. claims that Crè vecoeur'stask was "understanding - and at the same time creating - a nationalidentity for America." I am closer to agreeing with her assertion that"Crèvecoeur's reflections on American nationality were formulated inthe context of Raynal's larger meditations on the problem of nationality in anage of international capitalism" (32). I would stipulate, however, that Crèvecoeur's meditation is centered on the problem of cosmopolitanism inan age when nationalism and international capitalism simultaneously emerged.
12. Such a view is perhaps best captured by Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 140-172. Cook, 143, argues that Letters"stages the eclipse of the Enlightenment ideal of the Republic of Lettersand of its cosmopolite, supranational citizen-critic" (143).
13. [M. G. St. J. de Crèvecoeur], J. Hector St. John, "Sketchesof Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects, " in Dennis D. Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crèvecoeur (Athens, Ga., 1995), 106-113.
14. Crèvecoeur also wrote a substantially revised French version ofthe sketch, entitled "Voyage à la Jamaique et aux Isles Bermudes, " that he included in Lettres d'un cultivateur americain, 2 vols.(Paris, 1784), 229-240.
15. For a discussion of this trend, see Dennis D. Moore's review essay, "The Empire of Early American Studies, " WMQ, 3d Ser., LIX (2002), 720-724.
16. In particular, Moore cites Carla Mulford, "New Science and the Question of Identity in Eighteenth-Century British America, " and Leonard Tennenhouse, "Caribbean Democracy and the Problem of Masculinity in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond, " both in Mulford and David S. Shields, eds., Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, Del., 2001), 79-103, 104-121.
17. For some other recent efforts to include the Caribbean ineighteenth-century American studies, see Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (New York, 2000);
18. Andrew Jackson O'Shaugnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolutionand the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000);
19. David P. Geggus, ed., The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, S.C., 2001);
20. David Barry Gaspar and Geggus, eds., A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution and the Greater Caribbean (Bloomington, Ind., 1997).
21. The classic statements by Eric Williams and C. L. R. James have beenreissued in recent decades. See Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; rpt.Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994),
22. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938; rpt. New York, 1989).
23. Abbé [Guillaume-Thomas-François] Raynal, A Philosophicaland Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the Eastand West Indies, 6 vols., trans. J. O. Justamond (New York, 1969).
24. Thomas Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur (New York, 1970), 20.
25. For a survey of some critical questions related to the composition andpublication of Letters from an American Farmer, see Plumstead, "Hector St.John de Crèvecoeur, " in Emerson, ed., American Literature, 213-231.Responding to speculation that Crèvecoeur's London publisher might havearranged the earlier manuscripts into the 1782 Letters from an American Farmer, Plumstead argues from internal evidence that Crèvecoeur himself revisedand arranged the earlier sketches.
26. This argument is pursued in Chevignard, "St. John de Crèvecoeur in the Looking Glass, " EAL, XIX (1984), 173-190, whosuggests that the bulk of the revision was done during Crè vecoeur'sdetainment in New York City. My own belief is that the early sketches certainlyunderwent significant revision during the late 1770s and early 1780s. Someonetransformed a transnational body of work into an exclusively mainland narrative.Crèvecoeur's own experiences with his North American neighbors and British authorities might well have inspired him to conceal a form ofcosmopolitan identity (and the fluid "political affiliations" itimplied) to which the Revolutionary Atlantic had grown increasingly hostile. His London publishers might have selected only the mainland sketches in order tosatisfy the growing vogue for accounts of North America.
27. See Rice, "Crèvecoeur and the Politics of Authorship, "EAL, XXVIII (1993), 91-119, for versions of both these arguments. The textualhistory sketched above provides one way of understanding the narrativeinstability remarked by so many modern critics of Letters from an American Farmer. The text may be viewed as a complex palimpsest in which thetransnational concerns of the earlier versions of the sketches remain visiblebeneath the mainland narrative that is written over them.
28. Thomas Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought: Its Form and Function in the Ideas of Franklin, Hume, and Voltaire, 1694-1790 (Notre Dame, Ind., 1977), 32.
29. For a fascinating account of the cosmopolitanism of the new merchantclass in Britain, see David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants andthe Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735-1785 (New York, 1998).
30. Interest in the eighteenth-century origins of cosmopolitanism hasincreased with the reemergence of the term within contemporary debates onglobalization. Kant's concept of the cosmopolitan has been reexamined by Jürgen Habermas, "Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace with the Benefit of Two-Hundred Years' Hindsight, " in James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachman, eds., Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).
31. For one example of contemporary debates over cosmopolitanism, see Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation(Minneapolis, Minn., 1998).
32. For an attempt to incorporate these debates into literary criticism, see Vinay Dharwadker, ed., Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (New York, 2001).
33. Schlereth, Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought, 32.
34. Crèvecoeur, "Rock of Lisbon, " June 3, 1770, in Moore, ed., More Letters from an American Farmer, 71.
35. Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the East and West Indies, trans. Justamond, V, 107.
36. Crèvecoeur, "Sketches of Jamaica, " in Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer, 106, 113, 107.
37. On the transformative effects of this trade on both North America and the British Caribbean, see O'Shaugnessy, An Empire Divided, 69-76
38. John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1985), 144-146.
39. These figures are adapted from tables in McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 115, 130, 174, 199.
40. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 164-165. Jeffersonian notions of agrarian virtue andtheir relation to classical republicanism were central to the development of a"republican synthesis" thirty years ago.
41. For the classic statements of that synthesis, see J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J., 1975);
42. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution(Cambridge, Mass., 1976);
43. Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972).
44. These seminal works were challenged by a liberal counterthesis, whichquestioned the characterization of republicanism as an inherently anticommercialand anticapitalist ideology. For a summary of this position, see Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992);
45. Isaac Kramnick, Republicanism and Bourgeois Radicalism: Political Ideology in Late Eighteenth-Century England and America (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990).More recent scholars generally argue for the tense coexistence of liberalism andrepublicanism as competing and overlapping ideologies.
46. For an example of this pluralism in literary studies, see Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic(Princeton, N.J., 1998). In my own view, Crèvecoeur's writingsdemonstrate that republican discourse struggled to accommodate the liberalvalues necessary to a commercial society.
47. For a stimulating account of the transformation of republicanism in thecontext of commercialization, see Cathy Matson and Peter Onuf, "Toward a Republican Empire: Interest and Ideology in Revolutionary America, "American Quarterly, XXXVII (1985), 496-531.
48. Crèvecoeur, "Sketches of Jamaica, " in Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer, 107, 109.
49. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992), 239.
50. Wood relies in part on Garry Wills's understanding of the importance of Scottish Common Sense philosophy to late-eighteenth-century America in Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence (Garden City, N.Y., 1978).
51. Wills's argument has been severely questioned by Ronald Hamowy, "Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills's Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, " WMQ, 3d Ser., XXXVI (1979), 502-523.
52. For a nuanced examination of the combined influence of Common Sensephilosophy and Lockean sensationalism on notions of civic virtue, one thatincorporates key aspects of Hamowy's critique, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (New York, 1982), 23-26.
53. For some recent attempts to link republicanism with a broader discourseof masculine sentiment, see Burgett, Sentimental Bodies, 112-134;
54. Julie K. Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago, 1999).
55. Mary E. Rucker, "Crèvecoeur's Letters and Enlightenment Doctrine, " EAL, XIII (1993), 193-212.
56. Montesquieu [Charles-Louis de Secondat], The Spirit of the Laws, trans.Thomas Nugent (New York, 1949).
57. On Montesquieu's relation to cultural and political geography, see Karl Marcus Kriesel, "Montesquieu: Possibilistic Political Geographer, "Annals of the Association of American Geographers, LVIII (1968), 557-574.
58. Holbo, "Imagination, Commerce, and the Politics of Associationism, " EAL, XXXII (1997), 31.
59. Raymond J. Maras, "Abbé Raynal and the American Independence Movement, " Consortium on Revolutionary Europe, 1750-1850: Proceedings, 1991(Tallahassee, Fla., 1992), 284-293.
60. Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the East and West Indies, trans. Justamond, VI, 215.
61. Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the East and West Indies, trans. Justamond, V, 107.
62. The following historical sketch is derived from Carolyn E. Fick, "The French Revolution in Saint Domingue: A Triumph or a Failure?" in Gaspar and Geggus, eds., Turbulent Time, 52-61,
63. Fick, "French Revolution in Saint Domingue, " in Gaspar and Geggus, eds., Turbulent Time, 52.
64. For a sophisticated discussion of the North American response to the Sugar Acts, see O'Shaugnessy, Empire Divided, 62-69.
65. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 120.
66. Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the East and West Indies, trans. Justamond, V, 109.
67. Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery (London, 1988), 52-53.Although Blackburn, 170, writes that "the tenor of French writing onslavery, " including statements by Condorcet, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, "had often been more radical, if also more rhetorical, than that to befound in Britain or the United States, " Raynal's statements nonethelessremained anomalous.
68. For a comparison of British and French antislavery, beginning in thisperiod, see Seymour Drescher, From Slavery to Freedom: Comparative Studies inthe Rise and Fall of Atlantic Slavery (New York, 1999), 35-52.
69. Raynal, Philosophical and Political History of the East and West Indies, trans. Justamond, IV, 128-129.
70. Blackburn, Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 55.
71. Michael Mullin, Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance inthe American South and the British Caribbean, 1736-1831 (Urbana, Ill., 1992), 45-61.
72. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Susan Manning(New York, 1997), 7.
73. Robert Ferguson, The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820 (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 34.
74. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Manning, 7-8.
75. Rice, "Crèvecoeur and the Politics of Authorship, " EAL, XXVII (1993), 108.
76. Philbrick, "Nantucket Sequence, " NEQ, LXIV (1991);
77. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Manning, 87, 106.
78. Crèvecoeur, "Sketches of Jamaica, " in Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer, 109, 110.
79. In a fascinating reading of Letter IX, Jennifer Rae Greeson, "The Figure of the South and the Nationalizing Imperatives of Early United States Literature, " Yale Journal of Criticism, XII (1999), 221, makes a similarargument: "The very fact that the 'extended Caribbean' region had been atthe center of European representation of the American colonies meant thatportrayal of the Southern U.S. was inflected by centuries of ideologicalassociations dictated by European imperialism."
80. Crèvecoeur, Letters front an American Farmer, ed. Manning, 151-152.
81. For some examples of critics who locate the turn in the ninth letter and James's encounter with the caged slave, see Saar, "Crè vecoeur's'Thoughts on Slavery, '" EAL, XXII (1987), 192-203;
82. Rucker, "Crèvecoeur's Letters and Enlightenment Doctrine, " EAL, XIII (1993), 93-212;
83. Grabo, "Crèvecoeur's American, " WMQ, 3d Ser., XLVIII(1991), 159-172;
84. Stephen Carl Arch, "The 'Progressive Steps' of the Narrator in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, " Studies in American Fiction, XVIII (1990), 145-158.
85. For a particularly astute reading of the episode, see Cook, Epistolary Bodies, 160-167. Cook argues that Crèvecoeur's belief in the cosmopolitanideals of the Enlightenment is finally undermined by the paradoxical status ofthe slave's body as both subject and object, agent of labor and article ofproperty, within a market economy. Her reading complements my own notion, discussed below, that the caged slave confronts the narrator with an uncannyform of rebellious agency.
86. According to Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra:Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic(Boston, 2000), 224-226, the 1770s saw a particularly intense cycle of revoltsin the Caribbean. In 1775, plots and insurrections took place in New York, Maryland, Virginia, and Charleston, S.C. (224).
87. On his return to Pennsylvania in Letter X, James offers a depiction ofits natural environment as a volatile and predatory space, largely at odds withthe celebratory early letters. The section ends with a dramatic account of abattle between a white water snake and its black challenger, which, as Greeson, "Figure of the South, " Yale Journal of Criticism, XII (1999), 215 n.26, suggestively argues, contains a subtle echo of Raynal's Caribbean revolt. Onits surface, Letter XI appears to counter the sweeping pessimism of theprevious two sections. A Russian visitor to John Bartram's home and gardenpraises his host's participation in an extensive natural historical network thatspans the Atlantic. The knowledge gleaned from Bartram's cosmopolitanactivities is presented as invaluable to the developing colony. By introducingan entirely new narrator, however, Crèvecoeur distances a now worldly James from such humanist dreams.
88. Philbrick, St. John de Crèvecoeur, 140.
89. Crèvecoeur, Lettres d'un cultivateur americain, 236 (translationmine).
90. For a persuasive account of the role of black mariners from Bermuda inthe contraband trade, see Michael J. Jarvis, "Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783, " WMQ, 3d Ser., LIX (2002), 585-622.Jarvis argues that the owners of Bermuda ships preferred to use crews of slaveson smuggling trips in part because British law made it impossible for slaves tooffer testimony.
91. Geggus, "Slavery, War, and Revolution in the Greater Caribbean, 1789-1815, " in Gaspar and Geggus, eds., Turbulent Time, 2.