Chapter I: • Colonial Backgrounds

I • New Stock

Immigration in the eighteenth century was almost wholly economic in motive. The reports of free land and free opportunity in America penetrated to remote hamlets of Great Britain, and more slowly to the continent, and drew hither a rude influx of the dispossessed and disinherited of Europe. From the hopeless poverty of great masses of old-world laborers, increasing numbers sought escape through emigration, accepting the hardships and uncertainties of the migration in the hope of bettering themselves ultimately. A host of English nondescripts--broken men, bond servants, “gaol birds,” the lees and settlings of the old world--came overseas, voluntarily or under duress, in numbers running into the hundred thousands, and shared with German peasants from the Palatine, or Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the back-breaking labor of subduing the wilderness. About these unfortunate men and women no romance has gathered; tradition and history have not remembered their names or glorified their deeds; yet their blood runs in the veins of most Americans today of the older stock, and their contribution to our common heritage was great and lasting.

Of the different racial strains that mingled their blood with the earlier English--Irish, Huguenot-French, German, Scotch-Irish--the last was by far the most important. Not since 1630, when the _Lady Arbella_ and her companion vessels brought the Puritans to Massachusetts Bay, had there been an event so momentous to America as the arrival in 1718 of some four thousand Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the vanguard of an army which by the time of the Revolution had risen to approximately two hundred thousand, or more than twelve times the number of English who settled Massachusetts. They were desperately poor; the available lands near the coast were already preëmpted; so armed with axes, their seed potatoes, and the newly invented rifle, they plunged into the backwoods to become our great pioneering race. Scattered thinly through a long frontier, they constituted the outposts and buffer settlements of civilization. A vigorous breed, hardy, assertive, individualistic, thrifty, trained in the democracy of the Scottish kirk, they were the material out of which later Jacksonian democracy was to be fashioned, the creators of that “western type which in politics and industry became ultimately the American type.”[134]

Next to the Scotch-Irish, who for the most part were free peasants, the most important addition to eighteenth-century America were the indented servants. Mostly from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany, they represented all trades and some of the professions. The white slavers of the times were well organized and plied a brisk trade with satisfactory profits; and in consequence, a steady stream of indented servants poured into America to turn the wheels of colonial industry. In his history of the German redemptioners, Diffenderfer has printed a number of newspaper advertisements which throw a curious light upon the traffic: here are two:

From the _American Weekly Mercury_, February 18, 1729:

Lately arrived from London, a parcel of very likely English
servants, men and women, several of the men Tradesmen; to be
sold reasonable and Time allowed for payment. By Charles Read of
Philadelphia, or Capt. John Ball, on board his ship, at _Anthony
Millkinson’s Wharf_.

From the same for May 22, 1729, announcements of two ships:

There is just arrived from Scotland, a parcel of choice _Scotch
Servants_; Taylors, Weavers, Shoemakers and ploughmen, some for
five and others for seven years; Imported by James Coults, etc.

Just arrived from London in the ship _Providence_, Capt. Jonathan
Clarke, a parcel of very likely _servants_, most Tradesmen, to be
sold on reasonable Terms.

The several nationalities were appraised and rated by careful merchants and the fittest import seasons considered.[135] The “best time for Servants is about the month of May,” one merchant wrote to his agent in Ireland; and another warned, “Irish servants will be very dull, such numbers have already arrived from Different parts & many more expected, that I believe it will be overdone, especially as several Dutch vessels are expected here, which will always command the Market.”[136]

In the middle colonies, particularly Pennsylvania, the greater number of servants came from the Rhine country. Deceived by swindling agents, thousands of German peasants, eager to get away from their war-harried and plundered homes, sold themselves into servitude to pay their passage to America. For the better part of a century these German redemptioners thronged the ports of Philadelphia and Baltimore, as the following news items testify:

From _Der Hoch Deutsche Pennsylvanische Bericht_, August 16, 1750:

Six ships with Irish servants have arrived at Philadelphia, and two
ships with German Newcomers. Some say 18 more on their way here;
others say 24 and still others 10,000 persons.

From the same, December 16, 1750:

Capt. Hasselwood has arrived from Holland with the latest ship that
brought Germans. It is the fourteenth that has come laden with
Germans this year. 4,317 have registered in the Court House....
Besides these, 1,000 servants and passengers arrived from Ireland
and England.[137]

Of the human side of this widespread traffic some little idea may be got from the diary of a certain John Harrower, a man of modest education who became an articled schoolmaster to a Virginia family in the year 1774. Following are some entries:

Wednesday, 26th. [January, 1774.] This day I being reduced to
the last shilling was obliged to engage to go to Virginia for
four years, as a schoolmaster for Bedd, Board, washing and five
pounds during the whole time. I have also wrote my wife this day a
particular Acct of everything that has happened to me since I left
her until this date....

Munday 31st ... It is surprising to see the No. of good tradesmen
of all kinds, th’t come on b’d every day ... while the Clerk was
filling up the Indentures the doctor search’d every serv’t to see
that they were sound ... seventy-five were Intend [indented] to
Capt Bowres for four Years....

Munday 7th ... at 4 pm put a servant ashore extreamly bade in a
fever, and then got under saile for Virginia with seventy Servants
on board all indented to serve four yeares there at their different
Occupations....

Munday, May 2nd.... At 2 pm the Capt carried five servts ashore to
Hampton in order to sell their Indentures, But returned again at
Midnight with[out] selling any more but one Boat Builder....

Freiday, 6th ... at Hobshole there was five Glasgow ships and an
English Brigantine lying, at 2 pm we passed by Leedstown on our
Star board hand where there was a ship from London lying with
convicts....

Wednesday, 11th.... At 10 A M Both Coopers and the Barber from our
Mace [mess] went ashore upon tryall. At night one Daniel Turner a
servt returned onb’d from Liberty so Drunk that he abused the Capt
and Chief Mate and Boatswan to a verry high degree, which made
him to be horse whipt, put in Irons and thumb screwed, on houre
afterward he was unthumbscrewed, taken out of the Irons, but then
he was hand cuffed, and gagged all night....

Munday, 16th. This day severalls came on b’d to purchase servts
Indentures and among them there was two soul drivers, they are
Men who made it their business to go on b’d all ships who have
in either Servants or Convicts and buy sometimes the whole and
sometimes a parcell of them as they can agree, and then they drive
them through the Country like a parcell of Sheep until they can
sell them to advantage, but all went away without buying any....

Munday, 23rd [May] ... at same time all the rest of the servants
were ordered ashore to a tent at Fredericksbg and several of their
indentures were then sold, about 4 pm I was brought to Colonel
Daingerfield, when we immediately agreed and my Indenture for four
years was then delivered him and he was to send for me the next
day.[138]

In some such fashion, year after year, thousands of immigrants were transported to America, there to mingle their blood with that of the earlier comers. They came as social derelicts, were greeted by the awaiting “soul-drivers,” found masters, worked and got on, or lost heart and slipped away into the tempting backcountry whither so many broken men went in search of refuge. They were a plebeian lot, and they endured the common fate of the underling. Very likely they transmitted to their children a bitter hostility to the ways of an aristocratic society, the residuum of old grievances, and this slowly accumulating animus was eventually to count heavily with lower-class colonials in favor of a more democratic order in the new world.

II • The Frontier • Lubberland

The frontier, which exercised so creative an influence in shaping American character and institutions, was regarded in very different lights by the gentleman and the commoner. To the former it was no other than lubberland, the abode of rude leveling, the temptation to gross social laxity. It drew away servants who were needed, and kept the price of real estate low; and such very different persons as Cotton Mather and John Dickinson agreed in desiring to stop the constant drain into the backcountry, and keep settlers in the older portions. Descriptions of the frontier indited by aristocratic pens convey an idea very different from later democratic conceptions, and paint the ancestors of later Jacksonians in unlovely colors.

Among the earliest of these records is _The Private Journal kept by Madam Knight on a Journey from Boston to New York in the Year 1704_. Madam Knight was a sprightly and intelligent woman, keeper of a dame’s school in Boston, who set down in the journal some of the odd things that came under her sharp eyes on her venturesome trip on horseback. As she drew away from the older settlements, signs of relaxing social convention multiplied with the worsening of the road. Connecticut, which had always been too democratic to suit the Boston taste, she found “a little too much Independant in their principalls.” It was not careful to uphold proper social distinctions, but inclined to a free and easy leveling altogether offensive:

... They Generally lived very well and comfortable in their
famelies. But too Indulgent (especially ye farmers) to their
slaves: suffering too great familiarity from them, permitting ym
to sit at Table and eat with them (as they say to save time), and
into the dish goes the black hoof as freely as the white hand. They
told me that there was a farmer lived nere the Town where I lodged
who had some difference with his slave, concerning something the
master had promised him and did not punctually perform; wch caused
some hard words between them; But at length they put the matter to
Arbitration and Bound themselves to stand to the award of such as
they named--wch done, the Arbitrators Having heard the Allegations
of both parties, Order the master to pay 40s to black face, and
acknowledge his fault. And so the matter ended; the poor master
very honestly standing to the award.[139]

In the unsettled country strange figures with rude decivilized ways made their appearance. Here is a description of one such product of the wilderness:

I had scarce done thinking, when an Indian-like Animal come to the
door, on a creature very much like himselfe, in mien and feature,
as well as Ragged cloathing; and having ’litt, makes an Awkerd
Scratch with his Indian shoo, and a Nodd, sitts on ye block,
fumbles out his black Junk [salt meat?], dipps it in ye ashes, and
presents it piping hott to his muscheeto’s (?), and fell to sucking
like a calf, without speaking, for near a quarter of an hower. At
length the old man said how do’s Sarah do? who I understood was the
wretches wife, and Daughter to ye old man.[140]

She thus describes a squatter’s hut in the backwoods:

This little Hutt was one of the wretchedest I ever saw a habitation
for human creatures. It was suported with shores enclosed with
Clapboards, laid on Lengthways, and so much asunder, that the
Light come throu’ everywhere; the doore tyed on with a cord in ye
place of hinges; The floor the bear earth; no windows but such
as the thin covering afforded, nor any furniture but a Bedd with
a glass Bottle hanging at ye head on’t; an earthan cupp, a small
pewter bason, A Bord with sticks to stand on, instead of a table,
and a block or two in ye corner instead of chairs. The family were
the old man, his wife and two children; all and every part being
the picture of poverty. Notwithstanding both the Hutt and its
Inhabitance were very clean and tydee.[141]

As Madam Knight meditated upon the causes of such poverty, she came to a characteristic Boston conclusion:

We may Observe here the great necessity and benefitt both of
Education and Conversation: for these people have as Large a
portion of mother witt, and sometimes Larger, than those who have
bin brought up in Citties; but for want of emprovements, Render
themselves almost Ridiculos, as above.[142]

It is in the chatty narrative of Colonel William Byrd of Virginia,[143] that we find the earliest detailed description of the fringe of squatter settlements. Colonel Byrd was the first gentleman of Virginia, a man of old-world education and some literary taste,[144] polished manners, and a vast number of acres of choice land which he had acquired and held largely tax-free, by means well understood among Virginia gentlemen.[145] Among the several capacities in which he served the commonwealth in return for his many acres, was to act as a member of a joint commission which in the year 1728 ran a boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina. As he sat his horse in the capacity of overseer, he observed many amusing things which he jotted down in his journal.

The backcountry, it would seem, had already developed the free and easy ways of a squatter world, shiftless, lubberly, independent, but animated by hostility towards the aristocratic Old Dominion, from which many of the settlers had come. North Carolina had long been a place of refuge for debtors, criminals, and runaway servants, who used their legs to even the score with a caste system; and Colonel Byrd regarded the lazy crew with amused contempt:

Surely there is no place in the World where the Inhabitants live
with less Labour than in N Carolina. It approaches nearer to the
Description of Lubberland than any other, by the great felicity
of the Climate, the easiness of raising Provisions, and the
Slothfulness of the People. Indian corn is of so great increase,
that a little Pains will Subsist a very large Family with Bread,
and then they may have meat without any Pains at all, by the Help
of the Low Grounds, and the great Variety of Mast that grows on
the High-land. The Men, for their parts, just like the Indians,
impose all the Work upon the poor Women. They make their Wives
rise out of their Beds early in the Morning, at the same time that
they lye and Snore, till the Sun has run one third of his course,
and disperst all the unwholesome Damps. Then, after Stretching and
Yawning for half an Hour, they light their Pipes, and, under the
Protection of a cloud of Smoak, venture out into the open Air;
tho’ if it happens to be never so little cold, they quickly return
Shivering into the Chimney corner. When the weather is mild, they
stand leaning with both their arms upon the corn-field fence, and
gravely consider whether they had best go and take a Small Heat at
the Hough; but generally find reasons to put off till another time.
Thus they loiter away their Lives, like Solomon’s Sluggard, with
their Arms across, and at the Winding up of the Year Scarcely have
Bread to Eat. To speak the Truth, tis a thorough Aversion to Labor
that makes People file off to N Carolina, where Plenty and a Warm
Sun confirm them in their Disposition to Laziness for their whole
Lives.[146]

One thing Colonel Byrd noted everywhere: the lazy lubbers wanted chiefly to be let alone; they dreaded the possibility of falling within the Virginia line; they were content in their Eden, and had no wish to exchange their freedom for the stricter rule of the Old Dominion:

Wherever we passed we constantly found the Borderers laid it to
Heart if their Land was taken into Virginia; they chose rather
belong to Carolina, where they pay no Tribute, either to God or
to Caesar.... Another reason was, that the Government there is
so Loose, and the Laws so feebly executed, that, like those in
the Neighbourhood of Sydon formerly, every one does just what
seems good in his own Eyes.... Besides, there might have been
some Danger, perhaps, in venturing to be so rigorous, for fear of
undergoing the Fate of an honest Justice in Corotuck Precinct. This
bold Magistrate, it seems, taking upon to order a fellow to the
Stocks, for being disorderly in his Drink, was, for his intemperate
zeal, carry’d thither himself, and narrowly escap’d being whipp’t
by the Rabble into the Bargain.[147]

They are rarely guilty of Flattering or making any Court to their
governours, but treat them with all the Excesses of Freedom and
Familiarity. They are of Opinion their rulers woul’d be apt to grow
insolent, if they grew Rich, and for that reason they take care to
keep them poorer, and more dependent, if possible, than the Saints
of New England used to do their Governours.[148]

To the student of colonial politics such glimpses are suggestive. They reveal how early was the popular distrust of magistrates and government; and they serve to explain the most striking characteristic of Revolutionary political practice--the movement to minimize the power of the judiciary and the executive, and magnify the power of the legislature; to keep authority within the control of the local democracies. “Every one does just what seems good in his own Eyes”--in this attitude of social _laissez faire_ that throve on a diet of corn pone and salt pork was the origin of the coonskin democracy of Old Hickory that was to bring eventual disaster to the plans of gentlemen.

III • The Frontier • Land of Promise

Quite another picture of the frontier was likely to be painted by the eighteenth-century democrat. In the well-known _Letters_ of Crèvecœur, and in the recently published _More Letters from an American Farmer_,[149] is an analysis of frontier life and its creative influence upon the emerging American character, far more sympathetic and thoughtful than the casual narratives of Madam Knight and Colonel Byrd. The author was a cultivated Norman-French gentleman, who about the year 1759 or 1760 entered the English colonies from Canada, was a surveyor for a time near Albany, a resident of Pennsylvania and of Ulster County in the province of New York, eventually acquired a farm of 120 acres in Orange County which he named “Pine Hill,” married Mehetabel Tippet of Yonkers, and became a competent tiller of the soil as well as a lover of country life. In disposition he was active and energetic, curious concerning the ways of nature and society. In Canada he had joined the army as lieutenant under Montcalm and was sent on a map-making expedition to the wilderness beyond the Great Lakes, and traveled from Detroit as far south as the Ohio River. After quitting Canada following the fall of Quebec, he traveled from Nova Scotia through the English colonies to the extreme south, and perhaps visited Bermuda and Jamaica, noting keenly the country and the manners of the people. Perhaps no other man before the Revolution was so intimately acquainted with the French and English colonies as a whole, with their near background of frontier and the great wilderness beyond, as this French American; and it was from long and intimate contact with the realities of colonial life that he wrote those comments that have preserved his name to the present.

The Revolution broke in upon his peaceful life with disastrous consequences. He took no part in the preliminary disputes, and was under grave suspicion by his neighbors in Orange County and by the British. He was thrown into prison in New York by his Majesty’s officers, where his health was undermined and he was reduced to extreme straits. Finally permitted to sail for Europe without his family, he was shipwrecked off the coast of Ireland, but reached London where he disposed of his manuscripts, and eventually got over to France in August, 1781. After the peace he returned to America to find his wife dead, his children scattered, and his farmhouse burnt. For a time he was French consul at New York, where he interested himself in establishing a packet service between France and America, and in the improvement of agricultural methods, amongst other ways by the establishment of botanical gardens. He was a scientific farmer, introducing the system of cover crops into America and endeavoring to introduce potato culture into France. He was a corresponding member of the Académie des Sciences and the Royal Agricultural Society of Paris, and a member of the Société d’Agriculture, Sciences, et Arts de Meaux, and of the Société d’Agriculture de Caen. In 1790 he returned to France where he died in 1813.

Underneath the discursive chat of his letters is the firm fabric of economic fact. In the background of his thinking Crèvecœur was quite definitely Physiocratic, in his warm humanitarianism as well as in his agrarian bias. As the kindly Frenchman studied the ways of colonial society and contemplated the future, he asked himself the question, what was the American as he was perceptibly differentiating from his European ancestors? That a new race was emerging in this new country, he was convinced; and that it was not in consequence chiefly of a new mixture of blood--although that was not without its influence--he likewise believed. A more potent influence was at work and that influence was environment. Crèvecœur was something of an economic determinist who sought to explain laws, customs, institutions--the pattern of the social web--by an inquiry into economic factors. _Mann ist was er isst._ “Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the mode of our employment.”[150] Transplanted from the meager opportunities of the old world to the rich soil and ample spaces of America, the European undergoes a subtle transformation.

The rich stay in Europe, it is only the middling and the poor that
emigrate. In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have
by some means met together, and in consequence of various causes;
to what purpose should they ask one another, what countrymen they
are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch who
wanders about, who works and starves ... can that man call England
or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for
him, whose fields procured him no harvest, who met nothing but
the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and
punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface
of this planet? No! urged by a variety of motives, here they came.
Every thing tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of
living, a new social system; here they are become men: in Europe
they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetable mould, and
refreshing showers; they withered and were mowed down by want,
hunger, and war: but now by the power of transplantation, like all
other plants, they have taken root and flourished! Formerly they
were not numbered in any civil list of their country, except in
those of the poor; here they rank as citizens. By what invisible
power has this surprizing metamorphosis been performed? By that
of the laws of their industry ... his country is now that which
gives him land, bread, protection, and consequence: _Ubi panis ibi
patria_, is a motto of all emigrants.... Here the rewards of his
industry follow with equal steps in the progress of his labor; his
labor is founded on the basis of nature, _self-interest_; can it
want a stronger allurement?[151]

From economic individualism in presence of unexploited natural resources, he deduces the natural emergence of a new American psychology that differentiates the colonial from the European peasant. If “from involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor,” the emigrant “has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence”; if he has left off being a peasant and become a free-holder and citizen; will not this man “entertain new ideas, and form new opinions”? He possesses a stake in society; his horizons broaden, his ambitions quicken; this is his country.

An European, when he first arrives, seems limited in his
intentions, as well as in his views; but he very suddenly alters
his scale ... he no sooner breathes our air than he forms new
schemes, and embarks in designs he never would have thought of
in his own country. There the plenitude of society confines many
useful ideas, and often extinguishes the most laudable schemes
which here ripen into maturity.[152]

He begins to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection; hitherto
he had not lived, but simply vegetated; he now feels himself a
man, because he is treated as such; the laws of his own country
had overlooked him in his insignificancy; the laws of this cover
him with their mantle. Judge what an alteration there must arise
in the mind and thoughts of this man; he begins to forget his
former servitude and dependence, his heart involuntarily swells and
glows; this first swell inspires him with those new thoughts which
constitute an American.... From nothing to start into being, to
become a free man, invested with lands, to which every municipal
blessing is annexed! What a change indeed! It is in consequence of
that change that he becomes an American.[153]

_He_ is an American, who leaving behind him all his ancient
prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the mode of life
he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he
holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of
our great _Alma Mater_. Here individuals of all nations are melted
into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day
cause great changes in the world.[154]

Having convinced himself that economic relaxation was the creative force in determining American institutions and psychology, he was led to examine the working of that force in diverse portions of America. It is neither in the older seacoast world, nor along the extreme frontier that he discovers his representative America; but in the broad stretches of clearings, the vigorous backcountry or “middle-settlements,” where agriculture was followed soberly and effectively. “Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the soil,” he pointed out; and it is the farmer of the middle region of New York and Pennsylvania, with his broad acres in prosperous cultivation, his economic independence, and his manly vigor, that he most delights to dwell upon:

Europe has no such class of men; the early knowledge they acquire,
the early bargains they make, give them a great degree of sagacity.
As freemen, they will be litigious; pride and obstinacy are often
the cause of lawsuits; the nature of our laws and governments
may be another. As citizens it is easy to imagine, that they
will carefully read the newspapers, enter into every political
disquisition, freely blame or censure governors and others. As
farmers, they will be careful and anxious to get as much as they
can, because what they get is theirs.... As Christians, religion
curbs them not in their opinions; the laws inspect our actions;
our thoughts are left to God. Industry, good living, selfishness,
litigiousness, country politics, the pride of freemen, religious
indifference, are their characteristics.[155]

The thinly settled backwoods with their restless squatter population, Crèvecœur regards as the rough vanguard of the westward-moving settlements. It is here, he points out, that the forces of leveling are strongest, that the last remnants of old-world distinctions and privileges are stript away, that the idea of individual freedom carries furthest, sometimes to social disaster. “He who would wish to see America in its proper light,” he says, “and have a true idea of its feeble beginnings and barbarous rudiments, must visit our extended line of frontiers where the last settlers dwell.”

Now we arrive near the great woods, near the last inhabited
districts; there men seem to be placed ... beyond the reach of
government, which in some measure leaves them to themselves ...
as they were driven there by misfortune, necessity of beginnings,
desire of acquiring large tracts of land, idleness, frequent want
of economy, ancient debts; the reunion of such people does not
afford a very pleasing spectacle.... The few magistrates they have,
are in general little better than the rest; they are often in a
perfect state of war; that of man against man, sometimes decided by
blows, sometimes by means of law ... men are wholly left dependent
upon their native tempers, and on the spur of uncertain industry,
which often fails when not sanctified by the efficacy of a few
moral rules. There, remote from the power of example, and check of
shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.
They are a kind of forlorn hope, preceding by ten or twelve years
the more respectable army of veterans which come after them. In
that space, prosperity will polish some, vice and law will drive
off the rest, who uniting with others like themselves will recede
still farther; making room for more industrious people, who will
finish their improvements, convert the loghouse into a convenient
habitation, and rejoicing that the first heavy labors are finished,
will change in a few years that hitherto barbarous country into a
fine, fertile, well regulated district. Such is our progress, such
is the march of the Europeans toward the interior parts of this
continent. In all society there are off-casts; this impure part
serves as our precursors or pioneers.[156]

Crèvecœur’s chattiness and bucolic love of nature may easily obscure for the casual reader, the solid economic core of the _Letters_. The story of Andrew, the Hebridean, with its note of idyllic simplicity, reads like a tale out of the French romantics; yet in its broad outline it is the story of many an immigrant who penetrated to the hospitable backcountry, took land, and prospered. The strong coloring of the description is only partly French; in part it is a reflection of the spontaneous optimism that was working like leaven in colonial society. It is the old-fashioned phrasing rather than the matter that makes the _Letters_ seem obsolete to modern readers. Change the wording, soften the bucolic enthusiasm, and the sober American of earlier generations, as he observed the arrival of the strong-armed peasant from the north of Europe, would have discovered nothing strange in such a sentiment as this:

After a foreigner from any part of Europe is arrived, and become
a citizen; let him devoutly listen to the voice of our great
parent, which says to him, “Welcome to my shores, distressed
European; bless the hour in which thou didst see my verdant fields,
my fair navigable rivers, and my green mountains!--If thou wilt
work, I have bread for thee; if thou wilt be honest, sober, and
industrious, I have greater rewards to bestow on thee--ease and
independence. I will give thee fields to feed and clothe thee; a
comfortable fire-side to sit by.... I shall endow thee besides
with the immunities of a freeman.... Go thou, and work and
till; thou shalt prosper, provided thou be just, grateful, and
industrious.”[157]

Andrew the Hebridean is a portrait painted by a Physiocratic humanitarian, but the idealism that would build peace and content on honest foundations, and would deny them to none, not even the poorest if they proved worthy, found frequent justification in the prosaic experience of colonial America. If many an immigrant found “soul-drivers” awaiting them, many others like Andrew found a more hospitable reception.

Across the peaceful scenes depicted in the _Letters_ soon fell the dark shadow of civil war, and Crèvecœur’s content was rudely broken in upon. As a French humanitarian he loathed war and all its works, and every instinct and argument counseled him to stand apart from the strife that seemed to him so meaningless. He liked peace and orderly ways and he could not work himself into a passion over the supposed wrongs of a people who seemed to him blessed above all others on this troubled earth. As a philosophical farmer he held the politician in contempt and refused to take seriously abstract theories of statecraft. The citizen who stuck to his plow was happier, he believed, than the citizen who talked noisily of his wrongs, and was eager to overset things. The rough leveling of the frontier he had found distasteful, and as he watched the development of the Revolutionary disputes, he seems to have discovered in the Whig program an irruption of the tumultuous frontier leveling that threatened to sweep away the common peace and well-being. The source of the unrest he traced to New England, the feculent wellspring of all the hypocrisies; it was inspired, he was convinced, by a selfish demagoguery and led by unprincipled mobsters. In so far as he held partisan sympathies, they inclined to the Loyalist side. His education in England and his breeding as a gentleman, drew him towards the Loyalist gentry with whom he associated in Orange County, and repelled him from the noisy ardor of the plebeian patriots. Yet in spirit he stood resolutely aloof, although his sympathies were cruelly hurt by the sufferings that fell under his observation. In certain letters only recently published (_Sketches of Eighteenth Century America_), he narrates the misfortunes that befell innocent men and women from the bitterness of civil strife,[158] and draws a picture of the lawlessness and greed of patriot committeemen, and the intolerance of the mob spirit, that is not pleasant to contemplate.[159] Bitterness rarely exudes from his pen, but when he considers the ways of Whig politicians he now and then indulges in a passage that reveals his loathing of the mercenary spirit that he discovers in the new patriotism. In the conclusion of “The American Belisarius” he gives vent to his anger against those who outrage common morality; if it were not for the fact that this is a moral universe, he says ironically:

I’d worship the demon of the times, trample on every law, break
every duty, neglect every bond, overlook every obligation to which
no punishment was annexed. I’d set myself calumniating my rich
neighbors. I’d call all passive, inoffensive men by the name of
inimical. I’d plunder or detain the entrusted deposits. I’d trade
on public moneys, though contrary to my oath. Oath! Chaff for good
Whigs, and only fit to bind a few conscientious Royalists! I’d
build my new fortune on the depreciation of the money. I’d inform
against every man who would make any difference betwixt it and
silver, whilst I, secure from any discovery or suspicion by my good
name, would privately exchange ten for one. I’d pocket the fines
of poor militiamen extracted from their heart’s blood. I’d become
obdurate, merciless, and unjust. I’d grow rich, “fas vel nefas.”
I’d send others a-fighting, whilst I stayed at home to trade and
to rule. I’d become a clamorous American, a modern Whig, and offer
every night incense to the god Arimanes.[160]

A lover of peace and good will, a humanitarian concerned only with justice and the common well-being, seeking new ways to enlarge the returns of agriculture, devoid of petty ambition and local prejudice, a friend of man, Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was an embodiment of the generous spirit of French revolutionary thought, a man whom Jefferson would have liked for a neighbor. His sketchy and discursive writings may not be notable literature, but we could ill spare them from the library of eighteenth-century America.

Footnotes

[134] See Commons, _Races and Immigrants in America_, p. 37.

[135] Sometimes the profits were unexpectedly great, as is illustrated by the case of a certain George Martin, who contracted with a shipmaster to transport himself, his wife, and five children to America for fifty-four pounds. He paid down $16, but died on the passage. On the arrival of the vessel in port, the captain foreclosed on the contract, sold the widow for twenty-two pounds, the three eldest sons at thirty pounds each, and the two youngest, who were under five years of age, he sold for ten pounds, realizing one hundred and twenty-two pounds on a debt under fifty-one pounds. (Diffenderfer, _The German Immigrants into Pennsylvania_, p. 268).

[136] _Ibid._, p. 229.

[137] _Ibid._, Part II, “The Redemptioners,” p. 209.

[138] For the entire diary, see _American Historical Review_, Vol. VI, pp. 65-107.

[139] _The Private Journal, etc._, p. 40.

[140] _Ibid._, pp. 29-30.

[141] _Ibid._, p. 28.

[142] _Ibid._, p. 45.

[143] “The History of the Dividing Line,” in _The Writings of Colonel William Byrd of Westover in Virginia, Esquire_, New York, 1901.

[144] At his death his library contained some four thousand volumes, “the largest private library in the English-speaking colonies,” according to his biographer.

[145] His father died possessed of 26,231 acres. He himself owned at his death “no less than 179,440 acres of the best land in Virginia.”

[146] _Op. cit._, pp. 75-76.

[147] _Ibid._, p. 87.

[148] _Ibid._, p. 81.

[149] Published under the title of _Sketches of Eighteenth Century America_ by the Yale University Press, 1925.

[150] _Letters ..._, in edition of 1904, p. 56.

[151] _Ibid._, pp. 52-55.

[152] _Ibid._, p. 76.

[153] _Ibid._, pp. 77, 79.

[154] _Ibid._, pp. 54-55.

[155] _Ibid._, pp. 57-58.

[156] _Ibid._, pp. 58-60.

[157] _Ibid._, pp. 90-91.

[158] See, e. g., “The Man of Sorrows,” “The Wyoming Massacre,” “The History of Mrs. B.,” “The Frontier Woman.”

[159] See, e. g., “The American Belisarius” and “Landscapes.”

[160] _Sketches of Eighteenth Century America_, p. 249.