Christopher Iannini

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Christopher Iannini | 'The Itinerant Man': Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism | The William and Mary Quarterly, 61.2 | The History Cooperative

"The Itinerant Man": Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism

IN July of 1779, Magistrate Peter Dubois of New York City composed a detailed report to the colonial governor. Its subject was a Frenchman, J. Hector St. John, who had been arrested a few days earlier for alleged possession of rebel maps of New York harbor. Though no maps were found, suspicion intensified on discovery of the curious trunk the man had smuggled through British lines outside the seaport. Dubois reported: "When he came into this City, from among the Rebels, he brought with him Some Boxes in which he had curious Botanical plants and at the Bottom of those Boxes under the Earth in which these plants were, he had private Drawers or Cases in which he had papers." ¹ Even after a reading of the papers revealed their author's loyalist sentiments, he was held in prison for three months before finally receiving permission to sail for England and then France. ²

The papers were the thirty-two manuscript sketches from which their author—known to posterity as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur—would assemble Letters from an American Farmer. Dubois's report suggests that the very production of Letters from an American Farmer demanded painstaking negotiation of an Atlantic world troubled by a succession of imperial disputes. So too did the career of the author himself, who transformed from a French lieutenant during the French and Indian War, to a loyalist British subject and farmer in rural New York during the 1770s, to a British prisoner, to a French trade consul to the United States in 1784. Throughout his life, Crèvecoeur treated identities and allegiances as provisional strategies designed to ensure his continued mobility and prosperity. In keeping with those biographical circumstances, Crèvecoeur's consuming artistic and philosophical interest—from the travel sketches of the early 1770s, to the English Letters from an American Farmer, through the expanded French Lettres d'un cultivateur americain of 1784 and 1787—lay, not in the delineation of any one parochial identity, but in the fate of a point of view rooted in enlightened cosmopolitanism.

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