(This is a 619 page hardback book with dust jacket titled ...)
This is a 619 page hardback book with dust jacket titled JOURNEY INTO NORTHERN PENNSYLVANIA AND THE STATE OF NEW YOUR by Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur. Published by The University of Michigan Press in 1964. See my photographs (3) of this book on main listing page. Bookseller since 1995 (LL-Base2BS-12-bottom-up-L) rareviewbooks
https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Into-Northern-Pennsylvania-State/dp/B000NW9PAQ?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B000NW9PAQ
Michel Guillaume Jean de Crevecoeur was born on January 31, 1735 near Caen, in Normandy, the son of Guillaume Jean de Crevecceur (see birth certificate) and of Marie-Anne-Therese Blouet.
He later stated that his family name was Saint - Jean, “Crevecceur” being the name of an ancestral estate which neither he nor his father ever possessed. Though the descendant of families of distinction, the young man chose to become a pioneer and wanderer.
He had received part of his education in England, which he had left in 1754, and during his services in New France seems to have explored the vast tracts of land near the Great Lakes and the Ohio River.
He migrated to Canada and served under Montcalm in the last of the French and Indian wars. He had received part of his education in England, which he had left in 1754, and during his services in New France seems to have explored the vast tracts of land near the Great Lakes and the Ohio River.
His official duty was, perhaps, that of map-maker. In any case, he acquired a knowledge of the countries of the Scioto and the Muskingum, and of their Indian peoples.
These adventures were a mere overture to his later participation in the drama of American colonization and revolution. At the age of twenty-four (1759), he landed in New York, For the next decade he again traveled widely, acquiring a thorough knowledge of Pennsylvania and New York, and, presumably, penetrating into the Carolinas. Now, however, there were anchors for this French voyager.
In December 1765 he became a naturalized American citizen. Though details of his experiences are wanting between 1769 and September 1780, when he embarked for France, it is probable that during this decade he wrote most of the charming and informative essays on which his reputation rests. These are, for the most part, available in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) “by J. Hector St. John, ” a name which Crevecceur occasionally used simply because he liked it; and in Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (1925).
It is likely that he sometimes wrote long after the event, and the particular essays cannot be finally dated, but it is reasonable to think that these two volumes present substantially the Farmer’s reactions to American life during his stay here.
Immediately after the war he returned to America, arriving in New York, November 19, 1783, only to discover that his home had been burned.
He now became French consul at New York and endeavored to cement the friendly relations of his two countries. He corresponded with Washington; he knew Franklin; he wrote for the American newspapers over the signature “Agricola, ” and at the marriage of his daughter, America- Frances, Thomas Jefferson was present.
In 1790 he took final leave of his adopted country. He died at Sarcelles, on November 12, 1813.
Had Crevecceur written nothing, his life as a Frenchman living through the upheaval of the Revolution would have been remarkable. He was a master of the forest and of the pioneer farm. He studied with the utmost thoughtfulness the vexed question of taxation. He was familiar with the evils of fraudulent titles, heavy mortgages, and imperfect agricultural equipment. He understood the misery of the poor, and he observed the vast reestablishments in America of feudal systems under the Dutch and other colonial aristocrats. He was particularly interested, since this was his own lot, in the difficulties of the independent family tilling the soil, under cramped methods of husbandry, for a perilous livelihood. Finally, he experienced the despair of the Revolution which set at naught all that he, and those like him, had gained. Though deeply attached to the common people, he became, perhaps because of an innate aristocratic bias, a Loyalist; and he saw in the chicanery of some so-called patriots much to support him in this conviction. In Landscapes, an early specimen of American drama, and in various essays, he penetrated shrewdly economic and personal motives that underlay the Revolution. An intense lover of true liberty, he saw clearly the oppressions committed in America in its name, and he could not endure those, as he said, who were “perpetually bawling about liberty without knowing what it was. ” All this he set down in vigorous English, in such letters or essays as “What is An American ?” , or “The American Bclisarius. ” These great issues he viewed with a broad and sane philosophy, but he described also in detail the physical and social conditions of rural life in America. In- “Farm Life, ” “Enemies of the Farmer, ” “Customs, ” and “Implements” he at once gives a photographic record of the husbandman’s life about the year 1775; and he also destroys finally the popular notion that he was a sentimentalizer concerning agricultural life. Truer than this outworn tradition is the fact that many of the essays reflect the warm humanity which was so strong a part of his own nature. He can describe unforgettably a negro under torture, travelers arriving for the night; children coming home from school in a snowstorm; a woman’s cry as the raiders enter her home for massacre; or a family “frolic. ”
In “The Wyoming Massacre” he silhouettes the refugees on their long journey through the forest. On a horse with bedding as a saddle, “sat a wretched mother with a child at her breast, another on her lap, and two more placed behind her.
(This is a 619 page hardback book with dust jacket titled ...)
Quotations: “There is something truly ridiculous in a farmer quitting his plough or his axe, and then flying to his pen. ”
In 1769 he married Mehetable Tippet of Yonkers, and in the same year he settled on his farm, at “Pine Hill, ” Orange County, New York.
His wife had died, and his children had disappeared. “I should have fallen to the ground, ” he said, “but for the support, at this instant, of my friend Mr. Seton, who had come to conduct me from the French vessel to his house. "
Eventually he found his children, but the dramatic circumstances of the Indian raid which had caused the catastrophe in his absence seem a startling parallel to the sufferings of the frontier which he himself had described in his essays.
