It is
interesting that in your question you emphasize the issue of religion as it existed in England
at the time Cr¨vecÅ“ur wrote his Letters from an American Farmer.
Cr¨vecÅ“ur says relatively little about religion in his description of what
constitutes "being an American." He does mention the absence of "ecclesiastical
dominion" in the new land. But the emphasis is principally upon two other factors. First,
in America, there is no huge gulf between rich and poor as there is in Europe. And second,
Cr¨vecÅ“ur recognizes that America, even at this stage (in 1782) is already a "melting
pot"at least of people of the European nationalities. There are:
English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and
Swedes.
Yet for an English immigrant first arriving in
America at this time, possibly the mixture of national groups, as it was, would be of relatively
little importance. Not only are all these ethnicities European, they are all northern
European. In addition, though Cr¨vecÅ“ur doesn't mention this, relatively few
Americans at this time belonged to non-Protestant denominations. When large numbers of Roman
Catholic immigrants arrived later on, during the Irish famine of the 1840's, they were met with
extreme prejudice in America. Nativists wished to keep the new country free of
"Papists."
And it was only later in the nineteenth century that
significant numbers of immigrants were to come from southern Europe,
chiefly from Italy, and these people were met with bigotry as well, which itself was still not
as severe as the prejudice and discrimination against non-Christians (such as Jews and Asians)
during the late 1800s, the early 1900s, and later.
Cr¨vecÅ“ur could not have
anticipated these developments. He accurately describes what America would have meant to an
ordinary person arriving from England: the fact that here, the class distinctions, one's
ancestry, and the gap between rich and poor were mostly absent from the New World or no longer
had the significance they held in European society. Every man was relatively
capable of starting afresh, perhaps claiming a homestead of his own in the open
territory to the west, and making a success of himself.
What is lacking from
Cr¨vecÅ“ur's account is the fact that this freedom came at the expense of non-white peoples:
the African Americans and Native Americans. It was unfortunately typical of most white people
who extolled America at that time (and later, continuing in fact to this day) that they spoke
and wrote almost as if non-whites did not exist. And, as has been pointed out, it was partly the
presence of the American Indians as an "enemy" in the European view, as well as the
African Americans the white citizens wished to keep in a separate and unequal status, that
enabled the diverse European ethnic groups to put aside their differences in the New World and
merge into a new, blended nationality.
Though these negative observations
about America are of course valid, the genuinely positive aspect of America that Cr¨vecÅ“ur
identifies is, in fact, rooted in an ideal of freedom and equality that emerged from the
European Enlightenment. He also, perhaps even more significantly, recognizes that the ideal of
America was not a contradiction of but rather an extension of a societal
and governmental dynamic that already existed in Great Britain:
When he [the English immigrant] says to himself, this is the work of my countrymen,
who, when convulsed by factions, afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants, restless and
impatient, took refuge here. They brought along with them their national genius, to which they
principally owe what liberty they enjoy, and what substance they possess. Here he sees the
industry of his native country displayed in a new manner.
Within Europe, Britain was seen as the one large country in which a form of at least
incipient democracy already existed, in spite of the dominance of the Established Church (the
Church of England) and the power still held at the time by the monarch. This type of
"Anglo-Saxon" exceptionalism forms the subtext of Cr¨vecÅ“ur's analysis, which, as a
transplanted Frenchman, he was perhaps in an even better position to recognize than the English
new arrivals in America around the time the War of Independence had just
concluded.
