3. THE AMERICAN FARMER—GALLIC STYLE

The “American Farmer” was Hector St. Jean de Crèvecœur, a Frenchman, born in Caen in 1735, who settled in Canada at the age of nineteen. In 1765, after the close of the French and Indian War, he migrated across the border to the English colonies, and lived until the Revolution in Orange County, New York. Crèvecœur had some difficulties in the course of the struggle for independence, and finally left for France in 1780. He spent seven years more in this country as French consul between 1783 and 1790, but then returned to the land of his birth, where he died in 1813.His Letters from an American Farmer (1782) were written in English in Orange County between 1770 and 1775. Their impassioned rhetoric clothes a beautiful vision of the potentialities of American life. By no means blind to the darker aspects of what he saw, Crèvecœur was nevertheless a hopeful man, writing in a hopeful era, and his vision was substantially accurate.