CHAPTER VII 



What is an 

 American ? 



Answer by a 

 French- 

 American 

 Farmer 



AN EARLY FRENCH ESTIMATE OF AMERICAN 

 CHARACTER 



THE American character is a composite, repre- 

 senting many nationalities. In the early blend 

 there were four distinct types — English, Scotch, 

 French and Dutch. What we commonly call the Amer- 

 icans, with reference to the early colonists and their de- 

 scendants — using the term thus in a restricted sense — 

 came from the intermixture of these stocks or from the 

 unmixed blood. It will be interesting to read the esti- 

 mate which a French- American colonist gives of America 

 and the Americans in the last decade of the eighteenth 

 century. The following extract is taken from the Letters 

 from an American Farmer, published in London in 17S2, 

 the author being J. Hector St. John de Cr^vecoeur : 



''I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and 

 thoughts which must agitate the heart and present them- 

 selves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman, when 

 he first lands on this continent (America). . . . Here 

 he sees the industry of his native country displayed in a 

 new manner. . . . Here he beholds fair cities, sub- 

 stantial villages, extensive fields, an immense country 

 filled with decent houses, good roads, orchards, meadows, 

 and bridges, where an hundred years ago all was wild, 

 woody and uncultivated ! ... He is arrived on a 

 new continent ; a modern society offers itself to his con- 

 templation, different from what he had hitherto seen. It 

 is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess 

 everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing. 

 Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings. 



no bishops, no 



ecclesiastical 

 416 



dominion, no invisible 



