THE "AMERICAN FARMER" ST. JOHN DE CRÈVECŒUR AND HIS FAMOUS "LETTERS" (1735-1813).

BY F. B. SANBORN OF CONCORD, MASS.

A century and a quarter ago there began to be celebrated in England and France an adventurous Norman, calling himself an Englishman, by birth, and further claiming attention on the ground that he was an American Farmer, describing the character, condition, pleasures and hardships of his class in the Colonies, fast becoming independent republics, from Canada to Florida, and from the Atlantic and the Hudson to the Ohio. He wrote enthusiastically of Pennsylvania and its Quakers, of the Indian tribes, in which he professed to be an adoptive member, and he described the scenery and manners of the colonists before Chastellux, Brissot and Chateaubriand travelled among them. He wrote in English, translated his letters into French, and allowed them to be translated into Dutch and German; and in these various languages his books went the tour of Europe and were read in royal courts, in humble homes, and in the libraries of scholars. From an incident in one of his volumes, Kotzebue, the unwearied playwright of Germany, borrowed the plot of his "Quaker" (describing with poetic exaggeration the family history of Warner Mifflin), lately VOL. XXX.-17

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translated for the PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE. The Elector of Bavaria, who made himself king, Maximilian of Zweibrücken, told St. John, when he went to reside in Bavaria in 1806, that he had learned much from the American Letters, as did thousands of others. Yet so little was this once famous Frenchman known when Professor Wendell of Harvard wrote his "History of American Literature," that the historian did not know the date of his birth, the particulars of his career, or the titles of his French books, and could only quote from a poor English edition of less than a quarter part of his writings. I have therefore thought it well to devote some research to a man and a subject which I find interesting, and have made the man and his copious French biography, ("Saint John de Crèvecœur, sa Vie et ses Ouvrages") somewhat better known, I trust, in this land of his affections.

In the mingling of nationalities which, from the early part of the Eighteenth Century, went to make up the population of what is now the United States, Frenchmen had little part until the annexation of Louisiana a century later. A few small colonies of French Protestants, fleeing from the insensate persecution of that least Christian king, Louis XIV, planted themselves in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and South Carolina, and brought to our colonies the distinguished names of Baudouin, Faneuil, Jay, Freneau, De Lancey, Huger, Sigourney, and others. A few in Delaware and Pennsylvania gave lustre by their virtues to the names of Benezet, Boudinot, Dupont and Duponceau. But it was not until the period of the French Revolution and the acquisition of Louisiana that Protestant America became attractive to the French Catholics, who in their turn had to flee their country, and seek shelter under the flag of Washington. The Orleans princes, the diplomatist Talleyrand, and twenty years later the Bonapartes, Murats and Moreaus, came hither for temporary residence, or as explorers of our new Republic. Chateaubriand, Brissot de Warville, and other French tourists came and went,-some

returning to prosperity and fame, others to the guillotine. Lafayette, the most distinguished of all, survived to visit in 1824 the republic he had aided in defending, and to direct in France the Revolution of July, 1830.

But there was one Frenchman who came and went among us, travelled and resided here long before our Revolution or that in France, in both of which he suffered hardship; whose early history is mysterious, and who became distinguished as an American author under conditions so peculiar, and so little known to the mass of his readers, as to make his career no less interesting than most novels. This was St. John de Crèvecœur, who called himself for years" Hector St. John," and perhaps is better known today under that assumed name than by his own baptismal one, which circumstances led him to renounce and resume. It was for him that the Vermont town of St. Johnsbury was named; yet till a year or two ago, even the learned men of that town did not know his story, and had not his books in their great library.

There is an ancient city in Normandy, Caen, the capital of William the Norman before he conquered England, and itself conquered by Edward III at the time of the battle of Crecy; now a fine architectural town of some 50,000 people. There, in the 17th and 18th centuries, an old Norman family, St. John,-kindred, no doubt, to the English family of the same name, from which descended Bolingbroke the English statesman, and Emerson, the American sage, had exchanged the profession of arms for civil employments, and had settled down in the local magistracy. One of them, early in the 18th century, had purchased a small fief not far outside the city, and from its title added the name of Crèvecœur to his family name, and by courtesy had the rank of Marquis. His oldest son, Michael Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecœur, born at Caen, January 31, 1735, and early taught in the Jesuit College of the city, is the subject of my story, and also of adventures singularly varied, even for a Frenchman in the epoch of the great Revolution. He