Christopher Iannini

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/61.2/iannini.html
From The William and Mary Quarterly Vol. 61, Issue 2.
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Presented online in association with the History Cooperative. http://www.historycooperative.org

"The Itinerant Man": Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism

IN July of 1779, Magistrate Peter Dubois of New York City composed a detailed report to the colonial governor. Its subject was a Frenchman, J. Hector St. John, who had been arrested a few days earlier for alleged possession of rebel maps of New York harbor. Though no maps were found, suspicion intensified on discovery of the curious trunk the man had smuggled through British lines outside the seaport. Dubois reported: "When he came into this City, from among the Rebels, he brought with him Some Boxes in which he had curious Botanical plants and at the Bottom of those Boxes under the Earth in which these plants were, he had private Drawers or Cases in which he had papers." ¹ Even after a reading of the papers revealed their author's loyalist sentiments, he was held in prison for three months before finally receiving permission to sail for England and then France. ²	1
The papers were the thirty-two manuscript sketches from which their author—known to posterity as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur—would assemble Letters from an American Farmer. Dubois's report suggests that the very production of Letters from an American Farmer demanded painstaking negotiation of an Atlantic world troubled by a succession of imperial disputes. So too did the career of the author himself, who transformed from a French lieutenant during the French and Indian War, to a loyalist British subject and farmer in rural New York during the 1770s, to a British prisoner, to a French trade consul to the United States in 1784. Throughout his life, Crèvecoeur treated identities and allegiances as provisional strategies designed to ensure his continued mobility and prosperity. In keeping with those biographical circumstances, Crèvecoeur's consuming artistic and philosophical interest—from the travel sketches of the early 1770s, to the English Letters from an American Farmer, through the expanded French Lettres d'un cultivateur americain of 1784 and 1787—lay, not in the delineation of any one parochial identity, but in the fate of a point of view rooted in enlightened cosmopolitanism.	2
The recovery of this transnational dimension of Crèvecoeur's art and thought has marked a particularly welcome development in the general transformation of scholarship on the author. If a variety of forceful readings have challenged the notion that Letters from an American Farmer offers a celebratory account of an ideal America—by situating the first three letters in a longer and more complex literary creation—it is nonetheless too often assumed that Letters from an American Farmer struggles to reconcile a set of conflicts internal to an emergent mainland society. At stake in that struggle, it is further assumed, is the fate of American identity. Essays by Grantland S. Rice and Christine Holbo pose a suggestive alternative. Rice contends that the shifts of tone and narrative perspective in Letters from an American Farmer work to "elide potentially dangerous political affiliations in a rapidly nationalizing world,... address the plurality of rising national audiences[,] and to mediate the changes in attitudes within and between these audiences." Holbo similarly argues that the tensions in Letters from an American Farmer express Crèvecoeur's plight "as an international wanderer, both immigrant and émigré; as an individual with intellectual and personal affiliations in many nations, but without a basis for his sense of identity in one national tradition." With his multinational audience and his own restless migrations across a variety of shifting borders, Crèvecoeur emerges in such readings as an author whose concerns were continually refashioned by his itinerancy in the eighteenth-century Atlantic. ³	3
Crèvecoeur's writings, however, are deeply implicated not only in a larger Atlantic world but also in a particular vision of that world that depended on the Caribbean. That vision first emerges in his 1773 "Sketches of Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects," a text that, once concealed at the bottom of the author's crate, remained unpublished until 1995. ⁴ "Sketches of Jamaica" insists that the very notion of stable and discrete cultural identities is untenable in an interconnected and volatile Atlantic. It is an insight that had powerful implications for Crèvecoeur's subsequent career. "Sketches of Jamaica" grapples with a new maritime reality through its experiment with a narrative structure—involving the journey of a naive colonial from an agrarian utopia, to a decadent plantation society, and back again in disillusionment—that would be crucial to the organization of Letters from an American Farmer.	4
Though the neglect of "Sketches of Jamaica" may in part be attributed to its brevity and its fragmentary syntax, it is also likely owing to the North American focus of many Crèvecoeur critics. The two other manuscripts collected for the first time in Dennis D. Moore's More Letters from the American Farmer also chronicle societies beyond the mainland. Like "Rock of Lisbon" and "Sketch of a Contrast between the English and Spanish Colonies," "Sketches of Jamaica" has been overlooked for its seemingly anomalous subject matter. Consideration of all these texts and of their relationship to the rest of Crèvecoeur's writings is increasingly desirable now that eighteenth-century American studies has begun to reexamine America's position in the larger world. "Sketches of Jamaica" holds special potential owing to the prominence of Caribbean concerns in the general transformation of the field. A variety of Americanists grounded in black Atlantic studies have continued to build on the revisionist insights of Eric Williams and C. L. R. James. Several generations ago, those founding figures of Caribbean studies placed North America firmly at the periphery of an Atlantic economy centered on West Indian sugar production. ⁵ Now that their counter-geography of the colonial Americas has received fresh attention, we can ask how it might inflect understanding of an author whose canonical status is matched by few texts of early American literature.	5
To pursue that question is, oddly, to recover an essential component of the intellectual world in which Crèvecoeur lived and wrote. In describing the voluminous flow of persons, commodities, and cultural forms between the mainland and the West Indies, "Sketches of Jamaica" marks Crèvecoeur's earliest and most intense effort to come to terms with the theories of Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal—the man to whom Letters from an American Farmer was later dedicated. In his Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, Raynal propounded a theory of global development and decline centered on the Caribbean sugar revolution and the attendant growth of the Atlantic slave trade. Crèvecoeur's writings demonstrate a persistent awareness, extrapolated from the work of the philosophe, that relations between the West Indies and the mainland British colonies were of sweeping consequence. Both men came to believe that the fate of enlightened cosmopolitanism—and the vision of global republicanism it cherished—would be decided in the sugar islands. Tracing the origins of that realization in "Sketches of Jamaica" and its subsequent influence on the form and content of Letters from an American Farmer provides an account of the West Indian routes of Crèvecoeur's transnational oeuvre. ⁶	6
The earliest manuscripts concealed in Crèvecoeur's crate were composed in the early 1770s on the author's New York farm at Pine Hill. As Thomas Philbrick describes them, those years were a time of prolific and varied literary output: "The earliest of his writings ... consist chiefly of impressionistic travel sketches that center on such varied locales as Lisbon, the islands of Jamaica, Bermuda, Nantucket, and Martha's Vineyard, and the colonies of Virginia and South Carolina." ⁷ The pieces on Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and South Carolina evolved into Letters IV through IX of Crèvecoeur's 1782 masterpiece. The core of Letters from an American Farmer was extracted from a larger body of work, the cosmopolitan geography of which spanned the Atlantic and the hemisphere. ⁸	7
That comparative body of work marked its author's attempt to engage with the emergent cosmopolitan culture of the late Enlightenment. Thomas Schlereth provides a valuable description of the "republic of letters" that connected intellectuals and learned societies throughout the Atlantic: "Within the eighteenth-century societies, the philosophes came to realize that, although they belonged to a variety of countries, they were also a nation unto themselves; it was an elitist republic whose citizens of the world united in an effort ... to promote 'all useful Knowledge of Benefit to Mankind in General.'" ⁹ Essential to that effort was the new encyclopedic project of cultural geography, or "the study of the earth as a universal habitat for man." Cultural geographies were characterized by their focus on two related questions: the "physiographic conditions of the terrestrial globe and its origins" and "the vicarious, yet worldwide, anthropological study of man." ¹⁰ Although Crèvecoeur's interest in physiographic questions—including the transatlantic debates that raged around the Buffon thesis—is well documented, his immersion in a kind of global anthropology emerges with a focus on his writings of the early 1770s.	8
The early 1770s was the period when his Pine Hill neighbor, the well-known naturalist Cadwallader Colden, first introduced him to Raynal's Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. In many ways, the History provided a cultural geography extraordinaire. First published in 1770, it was released in fifty-five editions in five languages during the next thirty years. Its six volumes assay a comprehensive history and analysis of the major European colonialisms and the societies they conquered and enslaved, from the first voyages of discovery through the revolutionary ferment of the late eighteenth century. Raynal and his fellow Encyclopedists laboriously compiled histories of nearly every locality subject to European encroachment. ¹¹ The bulk of the first two volumes is devoted to the East Indies; volume III closes with a survey of the settlement of "the great Archipelago of America." The History segues to a scathing indictment of the pillage of Africa to fuel the Caribbean slave trade. It returns in volumes IV and V to detail the Spanish, Dutch, French, and English efforts to establish dominion over various West Indian islands. Volume VI covers North America, celebrating near its close the republican character of the northern British colonies.	9
In the travel sketches of the early 1770s, Crèvecoeur sought to incorporate Raynal's cultural geographic ambitions in his own more fictional project by experimenting with a series of cosmopolitan narratives and narrators. ¹² "Sketch of a Contrast" is the most rudimentary effort, involving a series of methodical comparisons between Peru and Pennsylvania. "Rock of Lisbon" is more elaborate, relying on an extended central flashback. An urbane narrator remembers a journey to a mountaintop convent near the Portuguese seaport and capital "for the recovery of [his] health." ¹³ "Sketches of Jamaica" marks Crèvecoeur's most intense engagement with Raynal both for the subversive implications of its narrative structure and its specific geographic location. The journey of Crèvecoeur's young narrator to Jamaica effectively undermines comparisons between agrarian New York and the plantation culture of the British West Indies by stressing the involvement of both regions in the wider commercial culture of the Atlantic rim.	10
Crèvecoeur, it seems, was a remarkably astute interpreter of Raynal's treatise, attentive to the prominence of the Caribbean in its volumes. In a crucial passage in the History—between its lengthy consideration of the West Indies and its overview of North American settlement—Raynal offered a sweeping summary of the particular role of the Caribbean in the development of world commerce: The labours of the people settled in those islands are the sole basis of the African trade: they extend the fisheries and the cultures of North America, afford a good market for the manufactures of Asia, and double, perhaps treble, the activity of all Europe. They may be considered as the principle cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe. This ferment must increase, in proportion as cultures, that are so capable of being extended, shall approach nearer to their highest degree of perfection. ¹⁴ The sugar revolution and the slave trade by which it was fueled continued to link the economic fates of five continents. In "Sketches of Jamaica," Crèvecoeur developed a narrative structure that allowed him to work through the implications of that Caribbean-centric vision for the culture and society of the Middle Colonies that were his adopted home.	11
The sketch depicts the voyage of a pre-Revolutionary American youth to Jamaica, then the most prosperous of England's Caribbean possessions and a primary source for the coveted West Indian staple. The sketch is narrated by the youth himself after his return to his father's thriving farm and mill. He addresses a letter to a close friend—another young gentleman—whom he imagines to be somewhere in Pennsylvania. "Are you still the Itinerant Man," the narrator asks his confidant. His friend's movements are of considerable import. The West Indian travel sketch at the core of the letter is framed by two urgent appeals. Unless his friend returns to their farming community in rural New York, the narrator's faith in humanity is in danger of being permanently lost. "Every motive I can possibly present you with ought to Induce you to repair here," the young protagonist writes his friend, "even a conscientious one, that of preventing an honnest Man from taking any Errative Paths." His problems had begun when his father, anxious to initiate his eldest son into the family business, sent him to serve as agent for a "great consignement of Flour" on Jamaica. ¹⁵ From his arrival, the decadence of white settler society and the barbaric violence of the slave code shock the young man. He quickly flees back to the mainland, via an excursion through Bermuda.	12
The trajectory of "Sketches of Jamaica" will feel familiar to readers of Letters from an American Farmer. In a manner similar to "Description of Charles-Town," the essay establishes a seemingly stark contrast between the plantation culture of the Caribbean (and the Carolinas) and the homogeneous communities of smaller, more subsistence-oriented farmers in the northern colonies. The moral crisis initiated by the narrator's experience in Jamaica, however, is only accelerated after his return to the Middle Colonies. Shortly after his return, his father unexpectedly dies, without a will, leaving his son to resolve a series of complex transactions before he can claim his patrimony. Troubles increase when the narrator immediately gives his brothers and sisters their share of the father's estate, "reserving to myself no other Priviledge of Primogeniture than that of Posessing the old paternal Roof." The narrator must settle his father's affairs or face financial ruin. Comforted by his belief that trade in his native colony is conducted on more virtuous principles than in Jamaica, the youth sets out to emulate the forthright business practices he learned from his father. He declares: "The First Principle I fixed upon was to think no Man a Rogue untill I had Experienced the Contrary, this Principle I had not Imbibed in Jamaica." This policy results in his near bankruptcy. The youth is subjected to repeated "Evasions, subterfuges, positive denials." He loses "above ... £400 by the absurdity of my first Principles." It is then that the social and moral distinction between life in Jamaica and New York, between the virtue nurtured by a sedentary life in a northern farming community and the vice produced by a life of travel and trade, breaks down. The narrator's "Journal through this laborious Carrier wou'd in Point of difficulties, soundings observations etc. by far Exceed those of the boldest Navigators who have Ventured in quest of the North West Passage and all these dangers came from the Native Keeness of an appearantly simple and Ignorant people who had not / as I had lived in Jamaica and Bermudas." ¹⁶	13
"Sketches of Jamaica" thus advances a penetrating argument regarding trade between the mainland and island colonies of British America. The distinction between commercial practices in Jamaica and rural New York proves illusory because the two societies had been economically integrated for more than a century. Since the mid-seventeenth century, merchants in the rapidly expanding port cities of North America had traded extensively with their fellow colonists in the West Indies. Trade with the islands of the French and Spanish Caribbean, though formally outlawed by Parliament in the Navigation Acts and strictly policed after the Sugar Acts of 1764, was also intense. As the Caribbean colonies transformed into a virtual sugar monoculture, devoting their scarce land resources to production of that increasingly profitable commodity, North American merchants quickly moved to supply the planters with the foodstuffs, lumber, and livestock necessary to daily survival. ¹⁷	14
In Georgia and the Carolinas, goods shipped to the British West Indies (primarily rice and lumber) accounted for more than one-fifth of the total exports of the region between 1768 and 1772, the period just before the composition of "Sketches of Jamaica." In the narrator's own Middle Colonies, sale of grain and grain products to the West Indies composed the single largest export in those years. Total exports to the Caribbean accounted for just less than half of the total annual average value of exports from the region during the same period. At £223, 610, the value of exports to the West Indies more than tripled that of sales to Great Britain. In New England, including the islands depicted in sections IV through VIII of Letters from an American Farmer, this imbalance was further exaggerated. Exports of fish, livestock, wood, and whale products to the British West Indies accounted for more than half the total exports of the region. Estimated at £278,000, the average annual value of New England's trade with the Caribbean nearly quadrupled that of its exports to Great Britain. ¹⁸ Significant in their own right, official figures fail to account for the thriving clandestine trade with French and Spanish islands.	15
By specifying that the patriarch in his sketch is both a flour merchant and mill owner, Crèvecoeur demonstrates an acute sense of the social and cultural impact of the West India trade. By the early eighteenth century, the miller-storekeeper was a common figure in British North America, found in nearly every rural community where grain was grown in any quantity. Through their extensive interactions with seaport merchants, such men provided local farmers with information about and access to wider and more profitable markets for their surpluses, often buying them to sell on consignment. By the 1740s, a broad shift had occurred. Large numbers of mill owners had begun to trade overseas directly in order to eliminate the costs exacted by port-city middlemen. They became "country merchants," to use Crèvecoeur's term, thus drawing rural farm communities deeper into the Atlantic market. The miller-storekeeper became "the most immediate link for colonial farmers in a commercial chain that stretched all the way to Great Britain or the West Indies and back again." ¹⁹	16
By invoking this transformative figure, Crèvecoeur's sketch dramatizes the question of whether the virtues of an "Eminent Farmer" are compatible with the market values necessary to success in his "multiplied business" as merchant and mill owner. In doing so, the essay addresses paradoxical fears of the material abundance resulting from the West India trade, for the crisis of agrarian virtue in the narrative is decisively linked to the Caribbean transit of its youthful American narrator. Just after his first appeal to his "itinerant" friend, the narrator nostalgically recalls the details of his moral training and development: I was born with a natural Inclination to do humane actions, there is a something in obliging which allways appeared to Exceed any other Pleasure—.. this disposition I believe I have Imbibed from my Father who never dismissed a man even when he refused what was asked, without sending him away Tolerably satisfyed—.. he had Talents he had a disposition to effect this which I have not— I was too young to think and Inquire of him by what means he preserved the good will of all yet cou'd watch very carefully over his Interests;— what a ressource this Knowledge wou'd be to me in the scituation in which I am; he did not think that he shou'd have quitted us so soon— from him I had received what Ideas of Right and wrong I have cultivated since, as well as those principles of Relligion which have since directed the operations of my Mind—.. no sooner had I pursued this Carrier than he thought proper to send me to Jamaica where his great consignment of Flour had often made him wish to have a Faithfull Correspondent. ²⁰ The father, it seems, had little trouble accommodating the pursuit of private interests in overseas trade to his underlying agrarian values of public virtue, benevolence, and faithfulness. But the true drama of the sketch turns on the question of whether the son will inherit that ability. The paragraph intimates that the narrator's journey to Jamaica might have disrupted the smooth transmission of knowledge and values from generation to generation by removing the narrator from the resource of his father's example. "Wou'd to God," he elsewhere pines, that "I had never seem Jamaica and had spent that Time with my Father." ²¹ Crèvecoeur finds an apt correlative for this disrupted transmission in his narrator's crisis of primogeniture. The father's agrarian virtues, the sketch argues, are the moral equivalent of the narrator's financial inheritance, the security of which has also been threatened by the penetration of the maritime market.	17
The broader implications of that crisis extend far beyond familial interest. Crèvecoeur employs a variety of subtle strategies to suggest that at stake in the youth's struggles and the wave of commercialization that impelled him toward Jamaica is the fate of enlightened republicanism. The only direct reference to republicanism occurs in some remarks on a visit to the Treaty Maroons of Jamaica. Whereas in general the island seems "a Chaos of Men Negroes and things which made my Young American head Giddy," the narrator finds Maroon society uncannily familiar. "I observed," he writes, "the singular Contrast of a Republick of Blacks in the midle of that Island." "Surrounded on all sides with slavery," he continues, "this object Pleased me much." ²² The narrator's use of "Republick"—pinnacle of European achievement for Montesquieu and other political theorists of the day—to refer to an Afro-Caribbean society is integral to his critique of the planters. The decadent luxury of the slaveholder society that surrounds the Maroons is presented as incompatible with republican values.	18
When, after his narrator's return home, Crèvecoeur begins to link the corrupt business practices of settlers in Jamaica and New York, he also begins to undermine the basis of the mainland colony's self-image as an exemplary New World republic. Crèvecoeur's focus on a farming family with newly "multiplied business" helps to strengthen such implications. The sketch opens an ambiguous space between two figures—yeoman and merchant—who occupied opposite poles of society in republican thought. By the late eighteenth century, the independent farmer had long occupied a privileged position in republican ideology. Strongly influenced by the French physiocrats, Thomas Jefferson declared: "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue." "Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators," Jefferson continued, "is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example." ²³	19
Crèvecoeur's rural New York threatens to furnish something very like this example. His imperiled narrator, heir to a newly commercialized agrarian world, makes frequent recourse to a language of male sympathy that was deeply embedded in republican notions of civic virtue. Near the beginning of the sketch, the narrator pointedly claims that he "was born with a natural Inclination to do humane actions," which makes the assistance of his fellow man "Exceed any other Pleasure." Later, he similarly insists that his virtuous division of his father's estate among his siblings was guided by "the secret calls of Equity the powerfull wisper, of an Inward sentiment." ²⁴ Gordon Wood argues that late-eighteenth-century theorists envisioned a republican polity held together by the collective exercise of a "natural social disposition, a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being." ²⁵ When, near the end of the sketch, Crèvecoeur's narrator threatens that he "shall repell those swellings of the heart from whence comes Kindness Good will etc.," he warns of the imminent corruption of the moral instinct in a descendant of the very social group that was to provide its mainstay. ²⁶	20
The sketch attempts to balance the threat of moral decline against the addition of a cosmopolitan dimension to the narrator's classical education. Comparing himself to his provincial neighbors, the narrator boasts that he has "read Cicero ovid sallust etc. [...] seen great Plantations." ²⁷ Yet, while broadening his horizons, the youth's experience in plantation America has challenged both his affective and his rational capacities. Mary Rucker suggests that Letters from an American Farmer raises profound questions regarding the efficacy of Enlightenment rationality. Overwhelmed by his journey to the plantation South, its narrator is rendered "incapable of penetrating phenomena to discover either scientific or spiritual laws." ²⁸ The narrator of "Sketches of Jamaica" suffers from a similar inability, one that Crèvecoeur dates to his residence in the decadent and polyglot space of the British sugar islands. On a stylistic level, the collapse of rationality is represented through syntax. In the central paragraphs on island society, the narrator shifts from subject to subject in a disjointed, loosely associative manner that belies his intermittent gestures toward systematic analysis. Individual sentences cover a dizzying array of Caribbean subjects, ranging from the climate, to the sexual exploitation of female slaves, to the contraband trade with neighboring French and Spanish colonies, to the island's vulnerability to natural disasters. ²⁹	21
Enlightenment rationality is questioned at a deeper level through the narrator's sporadic attempts to implement a range of scientific and philosophical theories. As exemplified by texts including Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, the new science of cultural geography sought to determine the effects of the physical environment upon societies and the political systems produced by them. ³⁰ Crèvecoeur's narrator engages in a related attempt to link the climate of a region to the character of its society. On arriving in Jamaica he notes, "It appeared to me an horrid climate. I was shocked at that perpetual Collision and Combination of Crimes and Prophligacy which I observed there." His thesis is reiterated a few lines later: "Life ressembled a Delirium Inspired by the warmth of the sun urging every Passion and desire to some prémature Extreme." The limits of this thesis are almost immediately apparent. In his discussion of Jamaican religion, for instance, the narrator wonders at the conspicuous lack of connection between climate and culture. The frequent hurricanes and earthquakes that afflict Jamaica should have produced correspondingly intense forms of worship: "This is the Climate which ought to produce the most sincere Devotees and the greatest Saints—.. For the lease which Nature and her Elements hath given them for the Period of their Existence is but at will 'tis prècarious Indeed." Throughout the island, the narrator "cou'd perceive no Traces whatever of Relligion save few Temples." The attempt to link Jamaican social ills to climate is further undermined after the narrator's return to a profligate New York. By the time an acquaintance declares that "vices and virtues are often Local and Geographical," the authority of such Enlightenment wisdom has been wholly subverted by the narrator's experiences with a commercial culture that subsumes the Middle Colonies and the West Indies. ³¹	22
Anxious meditations regarding the fate of Enlightenment rationality and republican virtue, then, play around the edges of Crèvecoeur's Caribbean travel sketch. In order to comprehend fully the scope of those meditations, we must ultimately place them in the context of Raynal's History and its vision of the potential global effects of an accelerated West Indian commerce. The plight of Crèvecoeur's young narrator provides a particular North American instance of a phenomenon that Raynal feared would ultimately pervade Atlantic society, as cosmopolitan humanism was undermined by a system based on the exploitation of slaves and the circulation of Caribbean commodities. That fear powerfully informed Raynal's analysis of a variety of New World transformations and revolutions—attitudes that would in turn influence Crèvecoeur's subsequent depictions of the mainland colonies. Careful attention to Raynal's West Indies is essential to understanding "Sketches of Jamaica" and Letters from an American Farmer as broad reflections on the fate of enlightened cosmopolitanism.	23
In Christine Holbo's insightful reading of the History, republican virtue and Enlightenment rationality occupy central positions in Raynal's analysis of New World colonialism and the commercial system to which it gave rise: On the one hand, Raynal saw commerce as the source of the global, humanitarian sympathies which ground his critique of slavery, and help to hold together the diverse histories presented in his book. Economically and socially, commerce gave rise to the discoveries of science, to the expansion of sentiment, and to the possibility of universal or philosophical reflection.... On the other hand, Raynal recognized that commerce caused the enslavement of Africans and native Americans, and transformed their owners into unfeeling monsters, slaves to passion and to limitless appetite. ³² That paradoxical thesis plays out in two opposing narratives: "a narrative of Enlightenment, of progress toward a world united by sympathetic knowledge; and a narrative of disintegration, of an entropic worldwide slide toward slavery and anarchy." Raynal's central examples of these movements, Holbo rightly contends, were "the establishment of new, republican, and virtuous settlements in North America, and the spread of multiple forms of slavery." ³³	24
Holbo stops short of noting that Raynal's imagination of slavery was also centered in a specific region. Whereas the Middle Colonies of North America (especially Pennsylvania) were his exemplary republics, the Caribbean plantation formed the epicenter of Atlantic slavery. Raynal's particular geographic vision has significant implications for interpretation of the History. With the West Indies at its center, the History offers a far less ambivalent and far more despairing account of the effects of international commerce. Raynal believed that the West India trade would continue to propagate the vices of chattel slavery and decadent luxury along its triangular routes and would thus destroy the bonds of sociability necessary to his redemptive project. That belief emerges with particular clarity in his analysis of a variety of anticolonial movements.	25
Crèvecoeur's own West Indian narrative displays his grasp of the darker implications of Raynal's New World geography. He was, it seems, a more careful reader of the History than his Anglo-American contemporaries. In pre-Revolutionary America, Raynal was normally read as prophesying the birth of a New World republican power. ³⁴ The thirteen mainland North American colonies, in such a reading, would inspire a series of Old World revolutions against feudalism and tyranny. To read Raynal as expecting global redemption to result from American independence, however, readers would have had to elide the staggering pessimism of his conclusions. In the lengthy recapitulation at the close of volume VI, Raynal attempted to conclusively determine "the influence which the intercourse established with the New World has had upon the opinions, government, industry, arts, manners and happiness of the Old." ³⁵ Balancing advances in intellectual and political culture against the atrocities of conquest and slavery, Raynal's ultimate judgment on the age of discovery is unflinching: Let us stop here, and consider ourselves as existing at the time when America and India were unknown. Let me suppose that I address myself to the most cruel of the Europeans in the following terms: There exist regions which will furnish thee with rich metals, agreeable clothing, and delicious food; but read this history, and behold at what price the discovery is promised to thee. Dost thou wish or not that it should be made? Is it to be imagined that there exists a being infernal enough to answer this question in the affirmative? ³⁶ Looking back on three centuries of European settlement of and commerce with the New World and Asia, Raynal judged them a colossal mistake, not a necessary prelude to North American republicanism. ³⁷	26
The despair of the History's conclusions is intimately linked to its Caribbean-centric worldview. The fate of enlightened republicanism turned on the empirical question of whether events in North America or the West Indies would have greater effect on world history. Raynal felt he could answer that question with relative certainty. A dark corollary to his belief that ideas and sentiments (whether virtuous or decadent) circulate along the same international routes as commodities was that the magnitude of a region's influence on world history depend on the volume of its trade. Like Eric Williams and C. L. R. James after him, Raynal viewed the colonial Caribbean as the prime mover of world commerce, the "primary cause of the rapid motion which now agitates the universe." ³⁸ An American War of Independence would be of limited global impact because of the poverty of British North America in relation to the Caribbean and the relative paucity of its commerce with Europe. In 1773, as Williams reminds us, imports to Britain from Jamaica alone were nearly five times as valuable as imports from the mainland colonies combined.	27
Concluding his analysis of the British Caribbean, Raynal noted the detrimental effect on the British empire of "the revolution which hath detached North America." ³⁹ His interest immediately turns to the impact that revolution might have on the West Indies: "Is the possession of the islands, which are become very wealthy, and have been placed by nature in the vicinity of that great continent, which is still in a state of poverty, better secured to the nations that have cultivated them? It is in the position, in the interests, in the spirit of the new republics that we must endeavour to explore the secret of our future destiny." ⁴⁰ Raynal's entire analysis of North American society is framed as an extension of his attempt to determine whether conditions in the island colonies might foster revolutionary movements that would be truly shattering to the European world system.	28
Raynal's answer to that question was deeply informed by his location in metropolitan France. Although he claimed to offer a synthesis of planter attitudes in the Spanish, French, and British islands, his account of a growing West Indian unrest reflected the particular situation of French Caribbean colonists. Since the 1720s, sugar cultivation in Saint Domingue had enjoyed such explosive growth that the island had quickly become the most productive colony in the Caribbean. ⁴¹ At the start of the American Revolution, it produced more sugar than all the British islands combined. Owing to their importance to a rising French maritime bourgeoisie, the Caribbean colonies "constituted a major cornerstone of France's prerevolutionary political economy." ⁴² With their newfound prosperity, French West Indian planters and merchants had grown to resent mercantile restrictions—whether in the form of the French exclusif or the British Navigation Acts—against trading with their imperial rivals and their colonies. It was solely owing to those restrictions that French Caribbean colonists still struggled to compete with planters in Jamaica and Barbados, despite producing cheaper and higher-quality sugar.	29
Raynal, attentive to the interests of an important sector of the metropolitan economy, predicted that easing mercantile restrictions and allowing the colonists a limited form of political autonomy might address their grievances. The prospect of West Indian rebellion marks the sensational climax of this antimercantile argument. Warning of the eventual loss of Caribbean revenues, Raynal offered a paradoxical logic whereby allowing colonial trade to transgress national boundaries would strengthen the bonds between the center and periphery of each European empire. In a more prosperous and cosmopolitan future, such bonds would be based on mutual gratitude rather than edict and force. Generalizing from the plight of French Caribbean colonists, Raynal argued that the national attachments of all West Indian settlers had been weakened by resentments over imperial trade policies. This was, however, far from the case in the British West Indies, where planters were in full support of mercantile restrictions that protected them from fierce French competition. British Caribbean colonists lobbied intensely for the tightened restrictions in the 1764 Sugar Acts. Those acts moved to limit the clandestine trade between British North America and the French West Indies through stiffer inspections and higher duties.	30
The French Caribbean bias of Raynal's cosmopolitan vision was one source of his popularity in the mainland British colonies. Elite North Americans largely shared the abbé's opposition to British mercantile policy regarding Caribbean trade. Like Raynal, they kept a keen eye on the lucrative arena of the French West Indies and were increasingly frustrated by the influence of the British planters. Those frustrations were an important factor in the rise of Revolutionary sentiments. Crèvecoeur composed his bitter portrait of Jamaican colonists in the midst of the continued after-shocks from the 1764 Sugar Acts and their reinforcement in the Townshend Revenue Act of 1767. ⁴³ Throughout the 1770s, the link between the Sugar Acts and the movement toward rebellion was relatively clear. Looking back on the Sugar Act protests, John Adams later declared, "I know not why we should blush to confess that molasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence, many great events have proceeded from smaller causes." ⁴⁴ In Capitalism and Slavery, Williams offered an even stronger assessment. The Sugar Acts, he argues, were a "greater blow to rising colonial consciousness than the Stamp Act.... The attempt to render the Act effective and stamp out smuggling led directly to the American Revolution." ⁴⁵	31
A more-nuanced interpreter of the History than his contemporaries, Crèvecoeur perceived that Raynal's antimercantilism in no way sanctioned colonial revolt. For, if Raynal's cosmopolitan viewpoint was opposed to mercantile restrictions, it was even more hostile to the amoral and insatiable desire for profit that lay at the root of his imagined West Indian rebellion. Crèvecoeur transposed aspects of this portrait of profligate Caribbean colonists to his depiction of the social transformations that would lead to the American Revolution. In 1773, mere months before militias began drilling throughout the northern colonies, "Sketches of Jamaica" linked the incipient breakdown of moral and social order in colonial New York to the penetration of a maritime market that stretched to Jamaica. Extending that insight, Letters from an American Farmer adopted a highly ambivalent stance toward the Revolution itself.	32
In order to grasp the full influence of Raynal's Caribbean on the North America of Letters from an American Farmer, we must first attend to the most sensational aspect of Raynal's West Indian revolt. When, amid the predictions of volume V, Raynal asks, "If a revolution should take place in [the islands], by what means will it be brought about, and what people will reap the advantage of it?" his question resonates with some especially haunting passages from the beginning of his Caribbean analysis in volume IV. ⁴⁶ In perhaps the best-known passage from the History, Raynal prophesied that Caribbean revolution would erupt, not in white settler rebellion, but in a slave-led insurrection: If then, the nations of Europe, interest alone can exert its influence over you, listen to me once more, Your slaves stand in no need either of your generosity or your counsels, in order to break the sacrilegious yoke of their oppression. Nature speaks a more powerful language than philosophy or interest. Already have two colonies of fugitive Negroes been established, to whom treaties and power give a perfect security from your attempts. These are so many indications of the impending storm, and the Negroes only want a chief, sufficiently courageous, to lead them on to vengeance and slaughter. The passages were likely composed for the compiler and editor Raynal by Jean de Péchmèja, whom Robin Blackburn identifies as "an early utopian socialist of colonial extraction." Such passages made the History "one of the most remarkable, radical, and widely disseminated attacks on slavery to be published in the pre-Revolutionary epoch." ⁴⁷ These are the words that would provide crucial inspiration to Toussaint Louverture: They will rush on with more impetuosity than torrents; they will leave behind them, in all parts, indelible traces of their just resentment. Spaniards, Portuguese, English, French, Dutch, all their tyrants will become the victims of fire and sword. The plains of America will suck up with transport the blood which they have so long expected, and the bones of so many wretches, heaped upon one another, during the course of so many centuries, will bound for joy. The Old World will join its plaudits to those of the New. In all parts the name of the hero, who shall have restored the rights of the human species, will be blest." ⁴⁸ Raynal's vision of slave revolution points to the limits of his vision of cosmopolitan fellowship in a future era of international free trade. Even if national restrictions on West Indian enterprise were eliminated, Raynal recognized, there was no guarantee that the abuses of slavery would be lessened. Indeed, by creating unprecedented opportunities for the pursuit of profit, such a system might intensify the brutalities of the Middle Passage and the sugar plantation, thus sparking a far more explosive form of Caribbean discontent. Fearing that Euroamerican elites, corrupted by the decadence of the West India trade, could not redeem the age of empire from its violent excess, Raynal here espoused a form of radical antislavery well beyond the norms of cosmopolitanism, with its belief in the saving function of elite humanism. ⁴⁹ Incorporating the politics of Péchmèja, Raynal attributed the virtues of cosmopolitanism to the future rebels. Black revolutionaries would become the true defenders of the universal rights articulated by the Enlightenment. Their broadscale movement would transgress the boundaries of nation and language between the Caribbean colonies of the various empires.	33
Raynal's reference to "two colonies of fugitive negroes" establishes Jamaica as a crucial center of the "impending storm." Those fugitives were the Treaty Maroons of Jamaica, an island that, according to Blackburn, "was notable for the frequency of revolts and the stubbornness of maroon resistance." ⁵⁰ Throughout the early eighteenth century, the Treaty Maroons waged continual war on British plantations until a series of settlements in the late 1730s officially recognized their sovereignty. ⁵¹ Raynal's description of Jamaica devoted four pages to the Treaty Maroons, in which he declared the righteousness of their long and bloody struggle against the colonial order. His account of Jamaica also stressed its vulnerability to a large slave insurrection, one that might inspire rebellious slaves on neighboring islands. In 1760, he recalled, Tacky's Revolt had threatened to topple the colonial regime. Despite the ultimate failure of that rebellion, Raynal felt certain that a future uprising would fulfill Tacky's ambitions. He speculated that a French invasion of the island from without, coordinated with a massive slave revolt from within, could wrest Jamaica from British control. France's treachery, however, would ultimately lead to its own demise. News of a Jamaican revolt would spark a similar insurrection on Saint Domingue.	34
Crèvecoeur's portrayal of Jamaican slavery is generally far removed from the more apocalyptic moments in the History. His depiction of slave-holder violence is limited to a curiously detached account of the daily whippings administered by his British-born landlady, whereas his depiction of slave resistance is limited to a comment, prior to his narrator's departure, on "the perpetual struggle subsisting between the 2 great Factions which Inhabit this Island." ⁵² Crèvecoeur devotes one sentence to the Treaty Maroons, in a paragraph filled with revulsion for white settler society. Its reference to republicanism suggests that Crèvecoeur, like Raynal, was capable of a radical, if momentary, identification with the political aims of maroonage. Whatever his specific attitude toward the Maroons and the prospect of a broad insurrection, however, there is considerable evidence that Raynal's prophecy exerted a strong impact on Crèvecoeur. To register that impact we must ultimately look beyond Jamaica to Letters from an American Farmer, where New World slavery and slave resistance play a pivotal role in the text's broader meditation on the fate of enlightened cosmopolitanism in an age of accelerated maritime commerce.	35
In his dedication of Letters from an American Farmer to Raynal, Crèvecoeur describes the transforming experience of reading the History on his New York farm: For the first time in my life I reflected on the relative state of nations; I traced the extended ramifications of a commerce which ought to unite, but now convulses the world. I admired that universal benevolence, that diffusive goodwill, which is not confined to the narrow limits of your own country, but, on the contrary, extends to the whole human race. As an eloquent and powerful advocate, you have pleaded the cause of humanity, in espousing that of the poor Africans." ⁵³ The dedication insists that the depiction of North American society in Letters from an American Farmer must be understood in the context of a broader comparative framework, one that, like the History itself and Crèvecoeur's own writings of the early 1770s, encompasses the territories of and relations between a variety of nations and their New World colonies. The "convulsions" with which the text will concern itself—including the growth of the plantation economy of the Carolinas in Letter IX and the outbreak of the American Revolution in Letter XII—are to be interpreted in relation to the development of maritime trade. By adopting that commercial worldview, the author-narrator of Letters from an American Farmer attempts to emulate a form of cosmopolitanism exemplified by Raynal. With his "diffusive goodwill," Crèvecoeur's Raynal embodies the enlightened cosmopolitan, the "true philosophe," who, as Robert Ferguson observes, "thinks in terms of a universal language, identifying less with nations than with the republic of letters.... As Enlightenment thinkers they believe in the global sphere of connections and the promise of republicanism throughout the world." ⁵⁴ From nearly the first words of Letters from an American Farmer, Crèvecoeur announces that his primary interest in a form of elite transnational fellowship subsumes his meditations on American identity. A passionate antislavery stance, he further declares, is integral to the particular cosmopolitanism he encountered in Raynal's treatise.	36
Such a reading provokes the question of why cosmopolitanism plays such a seemingly limited role in the subsequent narrative, with its exclusively North American setting and its primary reliance on a narrator (Farmer James) who has limited experience of the world beyond the mainland. Near the end of the dedication, the author-narrator provides an oblique answer. "There is, no doubt," he writes, "a secret communion among good men throughout the world; a mental affinity, connecting them by a similitude of sentiments." "Then, why, though an American, should not I be permitted to share in that extensive intellectual consanguity." ⁵⁵ Crèvecoeur fails to specify the forces that prohibit alliances between residents of late-colonial America and the members of a wider intellectual community. Fresh from his experiences with antiloyalist violence in rural New York and the suspicion of British colonial officials in New York City, however, Crèvecoeur was well aware that, since the advent of the Anglo-American conflict, his identity as an Atlantic cosmopolitan had become increasingly difficult to maintain.	37
Crèvecoeur's complaint points to the new limitations on mobility and allegiance in a "rapidly nationalizing" Atlantic. ⁵⁶ Negotiating that new reality, the narrative of Letters from an American Farmer appears to limit itself to the subject of mainland identity. ⁵⁷ Yet Crèvecoeur produces the core of that text by reworking a series of sketches rooted in a cosmopolitan outlook that situated North America in a range of overlapping comparative frameworks. The alternative geographical perspectives of the earlier travel sketches, encompassing Lisbon, Lima, and the British Caribbean, haunt the 1782 narrative. In the complex palimpsest that is Letters from an American Farmer, the broader concerns of the original body of work are never wholly effaced by the mainland narrative that is written over them. They enjoy a textual afterlife, disrupting the narrative with their insistent yet spectral presence. By bringing Letters from an American Farmer into conjunction with the History, the dedication helps to raise those residual cosmopolitan perspectives and the interpretive possibilities that adhere to them to the surface of Crèvecoeur's later text. The perspective carried over from "Sketches of Jamaica" is of particular importance, for Crèvecoeur draws on his sketch of the West India trade for both the basic narrative structure of Letters from an American Farmer and a dystopic account of Atlantic society that was centered in the Caribbean.	38
That alternative geography surfaces with particular clarity in Letters IV through XIII on Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, the first of the revised travel sketches that we encounter in the 1782 narrative. Though comprising the central five sections of Letters from an American Farmer, the depiction of those islands is marginalized by most critics. For Nathaniel Philbrick, however, the island letters provide a crucial, if subtle, transition from the utopianism of "What is an American?" to the despair of "Description of Charles-Town." Similarly, for Holbo, those spatially central letters ponder the central thematic question of the text as a whole. They offer "an extended meditation on the effects of commerce upon manners." ⁵⁸ At first, commerce appears to have a salutary effect. Because the sterility of their soil obliges the islanders to "seek abroad for the means of subsistence," the development of a decadent, landed elite is forestalled. Later, however, James worries about the use of opium among the islanders and warns that, "could the manners of luxuriant countries be imported here, like an epidemical disorder they would destroy every thing." ⁵⁹ Read in the context of "Sketches of Jamaica" and the plight of its narrator, such contamination is all but inevitable on an island that maintains such extensive overseas connections.	39
The West Indian voyages of the New England islanders have an especially powerful impact on their overall behavior. James writes, "They employ also several vessels in transporting lumber to the West-Indian Islands, from whence they procure in return the various productions of the country, which they afterwards exchange wherever they can hear of an advantageous market." ⁶⁰ Tellingly, it is in this West Indian allusion that the association between seafaring and market values is made most explicit.	40
This is by no means the only appearance the Caribbean makes in the Massachusetts sections of Letters from an American Farmer. Letter VIII, "Peculiar Customs at Nantucket," concludes with a description of the home of a Nantucket family built at the extreme eastern point of the island. The home is representative of the industry, moderation, and sociability James purports to find in Nantucket society. Crèvecoeur's description also stresses the unpredictability and invasiveness of the ocean that surrounds the home. Whereas the dedication to Raynal referred to a commercial network that "ought to unite, but now convulses the world," Farmer James describes an Atlantic that "seems to be the destroyer of this poor planet, yet, at particular times, accumulates the scattered fragments, and produces continents and islands fit for men to dwell on." ⁶¹ The Atlantic convulsions, which both men observe, have their ultimate source in the Caribbean. The imagery of the Nantucket passage is derived from a similar moment in "Sketches of Jamaica," in which, just before leaving Bermuda, Crèvecoeur's young narrator witnesses a Caribbean hurricane. As does James in Nantucket, the youth describes the local custom of gathering plunder from shipwrecked vessels and stresses the visual contrast between small, isolated societies and "the great Circumjacent ocean." "How diminutive," James declares, "does a man appear to himself when filled with these thoughts, and standing, as I did on the verge of the ocean." The young narrator in Bermuda similarly exclaims, "How diminutive did this little spot appear when I compared it to the Vast Extent of the watery mass whose percussion seems to shake the very Foundation of the Island." ⁶²	41
Holbo argues that the sublime imagery of the Nantucket passage literalizes Crèvecoeur's troubled realization that, "if societies are no longer concretely defined by their land, people, and history, but are extended around the globe by commercial and intellectual relations, then no society can ultimately be defined." ⁶³ Crèvecoeur first arrived at that realization and that literary technique in his essay on the West India trade. In "Sketches of Jamaica," the hurricane passage blurs distinctions between Jamaica, Bermuda, and the mainland. After the storm, the simple virtue of Bermudan society, based, as that of Nantucket would later be, on the poverty of its soil, no longer seems stable. Nor is the contrast with decadent, soil-rich Jamaica sustainable. His Bermuda idyll shattered, the narrator flees "for a securer habitation, on a large Continent," but that distinction also breaks down. Back in New York, the young man exclaims, "But where was I? if not in the Midst of the Great Storm at Bermudas, I found myself full as Exposed." ⁶⁴ Like its companion text in "Sketches of Jamaica," the ocean passage in Letters from an American Farmer blurs the distinction between an island and mainland society, this time between the New England fisheries and slaving Charleston. The transition from Nantucket to Charleston in Letters from an American Farmer provides a mirror image of the transition from the Caribbean to rural New York in "Sketches of Jamaica."	42
It is in Crèvecoeur's depiction of Charleston and the surrounding lowcountry, another of the pre-1774 writings revised for inclusion in his later work, that the alternative geographies of the early travel sketches attain their greatest prominence in Letters from an American Farmer. The first sentence of Letter IX establishes a hemispheric frame uncharacteristic for the narrative voice of the first sections. Echoing similar statements from "Sketch of a Contrast between the English and Spanish Colonies," James declares that "Charles-Town is in the north what Lima is in the south; both are capitals of the richest provinces of their respective hemispheres." ⁶⁵ A few pages later, James again surprises by situating southern slavery in a global frame worthy of his author's mentor. Speaking of Carolina traders, James declares: "With gold dug from Peruvian mountains, they order vessels to the coasts of Guinea; by virtue of that gold, wars, murders, and devestations, are committed in some harmless, peaceable, African neighbourhood." ⁶⁶ As the passage indicates, the Atlantic and hemispheric perspectives of Letter IX derive from its imperative to portray the violence and exploitation of slavery in its full dimensions. That imperative also explains the specific presence of the Caribbean in the letter. While Crèvecoeur's Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard are in part written over his earlier representation of the Bermudas, the Charleston of 1782 is written over the Jamaica of 1773. Both texts stress the litigiousness, physical debility, moral decadence, and brutal slave regime common to the societies they chronicle. ⁶⁷	43
Nor is the West Indian connection merely implicit. In a long passage near the opening of Letter IX, Crèvecoeur begins to write of Charleston high society: The inhabitants are the gayest in America; it is called the center of our beau monde, and is always filled with the richest planters in the province, who resort hither in quest of health and pleasure. Here is always to be seen a great number of valetudinarians from the West-Indies, seeking for the renovation of health, exhausted by the debilitating nature of their sun, air, and modes of living. Many of these West-Indians have I seen, at thirty, loaded with the infirmities of old age; for, nothing is more common, in those countries of wealth, than for persons to lose the abilities of enjoying the comforts of life at a time when we northern men just begin to taste the fruits of our labour and prudence. The round of pleasure, and the expences of those citizens tables, are much superior to what you would imagine: indeed the growth of this town and province have been astonishingly rapid. ⁶⁸ The passage contains a series of unmarked transitions between discussions of residents of the West Indies and Carolinas. Whereas the first sentence speaks of Charleston planters who visit the city to restore their health, the second speaks of valetudinarians from the West Indies who come to Charleston for the same purpose, as if to include them among the "richest planters in the province." Similarly, when the end of that sentence distinguishes between the poor health of West Indians and that of northern men, it leaves open the question of whether residents of Charleston are numbered among northern men or among West Indians "loaded" with "infirmities." The syntax remains ambiguous throughout the passage. When at the beginning of the final sentence Crèvecoeur refers to "those citizens tables," the likely referents for the preposition are the visiting West Indian gentlemen. The end of the same sentence, however, concerns the growth of "this town," meaning Charleston. It is highly uncertain whether at any moment in the passage James is speaking of Charleston or a Caribbean seaport. In Crèvecoeur's palimpsestic text, such a distinction is largely without a difference.	44
Farmer James's only direct reference to Caribbean slavery holds similar implications. Although deploring the inhumane treatment of lowcountry slaves, James pauses to rehearse a familiar defense of their southern masters: "It is said, I know, that [slaves] are much happier here than in the West-Indies; because, land being cheaper upon this continent than in those islands, the fields, allowed them to raise their subsistence from, are in general more extensive." Although he here offers a tentative distinction, based on the availability of fertile land, between the slave regimes of two New World locales, the next sentence disrupts his comparison. "The only possible chance of any alleviation," James declares, "depends on the humour of the planters, who, bred in the midst of slaves, learn, from the example of their parents, to despise them; and seldom conceive, either from repetition or philosophy, any ideas that tend to make their fate less calamitous." ⁶⁹ By failing to note whether it here refers to planters in the West Indies or the Carolinas, the text again leaves its reader in a telling state of confusion.	45
References such as these implicitly map South Carolina as the periphery of an extended Caribbean and thus as a region thoroughly implicated in the commercial revolution, radiating along the networks of Atlantic slavery, that grounded Raynal's global analysis. Recovering that broader perspective illuminates the dramatic impact of Letter IX on the overall narrative. Caribbean slavery, however, exerts its most profound influence on Letter IX, not in any direct reference, but through a largely unremarked aspect of James's infamous encounter with a tortured slave near Charleston. From a cage suspended in the branches of a tree, a man, left to starve to death by his master, begs James for a fatal dose of poison. Birds of prey have plucked out his eyes and picked the flesh from his cheeks and arms. The incident has long been acknowledged as a decisive turning point in Letters from an American Farmer, the moment when the relatively coherent narrative voice of the early sections suffers an irrevocable collapse. ⁷⁰ By James's own admission, the encounter provides the immediate impetus for the series of bleak global meditations that pervade his account of Charleston. Those meditations do indeed mark a shocking departure from the tone of earlier letters. "The history of the earth!" James declares at one especially sweeping moment of his invective against slaveholder violence, "doth it represent any thing but crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other?" ⁷¹ James's belief in republicanism is but one casualty of this new worldview: "Republics, kingdoms, monarchies, founded either on fraud or successful violence, increase by pursuing the steps of the same policy, until they are destroyed, in their turn, either by the influence of their own crimes or by more successful but equally criminal enemies." ⁷²	46
Such declarations amount to a grotesque parody of the cosmopolitan viewpoint. Filled with the international and transhistorical knowledge that characterized the texts of the philosophes, they remain void of nearly all belief in the redemptive possibility of humanist sympathy. Cosmopolitan optimism is profoundly threatened in Letters from an American Farmer at almost the precise moment that the characteristic global scale of cosmopolitan awareness fully surfaces.	47
This is the very paradox we have traced in "Sketches of Jamaica." Yet the linking of James's crisis of faith to the dramatic expression of antislavery sentiment suggests that Letter IX is shaped by an even deeper engagement with the lessons of Raynal's West Indies than marked that earlier manuscript. Cosmopolitan optimism is initially undermined through an antislavery perspective that stresses the susceptibility of the Carolinas to the degenerative influence of West Indian intercourse. And, whereas in Raynal's Caribbean analysis, the loss of cosmopolitan faith was expressed through a radical and apocalyptic vision of a hemispheric slave insurrection, the specter of slave revolt plays a pivotal role in the final disillusionment of Letters from an American Farmer. The caged slave episode both obscures and evokes the revolutionary agency of the enslaved as depicted in the History. While James's initial encounter with the slave stresses the man's passive status as victim, his later conversation with some planters stresses the slave's active resistance. "The reason for this slave's being thus punished," the planters inform him, "was on account of his having killed the overseer of the plantation." "They told me that the laws of self-preservation rendered such executions necessary." ⁷³ The planters' recourse to a rhetoric of "self-preservation" intimates that they viewed the slave's resistance, not as a random and isolated act, but as symptomatic of the genuine threat that wider revolt posed to the plantation order. ⁷⁴	48
Other references to slave revolt in the letter also evoke the possibility of collective black resistance. The plantation order is only partly maintained, James had earlier insisted, by a system of corporeal discipline. Lowcountry slaves are "perpetually awed by the terrible cracks of whips, or by the fear of capital punishments, while even those punishments often fail of their purpose." ⁷⁵ More pointedly, after documenting a variety of forms of exploitation, James wonders: "Is there any thing in this treatment but what must kindle all the passions, sow the seeds of inveterate resentment, and nourish a wish of perpetual revenge? They are left to the irresistible effects of those strong and natural propensities." ⁷⁶ In James's view, the growth of insurrectionary sentiments among the entire slave population is all but inevitable. I am suggesting neither that Crèvecoeur invokes the threat of broadscale slave revolt with anything like the directness and intensity of Raynal, nor that he shared the radical politics of a Juan de Péchmèja. Rather, I am arguing that one way to understand the highly disruptive effect of the caged slave episode and the notorious narrative discontinuity of Letters from an American Farmer in general is to recall the dramatic and fiery rhetoric of Raynal's revelation. In order fully to account for the radical perspectival shift in Letter IX, we might attend both to the hemispheric dimensions of plantation slavery in the letter itself and to the potentially world-historical significance of West Indian insurrection in the History. Crèvecoeur's dystopic vision of Charleston and the lowlands is haunted by his own earlier account of Jamaican corruption and by the sensational prophecy at the heart of Raynal's Caribbean.	49

Though the residual West Indian narrative in Letters from an American Farmer reaches its climax in Charleston, the crisis of cosmopolitan faith with which it is closely associated continues to play a prominent role in the remainder of the narrative. As in "Sketches of Jamaica," a disillusioned narrator returns from a decadent plantation society to view a northern colony through altered eyes. ⁷⁷ In the most dramatic reversal of his earlier idyll, James's vision of universal violence and exploitation in Letter IX finds its rhetorical echo in the anti-Revolutionary sentiments of Letter XII. James interprets the outbreak of hostilities in the thoroughly dystopic account of world history and human nature first advanced in his portrait of New World slavery. "Why has the Master of the world," he asks in a representative passage, "permitted so much indiscriminate evil throughout every part of this poor planet, at all times, and among all kinds of people?" ⁷⁸ In the text of Letter XII itself, Crèvecoeur remains relatively silent about how he interpreted the origins of the American Revolution and why he might have applied the rhetoric of his critique of plantation slavery to his lament on the violence of the Anglo-American conflict. The dedication to Raynal, however, reveals that Crèvecoeur viewed both phenomena as products of the development of Atlantic mercantilism, as it cues the reader to understand events in the British North American colonies in the framework of the History. It is extensive commerce, the author-narrator insists, that "now convulses the world." For the Raynal of the History and the Crèvecoeur of "Sketches of Jamaica," the volatile and corrupting effect of Atlantic commerce could always be traced to its ultimate origin in West Indian sugar and slavery. Recognizing "Sketches of Jamaica" as an important shadow text in Letters from an American Farmer and recalling Adams's comments on the link between sugar and independence, we might speculate that Crèvecoeur's earlier lament over the degenerative influence of Caribbean trade (and the wider maritime system it made possible) plays a role in his later refusal to endorse the American Revolution as the advent of universal republicanism. Whatever the specific source of Crèvecoeur's anti-Revolutionary position in 1782, it remains clear that with the outbreak of war James desperately seeks a society beyond the reach of the entire Atlantic commercial network. The narrator hopes to flee North American hostilities, not, as his author did, through a return to Europe, but by moving his family inland to join an unnamed indigenous tribe. Disillusioned by his experiences in a range of port cities, James turns his back on the Atlantic world that formed the natural habitat of enlightened cosmopolitans, including his author and his author's mentor.	50
Or so we might reasonably conclude, had the career of Crèvecoeur's best-known work ended in 1782. In 1783, however, Crèvecoeur quickly compiled the two volumes of Lettres d'un cultivateur americain while preparing to depart from Paris for his new post as trade consul to New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. According to Rice, this 1784 publication "reinvented Crèvecoeur as the French champion of American democratic idealism." ⁷⁹ In nearly all instances, Crèvecoeur revised material from the English edition to qualify its anti-Revolutionary and pessimistic aspects and to augment its idyllic qualities. Among the new writings that filled out his volumes are the portraits of Benjamin Franklin and the marquis de Lafayette that Thomas Philbrick calls "sops to the French enthusiasm for the celebrities of the American Revolution." ⁸⁰ Concessions to contemporary French taste made Lettres d'un cultivateur americain an immediate and rousing success.	51
It is odd, then, that Crèvecoeur would include "Voyage à la Jamaique," a much-revised version of the most critical of his early travel sketches, in the French editions of Lettres d'un cultivateur americain. The inclusion of a version of "Sketches of Jamaica" was, however, essential to its author's attempt to simultaneously reinvent himself as the champion of cosmopolitan idealism. The encyclopedic form of Lettres d'un cultivateur americain marks a kind of tribute to the project of the philosophes, as its two dense and varied volumes strive to fulfill some of the cultural geographic ambitions of the early 1770s. In the more comprehensive 1784 text, the face of America extends south, beyond the mainland into the sugar islands.	52
The major revisions of the earlier sketch all soften the critique of West Indian trade as morally corrupt and corrupting and underscore the possibility that its dangers might be offset by the civic virtue of a scattered yet enlightened elite. In the most significant revision, Crèvecoeur reflects on the slaves who often manned and piloted Bermuda's extensive merchant fleets: The majority of these vessels are commanded by Negroes; a race of men completely regenerated, no less by their long stay on this island, than by the education they receive from their Masters. They assist in the construction, and sail afterwards to the other islands, where they are preferred over all others for coastal trade and smuggling. Their skill as Mariners and Carpenters, their fidelity as supercargoes, the punctuality with which they carry out the business of their Masters, and bring back their vessels, is a truly edifying spectacle. I have seen several of these black Skippers at the tables of the rich planters of Jamaica, treated with all the respect their intelligence and faithfulness deserve. ⁸¹ The new passage is addressed to the very root of Raynal's anxieties regarding the fate of cosmopolitanism. His vision of a general insurrection had expressed his fear that the form of free trade he advocated might simply expand an inherently violent and exploitative slave system. In "Voyage à la Jamaique," Crèvecoeur accommodates the development of international capitalism to a far more conservative form of antislavery than prevails in either Letter IX or the History. Through their central role in a transcolonial contraband trade—an illicit precursor to a system of free trade—the black pilots of Bermuda gain their gradual emancipation. In Crèvecoeur's view, their travels provide them broad training and education and allow them to achieve a social status (as evidenced by their presence at the tables of prosperous planters) unimaginable in his earlier depiction of Jamaica. The pilots are presented as an elite class of black cosmopolitans, whose prospects for social mobility, economic prosperity, and cultural refinement increase as the maritime enterprises of their colonial masters expand. ⁸²	53
Few passages in Crèvecoeur's writings may be taken at face value. Just as the form and content of Letters from an American Farmer reflects its author's attempt to negotiate the volatile context of Anglo-American hostilities, Lettres d'un cultivateur americain is shaped by his efforts to negotiate the varied demands of his French audience. ⁸³ It is intriguing to note that, by the time "Voyage à la Jamaique" appeared in print, trade between North America and Jamaica had ceased, owing to a British embargo. Rather than depicting an American reality, the revised essay might have addressed French attitudes toward their own Caribbean colonies. During the compilation of Lettres d'un cultivateur americain, French politics was marked by contentious debates over the sugar islands. A 1784 decision to relax the exclusif (monopoly) bitterly divided metropolitan merchants and colonial proprietors. The same year brought a reform of the Code noir, over planter protests, to confer more rights to free "coloreds" in the colonies. ⁸⁴ To grasp the full implications of Crèvecoeur's renewed cosmopolitan optimism in "Voyage à la Jamaique" would require detailed understanding of French debates over slavery and colonial involvement and of how works such as Lettres d'un cultivateur americain circulated in France and the French Caribbean.	54
Such questions are beyond the scope of this article, and I raise them here merely to stress that recovering the Caribbean dimensions of Crèvecoeur's art and thought raises at least as many new critical problems as it illuminates familiar ones. Full understanding of the man and his masks demands a supple awareness of shifting and overlapping attitudes toward Caribbean colonies and colonists in England, France, and North America, of the variable winds of literary fashion in each of these locales, and of the intra- and interimperial trade disputes that often lay beneath specific attitudes and tastes. Works such as "Sketches of Jamaica" should continue to pose exemplary problems for eighteenth-century American studies as it moves toward a multilingual and transnational understanding of the colonial Americas.	55
Christopher Iannini is a Ph.D. candidate in English and American studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Many thanks to William Kelly, Joan Richardson, and Katherine Manthorne, who read and commented on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to Neil Smith, Omar Dahbour, and the 2002–2003 fellows of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, Graduate Center, CUNY. I am especially grateful to Sarah Pearsall and the anonymous readers of this article for their careful and critical reading of the manuscript. Notes ¹ Peter Dubois, quoted in Bernard Chevignard, "St. John de Crèvecoeur in the Looking Glass: Letters from an American Farmer and the Making of a Man of Letters," Early American Literature, XIX (1984), 175. ² The anecdote and the biographical details provided below are from Gay Wilson Allen and Roger Asselineau, St. John de Crèvecoeur: The Life of an American Farmer (New York, 1987), 61–67. ³ Grantland S. Rice, "Crèvecoeur and the Politics of Authorship in Republican America," EAL, XXVIII (1993), 108; Christine Holbo, "Imagination, Commerce, and the Politics of Associationism in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer," EAL, XXXII (1997), 57. Before the 1960s, readings of the Letters tended to stress the idyllic aspects of the text and to privilege the earlier letters. Since then, most critics have complicated that vision by arguing that the narrator undergoes a profound shift in consciousness, or by establishing a distinction between a naive Farmer James and his sophisticated author, or both. Prominent contributors to the earlier consensus include Marcus Cunliffe, Henry S. Commager, Richard B. Morris, and Vernon Parrington. That such views retain some currency is evidenced by the Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot et al. (New York, 1988). For some representative examples of the later criticism, see A. W. Plumstead, "Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur," in Everett Emerson, ed., American Literature, 1764–1789: The Revolutionary Years (Madison, Wis., 1977), 213–231; Doreen Alvarez Saar, "Crèvecoeur's 'Thoughts on Slavery': Letters from an American Farmer and Whig Rhetoric," EAL, XXII (1987), 192–203; Nathaniel Philbrick, "The Nantucket Sequence in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer," New England Quarterly, LXIV (1991), 414–432; Norman Grabo, "Crèvecoeur's American: Beginning the World Anew," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XLVIII (1991), 159–172; and Larzer Ziff, Writing in the New Nation: Prose, Print, and Politics in the Early United States (New Haven, Conn., 1991), 18–33. Recent criticism often shares the focus of earlier scholars on questions of mainland society and identity. It is interesting to note that this concern still creeps into the transnational readings of Rice and Holbo. Thus, Holbo, "Imagination, Commerce, and the Politics of Associationism," EAL, XXXII (1997), 33, claims that Crèvecoeur's task was "understanding—and at the same time creating—a national identity for America." I am closer to agreeing with her assertion that "Crèvecoeur's reflections on American nationality were formulated in the context of Raynal's larger meditations on the problem of nationality in an age of international capitalism" (32). I would stipulate, however, that Crèvecoeur's meditation is centered on the problem of cosmopolitanism in an age when nationalism and international capitalism simultaneously emerged. Such a view is perhaps best captured by Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, Calif., 1996), 140–172. Cook, 143, argues that Letters"stages the eclipse of the Enlightenment ideal of the Republic of Letters and of its cosmopolite, supranational citizen-critic" (143). ⁴ [M. G. St. J. de Crèvecoeur], J. Hector St. John, "Sketches of Jamaica and Bermudas and Other Subjects," in Dennis D. Moore, ed., More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crèvecoeur (Athens, Ga., 1995), 106–113. Crèvecoeur also wrote a substantially revised French version of the sketch, entitled "Voyage à la Jamaique et aux Isles Bermudes," that he included in Lettres d'un cultivateur americain, 2 vols. (Paris, 1784), 229–240. ⁵ For a discussion of this trend, see Dennis D. Moore's review essay, "The Empire of Early American Studies," WMQ, 3d Ser., LIX (2002), 720–724. In particular, Moore cites Carla Mulford, "New Science and the Question of Identity in Eighteenth-Century British America," and Leonard Tennenhouse, "Caribbean Democracy and the Problem of Masculinity in Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond," both in Mulford and David S. Shields, eds., Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring J. A. Leo Lemay (Newark, Del., 2001), 79–103, 104–121. For some other recent efforts to include the Caribbean in eighteenth-century American studies, see Keith A. Sandiford, The Cultural Politics of Sugar: Caribbean Slavery and Narratives of Colonialism (New York, 2000); Andrew

"The Itinerant Man": Crèvecoeur's Caribbean, Raynal's Revolution, and the Fate of Atlantic Cosmopolitanism

Christopher Iannini

Notes