The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 63the Morals and Virtue” of the New World. For Franklin, America really was the land
of opportunity. It was also a land of tolerance, common sense, and reason, where
people could and should be left free to toil usefully for themselves and their
community, as he had done. Typically, he turned such beliefs into a matter of politi-
cal practice as well as principle, working on behalf of his colonial home, then his
country, for most of his life. In 1757 and 1775, for example, he mad two lengthy trips
to England, to serve as colonial agent. After the second trip, he returned to
Philadelphia just in time to serve in the Continental Congress and to be chosen as a
member of that committee which eventually drafted the Declaration of Independence.
He spent two years in Paris, negotiating an alliance between France and America.
Then, in 1783, he was one of the three American signatories to the treaty that ended
the Revolutionary War. Finally, after some years in France as American ambassador,
he became a member of that convention which drafted the Constitution of the
United States. Franklin was, in short, at the heart of the American Revolution from
its origins to its conclusion. And he shows, more clearly than any other figure of the
time, just how much that Revolution owed to the principles of the Enlightenment.
By his presence and comments he also suggests just how much the founding docu-
ments of the American nation were rooted in a project that he himself embraced
and emblematized, based on the principles of natural rights and reason, self-help
and self-reinvention.
“What then is the American, this new man?” asked J. Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur
(1735–1813) in his Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782. Answering
his own question, Crèvecoeur then suggested that “the American is a new man, who
acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new
opinions.” That was a common theme in the literature surrounding the American
Revolution. As the American colonies became a new nation, the United States of
America, writers and many others applied themselves to the task of announcing just
what this new nation represented, and what the character and best hopes of the
American might be. Crèvecoeur was especially fascinated because of his mixed
background: born in France, he spent time in England and Canada before settling
as a planter in New York State. He was also, during the Revolution, placed in a
difficult position. As a Tory or Loyalist (that is, someone who continued to claim
allegiance to Britain), he found himself suspected by the Revolutionaries; as some-
one with liberal sympathies, however, he also fell under suspicion among the other
Tories. So in 1780 he returned to France; and it was in London that Letters was first
published. Following a form very popular in the eighteenth century, Crèvecoeur’s
book (which was reprinted many times) consists of twelve letters written by a
fictional narrator, James, a Quaker and a farmer, describing his life on the farm and
his travels to places such as Charlestown, South Carolina. Letters is an epistolary
narrative; it is a travel and philosophical journal; and it also inaugurates that
peculiarly American habit of mixing fiction and thinly disguised autobiography.
James shares many of the experiences and opinions of Crèvecoeur but, unlike his
creator, he is a simple, relatively uneducated man and, of course, a Quaker – which
Crèvecoeur most certainly was not.GGray_c01.indd 63ray_c 01 .indd 63 8 8/1/2011 7:54:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 56 AM