• MAKING THE REVOLUTION

• INDEPENDENCE

• 1. Victory & Union
• 2. Promise & Peril
• 3. Progress & Identity
• 4. Patriots & Loyalists
• 5. A Golden Age
• 6. A New Man: The American
• 7. A Model for Europe
• 8. A Heads-Up for Europeans
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INDEPENDENCE: 1783-1791

6. A New Man: The American

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What then is the American, this new man? asked a French immigrant who had become a naturalized New York citizen and gentleman farmer in the 1760s. How is he different from a European? How does this difference make him a "new man" on the face of the earth? What does his unique identity offer the world? Here we consider two dominant works of the revolutionary era that addressed these questions—one by the French-born farmer, writing before and during the Revolution, and the other by a native-born New Englander writing after the Revolution. Each man strove to capture the essence of "the American, this new man."

• Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (writing as J. Hector St. John), "What Is an American?" Letter III of Letters from an American Farmer, written late 1760s-early 1770s, publ. 1782, selections. The landscape images above depict the New York Catskill Mountains in 1761—the embodiment of American expanse and opportunity, far from the class-locked societies of Europe. Here the Frenchman Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur bought farmland in 1764 after having served in the French and Indian War. He married, raised a family, and lived the life of an "American farmer" until the upheaval of the American Revolution drove him first to join Loyalist refugees in New York City and then, after being imprisoned as a suspected spy by the British, back to his homeland in France. There he amassed his writings on American culture and agriculture into a series of "letters" to a fictional English recipient, publishing them in London in 1782. The most famous of these letters is the third—"What Is an American?"—long considered the classic statement of this "new man": individualistic, self-reliant, pragmatic, hard-working, a stolid man of the land free to pursue his self-defined goals and, in the process, rejecting the ideological zeal that had racked Europe for centuries. While the letter is romantic and often utopian, it reflects the real experiences of a European-born American who long pursued the question "what is an American?" As historian Edmund S. Morgan reflects, "Crèvecoeur’s answer to the question was flattering to Americans of his own day, and it still reverberates in a society that has never stopped asking the same question of itself."1 Who is Crèvecoeur’s "American"?—and what is Crèvecoeur’s "America"? What do they offer Europe and the world? On the other hand, what most distressed Crèvecoeur about the emerging American? (15 pp.)



• Royall Tyler, The Contrast, comedy of manners, 1787. The first full-length play by an American and the first to be performed by a professional theater, The Contrast premiered in New York City in April 1787 to enthusiastic acclaim. It "must give sincere satisfaction to every lover of his country," wrote one critic, "to find that this, the most difficult of all the works of human genius [i.e., theater], has been attempted with such abundant success."2 Modelled after the English "comedy of manners" in which the pretensions of a social class are satirized, the play contrasts the stolid, honorable, no-airs American with the frivolous class-conscious American who aspires to European sophistication. (Amidst the subplots typical in a comedy of manners, this central contrast is emphasized in Act II, Scene 1; Act III, Scene 2; Act IV, Scene 1; and Act V, Scene 2). A multitude of related contrasts are dramatized including, as listed by cultural historian Kenneth Silverman, "revolutionary stoicism and high-mindedness against the new spirit of display and fun, republicanism against aristocracy, country against city, soldier against beau, Boston against New York, marriage against seduction, homespun against lace, the language of the heart against Frenchified elevation, American simplicity and sincerity against European affectation and preoccupation with fashion."3 Much fodder for a full-length five-act play.

  The venerable American (who wins the girl in the end) is Col. Henry Manly, a Revolutionary War veteran and an officer in the Massachusetts militia during Shays’s Rebellion of 1787-1788 (as was the playwright). When he comes to New York City to appeal to the Continental Congress for pensions for his wounded fellow veterans, he visits his young sister Charlotte and is engulfed in New York wannabe society. A horrified Charlotte insists that she cannot introduce him to society wearing his regimental coat, and a servant dismisses him as an "unpolished animal." But Manly knows what he stands for and why it matters. His monologue against luxury that opens Act III, Scene II, mirrors the alarm raised by many Americans in the 1780s that consumer excess would sap the energy of the young nation and threaten its very survival (see Noah Webster and David Ramsay in this Theme). He ardently defends American patriotism, civic commitment, and simple virtue from the disparaging barbs of (the villain) Billy Dimple. In the end, Dimple is exposed as a deceitful fraud, Charlotte disavows her frivolous aspirations, and Col. Manly affirms to the audience that the "probity, virtue [and] honor" of the "unpolished" American will triumph. The first play written by Royall Tyler, a wealthy Harvard- and Yale-educated Bostonian, The Contrast merits study along with Crèvecoeur’s well-known Letters. We recommend that you read the Act-Scene summaries and study the character chart before beginning the play. Do note the poem prologue, worth a study in itself. (38 pp.)

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