Crevecoeur's Question, Franklin's Example: This New American Man Anonymous College

In eighteenth-century America, a veritable tossed salad of people were coalescing into one place, forming a new nation with a unique identity. The world was watching to see what they would become – some with anticipation, some ready for mockery. As the budding nation grew, people wanted to know what to make of this new nation, and what its fruits would be. In 1782 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman who had lived in the United States for many years, published a volume of essays entitled Letters from an American Farmer (322). This work was the first to describe life in the Americas to Europeans and reflect on the New World’s identity. In one paragraph from Letter III, Crèvecœur sets forth the question, “What then is the American, this new man?” (325) He then proceeds to answer his question with a description of the traits that set the American apart from his ancestors as a new kind of man – traits that his contemporary, Benjamin Franklin, models remarkably well in his Autobiography, showing the simultaneous emergence of this idea from American literature of the time.

An American is an American not by descent, but by “leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, [receiving] new ones from the new mode of...