identified as a “man without a country,” into the American, which Crèvecœur’s Farmer James does by telling the “History of Andrew, the Hebridean” as “an epitome of the rest” (Letters 57). In tracing Andrew’s “metamorphosis” (59), Crèvecœur’s American farmer narrates an allegory of subject-formation, via the “invisible power” of political economy. The immigrant begins as a bond laborer, a servant indentured to a master, acquiring both technical training and moral cultivation through this “apprenticeship” (74). After fulfilling his contract and earning his freedom dues, he “become[s] a freeholder, possessed of a vote, of a place of residence, a citizen” (79): “From nothing, to start into being; from a servant, to the rank of master; from being a slave of some despotic prince, to become a free man, invested with lands.…It is in consequence of that change that he becomes an American” (59). By way of the Lockean telos of this transformational allegory, Crèvecœur’s ultimate answer to the question, “What is an American?” is that the “American” is an immigrant, who through his labors and “the laws of naturalization” (59) becomes a citizen, “performing as a citizen all the duties required of him” (82). He is one of those to whom Luther Martin referred when objecting to the Constitution’s “migration and importation clause”: a “foreigner who comes into a State to become a citizen,” coming not “absolutely free” but rather “qualifiedly so, as a servant.”41 His voluntary labor bondage serves as the ideal path to the freedom of American citizenship.
As representative “epitome of the rest,” the history of Andrew the Hebridean introduces into American literature several narrative tropes which will recur throughout the debates over the cultural characteristics of this ultimate figure, the “citizen.” The first is that already introduced in the structure of Andrew’s metamorphosis: the political coming-into-being of the citizen is based on the socioeconomic model of the passage from dependent servitude to independent self-mastery. The other tropes emerge within this structure of transformation and, like this larger structure, depend on the primacy of labor. First, there is the trope of “incorporation” (the eighteenth-century term for assimilation), which we have seen staged by those laboring poor who previously “had no country” but then, following “the motto of all emigrants,” become “American.” This first trope names the narrative structure of that process of assimilation mediating between the individual subject and the civic community. Second, there is the related trope of “visible character,” Crèvecœur’s name for the social recognition of this assimilating subject, and the figure for the public persona of that subject of citizenship divided between “invisible character” and “visible character” (Letters 50).
Crèvecœur introduces these two tropes together when he compares the “incorporation” of Europeans into “Americans” to the “dissemination” of “religious indifference” (Letters 50):
When any considerable number of a particular sect happen to dwell contiguous to each other, they immediately erect a temple, and there worship the Divinity according to their own peculiar ideas.…[They] are at liberty to make proselytes if they can…and to follow the dictates of their conscience; for neither the government nor any other power interferes. If they are peaceable subjects, and are industrious, what is it to their neighbors how and in what manner they think fit to address their prayers to the Supreme Being? But if the sectaries are not settled close together, if they are mixed with other denominations, their zeal will cool for want of fuel, and will be extinguished in a little time. Then the Americans become, as to religion what they are as to country, allied to all. In them the name of Englishman, Frenchman, and European, is lost, and, in like manner, the strict modes of Christianity, as practiced in Europe, are lost also. (48, emphasis added)
It is in this analogy, between the waning of religious sectarianism and the transformation of the “man without a country” into “an American,” that Crèvecœur introduces the split subject of this “new man,” the American citizen. Crèvecœur develops here the eighteenth-century view of religious belief as the primary index of the subject’s individual personhood, distinct from the abstract legal-formal person of the citizen. The particularity of religious belief (a sect’s “own peculiar ideas”) is considered not only distinct from but entirely irrelevant to the civic life of the community: “If they are peaceable subjects, and are industrious,” how they pray does not matter to their neighbors. Crèvecœur’s analogy uses religion as the site of all things considered “private,” as opposed to the public sites of the political (“peaceable subjects”) and the economic (“industrious”). As we have seen, this opposition would be codified in the U.S. Constitution itself. And throughout The Federalist Papers, religion is explicitly compared to private interests and inner passions, and the proliferation of political factions is likened to the proliferation of religious sects.42
It is in the context of this division between private religion and public political-economic life that Crèvecœur introduces his figure for the split subject of citizenship, and the related trope of “visible character”:
Next to [the Catholic and the German Lutheran] lives a Seceder, the most enthusiastic of all sectaries; his zeal is hot and fiery; but, separated as he is from others of the same complexion, he has no congregation, where he might cabal and mingle religious pride with worldly obstinacy. He likewise raises good crops, his house is handsomely painted, his orchard is one of the fairest in the neighborhood. How does it concern the welfare of the country, or of the province at large, what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good, citizen.…This is the visible character; the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business.…Thus all sects are mixed as well as all nations. Thus religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other. (49–50)
Reiterating his claims regarding the community’s “indifference” to the “peculiar ideas” of a particular sect, Crèvecœur makes explicit the role of religion as structural placeholder of the private, and underscores the split within the individual subject of citizenship, between the “invisible character” of the private person and the “visible character” of the public citizen. While the passage “from a servant, to the rank of a master” (Letters 58–59) structures the economic narrative of assimilation (or “incorporation”), its completion is marked not by any detectable transformation of the individual’s inner character, but rather solely through the successes of “visible character,” the outward signs of good citizenship. Whereas “incorporation” names the process of civic assimilation, whose ideal fulfillment is epitomized by Andrew the Hebridean, the dependent indentured servant become independent propertied citizen, “visible character” names a state of social being within this ideal process of assimilation, mediating the social recognition of its successful completion. The political-economic basis of this civic identity is underscored at the end of Letter III: the history of Andrew as epitome of the American closes with a ledger “account of the property he acquired with his own hands and those of his son,” in “Pennsylvania currency.—Dollars” (Letters 82).
If in Crèvecœur’s Letters the “visible character” of good citizenship takes the form of material prosperity (his crops, house, orchard), the success of such “incorporation” into citizenship is also marked by another type of “character.” When Farmer James greets Andrew the Hebridean at the dock and asks him his plans, Andrew, still fresh off the boat bringing servants to America, replies:
I do not know, Sir; I am but an ignorant man, a stranger besides:—I must rely on the advice of good Christians.…I have brought with me a character from our Barra minister, can it do me any good here? [To which Farmer James replies] Oh, yes; but your future success will depend entirely on your own conduct; if you are a sober man, as the certificate says, laborious and honest, there is no fear but that you will do well. (73)
One of the popular eighteenth-century uses of “character” was “to indicate reputation (including the formal giving of a character, a character reference
