3. Farmers & Landholders
In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), a French settler named Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur asserted that, “Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth, from Nova Scotia to West Florida.” Due to the land’s agrarian economy there were “no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one...The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.” A century before construction of the Statue of Liberty, Crèvecoeur was creating an American myth where “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” There was nothing "deserving of notice" on the island of Nantucket except the inhabitants themselves, whose improvements were of the simple and useful kind.
The landholding small farmer continued to be a powerful symbol, even as it became clear that all Americans would not own farms and farmers would hire unpropertied laborers. In fact, some of the European conditions that Crèvecoeur criticized—the “haughty mansion, contrasted with the clay-built hut and miserable cabin”—came to resemble the plight of migrant farmworkers. This section explores tensions underlying the idealized myth of American Farmers and their daily interactions with needful labor.