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"Footprints in the Sand" de Crevecoeur on Nantucket by Laland Keeshan AMERICAN LITERATURE AND Ajmerican history have for cen turies enjoyed a tenuous relationship. Problems arise when literary prose is credited as historical fact. Eighteenth century America, specifically New England, was portrayed as an idyllic Utopia, ruled by the industrious and pious and not by the crowned heads of Europe. "It may in truth be said," stated a 1797 Encyclopedia Britannica, "that in no part of the world are the people happier. . . or more independent than the farmers of New England." The Age of Enlightenment in Europe had provided an idea of an "agrarian democracy" in the unsettled wilds of America. It was an optimisim based on the belief that man, as a mixture of passion and reason, could learn to govern himself once he had learned the laws of physical and human nature. One eighteenth century author in particular played an important role in this attempt at implementation. J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur, who came to live in America, though of European extraction, helped establish the American literary tradition. His most famous and popular work, Letters From an American Farmer, described the Colonies as a general asylum for the world, or as Howard Mumford Jones states, ". . .a premature Statue of Liberty welcoming the poor and oppressed. . ." Crevecoeur had declared the perfect society had, in fact, already been established on Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts. "What happened here," he stated, "has and will happen everywhere else." Perfection is an intriguing yet baffling concept. One is always tempted to find fault. Crevecoeur has already been taken to task by eminent scholars and found to be severely lacking in the realm of literary morals. The concern here, however, is the perfect eighteenth century society that St. Jean has discovered. The ingredients of this philosophic model are revealed through Crevecoeur's notations on Nantucket. His model is more under scrutiny here than his credibility, as only scattered and inconclusive evidence can be gathered on pre-Revolutionary Nantucket. No paper on the "travelling Frenchman" would be complete without a dash of controversy. Nantucketers have joined critics of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries as they take exception to certain of
