In the first few pages of Letter 1 in Letters from an American Farmer, James describes his preparation to write to Mr. F. B. As James recounts, he and his wife use a shared metaphor for James's writing. James's wife initially asks him to contemplate how his writing is like a dish that he prepares from his many parts:
One half of his time Mr. F. B., poor man, lived upon nothings but fruit-pies, or peaches and milk. Now, these things were such as God had given us; myself and wench did the rest; we were not the creators of these victuals, we only cooked as well and as neat as we could. The first thing, James, is to know what sort of materials thee hast within thy own self, and then whether thee canst dish them up.
In order to know what James can write, James must first be familiar with his constituent parts—those ingredients from which he can "dish up" his letters. James picks up on this metaphor and continues it a few moments later:
My letters shall not be sent, nor will I receive any, without reading them to you and my wife; women are curious, they love to know their husband's secrets; it will not be the first thing which I have submitted to your joint opinions. Whenever you come to dine with us, these shall be the last dish on the table.
Like an actual dish of food, these letters will await the trio to discuss when their shared meals have drawn to a close. This treatment of James's intellectual "dish" fits neatly in line with a strain of literary devices throughout Letters from an American Farmer, in which de Crèveceour compares writing or other intellectual pursuits with the food, plants, and other agricultural products. Working one's mind, these devices suggest, is not so different from working one's land.
In Letter 1, James excitedly recounts the joy he feels when bringing his son along with him to plow the fields. He uses a plant metaphor to emphasize the effects that these small adventures have on the child:
I relieve his mother of some trouble while I have him with me; the odiferous furrow exhilarates his spirits and seems to do the child a great deal of good, for he looks more blooming since I have adopted that practice...
It is the smell of a freshly tilled field that so influences James's son, and the effect that this smell has on the child is apparently like to a "blooming" plant. This metaphor is implied rather than explicit, but it is nonetheless an important comparison that establishes how James prefers to convey his vision of his family—and his world—in terms of agriculture and agricultural language. Like a plant, his son begins to develop and thrive when he interacts with fresh soil.
This passage connects with two larger themes in the novel: James's love of nature and his connection with the land gained from farming, and his abiding respect for hard work—a respect James hopes to impart on his son, as he himself once learned from his father. "May God enable him to live," James adds, "that he may perform the same operations for the same purposes when I am worn out and old!"
In Letter 3, James gets more philosophical about colonial life in America and expounds on the unique characteristics of various types of settlers in the young country. When James discusses those who have settled along the wild colonial frontier, de Crèvecoeur employs his usual metaphor of planting and cultivation to describe their behavior:
They trust to the natural fecundity of the earth and therefore do little; carelessness in fencing often exposes what little they sow to destruction; they are not at home to watch; in order, therefore, to make up the deficiency, they go oftener to the woods. That new mode of life brings along with it a new set of manners, which I cannot easily describe. These new manners being grafted on the old stock produce a strange sort of lawless profligacy, the impressions of which are indelible.
The frontier settlers have a mind of their own, in James's experience—an attitude that has been developed by a crazed lifestyle on the very age of early American civilization. In this particular agricultural metaphor, he uses the process of grafting—in which two plants are joined together—to characterize how the particularities of frontier life add an entirely new set of behaviors to the American colonial landscape.
Throughout Letters from an American Farmer, James expresses his sincere distaste for lawyers. In Letter 7, he describes these insufferable pests of colonial America in the metaphorical language of weeds:
Lawyers are so numerous in all our populous towns that I am surprised they never thought before of establishing themselves here; they are plants that will grow in any soil that is cultivated by the hands of others; and when once they have taken root, they will extinguish every other vegetable that grows around them.
In each town James visits, there is an established legal practice run by some detestable lawyer. In this metaphor, de Crèvecoeur continues the strain of agricultural comparisons that runs throughout his novel to describe lawyers as though they are a fast-growing weed that chokes out a farmer's vegetables in a field. If the American colonies are a thriving family farm, then lawyers are an unstoppable invasive species that threatens to ruin the entire operation.
In James's view, lawyers are an unnecessary and extractive complication to the idyllic nature of early American life—causing trouble, overcomplicating everything, and leveraging their formal education over the relative ignorance of the populace. In that respect, James's disdain for lawyers is consistent with his core values: lawyers do not belong in the agrarian ideal of James's America, where success is earned through hard physical work.
As James explores colonial America, the reader gradually becomes aware that the idyllic conditions of this young country are at risk as the colonial leadership bristles against the British, settlers fight for expansion on the frontier, and cities grow wealthy and cosmopolitan despite the agrarian model of the country's original English settlements. One threat to this agrarian ideal, James makes clear, is that posed by lawyers. In Letter 7, he makes an allusion to Europe's Protestant Reformation and also uses a metaphor to express his wish for a reformation against lawyers in America:
In some provinces where every inhabitant is constantly employed in tilling and cultivating the earth, they are the only members of society who have any knowledge; let these provinces attest what iniquitous use they have made of that knowledge. They are here what the clergy were in past centuries with you; the reformation which clipped the clerical wings is the boast of that age, and the happiest event that could possible happen; a reformation equally useful is now wanted to relieve us from the shameful shackles and the oppressive burthen under which we groan...
James hopes that the metaphorical legal "wings" of America's ambitious lawyers might be clipped just as those of the clergy were over the course of the Protestant Reformation. That reformation halted the relentless expansion of the Catholic Church, which threatened the livelihoods of European commoners with an indulgent system that asked believers to pay in order to find their sins forgiven. In the same way that the Protestant Reformation rejected such practices, James hopes that the lawyers might be reigned in once and for all in America. To James, the lawyer represents the antithesis of the farmer: the former is a well-educated bureaucrat who thrives on manipulating the uninformed, while the latter is an honest, hard-working laborer who makes a livelihood out of an intimate relationship with the land itself.
In Letter 9, James turns his attention to the practice of slavery in Charles Town, South Carolina (modern-day Charleston). James finds the practice utterly detestable, at least as encountered in the American South, and uses hyperbole and metaphor to better portray the horrors of slavery and the cruelty of all those who are involved in the practice.
These unfortunate creatures cry and weep like their parents, without a possibility of relief; the very instinct of the brute, so laudable, so irresistible, runs counter here to their master's interest; and to that god, all the laws of Nature must give way.
This hyperbolic and metaphorical language paints slaveholders—"masters"—as gods in their own right—to the divine will of "that god," he observes, even Nature herself must "give way." The power of slaveholders over the people that they owned was absolute to the point that they behaved as though they were godlike. Indeed, quite a few slaveholders believed that the right to own slaves was divinely ordained. James considers this attitude to be an abomination as he encounters it in Charles Town, but it is left unclear to the reader exactly what he thinks of the practice as a whole (after all, he refers to children of the enslaved as "creatures," rather than children). Notably, James goes to some length to excuse the practice of slavery in the northern colonies, which he sees as a lesser evil.
In Letter 12, James wonders about the unavoidable violence that Americans face in the tumult leading up to the Revolutionary War. Struggling to explain the difficulty of his situation, he uses a metaphor to compare the behavior of animals to the behavior of humans:
The fox flies or deceives the hounds that pursue him; the bear, when overtaken, boldly resists and attacks them; the hen, the very timid hen, fights for the preservation of her chicken, nor does she decline to attack and to meet on the wing even the swift kite. Shall man, then, provided both with instinct and reason, unmoved, unconcerned, and passive see his subsistence consumed and his progeny either ravished from him or murdered?
Wild animals, when threatened and attacked, will viciously defend themselves with as much violence as necessary. With this metaphor, James demands to know why anyone could expect any different from humankind. This is the terrible situation in which the American colonists have found themselves. With American and English aggressors stirring up conflict, anyone caught in the middle—like James himself—has no choice but to abandon their loyalties and turn their backs on former allegiances in order to ensure the safety of their family. Ultimately, James holds himself accountable only to his wife and children.
In Letter 12, James has taken a turn for the worse. Gone is the idealistic farmer from the opening letters of the novel—the chaos of pre-revolutionary America has disgruntled James and caused him to turn his attentions away from the colonies' bucolic agrarian enclaves and toward the wild American frontier. In the process, James begins to question the meaning of life itself through bleak metaphor:
What, then, is life, I ask myself; is it a gracious gift? No, it is too bitter; a gift means something valuable conferred, but life appears to be a mere accident, and of the worst kind; we are born to be victims of diseases and passions, of mischances and death; better not be than to be miserable. Thus, impiously I roam, I fly from one erratic thought to another, and my mind, irritated by these acrimonious reflections, is ready sometimes to lead me to dangerous extremes of violence.
Life, James writes with no small amount of nihilism, might appear to be a "gift," but it's nothing more than an accident—and therefore entirely meaningless. This is James at his lowest, struck by the suffering of so many people in the American colonies and the difficulty of living in what was, not so long ago, total wilderness.
By the end of the novel, James has relayed a much more ambivalent vision of colonial life than the positive, even joyful tone of the first few letters might suggest. The arrival of full-scale war to the colonies presents an existential threat to the exciting new agrarian paradise that James describes in the beginning of the book. And yet, this violent turn also helps bring the reader back to reality and to the complexity of a colonization process that has, ultimately, relied on violence to function. There is violence between settlers and the indigenous populations of the area; the Engilsh have violently reshaped the North American wilderness to suit their agrarian ideals; and the institution of slavery has inflicted deep, structural violence that enables much of the colonies' prosperity.
