Letters from an American Farmer is not only a semi-biographical account of the agricultural experience of American colonial settlers—it is also a seminal work of American myth-making. As should be expected for such a novel, St. John de Crèvecoeur is prone to the occasional rhetorical flourish that raises his narrative to the grandiosity of myth. In Letter 1, he uses personification and allusion to do just this:
Here Nature opens her broad lap to receive the perpetual accession of newcomers and to supply them with food. I am sure I cannot be called a partial American when I say that the spectacle afforded by these pleasing scenes must be more entertaining and more philosophical than that which arises from beholding the musty ruins of Rome.
In this passage, de Crèvecoeur personifies the land itself as Nature, a living deity in the manner of classical bucolic poetry. He describes how well the land can take care of the settlers in terms of Nature generously opening her "broad lap" to grant her bounty.
He then invokes Ancient Rome and alludes to the prevailing obsession with classical civilization among the educated elite of England. Surely, in James's opinion, what is happening in the American colonies—the birth of a new civilization—must be infinitely more exciting and important than the prevailing European obsession with the detritus and ruin of Rome.
De Crèvecoeur's writing style draws unmistakable influence from georgic literature, a loose genre of pastoral writing pioneered by the Roman poet Virgil in the Georgics, who himself drew heavily on the Idylls of the Greek poet Theocritus. Nonetheless, he dismisses the idle worship of classical culture and civilization that was a hallmark of Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. Instead, this personification of Nature hints at James's belief in the powers of nature and of human agency rather than those of some omnipotent divine being. De Crèvecoeur's deism is extremely influential on his vision of the American colonial relationship between settlers and their newly claimed land.
At the end of Letter 9, after a letter spent exploring colonial Charles Town, South Carolina and explaining the institution of chattel slavery in the Southern colonies, James is confronted with the horrors of slavery firsthand. He comes across an enslaved man trapped in a cage in the forest, left to die as punishment for killing the overseer at the plantation where the man had worked. To capture the full power of this scene, de Crèvecoeur laces his language with personification, hyperbole, and pathos:
The living spectre, though deprived of his eyes, could still distinctly hear, and in his uncouth dialect begged me to give him some water to allay his thirst. Humanity herself would have recoiled back with horror; she would have balanced whether to lessen such reliefless distress or mercifully with one blow to end this dreadful scene of agonizing torture!
First, to appeal to the reader's sympathy, de Crèvecoeur personifies the whole of humanity as an individual woman: faced with a scene this horrific, even Humanity, the arbiter of mercy, would have wondered whether to end the man's life and relieve him of this agony. This awful deliberation and the description of the man as a phantom-like "living spectre" are both examples of hyperbole that de Crèvecoeur uses to further stoke the emotional appeal (pathos) of the scene. As such, the passage reads as an explicit plea with the reader to stand against the practice of slavery.
