In Letter 1 of Letters from an American Farmer, when helping to convince James to write letters to his elite, educated friend Mr. F. B. in England, the minister uses a beautiful simile to describe the process by which he gained his spiritual education:
I observed when I first entered into the ministry and began to preach the word, I felt perplexed and dry, my mind was like unto a parched soil, which produced nothing, not even weeds. By the blessing of heaven and my perseverance in study I grew richer in thoughts, phrases, and words; I felt copious, and now I can abundantly preach from any text that occurs to my mind.
By this simile, the process of learning and intellectual growth is like tilling one's own field and cultivating it once it has sprouted—the field of one's brain becomes capable of producing many goods when it is taken care of and nourished.
Throughout Letters, de Crèvecoeur highly valorizes hard work and the material and moral benefits that it can bring the agrarian settlers in the American colonies. This passage equates the outcome of that hard work with the outcome of hard study. It suggests that if James can only put his pen to paper with the dedication that he has brought to his farm in Pennsylvania, he will begin to see similar rewards to those that the minister has seen. As if to prove its significance not just as a type of labor but as an ideology unto itself, de Crèvecoeur uses farming as a simile and a metaphor for every thinkable aspect of colonial life over the course of Letters.
In Letter 1, James talks to his wife and the minister about James's impending correspondence with Mr. F. B. While James himself is uncertain of his writing ability, the minister speaks in florid, device-laden language that emphasizes his own learnedness. In the following passage, he uses a simile to describe James:
But perhaps you will be a more entertaining one dressed in your simple American garb than if you were clad in all the gowns of Cambridge. You will appear to him something like one of our wild American plants, irregularly luxuriant in its various branches, which an European scholar may probably think ill-placed and useless. If our soil is not remarkable as yet for the excellence of its fruits, this exuberance is, however, a strong proof of fertility, which wants nothing but the progressive knowledge acquired by time to amend and to correct.
By making a figurative comparison between an unusual, indigenous North American plant and James himself, the minister establishes that James has the benefit of a certain exoticism when writing to Mr. F. B.—coming as he does from the colonies. An unusual (and lush) American plant would be fascinating for a European audience. It would also serve as "proof" that the colonies are fertile and therefore have the potential to be great, even if they—like James—have much more room to grow.
In striking this simile, de Crèvecoeur establishes a parallel between the exciting agricultural society springing up around James in the colonies and James's own writing project. Letters from an American Farmer contains many such passages that tie James's intellectual ambition as an author with the reality of his vocation as a farmer. De Crèvecoeur insists that these two very different forms of labor are complementary—and, furthermore, that James's tale is worth reading because of his perspective as a farmer.
In Letter 1, the minister tries to convince James that he is worthy of writing his letters to Mr. F. B. despite his comparable lack of education and status. The cornerstone of the minister's argument rests on James's unique perspective as an American farmer—a perspective that no European elite could synthesize on their own, no matter how educated. Fittingly, the minister uses a farming simile to emphasize the importance of sticking to the difficult work of writing once begun:
When you have once begun, do as when you begin breaking up your summer fallow; you never consider what remains to be done, you view only what you have ploughed.
Just as he does when he plows, James should only keep in mind what he has written as he works on his letters—he must disregard how great the work is that has yet to be done.
On one level, this simile demonstrates the minister's rhetorical skill: he knows that James has little experience with writing, and adjusts his language to communicate with the farmer in terminology that will be familiar to him. On another level, however, de Crèvecoeur is setting up the power of farming as a metaphor through this equivalence between the process of plowing and the process of writing, and this comprison will persist through the rest of the novel. If America is (or is growing into) an idealistic society based on agrarian principles, then everything about American society should be explained in terms of farming—literally or figuratively.
In Letter 2, James describes his life and work on his family farm in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As he explores the livestock on the farm, and his practice of animal husbandry, he uses a simile to explain how he speaks to his cattle:
The same spirit prevails in the stable; but there I have to do with with more generous animals, there my well-known voice has immediate influence and soon restores peace and tranquillity. Thus, by superior knowledge I govern all my cattle, as wise men are obliged to govern fools and the ignorant.
Like a politician preaching to the "ignorant" masses, James's voice calms his herd. With this simile, de Crèvecoeur has compared James's command of his cattle to the practice of government itself. He makes the case that humans' relationship to agriculture and livestock is a microcosm for their relationship to one another within a structures of government: the educated are "obliged" to govern the uneducated in the same way that James must guide and "govern" his cattle.
To de Crèvecoeur, farming is a foundational building block of civilization—and, therefore, James's relationship to nature and the land fundamentally informs how he conceives of larger sociopolitical structures in early American life. To James, the freedom to farm and support oneself and one's family with the product of one's own labor is an essential component of the growing success of this new American colonial experiment.
In Letter 4, James describes Nantucket and the thriving community of American colonists who have settled on the island. Using a combination of simile and allusion, he expounds on the conditions in which he believes humanity can best flourish—conditions he believes he has found on Nantucket:
Give mankind the full rewards of their industry, allow them to enjoy the fruit of their labour under the peaceable shade of their vines and fig-trees, leave their native activity unshackled and free, like a fair stream without dams or other obstacles; the first will fertilize the very sand on which they tread, the other exhibit a navigable river, spreading plenty and cheerfulness wherever the declivity of the ground leads it.
The "vine and fig tree" is an allusion to a recurring image in Hebrew scripture and a favorite image of George Washington himself. The farmer basking in the shade of their own tree became a symbol of the American ideal—and this passage is James's explanation of that very ideal, packaged in a larger simile: let a river run its own course (give the American people the freedom to do what they will), and it will fertilize the ground on its own terms and grow into a wonderful unimpeded river that runs throughout the land (the American people will grow this new country, unimpeded, fueled by the "fruits of their labour." Even the cliché phrase "fruits of their labour" is perfect for James's larger argument in Letters: everything is good in a society based on small farms run by local farmers, when the fruits of labor are literally fruit or other crops.
In Letter 9, James describes the brutal reality of Southern chattel slavery. Using a simile, he compares the treatment of enslaved people to the treatment of livestock, describing how enslaved Africans are brought to a market to be bought and sold:
There, arranged like horses at a fair, they are branded like cattle and then driven to toil, to starve, and to languish for a few years on the different plantations of these citizens.
This dehumanizing simile, comparing the enslaved people to horses and cattle, emphasizes the horrible quality of life that enslaved people endured in the South. However, it may also help to distance James from these atrocities by avoiding consideration of these people's humanity.
Letter 9 is a turning point in Letters from an American Farmer. It is here that the tone of the novel shifts away from the optimism of the James's initial letters, and it is here where the reader begins to get a better sense of James's conflicted attitude toward slavery. Although he is unsparing in his description of southern slavery, he does not appear to reconcile his disgust over the practice with the fact that slavery is practiced abundantly in the northern colonies.
