`What is an American?`

What is an American

Various celebrated the American Constitution by noting that forms of government are generally the result of violence , deception , or fate . During the more than six thousand years since the creation of humankind , the United States presented the first example of a nation where the people had decided , without being attacked by an external enemy and without being shaken by domestic revolts , on a new system of government under which they and their descendants could live peacefully (Commager , 189

The Americans were , as John Jay said

The first

people to have been favored by heaven with the opportunity to choose and discuss the form of government under which they wanted to live all other constitutions owed their existence to power or fate (John Jay ,182

During the Revolution Americans took up the old Puritan missionary zeal again , the idea of being "a Citty upon a Hill " emphasizing the uniqueness of the American anticolonial revolts . A further progressive quality of the American Revolution manifested itself in the creation of the "new people " of the first new nation "the Americans " who no longer regarded themselves primarily as New Yorkers or Virginians , but developed a new feeling of belonging that extended beyond provincial boundaries , transcending not just the old political and geographic bs that had existed until that time , but , increasingly , ethnic and religious barriers as well , on the way to a new "American " identity and a new society of the homogeneous "melting pot

The frontier had been a force in American life since the coming of the first settlers , but except in the earliest period it had played only a small role in American literature . Hector St .Jean de Crivec ?ur was one of the few eighteenth-century to picture the life of men on the fringe of civilization . He was born in France , of a good family , in 1735 , and had come to Canada to fight under Montcalm . From Canada his wanderings led him deep into the wilderness and along most of the Eastern seaboard . Finally , in 1765 , he became an American citizen a few years later he married and settled as a farmer in New York . The Revolution , however , broke the serenity of his country life , and in 1780 he returned alone to France . Once the war was concluded he returned to America , to find that his home had been sacked , his children captured but recovered from the Indians , and that his wife was dead . For a time he acted as the French consul in New York City , but in 1790 he left America for his homeland , where he died twenty-three years afterward

His first book , Letters from an American Farmer , was published in London in 1782 the second of importance , Sketches of Eighteenth Century America ( New Haven , 1925 , was printed from manuscripts found long after his death 'What is an American ' is eloquent pamphleteering , but his chief ability as a writer is shown in his essays on frontier life

Crivecoeur 's praises of the civilizing...