AP U.S. History 3.11: Developing an American Identity

National identity is a people's sense of who they are as a nation. Colonists called themselves British subjects and Virginians or New Yorkers. Even before independence was won, some writers began to describe a single American people.

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's Letters From an American Farmer was published in London in 1782, written for a friend in England. It describes the British colonies in North America, mostly as they were before the war. In Letter III he asked "What then is the American, this new man?" and answered:

Being American, in this telling, is something a person becomes. It comes from a way of life, not from ancestry. The government he means is the government of the colonies, which he says rests on the people and is confirmed by the crown, not the government of an independent nation.

Read his definition for who it includes. He writes that the American "is either an European, or the descendant of an European." Enslaved Africans and American Indians, who also lived in the new nation, are not in his new man at all. A national identity was taking shape, but it was drawn narrowly.

A national culture is the set of ideas, habits and symbols that people across a whole country share. It grew in these years, but it grew next to regional variation: differences between parts of the country that did not go away.

Crevecoeur himself saw them. "The eastern provinces must indeed be excepted, as being the unmixed descendants of Englishmen." Describing Charles-Town in South Carolina, he found "a display of riches and luxury, inferior indeed to the former, but far superior to what are to be seen in our northern towns."

In 1796 George Washington's Farewell Address asked Americans to put their shared name first: "The name of American, which belongs to you in your national capacity, must always exalt the just pride of patriotism more than any appellation derived from local discriminations." An appellation is a name; local discriminations are local lines of division. Yet the same address warned that "it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western." The sentence goes on: "whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views." He blames party men for exaggerating these differences, and a president urging unity had reason to play them down. Still, the warning shows parties were being identified with regions, and he feared it.

Sources: Letter III (Avalon Project); Letter IX (Avalon Project); Farewell Address (Avalon Project).

Ideas about national identity increasingly found expression in works of art, literature and architecture. Crevecoeur's book is itself one: literature written to explain Americans to a reader in England.

Thomas Jefferson wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781 and enlarged it in 1782, answering questions from a foreigner living in America. He offered it to the public in its original form in 1787. In one passage he answers the Abbe Raynal, a European writer who applied to Europeans in America a theory that nature made living things smaller and weaker on this side of the Atlantic. Jefferson quotes the charge: "America has not yet produced one good poet."

His reply turns American talent into national pride. "In war we have produced a Washington." "In physics we have produced a Franklin." Then he widens the claim to the arts: "As in philosophy and war, so in government, in oratory, in painting, in the plastic art, we might shew that America, though but a child of yesterday, has already given hopeful proofs of genius" (spelling as printed). The plastic art means sculpture and modeling.

Notice the shape of the argument. Jefferson admits the nation is young. He claims its people can match Europe's anyway. Art and learning had become a measure of whether America counted as a nation.

Source: Notes on the State of Virginia (Avalon Project).

Architecture was part of the same argument. In the Notes, Jefferson judged the buildings of Virginia and found them poor: "The genius of architecture seems to have shed its maledictions over this land." (Maledictions are curses.) He complained that "the first principles of the art are unknown, and there exists scarcely a model among us sufficiently chaste to give an idea of them."

He measured buildings against the classical orders, the standard column styles of ancient Greek and Roman building. Of the Capitol at Williamsburg, the old seat of Virginia's government, he wrote that "it is the most pleasing piece of architecture we have," while faulting its columns and proportions.

He did not stop at complaint. He hoped teaching at the college might mean that "perhaps a spark may fall on some young subjects of natural taste, kindle up their genius, and produce a reformation in this elegant and useful art."

His subject here is Virginia, but his standard was Europe's classical one. Like his answer to Raynal, the passage treats buildings as a public test of a people's culture, one he wanted Americans to pass.

Source: Notes on the State of Virginia (Avalon Project).