Bonds of Citizenship. Hoang Gia Phan
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dwell contiguous to each other, they immediately erect a temple, and there worship the Divinity according to their own peculiar ideas.…[They] are at liberty to make proselytes if they can…and to follow the dictates of their conscience; for neither the government nor any other power interferes. If they are peaceable subjects, and are industrious, what is it to their neighbors how and in what manner they think fit to address their prayers to the Supreme Being? But if the sectaries are not settled close together, if they are mixed with other denominations, their zeal will cool for want of fuel, and will be extinguished in a little time. Then the Americans become, as to religion what they are as to country, allied to all. In them the name of Englishman, Frenchman, and European, is lost, and, in like manner, the strict modes of Christianity, as practiced in Europe, are lost also. (48, emphasis added)
It is in this analogy, between the waning of religious sectarianism and the transformation of the “man without a country” into “an American,” that Crèvecœur introduces the split subject of this “new man,” the American citizen. Crèvecœur develops here the eighteenth-century view of religious belief as the primary index of the subject’s individual personhood, distinct from the abstract legal-formal person of the citizen. The particularity of religious belief (a sect’s “own peculiar ideas”) is considered not only distinct from but entirely irrelevant to the civic life of the community: “If they are peaceable subjects, and are industrious,” how they pray does not matter to their neighbors. Crèvecœur’s analogy uses religion as the site of all things considered “private,” as opposed to the public sites of the political (“peaceable subjects”) and the economic (“industrious”). As we have seen, this opposition would be codified in the U.S. Constitution itself. And throughout The Federalist Papers, religion is explicitly compared to private interests and inner passions, and the proliferation of political factions is likened to the proliferation of religious sects.42
It is in the context of this division between private religion and public political-economic life that Crèvecœur introduces his figure for the split subject of citizenship, and the related trope of “visible character”:
Next to [the Catholic and the German Lutheran] lives a Seceder, the most enthusiastic of all sectaries; his zeal is hot and fiery; but, separated as he is from others of the same complexion, he has no congregation, where he might cabal and mingle religious pride with worldly obstinacy. He likewise raises good crops, his house is handsomely painted, his orchard is one of the fairest in the neighborhood. How does it concern the welfare of the country, or of the province at large, what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good, citizen.…This is the visible character; the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business.…Thus all sects are mixed as well as all nations. Thus religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other. (49–50)
Reiterating his claims regarding the community’s “indifference” to the “peculiar ideas” of a particular sect, Crèvecœur makes explicit the role of religion as structural placeholder of the private, and underscores the split within the individual subject of citizenship, between the “invisible character” of the private person and the “visible character” of the public citizen. While the passage “from a servant, to the rank of a master” (Letters 58–59) structures the economic narrative of assimilation (or “incorporation”), its completion is marked not by any detectable transformation of the individual’s inner character, but rather solely through the successes of “visible character,” the outward signs of good citizenship. Whereas “incorporation” names the process of civic assimilation, whose ideal fulfillment is epitomized by Andrew the Hebridean, the dependent indentured servant become independent propertied citizen, “visible character” names a state of social being within this ideal process of assimilation, mediating the social recognition of its successful completion. The political-economic basis of this civic identity is underscored at the end of Letter III: the history of Andrew as epitome of the American closes with a ledger “account of the property he acquired with his own hands and those of his son,” in “Pennsylvania currency.—Dollars” (Letters 82).
If in Crèvecœur’s Letters the “visible character” of good citizenship takes the form of material prosperity (his crops, house, orchard), the success of such “incorporation” into citizenship is also marked by another type of “character.” When Farmer James greets Andrew the Hebridean at the dock and asks him his plans, Andrew, still fresh off the boat bringing servants to America, replies:
I do not know, Sir; I am but an ignorant man, a stranger besides:—I must rely on the advice of good Christians.…I have brought with me a character from our Barra minister, can it do me any good here? [To which Farmer James replies] Oh, yes; but your future success will depend entirely on your own conduct; if you are a sober man, as the certificate says, laborious and honest, there is no fear but that you will do well. (73)
One of the popular eighteenth-century uses of “character” was “to indicate reputation (including the formal giving of a character, a character reference as we would now say).”43 In the eighteenth century, “character” was itself a document one could obtain, whose text would attest to the merits of an otherwise invisible because internalized possession. This character was “an outward sign,” but one signifying the “inner character” of relatively fixed traits; and the bearer of the document was likewise considered an individual shaped by external forces.44It is in this latter sense that “character” converges with what Pierre Bourdieu has described as “social capital.”45Because Andrew is a “stranger” not yet assimilated into the community of citizens in Pennsylvania, he does not possess that socially “visible character” of a reputation for industry and sobriety (like the “good name” left to Farmer James by his father), and so must rely instead on another outward sign of his inner self, the written document from a legitimating authority, his Barra minister. Here “character” is nothing less than embodied social capital, which Andrew can then build upon, through his own industry and performance of its claims, to accumulate economic capital.
Following the formal logic of the split subject of citizenship—the division between “visible character” and “invisible character”—the transformation of the social capital of this written character into direct economic capital is likewise marked by a series of texts as “outward sign[s].”46 After reading Andrew’s textual “character,” Farmer James decides to assist in Andrew’s “metamorphosis.” After Andrew has “served a short apprenticeship at [Farmer James’] house,” (Letters 74), Farmer James himself provides him with yet another character reference: “I went to Mr. A. V. in the county of——. . . I gave him a faithful detail of the progress Andrew had made in the rural arts; of his honesty, sobriety, and gratitude; and pressed him to sell him a hundred acres” (77), to which Mr. A. V. responds: “Well, honest Andrew,…in consideration of your good name, I will let you have a hundred acres of good arable land” (78). Significant to our understanding of the development of the representations of “character” in American literature is that the “character” written by Crèvecœur’s Farmer James in the pages of Letter III is a supplementary text which displaces that initial “character” written by Andrew’s Barra minister. Andrew’s minister, a legitimating authority from his old world, had provided Andrew with his initial character, yet it is the respected citizen of his new world, Farmer James, who functions as the legitimating authority necessary to Andrew’s accumulation of greater economic capital. From these two visible (because textual) characters, Andrew then obtains yet another document, a “lease” securing his property. As Mr. A. V. informs Andrew, still ignorant of such legal terms, “If ever you are dissatisfied with the land, a jury of your own neighborhood shall value all your improvements, and you shall be paid agreeably to their verdict” (78–79).
Crèvecœur closes this narration of the translation of “character” into lease, of “good name” into freehold property, with a discussion of the ways in which the terms for the attributes of free, independent personhood converge with the language of the economic. After Andrew tells them he “know[s] nothing of what [they] mean about lease, improvement, will, jury, &c,” Farmer James reflects: “[Those]