Crèvecoeur also insisted that the frontier of an abundant continent invited a selfishness that perverted society. Too much freedom and too easy a subsistence threatened to barbarize the newcomers rather than redeem them. Aside from coastal Nantucket, Crèvecoeur located his ideal America in “the middle settlements”: the broad, agricultural zone between the older and more commercialized seacoast towns to the east and the raw new settlements to the west. That western frontier provided a haven for the drunken, the indolent, and the vicious to indulge in “the unlimited freedom of the woods.” Cursed with an easy abundance, the settlers allegedly could survive without hard work or banding together: “There, remote from the power of example and check of shame, many families exhibit the most hideous parts of our society.” He concluded: “They are often in a perfect state of war; that of man against man.... There men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them.”
In his early and optimistic letters, Crèvecoeur predicts that society ultimately will triumph over barbarism on the frontier, as proper farmers migrate westward to introduce true social bonds. The advent of respectable people compels the vicious early settlers to embrace civilization or to “recede still farther” west, “making room for the more industrious people.” He concludes that “thus are our first steps trodden, thus are our first trees felled, in general, by the most vicious of our people; and thus the path is opened for the arrival of a second and better class, the true American freeholders, the most respectable set of people in this part of the world.”
But the American Revolution soured Crèvecoeur’s optimism, as he discovered how readily people could dissolve the mutual bonds of society to indulge in violent retribution. During the war, passions suddenly erupted to silence reason and dissolve sociability, dividing communities and families. “How easily do men pass from loving to hating and cursing one another!” Prospering under British rule, Crèvecoeur saw no grounds for severing the imperial connection and thereby plunging the colonies into a brutal civil war between the Patriots and the Loyalists. His narrator felt “divided between the respect I feel for the ancient connection and the fear of innovations ... embraced by my own countrymen. I am conscious that I was happy before this unfortunate revolution. I feel that I am no longer so; therefore I regret the change.”