It has been a few years since I have taught an American literature course from colonialism to 1865. This semester, I am doing just that, and I am again thinking about the ways that I structure this course. I have always organized this course, and others, around conversations, taking Kenneth Burke’s “parlor metaphor” to heart that conversations continue onwards, ceaselessly, even when participants leave. We need only look at David Walker’s responses to Thomas Jefferson three years after the latter’s death as an example. I’ve written about my process before in “Excavating the Roots Beneath Our Feet in the Early American Survey Course,” but since it has been a few years since I have taught this course, I rewrote the course description. You can read it below.

Course Overview:

In his Letters from an American Farmer, Jean Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, who wrote the fictional correspondence between a fictional farmer in America and an English gentleman, asks, “What is an American?” He proclaimed that “individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men” in America, forming a new culture. He continues by stating, “He is either a European or the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a man whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations.”

The words of de Crèvecoeur’s narrator echo Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the colonies’ desire to form their own country free of British control, when he wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We know these words by heart, and we these ideals sit within our breasts, reminding us of the ideals of the nation. However, when de Crèvecoeur and Jefferson define an American, who, actually, do they define as an American?

This question and the debates surrounding it weren’t new in 1776 when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and it wasn’t new in 1861 at the outset of the Civil War. During the drafting of the Declaration at the Second Continental Congress in 1776, this question took center stage when the delegates voted to remove an entire section referencing the enslavement of Blacks. In his autobiography, Jefferson wrote, “The clause, too, reprobating the enslaving of inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who, on the contrary, still wished to continue it.” Even some Northern delegates, Jefferson writes, wanted the clause removed because even though they enslaved less individuals, enslavement was still legal in much of the North.

Likewise, Abigail Adams wrote, in March 1776, to her husband and the second President of the United States John Adams about the proceedings of the Second Continental Congress. She implored him to “[r]emember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” John laughs at his wife, telling her that the struggle for independence has caused various groups from Indigenous individuals, enslaved individuals, children, and apprentices to call for their freedom, and he, along with the others at the congress, cannot abide these insurrections because it would mean relinquishing their power and, he continues, “we know better than to repeal our masculine systems.”

Later, at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, the group of 68 women and 32 men drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, rewriting the Declaration of Independence that, as Frederick Douglass put it, was a “grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rights of women.” Likewise, David Walker, in his 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World questioned whether or not “all men” referred to African Americans and the enslaved. He asks his readers to look at the language in the Declaration of Independence and compare it “with your cruelties and murders inflicted by your cruel and unmerciful fathers and yourselves on our fathers and on us — men who have never given your fathers or you the least provocation!!!!!!” The Cherokee Nation, in 1829 as they fought to stave off Removal, implored the United States government to consider how their “right to self-government was affected and destroyed by the Declaration of Independence, which has never noticed the subject of Cherokee sovereignty.”

The question that de Crèvecoeur asked in his 1782 book, a year before the United States officialy became a nation, has existed, in some form, from colonization to the present. Debates over this question have raged, for over four centuries, dating back the Pilgrims’ William Bradford and adventurer Thomas Morton to Mary Rowlandson and Pokanoket chief Metacom to Thomas Jefferson and David Walker to Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth to Daniel Webster and William Apess. Over the course of this semester, we will look at various genres of literature from diaries and memoirs to poetry and short stories to polemical writings on government to philosophical essays. These readings will all, in some manner, address the question, “What is an American?”

While you may expect this course to follow a chornological approach to a course such as this, we will conduct the course in a more thematic manner, looking at various individuals in conversation with one another. For instance, David Walker directly addresses Thomas Jefferson, so will look at these two writers, even though Jefferson died three years before Walker’s Appeal appeared in print, in conversation with one another. We will think about writers not as individuals but as part of a wide tapestry of ideas, in communication with one another rather than existing in solitude. All the while, we will bear in mind the words of the “Father of the Constitution” and the fourth President of the United States James Madison who said, “Liberty & Learning lean on each other for their mutual and surest support.”

What texts would you add? What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.