St John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Paine: Two Voices and One Common Goal

This paper compares Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Voyage dans la Haute Pennsylvanie et dans l’État de New York (1801) with Thomas Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1797) and other political writings in order to examine two competing visions of social welfare in the early American republic. Although both writers are concerned with the condition of ordinary people and seek mechanisms capable of alleviating poverty and insecurity, they differ fundamentally in their understanding of rights, government, and social obligations. On the one hand, Crèvecoeur famously celebrated America as a new society in which individuals could be reborn. His fictionalised America is a land where one of the main characters, Mr Herman, claims: “Suddenly I feel myself a new man” and where “Property, Protection, Justice” form the foundations of civic life (Crèvecoeur, Voyage 30; 40). Despite the novelty of his ideology, his conception of welfare remains rooted in typical eighteenth century British and European frameworks. Central to this vision are charters, which he describes as “inviolable” and “sacred,” and voluntary associations that unite private citizens for charitable purposes (Crèvecoeur, Voyage 524). For Crèvecoeur, social welfare emerges, and is controlled, exclusively by the people: individuals pool resources into “common funds” that become “an inexhaustible treasury of aid to help the needy and ease the weight of the miseries of life” (Crèvecoeur, Voyage 529). As the governing principle is charity, there is no state involvement. Paine, on the other hand, transforms this language of privately-organised assistance into a radically different political project, one that rejects individual charity and favours a government-led effort. Rejecting the very logic of charters, he insists that “it is a perversion of terms to say, that a charter gives rights” and claims instead that every person is born with inviolable rights which are not concessions granted by sovereign authorities (Paine, Rights of Man 274). Likewise, relief for the poor cannot depend on voluntary benevolence. In Agrarian Justice, Paine repeatedly insists that “it is not charity but a right–not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for” (6). Poverty is a product of civilisation itself and therefore requires collective redress through institutions acting on behalf of the whole community. While Crèvecoeur is renowned for his claim that America had created “the American, this new man”, Paine reconfirms himself as having had a truly revolutionary voice by claiming that social welfare should be structured on justice for all and not on the bounty of single individuals (Letters, 32). By placing Crèvecoeur’s politics of sentimentalism and compassion alongside Paine’s revolutionary politics of rights for all and justice, this essay argues that Paine represents a decisive break from inherited feudal and monarchical traditions. Whereas Crèvecoeur imagined a new people within familiar structures, Paine envisioned a genuinely new social order grounded in equality and social justice.