Rhetorical Analysis Of Letters From An American Farmer

Letters from an American Farmer Rhetorical Analysis The movement of human beings has been a major part of the world for thousands of years. Whether it is the conquistadors who explored South America or the Africans who were brought to the United States, migration has played an important role in the world as we know it today. America was built solely by immigrants and in his 1782 collection of essays, Letters from an American Farmer, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur defines what it truly means to be an American by explaining the push and pull factors that caused Europeans to leave their home countries and what exactly this resulted in. Crèvecoeur introduces his definition of an American by first explaining why the immigrants left their
His use of the question “What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country where he had nothing?” provokes empathy from the reader, thus building on pathos. He states that these individuals now consider America their country and in order to support this idea, he alludes to the emigrants’ motto, “Ubi panis ibi patri,” or “Where there is bread, there is the homeland.” Furthermore, the author defines an American as a human mixed from many different nationalities and subsequently many immigrants, but he says this in a way that creates even more imagery with the description of “a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and who present four sons have now four wives of different nations,” thus allowing the audience to imagine the entire family and how different each member is from the others. Lastly, Crèvecoeur utilizes this imagery to transfer into the idea that he foreshadowed earlier in the passage, which is that Americans are the immigrants who helped shape the country and that these immigrants personify “one of the finest systems of