Paradise and the Noble Savage in Jeffersonian Thought

vision, a mythic ordering of reality. Though his conceptualization might have had impressive affinities to agricultural life in the American colonies, it probably had little to do with how the Indian really lived. Just as the primitivist convention presented an unreal idealization of savage existence, so also did the pastoral garden. The Farmer and the Indian were portrayed as nicely synchronized with the natural condition; their style of life was relatively simple, and they had acquired only a small complement of artificial desires. Similarly, as the paradisaic ideal was progressive, the pastoral vision offered a satisfactory consummation for the deepest yearnings of the human spirit. In one sense the Farmer fled to it, away from a world that was pressing him closely with violence. Just so the utopian urge had impelled men to leave the imperfections of civilization in search of paradise. It was a primitivistic optimism, so easily transposed into a utopian future, that gave to the middling landscape its aura of unfolding perfectionism. There were also mundane implications to the pastoral convention. Without denying its perfectionist flavor, it had the stamp of common sense meliorism. Jefferson, after all, and many of his generation, believed that the yeoman farmer, living in a setting very close to the pastoral ideal, was the very best of men. They wanted the new nation to use its ample resources to create the middling social condition. The Indian, it seemed, 83 Cravecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, 300-30L. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Mon, 20 Jun 2016 05:46:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 342 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY already possessed many of the needed virtues to spend his days in the uncluttered tranquility of the American garden. Skeptical of the possibility of educating the Indian outside of his native element and conscious always that there were important differences between white and native, Crevecoeur did think that the two races would inevitably mix and he wanted to encourage the Indian to a further adoption of agriculture.34 There was no doubt that progress included the Indian and with the pastoral convention he possessed unique qualifications to take his part

Jeffersonian democracy · Paradise · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American Environmental and Regional History · American History and Culture

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