The Contrasting Attitudes Toward Freedom Held by J. Hector St. John De Crèvecoeur and Phillis Wheatley Lucy White College

Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and Phillis Wheatley’s poems exemplify vastly different attitudes toward freedom from contemporaries within the British colonies. Crèvecoeur defines freedom most simply as owning land, because owning land allows men to eventually achieve success through hard work, without being impeded by tyranny from a monarch, a landlord, or the church. It is harder to pinpoint Wheatley’s exact definition of freedom. In one of her poems, “to the Right Honorable William, Earl of Dartmouth,” Wheatley describes tyranny as enslaving those who live in the colonies, showing how she not only considers freedom as emancipation from slavery, but how, like Crèvecoeur, she believes freedom is compromised by tyranny. But despite being a slave in colonies riddled with tyranny, Wheatley most often and most significantly describes freedom in the context of religion, freedom from a life without God, and freedom from sin.

Crèvecoeur often implies that “America” is synonymous with “freedom.” Europe is a land of great restrictions. Everything that makes American society different from European society is everything that makes Americans free. To Crèvecoeur embodiment of freedom in America is land ownership. Land...