By Lauren Rule Maxwell

This essay is part of The MLA Democracy Project: Essays on Teaching Democracy and Literature.

“Why should we study American literature?” is the first question I have asked my Masterpieces of American Literature students since I began teaching the course in the fall of 2008. It is a question we consider in class discussion both at the beginning and at the end of the semester. In our initial class meeting, students typically share a wide range of responses to the question—from understanding past popular culture and thought to becoming a better, more empathetic person. But the answers always include wanting to learn about how American literature projects and reflects American identity. I teach at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina; most of my students pride themselves on being patriotic and are eager to study topics associated with national identity. They approach this class with a goal of learning about what literary works can teach them about what it means to be an American, and some of the works we read directly address that theme.

The spring 2026 Masterpieces of American Literature class has a special opportunity to study literature’s relationship with American identity as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States. This course examines a range of texts from the Age of Reason and Revolution, including the Declaration of Independence and two works that aim to explain what an American is and who should become one: Benjamin Franklin’s “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America” (1784) and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782).

In our discussion of the Declaration of Independence, we note how the document outlines the universal rights of man and asserts that government is created to protect those rights, that the people consent to be governed by laws that are equitable and just, and that the people must hold the government accountable for unjust practices. We talk at great length about the phrasing of these claims, particularly the passage “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” (Levine 356). We consider these lines when analyzing “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” Franklin’s pamphlet that promotes opportunities for hard-working European immigrants to the United States. Franklin suggests that, of a fellow American, one would ask not “[w]hat IS he? but [w]hat can he DO?”¹ We discuss the “general happy Mediocrity” Franklin associates with America and more deeply consider who is included in the American citizenry Franklin describes. The third letter in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer—“What Is an American?”—directly focuses on this designation: he asks, “What then is the American, this new man?” and answers, “He is either a European, or the descendant of a European” (Levine 325), going on to explain that “[t]he American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions” (326). Crèvecoeur celebrates the “power of transplantation,” the “surprising metamorphosis” (325) that allows European immigrants to thrive and even deems America to be “the most perfect society now existing in the world” because of equal protection under the law and the industry of the people (324).

But Crèvecoeur’s ninth letter, which focuses on Charles-Town (now Charleston), South Carolina, reveals the new society’s Achilles’ heel—slavery. Because The Citadel campus resides on the banks of the Ashley River, one of the two large rivers Crèvecoeur cites at the beginning of the letter, and because the college was founded in 1842 to protect against slave rebellions, this reading has heightened relevance for our students. Crèvecoeur describes Charleston as “the richest province” of the United States, characterized by “joy, festivity, and happiness” (Levine 333) but laments that the people’s “ears by habit are become deaf, their hearts are hardened; they neither see, hear, nor feel for the woes of their poor slaves, from whose painful labors all their wealth proceeds” (334). After outlining the “horrors of slavery” (336), Crèvecoeur recounts a haunting encounter to make people see and feel its human costs. While walking in the woods of a plantation outside the city, Crèvecoeur, “suddenly arrested by the power of affright and terror,” discovers an enslaved man suspended in a cage: “I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked out his eyes, his cheek bones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places, and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds” (336). Crèvecoeur says he is “[o]ppressed” with “this dreadful scene of agonizing torture” (337), but I remind the students that he nevertheless claims that the United States has the “most perfect” society (324). Here we consider what equal protection under the law meant at the time and how the extent of that protection has changed over time, more closely representing the truths that the signees of the Declaration of Independence held “to be self-evident” (356).

I typically include one novel within this survey course. In 2025, I taught The Great Gatsby, and students presented at a local library on the enduring cultural relevance of the novel to celebrate its 100th anniversary. For the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding, I chose The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We considered what the novel contributes to our ongoing exploration of what it means to be an American, how it relates to conversations about US citizenship, and what it suggests about the power of writing. Students wrote blue book essays about these topics and the controversies around the novel itself, including why this book has been banned, and whether it should be. At the end of the semester, we’ll return to our overarching course question, reflecting on what we have learned by studying American literature and discussing why it is important to do so.

Note

1. Quotations of Franklin not attributed to Levine are available online: founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-41-02-0391.

Work Cited

Levine, Robert S., editor. The Norton Anthology of American Literature: Volume 1: Beginnings to 1865. W. W. Norton, 2017.

Lauren Rule Maxwell is professor of English and director of the Distinguished Scholars Program at The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina.