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4

Tocqueville’s Journey into America

JEREMY JENNINGS

All Tocqueville scholars are familiar with Garry Wills’s charge that Tocqueville did not “get” America.1 “A fact usually omitted in discussions of Tocqueville,” Wills contends, “is the shallow empirical basis of his study.” “It is,” he continues, “as if [Tocqueville] ghosted his way directly into the American spirit, bypassing the body of the nation.” In Tocqueville’s account, Wills further reminds us, there is virtually nothing about American capitalism, manufactures, banking, or technology. During their nine months in America, Tocqueville and his companion Gustave de Beaumont spent around two months “narrowly focused on prison life.” In addition, they devoted time on trips “only remotely connected, or not connected at all, with what went into Democracy.” These included a trip to Lower Canada, where, as Tocqueville wrote to the Abbé Lesueur, “we felt as if we were at home, and everywhere we were received like compatriots,”2 and the now-famous “Two Weeks in the Wilderness,” where he and Beaumont saw only “the still empty cradle of a great nation.”3 Most of the remaining seven months, Wills tells us, were spent in the North, where “almost all of Democracy’s conclusions” were “formed while Tocqueville was fresh in the country and seemed particularly impressionable.” Wills further contends that Tocqueville was also extremely selective—not to say snobbish—about those with

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whom he chose to converse, showing little interest in “ordinary people.”4 Wills is likewise less than charitable in his assessment of the impact of these meetings with the superior minds of the East Coast. “Tocqueville,” he writes, “took many of his views from the last remnants of the Federalists, who supplied him with what he thought necessary to democracy, a moderating counter to extreme egalitarianism.” Accordingly, Wills affirms, Tocqueville “parroted” the views of the Federalists in his “scathing” comments on Andrew Jackson and upon populist leaders such as Sam Houston and Davy Crockett. The implication of Wills’s comments is that not only were these views of dubious worth—damned, as they were, by their lofty social origin—but also Tocqueville would have discovered an altogether different America had he chosen occasionally to mix with his social inferiors.

The criticism does not cease there. “In his erratic traversing of the country,” Wills writes, “what Tocqueville did not see is often more interesting than what he did.” Tocqueville, it seems, never visited a New England town meeting. He never saw an American university. He made no efforts to become familiar with American intellectual life. The only state capital he visited was Albany.5 His journey through the South to New Orleans was hasty in the extreme and diminished as a source of potential information by Tocqueville’s debilitating illness.

The conclusion is clear. Tocqueville “would probably not have benefited by a longer stay in America.” His ideas were formed upon the basis of first encounters and rarely changed afterward. He had a propensity to form “instant judgments.” He “concluded things about America because of the prejudices he brought with him from France.” He was not seeking to write “an objective account of what he saw in America.” His pronouncements were made “de haut en bas.” The whole book, like

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Tocqueville’s work in general, was characterized by “the taste for grand simplification.”

The surprise is that these conclusions find an echo in what would normally be regarded among Tocqueville scholars as a friendly source, namely, George Wilson Pierson’s reconstruction of Tocqueville’s stay in America. At the end of his magisterial volume, Pierson devoted a set of four chapters to a consideration of the overall character of Tocqueville’s achievement.6 Let us first be clear that Pierson was of the opinion that Tocqueville drew “some useful conclusions” from his American experiences. In particular, Pierson wrote, Tocqueville saw that “there seemed to exist in the United States certain habits, certain institutional practices, that increased the good effects obtainable from self-government at the same time that they mitigated or even altogether eliminated the dangers inherent in mass control.”7 Second, Pierson acknowledged that Tocqueville “had carried some prejudices to America,” but he countered this by asserting that “the Americans themselves had again and again supplied the corroborating information.” To take but one example, Tocqueville no longer saw the Native American “through the romantic haze of a tale by Chateaubriand, but in terms of personal contact and experience.”8

Yet Pierson did not seek to disguise or hide the “defects” to be found in Democracy in America. Of these, Pierson suggested, the principal deficiency was to be found in Tocqueville’s philosophical method. Tocqueville was “neither a historian nor a scientist but a philosopher, and a philosopher whose concepts and whose habits were not well calculated, if he wanted, rigorously, to find the truth.” It was this, Pierson concluded, that “injected into his classic the strong dose of mortality that it undoubtedly contains.”9 We might further note that Pierson was also of the view that Tocqueville was “unscientific in his use, or rather in his failure to use, contemporary literature” and that he was “not sufficiently inquisitive.”10

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So, too, Tocqueville was guilty of “errors of observation.”11 Here is a shortened version of the lengthy list highlighted by Pierson. Tocqueville misread the American inheritance laws. He neglected American material development, in the process ignoring “the one great factor that was going to transform his chosen civilization almost overnight.” He failed properly to acknowledge the nationalizing influence of American commerce and underestimated the centralizing tendency in American politics. He did not foresee the rise of American cities and therefore did not appreciate the strain that would be placed upon institutions of local self-government. In his appraisal of American institutions, he failed to obtain “sufficient knowledge of their historical background,” and so he was unable correctly to discuss the dispute over slavery and the bitterness between North and South. In the field of politics, he made “two considerable errors of omission”: he failed to notice the growth of a two-party system and he neglected the intermediate unit of American politics, the state, thus closing his eyes to “its significant possibilities as a balancing force and experimental laboratory.” “Both of these mistakes,” Pierson concluded, “can be traced to his visit to Albany and his failures of observation there.”12 More than this, because of his experience with Andrew Jackson, Tocqueville “underestimated the power of the executive branch in American government.” Most alarming of all given its centrality to the argument of the text and its subsequent notoriety, Tocqueville “perhaps overestimated the tendency of democracy, at least as practiced in the United States, to degenerate into tyranny by the majority.”

Having got this far, we might pause to consider the justice and substance of some of the critical remarks cited above. There is, indeed, no shortage of evidence to support the view that Tocqueville quickly made up his mind about what he saw in America. Letters to his two close friends Ernest de Chabrol and Louis de Kergorlay, written shortly after his arrival, gave a strong intimation of what would in due course form the content of his famous book.13 Likewise, Tocqueville’s chosen

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pattern of social interaction was also quickly evident. Once on dry land, Tocqueville and Beaumont soon found themselves the toast of New York society and later found the doors of the Bostonian elite opened to them. A reading of Tocqueville’s notebooks reveals just how much he learned from his eminent acquaintances. It was, for example, Alexander Everett who informed Tocqueville one evening that “[t]he point of departure for a people is of immense importance.”14 It was this idea, as Tocqueville was later to inform readers of Democracy in America, that provided “the key to nearly the whole book.”15

But what of the more serious, and most often repeated, charge that Tocqueville showed no interest in and failed to perceive the growing industrialization of the American economy? This assertion can often figure as part of a broader argument alleging that Tocqueville knew nothing of economics and displayed a near total indifference to the social issues and problems of his day. That this general contention is largely false has been amply shown by the recent work of Michael Drolet and Richard Swedberg,16 but does it hold true for the specifics of Tocqueville’s examination of America? This is the manner in which the evidence has been presented by one of the most perceptive of commentators upon Tocqueville’s work, Seymour Drescher. Tocqueville and Beaumont, he writes,

visited prisons until they felt themselves imprisoned by their own mission. They sacrificed comfort, and almost their lives, to view the American West at first hand. But though they knew of the world famous industrial experiment at Lowell, Massachusetts, they simply

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passed it by. Their one hour in Pittsburgh … was spent catching up on correspondence. They were deeply impressed by Cincinnati’s throbbing industry but spent their extremely rationed time there with its lawyers rather than its industrial classes.17

How, on Tocqueville’s behalf, might we respond?

The failure to visit Lowell was undoubtedly a notable omission. Despite its recent creation, after 1821 it had already achieved notoriety as a purpose-built mill town and regularly received foreign visitors, including some from France. Among these was Michel Chevalier, who devoted considerable space to Lowell and its factory girls in his own account of his journey across America.18 Chevalier also discoursed at some length on the towns of Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, both cities evoking his admiration and enthusiasm.19 With regard to Tocqueville’s visit to Pittsburgh, however, Drescher is perhaps unfair. Beaumont and Tocqueville arrived there only after an arduous journey fraught with considerable difficulty and in blizzard conditions. Moreover, following a request from the French Ministry of Justice, they were obliged to cut short their visit to America and were now hurrying in order to return to France within a year.20

A similar observation might be made about their four-day stay in Cincinnati. While it is undeniably true that Tocqueville used his letters of recommendation in order to secure interviews with lawyers—and also Supreme Court Justice John McLean—these conversations were wide ranging and led Tocqueville to reflect extensively upon the character of the rapidly expanding American West. “More than any other part of the Union,” Tocqueville confided to his notebook, “Ohio strikes me as a society totally occupied with its own affairs, and, through work, with

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rapid growth.”21 The whole of society, he observed, is an industry, and everyone has come there to make money. Of Cincinnati, in particular, Tocqueville remarked:

It is always difficult to know exactly why cities develop and grow. Chance always plays a part. Cincinnati is situated in one of the most fertile plains of the New World, and because of this it began to attract settlers. Factories were built to supply the needs of these settlers and before long the whole of the region of the West, and the success of these industries attracted new industries and more settlers than ever. Cincinnati was, and I believe still is, a transit point for many shipments to and from the Mississippi and Missouri valleys to Europe and for trade between New York, and the northern states and Louisiana.22

From this, and other similar observations in his notebooks, it would be difficult to conclude that Tocqueville did not either observe or appreciate the importance of the rapid industrial and commercial progress that was transforming America and pushing its population ever westward.

Nevertheless, this does not appear in Democracy in America. Indeed, in his printed text, this part of Tocqueville’s journey into America figured largely as the occasion for him to reflect upon how, when traveling down the Ohio River, the “traveller … navigates so to speak between liberty and servitude.” “The white on the right bank,” Tocqueville commented, “obliged to live by his own efforts, made material well-being the principal goal of his existence.… The American on the left bank scorns not only work, but all the enterprises that work brings to success.… So slavery not only prevents whites from making a fortune; it turns them from wanting to do so.”23 These remarks were anticipated in his notebooks and in a letter to his father.24 Yet, if one looks a little closer at the printed text, one also sees a curious footnote in which Tocqueville

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makes reference to the efforts of the state of Ohio to ensure the building of a canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, thanks to which “the merchandise of Europe that arrives in New York can descend by water as far as New Orleans, across more than five hundred leagues of the continent.”25 This observation is also prefigured in his travel notes.

I draw particular attention to this reference to the American canal network because, when comparisons are made between the accounts provided by Tocqueville and the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, it is usually to suggest that Tocqueville ignored the transport revolution that was turning an agrarian society into an entirely different kind of economic order. According to Wills, for example, Tocqueville “rides around on steamboats without noticing how crucially they were changing American life.… He also ignores the infant railroad industry and the burgeoning canal systems.” It is undoubtedly true that Chevalier devoted a larger proportion of his efforts to detailing the routes of transportation across the North American continent, but just as Tocqueville and Beaumont were commissioned to report on the American penitentiary system, Chevalier was assigned a similar task with regard to the new nation’s railway network.

The fact of the matter is that Tocqueville was not unfamiliar with these aspects of the American economic infrastructure. In his Notebook E, the section recording his impressions of Cincinnati and Ohio is followed almost immediately by a section titled “Means of Increasing the Public Prosperity.” “Roads, canals and the mails,” Tocqueville there wrote, “play a prodigious part in the prosperity of the Union.” America, he continued, not only enjoyed a greater sum of prosperity than any other country but also had “done more to provide for … free communications.” One of the first things done in a new state was to create a postal service such that “there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild that letters and newspapers are not delivered at least once a week.” Main roads are built in the middle of a wilderness and almost always before the arrival of those whom they were meant to serve. America, Tocqueville further observed, “has planned and built immense canals. It already has more railways than France. Everyone recognizes that the discovery of steam immeasurably increased the strength and prosperity

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of the Union by facilitating rapid communications among the various parts of this vast country.” Moreover, because Americans were not a sedentary people, they felt the need for means of communication with a liveliness and zeal unknown in France. As to the means employed to open up communications in America, Tocqueville saw that, while “the American government does not involve itself in everything,” when it came to “projects of great public utility,” they were seldom left to the care of “private individuals.” The states led the way.26

Why did Tocqueville not include these observations in Democracy in America? Wills has a simple answer. “Tocqueville,” he tells us in a footnote, “took some notes on these matters, but did not consider them important enough to reflect on in Democracy.” There might be another explanation. Tocqueville himself made the following remark: “To return to the subject of roads and other means of rapidly transporting the products of industry and thought from one place to another, I do not claim to have made the discovery that these promote prosperity, for this is a universally accepted truth.”27 As far as Tocqueville was concerned, in other words, these conclusions were so blindingly obvious that they did not merit comment or inclusion in his text.

There is a further, and equally compelling, reason why Tocqueville chose to exclude these issues from his account. This is found in the first paragraph of the critical edition of Democracy in America provided by Eduardo Nolla. It reads as follows: “The work you are about to read is not a travelogue, the reader can rest easy. I do not want him to be concerned with me. You will also not find in this book a complete summary of all the institutions of the United States; but I flatter myself that, in it, the public will find new documentation and, from it, will gain useful knowledge about a subject that is more important for us than the fate of America and no less worthy of holding our attention.”28 Tocqueville therefore intended quite explicitly to distance his own inquiry from

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the extensive travel literature that had flourished in France from the 1780s onward and that, for the most part, had focused its attention upon the flora and fauna of the American continent, its majestic landscape, and the rude manners of its people.29 To continue in this vein was no part of Tocqueville’s purpose. Again his perspective is clarified by the Nolla critical edition. In a first version of the drafts, Tocqueville wrote: “I have not said everything that I saw, but I have said everything that I believed at the same time true and useful [v: profitable] to make known, and without wanting to write a treatise on America, I thought only to help my fellow citizens resolve a question that must interest us more deeply.”30 He went on to add the following remark: “I see around me facts without number, but I notice one of them that dominates all the others: it is old; it is stronger than laws, more powerful than men; it seems to be a direct product of the divine will; it is the gradual development of democracy in the Christian world.”31 This was the subject of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and this was so, as he declared in the opening lines of the published version, because “[a]mong the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more vividly than the equality of conditions.”32

This aspect of American society was so striking and so novel that it came progressively to displace all other considerations in Tocqueville’s mind.33 Again, the process by which this occurred can be seen by consulting the Tocqueville material held at Yale University’s Beinecke Library and assembled by Eduardo Nolla. In brief, if on Tocqueville’s

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part there was no lack of interest in the commercial aspects of American society, as he came to reflect upon what he wanted to say in his own study, they were not integral to the argument that he wished to develop. As Tocqueville made plain in his letter to Beaumont of November 4, 1836, in which he asked his friend specifically for commentary on Chevalier’s rival text, his own study was intended to be an “ouvrage philosophique-politique.”34

It was accordingly in light of the impact of industrialization upon the workings of democracy that, in volume 2 of the Democracy in America, Tocqueville considered the question of “What Makes Nearly All Americans Tend toward Industrial Professions.”35 Recognizing that “no people on earth who has made as rapid progress as the Americans in commerce and industry” and that, although they had “arrived only yesterday,” the Americans had “overturned the whole natural order to their profit,” Tocqueville drew three conclusions of substance and not inconsiderable importance from these “industrial passions”: commercial crises would be endemic to industrial capitalism; industrialization would produce a new kind of capitalist aristocracy; and a version of state capitalism would engender a new form of soft despotism. It was, however, never Tocqueville’s intention to publish a detailed description of America’s transport infrastructure.

The second substantive criticism—and one that might be deemed to be fatal to his entire enterprise—is that Tocqueville overestimated the potential of American democracy to degenerate into the tyranny of the majority. For example, when Tocqueville’s good friend Jean-Jacques Ampère visited America in the early 1850s, he recorded that Americans were almost universally agreed that, on one thing, Tocqueville had been mistaken: the possibility of a tyranny of the majority was unfounded. The most intriguing of Ampère’s encounters, therefore, was with John C. Spencer, author of a preface to the first American edition of Democracy in America. According to Spencer, the ever-changing nature of majority opinion ensured that no “lasting tyranny” could

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be established. Spencer himself attributed Tocqueville’s error to the peculiar political circumstances pertaining during his stay: namely, the support of the overwhelming majority for General Jackson’s populist measures, which might have given the impression that the minority was “crushed” and without the power to protect itself.36

A very similar charge was made by Tocqueville’s American friend Jared Sparks, the man who in 1833 told Tocqueville that in his forthcoming book he anticipated “a more accurate and judicious account of the United States than has yet appeared from the pen of any European traveller”37 and who, after its publication and in the face of objections in America to Tocqueville’s remarks on “the defects of Democratic institutions,” assured his colleague that “all the intelligent persons among us who have read your treatise have applauded its ability and candour.”38 In a letter to another of Tocqueville’s critics, Guillaume-Tell Poussin,39 of February 1841, he wrote:

Your criticisms of M. de Tocqueville’s work also accord for the most part with my own sentiments. Notwithstanding the great ability with which his book is written, the extent of his intelligence, and his profound discussions of many important topics, I am persuaded that his theories, particularly, when applied to the United States, sometimes lead him astray. For instance, in what he says of the tyranny of the majority, I think, he is entirely mistaken. His ideas are not verified by experience. The tyranny of the majority, if exercised at all, must be in the making of laws; and any evil arising from this source operates in precisely the same manner on the majority itself as on the minority. Besides, if the majority passes an oppressive law, or a law which the people generally disapprove, this majority will certainly be changed at the next election, and be composed of different elements. M. de Tocqueville’s theory can only be true where

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the majority is an unchangeable body and where it acts exclusively on the minority, as distinct from itself—a state of things which can never occur where the elections are frequent and every man has a voice in choosing the legislators.40

It should be noted that Ampère himself was not convinced by these criticisms and that, on Tocqueville’s behalf, he provided a response that is not without merit or cogency. That the oppressed could themselves in turn become the oppressors, he countered, was no safeguard for personal liberty. Moreover, the new majority might simply continue to voice many of the “common passions” and “prejudices” of the previous majority, thus continuing the oppression of “a persistent minority.” This was especially true in the states of the South where freedom of expression on the subject of slavery did not exist and where, on this issue, it mattered not whether the Whigs or the Democrats were in power. Moreover, that the excesses of Jacksonian democracy no longer existed did not prove that they had been completely cured and that they could not return. Tocqueville, he consequently affirmed, had been right to diagnose the existence of a “radical infirmity” existing at the heart of American society: “the possible tyranny of number where numbers counted for everything.”41 Nor, it should be added, was it the case that everyone shared the view that Tocqueville had failed to observe America in an accurate and impartial fashion. In a lengthy article written for the North American Review,42 Edward Everett, while not denying that Tocqueville was sometimes “led away by the desire to generalize,” affirmed that Tocqueville’s work was “by far the most philosophical, ingenious and instructive, which has been produced in Europe on the subject of America.”

Be that as it may, it is not easy to dislodge the criticism that errors in central aspects of Tocqueville’s analysis arose because of both the brevity of his stay and the fact that he could not escape his own inherited prejudices. Here let us remember that Tocqueville was an outsider in America not only because he was French and aristocratic but also

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because he was a Catholic.43 In short, on this view, the odds were well and truly stacked against Tocqueville ever producing an account of America that rose above shallow empiricism and vague theoretical generalization. Indeed, this was the view of no less an authority than François Furet, who asserted that “when Tocqueville went to the United States in the spring of 1831, he had already formed his own hypothesis for comparing the French Revolution and the American Republic.”44 Thus forewarned, it might be argued, are we not better placed to make sense of Tocqueville’s well-known remark that “in America I saw more than America,” for was he not really only interested in France all along? Moreover, is this not substantiated by Tocqueville’s statement that “[w]hile I had my eyes fixed on America, I thought about Europe.”45

Is this then not evidence enough to dispel any lingering doubt as to the lack of utility and purpose in Tocqueville’s voyage? First, we would do well to remember James T. Schleifer’s observation that it would have been remarkable had Tocqueville not “reached the shores of America carrying much of the historical and intellectual baggage of early 19th century France.” Could it have been imagined that he would have arrived with a completely empty mind, without “a variety of preconceptions about the fundamental nature and direction of modern society”?46 Next, Tocqueville was only too aware of his own prejudices and of the difficulties involved in freeing himself from them. In his Two Weeks in the Wilderness, we find the following remark: “[A]s for me, in my traveler’s illusions—and what class of men does not have its own—I imagined something entirely different.” America, he had believed, would be bound to exhibit “all the transformations that the social state imposed on man and in which it was possible to see those transformations like a vast chain.” Nothing of this picture, he confirmed, had any truth. Indeed, America was “the least appropriate

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for providing the spectacle that I was coming to find.”47 For his part, Tocqueville was in turn utterly damning in his attitude toward those of his fellow countrymen who had not bothered themselves with doing anything other than observing America from a lofty and disdainful distance. In a letter to the Abbé Lesueur, for example, he warned that his compatriot, a man called Scherer, “will paint you an unfavourable picture of America: the fact is that he has made the most stupid journey in the world. He came here without any other end than to stroll about, knowing nothing about either the language or the customs of the country.”48 He later repeated the advice to his mother, condemning what was probably the same person for deriving all he knew of the country from a “particular class of Frenchmen whom he saw exclusively.”49 Moreover, all of this accords with Gustave de Beaumont’s own description of Tocqueville as a traveler. Contrasting his friend with those visitors to North America “who passed through, seeing nothing and looking for nothing, not even wild ducks,” he remarked that, for Tocqueville, “everything was subject to observation.”50

Accordingly, a reading of Tocqueville’s diaries, notebooks, and letters reveals a mind, not closed to new experiences, but overwhelmed by the novelty and importance of what he was seeing. For example, having told us that the penitentiary system was a pretext for his visit to America, a letter to Kergorlay continues as follows: “In that country, in which I encountered a thousand things beyond my expectation, I perceived several things about questions that I had often put to myself. I discovered facts that seemed useful to know. I did not go there with the idea of writing a book, but the idea for a book came to me there.”

Nor is it easy to unravel the complex relationship between Tocqueville’s impressions of America and his thoughts on the future of European civilization. Even his earliest reviewers realized that this was not merely a book about America, and the fact that it is not so explains why we continue to read it for instruction and enlightenment (unlike the vast

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majority of nineteenth-century accounts of America that, if read at all, are done so for entertainment and amusement alone). Again, a letter to Kergorlay clarifies his intentions:

Although I rarely spoke of France in this book, I did not write a page without thinking of her and without always having her, so to speak, before my eyes. And above all what I tried to highlight in the United States and to make understood was less a complete picture of this foreign country but the contrasts and resemblances with our own. It was always, either through opposition or analogy with the one, that I endeavoured to present a fair and, above all, interesting idea of the other. In my opinion, the permanent return that I made, without making it known, to France was one of the main causes of the success of the book.51

But this does not reduce the journey itself to insignificance. A letter to his father reported that since their arrival, Tocqueville and Beaumont had had, “in truth, only one idea … this idea is to understand the country through which we are travelling.”52 He similarly told his brother: “In my opinion, one must be truly blind to want to compare this country to Europe and to impose on one what works in the other. I believed this before I left France; I believe it more and more in examining the country in the midst of which I now live.”53

Moreover, Tocqueville was under no illusions as to the limits of his knowledge and acquaintance with the United States. Writing from Washington, D.C., as his time in America reached its end, he confided in separate letters to his father and to his brother Édouard that he had only a “superficial” knowledge of the South and that a minimum stay of two years was required to prepare a “complete and accurate picture” of the whole country. To attempt to take in the whole, he continued, would be madness, because he had simply not seen enough. In any case,

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such a work would be as “boring as it was instructive.” Nevertheless, Tocqueville recorded, his time had been spent usefully and he had collected many documents and spoken with many people. Furthermore, he felt that he knew more about America than was generally known in France and some of what he knew might be of “great interest.” “I believe,” Tocqueville wrote modestly, “that if, upon my return I have the leisure, I might write something passable on the United States.”54 Less than four years later, the first volume of Democracy in America was published to instant acclaim.

Furthermore, the Nolla critical edition of Democracy in America provides an unprecedented insight into how Tocqueville’s text was written and how its content evolved over time. Tocqueville began with the notebooks and letters he had written while in America. He worked his way through the extensive collection of printed material he had accumulated. He continued to communicate and interrogate his American acquaintances by mail. To help him to complete his research, he employed two young Americans, Francis Lippitt and Theodore Sedgwick, as his assistants. The manuscript was passed on to his family, to Gustave de Beaumont, and to Louis de Kergorlay, and in turn received extensive, expert comment. Certain sections were read out to close friends. Given this thoroughness, it is difficult to know what to make of the charge that Tocqueville was not sufficiently inquisitive and was unscientific in his use of contemporary sources. That aside, we know that his long reflection upon his investigation of America convinced Tocqueville that “[a] new political science is needed for a world entirely new.”55 Later Tocqueville was to sketch out in greater detail what he took the “science of politics” to be, distinguishing it in the process from the “art of government.”56

Why was a new science of politics required? For the simple reason, as Tocqueville pointed out in his own introduction, that “a great democratic revolution is taking place,” and this was a revolution where “the generating fact from which each particular fact seemed to derive” was

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revealed in American society. The corollary to this, as James T. Schleifer has observed, is that Tocqueville discounted “the traditional inclination to draw lessons about democracy from ancient and Renaissance texts.”57 The entire book, Tocqueville confided, was written “under the impression of a sort of religious terror” produced “by the sight of this irresistible revolution that has marched for so many centuries over all obstacles.”58 To wish to stop it was to act against God himself. The best we could do was to accommodate ourselves to the social state that Providence wished to impose upon us.

There is much that might be said about the merits and character of this avowedly new political science. To what extent was it genuinely new and innovative? Was it to be value free? Did it possess predictive power? To what extent was it philosophically and empirically flawed? Whatever the answer to these questions, there can be no doubt that Tocqueville did not imagine that his new political science amounted (as Sheldon Wolin has recently suggested)59 to a form of political impressionism. The guiding assumption was that, sooner or later, Europe would also arrive at something near to the equality of conditions. This did not mean that Europe would be obliged to draw the same political conclusions from this social state as had been done in America or that democracy would produce only one form of government. It had therefore been no part of Tocqueville’s purpose to write a “panegyric” on America or to advocate “any particular form of government in general.” Rather, his hypothesis was that, beyond a legitimate curiosity, one could “find lessons there from which we would be able to profit.”60

This was achieved with a level of methodological self-awareness and sophistication that was unusual for the age and certainly unusual for the subject matter. In both the printed text and his notes, Tocqueville acknowledged that nothing would be easier than to criticize his book. It would be sufficient, he acknowledged, only “to contrast an isolated

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fact to the whole of the facts,” “a detached idea to the whole of the ideas.” Yet, he remained adamant that he had “never yielded, except unknowingly, to the need to adapt facts to ideas, instead of subjecting ideas to facts.”61 To this disclaimer, he added a clear statement of his methodology. “When a point could be established with the help of written documents,” Tocqueville explained, “I have taken care to turn to original texts and to the most authentic and respected works. I have indicated my sources in notes, and everyone will be able to verify them. When it was a matter of opinions, of political customs, of observations of mores, I sought to consult the most enlightened men. If something happened to be important or doubtful, I was not content with one witness, but decided only on the basis of the body of testimonies.”62 To an extent, Tocqueville conceded, this had to be taken on trust, because it needed not to be forgotten that “the author who wants to make himself understood is obliged to push each of his ideas to all of their theoretical consequences, and often to the limits of what is false and impractical.”63 Tocqueville therefore, and not without some justification, made a plea for generosity on the part of the reader. “I would like you,” he remarked, “to grant me the favor of reading me with the same spirit that presided over my work, and would like you to judge this book by the general impression that it leaves, as I myself came to a decision, not due to a particular reason but due to a mass of reasons.”64 In his unpublished notes, he added the following remark: “To whoever will do that and then does not agree with me, I am ready to submit. For if I am sure of having sincerely sought the truth, I am far from considering myself as certain to have found it.”65 Tocqueville’s modesty in this and (as we have seen) with regard to other elements of his inquiry on America seems frequently to have been overlooked by his critics.

What of the voyage itself and how did Tocqueville come to understand his journey into America?66 We have to acknowledge, with François

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Furet, that “the genesis of Tocqueville’s visit to America is shrouded in mystery.”67 When and why he decided to undertake this hazardous enterprise is difficult, if not impossible, to gauge. Next, we should begin by remembering that Tocqueville was only one of many French men and women who, throughout the nineteenth century, crossed the Atlantic to witness the New World at first hand. We should then add that his journey was in many ways not dissimilar from that of substantial numbers of his compatriots. Most arrived by way of New York and were immediately overwhelmed by its sense of fervent and perpetual activity. Educated visitors tended to make their way to Boston. Substantial numbers visited Canada and the Great Lakes (and, like Tocqueville, saw and wondered at the startling beauty of Niagara Falls),68 but few ventured to the South, preferring rather to satisfy their curiosity on the Eastern Seaboard. Typically people came for an extended stay, but it was unusual for it to last longer than between three and six months. Rarely did the French come alone—characteristically they came with a friend or member of the family—and even more rarely did they decide not to return home. But for all of them, America began the moment they boarded ship and set sail, most often (as in Tocqueville’s case) from Le Havre.

With the advent of the steam ship, the journey time was reduced to between one and two weeks, and it could be undertaken in relative comfort. In Tocqueville’s day, a journey time of between six and seven weeks was quite normal, and it was not without hazard or hardship.69 As Jacques Portes recounts, travelers used their enforced leisure to read books about the United States, to meet Americans, and to improve their often very poor English.70 Tocqueville was no exception.71 Armed with a copy of Basil Hall’s Travels in North America and Volney’s Tableau du climat et du sol des Etats-Unis d’Amérique, Tocqueville embarked on

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April 2, 1831, and, with the ship’s provisions almost exhausted, landed at Newport, Rhode Island, on May 9. A day later he and Beaumont arrived in New York. A long letter to his mother, written on board ship and dated April 26,72 vividly portrays what reads as an almost existential experience. No sooner was he out of sight of the French coast and laid low by seasickness than Tocqueville began to doubt that he would see dry land again. He quickly came to see his world as “a kind of narrow circle upon which play heavy clouds.” To this he added that “the solitude of the ocean is a very remarkable thing to experience.” His vessel came to take on the form of a separate universe, with its own rituals and codes of behavior. Noah’s ark, he told his mother, did not contain a greater variety of animals. Although tightly confined, everyone acted as if they were completely alone and enjoyed a level of freedom unknown elsewhere. “Everyone,” he wrote, “drinks, laughs, eats or cries as the fancy takes him.” Privacy was almost nonexistent, leading Tocqueville to conclude that they were living in the public space like the ancients. Weather permitting, he and Beaumont tried to work as normal. After dinner they spoke English to “all those prepared to listen.” Their first sense of coming within reach of America came when an injured, sky-blue bird became trapped in the ship’s rigging. You could not imagine, he told his mother, the joy caused by such a small animal, which “seemed to have been sent with the express intent of announcing the approach of land.” Later came more birds and fish and, finally, marine vegetation. Then came the first sighting of land and the “delicious spectacle” of grass and trees. Soon after they dropped anchor and went ashore. Never, he wrote, had people been so happy: “[W]e leapt onto land and each of us took a dozen unsteady steps before coming to stand solidly on our feet.” Tocqueville had arrived, and the journey into America had begun.

It is at this point that Tocqueville’s journey can be read as a travelogue, his letters bristling with detail, his mood never less than one of fascination. A new world passed before him, he told one of his sisters-in-law, as if it were seen through a magic lantern.73 The houses along the coast were small and clean, like “chicken coops.” The coastline

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was low and lacking in beauty. No description was adequate to portray the “immense” steamship that conveyed them over sixty leagues in only eighteen hours. New York was greeted with “cries of admiration.” Its external aspect was “bizarre and not very agreeable.” It was possible to call on a lady at nine in the morning without impropriety. No wine was drunk at meals, although American eating habits left much to be desired, with Americans consuming copious amounts in conditions of “complete barbarism.” Americans smoked, chewed tobacco, and spat in public. Generally speaking, they lacked grace and elegance; but this did not mean that they were not a “quite remarkable race of men.”74 The navigation of rivers and canals meant that distance was regarded with “unbelievable contempt.” The speed at which journeys were completed never ceased to astound him, especially when his steamship unexpectedly raced past West Point on its way to Albany. To his brother Édouard, he reported that he was now living in “another world,” where political passions were superficial and the desire to acquire wealth prevailed. Moreover, there were a thousand ways of doing this without troubling the state.75 The cost of living was less than in Paris, although the price of manufactured goods (Tocqueville was especially concerned about the price of much-needed gloves) was exorbitant. Nothing was more delicious than the spectacle offered by the banks of the Hudson, disappearing as the river did in the high, blue mountains to the north, nor anything as sublime as the “perfect calm” and “complete tranquillity” of the wilderness around the Oneida Lake.76 Autumn, with its great variety of colors and its “pure and sparkling sky,” was “the moment when America appeared in all her glory.”77 Even the flies that lit up the nighttime sky were a source of fascination. Nothing, however, had quite prepared him for the extraordinary Shaker ceremony he witnessed in the woods not far from Albany or for the Fourth of July celebrations the day after, all carried out in “perfect order.”78 Nor could he but be

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moved by the lamentable and mournful sight of the Choctaw Indians being transported from their homeland to probable oblivion.

Above all, it was the sheer newness and novelty of America that came increasingly to press itself upon him. Writing to his mother from Louisville in December 1831,79 Tocqueville recorded his impressions of the society he was seeing emerging in the new cities of the Midwest. The Europeans who had first arrived in America, he wrote, had built a society that was analogous to that of Europe but which “at bottom” was radically different. Since then, a new “swarm” of immigrants had poured westward, creating in the valleys of the Mississippi “a new society which bore no comparison with the past and was connected to Europe only by language.” It was here that “a people absolutely without precedents, without traditions, without customs,” which ignored the wisdom of others and of the past, were carving out institutions, as they were roads, in the forests where they had just arrived, sure in the knowledge that they faced neither obstacles nor limits. With time, their job done, they would uproot themselves again, pushing headlong ever westward toward yet more virgin soil and new challenges. Phrased in the terminology of Tocqueville’s published text, this sense of constant movement reappeared in his conclusion that “there is something precipitous, I could almost say revolutionary, in the progress society makes in America.”80

The mistake is to believe (primarily on the basis of the letters written to Chabrol and Kergorlay in June 1831) that Tocqueville quickly settled his mind on what he had seen of American society. This was not the case because it is clear that his journey across the continent forced him to rethink his impressions and conclusions on an almost daily basis. To his father, in early June, he wrote that he could not tell him what most struck him about America, “a whole volume would be necessary to tell you; and, in any case, I would perhaps not think the same tomorrow.”81 In September, writing from Boston, he told his

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mother that “[e]verything I see, everything that I hear, everything that I see from a distance, forms a confused mass in my brain which I will perhaps never have the time nor the strength to unravel. It would be an immense undertaking to present a picture of a society that is as large and as lacking in homogeneity as this one.”82 A month later, this time writing from Hartford, he reaffirmed the observation earlier passed on to his father. “I will know what I think of America only when I am no longer here,” he wrote: “One has to give up any idea of studying things deeply when one sees so many things, when one impression drives out the one that preceded it; at best there remain a few general ideas, a few general conclusions, which much later can enable you to understand details when one has the time to study them.”83 From Philadelphia in November, he told his mother that the clearest outcome of his trip would be that, upon leaving America, he would be in a position to understand the documents that he had collected but not yet studied. “For the rest,” he continued, “on this country I have only disordered and disconnected notes, disjointed ideas to which only I hold the key, isolated facts which recall a mass of others.” The only general ideas he had expressed on America, he confided, were to be found in letters to his family and a few friends in France, and these were written in haste, on a steamboat or in a corner, with his knees serving as a desk. Would he ever write a book on this country? he asked himself. In truth, he did not know. “It seems to me,” he concluded, “that I have a few good ideas, but I still do not know how to arrange them.”84

How these various ideas emerged is captured vividly in Tocqueville’s letters and notebooks. To his father, he explained that, despite his mental confusion, two ideas had already come to him. The first was that the American people were the happiest in the world. The second was that America owed its prosperity less to its own virtues and even less to a form of government that was superior to all others than to the particular circumstances in which it found itself. This in turn told him that political institutions were neither good nor bad in themselves and that everything depended upon the physical conditions and social

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state of the people where they applied. What might work in America, might not work in France and vice versa.85 An altogether different set of conclusions was listed in a note titled “First Impressions,” dated May 15, 1831. The Americans were a prey to national pride and small-town pettiness. They seemed a religious people, but how far religion regulated their conduct was unclear. The whole of society seemed to be composed of one enormous middle class. Elegant manners and polite refinement were lacking, but all Americans, “right down to the simple shop assistant,” seemed to have had a good education and to possess sober manners. Betraying what was to be one of his abiding preoccupations, Tocqueville also commented upon the way women dressed and the causes of chaste morals.

By dint of considerable effort and imaginative intuition, Tocqueville came, in fits and starts, to make sense of these confused and diverse impressions. Yet, as George Wilson Pierson observed long ago, their very tone “prophesized the book that one day would result.”86 Tocqueville showed himself not to be interested in individuals. There were no descriptions of domestic interiors. His subject from the beginning was “the real character of the American people,” and with that came necessarily a fascination with the patterns of behavior and institutions of a democratic society.

What Tocqueville came to observe and to learn from his journey through America has best been summarized by James T. Schleifer.87 Tocqueville, he contends, learned first of all of the equality of conditions in all its assorted forms. He came to appreciate the pace of change and mobility of American society. He discovered some of the key mechanisms for moderating democracy. These included the federal system and the independence of the judiciary. He noticed the importance of administrative decentralization. He understood the significance of the habit of association. Perhaps most important, he saw the centrality to American mores of the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood

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and of religion as a guarantor of liberty and democracy. To his obvious delight, he discovered fresh ways of thinking about Catholicism and saw that it might be on the new continent that it would achieve its most authentic expression.

In highlighting these and other themes, Schleifer has also drawn our attention to the language used by Tocqueville to indicate moments of surprise in his journey. He specifically refers us to the numerous occasions when Tocqueville admits that he found something to be “striking.” The best example of this occurs in the very first sentence of the published text, where Tocqueville states: “Among the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more vividly than the equality of conditions.”88 By extending this analysis of the actual words used by Tocqueville in his account, we gain a further insight into the importance of Tocqueville’s journey and the manner in which it shaped the content of his argument about America. If, for example, we limit ourselves only to chapters 9 and 10 of part 2 of volume 1, we read such phrases as: “I sometimes encountered in the United States,” “While I was in America,” “I saw Americans associating,” “I encountered wealthy inhabitants of New England,” and “As I prolonged my stay, I perceived the great political consequences that flowed from these new facts”; “I saw with my own eyes”; “During my stay in America I did not encounter a single man, priest or layman, who did not come to accord on this point”; “I remember when traveling through the forests”; “I learned with surprise that”; “I discovered that”; “I heard them”; “I wondered how it could happen that”; “I lived much with the people of the United States”; “I met men in New England”; “What I have seen among the Anglo-Americans brings me to believe that.” Many more similar phrases and expressions can be found that testify to the impact upon Tocqueville of his voyage, but to confirm the point we might care to consider the following short paragraph:

Thus I found in the United States the restlessness of heart that is natural to men when, all conditions being more or less nearly equal, each sees the same chances to rise. There I encountered the democratic sentiment of envy expressed in a thousand different ways. I observed

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that the people often showed, in the conduct of affairs, a great blend of presumption and ignorance, and I concluded that in America, as among us, men were subject to the same imperfections and exposed to the same miseries.89

With the emphases added, we see clearly how Tocqueville combined a series of observations and reflections drawn directly from experience in order to reach a substantive conclusion.

In closing, I wish to make the suggestion that it is in the final two chapters of volume 1 of Democracy in America that the impact of Tocqueville’s journey appears in its most unmediated form. As Eduardo Nolla informs us, these parts of the book were written as late as the spring or summer of 1834, and they were not the subject of commentary from either Tocqueville’s friends or family. There were few drafts, and there are no great differences between the manuscript and the published version.90 Tocqueville himself also recognized their distinctiveness within the book as a whole. Issues relating to the future and permanence of the Republic, he commented, “touch on my subject, but do not enter into it; they are American without being democratic, and above all I wanted to portray democracy. So I had to put them aside at first: but I must return to them as I finish.”91 In short, given that there was no clear or obvious parallel between the situation of the slave and Indian populations and conditions then pertaining in Europe, there were no conclusions to be drawn for France. These were specifically American issues and had to be addressed as such.

There can be no doubt that Tocqueville was deeply moved by the plight of the Native Americans. Denying that the picture he had drawn was “exaggerating,” he added, referring to the incident so vividly recalled in a letter to his mother: “I have gazed upon evils that would be impossible for me to recount.”92 But these evils, he believed, were irredeemable, as it seemed inevitable that the “Indian race of North America is condemned to perish.”93 Whether they continued to wander

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through the wilderness or decided to settle made no difference to their prospects. The relentless and prodigious advance of the European settler population condemned them to destruction and extinction. If the individual states sought their complete expulsion, the Union, exuding the spirit of philanthropy and respect for the law, made it possible.

If then the Native American was fated to live on only in our memories, the same could not be said of the slave population of the South. Here was “the most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States.”94 Again, Tocqueville’s description of their situation and his deep sense of foreboding about the future were structured around his own experience of traveling down the Ohio River to the mouth of the Mississippi. He also drew upon the numerous conversations he had had on the subject while in America. From this he could see how slavery penetrated into the souls of the masters and, therefore, how to the tyranny of laws had to be appended the intolerance of mores. The acute dilemmas and difficulties of this situation did not escape Tocqueville. Slavery neither could nor should endure. It defied economic reason. It denoted a reversal of the order of nature. It was attacked as unjust by Christianity. But, as a deleted passage from the original manuscript reveals, it also told us something profound about American society. “The Americans,” we read in the Nolla edition,

are, of all modern peoples, those who have pushed equality and inequality furthest among men. They have combined universal suffrage with servitude. They seem to have wanted to prove in this way the advantages of equality by opposite arguments. It is claimed that the Americans, by establishing universal suffrage and the dogma of sovereignty have made clear to the world the advantages of equality. As for me, I think that they have above all proved this by establishing servitude, and I find that they establish the advantages of equality much less by democracy than by slavery.95

The prospects of a resolution to this terrible question, in Tocqueville’s view, were slim indeed. Either the Negroes in the South

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would seize their own freedom (by violent means if necessary) or, if freedom were granted to them, they would undoubtedly abuse it. This, in turn, raised the question of the future viability of the Union itself. In his lengthy meditation on this subject, we see clearly the extent to which Tocqueville had taken note of the key political questions agitating America at the time of his stay. He commented, at some considerable length, not only upon the character of President Andrew Jackson but also upon the intense debates over the renewal of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, tariff reform, and the nullification crisis engineered by Calhoun and his supporters in South Carolina. Jackson, he concluded, was “a slave of the majority” who “tramples underfoot his personal enemies … with an ease that no President has found.”96

Yet, as ever, Tocqueville’s preoccupation was not with the fleeting questions of today but with the future. His focus remained upon the long-term trends that would decide and determine the course of American history. He saw the threats to the Union that came from the slave-owning interests of the South but believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that all Americans recognized the commercial and political incentives to remain united. Americans, “from Maine to Florida, from the Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean,” agreed about the general principles which should govern society and about the sources of moral authority. The greatest threat to the Union, therefore, came from expansion and what Tocqueville termed “the continual displacement of forces that take place within it.”97 The rapidity and extent of this internal movement, driven forward by the search for material prosperity, only accentuated the danger. Countering these tendencies toward dissolution, however, were the forces of greater economic integration—the civilization of the North, Tocqueville contended, would become the norm—and the Constitution itself. The principles of the Republic had deep roots in American society, and he believed therefore that it could only be with extreme difficulty that the principles of monarchy and aristocracy could be received into American customs. Again

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misjudging the situation, he believed that federal power was weakening rather than strengthening, and thus that talk of presidential despotism was unfounded. His position, then, was one of relative optimism.

It was at the very end of these reflections that Tocqueville provided a glimpse of what he clearly perceived as the forces likely to transform America in the decades to come. He first turned his attention to the causes of America’s commercial greatness. And here he captured something of the all-conquering spirit of American capitalism. “I cannot better express my thoughts,” Tocqueville wrote, “than by saying that Americans put a kind of heroism in their way of doing commerce.”98 They constantly adapted their labors to satisfy their needs and were never hampered by old methods and old attitudes. They lived in “a land of wonders” where everything was in motion and where change was seen as a step forward. Newness was associated with improvement. Americans lived in a “sort of feverish agitation,” keeping them above “the common level of humanity.” “For an American,” Tocqueville wrote, “all of life happens like a game of chance, a time of revolution, a day of battle.”99

In consequence, America was destined to become a major maritime power. It would, as a matter of course, gain dominance over South America. Inescapably, commercial greatness would soon generate military power. Moreover, America would drag the whole North American continent into its orbit. He saw that the United States would soon break its treaty obligations with Mexico. Its people would “penetrate these uninhabited areas,” intent on snatching ownership of the land from its rightful owners. Texas, although still under Mexican rule, was day by day being infiltrated by Americans, imposing their language and way of life. The same was happening wherever the “Anglo-Americans” came into contact with other peoples. “So it must not be believed,” Tocqueville concluded, “that it is possible to stop the expansion of the English race of the New World,” for such was its “destiny.”100

Moreover, the mistake has been to imagine that Tocqueville, having completed the second volume of Democracy in America, turned his

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back for good upon the country that had so contributed to his fame and renown. This fits in well with the opinion that derides the value and significance of his journey to America. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only did Tocqueville keep in touch with many of those he had met on his travels across the North American continent, but, time upon time, he referred to America in his published writings and parliamentary speeches, always reminding his readers and listeners of what there was to learn from the American experience. More intriguing still, as time passed by, Tocqueville focused his attention ever more upon the issues he had raised in the final chapters of volume 1. As the institution of slavery was extended westward, he saw that it risked securing a new lease of life with fateful consequences for the Union. He saw a heroic commerce turning into a rapacious capitalism, led by a breed of men not before seen in the world and fueled by an unbridled materialism. He saw America needlessly and dangerously expanding its territory, constantly running the risk of war with its neighbors on land and sea. He saw a decline in law and order and in political morals. America, he wrote in 1856, was such as now to “distress all the friends of democratic liberty and delight all of its opponents.”101

Nevertheless, the memories of Tocqueville’s visit to America never lost their power to move him. Writing to Gustave de Beaumont from Compiègne during the harsh winter of 1855, he reminisced as follows:

[F]or the last week I have not stopped from going, once a day, for a walk of an hour or more in the forest. These enormous trees, seen through the snow, remind me of the woods of Tennessee that we travelled through, almost 25 years ago, in weather still more severe.102 What was most different in the picture was myself.… This little retrospective review put me back in good humour and, to finish the job of cheering me up again, I thought how I had kept to this day the same friend with whom I had hunted the parrots of Memphis and

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that the passing of time had only strengthened the ties of trust and of friendship which then existed between us. This thought seemed to me more heartening to reflect upon than all the others.103

To imagine that Tocqueville might just as well have stayed at home is simply mistaken.