Democracy in America, Part I

Tocqueville begins his story by discussing the “Exterior Form of North America,” and in particular, the part that would become the United States. By European standard, it was a vast territory, dominated by the great central valley of the Mississippi River and its tributaries. In the east there were dense forests, to the west seemingly endless prairies. When European man came to the lands of the Caribbean and South America, he found Nature to be generous, a constant delight. Middle America, what would become the United States, was a land made for work. It was sparsely inhabited by a poor and ignorant, yet noble race, given the name “Indians,” who “notions of the great intellectual truths,” Tocqueville states, “were general and simply and philosophical. This race the colonists would inevitably subdue. America was to present a startling opportunity to humanity.

In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man. And it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past.

     The next chapter — on the “Origin of the Anglo-Americans” — is one of the most important in the whole work. This is because of Tocqueville’s view that, just as the childhood of an individual determines the main features of his character and personality, so the first stages in the life of a people shape and mold the national character and way of life of that people. Tocqueville goes so far as to state that “the readers of this book will find in the present chapter the germ of all that is to follow and the key to almost the whole work.”

     The Englishmen who first colonized the North American shores, Tocqueville maintains, came from a country that had long been agitated by struggles between liberty and power — he has in mind the 17th century battles against the Stuart kings and their absolutist claims, which finally ended with a victory in Parliament. They were therefore “more conversant with the principles of true freedom than the greater part of their European contemporaries.” Democracy was an element in the American makeup from the very start. First, because, by and large, those who came were not from the upper classes but from the segments of society that were looking to better their lot. Second, because an American aristocracy could not get a footing in the new country.

It was soon found that the soil of America was opposed to a territorial aristocracy. It was realized that in order to clear this land, nothing less than the constant and self­-interested efforts of the owner himself was essential. The ground prepared, it became evident that its produce was not sufficient to enrich at the same time both and owner and a farmer. ... Land is the basis of an aristocracy, which clings to the soil that supports it. ... A nation may present immense fortunes and extreme wretchedness, but unless those fortunes are territorial, there is no true aristocracy, but simply the class of the rich and that of the poor.

Here it is beginning to become clear that when Tocqueville speaks of “America” he is essentially omitting a very large part of it — namely, the South. The reason for that is the South’s “peculiar institution,” slavery.

This was the fact which was to exert an immense influence on the character, the laws, and the whole future of the South. Slavery, as I shall afterwards show, dishonors labor; it introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man. The influence of slavery, united to the English character, explains the manners and the social condition of the Southern states.

Thus, by “America” Tocqueville basically has in mind the northern, free states, and above all, New England, which he considers the cradle of the American nation:

[In] the New England states, the two or three main ideas that now constitute the basis of the social theory of the United States were first combined. The principles of New England spread at first to the neighboring states; they then passed successively to the more distant ones; and at last they interpenetrated the whole confederation. ... The civilization of New England has been like a beacon lit upon a hill, which, after it has diffused its warmth immediately around it, also tinges the distant horizon with its glow.

The first settlers of New England, Tocqueville points out, were associated with the Puritan strand of English society. Socially, they were more or less equal. Politically, they established institutions by which the adult male citizens exercised, the rights of sovereignty, naming their own magistrates and often directly conduct­ing the business of government. They drew many of their principles of law and often even its content from the religious faith that animated them. Tocqueville notes a salient element in the law-making of these early Puritans:

The chief care of the legislators in this body of penal laws was the maintenance of orderly conduct and good morals in the community. Thus, they constantly invaded the domain of conscience, and there was scarcely a sin which was not subject to magisterial censure. ... In [some] places, the legislator, entirely forgetting the great principles of religious toleration that he had himself demanded in Europe, made attendance on divine service compulsory, and went so far as to visit with severe punishments and even with death Christians who chose to worship God according to a ritual differing from his own. ... It must not be forgotten that these fantastic and oppressive laws were not imposed by authority, but that they were freely voted by all the persons interested in them ...

What Tocqueville does not notice, however, is an opposing strand in early New England society, even in the 17th century — the libertarian component represented by Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, who insisted on freedom of individual choice in matters of religion and personal morals. In fact, neither Hutchinson’s or Williams’s name appears in Tocqueville’s work. Instead, Tocqueville refers to the formation  of the first public schools, whose aim was to instill the prevailing religious and moral doctrines. And he cites an address by John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in which Winthrop gives what Tocqueville qualifies as a “fine definition of liberty.”

Concerning liberty, I observe a great mistake in the country about that. There is a twofold liberty, natural (I mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal. ... By [natural liberty] man hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. ... This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue. The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal. ... It is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest. ... This liberty is maintained and exercized in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free.

Although Tocqueville had previously referred to the “fantastic and oppressive” laws of the Puritians, here he expresses his admiration for and agreement with Winthrop’s defense of those laws. Moreover, he paints early New England — the seedbed of the American character — monochromatically, as the exclusive preserve of those eager to impose their own faith and value-system on others. The beginning of the very speech by Winthrop that Tocqueville cites, however, should have alerted him to the existence of another type of early American — those who, according to Winthrop, commit the “great mistake” of believing in liberty for the individual and an open society.

     At any rate, Tocqueville is ready to summarize the foundations of Anglo-American civilization:

It is the result ... of two distinct elements, which in other places have been in frequent disagreement, but which the Americans have succeeded in incorporating to some extent one with the other and combining admirably. I allude to the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty.

He soon adds another element, associated with liberty:

One sees [the Americans) seeking with almost equal eagerness material wealth and moral satisfaction; heaven in the world beyond and well-being and liberty in this one.

     Next Tocqueville goes on to examine the social condition — the habits and mores — of the Anglo-Americans. He begins by indicating his theory of social causation:

Social condition is commonly the result of circumstances, sometimes of laws, oftener still of these causes united. But when once established, it may justly be considered as itself the source of almost all the laws, the usages, and the ideas which regulate the conduct of nations. Whatever it does not produce, it modifies.

The social condition of the Americans, he observes is “eminently democratic.” Even in the South, where a landed elite existed, it was not a true aristocracy, since it possessed no special legal privileges. The American Revolution, as a great popular uprising for independence, strengthened the democratic element. Tocqueville attributes a very powerful — indeed, exaggerated — influence to the laws of inheritance. Primogeniture and entail, to the degree they even existed before, were effectively abolished after the Revolution. The result is a constant circulation of property.

I do not mean that there is any lack of wealthy individuals in the United States; I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken stronger hold on the affections of men and where a profounder contempt is expressed for the theory of the permanent equality of property. But wealth circulates with inconceivable rapidity, and experience shows that it is rare to find two succeeding generations in the full enjoyment of it. ... America, then, exhibits in her social state an extraordinary phenomenon. Men are there seen on a greater equality in point of fortune and intellect, or in other words, more equal in their strength, than in any other country of the world, or in any age of which history has preserved the remembrance.

     In the equality of social condition that is characteristic of the Americans, Tocqueville perceives a grave potential danger — the possibility of despotism. First of all, despotism may be abetted by a perversion of the love of equality.

There is a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored ... but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to preferring equality in slavery to inequality with freedom.

Secondly, in a state in which men are more or less equal it may be difficult to gather sufficient forces to resist the inroads of a would-be despot. Tocqueville was a life-long student of the great 18th century political thinker, the Baron de Montesquieu. One of Montesquieu’s chief concerns was how to avoid despotism, by limiting political power. As he expresses it in The Spirit of the Laws, his deep study of history had taught him that

It is an eternal experience that every man who possesses power is led to abuse it. He proceeds until he finds limits. So that no one will abuse the power he has, it is necessary that, by the disposition of things, power checks power.

Tocqueville questions whether a democratic society lends itself to this kind of resistance.

In a state where the citizens are all practically equal, it becomes difficult for them to preserve their independence against the aggressions of power. No one among them being strong enough to engage in the struggle alone with advantage, nothing but general combination can protect their liberty. Now, such a union is not always possible.

This is an issue that would occupy Tocqueville until his very last works. Here he just suggests that the Americans have been able to avoid the temptations of equality in servitude and the difficulties of limiting power through their circumstances, their intelli­gence, “and especially their morals.”

     The United States was a land committed to the sovereignty of the people. Tocqueville notes that there had existed hindrances to the people’s sovereignty in the early years of the American colonies, in the form of a restricted suffrage and the leading role played by the intellectual elite in New England and the landed proprietors to the south. But the Revolutionary cataclysm — together with changes in the laws of inheritance — put an end to these. The democratic principle won out. Power passed from the various elites to the people at large. Universal manhood suffrage became the rule. With an eye to the French — and English — governments of his day, which attempted to restrict the right to vote to the upper classes, Tocqueville states:

When a nation begins to modify the elective qualifications, it may easily be foreseen that, sooner or later, that qualifica­tion will be entirely abolished. There is no more invariable rule in the history of society. The further electoral rights are extended, the greater is the need of extending them. ... Concession follows concession, and no stop can be made short of universal suffrage.

Tocqueville is again pointing out that the advanced nations of western Europe will, sooner or later, follow in the footsteps of the United States.

     Tocqueville summarizes the political condition of the Americans:

The people reign in the American political world as the Deity does in the universe. They are the cause and the aim of all things; everything comes from them, and everything is absorbed in them.

     Tocqueville quite deliberately begins his discussion of popular government in the United States at the basic level — the township, or village. In Boston he had learned that they are, the foundation of American democracy:

Municipal institutions constitute the strength of free nations. Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science. They bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it. A nation may establish a free government, but without municipal institutions it cannot have the spirit of liberty.

The township system, especially as it developed in New England and spread to other parts of the nation, was where the people learned self-government by prac­ticing it. They either directly administered the various affairs of the community — such as education, roads and other public works, care for the sick and indigent, police, fire departments, and so on — or they elected and oversaw those who did. Democracy at the local level was indispensable condition for democracy at the state and national levels.

     Tocqueville links local self-government with the question of limiting the power of the central state. Here he makes an important distinction which supports the view that he was “a liberal of a new kind.”

There are two methods of diminishing the force of authority in a nation. The first is to weaken the supreme power in its very principle, by forbidding or preventing society from acting in its own defense under certain circumstances. To weaken authority in this manner is the European way of establishing freedom. The second manner of diminishing the influence of authority does not consist of stripping society of some of its rights, nor in paralyzing its efforts, but in distributing the exercise of its powers among various hands and in multiplying functionaries, to each of whom is given the degree of power necessary to perform his duty. ... It was never assumed in the United States that the citizen if a free country has a right to do whatever he pleases. On the contrary, more social obligations were there imposed upon him than anywhere else. No idea was ever entertained of attacking the principle or contesting the rights of society; but the exercise of its authority was divided, in order that the office might be powerful and the officer insignifi­cant, and that the community should be at once regulated and free. In no country in the world does the law hold so absolute a language as in America; and in no country is the right of applying it vested in so many hands.

Tocqueville appears to be saying that, while friends of freedom in Europe sought to limited the extent of state paper — although he uses the term “society,” rather than “state” — in America their concern was simply to distribute state power as widely as possible. If this is his meaning, he is surely mistaken. The Jeffersonian tradition, at least, always insisted in the strongest possible terms that the powers of “society,” in the sense of government, must be few and severely limited. The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution, as well as the various bills of rights in the constitutions of the several states, represented so many fetters on political power vis-à-vis the individual citizen. In this passage — as, from time to time, elsewhere in Democracy in America and in his other works — Tocqueville seems to give in to the temptation to force the facts to fit his more abstract notions in political philosophy.

     Now Tocqueville comes to a concept that is closely intertwined with self-government and democracy and its dangers, and which will, likewise, occupy him for the rest of his life: centralization. He begins by making another distinction.

There exist two distinct kinds of centralization, which it is necessary to discriminate with accuracy. Certain interests are common to all parts of a nation, such as the enactment of its general laws and the maintenance of its foreign relations. Other interests are peculiar to certain parts of the nation, such, for instance, as the business of the several townships. When the power that directs the former, or general, interests is concentrated in one place or in the same persons, it constitutes a centralized government. To concentrate in like manner in one place the direction of the latter, or local, interests, constitutes what may be termed a centralized administration.

Centralization government is a benefit to society, as the example of England shows. Indeed, it was the lack of such centralization in the general affairs of society that had produced the chaos of feudalism. Centralized administration, however — the direction of all the affairs of society, even those of local concern, by a monolithic state bureaucracy — is one of the great evils of modern times. Tocqueville is well-aware of the arguments that can be made in favor of centralized administra­tion, which make it all the more insidious a danger.

Although such an administration can bring together at a given moment, on a given point, all the disposable resources of a people, it injures the renewal of those resources. It may ensure a victory in the hour of strife, but it gradu­ally relaxes the sinews of strength. It may help admirably the transient greatness of a man, but not the durable prosperity of a nation.

This is another motif to which Tocqueville will continually return, perhaps his deepest concern of all — the varying effects on human character of different social and political arrangements. So destructive is centralization to the kind of independent and resourceful human type Tocqueville hoped to foster, that he adds argument to argument. Interestingly, on point he makes is reminiscent of the case economists have made against government economic planning:

However enlightened and skillful a central power may be, it cannot of itself embrace all the details of the life of a great nation. Such vigilance exceeds the powers of man. All when it attempts unaided to create and set in motion so many complicated springs, it must submit to a very imperfect result or exhaust itself in bootless efforts.

Centralize by its very nature generates uniformity, which frustrates innovation and progress. Tocqueville concedes that in rejecting centralized power, the Americans must put up with disadvantages often absent in societies that are more carefully monitored and overseen by the authorities.

It is undeniable that the want of those uniform regulations which control the conduct of every inhabitant of France is not infrequently felt in the United States. Gross instances of social indifference and neglect are to be met with, and from time to time disgraceful blemishes are seen, in complete contrast with the surrounding civilization.

But the system, if it has its drawbacks, also offers advantages missing in central­ized societies.

In no other country in the world do the citizens make such exertions for the common weal. I know of no people who have established schools so numerous and efficacious, places of public worship better suited to the wants of the inhabitants, or roads kept in better repair. Uniformity or permanence of design, the minute arrangement of details, and the perfection of administrative system must not be sought for in the United States. What we find there is the presence of a power which, if it is somewhat wild, is at least robust, and an existence checkered with accidents, indeed, but full of animation and effort.

     Tocqueville contrasts with the American situation the condition pre­vailing in places where total centralization has become the rule — he is thinking of the Ottoman Empire, and probably of Russia, southern Italy, and other areas as well.

There are countries in Europe where the native considers himself as a kind of settler, indifferent to the fate of the spot which he inhabits. The greatest changes are effected there without his concurrence and, unless chance may have apprised him of the event, without his knowledge. Nay, more. The condition of his village, the policing of his street, the repairs of his church or the parsonage, do not concern him, for he looks upon all these things as unconnected with himself and as the property of a powerful stranger whom he calls the government. ... When a nation has arrived at this state, it must either change its customs and its laws, or perish, for the source of public virtues is dried up. And though it may contain subjects, it has no citizens.

Ever anxious lest despair paralyze action and the quest for improvement, Tocque­ville ends this highly important chapter on a note of hope.

It depends upon the laws to awaken and direct the vague impulse of patriotism, which never abandons the human heart. ... Let it not be said that it is too late to make the experiment, for nations do not grow old as men do, and every fresh genera­tion is a new people ready for the care of the legislator.

“The Legislator;” Tocqueville was a life-long student of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well, and this echo from the Social Contract — on the redemptive role of the Law-Giver — is not the only residue from these studies that we will have occasion to note.

     Tocqueville goes on to discuss how dispersion of power among the states and an independent judiciary are further guarantees of freedom. He particularly praises the American system for carrying over from England the principle of the accountability of government functionaries before the common courts:

It is hardly necessary to say that in a free country like America all the citizens have the right of indicting public functionaries before the ordinary tribunals, and that all the judges have the power of convicting public officers. The right granted to the courts of justice of punishing the agents of the executive government when they violate the laws is so natural a one that it cannot be looked upon as an extraordinary privilege.

The case is quite different in France, however, where from the time of Napoleon on a citizen could only bring a public functionary to justice with the consent of the council of state — another branch of the same executive power that the citizen was indicting. Tocqueville states that he has a hard time making his American and English friends even understand the meaning of this provision, which insulates the state bureaucracy from any accountability for its routine violations of the law and infringements of individual rights.

     Tocqueville now tackles the Constitution of the United States. Many European liberals, before and after Tocqueville, have been impressed, even amazed by this document. William Gladstone, the liberal Prime Minister of Great Britain in the later 19th century, referred to the Constitu­tion as the most brilliant work ever set down at one time by the pen of man. Tocqueville is similarly affected:

The assembly which accepted the task of composing the Con­stitution was small. But George Washington was its President, and it contained the finest minds and the noblest characters that had ever appeared in the New World.

     Tocqueville sketches, for the benefit of his European readers, the various organs of the Federal government, the modes of election for the President and the houses of Congress, their respective powers, the jurisdiction of the Federal courts, and the decisive role of the Supreme Court. But the balance of the Constitution, he thinks, lies with the states rather than the Federal government.

The attributes of the Federal government were carefully defined, and all that was not included among them was de­clared to remain to the governments of the several states. Thus the government of the states has remained the rule, and that of the confederation the exception.

It is the states that have the people’s deepest loyalties. This was a major reason, in fact, why toward the end of Part I, Tocqueville doubts the capacity of the Union to survive. Why did he neglect the possibility — in later decades, a reality — that power would shift from the states to the central government? Here Tocqueville may have been misled by the tactics of one of the fathers of the Constitution — Alexander Hamilton. In preparing to write Part I, Tocqueville studied assiduously the copy of The Federalist he had picked up on his trip. In Number 17 of The Federalist, Hamilton, ever anxious to downplay potential dangers in the new Constitution from massing powers in the national government, stressed the “alleged” tendency of power to drift toward the states:

Upon the same principle that a man is more attached to his family than to his neighborhood, to his neighborhood than to the community at large, the people of each state would be apt to feel a stronger bias towards their local govern­ments than towards to the government of the Union. ... This strong propensity of the human heart would find powerful auxiliaries in the objects of State regulation. ... It will always be far more easy for the State governments to en­croach upon the national authorities than for the national authorities to encroach upon the State authorities.

     Tocqueville commits a similar mistake in minimizing the role of the President within the Federal system:

The President is also the executor of the laws, but he does not really cooperate in making them, since the refusal of his assent does not prevent their passage. He is not, therefore, a part of the sovereign power, but only its agent. He exer­cizes a certain influence on state affairs, but he does not conduct them. The preponderating power is vested in in the representatives of the whole nation.

Tocqueville’s somewhat disdainful views on the American Presidency were strongly affected by the meeting he and Beaumont had in Washington with the man who then filled that office, Andrew Jackson. The French travellers had not been overwhelmed. Beaumont had written home:

He is an old man of 66 years, well-preserved, and appears to have retained all the vigor of his body and spirit. He is not a man of genius. His great merit is to have won the battle of New Orleans against the English. That victory made him popular and brought it about that he was elected president, so true is it that in every country military glory has a prestige that the masses can’t resist, even when the masses are composed of merchants and businessmen. The President of the United States occupies a palace that in Paris would be called a fine private residence. He has no guards watching at the door; and if he has courtiers they are not very attentive to him, for when he entered the salon he was alone. We chatted of things that were insignificant enough. He made us drink a glass of Madeira wine, and we thanked him, using the word Monsieur, like the first guest.

But Tocqueville was perspicacious enough to see the potential for power in the office of the presidency and the changed circumstances that would realize that potential:

It is chiefly in its foreign relations that the executive power of a nation finds occasion to exert its skill and its strength. If the existence of the United States were perpetually threatened, if its chief interests were in daily connection with those of other powerful nations, the executive government would assume an increased importance in propor­tion to the measures expected of it and to those which it would execute. The President of the United States, it is true, is the commander-in-chief of the army, but the army is composed of only 6,000 men. He commands the fleet, but the fleet reckons but few sail. He conducts the foreign relations of the Union, but the United States is a nation without neigh­bors. Separated from the rest of the world by the ocean, and too weak as yet to aim at the dominion of the seas, it has no enemies, and its interests rarely come into contact with those of any nation of the globe. ... The President of the United States possesses almost royal prerogatives, which he has no opportunity of exercising. ... The laws allow him to be strong, but circumstances keep him weak.

As things stood then, in an America without military and political entanglements all across the globe, and the wars they inevitably entailed, the balance of the Constitution lay with the states, rather than the Federal government, and, within the central government, with the branch closest to the people — the Congress. But, remarkably enough, Tocqueville was able to judge that this was conditional and foresee the circumstances that would change it in the future.

     Tocqueville touches on the advantages that the Americans derive from their federal system. While being members of a large nation, which, he thinks, is conducive to “the more rapid and energetic circulation of ideas” and the progress of the arts and sciences, most of the laws under which they live can be tailored to the conditions and circumstances that surround them — they are not designed from the center, to be applied uniformly throughout the nation.

     Now Tocqueville feels the need to go beyond the skeleton of the political constitution to more fundamental factors.

Thus far I have examined the institutions of the United States, I have passed their legislation in review and have described the present forms of political society. ... But above these institutions and beyond all these characteristic forms, there is a sovereign power, that of the people, which may destroy or modify them at its pleasure. It remains to be shown in what manner this power, superior to the laws, acts; what are its instincts and passions, what the secret springs that retard, accelerate, or direct its irresistible course, what the effects of its unbounded authority, and what the destiny that is reserved for it.

These are the questions that Tocqueville will pursue throughout the rest of Democracy in America.

     After discussing political parties, which he considers a necessary evil in free governments, Tocqueville turns to freedom of the press. With a touch of aristocratic scorn for the violent language and vulgarity sometimes found in the newspapers of his day, he states:

I confess that I do not entertain that firm and complete attachment to the liberty of the press which is wont to be excited by things that are supremely good in their very nature. I approve of it from a consideration more of the evils it prevents than of the advantage it ensures.

Freedom of the press is crucially important as a check on the abuse of government power. Moreover, in a democracy like the United States, censorship of the press would be absurd.

When the right of every citizen to a share in the government of society is acknowledged, everyone must be presumed to be able to choose between the various opinions of his contem­poraries. ... The sovereignty of the people and the liberty of the press may therefore be regarded as correlative ...

Somewhat paradoxically, despite the total freedom of the press that exists in the United States and the often uncontrolled violence of newspaper attacks on institutions and individuals, the result is not disorder and turmoil, but the reverse.

America is perhaps, at this moment, the country of the whole world that contains the fewest germs of revolution. ... The general principles of the government are more stable and the chief opinions which regulate society are more durable there than in many other countries. ... I attribute this to a cause that may at first sight appear to have an opposite tendency — namely, to the liberty of the press. The nations among whom this liberty exists cling to their opinions as much from pride as from conviction. They cherish them because they hold them to be just and because they chose them of their own free will; and they adhere to them, not only because they are true, but because they are their own.

     Tocqueville now veers into one of those by-paths that occur from time to time in Democracy in America, and which students have found so fascinating. He sketches the psychological stages of belief in man — beginning with uncritical faith.

A man believes firmly because he adopts a proposition without inquiry. He doubts as soon as objections present themselves. But he frequently succeeds in satisfying these doubts, and then he begins again to believe. This time he has not a dim and casual glimpse of the truth, but sees it clearly before him and advances by the light it gives.

So far, this seems optimistic enough, consistent with the view of 18th century liberals of the Enlightenment and of 19th century ones such as John Start Mill­ on man’s progress towards greater rationality. But immediately, a darker tone is introduced:

It may be doubted, however, whether this rational and self-guiding conviction arouses as much fervor or enthusiastic devotion in men as does their first dogmatical belief.

And Tocqueville concludes on a strangely somber note:

We may rest assured that the majority of mankind will always remain in one of these two states, will either believe they know not wherefore, or will not know what to believe. Few are those who can ever attain to that other state of rational and independent conviction which true knowledge can produce out of the midst of doubt.

This pessimistic conclusion — that the choice for the great majority of human beings is between uncritical, unreasoning belief on the one hand and paralyzing doubt on the other — will have momentous consequences for Tocqueville’s ideas on the importance of religion in social life.

     Tocqueville observes the ubiquitousness of associations in America — indeed, elsewhere he considers it to be a mark of the Anglo-Saxon race.

In no country in the world has the principle of association been more successfully used or applied to a greater multi­tude of objects than in America. Besides the permanent associations which are established by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals. The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life. He looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety. ... This habit may be traced even in the schools, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they have themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they have themselves defined. ... There is no end the human despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society.

In the United States, the voluntary, cooperative sector of society flourishes, and the political live is often avoided. Tocqueville remarks on how surprised he was to find how much talent there was among the citizens in America, and how little among the leaders of government — perhaps he is thinking of Jackson again. He finds the reason for this in the engrained commercial spirit of the people.

The pursuit of wealth generally diverts men of great talents and strong passions from the pursuit of power; and it fre­quently happens that a man does not undertake to direct the fortunes of the state until he has shown himself incom­petent to conduct his own.

Unlike a monarchical system, a democracy will rarely have strong leaders, willing to swim against the tide, to stand up against the inclinations of the majority. This tends to accentuate certain weaknesses natural to a democracy, in domestic expenditures for government and in foreign policy. In regard to the first:

As the great majority of those who create the laws have no taxable property, all the money that is spent for the community appears to be spent to their advantage, at no cost of their own ... in countries in which the poor have the exclusive power of making laws, no great economy of public expenditure ought to be expected.

The remedy for this is the widespread distribution of property.

The extravagance of democracy is less to be dreaded in pro­portion as the people acquire a share of property, because, on the one hand, the contributions of the rich are then less needed, and, on the other, it is more difficult to impose taxes that will not reach the imposers.

Tocqueville’s argument is somewhat confusing at this point. He states that in “America ... the great majority of the citizens possess some fortune,” yet goes on to claim:

Faithful to its popular origin, the government makes great efforts to satisfy the wants of the lower classes. ... I conclude, therefore, without having recourse to inaccurate statistics, that the democratic government of the Americans is not a cheap government, as is sometimes asserted ...

According to his generalization, however, the American government should be a low-spending one and the American people, since most of them are property-owners to some degree, only lightly taxed. This may be another example of Tocqueville stretching the facts to fit the theory.

     A more serious problem with democracy arises in the area of foreign relations. In a democratic society, the people are constantly surrounded by flatterers — there is no one with the authority to chastise the people as a whole, no elite, perhaps more foresighted than the multitude, whose guidance or warnings they respect. Often, like children, they will resent any demand for sacrifice preferring to indulge their momentary desires. Tocqueville takes as an example conscription.

In America, conscription is unknown and men are induced to enlist by bounties. The notions and habits of the people of the United States are so opposed to compulsory recruitment that I do not think it can ever be sanctioned by the laws.

The people, accustomed to pursuing their own affairs, above all the accumulation of wealth, will tend to chafe at taking on burdens such as conscrip­tion, and the glory of war means little to them. But such burdens are inevitable in any confrontation with another power. Here lies a potentially fatal danger:

I am of the opinion that a democratic government tends, in the long run, to increase the real strength of society. ... If a democratic country remained during a whole century subject to a republican government, it would probably at the end of that period be richer, more populous, and more prosperous than the neighboring despotic states. But during that century it would often have incurred the risk of being conquered by them.

So far America had avoided the need to impose the sacrifices of war on itself by following a very different foreign policy from that of the European powers — non-intervention, or, as it is sometimes called today, isolationism. Tocqueville cites passages from Washington’s Farewell Address, whose theme is given in Washington’s words, “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible.” This policy, and the geographical circumstances of the country, permitted the Americans to enjoy peace for virtually the whole first half century of their history. It remained to be seen whether they could con­tinue to do so. One thing was certain, however:

Almost all the nations that have exercized a powerful in­fluence upon the destinies of the world, by conceiving, following out, and executing vast designs, from the Romans to the English, have been governed by aristocratic institutions.

It is not accidental that Tocqueville mentions peoples noted for their imperialism. As we shall see, imperialistic expansion was by no means repugnant to him. In fact, it was a special example of the quest for glory, the will to high deeds, that Tocqueville found so sorely lacking in democratic societies.

     Throughout his great work, democracy is never a black or white proposition for Tocqueville. While it has its drawbacks, it also has advantages.

The defects and weaknesses of a democratic government may be readily discovered. They can be proved by obvious facts, whereas their healthy influence becomes evident in ways which are not obvious and are so to speak, hidden.

The advantages of democracy are connected with the new world Tocqueville sees in the process of being born. This is one of the most important aspects of Tocqueville’s thought. One reason he is considered to be among the first great modern sociologists is that he recognizes and builds on the concept of a great transition — between the fading world of the past and new society which is coming into existence before his very eyes. The change can be illustrated by the transformation of the feeling of patriotism. There was an older kind of patriotism, according to Tocqueville:

[It] connects the affections of man with his birthplace. This natural fondness is united with a taste for ancient customs and a reverence for traditions of the past. Those who cherish it love their country as they love the house of their father. ... It is in itself a kind of religion; it does not reason, but it acts from impulse of faith and sentiment.

A few generations afterwards, the great German sociologist Max Weber was to speak of the great transition to modern times as a vast rationalization of all areas of life. Tocqueville already understood this concept very well. As applied to patriotism:

There is another species of attachment to country which is more rational than the one I have been describing. It is perhaps less generous and less ardent, but it is more fruitful and more lasting. ... A man comprehends the influence which the wellbeing of his country has on his own. He is aware that the laws permit him to contribute to that prosper­ity, and he labors to promote it, first because it benefits him, and secondly because it is in part his own work.

The old, traditional world is lost forever, Tocqueville believes. The worm of skepticism and doubt has subverted all ancient loyalties. The burning question now is, how are men to be led to continued concern with the fate of their fellow men and their country? To those who are complacent about the trend of society, Tocqueville addresses a cry from the heart:

Do you not see that religious belief is shaken and the divine notion of right is declining, that morality is debased and the notion of moral right is therefore fading away? Argument is substituted for faith, and calculation for the impulses of sentiment. If, in the midst of this general disruption, you do not succeed in connecting the notion of right with that of private interest, which is the only immutable point in the human heart, what means will you have of governing the world except fear?

The democratic approach to patriotism, characteristic of the Americans, still offers a hope.

I maintain that the most powerful and perhaps the only means that we still possess of interesting men in the welfare of their country is to make them partners in the government. ... The lower orders in the United States understand the influence exercized by the general prosperity upon their own welfare. ... They are accustomed to regard this prosperity as the fruit of their own exertions. The citizen looks upon the fortune of the public as his own, and he labors for the good of the state not merely from a sense of pride or duty, but from what I venture to term cupidity.

Here Tocqueville is combining two rather different motives that might substi­tute for the fading, instinctive identification of the individual with his country. The first is participation in the governing process, through institu­tons of democratic government. The second is the recognition that one’s own wellbeing stands or falls with that of the society of which you are a part. Both are democratic, in a sense. They pertain to the new world, which dislodges status, hierarchy, tradition, and sacrifice for a higher good, and puts in their place an apotheosis of the individual and his personal concerns. This is the inevitable tendency of democracy, the polar opposite of aristocracy.

     Tocqueville’s sharp contrast of aristocratic and democratic patriotism is a good example of his method. As he put it in a note he wrote for himself:

In order to make myself well-understood, I am constantly obliged to portray extreme states, an aristocracy without a mixture of democracy, a democracy without a mixture of aristocracy, a perfect equality, which is an imaginary state. It happens then that I attribute to one or the other of the two principles more complete effects than those that in general they produce, because in general they are not alone.

Striving to order and arrange the enormously complex phenomena of social evolu­tion — to make sense of them — Tocqueville resorts to what he calls “imaginary states.” Later, Max Weber will use the term ideal type — a conceptual construct or model that can be used as a reference point for understanding. In his great work, Tocqueville’s major ideal types are aristocracy and democracy. These do not stand merely for contrasting legal systems or social structures — indeed, scholars have commented on the many different ways Tocqueville uses the term “democracy” in his book. Each of the ideal types entails contrasting value­-systems, ways of life, even feelings and what Tocqueville called “habits of the heart.” As he operates with these concepts, we begin to see that Aristocratic and Democratic Man are two distinct types of human being. Nowhere does Tocque­ville make this clearer than in the chapter under discussion, on the advantages of democracy. With twenty generations of Norman nobility, he describes the aristocratic way of life:

Do you wish to give a certain elevation to the human mind and teach it to regard the things of this world with generous feelings, to inspire men with a scorn of mere temporal advantages, to form and nourish strong convictions and keep alive the spirit of honorable devotedness? Is it your object to refine the habits, embellish the manners, and cultivate the arts, to promote the love of poetry, beauty, and glory? Would you constitute a people fitted to act powerfully upon all other nations, and prepared for those high enterprises which, whatever be their results, will leave a name forever famous in history?

If this is your aim, Tocqueville declares, then avoid democracy, for these are the characteristic marks of aristocratic society. But Tocqueville as a man of the 19th century — and he divined what democracy was bringing in its train:

But if you hold it expedient to divert the moral and intellec­tual activity of man to the production of comfort and the promotion of general wellbeing; if a clear understanding be more profitable to man than genius; if your object is not to stimulate the virtues of heroism but the habits of peace ... if, instead of living in the midst of a brilliant society, you are contented to have prosperity around you; if, in short, you are of the opinion that the principal object of government is not to confer the greatest power and glory upon the body of the nation, but to ensure the greatest enjoyment and to avoid the most misery to each of the indivi­duals who compose it — if such be your desire, then equalize the conditions of men and establish democratic institutions.

Although in this passage, Tocqueville, for rhetorical effect, presents the two ideal types as if they were real alternatives for choice, of course he held that democracy was inevitable. Thus, he turns now to the unlimited power that the majority wields in the United States and the factors that — so far — have kept it from being a scourge to American society. He lays down the proposition that it is incorrect to say that the majority has the right to do whatever it wishes:

I hold it to be an impious and detestable maxim that, poli­tically speaking, the people have a right to do anything. ... A general law, which bears the name of justice, has been made and sanctioned, not only by a majority of this or that people, but by a majority of mankind. The rights of every people are therefore confined within the limits of what is just. ... When I refuse to obey an unjust laws, I do not contest the right of the majority to command, but I simply appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of mankind.

Tocqueville does not give any example of any act which “mankind” — the thousands of differing societies that exist and have existed — has agreed to consider unjust when committed by a majority against an individual. He wishes to preserve some sphere of freedom of action to the individual, yet — perhaps because of his admitted distaste for philosophical speculation — is unable or unwilling to suggest any theory of individual rights. In fact, it seems doubtful that rights, in any sense that an American, for instance, would understand them have in fact ever been endorsed by a majority of human societies.

     At any rate, this discussion is a prelude to Tocqueville argument that in a democratic society such as the United States, freedom is not threatened by an absolute monarch — but by the people itself. The great danger is the tyranny of the majority, a phrase that helped make Part I of Democracy in America famous and left a deep impression on John Stuart Mill’s essay, On Liberty. In modern society, the individual or a minority is threatened not so much by the monarch and his agents, or even by the power of the government itself. The threat comes from the massed power of all of society, by the total­ity of governmental and non-governmental institutions. Indeed, the pressures of non-governmental forces can often be stronger and less capable of being re­sisted than the state-power itself, as Tocqueville had discovered during his trip to the United States.

     In Philadelphia Tocqueville encountered Mr. John Jay Smith, a “very respected Quaker,” who explained to him the position of free blacks in the Northern states:

Slavery is abolished in Pennsylvania. The Negroes have the right to vote at elections, but they cannot go to the poll without being ill-treated.

When Tocqueville inquired why the law did not protect them, Smith replied:

The laws have no force with us when public opinion does not support them. Now the people is imbued with very strong prejudices against the Negroes, and the magistrates feel that they have not the strength to enforce laws which are favorable to the latter.

Several weeks later, Tocqueville conversed in Baltimore with Richard Stewart, a distinguished physician, and learned more about the potency of public opinion, this time in enforcing conformity to religious beliefs, at least outwardly. In America, Dr. Stewart said:

Public opinion does with us what the Inquisition could never do. I have known a lot of young people who thought they had discovered that the Christian religion was not true. Carried away by the ardor of youth, they have started loudly proclaiming this opinion. What then? Some have been forced to leave the country or to vegetate miserably there. Others, feeling the struggle unequal, have been constrained to an external religious conformity, or have at least kept quiet. The number who have thus been suppressed by public opinion is very considerable. Anti-Christian books are never published here, or at least that is very rare.

Tocqueville was so struck by these and similar conversations that he incorporated what he had learned from them in his chapter on “The Unlimited Power of the Majority in the United States.” His unusually harsh language is an indication of how strongly he felt:

I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. If America has not yet had any great writers, the reason is given in these facts: there can be no literary genius without freedom of opinion, and freedom of opinion does not exist in America. The Inquisition has never been able to prevent a vast number of anti-religious books from circu­lating in Spain. The empire of the majority succeeds much better in the United States, since it actually removes any wish to publish them.

Tocqueville pondered this dark side of democracy. Since “the very essence of democratic government consists in the absolute sovereignty of the majority,” all legal and political institutions will tend to fall under the majority’s sway. The legislature, local law-enforcement officials, the jury-system itself, and, increasingly, many judges — all were organs of the popular will. Moreover, in a democracy the will of the people exerted a potent, if often subtle, control over the would-be dissident, even in the deepest recesses of his mind. Such a situation filled Tocqueville with anxiety, since it presaged the end of intel­lecrtual freedom, of cultural progress, and even of any individual independence. It also provoked his wrath, expressed in both parts of Democracy in America, particularly in a passage in Part II that has become justly famous:

If democratic peoples substitute the absolute power of a majority for all the various powers that used excessively to imped the upsurge of individual thought, the evil itself would only have changed its form. Men would by no means have found the way to live in independence; they would only have succeeded in the difficult task of giving slavery a new face. There is matter for deep reflection here. l cannot say this too often for all those who see freedom of the mind as something sacred and who hate not only despots but also despotism. For myself, if l feel the hand of power heavy on my brow, l am little concerned to know who it is that oppresses me. l am no better inclined to pass my head under the yoke because a million men hold it out for me.

     Fortunately, up to now there have been forces at work which have set limits to the absolute sway of the majority. Tocqueville discusses for instance the legal profession, trained to respect precedent and order, which naturally acts as to prevent democratic excesses. But the force to which he devotes the most attention is religion.

     Religion was a subject that engaged Tocqueville’s thinking all of his life. His own personal religious views have been a matter of controversy. Some have claimed that he was a devout Christian, even Catholic. It is true that Tocqueville participated in Catholic worship. This appears, however, to have been more out of sense of the obligations of his position as a nobleman and landowner in his community than out of sincere faith. In a letter written to his friend Arthur de Gobineau, in October, 1843, Tocqueville says:

I am not a believer, which I am far from saying in order to boast, but as much of an unbeliever as I may be, I have never been able to keep from feeling a profound emotion in reading the Gospel.

It seems most likely that Tocqueville was a sort of deist — a believer in God, in a God-given moral code, and in an afterlife, but not in the doctrines of any particular faith. In any case, what concerned him was the functional value of religion. As he states in Democracy in America:

If it be of the highest importance to man, as an individual, that his religion should be be true, it is not so to society. Society has no future life to hope for or to fear; and pro­vided the citizens profess a religion the peculiar tenets of that religion are of little importance to its interests.

     Throughout all of Democracy in America, and, indeed, his other works as well, Tocqueville accentuates the value of religion. He realized he was arguing against a tradition of free thought and opposition to religion that was still strong among French liberals. This tradition stemmed from the 18th century Enlightenment, when many of the philosophes went beyond attacking religious intolerance, and denounced religion itself. Religious faith was an obstacle to the progress of thought and the liberation of man from ancient tyrannies. The Marquis de Condorcet, for instance, was a brilliant mathematician, philosopher, and liberal leader, who lived to take an active part in the events of the French Revolution. His most famous work, Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, was written while he was in hiding, under threat of death from Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. In it, Condorcet contrasts the evil and tyrannical past of the human race, under the dominion of superstition and organized religion, with what the future would bring, under the reign of reason, science, and the rights of man.

     Following the Revolution, however, the hostility toward religion shown by liberals like Condorcet began to give way to a new appreciation. The outstanding liberal of the time, Benjamin Constant, while condemning religious intolerance, respected faith in a Supreme Being and felt it had a critical role to play in guaranteeing freedom. His close friend, Madame de Stael, agreed, and rejected the opposition of liberty and religion as bogus:

Since the Revolution was made in the name of philosophy, the conclusion has been drawn that one has to be an atheist in order to love freedom. But it was precisely because the French did not unite religion with freedom that their Revolution deviated so quickly from its early course. It is Christianity that truly has brought freedom upon this earth, justice to the oppressed, respect for the unfortunate, and, above all, equality before God, of which equality before the law is only an imperfect image. It is through an inten­tional confusion of thought with some, through blindness with others, that people have presented the privileges of the nobility and the absolute power of the throne as dogmas of religion. They would thus forbid the noblest sentiment on this earth, the love of liberty, from entering into an alliance with Heaven.

This attitude was shared by the Doctrinaires, Guizot and Royer-Collard — and by Tocqueville. His experiences in America convinced him he had solid evidence for his views. Throughout his stay, he had been struck by the religiosity of the people:

There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America; and there can be no greater proof of its utility and of its conformity to human nature than that its influence is powerfully felt over the most enlightened and free nation of the earth.

Tocqueville observes that in the United States the clergy keeps its distance from political affairs and partisan politics. Religious influence is more indirect — and more powerful. Religion determines the customs — the basic way of life — of the people. In turn, this acts on political life. One of the greatest influences of religion on society is through the institution of marriage and the family. Americans are extraordi­narily devoted to the family, Tocqueville observes. Here he implies that the easy acceptance of the taking of a mistress or a lover that was to often to be found in France would not be, countenanced in the average American community.

When the American retires from the turmoil of public life to the bosom of his family, he finds in it the image of order and of peace. There his pleasures are simple and natural, his joys are innocent and calm; ... he accustoms himself easily to moderate his opinions as well as his tastes.

Another characteristic of the deep-seated religious faith of the Americans, Tocqueville has already noted: fixity in matters of doctrine and morals is a kind of neces­sary complement to the thrust toward innovation characteristic of a democracy. Moreover, principles of Christian morality and equity act as obstacles to the commission of injustice against the individual:

Hitherto no one in the United States has dared to advance the maxim that everything is permissible for the interests of society, an impious adage which seems to have been invented in an age of freedom to shelter all future tyrants. Thus, while the law permits the Americans to do what they please, religion prevents them from conceiving and forbids them to commit what is rash or unjust.

So intimately are religion and liberty linked in the United States, that the Americans believe it is impossible to have one without the other, Tocqueville quotes an item from a New York newspaper he had come across on his trip.

The Court of Common Pleas of Chester County a few days since rejected a witness who declared his disbelief in the existence of God. The presiding judge remarked that he had not before been aware that there was a man living who did not believe in the existence of God; that this belief constituted the sanction of all testimony in a court of justice; and that he knew of no cause in a Christian country where a witness had been permitted to testify without such belief.

This commitment on the part of the whole society is natural, Tocqueville believes.

Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. Religion is much more necessary in [a] republic ... than in [a] monarchy. ... How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in propor­tion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to a Deity?

As for the philosophes who looked forward to religion dying out as freedom and enlightenment advanced, the example of America shows they were wrong. The reason, Tocqueville maintains, is that religious belief is inherent in human nature. Lack of faith is the exception, a kind of moral abnormality. And the anti-reli­gious writers made another grave mistake. They considered a temporary and acci­dental condition — the united front of religious authorities with reactionary political powers — to be necessary and permanent.

The unbelievers of Europe attack the Christians as their political opponents rather than as their religious adversaries. They hate the Christian religion as the opinion of a party much more than as an error of belief; and they reject the clergy less because they are representatives of the Deity than because they are the allies of government.

The answer, then, is to sever the bond between the Christian churches and the last-ditch supporters of the Old Regime, whose cause, in any case, is doomed. In that way, faith can flourish again and act as a bulwark of the free society, as it does in America.

     The whole last section of the work that appeared in 1835, about 1/5 of it, is devoted to “The Present and Probable Future Condition of the Three Races that Inhabit the Territory of the United States.” The American situation in regard to race must have appeared unprecedented to a Frenchman like Tocqueville. Here was a land which fate seemed to have destined as the home of three distinct races of mankind, the Indians, or Native Americans; the Negroes; and the whites. This had created unparalleled problems. The question was open whether the Americans would be able to deal with them successfully.

     Tocqueville was a pronounced opponent of race-hatred and racial dis­crimination. Nothing distressed him as much in what he had seen in America as the treatment of the two subjugated races by the whites:

If we reason from what passes in the world, we should almost say that the European is to the other races of mankind what man himself is to the lower animals: he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue them, he destroys them.

     The Indians were forced to retreat before the advancing Europeans from the days of the first settlements. They were not equal to the competition, and the aggressions, of the whites. Tocqueville compares the ethos, the system of values of the Indian, to that of the feudal lord in the Middle Ages — war and hunting were viewed as the only worthwhile occupations. The Indians were shut up within compounds that grew narrower and narrower. Some of them, Toc­queville notes, proved their capacity for what is called civilization. He men­tions the Cherokees, who not only invented a written language, but even set up a newspaper! But their progress in assimilating the ways of the white man did not lead to their being spared.

     By a remarkable coincidence, while Tocqueville was in the United States he was able to witness personally an egregious example of the maltreatment meted out by the more advanced of the original inhabitants of the country. December 1831 found him and Beaumont at Memphis, Tennessee, anxiously seeking for some means of transportation down the Mississippi to New Orleans. Finally, a steamboat appeared, and as Tocqueville and his party were negotiating with the captain, a great troop of Indians emerged from the forest — men, women, children, old people, together with horses and dogs. They were Choctaws, and, along with the Cherokees, the Creeks, and the other so-called civilized tribes, they had been forced from their lands in the southeast, in Georgia and Alabama. This was a result of the policy of “Indian Removal,” executed by the government of Andrew Jackson. As Jackson expressed it in a message to Congress:

Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and Philanthropy has been long busily em­ployed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth.

Now Tocqueville was seeing with his own eyes a portion of the infamous “Trail of Tears” that led to the lands beyond the Mississippi. In a letter dated Christmas day, he wrote to his mother in France of how the Americans had ap­proached “the Indian question”:

... rational and unprejudiced people, moreover, great philan­thropists, [they] supposed, like the Spanish, that God had given them the new world and its inhabitants as complete property. ... The Spanish, truly brutal, loose their dogs on the Indians as on ferocious beats; they kill, burn, massacre, pillage, the new world as one would take a city by assault, without pity as without discrimination. But one cannot destroy everything; fury has a limit. The rest of the Indian population ultimately becomes mixed with its conquerors, takes on their mores, their religion. ... The Americans of the United States, more humane, more moderate, more respectful of law and legality, never bloodthirsty, are profoundly more destructive. ... The poor Indians take their old parents in their arms; the women load their children on their shoulders; the nation finally puts itself on the march. ... It abandons forever the soil on which, perhaps for a thousand years, its fathers have lived, in order to go settle in a wilderness where the whites will not leave them ten years in peace.

Tocqueville observed the masses of Indians, freezing, sick, some dying, board the steamboat and was profoundly moved:

There was, in the whole of this spectacle, an air of ruin and destruction, something that savored of a farewell that was final and with no return ... the Indians were calm, but somber and taciturn. ... We will deposit them tomorrow in the soli­tudes of Arkansas. It has to be confessed that this is a singular accident that made us come to Memphis to witness the expulsion, one might say the dissolution, of one of the most celebrated and most ancient American nations. But this enough on the savages. It is time to return to civilized people.

This episode made a profound impression on Tocqueville and colors his whole discussion of the fate of the Native Americans. He mentions that Indian leaders arise from time to time who try to unite all the the nations against the European invaders to no avail. It was their misfortune to confront a “civilized people,” Tocqueville says, “who are also the most grasping nation on the globe.”

I believe that the Indian nations of North America are doomed to perish, and that whenever the Europeans shall be established on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, that race of men will have ceased to exist.

     According to Tocqueville, the most formidable danger that threatens the future of the United States is the problem of the blacks. Slavery has de­graded the Negro.

Having been told from infancy that his race is naturally inferior to that of the whites, he assents to the proposition and is ashamed of his own nature. In each of his features he discovers a trace of slavery, and if it were in his power he would willingly rid himself of everything that makes him what he is.

Not the least of the harm produced by slavery is the prejudice it leaves behind even after it is removed. Free Negroes, in the North, suffer from the disdain of their fellow citizens no less than enslaved Negroes in the South. Tocqueville was thus one of the first of a long line of foreign observers to comment on the prevalence of racism in the United States.

     Tocqueville had gathered his views on slavery and the South from many sources. One of those that affected him most was the former president, John Quincy Adams. Tocqueville met him at a dinner party in Boston, and was seated next to him at the table. The French traveller plied his famous dinner-companion with questions — he later noted that Adams spoke a fluent and elegant French especially on slavery. Adams did not hesitate to state his strong opinions:

It is in slavery that are to be found almost all the embarrass­ments of the present and fears of the future. Slavery has modified the whole state of society in the South. Every white man in the south is a being equally privileged, whose destiny is to make the Negroes work without working himself. We cannot conceive how far the idea that work is dishonorable has entered the spirit of the Americans of the south. From this laziness in which the southern Whites live great differ­ences in character result. They devote themselves to bodily exercise, to hunting, to racing; they are vigorously constituted, brave, full of honor; what is called the point of honor is more delicate there than anywhere else; duels are frequent.

According to Adams, then, what the South was producing was a kind of aristocratic type of personality. But Tocqueville felt no admiration at all for these simula­tions of the European nobility. What he retained from the Adams and his other sources was that slavery was a blight not only on those held in bondage, but on the rest of society as well. In Democracy in America, he makes his point

The stream that the Indians had distinguished by the name of Ohio, or the Beautiful River, waters one of the most magnificent valleys which have ever been made the abode of man. ... [The state] which follows the numerous windings of the Ohio upon the left is called Kentucky; that upon the right bears the name of the river. These two states differ in only a single respect: Kentucky has admitted slavery, but the state of Ohio has prohibited [it]. ... Upon the left bank of the stream the population is sparse; from time to time one descries a troop of slaves loitering in the half­-desert fields; the primeval forest reappears at every turn; society seems to be asleep, man to be idle. ... From the right bank, on the contrary, a confused hum is heard, which proclaims the presence of industry; the fields are covered with abundant harvests ... and man appears to be in the enjoyment of that wealth and contentment which is the reward of labor.

Slavery caused economic stagnation in society, which ultimately hurt everyone — a society of freemen is vastly more productive than a society dependent on slaves. The use of such a pragmatic and utilitarian argument is characteristic of Tocqueville on this issue. Around 1840, when he was a member of the Chamber of Deputies, he made the issue of abolishing slavery in France’s West Indian colonies one of his prime concerns. Tocqueville was an unequivocal abolitionist, and he did point out the immorality of slavery. But he was also well aware that previous attempts to abolish slavery in French territories had relied ex­clusively on the moral argument and had ultimately foundered. The English anti­slavery movement, on the other hand, had used both sorts of arguments, and had been victorious. Concerned as he was not simply to make a rhetorical point but to ensure that slavery was wiped out, Tocqueville made use of the sort of pragmatic appeal that would achieve that end.

     Tocqueville was pessimistic on the future of race relations in the United States. He felt that “the Negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle,” since there seemed to be no possibility of a bi-racial society where both races were on an equal footing. But the English, of all the European peoples, have been the most averse to mixing with other races. What was to be the final outcome? A great conflict between the black and white inhabitants of the South, at least. Tocqueville did not blame the white Southerners:

When I see the order of nature overthrown, and when I hear the cry of humanity in its vain struggle against the laws, my indignation does not light upon the men of our own time who are the instruments of these outrages; but I reserve my execration for those who, after a thousand years of freedom, brought slavery into the world once more.

Will the Union endure? Tocqueville seems to have been of two minds on the ques­tion. In his notes, he refers to the dissolution of the Union as “something certain in time.” But this prediction does not appear in the published text, where he speaks of forces pulling in both directions. Much later, in 1856, as the issue of slavery in the United States was becoming more acute, Tocque­ville wrote to Nassau Senior:

I cannot desire, as many persons do, [the dismemberment of America]. Such an event would inflict a great wound on the whole human race; for it would introduce war into a great continent from whence it has been banished for more than a century. The breaking up of the American Union will be a solemn moment in the history of the world. I never met an American who did not feel this, and I believe that it will not be rashly or easily undertaken. There will, before actual rupture, be always a last interval, in which one or both parties will draw back. Has not this occurred twice?

But Tocqueville was certain that the Anglo-Americans would retain their republi­can institutions, and that some kind of extraordinary destiny waited this new people. The two volumes of Democracy in America that appeared in 1835 end with his astonishing and celebrated prophecy:

There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. Both of them have grown up unnoticed; and while the attention of mankind was directed elsewhere, they have suddenly placed themselves in the front rank among the nations. ... All the other [nations] have stopped, or continue to advance with extreme difficulty; these alone are proceeding with ease and celerity along a path to which no limit can be perceived. The American struggles against the obstacles that nature opposes to him; the adversaries of the Russian are men. ... The conquests of the American are therefore gained by the plowshare; those of the Russian by the sword. The Anglo­-American relies upon personal interest to accomplish his ends and gives free scope to the unguided strength and common sense of the people; the Russian centers all the authority of society in a single arm. The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different and their courses are not the same. Yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

     The reaction to the first part of Democracy in America was overwhelming; it was hailed as an instant classic of political thought, and Tocqueville was praised as a modern master of the field. The writer he was most often compared to was Montesquieu, the eighteenth century writer who, in his Spirit of the Laws, bolstered his conclusions with wide-ranging historical observations. One reviewer, who devoted a long essay to the book, was a noted English liberal, John Stuart Mill:

[Democracy in America] has at once taken its rank among the most remarkable productions of our time; it is a book with which, both for its facts and its speculations, all who would understand, or who are called upon to exercise influence over their age, are bound to be familiar. It will contribute to give to the political speculations of our time a new character. ... Monsieur de Tocqueville ... has set the example of analyzing democracy; of distinguishing one of its features, one of its tendencies, from another; of showing which of these tendencies is good, and which bad, in itself; how far each is necessarily connected with the rest, and to what extent any of them may be counteracted or modified.  ... The author’s mind, except that it is of a soberer character, seems to us to resemble Montesquieu most among the great French writers. The book is such as Montesquieu might have written, if to his genius he had superadded good sense, and the lights which mankind have since gained from the experiences of a period in which they may be said to have lived centuries in fifty years.

     Mill’s review was not simply effusive — it was a detailed analysis and discussion of the important issues raised by Democracy in America. Tocque­ville was grateful for Mill’s insightfulness:

Of all my reviewers, you are perhaps the only one who has thoroughly understood me; who has taken a general, bird’s­eye view of my ideas; who sees their ulterior aim and yet has preserved a clear perception of the details. I wanted this testimony to console me for all the false conclusions that are drawn from my book. I am constantly meeting people who want to persuade me of opinions that I proclaim, or who pretend to share with me opinions that I do not hold.

This was the beginning of an amicable association between the two great thinkers. Mill’s own thought, as later works, especially his famous essay, On Liberty, show, was decisively affected by Tocqueville’s ideas on the danger of a tyranny of the majority. It was only when Tocqueville’s nationalistic feelings got the better of his liberalism — in Mill’s view — that their friendship cooled.

     Praise for Part I was universal, in France, in England, and in the United States itself. Tocqueville was something bemused by it all. He wrote to a friend:

I feel like a certain lady of the court of Napoleon, whom the Emperor once took it into his head to make a duchess. That evening, as she heard herself announced by her new title when she arrived at court, she forgot to whom it belonged, and she ranged herself to one side to let the noble lady pass whose name had just been called. I assure you this is exactly my case. I ask myself if it be l that they are talking about? I infer that the world must consist of a poor set of people, since a book of my making, the limitations of which I know so well, has had the effect this appears to produce.

     Tocqueville went to visit England again, where he was celebrated and befriended on all sides. The cream of British intellectual society — especially among the liberals — rushed to congratulate him. Harriet Grote was the wife of a leading liberal, George Grote, the distinguished author of a history of ancient Greece; a shrewd and sociable woman, she was also an intellectual luminary in her own right. She wrote of Tocqueville at this time:

He is a small and delicate-looking young man and a most engaging person. Full of intelligence and knowledge, free from boasting and self-sufficiency, of gentle manners and handsome countenance. In conversing he displays a candid and unprejudiced mind. About thirty-two years of age, of a noble race in Normandy, and unmarried.

This last omission Tocqueville soon made good. Several years before he had made the acquaintance of an Englishwoman a few years older than himself. Mary Mottley, who was living with an aunt in Versailles, was a commoner, from a not particularly affluent background. Tocqueville’s family and many of his friends disapproved of their plan to marry. Finally, literary success assured, Tocque­ville went ahead, defying his family’s wishes, and made Mary his wife. Their union proved generally a happy one, though clouded by the fact that they never had children.

     But Tocqueville still had to complete his great work. This was proving more difficult than he had imagined. He wrote to Henry Reeve:

I have never worked on anything with as much enthusiasm. I think of my subject night and day. I would never have imagined that a subject that I have already revolved [in my head] so many ways could present itself to me with so many new faces.