Alexis de Tocqueville

The trip across the Atlantic took thirty-five days, They sighted land at New­foundland, then proceeded down the coast. At Newport, they boarded a steamboat for New York, where they arrived on May 10th, Tocqueville found these new contrap­tions imposing, as he found New York itself. He wrote to a friend in France:

The next day we boarded a steamboat, which transported us here in eighteen hours. These are immense machines much larger than a house, in which 500, 600, and up to a thousand persons are gathered together in vast saloons, have beds and a good table at their disposal, and thus cover quite tranquility, without suspecting it, three or four leagues an hour.

New York is located in one of the most admirable sites I know, with an immense port, at the mouth of a river. It is the key to northern America. Through it each year arrive thousands of foreigners who will populate the wilderness of the west. Its population, which was only 20,000 souls fifty years ago, is today 230,000. It is a clean city, built of brick and marble, but without noteworthy public monuments.

Within a month of his arrival, Tocqueville was beginning to put his first impres­sions of the new nation in order and to sketch the outlines of a theory. He already identified one of the keys to the riddle of an America that was vastly diversified, yet by and large harmonious and stable: the role of self-interest. As he wrote home:

Imagine, my friend, if you can, a society formed of all the nations of the world, English, German, French, people having different languages, beliefs, opinions, in a word, a society without roots, without memories, without prejudices, without common ideas, without a national character, yet a hundred times happier than our own. What serves as the link among such diverse elements? What makes all of this into one people? Interest — that is the secret. The private interest that breaks through at each moment, the interest that, moreover, appears openly and even proclaims itself a social theory!

     Tocqueville and Beaumont were welcomed with enthusiasm both by the public authori­ties and private citizens, who showered them with attention and hospitality. While they naturally sought out people of knowledge and learning, who could teach them the most, the two Frenchmen mingled with Americans of different social classes, observing, absorbing impressions, above all asking countless questions and listening carefully to the answers. Much of what they experienced they admired, Tocqueville expressed this is a long letter to his boyhood friend, another aristocrat, Louis de Kergolay:

These people incontestably are situated higher on the moral scale than among us; each man has a sense of his independent position and his individual dignity that does not always make his bearing very agreeable, but which definitely leads him to respect himself and to respect others. I especially admire two things here: the first is the extreme respect people have for the law; alone, and without public force, it commands in an irresistible way. The second thing that I envy the people here is the ease with which they do without government.

Evidently, Americans did possess some common ideas and something that could be called a national character, after all. The absence of government astonished Tocqueville in the first months of his trip. It led him to draw comparisons with his native land. He wrote another friend:

What is most striking to everyone who travels in this country is the spectacle of a society marching along all alone, without guide or support, by the sole fact of the cooperation of individual wills. In spite of anxiously searching for the government, one can find it nowhere, and the truth is that it does not, so to speak, exist at all. The govern­ment is so small a thing here that I cannot conceive how it so large in France. The Ministry of the Interior’s 1200 [twelve hundred] employees seem to be inexplicable.

In this case, by “government” Tocqueville probably had in mind the central govern­ment, since in his work he would describe the state and, especially, the local authorities as quite active. But the questions of centralized power and proliferating bureaucracy, on which he was already gathering ideas and beginning to theorize, were to stand out as major themes of his book.

     Tocqueville and Beaumont’s journey took them throughout the United States — in fact, into territories yet unsettled by white men — and even into Canada. From New York City they headed upstate, stopping at Sing-Sing to inspect the prison which was already famous. This was one of the occasions when they remembered the ostensible purpose of their trip. They proceeded across New York State, to Buffalo, then a frontier town. By steamer they tra­velled to Detroit, a town, they estimated, of two or three thousand souls. They decided to press on to the limits of settlement. In August, the two friends rode on horseback through the forest, toward their destination:

The village of Saginaw is the last point inhabited by Euro­peans, toward the northwest of the vast peninsula of Michigan. It can be considered an advance post, a sort of refuge that the whites have come to place among the Indian nations. ... Thirty persons, men, women, old men, and children, at the time of our passage, composed the whole of this little soc­iety, scarce formed, germ confided to the wilderness that the wilderness is to make fruitful.

Eventually, they traveled, by steam-boat, as far as Green Bay, to observe the life of the Indians. A steam-boat brought them back to Detroit and then Buffalo, where they began to make their way north. The falls at Niagara they found so spectacular that the two eloquent young men were practically speechless.

     In Montreal and Quebec City, Tocqueville and Beaumont were amazed and fascinated to find a population that closely resembled their countrymen — like most Frenchmen, they had supposed that the French-Canadians had become Anglicized. Tocqueville made as close a study of their customs and ideas as he could before departing for New England. Their destination was Boston, the city with the greatest claim at the time of being the center of culture and intellect in America. There they spent a month, seeking out the leading lights of the community. Then it was across Connecticut, back to New York, and on to Philadelphia, and to Baltimore. Here they visited the great patriarch of the city, Charles Carroll, 95 years old and the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. They also witnessed at first hand, for the first time, the institution of Negro slavery. Once, they were taken to an asylum, where they were shown a young black man, screaming in terror. They were told that he lived in constant fear of a certain slave trader, who had mistreated him badly. The two travellers were deeply moved. It seems that it was in Balti­more that Beaumont decided to write his book on America, the novel he was to publish under the title, Marie, or Slavery in the United States.

     From Maryland, Tocqueville and Beaumont returned to Philadelphia, with the aim of pressing on to Ohio. As they travelled, Tocqueville continued to be stirred by the splendor of nature in America — the forests and mountains, rivers and waterfalls. This was an emotion he often felt, but one that sometimes made him somber as well, as he reflected that much of what he saw would someday succumb to the ceaseless activity of man in the new nation:

It is this idea of destruction, this conception of near and inevitable change, which gives so original a character and so touching a beauty to the solitudes of America. One sees them with melancholy pleasure. One hastens in a way to admire them. The idea of this natural and wild grandeur which is to end mingles with the superb images to which the march of civilization gives rise. One feels proud to be a man, and at the same time one experiences I know not what bitter regret at the power God has given us over nature.

     The two friends made their way down the Ohio, to the bustling river­ port town of Cincinnati, where they stopped for a few days. In the midst of a freezing December, they proceeded down the Mississippi, to Memphis. Here Tocqueville learned something of the strange political ways of democracy on the American frontier. He noted in his diary:

Two years ago the inhabitants of the district of which Memphis sent to Congress an individual named David Crockett, who has had no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods.

On board ship, Tocqueville and Beaumont met and conversed at length with a former governor of Tennessee, Sam Houston. By New Year’s Day, they were in New Orleans, where they had intended to spend two weeks. But because of mishaps along the way, their time was growing short — they were there just about a day. It took them another three weeks to traverse the southeast, on their way to Washington, where Tocqueville wished to study at close quarters the federal government, so little in evidence so far. There they spent a busy week, meeting prominent statesmen, including the President of the United States, Andrew Jackson, who did not impress them. By now they were being urged by their superiors to return home. After another few days in New York, they finally set sail for France on February 20th, 1832. Their ship was the same one that had brought them to America, the Havre.

     Back in France, Tocqueville and Beaumont still faced the task of writing the report on American prisons that was supposedly the reason for their journey. Tocqueville had little heart for it, and, although both their names appeared as authors, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France was largely Beaumont’s work.

     Meanwhile, the original idea of collaborating on a great book on American society was abandoned; Tocqueville undertook it himself. He began arranging his extensive notes and diaries and continued his reading and researches into everything pertaining to the United States. In 1833, he took some time off to visit England, where he made the acquaintance of a number of distinguished and influential persons. Among these was the great classical economist, Nassau Senior. Many years later, Senior’s daughter, Mrs. Simpson, described what had happened:

One day in the year 1833 a knock was heard at the door of the Chambers in which Mr. Senior was sitting at work, and a young man entered who announced himself in these terms: “Je suis Alexis de Tocqueville, et je viens faire votre connaissance.“ [”I am Alexis de Tocqueville and I come to make your acquaintance.”] He had no other introduction. Alexis de Tocqueville was at that time unknown to fame. His great work on America had not yet appeared.

It was the beginning of another friendship that lasted until Tocqueville’s death. Mrs. Simpson, who afterwards collected and translated the conversations and letters between her father and Tocqueville, described the great Frenchman:

In person he was small and delicate. He had very thick and rather long black hair, soft yet brilliant black dark eyes, and a finely marked brow. The upper lip was long and the mouth wide, but sensitive and expressive. His manner was full of kindness and playfulness, and his fellow­-countrymen used to say of him that he was a perfect specimen of the “gentilhomme de l’ancien regime“ [”the gentleman of the old regime”]. Although he had a keen sense of humor, his countenance was sad in repose. Indeed, the “fond” [basis] of his character was sad, partly from sensitiveness, partly from ill-health. The period in which his lot was cast was not calculated to raise his spirits; he foresaw, only too clearly, the troubled future in store for France.

     On his return from America, Tocqueville had resumed his many contacts in the French — and especially Parisian — world of politics and letters. He was closest to the group known as the Doctrinaires, led by Guizot and Pierre-Paul Royer-Collard, who became a close colleague and mentor. Moderate by tempera­ment, the Doctrinaires sought to avoid the extremes both of revolutionary upheaval and a reactionary blotting out of everything that had happened over the last 40 years. They were men of action as well as thought: through their political activity and journalism, as well as through their books and lectures, they tried to promote their solution for the political problems of France, to consolidate what they considered the gains of the Revolution within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, but with a very restricted suffrage.