14 - Tocqueville and the Americans: Democracy in America as Read in Nineteenth-Century America

Summary

A SLOW BEGINNING

Volume 1 of Democracy in America was published in France in January 1835 to immediate acclaim. In England, Henry Reeve translated it promptly, and it was published during the same year. But an American edition, the first requirement for broad circulation in the United States, had to wait until 1838.

A great difficulty in getting this initial installment of Alexis de Tocqueville's book to the American literary market was the sorry state of French-American relations. According to Tocqueville's friend Jared Sparks, Democracy in America could not have come out at a worse time. Sparks was a Unitarian minister ordained by William Ellery Channing, former proprietor and editor of the North American Review, soon-to-be Harvard's first history professor, and a New England Whig. Sparks had an interest in the book's appearance as he had had extensive conversations with Tocqueville and suggested to him two of the volume's driving ideas - the tyranny of the majority and the importance of the New England town as the point of departure for American democracy (on which he wrote a long disquisition for Tocqueville's personal use). On June 6, 1837, Sparks wrote to Tocqueville: ''I am vexed and mortified that an edition of your 'Démocratie' has not yet been published in America. . . . The work came out [in France] just at the time of the unfortunate 'Indemnity Controversy,' and then General Jackson's war spirit began to stir up in the people a hostile feeling towards France. Hence little interest was felt for a book by a French writer.''