26 - The Liberal North Atlantic

Summary

The middle decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the creation of a liberal North Atlantic that profoundly shaped America’s role in the wider world. State-to-state interaction did less to frame the contours of this era’s liberal ascendency than the discourse of travelers, reformers, and writers whose commitments and attitudes affirmed the century’s progressive tendencies. Observations published by Europeans sojourning in the United States offered early glimpses of an emerging conviction, shared within and beyond US borders, that mankind’s liberal future would boast an American pedigree.

John Stuart Mill stated a truism in his 1840 remark that “every book of travels in America had been a party pamphlet.” But while transatlantic travelogues of the colonial, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary periods had been “pressed into the service of one party or the other,” the appearance of Democracy in America (1835; 1840) by French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville shifted the dialogue. Thenceforth, popular government – its desirability, its extent, and its deficiencies – would be a touchstone for foreigners’ reflecting upon the American experiment.