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The Other Point of Departure: Tocqueville, the South, Equality, and the Lessons of Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2019

Bartholomew H. Sparrow
Bartholomew H. Sparrow*
Affiliation:
Government Department, The University of Texas at Austin
*
Email:[email protected]
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Abstract

Democracy in America has greatly influenced not only how political scientists think of democratic government, political equality, and liberalism in general, but also how we think of the United States as a whole. This article questions Tocqueville's interpretations of Americans’ habits and beliefs, given how little time Tocqueville actually spent in the South and the near West and given that he all but ignored the founding of Virginia and the other colonies not settled by the Puritans and for religious reasons. Contrary to Tocqueville's emphasis on the Puritan “point of departure,” I use historical evidence from the U.S. Census, state constitutions, and historical scholarship on slave ownership, tenant farming, political participation, and the American colonies and the early United States to show the existence of hierarchy among white Americans, rather than the ubiquitous social and political equality among European Americans described by Tocqueville. His writings actually indicate an awareness of another American culture in the South and near West—one that disregards education, condones coarse manners, tolerates aggressive behavior, and exhibits unrestrained greed—but Tocqueville does not integrate these observations into his larger conclusions about Americans’ mœurs and institutions. Because of the existence of these important, non-Puritan habits, the political institutions Tocqueville sees as facilitating democracy in America and hopes to apply to France and Europe may not have the effects he believes they will have.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , October 2019 , pp. 178 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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Footnotes

Acknowledgments: I thank two anonymous reviewers, editor Eric Schickler, and others at SAPD for their remarkable help. I am also grateful to Richard Ellis, Paul Herron, Dan Kryder, Joshua Mitchell, Dana Stauffer, and Jeffrey Tulis for their comments and suggestions. Previous versions of this article were presented at the American Political Science Association, Southern Political Science Association, and Western Political Science Association annual meetings. I give special thanks to the Newberry Library for its support.

References

1. Tocqueville to his brother Édouard, Washington, January 20, 1832, in Tocqueville, Alexis de, Letters from America, ed. trans., and Frederick Brown (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 262Google Scholar. Letters from America is hereafter cited as “LA.”

2. Damrosch, Leopold, Tocqueville's Discovery of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), xiii–xivGoogle Scholar.

3. Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America, xiv.

4. Brogan, Hugh, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 197–98Google Scholar.

5. Schleifer, James T., The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 53Google Scholar.

6. Jardin, André, Tocqueville: A Biography, trans. Davis, Lydia with Hemenway, Robert (New York: Farrer Straus Giroux, 1988 [1984]), 107Google Scholar.

7. See Zunz, Olivier, ed., Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), xxiiiGoogle Scholar; Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America, xi, xiii–xiv.

8. Tocqueville to Édouard de Tocqueville, Washington, January 20, 1832, LA, 262.

9. Tocqueville to Édouard de Tocqueville, Washington, January 20, 1832, LA, 262.

10. Tocqueville and Beaumont first wrote their report on American prisons, On the Penitentiary System, with Beaumont writing the body of the text and Tocqueville the introduction and appendix. After the two men took a five-week trip to England in mid-1833, Tocqueville began to draft the text of Democracy.

11. Tocqueville had met Thomas Sedgwick III in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Francis J. Lippitt, the other young assistant, was a secretary at the American Legation in Paris. Tocqueville also consulted a “lengthy essay on the political history of New England towns that Jared Sparks had written at his request” (Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans., Goldhammer, Arthur [New York: The Library of America, 2004], 891Google Scholar; Pierson, George Wilson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1938], 731–34Google Scholar; Crouthamel, James L., “Tocqueville's South,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 [Winter 1982]: 381–401, 393CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Tocqueville was further helped by other Paris-based, U.S. officials, particularly former Secretary of State Edward Livingston, President Jackson's Minister Plenipotentiary in Paris at the time (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 16n). I use Arthur Goldhammer's translation of Democracy in America (hereafter referred to as “Democracy” or, in the endnotes, “DA”). See DA, “Translator's Note,” 873–77; Goldhammer, , “Remarks on the Mansfield-Winthrop Translation,” French Politics, Culture & Society 21, no. 1 (2003), 110Google Scholar, http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~agoldham/articles/Mansfield.htm; Goldhammer, Arthur, “Translating Tocqueville: Constraints of Classicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Welch, Cheryl B. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 139–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; DA, 891.

12. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 726–38, 743n.; Schleifer, Making of Tocqueville's Democracy, 12–24; Jardin, Tocqueville, 200–204.

13. Each book is itself composed of two volumes. The combined 1835 and 1840 volumes of Democracy therefore total four volumes. I refer to the books as two volumes of a single, combined work, as do others who write on Tocqueville and Democracy.

14. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, 284–85, 290–94; Jardin, Tocqueville, 224–229; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 3–10, 755, 768–77; Tuckerman, Henry T., America and Her Commentators (New York: Scribner, 1864), 129–42, 272–73Google Scholar.

15. DA, 876–77; Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America, xv; Epstein, Joseph, Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy's Guide (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 1–7Google Scholar; Kaledin, Arthur, Tocqueville and His America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), xivCrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mansfield, Harvey, Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2010), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mansfield, Harvey and Winthrop, Delba, “Introduction,” in Democracy in America, ed. and trans., Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2000), xvii–lxxxvi, xvii–xix, xliiGoogle Scholar; Welch, Cheryl B., “Introduction: Tocqueville in the Twenty-First Century,” in The Cambridge Companion to Tocqueville, ed. Welch, Cheryl B. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1–20, 1–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. DA, 17; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 739–46; Schleifer, Making of Tocqueville's Democracy, 62–72.

17. Also see Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville; Epstein, Alexis de Tocqueville; Mansfield, Tocqueville. For an almost uniformly negative analysis, see Wills, Garry, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” The New York Review of Books 51, no. 7 (April 29, 2004), 52–56Google Scholar; in response, see Goldhammer, Arthur, “Tocqueville's Heart,” Letters, The New York Review of Books 13, no. 2 (August 12, 2004)Google Scholar.

18. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South”; Marshall, Lynn L. and Drescher, Seymour, “American Historians and Tocqueville's Democracy,” Journal of American History 55 no. 3 (December 1968): 512–32, 517CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nisbet, Robert, “Tocqueville's Ideal Types,” in Reconsidering Tocqueville's Democracy in America, ed. Eisenstadt, Abraham S. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 171–91, 175Google Scholar.

19. This article refers to the “South” as inclusive of the traditional South and trans-Appalachian west, incorporating the “Upper South,” the “Deep South,” Appalachia, and the near southwest. At other times it jointly refers to the South and the near West, so as to explicitly include the Midwest.

20. I use “whites” interchangeably with “European Americans”; I do not use Tocqueville's term, “Anglo-Americans” for the reason that many Americans were of German, Irish, Dutch, Swiss, and other ancestry; they were “Anglo” only in terms of their lingua franca and public culture—and sometimes not even then, as with German and Irish immigrants.

21. DA, 518, 50.

22. Chapter 2, “On the Point of Departure and Its Importance for the Future of the Anglo-Americans,” DA, 31–51, 321.

23. DA, 33. Also see Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, 269, 270

24. DA, 35, 36.

25. DA, 35n. On gold-seeking in Virginia, see also Jordan, Don and Walsh, Michael, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 70Google Scholar.

26. Abbot Smith, Emerson, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (New York: Norton, 1971)Google Scholar; Fogleman, Aaron S., “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of American Revolution,” The Journal of American History 85, no. 1 (1998): 43–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tomlins, Christopher, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27. Jordan and Walsh, White Cargo, 70; Vaughn, Alden T., American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975)Google Scholar. Many were separately transported to the sugar plantations of the Caribbean.

28. Ekirch, A. Roger, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Smith, Colonists in Bondage. The prospects of indentured servants were better in the seventeenth century than those later on, in the eighteenth century (Menard, Russell R., “From Servant to Freeholder: Status Mobility and Property Accumulation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” The William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 1 [1973]: 37–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Colonists in Bondage).

29. See Grubb, Farley, “The Incidence of Servitude in Trans-Atlantic Migration, 1771–1804,” Explorations in Economic History 22 (1985), 316–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Menard, Russell, “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” Southern Studies 16, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 355–90Google Scholar.

30. For an exception, see Coldham, Peter Wilson, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas 1607–1776 (Phoenix Mill, UK: Alan Sutton, 1992), 152–54Google Scholar; Ekirch, W. Roger, “Great Britain's Secret Convict Trade to America, 1783–1784,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 5 (December 1984): 1285–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. Laura Janara comments on the familial ties between the United States and Great Britain, particularly the relationship of “Mother England” to her New World offspring (Janara, Laura, Democracy Growing Up: Authority, Autonomy, and Passion in Tocqueville's Democracy in America [Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002], 59–67Google Scholar).

32. Genovese quoted in Merritt, Keri Leigh, Masterless Men: Poor White and Slavery in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press), 25Google Scholar.

33. Schleifer, Making of Tocqueville's Democracy, 53.

34. Jardin, Tocqueville, 107. Brogan makes a different argument, given the length of Tocqueville's southern tour (“more than fifteen hundred French leagues,” Tocqueville wrote in a letter to Eugène Stöffels). Brogan wonders why the two Frenchmen did not simply take a steamboat from Philadelphia down to Charleston (Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, 198–99).

35. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 400.

36. Ibid., 401. Also see Clark, Thomas, “Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts,” in The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, eds. van Minnen, Cornelis A. and Berg, Manfred (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013), 33–50Google Scholar. Garry Wills omits any discussion of Tocqueville's treatment and analysis of the rural South and near west, notwithstanding his thorough-going criticism of Democracy (Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?”).

37. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, 258–68, 276–78, 358–66; Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South”; Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America, 152–56, 179–81, 253–57, 264–66; Marshall and Drescher, “American Historians and Tocqueville's Democracy”; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 755–67; Wilentz, Sean, “Many Democracies: On Tocqueville and Jacksonian America,” in Reconsidering Tocqueville's Democracy in America, ed. Eisenstadt, Abraham S. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 207–28Google Scholar. Tocqueville wrote little of technology, such as of the great steamboats on the bays, rivers, lakes, and inland waterways of the United States (although he did note that Americans seemed to be constantly on the move) (Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 764–65; Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” 52). He also neglected women's political and economic roles, as well as their own aspirations (as opposed to assigning them their accepted family, social, and gender roles) (Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America, 310–12). In addition, he downplayed the political and social unrest in the United States of the 1830s, such as the bloody New York election riots of 1828 (Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America, 290), the Nat Turner rebellion, and the activities of the early abolitionists. Nor did Tocqueville mention the Missouri Compromise (Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 765).

38. Elster, Jon, Alexis de Tocqueville, the First Social Scientist (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mansfield and Winthrop, “Introduction,” lii.

39. See, for example, Zetterbaum, Marvin, Tocqueville and the Problem of Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

40. Smith, Rogers M., “Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America,” American Political Science Review 87, no. 3 (September 1993): 549–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Rogers M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

41. West, Thomas G., “Misunderstanding the American Founding,” in Interpreting Tocqueville's Democracy in America,” ed. Masugi, Ken (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 155–77Google Scholar. Scholars who point out Tocqueville's inconsistent uses of “equality” and “democracy” in Democracy and indicate the problems with how he conceptualizes and operationalizes his comparative study of democracy and equality (Elster, Tocqueville, 3; Marshall and Drescher, “American Historians,” 518–21, 525–26; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 757–58, 763–54) do not discuss the South, the backwoods of the southern or western states, or the U.S. territories.

42. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville; Elster, Tocqueville; Jennings, Jeremy, “Tocqueville's Journey into America,” in Tocqueville's Voyages: The Evolution of His Ideas and Their Journey Beyond his Time, ed. Henderson, Christine Dunn (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2014), 79–110Google Scholar; Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America; Mansfield and Winthrop, “Introduction,” xvii–xciii; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont; Schleifer, Making of Tocqueville's Democracy. Also see “The Conversation,” Aurelian Craiutu, “Tocqueville's New Science of Politics Revisited” (May 2014), Online Library of Liberty, http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/tocqueville-s-new-science-of-politics. Scholars typically focus on a single aspect of Tocqueville's work, such as liberalism (e.g., Boesche, Roger, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987]Google Scholar), democracy (e.g., Manent, Pierre, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy, trans. Waggoner, John [Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996]Google Scholar), or Tocqueville's process when researching and writing Democracy (e.g., Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America).

43. DA, 16–17.

44. See Tocqueville's “Chapter 10: Some Considerations Concerning the Present State and Probably Future of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States” (DA, vol. 1, 365–476); also see DA, 27–29, 368–92.

45. They were Baptists, Methodists, and evangelicals, moreover, rather than Puritans, Episcopalians, or Catholics, although no single religious sect was dominant (DA, 202, 508).

46. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 639n.

47. DA, 730n; Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 393; Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery, 167–68. Tocqueville likewise relied heavily on Jared Sparks’ account of New England and, by so doing, privileged the importance of states, counties, and towns of the northeastern United States as models of local communities and self-governance (DA, 68–89).

48. Also see Tuckerman, America and Her Commentators, 7–12; Vigne, Godfrey, Six Months in America (Philadelphia: Thomas T. Ash, 1833), 68Google Scholar. Vigne, an English barrister who met Tocqueville on his travels, likewise saw “America … in some respects [as] a laboratory for the rest of the world. It is the fittest region for experiment.” Vigne was particularly interested in the United States’ judicial system. Tuckerman similarly refers to the “first lesson to be inferred” from his survey of European commentary on the United States as being the “American Question,” namely, “the immense and intricate influence and relations that now unite the New to the Old World,” including trade, immigration, political ideas, science, and religion (Tuckerman, America and Her Commentators, 8).

49. DA, 15–16.

50. Ibid., 507.

51. Beaumont to his mother, December 15, LA, 244–46; Jardin, Tocqueville, 167–69.

52. DA, 889–90; Jardin, Tocqueville, 167–72; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 570–601, 607–55.

53. Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America, xiv.

54. Beaumont to his mother, December 15, LA, 246; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 576–77.

55. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 577–78.

56. Tocqueville to his mother, “On the Mississippi,” December 25, LA, 252; Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, 204; Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America, 152; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 595. A U.S. government agent responsible for taking a band of Choctaw Indians southwest, per the terms of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, paid the steamship captain to reverse course.

57. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 401; Jardin, Tocqueville, 107.

58. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 387; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 616. With the horrific Nat Turner slave rebellion of August 1831—horrific in terms of white deaths (an estimated total of 50–65) and the retaliation against blacks (with 50 slaves executed by authorities and another 50 or so slaves killed by white mobs)—looming over him for much of his travels (Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 398; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 515), Tocqueville could not have been unaware of the degree to which established Americans feared the dangers posed by slavery. Other foreign visitors were. Godfrey Vigne recounted a story of a slave trader “and his assistants” being “murdered on the Mississippi by a cargo of slaves, who spared no torture that could be applied by means of fire and steel” (Vigne, Six Months in America, 117). Martineau, too, wrote of the danger of the fires that slaves set on their masters’ houses and property. She also commented on the hatred white slave-owners and their families have for those they oppress (Martineau, Harriet, Society in America, 2 vols. [New York: Saunders and Otley, 1837] 1: 376–87Google Scholar).

59. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 389; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 639n; cf. Berger, Max, The British Traveller in America, 1836–1860 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), 108–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. See Hodgson, Adam, Journey through America in the Year 1919, 1920, 1921 (New York: Samuel Whiting, 1823), 125–27Google Scholar.

61. Tocqueville's notes and correspondence do not provide Mr. Clay's first name.

62. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 383; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 368–69, 423–24, 486–88.

63. DA, 890; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 643–55. Tocqueville had already met Mr. Poinsett in Philadelphia. Poinsett informed him of the contrast in the mœurs of the residents of Ohio and those of Kentucky, for the reason that the former largely emigrated from New England and the latter from Virginia (Schleifer, Making of Tocqueville's Democracy, 65). Poinsett was fluent in French and Spanish, had served as U.S. ambassador to Mexico, and was among the leaders of South Carolina's Unionist Party, which opposed nullification. In 1837 President Martin Van Buren would appoint Poinsett as secretary of war. The poinsettia, native to tropical Mexico, derived its name from Joel Poinsett.

64. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 512.

65. Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America, 172; Beaumont to his mother, December 15, LA, 245; Tocqueville to his father, Memphis, December 20, 1831, LA, 249–50; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 573.

66. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 392; Jardin, Tocqueville, 167–68; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 579–80.

67. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 389, 392; Mesick, Jane Louise, English Travel in America, 1785–1835 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1922), 68Google Scholar.

68. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 392.

69. Cf. Hodgson, Journey through America, 101–102; Hall, Basil, Travels in North America in the Years 1827 and 1828, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (Edinburgh, UK: Robert Cadell, 1830), 1:29–30; 3:38–41, 143–48Google Scholar.

70. DA, 27–29, 368–92; Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 400; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont.

71. Martineau, Society in America, 1:vi–x; Martineau, Harriet, Retrospect of Western Travel, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1838)Google Scholar.

72. Jardin, Tocqueville, 107–10; Mancini, Matthew, Alexis de Tocqueville (New York: Twayne, 1994), 28Google Scholar; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 36.

73. Tocqueville to Ernest de Chabrol, New York, May 18, 1831, LA, 36; Beaumont to his brother Jules, May 26, 1831, LA, 39; Tocqueville to Abbé Lesueur, New York, May 28, 1831, LA, 47. Also see Zunz, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America, xxvi.

74. DA, 883–90; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 62–65, 135–47, 349–50, 362–68, passim.

75. DA, 16.

76. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 382–90; Marshall and Drescher, “American Historians”; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont.

77. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 382–85; Marshall and Drescher, “American Historians,” 522–23; also see Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” 55.

78. Nisbet, “Tocqueville's Ideal Types,” 175. “How could there not be,” Nisbet adds, “given the shortness of [Tocqueville's] stay and then his mode of composing it at home? There are extraordinary omissions” (ibid.). Also see Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?”

79. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 760.

80. Clark, “Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts,” 37.

81. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 760–61.

82. Schleifer, Making of Tocqueville's Democracy, 279–80.

83. Elster, Tocqueville, 2; Epstein, Alexis de Tocqueville, 3; Jared Sparks to William Smith, October 14, 1841, in Jeremy Jennings, “Tocqueville's Balancing Act” [Posted: June 2, 2014], in “The Conversation,” Aurelian Craiutu, “Tocqueville's New Science of Politics Revisited” (May 2014), Online Library of Liberty, http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/tocqueville-s-new-science-of-politics.

84. Damrosch, Tocqueville's Discovery of America, 513; Elster, Tocqueville, 4; Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America, 270; Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” 53–54; but see Mansfield and Winthrop, “Introduction,” xli–xlii.

85. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 401; Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America, 300; Pierson, Toqueville and Beaumont, 760–61. Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” 53–54.

86. DA, 3, 321, 518, 655, 667, 685, 738–39.

87. Ibid., 353.

88. Ibid., 431.

89. Ibid., 431.

90. Ibid., 353. For an application of Tocqueville's analysis to contemporary America, see Hochschild, Jennifer L., “Ambivalence about Equality in the United States or, Did Tocqueville Get It Wrong and Why Does That Matter?” Social Justice Research 19, no. 1 (March 2006), 43–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hochschild takes the term “equality” at face value (i.e., as actual material equality or egalitarianism), whereas Tocqueville uses “equality” in terms of the success of Americans’ own relative accumulation. And “equality of conditions” for Tocqueville refers not to material equality but to the absence of aristocracy.

91. DA, 431.

92. Tocqueville quoted in Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 236–37; Tuckerman, America and Her Commentators, 136. Tocqueville at one point wrote of the “almost complete equality of conditions” (DA, 14; emphasis added). He also wrote of the “equality of conditions” as a political principle (DA, 747, 787), as with the relations between the sexes (DA, 698–702).

93. DA, 322, 323.

94. Ibid., 58–59.

95. Ibid., 359.

96. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South”; Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America; Wilentz, “Many Democracies.”

97. Previous research has almost entirely ignored the South, but see Clark, “Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts,” and Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South.”

98. DA, 398. Laura Janara points out that Tocqueville described America as having “two main branches,” a northern branch and a southern branch (Democracy Growing Up, 62). Tocqueville did not discuss the mixed origins of or the divisions with the United States’ “Anglo-American” heritage.

99. DA, 399; cf. Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel, 2:25, 29–34.

100. DA, 90, 399. Tocqueville writes that Ohio was formed in 1787 (which was the date of the Ordinance of 1787, i.e., the Northwest Ordinance); Ohio was admitted as a state in 1803. He also lists 1775 as the year Kentucky became a state, rather than the year in which it was admitted as a state, 1792 (DA, 399). In neither instance did Tocqueville explain his selections of dates.

One factor that suppressed Kentucky's population growth and that Tocqueville did not discuss was the difficulty its settlers had in obtaining clear land title because of the state's often multiply conflicting (“shingled”) land claims (Gates, Paul Wallace, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1973], 13–44Google Scholar). In particular, residents of Kentucky and the other western states strongly objected to the Supreme Court's ruling in Green v. Biddle 21 U.S. 1 (1823). They regarded the decision as tone-deaf to the problems Kentucky residents had getting a title to land and as being oblivious to the principle that the government protect those residents who actually lived on and improved the land. Ohio, in contrast, had not previously been part of another state and was guided by the Land Ordinance of 1785, which used rectangular surveys to divide the land into square-mile “sections,” and then by the Northwest Ordinance.

101. U.S. Census 1830, https://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1830a-01.pdf. All census numbers are rounded to two significant figures or the nearest thousand.

102. Tocqueville to his father, Memphis, December 20, 1831, LA, 249; Tocqueville to Ernest de Chabrol, Chesapeake Bay, January 16, 1832, LA, 261.

103. DA, 35, 433. The “poverty” of which Tocqueville writes presumably applies solely to African slaves.

104. Ibid., 433.

105. Ibid., 433; Beaumont to his mother, December 15, LA, 245.

106. Cecil-Fronsman, Bill, Common Whites: Class and Culture in Antebellum North Carolina (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 28Google Scholar; Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press 2007), 56Google Scholar.

107. U.S. Census 1830. All census numbers are rounded to two significant figures or the nearest thousand.

108. Kentucky's northern counties bordered Ohio and Indiana, thereby prompting Tocqueville's comparison between the two cultures on the opposing banks as he traveled down the Ohio River. The Kentucky population included 4,900 free blacks.

109. All figures are from the U.S. Census of 1830.

110. “Selected Statistics on Slavery in the United States,” n.d., Civil War Causes, http://civilwarcauses.org/stat.htm. These figures are consistent with in-depth studies of particular regions of southern colonies or states that show most white households did not own slaves (Tillson, Albert H., Accommodating Revolutions: Virginia's Northern Neck in an Era of Transformations, 1760–1810 [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010], 16Google Scholar, Table 2).

111. DA, 531.

112. Also see Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 56.

113. Merritt, Masterless Men, 7, 53.

114. Also see Danhof, Clarence H., Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 89Google Scholar; Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 22Google Scholar.

115. The term “tenant farmers” refers to persons who pay rent in some form, whether with their labor such as clearing land, building fences, constructing buildings, etc.), a prearranged quantity or proportion of crop harvests, the completion of set tasks, or a deferred payment for their right to farm or otherwise work land owned by others.

116. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Abstracts of the United States from Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1957), 258–59Google Scholar.

117. DA, 679.

118. Danhof, Change in Agriculture, 88–91.

119. Clemens, Paul G. E. and Simler, Lucy, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household in Chester County, Pennsylvania, 1750–1820,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Innes, Stephen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 106–43Google Scholar.

120. Simler, Lucy, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania: The Case of Chester County,” The William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 4 (October 1986), 561CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

121. Danhof, Change in Agriculture, 94.

122. Simler, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania,” 561.

123. Clemens and Simler, “Rural Labor and the Farm Household,” 114.

124. Ibid., 126–27.

125. Merritt, Masterless Men, 4, 85.

126. Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, 165. Hahn writes that perhaps as many as one fourth of tenants—renters and sharecroppers—worked land owned by their relatives.

127. Merritt, Masterless Men, 85, 86.

128. Ibid., 16, appendix.

129. Danhof, Change in Agriculture, 91; see also Vickers, Daniel, “Working the Fields in a Developing Economy: Essex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1675,” in Work and Labor in Early America, ed. Innes, Stephen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 49–68Google Scholar.

130. Faragher, John Mack, “Open Country Community: Sugar Creek, Illinois, 1820–1850,” in The Countryside in the Age of Capital Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, eds. Hahn, Steven and Prude, Jonathan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 233–58, 247–49Google Scholar.

131. Faragher, “Open Country Community,” 248–49.

132. Simler, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania,” 546–48. Simler explains that tenant farmers were divided into “inmates,” who were married or widowed men living on someone else's property, and freemen, who were unmarried men living in other households.

133. Bolton, Charles C., Poor Whites of the Antebellum South: Tenants and Laborers in Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississippi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gates, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier, 156–61; Humphrey, Thomas J., “Conflicting Independence: Land Tenancy and the American Revolution,” Journal of the Early American Republic 28, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 159–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tillson, Accommodating Revolutions.

134. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 552–55; Taylor, Alan, “Land and Liberty on the Post-Revolutionary Frontier,” in Devising Liberty, ed. Konig, David (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 81–108, 87Google Scholar. Also see Aron, Stephen, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Appendix: Tables, 201–208Google Scholar.

135. Lee Soltow quoted in Merritt, Masterless Men, 44.

136. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Series D 75–84, “Gainful Workers, by Age, Sex, and Farm-Nonfarm Occupations: 1820 to 1930,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 134Google Scholar; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Series K 109-153, “Farms, by Race and Tenure of Operator, and Acreage and Value, by Tenure of Operators: 1880 to 1969,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 465Google Scholar.

137. Ibid.

138. The figures do not total 2.0 million because of rounding.

139. The category of “non-white” included African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and others. On the share rental system for landless blacks—that is, varieties of sharecropping—see Kolchin, Peter, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 219–20Google Scholar.

140. U.S. Census, Historical Abstracts, Series K 109–153, “Farms, by Race and Tenure of Operator, and Acreage and Value, by Tenure of Operators: 1880 to 1969,” Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), 465Google Scholar.

141. Other foreign travelers did not comment on tenant farming in the United States, despite the fact Hodgson, Martineau, and some of the other European visitors spent more time in the South and touring the United States than did Tocqueville (Berger, The British Traveller in America; Hodgson, Journey through America; Martineau, Society in America; Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel; Mesick, English Travel in America, 149–64).

142. DA, 679–81.

143. Ibid., 350, italics in original.

144. The feudal basis of employer-employee relations was not only evident in nineteenth- and twentieth-century industry, as Karen Orren points out, but also possibly in agriculture. Drawing on a history of U.S. labor law, Orren examines the “belated feudalism” evident in the legalized and institutionalized hierarchies of late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial America and the continuity of employment law from feudal Britain to American soil (Orren, Karen, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988]; Smith, Civic Ideals, 15Google Scholar).

145. Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 386.

146. Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America, 315.

147. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 337; Tocqueville to Ernest de Chabrol, New York, June 9, 1831, LA, 68 n.32; Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America, 344. Tocqueville contended that no work in democratic societies was regarded as dishonorable (DA, 642–43), notwithstanding the fact that Americans did not regard prostitution as being an honorable occupation.

148. Tocqueville also denied that women had to engage in hard labor or arduous activities (DA, 706)—a characterization that does not apply to a large minority of the female rural poor, the young women employed in the textile mills, and many of domestic servants.

149. Jennings, “Tocqueville's Journey into America,” 83–84; Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” Beaumont himself wrote that “true poverty is unknown” in Massachusetts (Beaumont to his brother Jules, September 16, LA, 185; but see Jennings, “Tocqueville's Balancing Act”).

150. DA, 320n.1.

151. Simler, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania,” 542.

152. Simler, “Tenancy in Colonial Pennsylvania,” 543, n.2.

153. DA, 64.

154. Ibid., 65n, 853; see also Ratcliffe, Donald, “The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787–1828,” Journal of the Early Republic 33, no. 2 (Summer 2013), 224–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

155. Several states had minimal requirements of previous taxes paid in state: Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania (see Keyssar, The Right To Vote, table A.2). This is apart from state requirements with respect to the minimum voting age and state residency, which ranged from three months to two years.

156. Several states throughout the nineteenth century continued to explicitly prohibit suffrage for paupers: Delaware, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and South Carolina. Table 1 excludes residency requirements and qualifications with respect to mental capacity; see Cogan, Jacob Katz (“The Look Within: Property, Capacity, and Suffrage in Nineteenth-Century America” Yale Law Journal 107 [1997]: 473–98)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

157. U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 2, Clause 1.

158. Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote,” 232, 234–36, 236–37.

159. Philip Klein cited in Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote,” 232.

160. J. R. Pole cited in Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote,” 242.

161. Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote,” 248.

162. Ibid., 243.

163. Ibid.

164. Ibid., 253.

165. Ibid., 254.

166. Ibid., 230. Six states were around 90 percent; three above 80 percent, three between 65-70 percent; and two around 60 percent.

167. Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote,” 232.

168. Ibid., 235.

169. Ibid., 241.

170. Ibid., 242. Ratcliffe points out that fraud in New York State from 1807 onward brought “every man over the age of twenty-one to the polls,” but for many reasons New York State was atypical. For a general overview see Pole, R.R., Foundations of American Independence 1763–1815 (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1972), 81–97Google Scholar.

171. Bolton, Poor Whites of the Antebellum South, 116.

172. Ibid., 116–17.

173. Hinton Helper cited in Merritt, Masterless Men, 162.

174. Merritt, Masterless Men, 165–78.

175. Ibid., 164; also see Ratcliffe, “The Right to Vote,” 235.

176. Charles Bolton cited in Merritt, Masterless Men, 163.

177. Merritt, Masterless Men, 163.

178. Bolton offers several explanations why the poor often exercised their suffrage despite their subaltern status—the endorsement of southern republicanism, a shared racism, and an acceptance of planter hegemony (Poor Whites of the Antebellum South, 118–27). For another study of the white poor's tolerance and seeming acceptance of highly inegalitarian local politics, see Gaventa, John, Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

179. Merritt, Masterless Men, 162.

180. Bernard Mandell, cited in Merritt, Masterless Men, 163.

181. Merritt, Masterless Men, 163.

182. Ibid., 171.

183. Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1968), 93Google Scholar.

184. DA, 852. Many of Tocqueville's facts on state suffrage as of 1831 are either out of date or incorrect (DA, 852), see table 1.

185. DA, 64, 221, 224–27, 229–30.

186. Other indicators of democratic government are the number and proportion of local and national government posts open to popular election, and the frequency of elections (annually, biennially, quadrennially, etc.). State constitutions also sometimes had provisions to protect the representation of certain (favored) counties or municipalities in the state legislature (e.g., Delaware's 1831 constitution specified that each county had to have three state senators [Art. II, Sect. 3, cl. 3]). Irrespective of how well justified or well intended such stipulations may have been, over time these strictures could lead to oligarchical government rather than representative government (Dealey, James Q., Growth of American State Constitutions: From 1776 to the End of the Year 1914 [Boston: Ginn, 1915], 194–213Google Scholar).

187. Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000)Google Scholar; McKinley, Albert Edward, The Suffrage Franchise in the Thirteen English Colonies in America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1905)Google Scholar; Porter, Kirk H., A History of Suffrage in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1918)Google Scholar.

188. DA, 94–97. Indicatively (and appropriately), Ratcliff cites Tocqueville on the point of American not needing a democratic revolution to achieve mass democracy (“The Right to Vote,” 254).

189. DA, 738–41.

190. Ibid., 35.

191. Ibid., 35.

192. Ibid., 35n. On the gold-seeking of the Virginia proprietors, see Jordan and Walsh, White Cargo, 70.

193. DA, 35.

194. Tocqueville quoted in Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 384.

195. DA, 407.

196. Ibid., 35.

197. Wines, Frederick Howard, Punishment and Reformation: A Study of the Penitentiary System (New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1919), 168–69Google Scholar. Also see Galenson, David, “White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America,” The Journal of Economic History 41, no. 1 (March 1981): 39–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

198. Kolchin, American Slavery, 7, 11.

199. Ibid.

200. Many of the merchants, investors, and ship captains who transported British and other servants also imported African slaves to Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The ships used to import indentured servants and exiled felons were also often the same vessels used on the Middle Passage from West Africa to the southern colonies and, particularly, to Barbados and the West Indies. Many more slaves went to the Caribbean than to British North America.

201. The term “indentured servants” is used here to encompass all European-American bound laborers obligated to serve a fixed term of labor. This varied group includes transported convicts, political prisoners, abductees, and others who became their masters’ property in exchange for their passage.

202. Ekirch, Bound for America; Jordan and Walsh, White Cargo; Nash, Gary B., “Poverty and Politics in Early American History,” in Down and Out in Early America, ed. Smith, Billy G. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 1–37Google Scholar; Bruce James Smith, “A Liberal of a New Kind,” in Interpreting Tocqueville's Democracy in America,” ed. Ken Masugi (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 63–95; Billy G. Smith, “Introduction,” in Down and Out in Early America, ix–xx.

203. Cawley, Alexa Silver, “A Passionate Affair: The Master-Servant Relationship in Seventeenth-Century Maryland,” The Historian (Summer 1999): 751–63, 758Google Scholar. Because servants’ escapes deprived masters of their contracted workers, servants’ flight was regarded as “stealth of one's self.”

204. Smith, Colonists in Bondage; Ekirch, Bound for America. Proportionally more freed indentured servants were able to enter mainstream colonial society in the 1600s than in the 1700s (Menard, “From Servant to Freeholder”; Smith, Colonists in Bondage).

205. DA, 35.

206. Jordan and Walsh, White Cargo, 42–44, 71–73, 75–85; Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 41, table 1.5. The Plymouth Company also used unfree Europeans in 1607 for its short-lived settlement in Popham, Massachusetts (Maine).

207. DA, 35, 432.

208. Foner, Eric, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 52Google Scholar.

209. See Ashworth, John, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2012)Google Scholar; Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014)Google Scholar; Smith, Civil Ideals.

210. Merritt, Masterless Men, 16, appendix.

211. Nisbet, “Tocqueville's Ideal Types,” 175; Joseph Story to Francis Lieber, in Jennings, “Tocqueville's Balancing Act.” Also see DA, note IV, p. 49, 842–50.

212. DA, 320. In several passages in Democracy Tocqueville makes clear his disapproval of the president. Jackson sought to abolish the Bank of the United States, which is opposed by the “enlightened classes” and favored by “the people,” even though the people are incapable of explaining their opposition (Ibid., 203, 448–49). Jackson also displaced the Cherokees from their ancestral lands (Ibid., 389–90), he inflamed “provincial jealousies,” and he was enslaved by—or, rather, he anticipated the desires of—“the majority” (Ibid., 453–54).

213. Tocqueville quoted in Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 386.

214. DA, 403.

215. Ibid., 679, 224.

216. Ibid., 35, 432.

217. Ibid., 35n; 320n.1.

218. Ibid., 16.

219. Ibid., 17.

220. Ibid., 36.

221. Ibid., 353, 431.

222. Ibid., 349.

223. Ibid., 589.

224. Ibid., 37; italics in original.

225. Ibid., 3, 321, 518, 655, 667, 685, 738–39.

226. Joshua Mitchell, personal communication. See Berger, British Traveller; Mesick, English Travel in America; Zuckerman, Michael, “Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America,” Journal of American History 85, no. 1 (June 1998): 13–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Three responses to Zuckerman's article to varying degrees challenge Zuckerman's interpretation of colonial deference as based on four servant narratives. See Brown, Kathleen M., “Antiauthoritarianism and Freedom in Early America,” Journal of American History 85, no. 1 (June 1998): 77–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Murrin, John M., “In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Slave, Maybe There Was Room Even for Deference,” Journal of American History 85, no. 1 (June 1998): 86–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gross, Robert A., “The Impudent Historian: Challenging Deference in Early America,” Journal of American History 85, no. 1 (June 1998): 92–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

227. DA, 36–37, 321–22.

228. Ibid., 36, italics in original.

229. Ibid., 349.

230. Ibid., 36.

231. Ibid., 36, 48, italics in original.

232. Ibid., 321, 322; Ceaser, James W., “Alexis de Tocqueville and the Two-Founding Thesis,” The Review of Politics 73, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 216–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955), 23Google Scholar; Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 126, 312; Morone, James, Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2003)Google Scholar.

233. DA, 322.

234. Ibid., 32.

235. Ibid., 107, 276.

236. Ibid., 134.

237. Ibid., 190.

238. Ibid., 134.

239. Ibid., 518.

240. Ibid., 126n, 129n–130n, 131n, 135n, passim; Ceaser, “Tocqueville and the Two-Founding Thesis,” 221; Mansfield and Winthrop, “Introduction,” xxvi–xxvii, xlii.

241. DA, 296; Tocqueville to Louis de Kergorlay, Yonkers, June 29, 1831, LA, 98.

242. DA, 113–16, 126–41, 153–85, 272–76; Tocqueville to Louis de Kergorlay, Yonkers, June 29, 1831, LA, 97.

243. Ceaser, “Tocqueville and the Two-Founding Thesis,” 224–26; West, “Misunderstanding the American Founding.” Neither do Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison mention the Declaration of Independence in the Federalist; nor do they mention John Locke or David Hume.

244. DA, 484.

245. Ibid., 484–86.

246. Ibid., 62–63; Ceaser, “Tocqueville and the Two-Founding Thesis”; Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 6–10; Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 104–105, 110; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 349.

247. DA, 356.

248. Ibid., 36, 58, 228.

249. Ibid., 58.

250. Tocqueville quoted in Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 388; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 641. It is not clear where Tocqueville obtained his figures on illiteracy. The Montgomery (Alabama) lawyer with whom he spoke mentioned “one third” of southerners being illiterate (Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 388). On southern illiteracy in general, see Merritt, Masterless Men, 144–61.

251. Martineau, Society in America, vol. 1, appendix, 398–99; Merritt, Masterless Men, 154–64.

252. Kolchin, American Slavery, 225.

253. DA, 356.

254. Ibid., 595–99.

255. Ibid., 229.

256. Tocqueville quoted in Crouthamel (“Tocqueville's South,” 388); Clark, “Tocqueville and Three German Travel Accounts,” 38–39.

257. DA, 229.

258. Ibid., 229.

259. Ibid., 257. Tocqueville also noted that the people there preferred duels to trials.

260. DA, 229. See also Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 388; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 641.

261. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 351–52.

262. Merritt (Masterless Men, 87–89, passim) similarly finds a common culture among landless whites, one that was hostile towards slave-owners, violent, and resentful of their subaltern status. Although Faragher finds no hard evidence of a class consciousness among tenant farmers (“Open Country Community,” 248) and although Hahn finds no “floating body of the dispossessed” among the non-landowning farmers of upcountry Georgia (The Roots of Southern Populism, 22), the absence of written documents and other textual evidence—as might be expected with a mostly illiterate and marginalized population—does not disprove the presence of a shared, trans-generational oral culture.

263. DA, 246, 280, 326, 462, 470, 517, 647–48; Tocqueville to Chabrol, June 9, 1831, LA, 67–68.

264. DA, 48.

265. Ibid., 518.

266. Tocqueville quoted in Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 244.

267. DA, 326. On Americans’ greed and the role of money in society, also see de Beaumont, Gustave, Marie or Slavery in the United States, trans. Chapman, Barbara, intro. Tinnin, Alvis L. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958), 88Google Scholar, “Appendix E. Note on the Indulgence of American Society to Bankrupts,” 221–22.

268. This fourfold analysis of Tocqueville's position on the effects of Americans’ love of commerce constitutes my own reading of Democracy, Tocqueville's letters, and his notes.

269. DA, 507, 326; Tocqueville to Chabrol, June 9, 1831, LA, 68.

270. DA, 516.

271. Ibid., 618.

272. Ibid., 531, 618.

273. Ibid., 107.

274. Ibid., 273, 276. Tocqueville discounted American intellectual life, just as others have criticized. Not once did he visit an American college or university. Nor did he write of such acclaimed figures of the early 1830s as James Fennimore Cooper, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, or Washington Irving (Wills, “Did Tocqueville ‘Get’ America?” 53).

275. DA, 516; Wettergreen, John Adams, “Modern Commerce,” in Interpreting Tocqueville's Democracy in America, ed. Masugi, Ken (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991), 214Google Scholar.

276. DA, 620; Tocqueville quoted in Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 244; emphasis added.

277. DA, 626, 359.

278. Ibid., 179, 185, 354–55; Tocqueville to Chabrol, June 9, 1831, LA, 66, 67.

279. DA, 626.

280. Ibid.; also see Mansfield and Winthrop, “Introduction,” xxxi.

281. DA, 531.

282. Ibid., 625.

283. Ibid., 626.

284. Ibid., 627. Also see Elster, Jon, ed., Tocqueville: The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Goldhammer, Arthur (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 5–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

285. DA, 625, 627.

286. Tocqueville almost never used the word “envy” (but see DA, 359; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 355), even as the emotion is implicit throughout Democracy (Elster, Tocqueville, 61–66, 71–72). “Envy” also bears a family resemblance to the “politics of resentment” described by Katherine Cramer. In her ethnographic study of dozens of groups of Wisconsin residents, Cramer shows that inequality may be defined and identified culturally (The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016]Google Scholar).

287. Tocqueville quoted Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 244, emphasis added. In an analysis of Tocqueville's visit to the old northwest, Atassow refers to the “traffic[king] in everything” phrase as exposing the “spiritual limitations of this ‘restless race” (Atassow, Ewa, “Fortnight in the Wilderness: Tocqueville on Nature and Civilization,” Perspectives on Politics 35, no. 1 [Winter 2006], 26Google Scholar).

288. Tocqueville to Chabrol, June 9, 1831, LA, 67–68.

289. Tocqueville quoted in Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 261.

290. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 347.

291. Tocqueville quoted in Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 347, emphasis added; also see DA, 634–35.

292. DA, 731.

293. Ibid., 359; Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), 160Google Scholar; cf. Martineau, Society in America, vol. 2, 169–75.

294. DA, 702. Also see Kohn, Margaret, “Tocqueville and Beaumont on Race and Slavery,” Polity 32, no. 2 (Winter 2002), 178Google Scholar.

295. Also see Smith, “A Liberal of a New Kind,” 75, 81.

296. Tocqueville to Abbé Lesueur, New York, May 28, 1831, LA, 49; emphasis added. Abbé Lesueur (“Bébé”) was an old family friend. “We sometimes laugh, Beaumont and I,” Tocqueville added, “over the posturing of acquaintances anxious to establish their relationship with European families and their enormous investment in such social distinctions as lie within their reach, however trivial.” He also observed, in passing, “one seldom meets an American who is not keen to trace his ancestry back to the original founders of the colonies, and all America seemed to me blanketed with scions of the great families of England (DA, 666). He saw this as an artifact of aristocracy, not of democratic peoples (ibid.).

297. Berger, British Traveller, 60.

298. Ibid., 60–61. More recently, Schleifer summarizes Tocqueville's depiction of Americans’ single-minded pursuit of material gain, remarking their “greediness,” their “restlessness and constant movement,” their “coldness,” and their “inability to enjoy life.” Americans exhibit “discontent and frustration despite [their] prosperity and success” and, without distinctions of hereditary, are insecure about their “status and well-being” and envious of each other. Schleifer describes Americans’ materialism as one of three “essential dangers” of democratic societies (Schleifer, James T., “Democratic Dangers, Democratic Remedies, and the Democratic Character,” in Tocqueville's Voyages: The Evolution of His Ideas and Their Journey Beyond His Time, ed. Henderson, Christine Dunn [Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2014], 73–74Google Scholar).

299. Tocqueville scholars have frequently and sometimes lengthily commented on American's love of commerce, although I find that they understate the seriousness of Tocqueville's interpretation and disapproval. See Mansfield and Winthrop, “Introduction,” lxxix; Mansfield, Harvey, “Intimations of Philosophy in Tocqueville's Democracy in America,” in Tocqueville's Voyages: The Evolution of His Ideas and Their Journey Beyond His Time, ed. Henderson, Christine Dunn (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2014), 202–41Google Scholar; Schleifer, “Democratic Dangers,” 56–78, 73–75; Wettergreen, “Modern Commerce.” Wolin refers to Tocqueville's formulation of an “entrepreneurial culture” in America that “could enable democracy to become an auxiliary of capitalism” (Wolin, Sheldon, Tocqueville: Between Two Worlds [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001], 347Google Scholar). Also see Aurelian Craiutu, “Tocqueville Himself on American Equality” [Posted: June 2, 2014], in “The Conversation,” Online Library of Liberty, http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/tocqueville-s-new-science-of-politics.

300. DA, 39.

301. Tocqueville observed that an “impassioned, almost wild spiritualism” exists throughout the United States, albeit “primarily in the partly settled regions of the West” (DA, 621–22).

302. DA, 322.

303. Ibid., 190.

304. See Una Pope-Hennessy, ed. The Aristocratic Journey: Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs. Hall, Basil Written during a Fourteen Months’ Sojourn in America 1827–1828 (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1931)Google Scholar; Beaumont to his father, May 16 [1831], LA, 29–30; Beaumont to his brother Jules, July 4 [1831], LA, 103; Berger, British Traveller, 51, 117, 152–53, 312–13; Crouthamel, “Tocqueville's South,” 391–92; Dickens, Charles, American Notes (New York: International, 1985 [1842]), 245–46, 248–59Google Scholar; Elias Pym Fordham, “Extracts from Letters Written, on a Journey to the Western Parts of the United States and during a Residence in the Illinois Territory” (manuscript, 1818, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL); Hall, Travels in North America, vol. 3, 258–63, 264–65, 272–73; Hodgson, Journey through America, 111; Kaledin, Tocqueville and His America, 238; Mesick, English Travel in America, 7, 206–07, 310, 312; Tuckerman, America and Her Commentators, 114–15, 117–18, 204; Vigne, Six Months in America. Tocqueville's comments, in comparison, are more guarded, less explicit, and less critical.

305. DA, 35, 432, 350. See Greene, Jack P., The Pursuits of Happiness (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

306. DA, 35; Kupperman, Karen Ordahl, “The Founding Years of Virginia and the United States,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 104, no. 1 (1996): 103–12Google Scholar. Also see Dick, Everett, The Dixie Frontier: A Comprehensive Picture of Southern Frontier Life Before the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 1948)Google Scholar.

307. DA, 6–7.

308. See Boesche, The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville, 27–30; Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, 108–40; Janara, Democracy Growing Up, 28–33; Jardin, Tocqueville, 71–72, passim.

309. DA, 14.

310. Ibid., 7.

311. Ibid., 14–15.

312. Ibid. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville, 271.

313. DA, 15, 21–26. Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville; Elster, Alexis de Tocqueville; Jardin, Tocqueville.

314. DA, 7.

315. Ibid., 17.

316. Ibid., 7.

317. Ibid.

318. Also see Craiutu, “Tocqueville's New Science of Politics Revisited”; Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds, 5–8.

319. DA, 358. Schleifer is hopeful that appropriate public policies may be able to mitigate the worst effects of Americans’ greed. Following the applied nature of Tocqueville's political science, Schleifer states that political and social leaders may be able to foster democratic mœurs and instill the habits of liberty capable of counteracting the detrimental effects of Americans’ materialism and withdrawal from public life (“Democratic Dangers,” 77–78).

320. DA, 359.

321. Tocqueville to his brother Édouard, Washington, January 20, 1832, LA, 262.

322. DA, 15–16, 618–22, 629–30.

323. Tocqueville to Charles Stöffels, Philadelphia, October 22, 1831, LA, 219. Charles's brother, Eugene Stöffels, was also a close friend (see Tocqueville's letters to Eugene Stöffels of June 28, 1831 [LA, 84–86], and October 18, 1831 [LA, 216–17]). Tocqueville wrote that as a younger man, he had believed the “fantasy” that the world “was full of demonstrable truths; that one only had to look hard to see them.” He went on to observe that “the search for absolute, demonstrable truth, like the search for perfect happiness, is futile.” There may be “some truths worthy of our whole-hearted conviction, but…they are very few.”

324. Tocqueville to his brother Édouard, Washington, January 20, 1832, LA, 262.

325. Tocqueville to Charles Stöffels, Philadelphia, October 22, 1831, LA, 219, 220.

326. Tocqueville to Stöffels, October 22, 1831, LA, 219; DA, 15–16.

327. DA, 891; Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont, 726–38.

328. DA, 364.

329. Ibid.

330. DA, vol. 1, pt. 2, ch. 8, “On That Which Tempers the Tyranny of the Majority in the United States,” 301–18; ch. 9, “On the Principal Causes that Tend to Maintain the Democratic Republic in the United States,” 319–64.

331. DA, 211.

332. Ibid., 824–25.

333. Ibid., 595, 595–99.

334. Ibid., 600–601.

335. Ibid., 601.

336. Ibid., 219, 215–23.

337. Ibid., 599.

338. Ibid.

339. Ibid., 205–206, 208.

340. Ibid.

341. Ibid., 598–99.

342. Ibid., 309. As with the press, Tocqueville was by no means unequivocal in his praise. He was “not unaware of the defects inherent in the legal spirit” (ibid., 306) or of “the flaws of the legal mind” (ibid., 309).

343. DA, 303.

344. Ibid.

345. Ibid., 306–307.

346. Ibid., 304.

347. Ibid., 303.

348. Ibid., 309.

349. Ibid., 303.

350. Ibid., 309.

351. Ibid., 311.

352. Ibid., 707, 708. See Janara on religion, morality, and female maturity in America (Democracy Growing Up, 85–91, passim).

353. DA, 706.

354. Ibid., 708.

355. Ibid. Also see Beaumont, Marie, “Appendix B. Note on American Women,” 216–17.

356. DA, 699.

357. Ibid., 696.

358. Ibid., 359.

359. Ibid.

360. Ibid.

361. Ibid. He acknowledged that towns and counties are not ordered the same way throughout the states and that Massachusetts evidenced “more fully developed” principles of government (ibid., 359).

362. DA, 79, 92.

363. At the federal level, too, Tocqueville noted that the indirect election of senators furnished an assembly of successful and famous and men, “eloquent attorneys, distinguished generals, clever magistrates, and well-known statesmen”—all in contrast to the “obscure individuals” and “vulgar appearance” of the House of Representatives (DA, 229–30).

364. DA, 273.

365. Ibid., 276.

366. Tocqueville commented that “in the United States, where the poor man governs, the rich must always be afraid that he will abuse his power at their expense” (DA, 276). Although this statement would seem to contradict his previous remarks, it has to be taken in the context of the contrast to France and Europe, where the situation is reversed and the poor distrust the law (ibid., 276).

367. DA, 80.

368. V., p. 44, “Tocqueville's Notes,” DA, 839–42; Beaumont, Marie, “Appendix D. Note on Blue Laws,” 219–20.

369. V., p. 44, “Tocqueville's Notes,” DA, 839–41.

370. Ibid.

371. DA, 359.

372. Tocqueville acknowledged that these points apply more to New England than for regions further south and west (DA, 274–75).

373. DA, 221. Tocqueville pointed out that associations did not represent the majority. If they did “represent the majority, they would change the law themselves rather than petition for its reform” (ibid.).

374. DA, 359.

375. Ibid., 315–16.

376. Ibid., 316.

377. Ibid., 318.

378. Ibid., 315.

379. Ibid., 318.

380. Ibid., 359.

381. Ibid., 356.

382. Ibid., 35, 432, 350.

383. Ibid., 349-50.

384. Ibid., 352. Tocqueville praised America's educational system, but he warns that what he “say[s] about New England should not be extended indiscriminately to the Union as a whole” (as discussed above). “The farther west or south one goes, the less educated the people are” (ibid., 356).

385. DA, 349, 348.

386. Ibid., 356.

387. Ibid.

388. Ibid., 311.

389. Ibid.

390. Ibid., 303.

391. Ibid., 356, 623.

392. Ibid., 356. On the lack of religious faith among European American residents of the western United States, also see Aron, How the West Was Lost.

393. DA, 356.

394. Ibid., 623.

395. Ibid., 48.

396. Ibid., 359.

397. Ibid., 356. Tocqueville qualified this statement, adding to “a certain extent” (Ibid., 356).

398. Ibid., 229, 257, 355–56.

399. Ibid., 356, 359.

400. Ibid., 320n.1. Although Tocqueville did not mention Boston in his note, he mentioned the city at several other points in the two volumes of Democracy.

401. DA, 314.

402. Ibid., 349, 351.

403. Ibid., 349.

404. See, inter alia, Coldham, Emigrants in Chains; Ekirch, Bound for America; Fogleman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers”; Galenson, “White Servitude and the Growth of Black Slavery in Colonial America”; Jordan and Walsh, White Cargo; Smith, Colonists in Bondage; Tomlins, Freedom Bound.

405. DA, 613.

406. Ibid., 7.

407. Ibid., 350–51.

408. Ibid., 37; italics in original; Tocqueville did write of the “adventurers without families” who settled Virginia (ibid., 35n.1).

409. Ibid., 37; italics in original.

410. Ibid., 36, 48, italics in original.

411. Also see ibid., 320 n.1. But even here, Tocqueville did not investigate the subsequent in-migration from the cities and the larger effects of this population on American political culture.