Tocqueville’s Voyages. Группа авторов

You could not imagine, he told his mother, the joy caused by such a small animal, which “seemed to have been sent with the express intent of announcing the approach of land.” Later came more birds and fish and, finally, marine vegetation. Then came the first sighting of land and the “delicious spectacle” of grass and trees. Soon after they dropped anchor and went ashore. Never, he wrote, had people been so happy: “[W]e leapt onto land and each of us took a dozen unsteady steps before coming to stand solidly on our feet.” Tocqueville had arrived, and the journey into America had begun.

      It is at this point that Tocqueville’s journey can be read as a travelogue, his letters bristling with detail, his mood never less than one of fascination. A new world passed before him, he told one of his sisters-in-law, as if it were seen through a magic lantern.73 The houses along the coast were small and clean, like “chicken coops.” The coastline

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      was low and lacking in beauty. No description was adequate to portray the “immense” steamship that conveyed them over sixty leagues in only eighteen hours. New York was greeted with “cries of admiration.” Its external aspect was “bizarre and not very agreeable.” It was possible to call on a lady at nine in the morning without impropriety. No wine was drunk at meals, although American eating habits left much to be desired, with Americans consuming copious amounts in conditions of “complete barbarism.” Americans smoked, chewed tobacco, and spat in public. Generally speaking, they lacked grace and elegance; but this did not mean that they were not a “quite remarkable race of men.”74 The navigation of rivers and canals meant that distance was regarded with “unbelievable contempt.” The speed at which journeys were completed never ceased to astound him, especially when his steamship unexpectedly raced past West Point on its way to Albany. To his brother Édouard, he reported that he was now living in “another world,” where political passions were superficial and the desire to acquire wealth prevailed. Moreover, there were a thousand ways of doing this without troubling the state.75 The cost of living was less than in Paris, although the price of manufactured goods (Tocqueville was especially concerned about the price of much-needed gloves) was exorbitant. Nothing was more delicious than the spectacle offered by the banks of the Hudson, disappearing as the river did in the high, blue mountains to the north, nor anything as sublime as the “perfect calm” and “complete tranquillity” of the wilderness around the Oneida Lake.76 Autumn, with its great variety of colors and its “pure and sparkling sky,” was “the moment when America appeared in all her glory.”77 Even the flies that lit up the nighttime sky were a source of fascination. Nothing, however, had quite prepared him for the extraordinary Shaker ceremony he witnessed in the woods not far from Albany or for the Fourth of July celebrations the day after, all carried out in “perfect order.”78 Nor could he but be

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      moved by the lamentable and mournful sight of the Choctaw Indians being transported from their homeland to probable oblivion.

      Above all, it was the sheer newness and novelty of America that came increasingly to press itself upon him. Writing to his mother from Louisville in December 1831,79 Tocqueville recorded his impressions of the society he was seeing emerging in the new cities of the Midwest. The Europeans who had first arrived in America, he wrote, had built a society that was analogous to that of Europe but which “at bottom” was radically different. Since then, a new “swarm” of immigrants had poured westward, creating in the valleys of the Mississippi “a new society which bore no comparison with the past and was connected to Europe only by language.” It was here that “a people absolutely without precedents, without traditions, without customs,” which ignored the wisdom of others and of the past, were carving out institutions, as they were roads, in the forests where they had just arrived, sure in the knowledge that they faced neither obstacles nor limits. With time, their job done, they would uproot themselves again, pushing headlong ever westward toward yet more virgin soil and new challenges. Phrased in the terminology of Tocqueville’s published text, this sense of constant movement reappeared in his conclusion that “there is something precipitous, I could almost say revolutionary, in the progress society makes in America.”80

      The mistake is to believe (primarily on the basis of the letters written to Chabrol and Kergorlay in June 1831) that Tocqueville quickly settled his mind on what he had seen of American society. This was not the case because it is clear that his journey across the continent forced him to rethink his impressions and conclusions on an almost daily basis. To his father, in early June, he wrote that he could not tell him what most struck him about America, “a whole volume would be necessary to tell you; and, in any case, I would perhaps not think the same tomorrow.”81 In September, writing from Boston, he told his

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      mother that “[e]verything I see, everything that I hear, everything that I see from a distance, forms a confused mass in my brain which I will perhaps never have the time nor the strength to unravel. It would be an immense undertaking to present a picture of a society that is as large and as lacking in homogeneity as this one.”82 A month later, this time writing from Hartford, he reaffirmed the observation earlier passed on to his father. “I will know what I think of America only when I am no longer here,” he wrote: “One has to give up any idea of studying things deeply when one sees so many things, when one impression drives out the one that preceded it; at best there remain a few general ideas, a few general conclusions, which much later can enable you to understand details when one has the time to study them.”83 From Philadelphia in November, he told his mother that the clearest outcome of his trip would be that, upon leaving America, he would be in a position to understand the documents that he had collected but not yet studied. “For the rest,” he continued, “on this country I have only disordered and disconnected notes, disjointed ideas to which only I hold the key, isolated facts which recall a mass of others.” The only general ideas he had expressed on America, he confided, were to be found in letters to his family and a few friends in France, and these were written in haste, on a steamboat or in a corner, with his knees serving as a desk. Would he ever write a book on this country? he asked himself. In truth, he did not know. “It seems to me,” he concluded, “that I have a few good ideas, but I still do not know how to arrange them.”84

      How these various ideas emerged is captured vividly in Tocqueville’s letters and notebooks. To his father, he explained that, despite his mental confusion, two ideas had already come to him. The first was that the American people were the happiest in the world. The second was that America owed its prosperity less to its own virtues and even less to a form of government that was superior to all others than to the particular circumstances in which it found itself. This in turn told him that political institutions were neither good nor bad in themselves and that everything depended upon the physical conditions and social

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      state of the people where they applied. What might work in America, might not work in France and vice versa.85 An altogether different set of conclusions was listed in a note titled “First Impressions,” dated May 15, 1831. The Americans were a prey to national pride and small-town pettiness. They seemed a religious people, but how far religion regulated their conduct was unclear. The whole of society seemed to be composed of one enormous middle class. Elegant manners and polite refinement were lacking, but all Americans, “right down to the simple shop assistant,” seemed to have had a good education and to possess sober manners. Betraying what was to be one of his abiding preoccupations, Tocqueville also commented upon the way women dressed and the causes of chaste morals.

      By dint of considerable effort and imaginative intuition, Tocqueville came, in fits and starts, to make sense of these confused and diverse impressions. Yet, as George Wilson Pierson observed long ago, their very tone “prophesized the book that one day would result.”86 Tocqueville showed himself not to be interested in individuals. There were no descriptions of domestic interiors. His subject from the beginning was “the real character of the American people,” and with that came necessarily a fascination with the patterns of behavior and institutions of a democratic society.

      What Tocqueville came to observe and to learn from his journey through America has best been summarized by James T. Schleifer.87 Tocqueville, he contends, learned first of all of the