Tocqueville’s Voyages. Группа авторов

discovered some of the key mechanisms for moderating democracy. These included the federal system and the independence of the judiciary. He noticed the importance of administrative decentralization. He understood the significance of the habit of association. Perhaps most important, he saw the centrality to American mores of the doctrine of self-interest rightly understood

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      and of religion as a guarantor of liberty and democracy. To his obvious delight, he discovered fresh ways of thinking about Catholicism and saw that it might be on the new continent that it would achieve its most authentic expression.

      In highlighting these and other themes, Schleifer has also drawn our attention to the language used by Tocqueville to indicate moments of surprise in his journey. He specifically refers us to the numerous occasions when Tocqueville admits that he found something to be “striking.” The best example of this occurs in the very first sentence of the published text, where Tocqueville states: “Among the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more vividly than the equality of conditions.”88 By extending this analysis of the actual words used by Tocqueville in his account, we gain a further insight into the importance of Tocqueville’s journey and the manner in which it shaped the content of his argument about America. If, for example, we limit ourselves only to chapters 9 and 10 of part 2 of volume 1, we read such phrases as: “I sometimes encountered in the United States,” “While I was in America,” “I saw Americans associating,” “I encountered wealthy inhabitants of New England,” and “As I prolonged my stay, I perceived the great political consequences that flowed from these new facts”; “I saw with my own eyes”; “During my stay in America I did not encounter a single man, priest or layman, who did not come to accord on this point”; “I remember when traveling through the forests”; “I learned with surprise that”; “I discovered that”; “I heard them”; “I wondered how it could happen that”; “I lived much with the people of the United States”; “I met men in New England”; “What I have seen among the Anglo-Americans brings me to believe that.” Many more similar phrases and expressions can be found that testify to the impact upon Tocqueville of his voyage, but to confirm the point we might care to consider the following short paragraph:

      Thus I found in the United States the restlessness of heart that is natural to men when, all conditions being more or less nearly equal, each sees the same chances to rise. There I encountered the democratic sentiment of envy expressed in a thousand different ways. I observed

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      that the people often showed, in the conduct of affairs, a great blend of presumption and ignorance, and I concluded that in America, as among us, men were subject to the same imperfections and exposed to the same miseries.89

      With the emphases added, we see clearly how Tocqueville combined a series of observations and reflections drawn directly from experience in order to reach a substantive conclusion.

      In closing, I wish to make the suggestion that it is in the final two chapters of volume 1 of Democracy in America that the impact of Tocqueville’s journey appears in its most unmediated form. As Eduardo Nolla informs us, these parts of the book were written as late as the spring or summer of 1834, and they were not the subject of commentary from either Tocqueville’s friends or family. There were few drafts, and there are no great differences between the manuscript and the published version.90 Tocqueville himself also recognized their distinctiveness within the book as a whole. Issues relating to the future and permanence of the Republic, he commented, “touch on my subject, but do not enter into it; they are American without being democratic, and above all I wanted to portray democracy. So I had to put them aside at first: but I must return to them as I finish.”91 In short, given that there was no clear or obvious parallel between the situation of the slave and Indian populations and conditions then pertaining in Europe, there were no conclusions to be drawn for France. These were specifically American issues and had to be addressed as such.

      There can be no doubt that Tocqueville was deeply moved by the plight of the Native Americans. Denying that the picture he had drawn was “exaggerating,” he added, referring to the incident so vividly recalled in a letter to his mother: “I have gazed upon evils that would be impossible for me to recount.”92 But these evils, he believed, were irredeemable, as it seemed inevitable that the “Indian race of North America is condemned to perish.”93 Whether they continued to wander

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      through the wilderness or decided to settle made no difference to their prospects. The relentless and prodigious advance of the European settler population condemned them to destruction and extinction. If the individual states sought their complete expulsion, the Union, exuding the spirit of philanthropy and respect for the law, made it possible.

      If then the Native American was fated to live on only in our memories, the same could not be said of the slave population of the South. Here was “the most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States.”94 Again, Tocqueville’s description of their situation and his deep sense of foreboding about the future were structured around his own experience of traveling down the Ohio River to the mouth of the Mississippi. He also drew upon the numerous conversations he had had on the subject while in America. From this he could see how slavery penetrated into the souls of the masters and, therefore, how to the tyranny of laws had to be appended the intolerance of mores. The acute dilemmas and difficulties of this situation did not escape Tocqueville. Slavery neither could nor should endure. It defied economic reason. It denoted a reversal of the order of nature. It was attacked as unjust by Christianity. But, as a deleted passage from the original manuscript reveals, it also told us something profound about American society. “The Americans,” we read in the Nolla edition,

      are, of all modern peoples, those who have pushed equality and inequality furthest among men. They have combined universal suffrage with servitude. They seem to have wanted to prove in this way the advantages of equality by opposite arguments. It is claimed that the Americans, by establishing universal suffrage and the dogma of sovereignty have made clear to the world the advantages of equality. As for me, I think that they have above all proved this by establishing servitude, and I find that they establish the advantages of equality much less by democracy than by slavery.95

      The prospects of a resolution to this terrible question, in Tocqueville’s view, were slim indeed. Either the Negroes in the South

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      would seize their own freedom (by violent means if necessary) or, if freedom were granted to them, they would undoubtedly abuse it. This, in turn, raised the question of the future viability of the Union itself. In his lengthy meditation on this subject, we see clearly the extent to which Tocqueville had taken note of the key political questions agitating America at the time of his stay. He commented, at some considerable length, not only upon the character of President Andrew Jackson but also upon the intense debates over the renewal of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States, tariff reform, and the nullification crisis engineered by Calhoun and his supporters in South Carolina. Jackson, he concluded, was “a slave of the majority” who “tramples underfoot his personal enemies … with an ease that no President has found.”96

      Yet, as ever, Tocqueville’s preoccupation was not with the fleeting questions of today but with the future. His focus remained upon the long-term trends that would decide and determine the course of American history. He saw the threats to the Union that came from the slave-owning interests of the South but believed (incorrectly, as it turned out) that all Americans recognized the commercial and political incentives to remain united. Americans, “from Maine to Florida, from the Missouri to the Atlantic Ocean,” agreed about the general principles which should govern society and about the sources of moral authority. The greatest threat to the Union, therefore, came from expansion and what Tocqueville termed “the continual displacement of forces that take place within it.”97 The rapidity and extent of this internal movement, driven forward by the search for material prosperity, only accentuated the danger. Countering these tendencies toward dissolution, however, were the forces of greater economic integration—the civilization of the North, Tocqueville contended, would become the norm—and