Democracy in America, Tocqueville, Alexis de

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Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville

Democracy in America (De la démocratie en Amérique) by Alexis de Tocqueville is an outsider's analysis of American political, social, and cultural institutions as the author encountered them in 1831. The son of French aristocrats, Tocqueville trained as a lawyer and served as an assistant magistrate in Versailles, until it was advantageous for him to leave France for a time. Thus he and his fellow assistant magistrate Gustave de Beaumont left on a tour of the United States with the ostensible intention of researching the prison system. Their true intention, however, was to study the country's democratic institutions, and during their nine-month voyage across the eastern and middle eastern parts of the country, Tocqueville noted many facets of the country, including the institution of slavery and race relations. When a translation of the 1835 work was published in America in 1841, it met with positive comments. For example, an anonymous reviewer for Washington, D.C.'s Daily National Intelligencer wrote about the work as a whole:

What is above all, remarkable is, that the author, a foreigner, hardly speaking our language … could comprehend with so much general accuracy, and analyze with so much discrimination, the operations of institutions which only the few, the very thinking few, even among ourselves understand. He looks at us, as posterity will, without entering, the least, into our politics, our prejudices, our vices, or follies, or wonderful progress, only so far as it was necessary to his purpose, to show the action of a republican form of government (1938).

One of these institutions was slavery. Tocqueville devoted volume 1, chapter 10, "Three Races That Inhabit the Territory," to the European colonizers, the native peoples, and the African slaves. One quality of Democracy in America that set it apart from the typical travelogues of the day is Tocqueville's analysis of social factors. He contrasted American slavery with the slavery practiced among the Ancient Greeks and pointed out that the major difference was that in America the slaves were of another race than the slave owners, rather than the same race as among the Ancient Greeks. He contended that despite equal legal status, freed African Americans would remain aliens in the eyes of those of European ancestry because they had been brought from another continent where the natives were thought to be uncivilized, and then as slaves they were deprived of the means to educate themselves and thus show their intelligence.

Were Africans necessary to work in the tropical climate of the American South, Tocqueville wondered. Though Southerners had maintained it was so, the Frenchman did not believe it to be true for Caucasians in Spain and Italy fared well enough. He did admit, however, that the tobacco, cotton, and sugar cane grown in the South required constant tending—rather than other crops for which large numbers of laborers would only be necessary at harvest time. Without the slaves, Tocqueville believed the plantation owners would be hard pressed to hire enough Caucasian laborers. Thus they would be forced to change the type of crops grown and the system of agriculture.

Having come from an aristocratic background in France, Tocqueville quickly recognized that the Southern social system formed its own kind of aristocracy, one in which the slave master equaled the former French nobleman in his life of idle comfort. So too, he realized that such a lifestyle was detrimental to the physical and mental health of the slave owner. "The southerner is born into a sort of domestic dictatorship. From the beginning, life teaches him that he is born to command, and the first habit he acquires is that of effortless domination. The southerner's upbringing all but ensures that he will be arrogant, quick-tempered, irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, and impatient of obstacles, but easily discouraged if triumph is not immediate" (Tocqueville 2004, p. 433). Not only does the antebellum Southerner have belligerent tendencies, according to Tocqueville, he "loves grandeur, luxury, glory, excitement, pleasure, and above all idleness" (p. 433). Conversely, Tocqueville painted Northerners with another brush: as practical, hardworking, and clever. Northerners used their knowledge as a means of producing wealth and "selfishness can be made to serve the happiness of all" (Tocqueville 2004, p. 434). These divergent character types led Tocqueville to believe that slavery had had an indirect, pernicious effect on American society.

Tocqueville described the gradual emancipation of African Americans in the Northern states and the results in terms of workforce migrations; yet he was keenly aware of the discrimination that remained nevertheless, "When I look at the United States today, it is clear that in one part of the country the legal barrier between the two races is tending to decrease, but not the barrier of mores. Slavery is receding; the prejudice to which it gave rise remains unaltered" (Tocqueville 2004, p. 395). For this point in particular, James T. Schleifer remarked: "In at least one critical instance, Tocqueville's analysis brilliantly described American reality. In various states of the Union, Tocqueville had noticed the second-class status of free Negroes. Particularly in states where slavery had been abolished, prejudice and injustice severely burdened the Negro population" (1980, p. 218).

TOCQUEVILLE'S PREDICTION

The French writer and politician Alexis de Tocqueville predicted the demise of slavery in the United States:

What is happening in the South strikes me as both the most horrible and the most natural consequence of slavery. When I see the order of nature overturned and hear mankind cry out and struggle in vain against the law, I confess that my indignation is not directed at my contemporaries, the authors of these outrages; all my hatred is reserved for those who, after more than a thousand years of equality, introduced servitude into the world once more.
Furthermore, no matter how hard southerners try to preserve slavery, they will not succeed indefinitely. Restricted to one part of the globe and attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as disastrous, slavery is not an institution that can endure in an age of democratic liberty and enlightenment. Either the slave or the master will put an end to it. In either case, great woes certainly lie ahead (p. 419).

SOURCE: Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Penguin Putnam, 2004.

In 1820 the Society for the Colonization of Blacks had founded a settlement in Africa called Liberia, to which it began to repatriate former slaves. Upon investigation of the African population in America, Tocqueville realized that more free African Americans were being born in America than could be repatriated. Moreover, why should they go if America was all they had ever known? Thus he considered various options of co-existence, such as intermarriage. Yet he thought a dichotomy more likely, "If we assume that Whites and emancipated Negroes are to occupy the same land and face each other as foreign peoples, it is easy to see that the future holds only two prospects: either Negroes and Whites must blend altogether or they must separate" (Tocqueville 2004, p. 410).

Tocqueville saw no easy solutions to the dilemmas caused by the importation of African slaves. Decades before the outbreak of the American civil war, he predicted the eventual end to slavery in the South. Yet he could not foresee that is would be the abolitionists—not masters or slaves—who would lead this effort perhaps because, as George Wilson Pierson noted in Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, "Tocqueville never allowed to education the beneficent possibilities that the American people still see in it. He missed the rising abolitionist movement. He failed to give adequate credit to American enthusiasm for liberty and freedom … [He] underestimated the power of the executive branch in American government." Finally, Pierson suggested, "And he perhaps overestimated the tendency of democracy, at least as practiced in the United States, to degenerate into tyranny by the majority" (1938, pp. 466-467). Though some scholars debate the correctness of Tocqueville's interpretations of American society and institutions, many of them acknowledge that his research is valuable for its insights and view him as an early sociologist.