Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  One day the mayor, the aldermen, and, it seemed, every public official in New York turned up in five carriages to take them on a tour of the city’s prisons, workhouse, deaf-and-dumb asylum and madhouse, with a banquet halfway through. At the banquet Beaumont was chiefly alarmed lest he be compelled to drink a toast to La Fayette, the Hero of Two Worlds, whom his young cousin regarded as a dangerous revolutionary (he did not foresee that one day he would marry one of La Fayette’s granddaughters).12 Tocqueville was distressed at the idea of drinking toasts at all, for everyone present (some two dozen officials) wanted to take a glass of wine with the Frenchmen:

  We were just like hares with a pack of hounds at their heels ... But at the third glass I decided never to take more than a sip, and so I got successfully enough to what we in France call the end of the meal but which here is merely the end of the first act; most of the plates having been removed lighted candles are brought and you are offered suitably enough a clean plate bearing cigars. Each of us took one,* the party enveloped itself in a cloud of smoke, the toasts began, muscles relaxed somewhat, and we gave ourselves up to the heaviest merriment possible.

  He could not help smiling to himself when he remembered how insignificant the guests of honour were in their own country. But renown had its downside. Even ladies at the dinner-table thought it their duty to make suitable remarks about hangings and lock-ups before allowing the conversation to turn to more commonplace subjects.13

  None of this contributed much to their purposes in America. As time would show, they were excellently equipped to interpret the country (their English rapidly improved) but at first they could not make head or tail of it. They did not know where to begin, and clutched desperately at any clue – for instance, the notion which Mr Scher-merhorn first put into their heads, that the Americans were no more than a nation of shopkeepers. Tocqueville grumbled to his father that there was far more in the newspapers about the price of cotton than about great political questions.14 He could not have chosen a worse example. Though he did not yet see it, the price of cotton was itself a great political question. Cotton was far and away America’s greatest export, underpinning its prosperity and earning the credit and hard currency which, reinvested, financed the industrial revolution that would one day make the United States the world’s greatest power. Meanwhile cotton sustained the regime of plantation slavery that in exactly thirty years’ time would plunge America into civil war. Cotton made a mockery of the country’s claims to liberty and democracy, and among the merchants of New York there were men who would have insisted on this to Tocqueville, had he met them: the Tappan brothers, for example, the bankers of the reviving abolitionist movement.* And cotton, by stimulating an intense political battle over the tariff, played its part in establishing the two-party system.

  There was wisdom in Kergorlay’s observation, made in the first letter which Tocqueville in America received from him, that to understand a place you had to live in it for at least two months.15 Instead, during his first two and a half weeks in New York, Tocqueville clung to his stereotype, in which there was not a little snobbery. He did not even recognize that he was also stereotyping his own country. Lurking behind his generalizations at this stage, one might say, was the implication that in France everyone spent the nights in adultery and the days in revolutionary politics, and no-one cared about money. He would have been furious had anyone pointed this out, but it was implicit in what he was saying – he, the countryman of Balzac! He and Beaumont were at risk of succumbing to a version of the prejudices which did so much to injure the observations that English writers made of America – Mrs Trollope, Basil Hall, Charles Dickens.

  They were saved from superficiality by the prison mission. It required them to make systematic investigations, which was excellent training for their larger enquiry; and it kept their attention firmly directed to American actualities. They spent long mornings at a public library wrestling with statistics of all kinds, which furthered both investigations,16 and on 26 May they set out on a visit to the celebrated penitentiary at Sing-Sing, thirty miles up the Hudson. The trip lasted for ten days, and proved extremely useful. Not only did they make a thorough study of one of America’s most famous jails, but they escaped from the incessant socializing which overwhelmed them in New York, and found time to think systematically. They were in holiday mood. The Hudson valley was extremely beautiful, rural and peaceful; though perhaps too civilized: Tocqueville wished that he could have arrived with the first Europeans, when the shores were covered with wild forest. The American family with whom they lodged were as friendly and hospitable as everyone else. They visited the prison by day and lounged on the river-bank in the evening until it was cool enough to go indoors (by now they had discovered how appalling the heat and humidity of an American summer can be). Tocqueville took the opportunity to give Beaumont swimming lessons: it would never do if Gustave fell off a steamboat into one of the dangerous American rivers and was unable to help himself. Beaumont wrote a mock diploma congratulating Tocqueville on the improvement of his manners: he was now polite to old women as well as young ones, and prepared to pretend pleasure in the piano-playing of ladies who had neither looks nor skill nor talent. Beaumont certified all this, and then, giving in to one of the sentimental impulses that recurred throughout his life, added: ‘since I am by way of handing out certificates, I further attest that the said Alexis is the best friend that Earth can furnish; and, he being mine, I am very happy to have him.’17

  Their most practical concern was the penitentiary. They were well-prepared for this, having read Basil Hall’s description, and much documentation. What they found was what they expected: a grim prison where a regime of hard labour and absolute silence was imposed on the prisoners by the free use of whips. The commissioners were deeply impressed by the experiment: 900 hardened villains were controlled by a mere thirty men; the convicts were trusted with tools, such as pick-axes, that could easily become weapons, yet they were not even chained while they laboured (their labour consisted of extracting stone from a quarry and using it to build their own prison). But Tocqueville was not convinced that the experiment was as yet proved a success. It had only been going for a few years, and might suddenly blow up at any moment, like one of those other wonderful American machines, the river steamboats. He noticed the apprehensiveness of the guards – ‘Their eyes never stopped moving.’ And he could get no confident affirmation that Sing-Sing contributed to the moral reform of the prisoners, which was the main point so far as he was concerned. He and Beaumont reserved their judgement until they had seen other examples of ‘the Auburn system’, as it was called after the penitentiary at Auburn in western New York state where the system was first installed.18 They would be going there by and by.

  Sing-Sing gave them a wonderful opportunity to take stock, as was highly necessary: it was now two full months since they had left France. Tocqueville seized his chance, both in his notebook and in a letter home to his father; but although it cannot be proved, probably it was in his conversations with Beaumont that he did the hard work of clarifying his ideas. The friends were together every hour of the twenty-four, fascinated by all they saw, sharing the same particular interests, and (so far as we can judge) invariably coming to the same conclusions. What they wrote down was simply the outcome of their discussions.

  Read in this light, their papers show that they were slowly getting to grips with the dimensions of their task. Tocqueville wrote to his father:

  Since arriving, we have had only one idea: that is, to understand the country that we are visiting. To do that, we find ourselves forced to deconstruct [decomposer] society a priori, to investigate the elements which make it up at home in France, so that we can ask useful questions here and overlook nothing. This study, very difficult but very attractive, shows us a host of details which would be hidden in the mass, failing such analysis, and suggests a host of questions which would otherwise never have occurred to us. This our labour has already resulted in a series of q
uestions to which we ceaselessly search for answers. Knowing precisely what we want to find out, our least conversation is instructive, and we can affirm that no man, at any level of society, can’t teach us something.19

  Tocqueville is becoming a true sociologist, and the method he sketches here was to be applied throughout the rest of his journey through America.

  It got its first airing during their return journey to New York. They paid a courtesy call on a member of the Livingston family (research has failed to decide which) in his country-house on the banks of the Hudson, and while they waited for the steamboat which was to take them down river Tocqueville raised a question arising from his observations: ‘To my mind, one of the drawbacks of American society is the general lack of intellectual activity.’ Mr Livingston quite agreed, and put this deficiency down to the post-Revolutionary laws of inheritance, which by abolishing entail and primogeniture were destroying the upper class, especially the gentry of the Hudson valley to which he belonged. Tocqueville was familiar with this idea, which he had already met in Basil Hall, who may have got it from the same Mr Livingston;20 since he was well aware how important primogeniture had been to the French noblesse before 1789 it was very attractive to him, and would one day find its way into De la démocratie en Amérique; but for the present it is more important to register the fact that this was the first extensive conversation with an American that he felt confident enough to record at length; he got up early next day in order to do so.21

  They passed three more weeks in New York city, devoting their working hours chiefly to the House of Refuge, a detention centre for young offenders, and their evenings to high society. This was a mixed blessing, had they but known it. Their youth, their charm, their important mission and, not least, their noble status* made them exceedingly welcome to the old elite of New York, the Knickerbocker families; so they were invited to dinner parties, and picnics, and a night-time wedding-reception in the open air where Tocqueville was delighted by the fireflies and Beaumont made up to the beautiful daughter of Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat.22 These activities provided plenty of material for lively letters home (Tocqueville devoted much paper to denouncing what he called the musique miaulante played at these parties: unfortunately he gives no indication of what it was and who wrote it)23 but they were dangerously misleading for serious students of the United States. Peter Schermerhorn and his friends were Federalists: relics, that is to say, of America’s first conservative party, which had disintegrated and disappeared after the War of 1812. They had given up the competition for political power in the raw and raucous America of the early nineteenth century; in fact they were, as Denis Brogan once pointed out, émigrés de l’intérieur, like Tocqueville and Beaumont’s relations and friends in France after 1830. They retained and vigorously expressed their anti-democratic opinions, which the commissioners eagerly solicited and carefully recorded – for example, the view that while republicanism was the only possible form of government for America, it would never do for a great European country such as France. This chimed with Tocqueville and Beaumont’s prejudices, as did Mr Livingston’s remarks about the inheritance laws, and they were not yet in a position to see that the views of, say, James Kent, the great Federalist lawyer, were as partial a guide to Jacksonian America as the views of the comte de Kergorlay or Beaumont’s father would have been to the France of Louis-Philippe.

  One of their blunders was entirely self-inflicted. When planning their journey they had resolved to have nothing to do with women in the way of sex (polite or even flattering attention at dances was another matter). This was not easy for either of them, but they were proud of their success in keeping their vow: Tocqueville wrote to Édouard, ‘Can you believe, mon cher ami, that since our arrival in America we have practised the austerest virtue. Not the slightest swerve. Monks – I ought to say, good monks – could not have done more.’ They meant to keep to the rule for the rest of their journey, since American married women were so virtuous that complete ruin would punish them if they fell, and seducing young girls was more trouble than it was worth; anyway the pressure of work was such as to make the commissioners less inclined than usual to fall into sin.24 It will be seen that Tocqueville is here applying to himself his contention that in America men were too busy for love; but the best comment is that of Jardin and Pierson, who remark that the resolution to live like monks ‘perhaps entailed a lacuna in their study of American manners’.25 Indeed it did: if Tocqueville and Beaumont ever had a serious conversation with an American woman, no record of it survives. Jardin and Pierson also point out that prostitution throve in the cities of Jacksonian America, including New York, which makes Tocqueville’s obstinate belief in the chastity of American women, and for that matter in the sexual apathy of American men, all the more bizarre (but he was evidently thinking of women of his own social class).

  It would be easy to go through Tocqueville’s other observations at this point of his travels and demonstrate his mistakes, but the impression left by his letters and notes of June 1831 is rather of brilliant insight. Perhaps none of the particular points he makes is original in itself, but he makes of them altogether something startlingly new and suggestive, and by the time he writes to Kergorlay, on the day of his departure from New York city, he has found, and knows he has found, what will be the theme of his book:

  We are travelling towards unlimited democracy, I don’t say that this is a good thing, what I see in this country convinces me on the contrary that it won’t suit France; but we are driven by an irresistible force. No effort made to stop this movement will do more than bring about brief halts.26

  This is the grand Tocquevillean doctrine. It is significant that he discovered it while again reflecting on the consequences of abolishing primogeniture and entail.

  On 30 June he and Beaumont left New York, having spent nearly seven weeks there (except for the excursion to Sing-Sing). It had been an excellent introduction to the United States, and even Kergorlay might have thought it long enough; it was time to move on. The commonplace that New York isn’t America has never been true, but the city is only part of the country and to understand its position in the United States it is necessary to explore the hinterland. Besides, the commissioners had exhausted New York’s resources as a place for prison research; now they headed for Auburn, the first and most famous American penitentiary. They did not hurry: they meant to savour the beauties of the Hudson, look in at the spa of Saratoga Springs where some of their smart friends threatened to join them, and then go to Albany to study the state government. None of these plans turned out quite as they expected. They missed Saratoga altogether, for after a pleasant day at Yonkers (where Tocqueville took out his gun and slaughtered birds, while Beaumont sketched) and another at a tiny place called Colwells (or Colwell’s)27 they boarded a steamboat in the evening which, they found, was racing another one to Albany and would stop nowhere on the way, not even at West Point, which they had much wanted to see. At Albany they were warmly welcomed in the usual way and were made to take a prominent part in a grand parade on the Fourth of July; they were given all the official papers which they asked for (Tocqueville told his father that he would have to buy a trunk to get his documents home) but they were baffled in their researches by the unexpected fact that the state government seemed hardly to exist. They had letters of introduction to the local Congressman, Churchill C. Cambreleng, and although no conversation is recorded, it seems unlikely that they were unaware that in the House of Representatives he was a leading supporter of the Jackson administration. Beaumont found him ‘positive and practical’, and he introduced them to Azariah C. Flagg, the Secretary of State at Albany. Perhaps the encounter with Cambreleng made them aware for the first time that there was an active national government in this strange country; and they had seen for themselves the vigorous municipal administration of New York city. But in spite of Mr Flagg’s best efforts they could not see that there was anything in between. Governor Throop was so badly paid that
he had to spend half the year working his farm;* there did not seem to be much for him to do in the other six months, and soon they would be told that no able men wanted to go into the state government since it was so easy to make a fortune by other means.28

  From the scientific point of view it was an unlucky visit. One of the weaknesses of De la démocratie en Amérique is its inadequate treatment of political parties, and this blemish might have been avoided had Tocqueville realized that a great discovery was waiting to be made at Albany. The so-called Albany Regency was at its height. The Regency was the name given in derision to the faction led by Martin Van Buren which dominated the politics of New York for twenty years or so. Not only that, but Van Buren had successfully applied his influence and organizational skills to the project of electing Andrew Jackson President of the United States, and in the process had in partnership with Jackson founded what soon became the Democratic party. American society had been pregnant with mass party politics almost since the ratification of the Constitution; Van Buren had been one of the chief midwives at the birth, and during his travels Tocqueville met several men – Throop, Cambreleng, Flagg, eventually Jackson himself – who could have shown him what was going on had he happened to ask the right questions. He did not do so, being blinded by his French and elitist preconceptions, which had been reinforced by what his New York friends had told him: that party politics was at an end, having been replaced by a mere vulgar scramble for office.29 So he missed one of the universally important innovations which the America of his age was making.