The commissioners continued to do best as witnesses and recorders of the American scene. Almost against their will they were deeply impressed by the Fourth of July ceremonies. ‘I would like to give you a precise idea of this spectacle,’ Tocqueville wrote to Chabrol:
in which vulgar, even burlesque details were mixed with a noble theme and managed to touch the heart. In the front row marched the militia: that is, the National Guard of this country, a country where the military spirit is absolutely unknown; you can imagine what a goose each honest citizen made of himself: the martial turnout was really ridiculous. Then came several carriages, bearing veterans who had served in the war of independence and seen the triumph of the American cause. The notion of associating with the ceremony these witnesses of the great events of which it was evoking the memory was an extremely good one.
Then the workingmen and their trade associations marched past, and the whole company assembled in a church, where a platform had been set up.
With my French notions I expected that the Governor of the State, or the municipal officers, would sit there. Instead, they set up the banners of the trades and the standard of the County, which had been carried in the war of the Revolution, and in the middle of it all were the old officers I mentioned previously.30
Beaumont put a comic emphasis on the fact that two very distinguished visitors marched at the head of the procession between the governor and the chancellor (‘Tocqueville et moi’). He went on:
There was nothing brilliant about the occasion; for splendour it could not have borne the slightest comparison with the least of our political or religious solemnities. But there was something great in its simplicity ... Nothing could be easier than to make fun of the standards we saw inscribed Associated Butchers, Association of Apprentices, etc.* But if you stop to think about it, what could be more natural than these emblems among a people who owe their prosperity to trade and industry?
He reported the speeches in the church and the reading out of the Declaration of Independence, but he was most impressed by the fact that the first item on the programme was a prayer: ‘I mention this, because it is characteristic of this country where nothing is done without religious assistance. I don’t think that things go the worse for it.’ He was more impressed by the whole than by any ceremony he had ever seen in France.31
Religion was much in the commissioners’ minds. The day before (3 July) they had visited the Shakers, whose oldest settlement was nearby. The ceremony they watched seemed to them utterly bizarre, and they both wrote long letters home describing it, too long, unfortunately, to be extensively quoted. The Shakers danced, the Shakers preached, then after two hours formed a single circle, men and women together:
They tucked their elbows into their sides while sticking out their forearms and dangling their hands, so that they looked like dogs trained to walk on their hind-legs. Thus prepared, they intoned an air more lamentable than any before and began to revolve round the room, an exercise which lasted for a good quarter of an hour ... do you see, my dear Mamma, into what aberrations the human soul can fall when it is left to itself? We had a young American Protestant with us, and he said as we came out, ‘Two more such displays and I’ll become a Catholic.’32
This was the most formidable challenge yet posed by American Protestantism, and Tocqueville’s sympathies were not equal to it, as is shown by, among other things, his disdain of the music, which may have included the famous Shaker hymn (‘To turn, turn, will be our delight, Till by turning, turning, we come round right.’) The fact is that Tocqueville had spent all his life in Catholic countries, and did not realize how profoundly Catholic he was himself, and what that could mean, until he went to America. The shock was enormous, for until then his knowledge of Protestantism was almost wholly theoretical. In New York he went to Protestant churches and discovered to his horror that the preachers dealt only with morality and said nothing about dogma. He was glad to hear, and eager to believe, that Catholicism was rapidly gaining ground in the United States, as indeed it was; he was not so pleased to discover that Unitarianism was also advancing strongly. Unitarians were theists, like himself, but his creed had a strong Catholic colouring; Unitarians seemed to him nothing but atheists in disguise, and deplorably unsentimental. At least they were logical. He could not see the logic of ordinary Protestantism at all, and felt this so strongly that he committed himself to the view that Protestantism was dying out, and in so doing was preparing the ground for a final collision between unbelief and Catholicism.33 On the other hand, he and Beaumont were both deeply impressed by the fact that American republicans saw religion as an essential support to democracy and liberty.
They left Albany on the evening of 4 July and two days later reached Syracuse. It was their first American journey by land of any length, and entailed vile roads, worse inns and bone-shaking vehicles. They noted the discomfort, but no more: they were falling under the enchantment of the forest, which hemmed the road in on either side, and which they were now experiencing for the first time:
I think that in one of my letters I complained that there were no more woods in America; I must now make the amende honorable. Not only do we see one wood after another in America, the whole country is nothing but one vast forest, in the middle of which they have made clearings. If you climb a church-tower you see nothing up to the edge of sight but tree-tops bending in the wind like waves of the sea; everything attests a new country. What they call défricher in this country [it is not clear what English term Tocqueville had in mind] is to cut off a tree three feet from the ground. Once this operation is complete, you till and sow alongside. The result is that in the midst of the finest crops you see hundreds of dead trunks of old trees encumbering the soil ... But if the country is new, one observes at every step that the people which is settling it is old. When, by a frightful road across a sort of wilderness, you arrive at a cabin, you are astonished to find a civilization more advanced than in any French village. The attire of the farmer is trim; his cabin is perfectly clean; usually you see at his side his newspaper, and his first wish is to talk politics with you.34
This is a striking passage, and is not less interesting when compared with one in Basil Hall’s book, published two years previously, which we know that Tocqueville read:
... an Englishman might fancy himself in the vale of Stroud. But, mark the difference: at the next crack of the whip ... he is again in the depths of the wood at the other extremity of civilized society, with the world just beginning to bud, in the shape of a smoky log-hut, ten feet by twelve, filled with dirty-faced children, squatted round a hardy-looking female, cooking victuals for a tired woodsman seated at his door, reading with suitable glee in the Democratic Journal of New York, an account of Mr Canning’s campaign against the Ultra Tories of the old country.
The question of plagiarism does not arise: Tocqueville was writing a letter to his mother. We can make a good guess as to what happened. Tocqueville read Hall, who alerted him to what he should look out for. (Something of the same sort may have happened in his conversation with Mr Livingston.) The significant thing is what Hall notices and Tocqueville does not, and the two men’s contradicting attitudes. Hall was not a lively writer, but he was a capable draughtsman, who carried a camera lucida with him and put it to good use in his sketching; he had a painter’s eye. So did Beaumont. As a result their reports of America contain somewhat more striking detail than Tocqueville’s. Tocqueville was certainly observant, but, more than the others, he was always more interested in analysis than in reportage.
He was consciously using his letters home as notes towards a book. He put into them whatever he found interesting or important, whether he discovered it himself or took it from someone else, even from Basil Hall, of whose intense unpopularity in the United States he was probably aware.* Hall’s Tory opinions and, still more, that painter’s eye for squalid detail infuriated his American readers and former hosts, who felt that they had been betrayed. So Tocqueville, while he approp
riated Hall, took care to correct him where he saw cause: for instance, the log-cabins which he saw were clean and their inhabitants decent; he took pains to say so. Where Hall thought that the settlers in the forest were the dregs of civilization, Tocqueville thought that they embodied its triumph, and it can hardly be disputed that in this he showed superior insight. Here is an early example of the qualities which were to make the Démocratie so unusual among European commentaries on pre-Civil War America.
He and Beaumont arrived at Syracuse on 6 July. They had important business there – interviewing Elam Lynds, formerly governor of the Auburn and Sing-Sing prisons – and undertook it as conscientiously as usual; but only a few hours’ ride to the north lay Lake Oneida, and it was simply impossible for Tocqueville to leave that sacred spot unvisited. So on their journey from Syracuse to Auburn (which they began on 7 July) they made a detour.
The forest, the lake, the island all lived up to Tocqueville’s most romantic expectations, but as he was still under the delusion that the refugee tale was history, not fiction, he saw what he wanted to see, not what was in front of him: a desolate refuge of love, not a failed homestead which the settler family had abandoned after two years for a profitable market-garden near Albany:
Left Syracuse at 2. Horseback. Umbrella, gun, game-bag ... Reached Fort Brewerton at six o’clock. Had a look round. The forest wars for ever against Man. Shot some birds. View of Lake Oneida. It stretches out of sight eastward between low wooded hills. Not a house or a clearing to be seen. Lonely, monotonous scenery. We slept in a detestable inn. Left at 6 in the morning. We plunged into an immense forest where the path was hard to follow. Delicious coolness. A wonderful sight, impossible to describe. Astonishing vegetation. Enormous trees of every kind. A jungle, grasses, plants, bushes. America in all her glory.35
Presently they reached a fisherman’s cabin on the lakeside, in full view of the Frenchman’s Island (still so called today). There was no-one at home but an old woman. She was the first of the common people of America, les petites gens, and the first woman, that Tocqueville talked to, or at any rate the first whose remarks he thought worth writing down. She answered his questions politely, but unintentionally fed his misapprehensions (never having met a tourist before, she could not imagine why he was interested in Frenchman’s Island). Yes, a Frenchman once lived there – thirty-one or thirty-five years ago – before her time. Yes, he had had a wife – but she had died there (this was incorrect). It was all quite enough for Tocqueville and Beaumont. They borrowed a boat, rowed to the island, and spent some happy hours exploring it, looking in vain for traces of the refuge of their ‘unhappy compatriots’, such as the exiled lady’s tomb. The best they could find was a half-dead apple-tree and a vine run wild. They wrote their names on the trunk of a pine-tree and came away; that evening Tocqueville confided to his notebook, ‘this excursion has moved and interested me more powerfully, not merely than anything since I came to America, but anything since I first went travelling.’36 Later he worked up his rough notes into an elegant piece of travel-writing like his Sicilian journal. It is somewhat larmoyant in style, and of psychological interest only: ‘Not without regret I saw fall behind that vast rampart of leaves which had for so many years defended two exiles against the bullet of the European and the arrow of the savage, but which had not been able to hide their cottage from the invisible attack of Death.’37
Next day they reached Auburn, and immediately got back to their business. Their meeting with Elam Lynds in Syracuse had profoundly impressed them. Lynds, not to mince words, was a sadistic bully, of an American type all too familiar today from films and novels about the US Marines in the Second World War, and recent outrages in the prisons at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. He was the effective midwife of the Auburn system, which had emerged by trial and error after the founding of the prison in 1817. He was three times driven from the governorships of Auburn and Sing-Sing for gross cruelty.38 When Tocqueville and Beaumont met him he was between engagements and running a hardware shop. They were somewhat wary of him, for they knew that he had enemies, and must have known why. Tocqueville, characteristically, observed that he had a common appearance, used vulgar language and couldn’t spell. Lynds, he thought, had a markedly despotic streak. But the commissioners were won over by his intelligence and energy (so much so that they eventually published their conversation with him in the Système pénitentiaire).39 Besides, he told them what they wanted to hear: that the penitentiary system could work anywhere, including France; that plentiful use of the whip was in the end the most humane form of discipline (‘it is necessary to be pitiless and just’); that prisoners were cowards, over whom a determined warder could establish irresistible authority; and that prison labour was, or could be made, valuable to the convicts and to society, and could bring in enough money to make an important contribution to meeting the costs of the prison system. Furthermore, Lynds had limited but apparently realistic expectations of the degree to which penitentiaries could reform characters and reduce recidivism; he poured scorn on theorists and mere philanthropists. Lynds, in fact, was the complete representative of the Auburn system, whose philosophy was that ‘The great end and design of the criminal law, is the prevention of crimes, through fear of punishment; the reformation of offenders being a minor consideration.’40 These ends were to be attained, under the Auburn system, by isolating the prisoners from each other at night and whipping them to work in absolute silence, as at Sing-Sing, during the day. Tocqueville and Beaumont were not prepared to give up all hope of turning criminals into honest citizens in prison, but it is easy to see why Lynds had such an effect on them.41
Yet they arrived at Auburn determined to test his ideas thoroughly, and did so successfully by, for example interrogating the supervisors of the comb-shop, the stone-cutting shop, the tool-shop, the shoemaking shop, the cooper shop, the weavers’ shop and the blacksmith’s shop. As a result they finally decided, as Tocqueville told Chabrol, that the penitentiary system was indeed practicable in France – ‘but keep that to yourself; we don’t want to seem to have made up our minds.’42 They had thus completed an important stage in their prison mission. Their next encounter would be an equally important incident in their political investigations. They travelled on westward to visit John Spencer of Canandaigua.
Spencer was the most congenial American they had met so far. He was the sort of man they both wanted to be: the most eminent lawyer in western New York, a leading politician (eventually he was to serve in President Tyler’s cabinet, first as Secretary of War and then as Secretary of the Treasury) and a distinguished legal writer. He lived in a comfortable house on a beautiful lake, and he had a pair of blue-eyed daughters who were beautiful too. By this time Tocqueville and Beaumont were feeling the strain of their monastic resolve: ‘our virtue is still intact,’ Tocqueville told Chabrol, ‘but we are beginning to stare at women with an impudence which hardly suits representatives of the Penitentiary System.’ Beaumont was particularly taken with Mary Spencer, and being unable to have any secrets from his family told his mother that Miss Spencer had ‘that pink and white complexion that you sometimes see in Englishwomen and that is almost unknown in France’; but he made haste to add reassuringly that they were about to leave Canandaigua and would never return. The long morning conversations with their host had much more permanent consequences. They ranged over American state legislatures, the utility of two chambers rather than one, American lawyers, American press freedom, religious toleration, the poor laws, education and universal suffrage. On all these matters Spencer was as judicious as he was well-informed, and his influence was to leave deep traces on the Démocratie (of which he would be the first American publisher). He was even able to suggest fruitful comparisons between conditions in America and in France. Tocqueville was delighted.43
They left Canandaigua on 19 July, intending to travel to Buffalo, Niagara Falls and thence, by way of Lake Ontario, to Canada. It was a regular tourist trip, as they had discovered,44 and the fact
that they intended to take it suggests that they felt a need for rest from penitentiaries and politics: they were ready for a lark. And the further west they went in New York state the more conscious they became that they had a wonderful opportunity to experience and study a great historical movement, quite as interesting as anything else which they were likely to encounter. America (to use M. Rémond’s useful distinction) was beginning to thrust the United States somewhat into the shade.
Ever since the end of the War of 1812 hundreds of thousands of emigrants from New England had been pouring into and across the Burned-Over District. Tocqueville and Beaumont were too intelligent not to notice the great movement going on all round them, and they wanted to understand it. Besides, it impinged directly on two of their preoccupations: Indians and wilderness. Like all Europeans, they were fascinated by the idea of Indians, and were agog for their first sight of them. When it came it was shocking. Just before they reached Syracuse they saw a knot of the once-proud Oneida nation begging in the dirt; and when they came to Buffalo they saw a young Indian man lying dead drunk in the road, being kicked by his woman in an angry attempt to wake him up or, if that failed, to punish him. Tocqueville and Beaumont were afraid he might die of drink or exposure, but nobody, Indian or American, would do anything for him, so reluctantly they left him to his fate. ‘I don’t think I have ever been more disappointed,’ wrote Tocqueville next day (he was now beginning to keep a sort of journal). ‘I was full of memories of M. de Chateaubriand and of Cooper, and in the natives of America I expected to see savages in whose faces Nature had nevertheless left the mark of some of those lofty virtues which beget the spirit of liberty.’ He thought to see bodies developed in hunting and warfare ‘which would lose nothing by nakedness’. Instead they were ugly, dirty and drunk.45
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