Even if his observations are disputable, they encompass much truth, and in logic there seemed to be no reason why they should not be applied to France. The difficulty was the point de départ. Contemplating the American system of as little government as possible, and perhaps remembering Chateaubriand’s Voyage, Tocqueville wrote:
few are the peoples who can thus do without government. Such a state of things has never lasted except at the two extremes of civilization. The savage, who has only his physical needs to satisfy, relies only on himself. For the civilized man to do the same he must have attained that condition of society in which his enlightenment allows him to perceive clearly what is useful to him, and in which his passions won’t prevent him from carrying it out.
The French were in neither condition, and were therefore unpromising material for democracy à l’américaine. Tocqueville knew it, and if he had not, his Boston friends would have told him. For instance, Francis Lieber, a German immigrant who was the editor of the Encyclopaedia Americana, said that Europeans’ great mistake was in supposing that a republic could be created simply by calling a constituent assembly. A people had to have republicanism in its bones – look at America! ‘The republic is everywhere, in the streets as much as in Congress.’ Tocqueville could not deny it; and Francis C. Gray, state senator and inspector of prisons, emphasized how early in life democratic attitudes were formed: ‘there’s not a boy of fifteen among us who hasn’t acted as a juror a hundred times. I suspect that the humblest citizen of Boston had a more truly parliamentary outlook and is more accustomed to political debate than most of your deputies.’ But Tocqueville could not entirely accept a theory which seemed to hold out so little hope for his own country. After all, one of his interlocutors, Mr Clay of Georgia,* thought that all nations, even the great powers of Europe, might one day become democratic. This astonished Tocqueville, as well it might, since Mr Clay thought that Protestantism was a necessary precondition; but waiving that, suppose he was right? A republican people, Tocqueville was told, had to be ‘steady, religious and very enlightened’. It also had to be prosperous. Was all this beyond French capacity? ‘In America a free society has created free political institutions; in France, free political institutions will have to create a free society. That is the end towards which we must work, without forgetting the point de départ.’ It was simply a matter of defining the problem correctly, rather than dismissing it in advance as insoluble.12
But during his visit to Boston another matter began to obtrude, which suggested very different thoughts about the future of the American republic. ‘In Massachusetts blacks have the rights of citizens. They can vote in elections ... but prejudice is so strong that their children are not admitted to the schools.’13
The fact that slavery created great problems for the United States was no secret in Europe: as we have seen, both Guizot and Chateaubriand alluded to it, and the British, whether through their diplomatic campaign against the slave trade, or through the anti-slavery agitation at home, kept the subject in the news. But largely by accident it had not previously forced itself on the attention of Tocqueville and Beaumont during their journey. Now, in Boston, soon to be the capital of abolitionism (William Lloyd Garrison had just started to publish the Liberator), the topic, in all its painful complexity, could not be missed. Sitting next to John Quincy Adams at dinner Tocqueville listened while the ex-President, in fluent and elegant French, held forth on slavery and its consequences for Southern society.
Whites there make up a class which has all the passions and prejudices of an aristocracy, but make no mistake, equality, among whites, is nowhere greater than it is in the South. Here we have complete equality before the law, but it does not apply at all in daily life.* There are upper classes and working classes. In the South, every white man is an equally privileged being, whose destiny is to make Negroes work without working himself. You can’t imagine how far the idea that labour is shameful has come to dominate the mind of the South ... They give themselves over to sports, to hunting, to racing. They are physically vigorous, brave, honourable; what is called ‘the point of honour’ is a much bigger issue there than anywhere else; duels are frequent.
Tocqueville saw that all this had ominous implications for the future of the Union, though Mr Adams refused to be drawn on the point (it was hardly a tactful question to raise with a former head of state); he also recorded certain remarks which showed that Adams was not altogether a believer in racial equality: ‘the Negresses very frequently abuse the goodness of their mistresses. They know it is not the custom to inflict corporal punishment on them.’14
Then there was Mr Clay, the planter. He was Tocqueville’s first Southerner: ‘I have rarely met a more amiable and well-educated man.’ He thought that emancipation would come, and be followed by a separation of the two races. Whites and blacks could never merge into a single people. ‘The importation of this foreign race is, moreover, the great, the unique plague of America.’15 Here was another big theme for meditation: it fascinated Beaumont particularly.
Their time in Boston was up. It had been extremely valuable: Tocqueville now saw more clearly than ever before what his book might be; and he seems to have begun to understand that it could not be a work of collaboration. But could he manage it? He was afraid that his family might expect too much of his journey. It had given him experience, and ideas on political questions which might one day be of practical use to him. But he was far from sure that he could write anything about America. ‘It would be a huge task to paint a picture of a society so vast and varied as this one.’ However, he continued to collect documents assiduously.16
Meanwhile, the prison mission reclaimed his attention. He and Beaumont had not altogether neglected it during their stay in Boston. They had visited the Auburn-style penitentiary at Charlestown, and the very impressive ‘House of Reformation’ for young offenders. They had heeded the hint given them by d’Aunay and reported at length to Paris – indeed, this last precaution was more necessary than ever, for the authorities seemed bent on curtailing their leave of absence. Beaumont had been promoted again, and was badly needed at the parquet, and it was suspected that eighteen months were far more time than was needed to assess the American prison system. Besides, though the Garde des Sceaux did not know what the commissioners were really up to, the most basic acquaintance with human nature must have suggested a suspicion that they were devoting an undue amount of time to enjoying themselves. From now on Tocqueville and Beaumont felt themselves to be under a pending sentence of execution; it was eventually to play havoc with their plans, and if it was not to defeat them entirely they would have to intensify their application to their mission, even though Beaumont, at least, was very bored with it.17 So on 3 October they tore themselves away from Boston and headed for Philadelphia by way of Hartford in Connecticut and New York. At Hartford, where they stayed for some days, they visited Wethers field penitentiary, another new prison on the Auburn plan, and formed a very positive impression of it, for they did not discern that under the surface was brewing another of those scandals which the Auburn system seemed to invite: the governor was embezzling money and food intended for the prisoners, who as a result were half-starved.18 In New York they shed half their baggage. By now, as a result of their own assiduity and the enthusiasm of the Americans, they were lugging a small library about with them. There was no point in continuing to do so since they could leave it to be called for when they embarked for home (but they continued to accumulate documents wherever they went in the meantime). They got to Philadelphia on 12 October.
They were eagerly awaited there; indeed, a small committee had been formed to assist them. For Philadelphia was the American city which had prison reform most at heart. The Quakers, who had founded it, no longer ruled it, but they were still the dominant social group, and the combination of their prestige with their religiously tended conscience made them amazingly effective agitators. They had embraced pacifism, and declared war on slavery, and assiduously pur
sued the dream of a rational and effective penology. Their first effort at reform had been the Walnut Street prison, an older establishment overhauled, somewhat on Auburn lines, in 1790. This had not answered (and by the time that Tocqueville and Beaumont arrived, Walnut Street had become the plaything of the spoils system),19 so in 1829 they had opened the Eastern State Penitentiary (known familiarly as Cherry Hill), in which the inexorable logic of the penitentiary philosophy was most completely expressed in the building itself and in the regime adopted there. All other objects of incarceration – punishment, prevention, deterrence – were discarded:20 once a convict entered Cherry Hill his guardians’ sole concern was to be his moral reformation. Since prisoners corrupted each other, or at least hindered each other’s reclamation if they were allowed to meet, each was now to be kept in solitary confinement, in a specially designed cell with a little exercise yard attached, talking to no-one except the prison chaplain, and warding off insanity by daily labour. The Quakers were confident (their faith in a man’s inner light was boundless) that in these circumstances not the most hardened soul could fail to soften, repent and be transformed, to his own lasting benefit and that of society.
Not surprisingly, then, Tocqueville and Beaumont were overwhelmed with attention when they reached Philadelphia, and before long the Quakers had convinced themselves that they had won over the commissioners to their way of thinking.21 They were wrong: Beaumont, in particular, found the Cherry Hill experiment impossibly expensive, at least for France, where there were currently no fewer than 32,000 prisoners; and they were both still uncertain that the penitentiaries (whether the Auburn or the Quaker model) actually induced penitence. But today the great interest of their encounter with Cherry Hill lies in the way that Tocqueville on this occasion went about his investigations.
It occurred to him and to Beaumont (as, surely, it ought to have occurred to them before) that in studying a prison – Cherry Hill, in this instance – it would be a good idea to talk to the prisoners. They got permission to interview each prisoner singly, without the presence of any warder; not wanting to intimidate the captives, they further decided that only one of them would conduct each interview, and in the end Tocqueville did them all – apparently because of Beaumont’s hopeless boredom with his mission. So for the best part of a fortnight Tocqueville went daily to gather what he rightly guessed could be invaluable testimony. He interviewed sixty-three prisoners in all.22
It should have been the high point of the enquiry; that it was not tells us a great deal about Tocqueville. As he got into his stride his notes on each prisoner became extremely businesslike, almost stereotyped:
No. 15 – This inmate is twenty-eight years old; he has been found guilty of manslaughter; he has been in the penitentiary for nearly two years; his health is excellent; he has learned the trade of a weaver in his cell. His solitude, he said, seemed at first unbearable; but later he got used to it.
No. 1 – This inmate, the first to be sent to this penitentiary, is a Negro. He has lived in the prison for more than two years. His health is very good.
This man works zealously: he makes ten pairs of shoes a week. His mind seems tranquil and his disposition excellent. He seems to look on his coming to the penitentiary as a signal blessing of Providence. In general, his thoughts are religious. He read to us from the Gospel the parable of the good shepherd, of which the meaning, which he had grasped, greatly touched him, he who was born of a degraded and oppressed race, and who had never experienced anything from his fellow men but indifference or hostility.23
Such were most of the interviews, and from them Tocqueville could gather, reassuringly, that the mental and physical health of the prisoners seemed good, that they welcomed the chance to work at a trade, if only to keep off despair, and that they knew how to sound pious. But all this was no more than the managers of Cherry Hill could and did tell him, and proved nothing except, perhaps, that it was better to be a prisoner in Philadelphia than in Sing-Sing. Yet it is possible to be absolutely certain that had Tocqueville asked different questions he could have got much more illuminating answers. ‘No. 35. – This inmate is more than eighty years old. At the moment that we entered his cell, he was engaged in reading the Bible.’24 Nothing more was recorded, yet how could Tocqueville have failed to ask why a man of such an age was a prisoner, and what the management hoped to achieve by keeping him locked up? (Had he done so he would surely have written down the answers.)
No. 65. – This inmate is thirty years old, without a family, condemned for forgery; in prison these seven months; feels very well. This convict is uncommunicative; he complains of the evils caused by solitary confinement, of which labour, he says, is the sole alleviation. He seems little concerned with religious ideas.25
Above all, there was prisoner 00 (one of several to whom Tocqueville gave this number), ‘forty years old; condemned for armed robbery on the public highway’, who, without much prompting, poured out the story of his life: of how, as a boy, he left the family farm and came to Philadelphia; how he was sent to prison for a month for vagabondage; how he fell in there with hardened young rogues and became one of them; how he was eventually sentenced to nine years in the Walnut Street prison (reduced to seven for good behaviour) for robbery; how, on his release, he tried, successfully at first, to earn an honest living as a tailor, and married; but how his criminal record lost him his job. How he fell ill; how in despair and anger he turned to robbery again; and how he was sent to Cherry Hill for ten years.
Tocqueville: What are your plans for the future?
00: I don’t feel inclined to blame myself for what I did, frankly, or to become a good Christian; but I am determined to steal no more, and I see a chance of succeeding. When, in nine years’ time, I get out of here, no-one in the world will recognize me; no-one will know that I’ve been in prison; I won’t have made any dangerous acquaintances. I will be free to earn my living in peace. That’s what I see as the great advantage of this penitentiary ...26
Tocqueville recorded 00’s narrative with the greatest care, and it remains one of the saddest and most touching pages in all his work; but he does not seem to have tried to elicit life-stories from any of the other prisoners. Yet perhaps they would have confirmed the palpable lesson implied by 00’s tale: that in American cities, at least, it was all too easy to fall into a life of crime, and immensely difficult to escape it, and that savagely long prison sentences were of little use except as deterrents: what induced 00 to renounce crime the first time was his observation that not even the cleverest criminals could for long evade arrest and punishment. Tocqueville, who had been startled to be told by a lawyer in Connecticut that the crime rate went up as prosperity increased (‘This observation requires confirmation’)27 was near to discovering that the origins and nature of criminality were far more complex than enthusiastic reformers supposed, but, obsessed with comparing Auburn and Cherry Hill, he missed this crucial lesson.
And this in part was the outcome of his personal conditioning, which did not blind him only to the point of view of convicts. Wherever they went, he and Beaumont sought out ‘les gens éclairés’ and were at a loss unless they made close contact with them. By this term they did not just mean the educated or enlightened. They meant the ‘upper class’ – ‘those who have something to live on and have received a good education.’28 They equated these fortunate beings with their own country’s hautes classes. Worse, within the upper class they felt most at home with lawyers – at times the reader of Tocqueville’s journal is bound to form the impression that they talked to no-one but avocats distingués. They thus forfeited one of the chief advantages of foreign travel, and of travel to the United States above all, the opportunity to shed the burden and trap of their own social identity. Inescapably noble in France, they could have been whatever they liked in America, but instead of embracing this freedom they seized every chance of asserting their original status, since they would have felt lost without it. This was not, in either of them, a mere personal q
uirk. Their upbringing and the recent history of France made a different attitude impossible.
The loss to their investigation was immense. Tocqueville sometimes dimly sensed this, as when he noticed, as he did frequently, how different America was from France, or when, on the brink of returning home, he commented that it would take two years really to understand the United States.29 Perhaps if he had been able to stay longer he would have broken through. As it was, he saw no problem in eschewing serious conversation with most Americans. It is futile to blame him for what was inevitable, but it is perhaps just to remark that a man who was so convinced that democracy was on the march and that America was ruled by ‘the majority’ (i.e. white adult males) should have sought out more democrats. His failure to do so meant that he came to build some of his most characteristic edifices of theory on sand, and vitiates the inferences he made from them.
To put it another way: when Tocqueville and Beaumont followed their fancy in the West they made great discoveries. They were almost participant-observers (it will be remembered that at one point they pretended to be land-speculators) and the informed understanding which they acquired enriches their books still. Even in Canada, where their desire to encourage sedition against King William IV misled them, they learned much and mis-learned little. But in New England and Pennsylvania the grid of their preoccupations once more locked them in, and seriously impeded their studies. The prison mission, which necessarily entailed constant contact with and reliance upon the elite and the expert, reinforced this tendency.
Alexis de Tocqueville Page 24
