Yet when Tocqueville detected a weakness in his investigations, he was always most anxious to put it right. For example, his visit to Boston had shown him a great opportunity. If his business was to tell Europe how democracy in America worked, then he must make a thorough study of American governmental machinery, and publish the results: an added inducement was that, as Jared Sparks told him, there was no existing book on the subject.30 Tocqueville resolved to fill this gap, and laboured mightily to do so; but he soon found that he needed help. Hence his applications to Sparks, Senator Gray and others. And mere information about political machinery was not enough; if his work was to be as valuable as he hoped, it would have to be comparative: he would have to show how American government differed from the French – and on reflection he and Beaumont realized that they were lamentably ignorant of how their own country was administered. So application was made to Chabrol, to Blosseville, and above all to Hervé de Tocqueville for enlightenment on this all-important matter:
You could do me a great service, my dear Papa, which wouldn’t cost you very much, now that you are enjoying your leisure. [Was this a quite tactful remark?] In judging America, nothing would be more useful to me than a knowledge of France. But that is exactly what is lacking. I know in general that with us the government meddles in almost everything; the word ‘centralization’ has been dinned into my ears a hundred times – without any explanation. I have never had the time or the occasion to study the various administrative machines which cover France. You have acquired this diverse knowledge, my dear Papa, by reflection and necessity. You have seen the administration operating in both big things and small, and I think that the matter is so familiar to you that you can, without any trouble, supply me with the documents I need ... If, my dear Papa, you could deconstruct the word ‘centralization’ for me, you would do a great service not only for the present but for the future.31
Hervé splendidly responded: the subject was of real interest to him, as he had been involved in official discussions of it in 1828, when the Martignac ministry had tried in vain to get a timidly decentralizing law passed.32 He sent his son a short essay in which he insisted that the vital principle of French government was centralization:
Royalty exercises a general tutelage over all branches of the administration. It names, it directs, it approves, it prevents. ... Without it the intimate union of all parts of the State would soon be replaced ... [by a mass?] of small republics. ... In a Monarchy surrounded by powerful and jealous States, a centre of unity is necessary.33
The contrast with what Alexis was learning about the American republic could hardly be starker, and did indeed give him matter for reflection for the rest of his life.
Prisons and parties: to start with, their life in Philadelphia was much the same as in Boston. They found the city to be clean and convenient, but too geometrical to be beautiful: Tocqueville did not think much of the practice of giving streets numbers rather than names: ‘only a people whose fancy was frozen could have invented such a system.’34 He let himself be somewhat distracted from his study of American state and local government by the equally important topic of the American legal system, especially the jury, which he investigated with professional insight and exactitude. But Philadelphia confronted him, and Beaumont still more, with a fundamental problem which, thus far, they had known about only by hearsay. The city had a sizeable black population, and wherever the commissioners turned they found that rigid racial segregation was enforced, although slavery had been abolished for fifty years. John Jay Smith, ‘a very well-informed and capable Quaker’, affirmed the full humanity and equal ability of African-Americans – ‘a black cow is of the same race as a white one’ – and asserted, from his experience as a Sunday school teacher, that their children did as well as or better than white children in school. But although the law gave them equal civil rights, they were not allowed to vote in Pennsylvania.
Tocqueville: What becomes of the rule of law in such cases?
Smith: Law with us is nothing unless it is supported by public opinion.
The conversation turned naturally to slavery and its prospects. Mr Smith thought that the slaves should be promoted to serfdom on the way to becoming free men, ‘but I am perfectly certain that the Americans of the South, like all despots, will never consent to cede the least part of their power; they will wait until it is torn from them.’35
Next day Beaumont wrote to his sister-in-law: ‘It is strange to see what aristocratic pride can exist among free men whose government is founded on the principle of absolute equality. Here the colour white is a patent of nobility and the colour black a mark of slavery.’ But it could not last. ‘The ignorance of the blacks is diminishing daily and, when they are fully enlightened, there is much reason to fear that they will take violent revenge for the contempt shown them.’36
These observations were soon tested: on 28 October they travelled to Baltimore, thereby entering a slave state (Maryland) for the first time. That evening they went to a grand public ball marking the start of the horse-races; as distinguished visitors the commissioners did not have to pay the entrance fee of $5 per person, but Tocqueville wrote in his notebook, ‘In France they would hardly dare to charge so much for entry to a public occasion; it would be said that the rich were insolently presuming to separate themselves from everybody else.’ Perhaps Tocqueville was more of a Jacobin than he realized. Next day they went to the races and saw another manifestation of Maryland society: ‘A Negro having dared to enter the enclosure with some whites was by one of them showered with blows from a walking-stick, which did not appear to surprise either the crowd or the Negro himself.’37
This was not the only proof to Tocqueville that African-Americans were treated badly in Maryland. The sympathetic Mr Latrobe, son of the famous architect (who among other works had built a penitentiary at Richmond, Virginia), and a leader of the colonization movement which sought to settle free African-Americans in Liberia, remarked that the state legislature wanted to make Maryland intolerable for them: ‘It can’t be hidden, the white and black populations are in a state of war. They will never mingle. One of the two must give way to the other.’ The day before, Tocqueville recorded: ‘The law lends its power to the master of the slave. He is able to imprison his slave as long as he pleases provided that he pays the running costs.’38
But what most shocked the commissioners was the mad slave they were shown in the Baltimore alms-house:
There is in Baltimore a famous slave-trader who is, I gather, much feared by the black population. The Negro I am describing thinks he sees this man, day and night, haunting his steps and tearing off parts of his flesh. When we entered his cell, he was sleeping on the floor rolled up in the blanket which was his only attire. His eyes rolled in their sockets and the look on his face was simultaneously one of terror and rage. From time to time he threw off his blanket and raised himself on his hands, crying: ‘Get out, get out, don’t come near me!’ It was an appalling sight. The man was one of the handsomest Negroes I have seen, he was in the prime of life.39
So by the time they returned to Philadelphia on 6 November, or thereabouts, Beaumont had apparently made a great decision (it is impossible to be more definite because of the disappearance of so many of his papers). The prison mission was substantially complete, though they had not told the Garde des Sceaux. Tocqueville was driving ahead with his political and administrative studies, always with his friend’s help, but now, essentially, independently. It is likely that by the time they went to Baltimore the idea of a fully collaborative work on America had been given up: it had become an inconvenience. But Beaumont’s literary ambition was still alight, and the discovery of American racism had given him a fresh subject. Besides, he and Tocqueville had realized that the American scene was too vast to be portrayed complete in one work. From now on they divided the labour. Tocqueville would tackle American government, Beaumont, American society – in particular, race relations. The categories were not watertight: one of t
he most valuable chapters of De la démocratie en Amérique would discuss race relations, for Tocqueville had been as deeply shocked as Beaumont by the horrors of slavery, which lurked so near the brilliant surface of Baltimore society. But one more barrier in his way to achievement had been removed.40
More decisions had to be taken in Philadelphia. On 2 September the Garde des Sceaux had written asking Beaumont to cut short his leave and return to France when it was convenient. ‘His letter is very amiable’ and left Beaumont free to decide what to do; however, the minister’s request was so urgent that Beaumont felt it would be singularly ungracious not to comply as best he could. Tocqueville concurred, and they planned to leave on 1 April 1832. But there were more reasons than one for this decision. Mme de Kergorlay had written to say that the cholera pandemic which had been moving across Asia for years was now threatening France and Paris. So Tocqueville and Beaumont found themselves worrying less about their official careers than about the fate of their families, friends and loves. Tocqueville wrote to Chabrol:
If cholera comes to France, Marie must leave our country. To you I admit that it would be a frightful sorrow to see her depart, perhaps for ever, for I love her more than I can say. But her life is still more precious to me; her health is delicate; like me, she has for long had acute pains in the bowels; she would be more vulnerable than other women and the thought makes me despair. So act for the best; advise her and take what measures you think most advisable. Understand, for me this isn’t a matter of pleasure or vanity, but of a real, vast concern, of a deep feeling which fills all my heart.
Not surprisingly, he and Beaumont, after reflection, decided to bring forward the date of their return: they now planned to sail on 16 February. And they went to considerable trouble to send home bottles of cajeput oil, an oriental remedy said to be effective against cholera (but Tocqueville did not believe in it, and nor does modern medicine).41
They felt that they ought to be with their families in this time of danger, but it would be absurd to leave America with their researches incomplete. So they stuck to their plans for the immediate future, even though from now on they would be living under a cloud of anxiety, and the prospect of their homeward journey would increasingly dominate the horizon. They had earlier settled that they ought to go to Washington for the opening of the Congressional session in January, in order to see the federal government in action. Before then they would make an extensive visit to the South, if only because of Beaumont’s new interest in race and slavery. They would visit James Madison, they would go to Charleston, for they were now well aware of the political importance of the tariff question and of the impending contest between South Carolina and Washington. So far, so rational; what is less easy to understand, and is nowhere explained, is why they did not go by a coastal steamboat from Philadelphia to Charleston. Perhaps they could not bear the idea of having to spend a whole month or more in the heart of the slavery kingdom. Or perhaps they felt that they could not leave America without having seen the Mississippi. At any rate, they decided to get to Charleston by way of Pittsburgh, the Ohio river, the Mississippi, New Orleans, and from there across country to Savannah and their destination. ‘It will be an immense journey,’ Tocqueville wrote complacently to Eugène Stoffels, ‘more than fifteen hundred French leagues’. But even this itinerary was not expected to quench their thirst for instructive travel. They thought they might sail from New York to Liverpool, and spend three weeks getting to know Britain before, at last, re-entering France: Tocqueville’s curiosity about that other country was longstanding, and the best way in which he could explain the fascination of America to his mother was by saying that ‘with England, this country is the most interesting and instructive that one could possibly visit.’42
In the same letter of 24 October Tocqueville praised the Pennsylvania fall: ‘America appears in all her glory’; but a month later, when they set out for Pittsburgh, things were very different. Beaumont said that the journey was one of the worst he had ever made: the roads were frightful, the carriages worse. When they reached the Alleghenies they were gripped by a terrible cold. ‘For almost all the rest of the journey we travelled through the middle of a perpetual hurricane of snow, such as has not been seen for a very long time, least of all at this season.’ After three days on the road they reached Pittsburgh, ‘the Birmingham of America’, but they had no time to look round, or visit the important penitentiary there, if they were to catch the next steamboat to Cincinnati. They boarded the Fourth of July on 25 November, very conscious that they were now to descend the Ohio as Chateaubriand had done (in a canoe) forty years earlier. But that had been in summer. Tocqueville, standing on the deck, admired the mountains, but lamented that they were covered in snow. Winter had caught him. He comforted himself with the thought that in a week he would have escaped southwards to the sun.43 That night he was shipwrecked.
Towards midnight the Fourth of July hit Burlington Bar, a notorious reef in the Ohio, a little above Wheeling. The ship had been going fast, propelled by steam and the current, and the crash of her wreck was heard for a mile round. Water poured in: ‘I have never heard an uglier sound,’ Tocqueville was to report to Chabrol. The dark river was a mile wide and full of floating ice; water was filling the cabins; Tocqueville and Beaumont, giving themselves up for lost, shook hands in farewell. (Even at that moment they were impressed by the self-control of the Americans: not one woman screamed.) But then the water stopped rising: the ship had impaled herself so firmly that as she settled on the rock it acted as a plug of the hole it had made. Another steamer came by and took aboard the crew and passengers of the wreck, which had to be left eventually to sink to the bottom with all the cargo. On 1 December they at last reached Cincinnati.44
Tocqueville’s substantial dossier of notes on Cincinnati and Ohio requires careful interpretation. He started to make sweeping generalizations about the state in not much more than twenty-four hours after arriving, and soon had to retract or modify them. He interviewed four lawyers and a doctor, and led all but one of them into anti-democratic remarks, even Salmon P. Chase, destined to be Lincoln’s Secretary of the Treasury (and Chief Justice of the United States afterwards). The hold-out was Mr Justice McLean, who was instead induced to criticize the mounting campaign against the Bank of the United States: ‘partisans are exploiting for their own ends the instinctive hate to which the idea of privilege and monopoly always gives birth.’45 Chase, even younger than Tocqueville (he was born in 1808), was led to shake his head over the length to which democracy had gone in Ohio. The voters kept on making bad choices, especially in towns. Unworthy men won by flattery, which distinguished candidates would never stoop to. The unworthy had even been known to take drinks with voters!46 In all this, whether they knew it or not, Tocqueville’s informants were responding to his anxious concern about the feasibility of democratic government, and he perhaps led them into saying more than they meant. As Donald Ratcliffe has pointed out in his study of Ohio politics at this period, three of them (including Chase) came from New England and had Federalist backgrounds, not to mention their native region’s emphatic self-esteem; they were thus not entirely representative of Ohio; but all of them, as practical men, accepted the permanence and workability of democracy: the point was not to fight it, but to win democratic elections. ‘In spite of everything,’ said Chase, ‘it is the influence of men of talent which governs us.’ McLean emphasized the excellence of the federal system as a way of distributing power between the centre and the locality. Even Mr Walker (‘a very distinguished young lawyer’), who expressed the most serious doubts, was full of confidence in the future of his region and his country, and so was Dr Drake (‘Cincinnati’s leading physician’).47 Tocqueville himself was not so much making a fresh investigation or pursuing an old one as testing an immensely important conclusion to which he had committed himself even before reaching Cincinnati. While still on the river he had written in one of his notebooks:
One thing is incontrovertibly demonstra
ted by America which I doubted until now: it is, that the middle classes can govern a State. I do not know if they could emerge with honour from really difficult political situations. But they are equal to the everyday business of society. In spite of their petty passions, their incomplete education, their vulgarity, they can demonstrably supply practical intelligence, and that is enough.48
He had crossed a watershed.
Once this is understood, it becomes clear that his real preoccupations in Cincinnati were with two other matters: the Westward movement and slavery. As to the first, he had already discovered it and begun to investigate it during his travels on the Great Lakes. During his last days in Philadelphia he had met Joel Poinsett, who was accurately described to him as a very remarkable man.* Poinsett was warmly encouraging about the Mississippi journey (‘It’s in Kentucky and Tennessee that you can judge the character of Southerners’) and made further remarks which confirmed the observations of the Westward movement which Tocqueville had made in Michigan. Here was another set of hypotheses to check by further enquiry, and consequently Tocqueville’s notes on Ohio are full of the theme. As to slavery, he imbibed the notions of his informants. He had already been told by John Quincy Adams that in the South work was regarded as dishonourable; now he discovered that there were absolutely no idlers in Cincinnati, there was no leisure class; Mr Walker said that he knew no-one who did not have a profession and practise it; he also asserted that Kentucky was falling far behind Ohio, although it was by twenty years the older state. ‘The sole discoverable reason for this difference is that slavery is established in Kentucky, and not in Ohio. There, work is despised, here it is honoured. There, idleness; here, endless bustle.’† Tocqueville listened to it all and elaborated it in his notebook, concluding: ‘Man is not made for servitude; this truth is perhaps still better demonstrated by the master than by the slave.’49
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