Alexis de Tocqueville

by Professor Hugh Brogan

  Tocqueville and Beaumont left Cincinnati on 4 December. They took a steamboat for Louisville, and Beaumont, in excellent spirits, wrote a lively description of life aboard for his brother Jules. But two days later Tocqueville was writing to Chabrol:

  Decidedly, journeys by water do not suit us. Although we are on the latitude of Palermo and it is only 6 December, the cold has become so intense that this morning the Ohio froze ... As I write, we are trying painstakingly to open a way through the ice; thanks to the river-current and to steam we are still making way, but we are afraid of dislocating our ship through the exertions exacted of her. I must add that the ears freeze if one pokes one’s head outside: this is a Russian cold. Nobody remembers seeing its equal in this part of the world.

  Beaumont was at first sceptical of this claim: ‘That is what one-time visitors are always told’; but the winter of 1831–2 was indeed the most terrible that America had known for half a century. At Westport, twenty-five miles short of Louisville, the captain gave up the struggle and put his passengers ashore. Tocqueville and Beaumont had to hire a hand-cart for their luggage and a strong man to push it, and trudge through the snow, up to their knees, all the way to Louisville, where they arrived at nine in the evening. Next day they found that the river was as impassable below Louisville as above it.50

  They refused to be trapped, and having been told that the Mississippi never froze below Memphis, ‘we did not hesitate.’ On 9 December they boarded a stagecoach for Nashville in Tennessee, which they reached the next day.51 The Cumberland river was frozen, but if they could only get to Memphis they should be all right. So off they went across country on 11 December. It was the worst part of all their journey. Instead of a stagecoach they had to travel in what Beaumont called an open charabanc. The road was no more than a narrow, sometimes precipitous track through dense woods (‘America is as yet no more than a forest’); the charabanc kept banging against tree-trunks on either side, and breaking down. They complained, and were told in true American fashion, ‘Go ahead, moan: the other day one of our passengers broke an arm, and another a leg.’ They travelled no more than ten leagues a day. One of their fellow travellers asked if there weren’t very bad roads in France? ‘Yes, sir,’ said Beaumont, relieving his feelings, ‘and you have such good ones in America, don’t you?’ But the shot did not seem to go home.52

  Worst of all was that the cold was becoming too much for Tocqueville. He shivered all over, he lost his appetite, his head ached, he could not go much further. They were forced to take refuge in a log-cabin at Sandy Bridge about halfway (say, 100 miles) between Nashville and Memphis: it had three beds for hire to travellers. In spite of an immense fire which Beaumont lit in a huge fireplace it was desperately cold: the ill-built cabin let in icy draughts through every joint – Beaumont poured himself a glass of water, but it froze before he could drink it. He put Tocqueville to bed, and heaped him with every sort of cover he could find, but his friend only gradually began to get warmer. Beaumont seems to have sat up all night, keeping the fire going, watching the moonlight shine through the gaps in the walls and worrying about what would happen the next day: there was no doctor nearer than thirty miles away. The owners of the cabin offered no help at all.

  Fortunately, the next day (14 December) Tocqueville felt somewhat better, though Beaumont had a hard time coaxing him to eat some stewed rabbit ‘as a change from the eternal beacon [sic]’. For two days he gained strength, and on the sixteenth was more or less himself again – still feeble, but he had got his appetite back. The next day the stagecoach for Memphis came by, and the travellers were able to escape from Sandy Bridge; but when they got to Memphis, after another awful journey, they found that the Mississippi had frozen after all, and navigation was suspended. They were stuck in Memphis for a week. They thought the place dreary, but amused themselves trying for game in the forest: they were joined by some Chickasaw Indians. Tocqueville bagged two parrots. They found volumes of Shakespeare and Milton in the latest log-cabin where they had taken refuge; Tocqueville read what he later called ‘that old feudal play’, Henry V.53

  On 24 December (Tocqueville makes absolutely no allusion to Christmas) a steamboat came up from the south en route for Louisville. She halted at Memphis, and the stranded travellers – there were fifteen besides Tocqueville and Beaumont – did their best to persuade the captain that, all the waters to the north being frozen, he should, in his own interest, return to New Orleans. They might not have succeeded; but suddenly out of the forest came a sad, extraordinary procession. Drums beat, horses whinnied, dogs barked, and at last a large band of Indians appeared – old men carried in their sons’ arms, babies on their mothers’ backs – making for Memphis on their way into exile. For these were Choctaw, victims of the notorious Indian Removal Act of 1830. Under that act the Five Civilized Tribes of the South-West – Creeks, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole – were condemned to lose their lands and be removed to Indian Territory, what is now eastern Oklahoma. Tocqueville and Beaumont gazed at them with compassion and indignation. Tocqueville, indeed, was to become quite Voltairean when he described the incident to his mother. The Americans, he said, having discovered that one square mile could feed ten times more civilized men than savages, reasoned that wherever civilized men could settle, the savages should give way: ‘see what a fine thing logic is.’ So the Choctaw would have to give up lands which they had lived in for perhaps a thousand years, and, rewarded with rich gifts (‘flasks of brandy, glass necklaces, earrings and mirrors’), intimidated by the hint of force, had to trudge 300 miles, without even being allowed to wait until spring. And Tocqueville was sure that within a century they would all have died out.54

  The government agent who was escorting them offered the steamboat captain a handsome price for carrying the Choctaw downriver to the place on the Arkansas shore chosen for their disembarkation, so Tocqueville and Beaumont were at last to be free of Tennessee. They watched the pitiful spectacle of the Indians boarding the ship: the dogs howled and refused to go until their masters dragged them on. Tocqueville found one old man who spoke English. Why were the Choctaw leaving their lands, he was asked. ‘To be free,’ was the only answer they could get out of him.55

  Even now their journey was not without incident. The Louisville hit a sandbar on the night of 26 December and remained stuck there for two days, to the great exasperation of our travellers, who were, however, calmly informed by the pilot that there was nothing to be done, and it was not his fault, since the sands of the Mississippi never stayed in the same place for a year – like Frenchmen. The insult had to be swallowed, but it may have given Tocqueville a dislike for the river. It did not deserve its fame, he wrote to his mother: ‘It is just a great yellow flood ... On the horizon not a hill to be seen, just trees, more trees, and trees again; reeds and creepers; deep silence; not a trace of humanity, not even the smoke of an Indian camp.’ His Romanticism was at a low ebb. The Choctaw were landed in Arkansas. On the last day of the voyage Tocqueville and Beaumont had a long and interesting conversation about Indians with a fellow-passenger, none other than Sam Houston, the future victor of San Jacinto and president of the republic of Texas. They visited a sugar plantation in Louisiana, presumably while the Louisville refuelled. Then on New Year’s Day they saw a forest of masts ahead. They had reached New Orleans.56

  It was now more than a month since they had left Philadelphia; they were at least two weeks behind schedule. After so long a time in the wild their sense of time was disoriented: their tactlessness in calling on Étienne Mazureau on New Year’s Day has already been described.* But it was clear that some hard choices must be made if they were to get to Washington in time for the meeting of Congress, and then catch the packet sailing for France in early February. They found it difficult to tear themselves away from New Orleans once having got there: they had meant to spend one night there, but ended in spending three. This was no help to their schedule. They left on 4 January and arrived in Mobile the same day: no doubt th
ey went by coastal steamer. At Mobile they made their final calculations. Not the most optimistic estimate of time and distance could blur the truth. They would have to give up Charleston. They would have to give up their proposed visit to James Madison at his Virginian plantation (which posterity must think was the greatest loss of their entire journey). They must go as straight and fast as they could to Washington, which meant crossing Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina until they reached the sea, when they could take to the water again and approach Washington by steam and Chesapeake Bay. In any circumstances it would have been a demanding journey, and, as G. W. Pierson remarks, it was made worse because the bad luck which had dogged them since they left Philadelphia did not desert them now.57 Tocqueville wrote to Chabrol of:

  carriages broken and overturned, bridges carried away, rivers swollen [there must have been a sudden thaw], no room in the stage ... The fact is that to traverse the immense stretch of country that we have just covered, and to do it in so little time and in winter, was hardly practicable. But we were right because we succeeded.

  And his health had been equal to the strain; in fact he boasted of it to Alexandrine:

  If ever I write a book on medicine, I guarantee that it won’t be like the usual ones that are brought out every day. I will maintain and will prove that, to be well, it is necessary, first, to live off maize and pork, to dine scantily, enormously, or not at all, according to circumstances; to make your bed on the floor and sleep fully clothed; to travel, in a week, from frost to heat and from heat to frost; to put your shoulder to a wheel or wake up in a ditch: above all, not to think ...58

  In reality, it was impossible not to think, as the stagecoach jogged and lumbered slowly over the bad roads of Alabama. Tocqueville found himself going over and over all he had seen and heard and thought in the past nine months; conclusions welled up and, either in the coach itself, with great difficulty, or at whatever wayside tavern at which they stopped to pass the night, he wrote them down in his notebook. It was the intellectual climax of his voyage.

  For instance, ‘the jury’ (by which he meant both grand and petty). He clung to his perception that it was ‘the most direct application of the principle of the sovereignty of the people’. His thoughts turning to France, as they were now doing more and more, he added that wherever a power other than the people established the jury system in good faith (he was thinking of the Restoration)* it brought about its own destruction. Perhaps an aristocracy might successfully manipulate it (he must have had England in mind); and it could be a mighty weapon in the hands of a tyrant. Bonaparte knew what he was doing when he made the jury dependent on the Crown. It was a mistake to think that Bonaparte had been the enemy of all liberty. His great, enlightened intelligence had clearly shown him the benefits to his regime of generously fostering civil liberty. But at the same time he hated political liberty. Even that was the hatred of an ambitious and masterful genius, not the blind antipathy of a clan leader (here, perhaps, Tocqueville was thinking of Charles X, but more likely of the usual reputation of Napoleon, who certainly acted as clan leader of the Bonapartes).59

  Liberty. Tocqueville began to set down what his American experiences had taught him as to the meaning of that word, and of the word ‘republic’. In doing so he reached not only the essence, the kernel, of his impending masterpiece, but the heart of his attitude to his country’s recent history, and to his own times.

  If our royalists could see the domestic progress of a well-ordered republic, its deep respect for vested interests, the power of those interests over the mob, law as a religion, the real and effective liberty which everyone there enjoys, the real power of the majority, the easy and natural progress in everything, they would see that they had been confounding under one label differing systems which have no real likeness. On their side, our republicans would feel that what we have called the republic has been only an unclassifiable monster, a [word missing in the MS] covered in blood and muck, clinging to the rags of classical names and quarrels. And what does it matter to me whether tyranny wears a royal mantle or a tribune’s toga if I feel its hand weighing on me? When Danton strangled unhappy prisoners whose sole crime was not to think as he did, was that liberty? When Robespierre later sent Danton to the scaffold for daring to be his rival, it was justice no doubt, but was it liberty? When the majority in the Convention proscribed the minority, when the arbitrary power of the proconsuls deprived citizens of their goods and their children, of their lives, when an opinion was a crime, and when a thought uttered in the sanctuary of the domestic hearth incurred death, was that liberty?

  And so on with regard to the Directory and Bonaparte, concluding: ‘we in France have seen anarchy and despotism under all their forms but nothing which resembles a republic.’ He immediately added:

  If I ever write anything on America, it will be extremely important to devote a chapter, of which the foregoing is a rough sketch, to bringing out the difference between anarchy and a real republic so that it can also be shown where the great principles of liberty are practised ...

  That chapter might be very interesting by reason of its novelty.60

  This passage is immensely important partly because it sets out the core of Tocqueville’s lifelong attitudes and opinions as to the historical and ideological questions which were to be the matter of all his work, and partly because it shows what effect the journey to the United States had had on his views. It had radicalized him. He had conceived a deep admiration for the American system as he had observed it; he had become, in principle, a republican, and although he was still well aware of the great differences between America and France, he had come to see how the American example could form the substance of a critique of French politics. His trenchant sketch of France’s revolutionary past (clearly informed by what had happened to his family and so many others) makes plain why he was so afraid of a relapse into despotism or anarchy – it had happened before, and not long ago: ‘vested interests’ had been destroyed (here Tocqueville unequivocally identifies himself with the propertied classes). Finally, the passage clearly indicates what he meant by liberty and why he loved it – the main note being his cult of the rule of law; and of course it shows that he knew that what he had to say would seem quite startling in France and might well make his reputation.

  The masterpiece was forming in his mind, but it would be a long time before he could get down to writing it. The journey was still unfinished, and still producing new experiences. On 13 January, probably at Columbia, South Carolina, who should board the coach but that remarkable Mr Poinsett? They remembered him well from their last days in Philadelphia, and he may have been as glad of their company on the coach as they were of his. He did not tell them much, if anything, of his most recent activities: that as a leading Unionist he had been trying in vain to get the South Carolina legislature to endorse Andrew Jackson for a second term, and that he was now going to Washington to report to the President and to try for a compromise on the great tariff issue.61 He was quite willing to answer the Frenchmen’s questions, and indeed seems to have talked non-stop until they reached Washington, on topics as varied as nullification, Mexico, Indians, banks, roads, penitentiaries and the presidency of the United States. This last was a topic which Tocqueville had not yet studied, and he was certain to look into it after he reached the federal capital. Unfortunately Poinsett got him off to a poor start by informing him (bizarrely for a Jacksonian) that the President had no power, that it was Congress which governed.62

  They arrived in Washington on 18 January in what, years later, Tocqueville remembered as extremely hot weather; but that night the Potomac froze.63 Nevertheless, winter was not seriously to inconvenience them again. They went to call on the French minister, Baron Sérurier, who welcomed them warmly. A veteran diplomatist, Sérurier had served as minister to the US under Napoleon, whom he had indiscreetly supported during the Hundred Days; dismissed from the public service after the return of the Bourbons, he had been recalled by Louis-Philippe, who ha
d made him a peer of France. He was thus a typical Orleanist. He was also a sincere patriot, and had supported Tocqueville and Beaumont’s mission from the moment that he heard of it: he had written to all the French consuls in the United States telling them to give the commissioners every help with their ‘honourable mission’; and now that he had met them he was charmed and delighted by the good impression they had made wherever they went. They were just the sort of young Frenchmen who ought to see and be seen by America.64 The day after their arrival he took them to the White House to meet the President.

  Tocqueville, by now, had come to understand the vivacity and energy of party politics in the United States, and (thanks to such informants as Joel Poinsett) realized that the current struggle over the tariff, which set South against North, might determine the future of the Union itself. But he did not understand the essential role of party competition in making the constitutional system workable, and still less did he understand the function, power and influence of the president within it. On both these points Andrew Jackson, party leader and imperious Executive, might have greatly enlightened him, but the opportunity was missed – if, given the circumstances of their meeting, it can be said to have existed. It was not merely that Jackson’s visitors had been taught to think meanly of him, whether as a general or a politician (‘formerly he was known chiefly as a duellist and a brawler,’ said Beaumont), nor even that Jackson was not yet fully embarked on the great campaigns, against the Bank of the United States and the nullification movement, which were to stamp his mark indelibly on his age and dramatically increase the authority of the presidency. Receiving distinguished visitors was part of his routine; he would give them half an hour of his time, offer them refreshment, and say good-bye. So Tocqueville and Beaumont might enter the White House but were not likely to be shown any of the inner workings of American politics and government. They were not impressed by Jackson, a vigorous sixty-six, who uttered only commonplaces in their presence, but they were vastly impressed by the occasion itself. America could still surprise them: