During his nine months in the United States, in 1831 and 1832, the 26-year-old Alexis de Tocqueville encountered an almost cinematic cross-section of the country. He dined twice with the patrician former president and then congressman John Quincy Adams, once in Boston and once in Washington. He met with Adams’s nemesis, the populist oligarch Andrew Jackson, then in the White House, although he got little from Jackson besides chitchat and a glass of Madeira. He saw the Choctaw being driven west from their ancestral lands in the first episode of the Trail of Tears, witnessed the brutal caning of a Black man at a social gathering in Baltimore, and observed with a novelist’s eye the nursery school racial consciousness of a plantation owner’s already imperious young daughter, tended by an enslaved woman and a Native American.
Tocqueville’s travels with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, memorialized in the two volumes of Democracy in America, can seem touched by a kind of fate. On the Western frontier, not long after observing the Choctaw dispossession, the two were approached by a rider on a splendid stallion. It was Sam Houston, future president of the Republic of Texas, who had recently slipped out of his marriage and the governorship of Tennessee to return to his earlier life among the Cherokee, who called him “the Raven.” Houston lectured the young Frenchmen on the continent’s indigenous tribes, whom he professed to respect deeply. He was, at that time, riding to Congress to advocate for Native Americans.
But if Tocqueville seemed picked out by fortune to see the United States whole, he also missed great swaths of what was in front of him. Attending society balls and flirting with the young women who persuaded him that democratic femininity was both free and virtuous, he missed the Great Awakening, the wildfire of Protestant religious passion that was sweeping through New York even as he made his way along the Mohawk Valley. Listening to upper-class informants, he concluded that American religion tended to be pragmatic and tolerant, and that this must be the tendency of democratic faith in general. Moving among the country’s capitalists and elite professionals, he observed abstractly the energy and churn of the young country, but formed no image of the great mercantile docks of New York and Boston or the fabric mills of Lowell, Massachusetts. When he later speculated about the prospects of industrialization and vast wealth for American democracy, his observations were drawn from a subsequent visit to Manchester, England.