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Of the Accidental or Providential Causes That Contribute to Maintaining the Democratic Republic in the United States e - Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition, vol. 2 [1835]

Edition used:

Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, translated from the French by James T. Schleifer. A Bilingual French-English editions, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010). Vol. 2.

Part of: Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition, 4 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


Of the Accidental or Providential Causes That Contribute to Maintaining the Democratic Republic in the United Statese

The Union does not have neighbors.—No large capital.—The Americans have had the good fortune of birth in their favor.—America is an empty country.—How this circumstance serves powerfully to maintain the democratic republic.—Manner in which the wilderness of America is populated.—Eagerness of the Anglo-Americans to take possession of the empty wilderness areas of the New World.—Influence of material well-being on the political opinions of the Americans.

There are a thousand circumstancesf independent of the will of men that make it easy to have the democratic republic in the United States. Some are known, others are easy to make known: I will limit myself to explaining the principal ones.

The Americans do not have neighbors,g consequently no great wars, financial crisis, ravages, nor conquest to fear; they need neither heavy taxes nor a numerous army, nor great generals; they have almost nothing to fear from a plague more terrible for republics than all the others put together, military glory.

How to deny the incredible influence that military glory exercises on the spirit of the people? General Jackson, whom the Americans have twice chosen to put at their head, is a man of violent character and middling capacity; nothing in all the course of his career had ever proved that he had the qualities necessary to govern a free people; consequently, the majority of the enlightened classes of the Union have always been opposed to him. So who put him in the President’s seat and still keeps him there? The memory of a victory won by him, twenty years ago, under the walls of New Orleans; now, this victory of New Orleans is a very ordinary feat of arms which cannot be of much interest for long except in a country where no battles are fought; and the people who allow themselves to be thus carried away by the prestige of glory is, certainly, the coldest, most calculating, least military and, if I can put it this way, the most prosaic of all the peoples of the world.[*]h

America has no large capital1 whose direct or indirect influence is felt over the whole extent of the territory; I consider this one of the first causes for maintaining republican institutions in the United States.j In cities, you can hardly prevent men from consulting each other, from getting worked up together, from making sudden and impassioned resolutions. Cities form like great assemblies of which all the inhabitants are members. The people exercise a prodigious influence over their magistrates there, and often the people execute their will there without intermediary.

So to subject the provinces to the capital is to put the destiny of the whole empire, not only in the hands of a portion of the people, which is unjust, but also to put it in the hands of the people acting by themselves, which is very dangerous. So the preponderance of capitals strikes a grave blow at the representative system. It makes modern republics succumb to the fault of the ancient republics which all perished from not knowing this system.

It would be easy for me to enumerate here a great number of other secondary causes that have favored the establishment and assure the maintenance of the democratic republics in the United States. But in the middle of this host of fortunate circumstances, I see two principal ones, and I hasten to point them out.

I have already said previously that I saw in the origin of the Americans, in what I called their point of departure, the first and most effective of all the causes to which the present prosperity of the United States could be attributed. The Americans have had the good fortune of birth in their favor: long ago their fathers imported to the land that they inhabit equality of conditions and intellectual equality, from which the democratic republic was bound to emerge one day as if from its natural source. This is still not all; with a republican social state, they passed on to their descendants the habits, ideas and mores most appropriate to make the republic flourish. When I think about what this original fact produced, I seem to see the whole destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who reached its shores, like the whole human race in the first man.

Among the fortunate circumstances that also have favored the establishment and assure the maintenance of the democratic republic in the United States, the first in importance is the choice of the country itself that the Americans inhabit. Their fathers gave them the love of equality and liberty, but it is God who, by giving them an unlimited continent, granted them the means to remain equal and free for a long time.k

General well-being favors the stability of all governments, but particularly of democratic government, which rests upon the dispositions of the greatest number, and principally on the dispositions of those who are the most exposed to needs. When the people govern, they must be happy so that they do not overturn the State. Misery produces among them what ambition does among kings. Now, causes that are material and independent of the laws and that can lead to well-being are more numerous in America than they have been in any country in the world, in any period of history. [In Europe the culmination of good laws is to produce well-being; in America all the work of bad laws would scarcely succeed in preventing well-being from being produced.]

In the United States, it is not only legislation that is democratic; nature itself works for the people.

Where to find, in the memory of man, anything resembling what is happening before our eyes in North America?

The famous societies of antiquity were all founded in the midst of enemy peoples who had to be conquered for those societies to be established in their place. Modern peoples have found in several parts of South America vast countries inhabited by peoples who were less enlightened than they, but who had already appropriated the soil by cultivating it. To establish their new States, they had to destroy or subjugate large populations, and they made civilization ashamed of their triumphs.

But North America was inhabited only by wandering tribes who did not think of using the natural riches of the soil. North America was still, properly speaking, a vacant continent, a deserted land, that awaited inhabitants.

Everything is extraordinary among the Americans, their social state as well as their laws; but what is still more extraordinary is the land that holds them.

When the earth was given to men by the Creator, it was young and inexhaustible,m but they were weak and ignorant; and when they had learned to take advantage of the treasures that it held in its bosom, they already covered the face of the land, and soon they had to fight to gain the right to have a refuge and to dwell in liberty.

That is when North America comes into sight, as if God had held it in reserve and it had only just emerged from the waters of the flood.

It presents, as at the first days of creation, rivers whose sources do not run dry, green and moist wildernesses, limitless fields not yet broken by the farmer’s plow. In this state, it is no longer offered to the isolated, ignorant and barbaric man of the earliest ages, but to the man already master of the most important secrets of nature, united with his fellows, and educated by an experience of fifty centuries.

At the moment I speak, thirteen million civilized Europeans are spreading tranquilly across fertile wilderness areas whose resources or extent they do not yet exactly know. Three or four thousand soldiers push before them the wandering race of natives; behind the armed men, woodsmen advance who pierce the forests, drive away the wild game, explore the course of rivers and prepare the triumphant march of civilization across the wilderness.

Often, in the course of this work, I have alluded to the material well-being that the Americans enjoy; I have pointed it out as one of the great causes for the success of their laws. This reason had already been given by a thousand others before me: it is the only one that, falling in a way within the awareness of the Europeans, has become popular among us. So I will not expand upon a subject so often treated and so well understood; I will only add several new facts.n

It is generally imagined that the wilderness of America is populated with the help of European emigrants who arrive each year on the shores of the New World, while the American population increases and multiplies on the soil that their fathers occupied: that is a great error. The European who reaches the United States arrives there without friends and often without resources; to live, he is forced to hire out his services, and it is rare to see him go beyond the large industrial zone that extends along the ocean. You cannot clear the wilderness without capital or credit;[*] before risking yourself in the middle of the forest, the body must become accustomed to the rigors of a new climate. So it is the Americans who, daily abandoning the place of their birth, go to create for themselves vast domains far away. Thus the European leaves his cottage to go to inhabit the transatlantic shores, and the American, who is born on these very shores, disappears in turn into the emptiness of the central part of America. This double movement of emigration never stops: it begins in the heart of Europe, it continues across the great ocean, it keeps on across the solitude of the New World. Millions of men march at the same time toward the same point of the horizon: their language, their religion, their mores differ, their goal is shared. They have been told that fortune is found somewhere toward the West, and they go in haste to find it.o [What are they going to do, in what precise place must they stop? They themselves do not know, but they march forward guided by the hand of God.]

Nothing can be compared with this continual displacement of the human species, except perhaps what happened at the fall of the Roman Empire. Then, as today, you saw men rush all in a throng toward the same point and meet turbulently in the same places; but the designs of Providence were different. [Then God wanted to destroy; today He wants to create.] Each new arrival brought in his train destruction and death; today each of them carries with him a seed of prosperity and life.

The distant consequences of this migration of the Americans toward the West is still hidden from us by the future, but the immediate results are easy to recognize: because one part of the former inhabitants moves each year away from the states where they were born, these states, as they grow older, are becoming populated only very slowly; thus in Connecticut, which still numbers only fifty-nine inhabitants per square mile, the population has only grown by a quarter during the past forty years, while in England it has increased by a third during the same period. So the emigrant from Europe always arrives in a country half-full where industry needs hands; he becomes a worker who is well-off; his son goes to find his fortune in an empty country and becomes a wealthy landowner. The first amasses the capital that the second turns to good account, and there is no poverty either among the foreigners or among the natives.

Legislation, in the United States, favors as much as possible the division of property; but a cause more powerful than legislation prevents property from dividing too much.2 You can see it clearly in the states that are finally beginning to fill up. Massachusetts is the most populated country in the Union; the inhabitants number eighty per square mile, which is infinitely fewer than in France, where there are one hundred sixty-two gathered in the same space.

In Massachusetts, however, it is quite rare that small estates are divided: the eldest generally takes the land; the younger go to find their fortune in the wilderness.

The law abolished the right of primogeniture; but you can say that Providence reestablished it without anyone having to complain, and this time at least it does not offend justice.

You will judge by a single fact the prodigious number of individuals who leave New England in this way to go to move their homes into the wilderness. We are assured that in 1830, among the members of Congress, there were thirty-six who were born in the small state of Connecticut. So the population of Connecticut, which forms only one forty-third of that of the United States, provides one-eighth of the representatives.p

The state of Connecticut itself, however, sends only five representatives to Congress: the thirty-one others appear there as representatives of the new states of the West. If these thirty-one individuals had remained in Connecticut, it is probable that instead of being rich landowners, they would have remained small farmers and lived in obscurity without being able to open a political career, and that, far from becoming useful legislators, they would have been dangerous citizens

These considerations do not escape the mind of the Americans any more than ours.

Chancellor Kent writes in his Commentaries on American Law (vol. IV, p. 380):

It cannot be doubted that the division of property will produce great evils when it is carried to the extreme; to the extent that each portion of land can no longer provide for the support of a family; but these disadvantages have never been felt in the United States, and many generations will pass before they are felt. The immense area of our uninhabited territory, the abundance of adjacent lands and the continual flow of emigration that, departing from the shores of the Atlantic, goes constantly into the interior of the country, are sufficient and will be sufficient to prevent the breaking up of inherited lands for a long time yet to come.

It would be difficult to portray the greediness with which the American throws himself on this immense prize that fortune offers him. To pursue it he fearlessly defies the Indian’s arrow and the diseases of the wilderness; the silence of the woods holds nothing that astonishes him, the approach of ferocious beasts does not rouse him; a stronger passion than love of life constantly spurs him on. Before him extends a continent nearly without limits, and you would say that, already afraid of having no room there, he hurries for fear of arriving too late. I spoke about the emigration from the old states, but what will I say about that from the new? Not fifty years ago Ohio was founded; most of its inhabitants were not born there; its capital has not existed thirty years, and an immense expanse of uninhabited country still covers its territory; the population of Ohio, however, has already started to march again toward the West; most of those who come into the fertile prairies of Illinois are inhabitants of Ohio. These men have left their first home to be comfortable; they leave the second to be still better off: nearly everywhere, they find fortune, but not happiness. Among them, the desire for well-being has become a restless and ardent passion that grows as it is being satisfied. Formerly they broke the ties that bound them to their birthplace; they have formed no other ties since. For them, emigration began as a need; today, it has become in their eyes a kind of game of chance, which they love for the emotions as much as for the gain.

Sometimes man moves so quickly that the wilderness reappears behind him. The forest has only bent under his feet; the moment he passes, it rises up again. It is not unusual, while traveling through the new states of the West, to encounter abandoned dwellings in the middle of the woods; often you find the ruins of a cabin in the deepest solitude, and you are amazed while crossing rough-hewn clearings that attest simultaneously to human power and inconstancy. Among these abandoned fields, over these day old ruins, the ancient forest does not delay growing new shoots; the animals retake possession of their realm; nature comes happily to cover the vestiges of man with green branches and flowers and hastens to make the ephemeral trace of man disappear.

I remember that while crossingq one of the uninhabited districts that still cover the state of New York, I reached the shores of a lake entirely surrounded by forests as at the beginning of the world. A small island arose in the middle of the water. The woods that covered it, spreading their foliage, entirely hid its banks. On the shores of the lake, nothing announced the presence of man; you noticed only a column of smoke on the horizon that, going straight up into the clouds above the top of the trees, seemed to hang from rather than rise into the sky.

An Indian canoe was pulled onto the sand. I took advantage of it to go to visit the island that had first attracted my attention and soon after I reached its shore. The entire island formed one of those delightful uninhabited places of the New World that almost make civilized men feel nostalgia for savage life. A vigorous vegetation proclaimed by its wonders the incomparable fertility of the soil. As in all the wildernesses of North America, a profound silence reigned that was interrupted only by the monotonous cooing of the woodpigeons or by the blows that the woodpecker struck on the bark of the trees. I was very far from believing that this place had formerly been inhabited, nature there seemed so left to itself; but upon reaching the center of the island, I suddenly thought that I had found vestiges of man. Then I carefully examined all the objects in the area, and soon I no longer doubted that a European had come to find a refuge in this place. But how his work had changed appearance! The woods that, long ago, he had hastily cut down to make himself a shelter had since grown shoots; his fence had become living hedges, and his cabin had been transformed into a grove. In the middle of these bushes you still saw a few stones blackened by fire, scattered around a small pile of ashes; undoubtedly this was the place of the hearth: the chimney, collapsing, had covered it with debris. For some time I admired in silence the resources of nature and the weakness of man; and when finally I had to leave these enchanted places, I again repeated with sadness: What! Ruins already!r

In Europe we are used to regarding as a great social danger restlessness of spirit, immoderate desire for wealth, extreme love of independence. These are precisely all the things that guarantee a long and peaceful future to the American republic. Without these restless passions, the population would concentrate around certain places and, as among us, would soon experience needs difficult to satisfy. How fortunate a country is the New World, where the vices of man are nearly as useful to society as his virtues!

This exercises a great influence on the way in which human actions are judged in the two hemispheres. Often the Americans call praiseworthy industry what we name love of gain, and they see a certain cowardice of heart in what we consider moderation of desires.

In France, simplicity of tastes, tranquillity of mores, spirit of family and love of birthplace are regarded as great guarantees of tranquillity and happiness for the State; but in America, nothing seems more prejudicial to society than such virtues. The French of Canada, who have faithfully preserved the traditions of the old mores, already find it difficult to live in their territory, and this small group of people just born will soon be prey to the miseries of old nations. In Canada, the men who have the most enlightenment, patriotism and humanity, make extraordinary efforts to give the people a distaste for the simple happiness that is still enough for them. These men celebrate the advantages of wealth, just as among us they would perhaps praise the charms of honest mediocrity, and they take more care to incite human passions than is taken elsewhere to calm such passions. Nothing in their eyes merits more praises than to exchange the pure and tranquil pleasures presented by the native country to the poor man for the sterile enjoyments provided by well-being under a foreign sky; to flee the paternal hearth and the fields where his ancestors rest; to abandon the living and the dead in order to run after fortune.

In our time, America offers men resources always greater than the industry that develops those resources can be.

So in America, you cannot provide enough enlightenment; for all enlightenment, at the same time that it can be useful to whoever possesses it, still turns to the profit of those who do not. New needs are not to be feared there, because all needs are satisfied without difficulty. You do not have to fear giving birth to too many passions, because all passions find an easy and salutary means of satisfaction. You cannot make men too free, because they are almost never tempted to make bad use of liberty.

The American republics of today are like companies of merchants formed to exploit in common the uninhabited lands of the New World and occupied with a prospering commerce.

The passions that most profoundly agitate the Americans are commercial passions and not political passions, or rather they carry into politics the habits of business. They love order, without which business cannot prosper, and they particularly prize regularity of mores, which lays the foundation of good business establishments; they prefer good sense, which creates great fortunes, to genius, which often dissipates them; general ideas frighten their minds, accustomed to positive calculations, and among the Americans, practice is more honored than theory.

You must go to America to understand what power material well-beings exercises over political actions and even over opinions themselves, which should be subject only to reason. It is among foreigners that you principally discover the truth of this. Most of the emigrants from Europe bring to the New World the wild love of independence and change that is so often born out of the midst of our miseries. I sometimes met in the United States some of those Europeans who formerly had been forced to flee their country because of their political opinions. All astonished me by their speeches; but I was struck by one of them more than any other. As I crossed one of the most distant districts of Pennsylvania, night surprised me, and I went to ask for shelter at the door of a wealthy planter: he was a Frenchman. He made me sit down beside his hearth, and we began to talk freely, as happens to men who find themselves in the depths of the forest two thousand leagues from the country where they were born. I was not unaware that forty years ago my host had been a great leveler and an ardent demagogue. His name was known to history.t

So I was strangely surprised to hear him discuss the right of property as an economist, I was almost going to say a landholder, would be able to do; he spoke of the necessary hierarchy that fortune establishes among men, of obedience to established law, of the influence of good mores in republics, of the aid that religious ideas lend to order and to liberty: he even cited as if by accident, in support of one of his political opinions, the authority of Jesus Christ.

While listening to him, I wondered at the weakness of human reason. Something is either true or false; how to find out amid the uncertainties of knowledge and the diverse lessons of experience? A new fact arises that relieves all my doubts. I was poor, now I am rich; if at least well-being, while acting upon my conduct, left my judgment free! But no, my opinions have indeed changed with my fortune, and in the happy outcome from which I profit, I have really discovered the decisive reason that I had lacked until then.

Well-being exercises an influence still more freely over the Americans than over foreigners. The American has always seen before his eyes order and public prosperity linked together and marching in step, he does not imagine that they can live separately; so he has nothing to forget, and, unlike so many Europeans, does not need to lose what he retains from his first education.

[Political society, however, is constantly agitated in the United States. But the movement is slow and measured. It influences the details and not the whole of public fortune. It bears more upon men than upon principles. You want to improve constantly, but are afraid of upsetting things; and while desiring the best, you are even more afraid of the worst.

What could I add to succeed in making my thought understood? What occurred to so many of the French republicans under the Empire and to some of the liberals of today happens to the majority of men in America. They find in the end that society does well, or nearly so, because they are doing well.]

[e. ] At first this part was entitled: What Tends {to Moderate the Omnipotence of the Majority in America} to Make the Democratic Republic Practicable in America. The first sentences of the initial draft show that this part was a continuation of that on the tyranny of the majority: “≠The causes that tend to moderate the omnipotence of the majority in the United States and to make the democratic republic practicable arise from the particular circumstances in which the country is or was, from laws and from mores.≠”

A note in the margin specifies: “≠To put immediately after the omnipotence of the majority what serves more particularly as a counterweight to it and then what in general favors the republic, for the omnipotence of the majority, which is the greatest obstacle to maintaining republics, is not the only one.≠”

[f. ] James T. Schleifer (The Making of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” p. 61) noted that the meaning of the word “circumstances” appreciably narrows from the drafts to the final version and ends by designating only physical circumstances. It can be added, in the same way, that the importance of the influence of climate, as has been seen elsewhere, is manifestly greater in the drafts and manuscript than in the final version.

During his journey, as the correspondence attests, Tocqueville accorded a great importance to climatic conditions: “When you see men who tell you that climate does nothing to the constitution of peoples, assure them that they are mistaken. We saw the French of Canada: they are a tranquil, moral, religious people; in Louisiana we left other French who were restless, dissolute, lax in everything. Between them was 15 degrees of latitude; that is in truth the best reason that I can give for the difference” (Letter to Ernest de Chabrol of 16 January 1832, YTC, BIa2). Also see Correspondance avec Kergorlay, OC, XIII, 1, pp. 225-36 and a letter of 1829, before the American journey, in Correspondance avec Beaumont, OC, VIII, 1, pp. 93-94.

[g. ] For Rousseau, the absence of conflicts with neighbors constitutes one of the conditions for the existence of a good body of laws (Du contrat social, book II, chapter X, in Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Pléiade, 1964, III, p. 389). Jefferson often repeated the same idea.

[[*]. ] {which has not prevented one of our compatriots who became American forty years ago} ≠During our visit to America a medal was struck in honor of G[ener (ed.)]al. J[ackson (ed.)] having as an inscription: “quod Caesar fecit Jackson superavit,” which could have seemed a pleasant jest, but the author did not intend it as a joke. It is true that this unfortunate flatterer was a former French republican, a very ardent enemy of kings and the vices of the royal court [Edmond-Charles Genêt (ed.)].≠

[h. ] This paragraph appears almost literally in a note of 1 November 1831 (pocket notebook 3, YTC, BIIa, and Voyage, OC, V, 1, p. 186). Tocqueville and Beaumont met Andrew Jackson on 19 January 1832. The evening spent at the White House seems hardly to have impressed the two Frenchmen favorably. Nor did it modify their opinion about the American President. Beaumont gave an account of this visit in a letter to his mother (Lettres d’Amérique, pp. 210-11). Also see George W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, pp. 663-66.

[1. ] America does not yet have a large capital, but it already has three large cities. In 1830, Philadelphia numbered 161,000 inhabitants, and New York 202,000. The lower classes who inhabit these vast cities form a populace more dangerous than even that of Europe. It is made up first of all of emancipated Negroes, who are condemned by law and opinion to a state of hereditary degradation and misery. Also in its midst is found a multitude of Europeans pushed daily by misfortune and loose behavior to the shores of the New World; these men bring to the United States our worst vices, and they have none of the interests that could combat the influence of those vices. Inhabiting the country without being citizens, they are ready to take advantage of all the passions that agitate the country; consequently we have for some time seen serious riots break out in Philadelphia and New York. Such disorders are unknown in the rest of the country, which is not worried about them, because until now the city population has not exercised any power or any influence on the rural population.

I regard the large size of certain American cities and above all the nature of their inhabitants, however, as a genuine danger that threatens the future of the democratic republics of the New World, and I am not afraid to predict that it is there that they will perish, unless their government succeeds in creating an armed force that, while remaining subject to the will of the national majority, is nevertheless independent of the people of the cities and can repress their excesses.

[j. ] Compare chapter VIII of book II of Ancien Régime et la Révolution (OC, II, 1, pp. 139-40), where Tocqueville cites the Marquis de Mirabeau and Montesquieu on the same theme. Later, the great anti-metropolitan will be Rousseau (Du contrat social, book III, chapter XIII, Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Pléiade, 1964, III, p. 427).

[k. ] To the side: “≠When a king finds himself troubled by his neighbors, he goes to war; when the people are discontent with their position, they make a revolution.≠”

[m. ] In the manuscript: “When God created the globe He at once gave part of it over to the efforts of its inhabitants. Providence held the rest in reserve, destined for happier generations.

“The land that thus became the first inheritance of man was young . . .”

[n. ] In the margin: “≠The Americans are so fortunate that everything, even including their vices, is useful to them.”

[[*]. ] A note of explanation and details.

[o. ] Cf. note h for p. 1313 of volume IV.

[2. ] In New England, the land is divided into small estates, but it is no longer being divided.

[p. ] Tocqueville got this information from Judge Dens of Hartford (non-alphabetic notebooks 2 and 3, YTC, BIIa, and Voyage, OC, V, 1, p. 102).

[q. ] The manuscript adds “by chance.” It is not at all by chance that Tocqueville found himself in this sparsely inhabited region of the state of New York. He was there expressly to visit the island that he describes here (see appendix I, Voyage to Lake Oneida).

[r. ] Hervé de Tocqueville: “I believe that in this place Alexis should add a note that would say a few words about the story of the emigrant” (YTC, CIIIb, 1, p. 57).

[s. ] See chapter X of the second part of the third volume.

[t. ] This person has not been identified.