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Position That the Black Race Occupies in the United States; 30 Dangers to Which Its Presence Exposes the Whites c - 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.


Position That the Black Race Occupies in the United States;30 Dangers to Which Its Presence Exposes the Whitesc

Why it is more difficult to abolish slavery and to make its mark disappear among modern peoples than among ancient peoples.—In the United States, prejudice of whites against Blacks seems to become stronger as slavery is destroyed.—Situation of Negroes in the states of the North and the South.—Why the Americans abolish slavery.—Servitude, which brutalizes the slave, impoverishes the master.—Differences that you notice between the right bank and the left bank of the Ohio.—To what they must be attributed.—The Black race moves back toward the South as slavery does.—How this is explained.—Difficulties that the states of the South have in abolishing slavery.—Dangers for the future.—Preoccupation of minds.—Founding of a Black colony in Africa.—Why the Americans of the South increase the rigors of slavery, at the same time that they are growing disgusted= with it.

The Indians will die in isolation as they lived; but the destiny of the Negroes is in a way intertwined with that of the Europeans. Although the two races are bound to each other, they do not blend together. It is as difficult for them to separate completely as to unite.

The most formidable of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of Blacks on their soil. When you seek the cause of the present troubles and future dangers of the Union, you almost always end up at this first fact, from no matter where you start.

Men generally need to make great and constant efforts to create lasting evils; but there is one evil that enters into the world furtively. At first, you barely notice it amid the usual abuses of power; it begins with an individual whose name is not preserved by history; it is deposited like an accursed seed at some point in the soil; it then feeds on itself, spreads effortlessly, and grows naturally with the society that received it. This evil is slavery.

Christianity had destroyed servitude; the Christians of the sixteenth century reestablished it; but they never allowed it in their social system other than as an exception, and they took care to restrict it to a single one of the human races. They therefore gave humanity a wound not as extensive, but infinitely more difficult to heal.d

Two things must be carefully distinguished: slavery in itself and its consequences.

The immediate evils produced by slavery were nearly the same among ancient peoples as they are among modern peoples, but the consequences of these evils were different. Among the ancients the slave belonged to the same race as his master, and often he was superior to him in education and in enlightenment.31 Liberty alone separated them; once liberty was granted, they easily blended.

So the ancients had a very simple means to rid themselves of slavery and its consequences; this means was emancipation, and as soon as they used it in a general way, they succeeded.f

Not that the marks of servitude in antiquity did not still continue to exist for some time after servitude was destroyed. [{Real inequality was followed by social inequality.}]

There is a natural prejudice that leads man to scorn the one who has been his inferior, long after he has become his equal; real inequality produced by fortune or law is always followed by an imaginary inequality that has its roots in mores; but among the ancients this secondary effect of slavery came to an end. The emancipated man so strongly resembled the men who were born free that it soon became impossible to distinguish him from them.

What was more difficult among the ancients was to change the law; what is more difficult among modern peoples is to change mores, and for us the real difficulty begins where in antiquity it ended.

This happens because among modern peoples the non-material and transitory fact of slavery is combined in the most fatal way with the material and permanent fact of the difference of race. The memory of slavery dishonors the race, and race perpetuates the memory of slavery.

There is not an African who came freely to the shores of the New World; from that it follows that all those who are found there today are slaves or emancipated. Thus the Negro, together with life, transmits to all of his descendants the external sign of his shame. Law can destroy servitude; but only God alone can make its mark disappear.g

The modern slave differs from the master not only in liberty, but also in origin. You can make the Negro free, but he remains in the position of a stranger vis-à-vis the European.

That is still not all. In this man who is born in lowliness, in this stranger that slavery introduced among us, we scarcely acknowledge the general features of humanity. His face appears hideous to us, his intelligence seems limited to us, his tastes are base; we very nearly take him for an intermediate being between brute and man.32

So after abolishing slavery, modern peoples still have to destroy three prejudices much more elusive and more tenacious than slavery: the prejudice of the master, the prejudice of race, and finally the prejudice of the white.

It is very difficult for us, who have had the good fortune to be born among men whom nature made our fellows and the law our equals; it is very difficult for us, I say, to understand what insurmountable distance separates the Negro of America from the European. But we can have a remote idea of it by reasoning by analogy.h

We formerly saw among us great inequalities whose principles were only in legislation. What more fictitious than a purely legal inequality! What more contrary to the instinct of man than permanent differences established among men clearly similar! These differences have continued to exist for centuries however; they still continue to exist in a thousand places; everywhere they have left imaginary marks that time can scarcely erase. If the inequality created solely by laws is so difficult to uproot, how to destroy the one that seems to have its immutable foundations in nature itself?m

As for me, when I consider what difficulty aristocratic bodies of whatever nature have merging with the mass of the people, and the extreme care that they take to preserve for centuries the imaginary barriers that separate them, I despair of seeing an aristocracy founded on visible and imperishable signs disappear.n

So those who hope that one day the Europeans will blend with the Negroes seem to me to entertain a chimera. My reason does not lead me to believe it, and I see nothing in the facts that indicate it.

Until now, wherever whites have been the most powerful, they have held Negroes in degradation or in slavery. Wherever Negroes have been the strongest, they have destroyed whites; it is the only accounting that might ever be possible between the two races.

If I consider the United States of our day, I see clearly that in a certain part of the country the legal barrier that separates the two races is tending to fall, but not that of mores. I see slavery receding; the prejudice to which it gave birth is immovable.

In the part of the Union where Negroes are no longer slaves, have they drawn nearer to whites? Every man who has lived in the United States will have noted that an opposite effect has been produced. [{In no part of the Union are the two races as separated as in New [England (ed.)] [v: the North].}]

Racial prejudice seems to me stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where slavery still exists, and nowhere does it appear as intolerant as in the states where servitude has always been unknown.[f]o

It is true that in the North of the Union the law allows Negroes and whites to contract legitimate unions;[a] but opinion declares vile the white who joins in marriage with a Negro woman; and it would be difficult to cite an example of such a deed.

In nearly all the states where slavery is abolished, the Negro has been given electoral rights;[b] but if he presents himself to vote, he risks his life.p Oppressed, he can make a complaint, but he finds only whites among his judges. The law opens the juror’s seat to him,[c] but prejudice pushes him away from it. His son is excluded from the school where the descendant of the European goes to be instructed. In the theaters he cannot, even at the price of gold, buy the right to sit next to the one who was his master;[d] in the hospitals he lies apart. The Black is allowed to beseech the same God as the whites, but not to pray to him at the same altar. He has his priests and his churches.[e] The gates of heaven are not closed to him: but inequality scarcely stops at the edge of the other world. When the Negro is no more, his bones are thrown aside, and the difference in conditions is found again even in the equality of death.

Thus the Negro is free, but he is not able to share either the rights or the pleasures or the labors or the pains or even the tomb of the one whose equal he has been declared to be; he cannot meet him anywhere, either in life or in death.

[{What miserable mockery this is.}]

In the South where slavery still exists, Negroes are less carefully kept aside; they sometimes share the labors of whites and their pleasures; to a certain point they are permitted to mix with them. Legislation is more harsh in their regard; habits are more tolerant and milder.

In the South the master is not afraid to raise his slave up to his level, because he knows that if he wishes he will always be able to throw him back into the dust. In the North the white no longer distinctly sees the barrier that should separate him from a degraded race, and he withdraws with all the more care from the Negro because he fears that someday he will merge with him.

With the American of the South, nature sometimes reasserts its rights and for a moment reestablishes equality between Blacks and whites. In the North pride silences even the most imperious passion of man. The American of the North would perhaps consent to make the Negro woman the temporary companion of his pleasures if the legislators had declared that she must not aspire to share his bed; but she is able to become his wife, and he withdraws from her with a kind of horror.

This is how in the United States the prejudice that pushes Negroes away seems to increase proportionately as Negroes cease to be slaves, and how inequality becomes imprinted in the mores as it fades in the laws.

But if the relative position of the two races that inhabit the United States is as I have just shown, why have the Americans abolished slavery in the north of the Union, why do they keep it in the south, and what causes them to aggravate its rigors there?

It is easy to answer. Slavery is being destroyed in the United States not in the interest of the Negroes, but in that of the whites.

[≠America has given great truths to the world, but it has as well provided the world with the demonstration of an admirable truth. Christianity had condemned slavery as odious, the experience of the United States proves it deadly.≠]

The first Negroes were imported into Virginia about the year 1621.33 So in America, as in all the rest of the world, servitude was born in the South. From there it gained ground step by step; but as slavery moved up toward the North the number of slaves kept decreasing;34 there were always very few slaves in New England.q

The colonies were founded; a century had already passed, and an extraordinary fact began to strike everyone’s attention. The provinces that possessed no slaves so to speak grew in population, in wealth, and in well-being more rapidly than those that had them.

In the first, however, the inhabitant was forced to cultivate the soil himself or to hire the services of another man; in the second, he found at his disposal workers whose efforts were not paid. So there was work and expense on one side, leisure and economy on the other. But the advantage remained with the first.

This result seemed all the more difficult to explain because the emigrants, all belonging to the same European race, had the same habits, the same civilization, the same laws, and differed only in slightly perceptible nuances.

Time continued to march. Leaving the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the Anglo-Americans [{Europeans}] plunged every day further into the uninhabited areas of the West; there they encountered new terrains and climates; they had to conquer obstacles of different kinds; their races mingled, men of the South went toward the North, men of the North descended toward the South. Among all these causes, the same fact was reproduced at each step; and in general the colony in which there were no slaves became more populated and more prosperous than the one in which slavery was in force.

So as things advanced you began to see that slavery, so cruel to the slave, was deadly to the master.

But this truth was conclusively proved on the banks of the Ohio.

The river that the Indians had named the Ohio, or the Beautiful River par excellence, waters one of the most magnificent valleys that man has ever made his dwelling-place. Rolling terrain extends on the two banks of the Ohio where the soil offers inexhaustible treasures to the plowman every day; on the two banks the air is equally healthy and the climate temperate; each one of them forms the extreme boundary of a vast state. On the left the state that follows the thousand curves made by the Ohio in its course is called Kentucky; the other borrowed the name of the river itself. The two states differ only on one single point: Kentucky allowed slaves, the state of Ohio cast all of them out.35

So the traveler who, placed in the middle of the Ohio, allows himself to be carried along by the current until the river flows into the Mississippi navigates, so to speak, between liberty and servitude; and he has only to glance around him to judge in an instant which one is most favorable to humanity.

On the left bank of the river, the population is scattered; from time to time you see a gang of slaves with a carefree air crossing fields half deserted; the primeval forest constantly reappears; you would say that society is asleep; man seems idle; it is nature that offers the image of activity and life.

From the right bank arises, in contrast, a confused murmur that proclaims from afar the presence of industry; rich crops cover the fields; elegant dwellings announce the taste and the attentions of the plowman; on all sides comfort is revealed; man seems rich and content: he is working.36

The state of Kentucky was founded in 1775; the state of Ohio was founded only twelve years later:r twelve years in America is more than a half-century in Europe. Today the population of Ohio already exceeds that of Kentucky by 250,000 inhabitants.37

These diverse effects of slavery and of liberty are easily understood; they are sufficient to explain clearly the differences that are found between ancient civilization and that of today.

On the left bank of the Ohio work merges with the idea of slavery; on the right bank, with that of well-being and progress; there it is debased, here it is honored. On the left bank of the river you cannot find workers belonging to the white race; they would be afraid of resembling slaves; you must rely on the efforts of Negroes. On the right bank you would look in vain for someone idle; the white extends his activity and his intelligence to all undertakings.

Thus the men who in Kentucky are charged with exploiting the natural riches of the soil have neither enthusiasm nor enlightenment; while those who could have these two things do nothing or go into Ohio in order to make use of their industry and to be able to exercise it without shame.

It is true that in Kentucky masters make slaves work without being obliged to pay them, but they gain little benefit from their efforts, while the money that they would have given to free laborers would have been repaid with great interest by the value of their work.s

The free worker is paid, but he works faster than the slave, and rapidity of execution is one of the great elements of economy. The white sells his help, but you buy it only when it is useful; the Black has nothing to claim as the price for his services, but you are obliged to feed him all the time; he must be sustained in his old age as in his mature years, in his unproductive childhood as during the fruitful years of his youth, during illness as in health. It is therefore only by paying that you obtain the work of these two men: the free worker receives a salary; the slave, an education, food, care, clothing. The money that the master spends for the maintenance of the slave melts away little by little and on small particulars; you hardly notice it. The salary that you give to the worker is given all at once, and it seems to enrich only the one who receives it; but in reality the slave has cost more than the free man, and his efforts have been less productive.38

The influence of slavery extends still further; it penetrates even into the very soul of the master, and gives his ideas and his tastes a particular direction.

On the two banks of the Ohio nature has given man an enterprising and energetic character; but on each side of the river he makes a different use of this common quality.

The white of the right bank, obliged to live by his own efforts, made material well-being the principal goal of his existence; and since the country that he inhabits presents inexhaustible resources to his industry, and offers constantly recurring lures to his activity, his ardor to acquire has surpassed the ordinary limits of human cupidity. You see him, tormented by the desire for wealth, go boldly down all the paths that fortune opens to him; he becomes indiscriminately seaman, pioneer, manufacturer, farmer, bearing with an equal constancy the work or the dangers attached to these different professions. There is something marvelous in the resources of his genius, and a sort of heroism in his greediness for gain.

The American of the left bank scorns not only work, but all the enterprises that work brings to success; living in idle comfort, he has the tastes of idle men; money has lost a part of its value in his eyes; he pursues fortune less than excitement and pleasure, and he expends to these ends the energy that his neighbor deploys elsewhere; he passionately loves the hunt and war; he takes pleasure in the most violent exercises of the body; the use of arms is familiar to him, and from his childhood he has learned to risk his life in single combat. So slavery not only prevents whites from making a fortune, it turns them away from wanting to do so.

The same causes, operating continuously for two centuries in opposite directions in the English colonies of North America, have ended by creating a prodigious difference between the commercial capacity of the Southerner and that of the Northerner. Today only the North has ships, factories, railroads and canals.

This difference is noticeable not only in comparing the North and the South, but in comparing the inhabitants of the South among themselves. Nearly all the men in the southernmost states of the Union who devote themselves to commercial enterprises and seek to utilize slavery have come from the North; each day the men of the North spread into this part of the American territory where there is less competition for them to fear; there they discover resources that the inhabitants did not notice, and submitting to a system that they disapprove of, they succeed in turning it to better account than those who, having established the system, still uphold it.

If I wanted to push the parallel further, I would easily prove that nearly all the differences that are noticeable between the character of the Americans in the South and the North are born out of slavery; but this would go beyond my subject. I am trying at this moment to find out not what all the effects of servitude are, but what effects servitude produces on the material prosperity of those who have accepted it.

[≠What I limit myself to saying at this moment is this. The Americans are, of all modern peoples, those who have pushed equality and inequality furthest among men. They have combined universal suffrage and servitude. They seem to have wanted to prove in this way the advantages of equality by opposite arguments. It is claimed that the Americans, by establishing universal suffrage and the dogma of sovereignty [of the people], have made clear to the world the advantages of equality. As for me, I think that they have above all proved this by establishing servitude, and I find that they establish the advantages of equality much less by democracy than by slavery.≠]

This influence of slavery on the production of wealth could only be very imperfectly known by antiquity. Servitude existed then in all the civilized world, and the peoples who did not know it were barbarians.

So Christianity destroyed slavery only by asserting the rights of slaves; today you can attack it in the name of the master. On this point interest and morality are in agreement.t

As these truths manifested themselves in the United States, you saw slavery retreat little by little before the light of experience.

Servitude had begun in the South and afterward spread toward the North; today it is withdrawing. Liberty, starting in the North, is moving without stopping toward the South. Among the large states Pennsylvania today forms the extreme limit of slavery to the North, but even within these limits it is shaken; Maryland, which is immediately below Pennsylvania, is preparing daily to do without it, and Virginia, which comes after Maryland, is already debating its utility and its dangers.39

No great change in human institutions takes place without discovering, among the causes of this change, the inheritance law.

When unequal division ruled in the South, each family was represented by a rich man who did not feel the need any more than he had the taste for work; the members of his family that the law had excluded from the common inheritance lived around him in the same manner, as so many parasitic plants; you then saw in all the families of the South what you still see today in the noble families of certain countries of Europe, where the younger sons, without having the same wealth as the eldest son, remain as idle as he. This similar effect was produced in America and in Europe by entirely analogous causes. In the South of the United States the entire race of whites formed an aristocratic body at the head of which stood a certain number of privileged individuals whose wealth was permanent and whose leisure was inherited.u These leaders of the American nobility perpetuated the traditional prejudices of the white race in the body that they represented, and maintained the honorable character of idleness. Within this aristocracy you could find poor men, but not workers; poverty there seemed preferable to industry; so Black workers and slaves encountered no competitors, and whatever opinion you might have about the utility of their efforts you very much had to use them, since they were the only ones available.

From the moment when the law of inheritance was abolished all fortunes began to diminish simultaneously, all families moved in the same way closer to the state in which work becomes necessary to existence; many among them entirely disappeared; all foresaw the moment when it would be necessary for each man to provide for his needs by himself. Today you still see the rich, but they no longer form a compact and hereditary body; they were not able to adopt a spirit, to persevere there, and to make it penetrate into all ranks. So the prejudice that condemned work began to be abandoned by common accord; there were more poor, and the poor were able without being ashamed to concern themselves with the means of gaining their livelihood. Thus one of the most immediate effects of equal division was to create a class of free workers. From the moment when the free worker entered into competition with the slave, the inferiority of the latter made itself felt, and slavery was attacked in its very essence, which is the interest of the master.

As slavery retreats, the Black race follows it in its backward march, and returns with it toward the tropics from where it originally came.

This can seem extraordinary at first glance; we will soon understand it. By abolishing the principle of servitude, the Americans do not free the slaves.

Perhaps what is about to follow would be difficult to understand if I did not cite an example. I will choose that of the state of New York. In 1788, the state of New York prohibits the sale of slaves within it. This was a roundabout way of prohibiting importation. From that moment the number of Negroes no longer grows except by the natural increase of the Black population. Eight years later a more decisive measure is taken, and it is declared that from July 4, 1799 onward, all children born of slave parents will be free. All means of increase are then closed; there are still slaves, but you can say that servitude no longer exists.

From the period when a state of the North also prohibits the importation of slaves, Blacks are no longer removed from the South to be transported to that state.

From the moment when a state of the North forbids the sale of Negroes, the slave, no longer able to leave the hands of the one who owns him, becomes a burdensome property, and there is an interest in transporting him to the South.

The day when a state of the North declares that the son of a slave will be born free, the slave loses a great part of his market value; for his posterity can no longer be part of the market, and again there is a great interest in transporting him to the South.

Thus the same law prevents slaves from the South from coming to the North and pushes those of the North toward the South.

But here is another cause more powerful than all those that I have just discussed.

As the number of slaves diminishes in a state, the need for free workers makes itself felt. As free workers take over industry, since the work of the slave is less productive, the slave becomes a second-rate or useless property, and again there is a great interest in exporting him to the South where competition is not to be feared.

So the abolition of slavery does not bring the slave to liberty; it only makes him change masters. From the north he passes to the south.

As for the emancipated Negroes and those who are born after slavery has been abolished, they do not leave the North to go to the South, but they find themselves vis-à-vis the Europeans in a position analogous to that of the natives; they remain half civilized and deprived of rights amid a population that is infinitely superior to them in wealth and enlightenment; they are exposed to the tyranny of laws40 and to the intolerance of mores.v More unfortunate from a certain perspective than the Indians, they have against them the memories of slavery, and they cannot claim possession of a single piece of land; many succumb to their misery;41 others concentrate in the cities where, undertaking the roughest work, they lead a precarious and miserable existence.

Since the number of whites is increasing at twice the rate after the abolition of slavery, Blacks would soon be as if swallowed up amid the waves of a foreign population, even if the number of Negroes continued to grow in the same way as in the period when they were not yet free.

A land cultivated by slaves is in general less populated than one cultivated by free men; America is, moreover, a new country; so at the moment when a state abolishes slavery, it is still only half full. Scarcely is servitude destroyed there and the need for free workers felt, than you see a crowd of hardy adventurers rushing in from all parts of the country; they come to profit from the new resources which are going to open to human industry. The land is divided among them; on each portion a family of whites settles and takes possession of it. It is also toward the free states that European emigration heads. What would the poor man of Europe do, coming to find comfort and happiness in the New World, if he went to inhabit a country where work was stained with shame?

Thus the white population grows by its natural movement and at the same time by an immense emigration, while the Black population does not receive emigrants and becomes weaker. Soon the proportion that existed between the two races is reversed. The Negroes form nothing more than unfortunate remnants, a small, poor and wandering tribe lost in the middle of an immense people, master of the land; and nothing more is noticed of their presence except the injustices and the rigors to which they are subjected.

In many of the states of the West the Negro race has never appeared; in all the states of the North it is disappearing. So the great question of the future is shrinking within a narrow circle; it thus becomes less formidable, but no easier to resolve.

The further south you go, the more difficult it is to abolish slavery usefully. This results from several material causes that must be developed.

This first is climate: it is certain that as Europeans approach the tropics work becomes proportionately more difficult for them; many Americans even claim that below a certain latitude it ends up becoming fatal to them, while the Negro submits to it without dangers;42 but I do not think that this idea, so favorable to the laziness of the man of the South, is based on experience. It is not hotter in the South of the Union than in the south of Spain or of Italy.43 Why would the European not be able to accomplish the same work there? And if slavery was abolished in Italy and in Spain without having the masters perish, why wouldn’t the same thing happen in the Union? So I do not believe that nature has forbidden the European of Georgia or of Florida, under pain of death, to draw their subsistence from the land themselves; but this work would assuredly be more painful and less productive for them than for the inhabitants of New England.44 With the free worker in the South losing in this way a part of his superiority over the slave, it is less useful to abolish slavery.

All the plants of Europe grow in the North of the Union; the South has special products.

It has been noted that slavery is an expensive means to cultivate cereal crops. Whoever grows wheat in a country where servitude is unknown normally keeps in his service only a small number of workers; at harvest time and during planting he brings together many others, it is true; but the latter live at his place only temporarily.

To fill his warehouses or to sow his fields, the farmer who lives in a slave state is obliged to maintain throughout the entire year a great number of servants, whom he needs only during a few days; for, unlike free workers, slaves cannot, while working for themselves, wait for the moment when you must come to hire their labor. You must buy them in order to use them.

So slavery, apart from its general disadvantages, is naturally less applicable to countries where cereal crops are cultivated than to those where other products are harvested.

The cultivation of tobacco, cotton and, above all, sugar cane requires, on the contrary, constant attention. There you can employ women and children that you could not use in the cultivation of wheat. Thus slavery is naturally more appropriate to the country where the products that I have just named are grown.

Tobacco, cotton, sugar cane grow only in the South; there they form the principal sources of the wealth of the country. By destroying slavery the men of the South would find themselves with these alternatives: either they would be forced to change their system of cultivation, and then they would enter into competition with the men of the North, more active and more experienced than they; or they would cultivate the same products without slaves, and then they would have to bear the competition of the other states of the South that would have retained slaves.

Thus the South has particular reasons for keeping slavery that the North does not have.w

But here is another motive more powerful than all the others. The South would indeed be able, if really necessary, to abolish slavery; but how would the South rid itself of Blacks? In the North slavery and slaves are chased away at the same time. In the South you cannot hope to attain this double result at the same time.

While proving that servitude was more natural and more advantageous in the South than in the North, I showed sufficiently that the number of slaves must be much greater there. The first Africans were brought into the South; that is where they have always arrived in greater number. As you go further south, the prejudice that holds idleness in honor gains power. In the states that are closest to the tropics there is not one white man who works. So Negroes are naturally more numerous in the South than in the North. Each day, as I said above, they become more numerous; for, in proportion as slavery is destroyed at one end of the Union, Negroes accumulate in the other. Thus the number of Blacks is increasing in the South, not only by the natural movement of the population, but also by the forced emigration of the Negroes of the North. The African race, to grow in this part of the Union, has reasons analogous to those that make the European race increase so quickly in the North.

In the state of Maine there is one Negro for every three hundred inhabitants; in Massachusetts one for every one hundred; in the state of New York two for every one hundred; in Pennsylvania three; in Maryland thirty-four; forty-two in Virginia, and fifty-five finally in South Carolina.45 Such was the proportion of Blacks in relation to whites in the year 1830. But this proportion changes constantly: every day it becomes smaller in the North and greater in the South.

It is clear that in the southernmost states of the Union you cannot abolish slavery as you have in the states of the North without running very great dangers that the latter did not have to fear.

We have seen how the states of the North carefully handled the transition between slavery and liberty. They keep the present generation in irons and free future races; in this way Negroes are introduced into society only little by little, and while the man who could make bad use of his independence is retained in servitude, the one who can still learn the art of being free, before becoming master of himself, is liberated.

It is difficult to apply this method to the South. When you declare that beginning at a certain time the son of the Negro will be free, you introduce the principle and the idea of liberty into the very heart of servitude; the Blacks who are kept in slavery by the legislator and who see their sons emerge from it are astonished by this unequal division that destiny makes between them; they become restless and angry. From that moment slavery has in their view lost the type of moral power that time and custom gave it; it is reduced to being nothing more than a visible abuse of force. [Thus the law that sets the son at liberty makes it more difficult to keep the father a slave.] The North had nothing to fear from this contrast, because in the North Blacks were small in number and whites very numerous. But if this first dawn of liberty came to break upon two million men at the same time, the oppressors would have to tremble.x

After emancipating the sons of their slaves, the Europeans of the South would soon be compelled to extend the same benefit to the entire Black race.

In the North, as I said above, from the moment when slavery is abolished, and even from the moment when it becomes probable that the time of its abolition is approaching, a double movement takes place. Slaves leave the country to be transported more to the South; whites of the northern states and the emigrants from Europe rush to take their place.

These two causes cannot work in the same way in the last states of the South. On the one hand, the mass of slaves is too great there to be able to hope to make them leave the country;y on the other hand, the Europeans and the Anglo-Americans of the North dread coming to live in a country where work has still not been rehabilitated. Moreover, they rightly regard the states where the proportion of Negroes surpasses or equals that of whites as threatened by great misfortunes, and they refrain from bringing their industry there.

Thus by abolishing slavery, the men of the South would not succeed, like their brethren of the North, in making Negroes arrive gradually at liberty; they would not appreciably diminish the number of Blacks, and to hold them in check they would be alone. So in the course of a few years you would see a great people of free Negroes placed in the middle of a more or less equal nation of whites.

The same abusesz of power that maintain slavery today would then become the source of the greatest dangers that whites in the South would have to fear. Today the descendant of Europeans alone possesses the land; he is the absolute master of industry; he alone is rich, enlightened, armed. The Black possesses none of these advantages; but he can do without them, he is a slave. Once free, charged with watching over his own fate, can he remain deprived of all these things without dying? So what made the strength of the white, when slavery existed, exposes him to a thousand perils after slavery is abolished.

Left in servitude, the Negro can be held in a state near that of the brute; free, he cannot be prevented from becoming educated enough to appreciate the extent of his ills and to catch sight of the remedy to them. There is, moreover, a singular principle of relative justice that is found very deeply buried in the human heart. Men are struck much more by the inequality that exists within the interior of the same class than by the inequalities that are noticed among different classes. Slavery is understood; but how to imagine the existence of several million citizens eternally bent down by infamy and given over to hereditary miseries? In the North a population of emancipated Negroes experiences these evils and feels these injustices; but it is weak and reduced; in the South it would be numerous and strong.

From the moment that you allow whites and emancipated Negroes to be placed on the same soil as peoples who are strangers to each other, you will understand without difficulty that there are only two possibilities in the future: Negroes and whites must either blend entirely or separate.

I have already expressed my conviction about the first means.46 I do not think that the white race and the Black race will come to live on an equal footing anywhere.

But I believe that the difficulty will be even greater in the United States than anywhere else.a If a man happens to stand outside of the prejudices of religion, of country, of race, and this man is king, he can work surprising revolutions in society. An entire people cannot so to speak rise above itself in this way.

A despot coming to join the Americans and their former slaves under the same yoke would perhaps succeed in mixing them together; as long as the American democracy remains at the head of affairs, no one will dare to attempt such an undertaking, and you can anticipate that, the more the whites of the United States are free, the more they will seek to separate themselves.47

I said elsewhere that the true link between the European and the Indian was the half-breed; in the same way, the true transition between the white and the Negro is the mulatto. Wherever there is a very great number of mulattos, the fusion between the two races is not impossible.

There are parts of America where the European and the Negro have so crossed that it is difficult to meet a man who is completely white or completely Black. Having reached this point, the two races can really be said to have mingled; or rather, in their place, a third has appeared that takes after the two without being precisely either the one or the other.

Of all Europeans the English are the ones who have least mingled their blood with that of the Negroes. You see more mulattos in the South of the Union than in the North, but infinitely fewer than in any other European colony. Mulattos are very few in the United States; they have no strength by themselves, and in the quarrels between the races they ordinarily make common cause with the whites. This is how in Europe you often see the lackeys of great lords put on nobility with the people.

This pride of origin, natural to the English, has been singularly increased further among the Americans by the individual pride given birth by democratic liberty. The white man of the United States is proud of his race and proud of himself.

Besides, since whites and Negroes do not come to mingle in the North of the Union, how would they mingle in the South? Can you suppose for one moment that the American of the South, placed as he will always be between the white man in all his physical and moral superiority and the Negro, can ever think of mixing with the latter? The American of the South has two energetic passions that will always lead him to separate himself: he will be afraid of resembling the Negro, his former slave, and of descending below the white, his neighbor.

If it were absolutely necessary to foretell the future, I would say that in the probable course of things the abolition of slavery in the South will make the repugnance that the white population feels there for the Blacks grow. I base this opinion on what I have already noted analogously in the North. I said that the white men of the North withdraw from Negroes all the more carefully as the legislator blurs the legal separation that should exist between them. Why would it not be the same in the South? In the North when whites are afraid of ending by blending with Blacks, they fear an imaginary danger. In the South where the danger would be real, I cannot believe that the fear would be less.b

If, on the one hand, you recognize (and the fact is not doubtful) that in the extreme South Blacks are constantly accumulating and growing faster than whites; if, on the other hand, you concede that it is impossible to foresee the time when Blacks and whites will come to mingle and to draw the same advantages from the state of society, must you not conclude that in the states of the South Blacks and whites will sooner or later end by getting into a struggle?

What will the final result of this struggle be?

You will easily understand that on this point you must confine yourself to vague conjectures. With difficulty the human mind manages in a way to draw a great circle around the future; but within this circle chance, which escapes all efforts, is in constant motion. In the portrait of the future chance always forms the obscure point where the sight of intelligence cannot penetrate. What you can say is this: in the Antilles it is the white race that seems destined to succumb; on the continent, the Black race.

In the Antilles whites are isolated in the middle of an immense population of Blacks;c on the continent Blacks are placed between the sea and an innumerable people who already extend above them as a compact mass, from the frozen areas of Canada to the borders of Virginia, from the banks of the Mississippi to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. If the whites of North America remain united, it is difficult to believe that Negroes can escape the destruction that threatens them; they will succumb by sword or misery. But the Black populations accumulated along the Gulf of Mexico have chances for salvation if the struggle between the two races comes about when the American confederation has dissolved. Once the federal link is broken, the men of the South would be wrong to count on lasting support from their brothers of the North. The latter know that the danger can never reach them; if a positive duty does not compel them to march to the aid of the South, you can foresee that the sympathies of race will be powerless.

Whatever the period of the struggle may be, the whites of the South left to themselves will moreover present themselves in the contest with an immense superiority of enlightenment and means; but the Blacks will have for them numbers and the energy of despair. Those are great resources when you have weapons in hand. Perhaps what happened to the Moors of Spain will then happen to the white race of the South [(something not very probable, it is true)]. After occupying the country for centuries, it will finally withdraw little by little toward the country from which its ancestors came in the past, abandoning to the Negroes the possession of a country that Providence seems to intend for the latter, since they live there without difficulty and work more easily there than whites.

The danger, more or less remote but inevitable, of a struggle between the Blacks and whites who populate the South of the Union presents itself constantly as a painful dream to the imagination of the Americans. The inhabitants of the North talk daily about these dangers, although they have nothing directly to fear from them. They seek in vain to find a means to ward off the misfortunes that they foresee.

In the states of the South the inhabitants are silent. They do not speak about the future with strangers; they avoid talking about it with friends; each person hides it so to speak from himself. The silence of the South has something more frightening about it than the noisy fears of the North.

This general preoccupation of minds has given birth to an almost unknown enterprise that can change the fate of one part of the human race.

Fearing the dangers that I have just described, a certain number of American citizens gather as a society with the goal of exporting at their expense to the coasts of Guinea the free Negroes who would like to escape the tyranny that weighs upon them.48

In 1820, the society that I am speaking about succeeded in founding in Africa, at 7 degrees of north latitude, a settlement to which it gave the name Liberia.d The latest news announced that two thousand five hundred Negroes were already gathered at this place. Transported to their former country, the Blacks have introduced American institutions there. Liberia has a representative system, Negro jurors, Negro magistrates, Negro priests; you see churches and newspapers there, and by a singular turn of the vicissitudes of this world whites are forbidden to settle within its walls.49

There certainly is a strange twist of fortune! Two centuries have passed since the day when the inhabitant of Europe undertook to carry Negroes from their family and their country to transport them to the shores of North America. Today you meet the European busy again carting the descendants of these very Negroes across the Atlantic Ocean in order to take them back to the land from which he had once uprooted their fathers. Barbarians have drawn the enlightenment of civilization from within servitude and have learned in slavery the art of being free.e

Until today Africa was closed to the arts and sciences of whites. The enlightenment of Europe, imported by Africans, will perhaps penetrate there. So there is a beautiful and great idea in the founding of Liberia; but the idea, which can become so fruitful for the Old World, is sterile for the New.

In twelve years the Society for the colonization of Blacks has transported to Africa two thousand five hundred Negroes. During the same time period, about seven hundred thousand of them were born in the United States.

If the colony of Liberia were in the position to receive each year thousands of new inhabitants, and the latter in a condition to be brought there usefully; if the Union took the place of the Society, and if annually it used its riches50 and its ships to export Negroes to Africa, it still would not be able to balance just the natural increase of the population among the Blacks; and by not removing each year as many men as those born, it would not even manage to suspend the development of the evil that is growing each day in its bosom.51

The Negro race will no longer leave the shores of the American continent, where the passions and the vices of Europe made it come; it will disappear from the New World only by ceasing to exist. The inhabitants of the United States can postpone the misfortunes that they fear, but they cannot today destroy the cause of them.

I am obliged to admit that I do not consider the abolition of slavery as a means to delay in the states of the South the struggle of the two races.f

The Negroes can remain slaves for a long time without complaining; but once among the number of free men, they will soon become indignant about being deprived of nearly all the rights of citizens; and not able to become the equals of whites, they will not take long to prove to be their enemies.

In the North emancipating the slaves was all profit; you rid yourself in this way of slavery, without having anything to fear from free Negroes. The latter were too few ever to claim their rights. It is not the same in the South.

The question of slavery was for the masters in the North a commercial and manufacturing question; in the South it is a question of life or death. So you must not confuse slavery in the North and in the South.

God keep me from trying, like certain American authors, to justify the principle of the servitude of Negroes; I am only saying that all those who have allowed this painful principle in the past are not equally free to abandon it today.

I confess that when I consider the state of the South, I discover for the white race that inhabits these countries only two ways to act: to free the Negroes and combine with them; to remain separated from them and hold them in slavery as long as possible.g The middle terms seem to me to lead shortly to the most horrible of all civil wars, and perhaps to the ruin of one of the two races.

The Americans of the South envisage the question from this point of view, and they act accordingly. Not wanting to blend together with the Negroes, they do not want to set them free.

It is not that all the inhabitants of the South regard slavery as necessary to the wealth of the master; on this point many among them agree with the men of the North, and readily admit with the latter that servitude is an evil; but they think that this evil must be maintained in order to live.

Enlightenment, by increasing in the South, made the inhabitants of this part of the territory see that slavery is harmful to the master, and this same enlightenment shows them, more clearly than they had seen until then, the near impossibility of destroying it. A singular contrast results. Slavery becomes established more and more in the laws, as its usefulness is more disputed; and while its principle is gradually abolished in the North, in the South more and more rigorous consequences are drawn from this very principle.

Today the legislation of the states of the South relative to slaves presents a kind of unheard of atrocity, and by itself alone it reveals some profound disturbance in the laws of humanity. It is enough to read the legislation of the states of the South to judge the desperate position of the two races that inhabit them.

It is not that the Americans of this part of the Union have exactly increased the rigors of servitude; they have, on the contrary, made the physical lot of the slaves milder. The ancients knew only chains and death to maintain slavery; the Americans of the South of the Union have found more intellectual guarantees for the continuance of their power. They have, if I many express myself in this way, spiritualized despotism and violence. In antiquity they tried to prevent the slave from breaking his chains; today we have undertaken to remove his desire to do so.

The ancients chained the body of the slave, but they left his mind free and allowed him to become enlightened. In that they were consistent with themselves; then slavery had a natural way out: from one day to another the slave could become free and equal to his master.

The Americans of the South, who do not think that at any time the Negroes can blend with them, have forbidden, under severe penalties, teaching them to read and write.h Not wanting to raise them to their level, they hold them as close as possible to the brute.j

In all times the hope for liberty had been placed within slavery in order to soften its rigors.

The Americans of the South have understood that emancipation always presented dangers when the emancipated person could not one day come to be assimilated with the master. To give a man liberty and leave him in misery and disgrace, that is to do what, if not to provide a future leader of a slave revolt? It had already been noted for a long time, moreover, that the presence of the free Negro cast a vague restlessness deep within the soul of those who were not free, and made the idea of their rights penetrate their soul like an uncertain glimmer. The Americans of the South have in most cases removed from the masters the ability to emancipate.52

I met in the Southk of the Union an old man who formerly had lived in an illegitimate union with one of his Negro women. He had had several children with her, who coming into the world became slaves of their father. Several times the latter had thought to bequeath them at least liberty, but years had gone by before he was able to overcome the obstacles raised to emancipation by the legislator. During this time old age came, and he was about to die. He then imagined his sons led from market to market and passing from paternal authority to the rod of a stranger. These horrible images threw his dying imagination into delirium. I saw him prey to the agonies of despair, and I then understood how nature knew how to avenge the wounds done to it by laws.

These evils are awful, without doubt; but are they not the foreseeable and necessary consequence of the very principle of servitude among modern peoples?

From the moment when Europeans took their slaves from within a race of men different from their own, that many among them considered as inferior to other human races, and with which all envisaged with horror the idea of ever assimilating, they supposed slavery to be eternal; for, between the extreme inequality that servitude creates and the complete equality that independence naturally produces among men, there is no intermediate lasting state. The Europeans vaguely sensed this truth, but without admitting it. Every time it concerned Negroes, you saw the Europeans obey sometimes their interest or their pride, sometimes their pity. Toward the Black they violated all the rights of humanity, and then they instructed him in the value and inviolability of these rights. They opened their ranks to their slaves, and when the latter attempted to enter, they chased them away in disgrace. Wanting servitude, the Europeans allowed themselves to be led despite themselves or without their knowing toward liberty, without having the courage of being either completely iniquitous or entirely just.

If it is impossible to foresee a period when the Americans of the South will mix their blood with that of the Negroes, can they, without exposing themselves to perishing, allow the latter to attain liberty? And if, in order to save their own race, they are obliged to want to keep them in chains, must you not excuse them for taking the most effective means to succeed in doing so?

What is happening in the South of the Union seems to me at the very same time the most horrible and the most natural consequence of slavery. When I see the order of nature overturned, when I hear humanity cry out and struggle in vain under the laws, I admit that I do not find the indignation to condemn the men of today, authors of these outrages; but I summon up all of my hatred against those who after more than a thousand years of equality introduced servitude again into the world.

Whatever the efforts of the Americans of the South to keep slavery, moreover, they will not succeed forever. Slavery, squeezed into a single point of the globe, attacked by Christianity as unjust, by political economy as fatal; slavery, amid the democratic liberty and the enlightenment of our age, is not an institution that can endure. It will end by the deed of the slave or by that of the master. In both cases, great misfortunes must be expected.

If you refuse liberty to the Negroes of the South, they will end by seizing it violently themselves; if you grant it to them, they will not take long to abuse it.

[c. ] To ask about Blacks.

1. Black population, slave and emancipated in the United States (illegible word).

2. Is it true that the laws of the Carolinas and Georgia forbid teaching slaves to read and write? Gazette of December.

(1) How do these laws set about to prohibit the (illegible word)?

(2) What does the President want for [the (ed.)] bank, to destroy it or to replace it?

(3) What did he do against the federal courts. (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 86).

The Quaker Collection of the library of Haverford College in Pennsylvania preserves three pages of questions in English concerning the “colored population.” A note from the last page attributes these questions to Tocqueville, but the writing is that of Gustave de Beaumont. The questions bear upon the separation of Blacks and whites in the schools, hospitals, churches and other public places, on the intellectual equality of the two races, on the possibility of a gradual abolition, and on the danger of a race war. Beaumont is concerned as well about the differences between the law and its execution: “In a government founded upon the will of the people, the public opinion secures the impartial execution of the law?—How is it possible that the law is impartially executed in reference to black people when the public opinion concerning such people is not impartial itself?” It has not been possible to identify the person to whom this inquiry is addressed. It probably concerns one of the persons that Tocqueville and Beaumont met in Pennsylvania (see George W. Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America, pp. 782-86). With the kind permission of Haverford College, Pennsylvania (Quaker Collection, E. W. Smith, no. 95).

[d. ] “Europeans by destroying millions of Indians in the New World inflicted a horrible, but temporary evil on humanity. Slavery [v: the presence of Blacks] is an evil that feeds on itself [v: perpetuates itself with the generations], that is constantly reborn, and that can only cease by evils greater than itself” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 93).

[f. ] When it is said that slavery is disappearing, it has disappeared in effect. Nothing like that. Prejudices that remain. Law of New England. As slavery withdraws, whites fear blending more, become scornful. Small number of mulattos. School, church and industry [separate(?) (ed.)]. The laws less harsh, hatreds more so. Slavery was cruel. You can make slavery end, but not the prejudices that it gave birth to; you can make the Negro cease to be a slave, but not make him become the equal of the white (YTC, CVh, 2, pp. 95-96).

[g. ] “When you see the difficulty of destroying the inequality in the laws, you understand what is impracticable about destroying the one in nature” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 90).

[32. ] For whites to abandon the opinion that they have conceived of the intellectual and moral inferiority of their former slaves, it would be necessary for Negroes to change, and they cannot change as long as this opinion persists.

[h. ] In the margin: “≠I regard the mixing of races as the greatest misfortune of humanity.≠”

[m. ] “Among the Americans slavery seemed contrary neither to religion nor to the interest of the State; what was more difficult was to establish it in the laws” (YTC, CVh, 3, pp. 2-3).

[n. ] In the margin:

≠Thus in America prejudice seems to grow stronger as slavery withdraws. The difference becomes marked in the mores as it fades away in the laws. In several countries of Europe different peoples found themselves together. They took centuries to blend; but they were similar on all points. The Moors who hardly differed from the Spanish could not manage to mingle with them. If the various offshoots of the same human family have so much difficulty mingling and blending, how to admit that two radically different races will ever manage to do so? If a slight difference in the nature of features was found to be a nearly insurmountable obstacle, what will it be when you find a difference so great that what appears beautiful to one seems the height of ugliness to the other?≠

[o. ] These alphabetical notes appear in the manuscript, but not the text of the notes, which is found, however, in one of the drafts:

(a) Among the states where slavery is abolished, Massachusetts is the only one I know that has prohibited the legitimate union of the two races. See Laws of Massachusetts, vol. I, p. [blank (ed.)].

(b) Among the states that have abolished slavery or did not allow it, the states of Delaware, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are the only ones I know that have excluded Negroes from electoral rights. In the others the law is silent about it and consequently allows it. In the constitution of the state of New York, amended in 1821, Negroes can vote, but particular property qualifications are required of them, which makes the permission of the law illusory.

(c) In most of the states where slavery is abolished, the law does not make any color distinction while establishing the qualification for the jury. But as it leaves an arbitrary power to the officials charged with drawing up the list, care is taken never to put the name of a Black on it.

(d) While I was in New York a French (illegible word) [Creole (?) (ed.)] from the Antilles, coming to the theater, {was taken for a mulatto and refused} was resisted in his entry to the boxes of the dress circle for which he had purchased the right at the door. He did not understand English; a violent quarrel ensued that nearly had unfortunate consequences; with his swarthy tint it was assumed that he could indeed be a mulatto.

(e) It is right to note that in general Negroes are mingled with whites in Catholic churches. Protestantism establishes in the religious order the government of the middle classes, and the haughtiness of the middle classes toward the people is known.

(f) Not only does Ohio not allow slavery, but it prohibits the entry into its territory of free Negroes and forbids them to acquire anything there.

(g) The gradual abolition of slavery was declared in Pennsylvania in 1780. In Massachusetts this abolition goes back to the very period of the constitution in 1779; Connecticut began to abolish slavery in 1784. The state of New York in 1799. Kent’s Commentaries, vol. II, p. 201 (YTC, CVh, 2, pp. 76-77).

Note g belongs to the following paragraph, in the margin in the manuscript: “Slavery today is abolished in {two-thirds} of the Union (here a note on the precise number of states where slavery does not exist. I believe that the number does not exceed twelve, but these are the most important). There are portions of the territory where it has been destroyed for nearly a half century,g others that never allowed it in their midst.”

Beaumont described the incident of the Creole twice, with many details (Marie, I, p. v, note and pp. 193-97).

[p. ] Draft, under a paper pasted into place: “. . . life. The law made them the equals of whites. In public places they can take a place next to whites, but if they try to do so, people flee their approach. The same hospitals are open to them, but they occupy separate places. Even in the prisons care is taken not to mingle the two races ≠and it seems to be believed that to force a murderer to breathe the same air as a Negro is to degrade him more. His sons . . .≠”

[33. ] See History of Virginia by Beverley. See also, in the Mémoires de Jefferson, curious details about the introduction of Negroes into Virginia and about the first act that prohibited their importation in 1778.

[34. ] The number of slaves was smaller in the North, but the advantages resulting from slavery were not disputed more there than in the South. In 1740, the legislature of the state of New York declares that the direct importation of slaves must be encouraged as much as possible, and that smuggling must be severely punished as tending to discourage the honest merchant (Kent’s Commentaries, vol. II, p. 206). You find in the historical Collection of Massachusetts, vol. IV, p. 193, the curious research of Belknap on slavery in New England. The result is that, as early as 1630, Negroes were introduced, but that from that moment legislation and mores showed themselves opposed to slavery.

Also see in this place the way in which public opinion, then the law, managed to destroy servitude.

[q. ] “Slavery which begins in the south and spreads to the north, abolition of slavery which begins in the north and spreads to the south” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 51).

[35. ] Ohio not only does not allow slavery, but it prohibits the entry of free Negroes into its territory and forbids them to acquire anything there. See the statutes of Ohio.

[36. ] It is not only the individual man who is active in Ohio; the state itself undertakes immense enterprises; between Lake Erie and the Ohio the state of Ohio has established a canal by means of which the Mississippi Valley communicates with the River of the North. Thanks to this canal the merchandise of Europe that arrives in New York can descend by water as far as New Orleans, across more than five hundred leagues of the continent.

[r. ] In the margin: “Ohio began to be inhabited 1787. Kentucky 1775. Daniel Boone.” Notebook E contains several notes on Ohio and Kentucky (YTC, BIIa, and Voyage, OC, V, 1).

[37. ] Exact figure according to the census of 1830:

Kentucky,688, 844.
Ohio,937, 679.

[s. ] The paragraph that follows is not in the manuscript.

[38. ] Apart from these causes, which make the labor of free workers, wherever they abound, more productive and more economical than that of slaves, another one must be pointed out that is particular to the United States. Over the whole surface of the Union the way to cultivate sugar cane successfully has not yet been found except on the banks of the Mississippi, near the mouth of this river, on the Gulf of Mexico. In Louisiana the cultivation of sugar cane is extremely advantageous; nowhere does the farmer gain such a great value from his efforts; and since a certain relationship is always established between the costs of production and the products, the price of slaves is very high in Louisiana. Now since Louisiana is one of the confederated states, slaves can be transported there from all parts of the Union; so the price given for a slave in New Orleans raises the price of slaves in all the other markets. The result of this is that, in countries where the land returns little, the cost of cultivation by slaves continues to be very considerable, which gives a great advantage to the competition of free workers.

[t. ] Tocqueville bases the greatest part of his argument against slavery on considerations of an economic type. Beaumont does as much in Marie (I, pp. 133-35, 303-304). Certain critics have not failed to blame Tocqueville for having nearly abandoned philosophical and religious arguments. The reason for this omission seems to be a tactical choice rather than lack of awareness. Not only had Tocqueville heard it asserted right from the mouths of several Americans that slavery would disappear because it was not profitable, but he was also aware that the discussion on slavery had henceforth left the religious and moral realm to take place principally on economic grounds. Even a partisan of slavery like Achille Murat had not hesitated to write that slavery would disappear “when free labor is cheaper than the labor of slaves” (Achille Murat, Esquisse morale et politique des États-Unis, Paris: Crochard Libraire, 1832, p. 110). It is not impossible that Tocqueville had read this book. Alphabetic notebook A (small notebook A, YTC, BIIa) contains the following note (omitted in Voyage, OC, V, 1): “Authors who have written on the United States. Letters on the United States by Achille Murat, son of the ex-king of Naples, Bossage, 1830.” The partisans of abolition used arguments of an economic type as well. You can cite in particular, based on Beaumont’s library, one of the first modern antislavery works, the book of Benjamin S. Frossard, La cause des esclaves nègres et des habitants de la Guinée portée au tribunal de la justice, de la religion, de la politique . . . (Lyon: Aimé de la Roche, 1789, 2 vol.), and Thomas Hamilton (Men and Manners in America, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1833, pp. 317-22), which Beaumont cites in his book, and who also uses arguments of this type.

The French Society for the Abolition of Slavery, to which Beaumont and Tocqueville belonged, proclaimed in 1837: “Abolition of slavery can no longer in any civilized country give rise to a discussion of principles: the only question with which enlightened minds have to be concerned today is that of the means by which this abolition could be realized without disruption in the colonies.” Revue des deux mondes, X, 4th series, 1837, p. 418 (see the speech of Tocqueville on the English experience, reproduced on page 422).

See on this subject Sally Gersham, “Alexis de Tocqueville and Slavery,” French Historical Studies 9, no. 3 (1976): 467-83; Richard Resh, “Alexis de Tocqueville and the Negro. Democracy in America Reconsidered,” Journal of Negro History 48, no. 4 (1963): 251-60; Gerald M. Bonetto, “Tocqueville and American Slavery,” Canadian Review of American Studies 15, no. 2 (1984): 129-39; Harvey Mitchell, America After Tocqueville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and August H. Nimitz, Jr., Marx, Tocqueville and Race in America (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2003), pp. 1-39.

[39. ] There is a particular reason that is finally detaching the two last states that I have just named from the cause of slavery.

The former wealth of this part of the Union was founded principally on the cultivation of tobacco. Slaves were particularly appropriate to this cultivation. Now, it happens that for quite a few years tobacco has been losing its market value; the value of the slaves, however, remains always the same. Thus the relationship between the costs of production and the products is changed. So the inhabitants of Maryland and of Virginia feel more disposed than they were thirty years ago either to do without slaves in the cultivation of tobacco, or to abandon the cultivation of tobacco and slavery at the same time.

[u. ] Many of Tocqueville’s ideas on the South of the United States come from conversations that he had during the months of September and October 1831 with Brown, John Quincy Adams and Latrobe (non-alphabetic notebooks 2 and 3, YTC, BIIa, and Voyage, OC, V, 1, pp. 87-152). At the beginning of November Tocqueville was so convinced of the existence of an aristocratic spirit in the South that, when he met Charles Carroll, he immediately saw in his manners and his way of life the proof of the existence of the southern aristocracy that he had been told had already nearly disappeared.

[40. ] The states where slavery is abolished ordinarily attempt to make it quite difficult for free Negroes to stay in their territory; and since a sort of emulation among the different states is established on this point, the unfortunate Negroes can only choose among evils.

[v. ] Cf. Beaumont, Marie, I, pp. 161-65, 333-38.

[41. ] There is a great difference between the mortality of whites and that of Blacks in the states where slavery is abolished: from 1820 to 1831, in Philadelphia only one white died out of forty-two individuals belonging to the white race, while one Negro died there out of twenty-one individuals belonging to the Black race. Mortality is not so great by far among Negro slaves. (See Emmerson’s [Emerson’s (ed.)] Medical Statistics, p. 28.)

[42. ] This is true in the places where rice is cultivated. Rice plantations, which are unhealthy in all countries, are particularly dangerous in those that are struck by the burning sun of the tropics. Europeans would have a great deal of difficulty cultivating the land in this part of the New World, if they wanted to insist on making it produce rice. But can’t one do without rice plantations?

[43. ] These states are closer to the Equator than Italy and Spain, but the continent of America is infinitely colder than that of Europe.

[44. ] Spain formerly had transported a certain number of peasants from the Azores into a district of Louisiana called Attakapas. Slavery was not introduced among them; it was an experiment. Today these men still cultivate the land without slaves; but their industry is so listless that it scarcely provides for their needs.

[w. ] “Cultivation by slaves is infinitely less advantageous to the north than it was formerly for two reasons.

“The first that certain very costly products such as tobacco have fallen [in price].

“The second that the price of slaves has always remained very high because of New Orleans where they are very expensive” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 86).

[45. ] In the American work entitled Letters on the Colonization Society, by Carey, 1833, you read the following: “In South Carolina, for forty years, the Black race has been increasing faster than the white race. By combining the population of the five states of the South that first had slavery, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, you discover,” Mr. Carey says again, “that from 1790 to 1830, whites have increased in the proportion of 80 per 100 in these states, and Blacks in the proportion of 112 per 100.”

In the United States, in 1830, the men belonging to the two races were distributed in the following manner: states where slavery is abolished, 6,565,434 whites, 120,520 Negroes. States where slavery still exists, 3,960,814 whites, 2,208,102 Negroes.

[x. ] Tocqueville will study in detail the systems of emancipation in his parliamentary report on slavery (Rapport fait au nom de la commission chargée d’examiner la proposition de M. de Tracy relative aux esclaves des colonies, Paris: A. Henry, 1839, reproduced in OC, III, 1, pp. 41-78). The committee recommends that, after the immediate abolition of slavery in the French colonies, the State become the tutor of Blacks during a transition period by educating them and selling their work at a low price. The revenue will serve to amortize the indemnities to the former owners. Each of the emancipated will receive a minimal salary and a parcel of land from the State.

Tocqueville will defend the conclusions of the committee in a series of articles on abolition published in the Siècle, 22 and 28 October, 8 and 21 November, 6 and 14 December 1843 (reproduced in Écrits et discours politiques, OC, III, 1, pp. 79-111). A few critics have noted that in his reflections on slavery Tocqueville allowed his nationalist ideas to prevail over his antislavery principles. See on this subject Seymour Drescher, Dilemmas of Democracy: Tocqueville and Modernization, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968; Melvin Richter, “Tocqueville on Algeria,” Review of Politics 25, no. 3 (1963): 363-98; Irving M. Zeitlin, Liberty, Equality and Revolution in Alexis de Tocqueville, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971.

In his novel Beaumont discusses in a little more detail the process of emancipation. Gradual emancipation seems to him too costly, and he is of the opinion that Jefferson’s idea of giving a portion of the territory to emancipated Negroes is dangerous. The confrontation of the two races seems as inevitable to him as to Tocqueville. (Cf. Marie, I, pp. 314-38.)

[y. ] “In the South the mass of slaves is too considerable for anyone ever to hope of diminishing the number of them very noticeably by exportation. You must wait until death, by making them disappear little by little, removes them along with the just terrors to which they give rise.

Here is one side of the subject, let us envisage another [text interrupted (ed.)]” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 102).

[z. ] The manuscript says: “The same causes.”

[46. ] This opinion, moreover, is based on authorities much more weighty than I. In the Mémoires de Jefferson, among others, you read: “Nothing is more clearly written in the book of destiny than the emancipation of the Blacks, and it is just as certain that the two races equally free will not be able to live under the same government. Nature, habit and opinion have established insurmountable barriers between them.” (See Extrait des Mémoires de Jefferson, by M. Conseil.)

[a. ] In the margin: “≠Of all governments those that have the least power over mores are free governments.≠”

[47. ] If the English of the Antilles had governed themselves, you can count on the fact that they would not have granted the act of emancipation that the mother country has just imposed.

[b. ] These notes in the manuscript seem instead to be the plan for the rest of this section:

≠If he does not mingle, what? Examine the various possibilities. Here nothing dogmatic, no fear for the white race of America, on the contrary for the Black race. Perhaps they will separate? Perhaps they will wage a war of extermination? This is probable as long as the Union lasts because the South leans on the North.

Finally reason to preserve slavery and all its rigors for the good of the two races.

If the two races cannot blend together in the southernmost states of the Union, what then will be their fate? You easily understand that on this point you must necessarily confine yourself to vague conjectures. In all human events there is an immense portion abandoned to chance or to secondary causes that escapes entirely from forecasts and calculations.≠

[c. ] “We have already seen the whites destroyed in the Antilles. Our sons will see the Blacks destroyed in most of the United States, this at the end of the successive retreat of Negroes toward the South” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 95).

[48. ] This society took the name Colonization Society of Blacks.

See its annual reports, and notably the fifteenth. Also see the brochure already indicated entitled: Letters on the Colonization Society and On Its Probable Results, by M. Carey, Philadelphia, April 1833.

[d. ] “You read in the National Intelligencer of 14 January 1834, a curious article on Liberia, from which it follows that at this period the colony had a newspaper entitled Liberia Herald which contained pieces on history and on ethics and a page of advertisements.

“See the letter addressed by Mr. Voorhead [sic (ed.)] captain of the ship John Adams to the Secretary of the Navy, published in the National Intelligencer of January 1834” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 75).

This is the letter of P.= F. Voorhees in which he describes his visit to Monrovia. This letter was published on 13 February 1834 in the review cited. Tocqueville also seems to have found in the same newspaper information about the Bank and the division of federal territories.

A note from his pocket notebook 1 also shows that he thought about visiting the colony established by Negroes in Wilberforce, Canada: “Colony that the colored men are establishing at Wilberforce in upper Canada. It can be interesting to visit” (YTC, BIIa, and Voyage, OC, V, 1, p. 153). The project was not accomplished.

[49. ] This last regulation has been penned by the founders of the settlement themselves. They were afraid that something analogous to what is happening on the frontiers of the United States would happen in Africa, and that the Negroes, like the Indians, entering into contact with a race more enlightened than theirs, would be destroyed before being able to become civilized.

[e. ] Note in the manuscript: “{To civilization by stultification.}”

[50. ] Many other difficulties as well would be met in such an enterprise. If the Union, in order to transport Negroes from America to Africa, undertook to buy Blacks from those whose slaves they were, the price of Negroes increasing in proportion to their rarity would soon rise to enormous amounts, and it is inconceivable that the states of the North would consent to make such an expenditure, whose benefits they would not receive. If the Union removed the slaves of the South by force or acquired them at a low price set by the Union, it would create an insurmountable resistance among the states located in this part of the Union. From the two sides you end up at the impossible.

[51. ] In 1830, there were in the United States 2,010,527 slaves, and 319,467 emancipated; in all 2,329,994 Negroes; which formed a little more than one fifth of the total population of the United States in the same period.

[f. ] “I admit that if I had the misfortune to live in a country where slavery had been introduced and I had the liberty of the Negroes in my hand, I would keep myself from opening it” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 86).

[g. ] Beaumont reached the same conclusion in Marie, I, pp. 294-301.

[h. ] To the side, with a note: “≠(Verify this). See National Intelligencer, December 1833. South Carolina.≠” Possible reference to a speech by O’Connell, delivered on the occasion of an antislavery meeting, and reproduced in the number for 5 December 1833 of this review. See note c of p. 548.

[j. ] “Blacks are a foreign nation that you have conquered and to whom you give a nationality and the means of resistance by emancipating them or even by enlightening them” (YTC, CVh, 2, p. 98).

[52. ] Emancipation is not forbidden, but subjected to formalities that make it difficult.

[k. ] In a variant, he specifies that the story took place in North Carolina.