from the French Ministry of Justice, they were obliged to cut short their visit to America and were now hurrying in order to return to France within a year.20
A similar observation might be made about their four-day stay in Cincinnati. While it is undeniably true that Tocqueville used his letters of recommendation in order to secure interviews with lawyers—and also Supreme Court Justice John McLean—these conversations were wide ranging and led Tocqueville to reflect extensively upon the character of the rapidly expanding American West. “More than any other part of the Union,” Tocqueville confided to his notebook, “Ohio strikes me as a society totally occupied with its own affairs, and, through work, with
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rapid growth.”21 The whole of society, he observed, is an industry, and everyone has come there to make money. Of Cincinnati, in particular, Tocqueville remarked:
It is always difficult to know exactly why cities develop and grow. Chance always plays a part. Cincinnati is situated in one of the most fertile plains of the New World, and because of this it began to attract settlers. Factories were built to supply the needs of these settlers and before long the whole of the region of the West, and the success of these industries attracted new industries and more settlers than ever. Cincinnati was, and I believe still is, a transit point for many shipments to and from the Mississippi and Missouri valleys to Europe and for trade between New York, and the northern states and Louisiana.22
From this, and other similar observations in his notebooks, it would be difficult to conclude that Tocqueville did not either observe or appreciate the importance of the rapid industrial and commercial progress that was transforming America and pushing its population ever westward.
Nevertheless, this does not appear in Democracy in America. Indeed, in his printed text, this part of Tocqueville’s journey into America figured largely as the occasion for him to reflect upon how, when traveling down the Ohio River, the “traveller … navigates so to speak between liberty and servitude.” “The white on the right bank,” Tocqueville commented, “obliged to live by his own efforts, made material well-being the principal goal of his existence.… The American on the left bank scorns not only work, but all the enterprises that work brings to success.… So slavery not only prevents whites from making a fortune; it turns them from wanting to do so.”23 These remarks were anticipated in his notebooks and in a letter to his father.24 Yet, if one looks a little closer at the printed text, one also sees a curious footnote in which Tocqueville
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makes reference to the efforts of the state of Ohio to ensure the building of a canal between Lake Erie and the Ohio River, thanks to which “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.”25 This observation is also prefigured in his travel notes.
I draw particular attention to this reference to the American canal network because, when comparisons are made between the accounts provided by Tocqueville and the Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, it is usually to suggest that Tocqueville ignored the transport revolution that was turning an agrarian society into an entirely different kind of economic order. According to Wills, for example, Tocqueville “rides around on steamboats without noticing how crucially they were changing American life.… He also ignores the infant railroad industry and the burgeoning canal systems.” It is undoubtedly true that Chevalier devoted a larger proportion of his efforts to detailing the routes of transportation across the North American continent, but just as Tocqueville and Beaumont were commissioned to report on the American penitentiary system, Chevalier was assigned a similar task with regard to the new nation’s railway network.
The fact of the matter is that Tocqueville was not unfamiliar with these aspects of the American economic infrastructure. In his Notebook E, the section recording his impressions of Cincinnati and Ohio is followed almost immediately by a section titled “Means of Increasing the Public Prosperity.” “Roads, canals and the mails,” Tocqueville there wrote, “play a prodigious part in the prosperity of the Union.” America, he continued, not only enjoyed a greater sum of prosperity than any other country but also had “done more to provide for … free communications.” One of the first things done in a new state was to create a postal service such that “there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild that letters and newspapers are not delivered at least once a week.” Main roads are built in the middle of a wilderness and almost always before the arrival of those whom they were meant to serve. America, Tocqueville further observed, “has planned and built immense canals. It already has more railways than France. Everyone recognizes that the discovery of steam immeasurably increased the strength and prosperity
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of the Union by facilitating rapid communications among the various parts of this vast country.” Moreover, because Americans were not a sedentary people, they felt the need for means of communication with a liveliness and zeal unknown in France. As to the means employed to open up communications in America, Tocqueville saw that, while “the American government does not involve itself in everything,” when it came to “projects of great public utility,” they were seldom left to the care of “private individuals.” The states led the way.26
Why did Tocqueville not include these observations in Democracy in America? Wills has a simple answer. “Tocqueville,” he tells us in a footnote, “took some notes on these matters, but did not consider them important enough to reflect on in Democracy.” There might be another explanation. Tocqueville himself made the following remark: “To return to the subject of roads and other means of rapidly transporting the products of industry and thought from one place to another, I do not claim to have made the discovery that these promote prosperity, for this is a universally accepted truth.”27 As far as Tocqueville was concerned, in other words, these conclusions were so blindingly obvious that they did not merit comment or inclusion in his text.
There is a further, and equally compelling, reason why Tocqueville chose to exclude these issues from his account. This is found in the first paragraph of the critical edition of Democracy in America provided by Eduardo Nolla. It reads as follows: “The work you are about to read is not a travelogue, the reader can rest easy. I do not want him to be concerned with me. You will also not find in this book a complete summary of all the institutions of the United States; but I flatter myself that, in it, the public will find new documentation and, from it, will gain useful knowledge about a subject that is more important for us than the fate of America and no less worthy of holding our attention.”28 Tocqueville therefore intended quite explicitly to distance his own inquiry from
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the extensive travel literature that had flourished in France from the 1780s onward and that, for the most part, had focused its attention upon the flora and fauna of the American continent, its majestic landscape, and the rude manners of its people.29 To continue in this vein was no part of Tocqueville’s purpose. Again his perspective is clarified by the Nolla critical edition. In a first version of the drafts, Tocqueville wrote: “I have not said everything that I saw, but I have said everything that I believed at the same time true and useful [v: profitable] to make known, and without wanting to write a treatise on America, I thought only to help my fellow citizens resolve a question that must interest us more deeply.”30 He went on to add the following remark: “I see around me facts without number, but I notice one of them that dominates all the others: it is old; it is stronger than laws, more powerful than men; it seems to be a direct product of the divine will; it is the gradual development of democracy in the Christian world.”31 This was the subject of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and this was so, as he declared in the opening lines of the published version, because “[a]mong the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck me more vividly than the equality of conditions.”32
This
