Majority Tyranny in Tocqueville’s America: The Failure of Negro Suffrage in 1846

Abstract

The question of the place of the Negro in American life has been and is still the greatest problem in American politics. Neither the formal mechanism of government nor the party system has been able adequately to cope with the problem of absorbing the Negro into the normal pattern of life. From the earliest days of the Republic, Americans have agonized over the problem, and their reactions, rationalizations, and generalizations over the Negro question are not wholly different today from what they were in the decades before the Civil War. Some historians have mistakenly assumed that the polarization of party opinion on the Negro, which plunged the country into civil war, was a normal pattern in American politics. They have assumed that the relationship between Whigs and Negroes was the same as that which later prevailed between Republicans and Negroes, that on the fundamental question in American politics, the Whigs and the Republicans were the same party and by implication had the same constituency. This was the case of Dixon Ryan Fox, who, while writing of such dynamic aspects of New York politics as the Decline of Aristocracy, nevertheless emphasized a certain continuity in the politics and the class basis of the Federalists and Whigs. Part of this continuity, as expressed by Fox, emphasized that the close relationship of New York State Whigs with Negroes was inherited from their Federalist predecessors and transmitted, in turn, to the Republican party.