Sentiment and the Contradiction of Racial Inequality in Beaumont's Marie or, Slavery in the United States

Abstract

AbstractFrom the American travels of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in 1831 and 1832, there emerged three books aimed at presenting European audiences with the lessons to be learned from the young democratic regime of the United States: the cowritten On the Penitentiary System in the U.S. and Its Application in France, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Beaumont's Marie or, Slavery in the United States. This essay aims to clarify the specificity of Beaumont's account of the United States in Marie by focusing on the central role he gives to sentiment as both formal principle and analytical concept. Through a reading of the book's sentimental novel form and its use of moral sentimentalist theory, this essay argues that Beaumont depicts American racism as the effect of a fundamental flaw in European American national character: an incapacity for sentiment that renders the United States incapable of fully realizing its democratic principles.