Working-Class Democracy in America: Sean Wilentz and the Jacksonian Worker

Abstract

As soon as he landed in New York City on May 11, 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville was recording the impressions that would be the foundation for Democracy in America, his magisterial volumes on American society in the age of Jackson. *'Never before has a people found for itself such a happy and fruitful basis of life. Here freedom is unrestrained, and subsists by being useful to every one without injuring anybody. Thanks to George Wilson Pierson's reading of Tocqueville's diaries we know whom he met on his travels; the list is a dazzling one. For New York City alone it included the banker Nathaniel Prime, former Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin, Chancellor James Kent, John R. Livingston Jr., Henry Dwight Sedgwick, John Duer, Ogden Hoffman, Philip Hone. Although Sean Wilentz's Chants Democratic devotes substantial space to aspects of life in New York City in the 1830s, although it too seeks to evaluate American society on a grand scale, and although its cast of characters is enor mous, Tocqueville does not appear, not even once. It is as though the New York City that he and Gustave de Beaumont visited was located on a planet other than the one Wilentz describes. Although the elite with whom Tocque ville spoke had much to do with setting the political context in which Wilentz's cast acted out their lives, virtually none except the prolific diarist Philip Hone appear in Wilentz's narrative. Two nations lived in juxtaposition but only im plicit interaction. Chants Democratic challenges Tocqueville's definition of what it is important to understand about antebellum New York, and, by exten sion, antebellum America. Tocqueville found in America a prosperous republic that was sharply dif