Gustave De Beaumont Research Articles

America Through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (review)

Reviewed by: America Through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Benjamin Goluboff America Through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Edited by Aurelian Craitu and Jeffrey Isaac. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2009. The introduction, conclusion and some very insistent dust-jacket copy for this book—a volume of essays written chiefly by political scientists—announce its relevancy to our moment. The development of European views of the United States, the editors remind us, has special meaning when Bush's War on Terror has discredited the U.S. for many Europeans, and when American global hegemony is under debate and under attack. This is certainly true, but it is also true that these essays on the plural meanings of America for the European imagination are sufficiently interesting in their own right. The volume includes a thoughtful overview essay by Alan Levine that surveys and theorizes the idea of America for European political thinkers from Contact to 9/11. The essays that follow cover a range of texts from Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes to G.K. Chesterton's 1922 What I Saw in America; many of the essays intersect in the 1830s America that Tocqueville visited. In choosing their materials our editors have "sought to underscore the complexity of European experiences of America as well as the complexity of European reflections on America" (5). Taken together, these materials constitute "an illuminating dialogue about American exceptionalism." (7) Several thematic preoccupations persist in French and British commentary on the United States; these unify the volume and illustrate that the cult of American exceptionalism has long had its European votaries. The essays demonstrate how, as Levine puts it, "America has since its discovery served as an imagined alternative, for good or ill, to the existing reality of Europe" (38). Indeed many of the European writers who have concerned [End Page 117] themselves with this imagined alternative did so without the benefit of actually traveling to North America. The ironies associated with an imaginary America present themselves throughout the volume; they are developed most provocatively in Costica Bradatan's "Notes on Bishop Berkeley's New World." Consistently, too, European commentators have talked about America as if it were an historical condition, not just a place. From Berkeley's Bermudas as the "fifth act" of empire's drama to the "golden age" of liberty and toleration that Voltaire imagined was underway in William Penn's woods, America is imagined as a when as well as a where. Americanists in many fields may value these essays most for what they have to teach us about Alexis de Tocqueville. Christine Dunn Henderson frames and explores Tocqueville's relative silence on American slavery through a discussion of Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville's traveling companion, whose Marie; or, Slavery in the United States was published in 1835 with Democracy in America. Tocqueville is also collated with Victor Jacquemont, whose views of American social leveling anticipate his own, and with Victor Schoelcher, whose call for immediate abolition contrasts with Tocqueville's gradualism. With errors in grammar, usage, and typography, the volume is less tidily presented than most academic books this reader sees. America Through European Eyes is nevertheless a distinguished and illuminating collection. Benjamin Goluboff Lake Forest College Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life (review)

Reviewed by: Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life Jeff Broadwater (bio) Alexis de Tocqueville: A Life. By Hugh Brogan. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Pp. 724. Cloth, $35.00; Paper, $20.00.) In this fine biography, the British historian Hugh Brogan has put a life to the name made famous by the classic Democracy in America. The effort makes for a surprisingly tumultuous story. Alexis de Tocqueville was born into a noble family in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The Jacobins had executed Tocqueville’s great-grandfather, the noted jurist Guillaume Chrétien Lamoignon de Malesherbes, along with other members of the family, and Tocqueville’s father Hervé was imprisoned. But Hervé survived, the family retained its estates, and Tocqueville himself enjoyed a life of privilege. As he matured, the young aristocrat started to show signs of intellectual promise. After considering a career in the army, indulging in some ill-advised romantic dalliances, and fighting at least one duel, Tocqueville began to study law in 1823. He also began writing, developing a distinctive style that combined an eye for detail with a search for broader meanings. As a deputy prosecutor—in the American vernacular—he met another young lawyer, Gustave de Beaumont, who became his lifelong friend. Tocqueville’s interests ranged far beyond the law; he seemed convinced at an early age that the triumph of egalitarianism was inevitable. The problem for France, deeply polarized between Left and Right, would be reconciling equality, which Tocqueville feared would produce an insipid conformity, with meaningful freedom. Tocqueville struggled throughout his life to adapt the aristocratic traditions he revered to the [End Page 139] demands of a more liberal age. Brogan, understandably, struggles to categorize Tocqueville, calling him at one point “an active, improving conservative” (390), and at another “a very conservative liberal” (747). In the spring of 1829, Tocqueville attended the lectures of the noted historian François Guizot at the Sorbonne. They suggested to Tocqueville that the professor’s sociological approach to history could be applied to current politics. Tocqueville had half-heartedly supported Charles X until the king was forced from office in 1830; Tocqueville then took a loyalty oath, without enthusiasm, to Louis-Philippe. Disillusioned with French politics, Tocqueville and Beaumont decided to go to America. Their ostensible purpose was to study American prisons, but in reality, Tocqueville would visit the United States, he said, “to see what a great republic is like” (145). In America, they found a country even more unlike France than they had expected. Tocqueville was prone to superficial observations, and he made mistakes. He did not understand American political parties, he underestimated the influence of the presidency, he exaggerated the dangers of majority rule, and he thought Protestantism was dying out. But the prison mission forced him to deal with specifics, and the most original part of his work, according to Brogan, was his treatment of the American legal system. Most importantly, Tocqueville concluded to his own bewilderment that democracy seemed to be working in America. Back in France, Tocqueville began to write in violent spurts in the fall of 1834. The result, Brogan writes, was “the greatest book ever written on the United States” (278). What Tocqueville thought about the democracy he described is open to debate. Brogan believes the French Revolution had left Tocqueville fearful of the dangers of majority tyranny, but that his months in America had converted him to republicanism. His criticisms of democracy, Brogan argues, were in part a tactical device to make Democracy in America more palatable to the French monarchists he hoped to persuade. Tocqueville’s greatest insight, Brogan argues, was an emphasis on origins. American democracy had begun with the “religious republicans” of New England. Time, geography, an enlightened legal system, and “les moeurs”—”the intellectual and moral tendencies” of the people—had allowed the United States to develop a democratic system (269–70). When the first volume of Democracy in America appeared in 1835, it made its author famous and attracted the attention of such luminaries as John Stuart Mill. Tocqueville published a less successful sequel in 1840; [End Page 140] Americans typically read the books as one today. Brogan devotes a chapter...

Gustave de Beaumont

In this article I argue that the work of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont must be seen as one common comparative project in studying emerging modern democracies, just as one sees Marx and Engels as life-long collaborators in the critique of capitalism. In order to fully appreciate the finer details of this common project it is first necessary to acknowledge Gustave de Beaumont's genuine insights and contributions as they can be found in his letters and in his anti-slavery novel Marie. Tocqueville then comes to be seen as primus inter pares rather than the solitary genius as which he is normally portrayed.

Failed states and modern empires: Gustave de Beaumont's Ireland and French Algeria

When Gustave de Beaumont finished writing L’Irlande: sociale, politique et religieuse, he had high hopes for his book, but little inkling of the kind of reception it would receive. The book's publi...

What Happened to Tocqueville’s America?

James Q. Whitman What Happened to Tocqueville’s America? T H E R E W AS A T IM E W H E N A M E R IC A N C R IM IN A L P U N IS H M E N T W AS A m odel for the civilized world. That time, which now seems very long ago, was the early nineteenth centuiy. “The fame of the great advances that America had made w ith regard to prisons rang out,” as one German com m entator w rote in 1844. “Several governm ents sent delegates to the United States, in order to verify the extent and significance of these im provem ents, and the reports of those who returned from America spread the word widely” (von W urth, 1844: v). Indeed, the reputation of the early republic was high w hen it came to punishm ent—remarkably high, considering that Europeans of that era often viewed other aspects of American society with suspicion or contem pt.1 The 1820s and 1830s saw the publication of at least six significant books by foreign visitors to American penitentiaries, as well as num erous articles and parliam entary debates.2The m ost famous of the foreign visitors to m ake the long jour­ ney across the Atlantic was of course the young Alexis de Tocqueville, who arrived in May 1831 w ith his friend and collaborator Gustave de Beaumont. Tocqueville and Beaumont’s study, On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France, which appeared in 1833, was the m ost im portant contribution to the European debate. It was the study of America’s much-admired prisons that launched Tocqueville on his great career as the sociologist of democracy in America. In the early nineteenth century, America asserted its m oral leadership in the world for the first time, and it did so w ith regard to crim inal punishm ent. It is hard to look back on that era today w ith­ out feeling sorrow. Nobody thinks of America as a m oral leader any social research Vol 74 : No 2 : Summer 2007 251 longer. Certainly there are no European governments sending delega­ tions to learn from us about how to m anage prisons. Far from serv­ ing as a model for the world, contem porary America is widely viewed w ith horror. Michael Tonry, the most em inent student of comparative punishm ent, declared in 1998 that American punishm ent was “vastly harsher than in any other country to w hich the United States would ordinarily be com pared.”4 The situation has not improved since then, as the contributions to this issue attest at troubling length. Perhaps the m ost im portant acknowledgement ofAmerica’s sorry place on the far harsh end of the punishm ent spectrum came from the Supreme Court in 2005, w ith Justice A nthony Kennedy’s controver­ sial m ajority opinion in Roper v. Simmons. In that opinion, which abol­ ished the juvenile death penalty in the United States, Justice Kennedy observed that “only seven countries other than the United States have executed juvenile offenders since 1990: Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and China. Since then each o f these countries has either abolished capital punishm ent for juveniles or made public disavowal of the practice.. . . In sum, it is fair to say that the United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty” (Roperv. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551, 577 [2005]). Thanks to Roper, w hich angered m any com m enta­ tors w ith its citations to foreign law, the juvenile death penalty is now gone. But there remains a host of other practices w ith regard to which the United States stands alone, especially w hen compared w ith other advanced industrial democracies. To take only one example, there is the prosecution ofjuveniles “as adults,” carried out in the United States in ways that regularly shock European observers. This American descent into harsh punishm ent is largely the work of the last several decades, which have seen...

Ecrits sur Tocqueville (review)

Reviewed by: Ecrits sur Tocqueville Jonathan Beecher Sainte-Beuve, Charles-Augustin . Ecrits sur Tocqueville. Edition établie par Michel Brix . Jaignes: La Chasse aux Snark, 2004. Pp. 192. ISBN 2-914015-35-6. Michel Brix, who is well known for his authoritative studies and editions of Nerval, has had the good idea of bringing together in a single small volume, the three articles on Alexis de Tocqueville published by Sainte-Beuve over a period of thirty years. The earliest of these articles is a review of the first two volumes of De la Démocratie en Amérique, which appeared in April 1835 just a few weeks after their publication. The second and third articles, which are more substantial, appeared in 1861 and 1865 and were reviews of several of the volumes of Tocqueville's work and correspondence published following the great liberal's death in 1859. Although Tocqueville and Sainte-Beuve were not close personal friends, they understood and appreciated each other. In acknowledging the 1835 review, Tocqueville wrote Sainte-Beuve of the "intellectual and moral intimacy" that would "reign between you and me if we had the opportunity to know each other better." They never had that opportunity. But thirty years later Tocqueville's friend and executor, Gustave de Beaumont, could tell Sainte-Beuve, speaking of his 1861 review, that "even though here and there you criticized a book that others could only praise, you were the only person who really understood Tocqueville as a writer and a stylist." One of the obvious interests of this volume is the opportunity it gives us to see how well Sainte-Beuve understood Tocqueville and to reconsider our own views concerning some of the issues raised by Sainte-Beuve. Not surprisingly, Sainte-Beuve's reviews mix biographical detail with literary analysis and criticism. Although Sainte-Beuve has little to say about the fine points of Tocqueville's analysis of Old Regime France and Jacksonian America, there is much on Tocqueville as a stylist and on the psychological and moral foundations of his thought. Taken together, the reviews add up to a richly textured intellectual portrait of Tocqueville as a man of complexity and nuance and a political thinker divided in his loyalties. "Although belonging to the Old Regime by birth and by his refined and delicate tastes," writes Sainte-Beuve, Tocqueville "fully accepted '89." And Sainte-Beuve sees very well the fundamental tension in Tocqueville's thinking between liberty and equality: "A man of '89, he is nevertheless so jealously devoted to liberty that he is watchful and wary with regard to equality, for which he is such a sullen adviser that he might at times be called an enemy." Elsewhere Sainte-Beuve writes of Tocqueville's "éloquence douloureuse" concerning the rise of democratic societies and compares him to Aeneas weeping for Dido as he founds Rome. Sainte-Beuve's main argument with Tocqueville focuses on the claim, presented most [End Page 686] forcefully at the outset of De la Démocratie en Amérique, that human history is unfolding according to an irresistible and "providential" plan, according to which traditional distinctions and hierarchies are giving way to an increasingly egalitarian and uniform society. Here Sainte-Beuve argues, in terms that seem to ignore Tocqueville's nuances and oft-stated qualifications, that history rarely displays such long-term trends and patterns, that history is the realm of the contingent, and that individual choices can never be reduced to clear patterns of cause and effect. Sainte-Beuve has little sympathy for what he describes as Tocqueville's excessive fondness for abstract categories, a fondness that leaves him in his first work much less concerned with grasping the specific features of American democracy than with understanding "the effects and dangers of equality in the modern world." In the case of L'Ancien Régime et la révolution, where Tocqueville's main concern is with the negative effects of monarchical centralization, Sainte-Beuve criticizes the narrowness of Tocqueville's perspective – his imposition of "a fixed and exclusive viewpoint" on the complex history of the Old Regime. Sainte-Beuve also argues, writing under the Second Empire, that centralization itself is not such a bad thing...

Ireland: social, political, and religious

Paralleling his friend Alexis de Tocqueville's visit to America, Gustave de Beaumont travelled through in the mid-1830s to observe its people and society. In Ireland, he chronicles the history of the Irish and offers up a national portrait on the eve of the Great Famine. Published to acclaim in France, Ireland remained in print there until 1914. The English edition, translated by William Cooke Taylor and published in 1839, was not reprinted. This rediscovered masterpiece, in a single volume for the first time, reproduces the 19th century Taylor translation and includes an introduction on Beaumont and his world.

Bentham and Tocqueville on Pauperism

Alexis de Tocqueville and Jeremy Bentham belong to two different generations. When Tocqueville made his firt trip to the South of England in 1833 and, the following year, when the publication of De la Démocratie en Amérique launched his career as a successful political writer, Bentham had died a couple of years before. Bentham had certainly never heard about a young hopeful French writer called Tocqueville. At least there is no mention of his name in Bentham’s Works and Correspondence and why should there be? However Bentham’s theories were not unknown to Tocqueville, more particularly those related to prisons. Tocqueville became acquainted with Bentham’s Panopticon when he and Gustave de Beaumont were commissioned by the French Interior Ministry to write a report on the American prison system which was subsequently published under Du système pénitentianire aux États-Unis in 1831.

Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and the Reform of Colonial Slavery by Carolyn Vellenga Berman

MLR, I02.4, 2007 1127 hegemony may be under threat.There aremoments when Mignolo's prose becomes a trifleconvoluted, and thenon-academic readermay struggle occasionally to followhis arguments. None the less, in the current context ofUS politics, to advocate a diverse, multilingual world inwhich differentworld-views and cultures can coexist side by side inmutual respect, differentbut coeval, may be more than a little idealistic, but it is remarkably courageous aswell. KING'S COLLEGE LONDON SUSAN CASTILLO Creole Crossings: Domestic Fiction and theReform ofColonial Slavery. By CAROLYN VELLENGA BERMAN. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press. 2oo6. xi+240 pp. $39.95; ?2I.50. ISBN 978-0-80I4-4384--8. Inmany ways, the term 'Creole' is the sitewhere theunstable dark side of themaster narratives we have inherited from the earlymodern period and theEnlightenment colonialism, race, slavery,nationhood, thepublic and private spheres-is most starkly cast into relief.This radical instability calls intoquestion many of the seemingly fixed categories which, even today,govern our world. In Creole Crossings Carolyn Vellenga Berman has chosen to trace the convergence of discourses related to colonial and domestic reform in the fiction and politics of the anti-slavery movement. In doing so, she has provided a fascinating analysis of theways inwhich many eighteenth and nineteenth-century domestic fictional narratives,with their foregrounding of is sues linked to race, slavery, and abolition, are destabilized by the figureof theCreole woman. Berman begins by offering an overview of the etymology of the term 'Creole' and theways inwhich ithas evolved in French and inBritish and American English, illustrating its slipperiness and radical ambiguity. This is followed by a brief study of characterizations of Creoles in several novels, such as Helena Wells's Constantia Neville; or, The West Indian (i 8oo), Gustave de Beaumont's Marie, ou l'esclavage aux Etats- Unis (i 83 5), Walt Whitman's Franklin Evans (i 842), and Eugene Sue's Les Mysteres deParis (1843). This is followed by a chapter on Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie,which according toBerman not only situatesmiddle-class domesti city in a colonial landscape, but also probes the linksbetween issues linked toCreole identity (coloniality, slavery, and education) and conceptions of nationhood. After this,Berman goes on to look at Creole characters and the roles they play innovels written and published during the early years of European abolitionist movements, which, however, concern themselves with women's rights rather thanwith slavery. The following two chapters illustrate, as Berman states, 'how the Creole figure served to emphasize this nexus between family practices and the (racial) qualifica tions fornational belonging in the laterperiod of slavery reform' (p. 24). She analyses Charlotte Bronte's linkage inyane Eyre of thediscourses onmadness and on theCre ole, inwhich theCreole figureofBertha becomes a synecdoche related to colonial and domestic reform, and situates her reading within the context of existing debates on emancipation, parliamentary reform, the status of governesses, penal systemswithin the colonies, and the treatment given to thementally ill.Chapter 5 is probably the strongest in the book, with its study of representations of domestic space (domestic inboth the familial and the national sense) in anti-slavery writing by theAmerican authors Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Jacobs. As Berman points out, Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin contests the institution of slavery by representing French colonial notions of the family that call into question rigidAnglo-American racial categories, as in the figureof the quadroon Cassy, who escapes from slavery inLouisiana. None the less, she observes, Stowe by championing maternal over paternal custody of chil dren ultimately repudiates the French model inorder to reinscribeAnglo-American I I28 Reviews familial norms. Harriet Jacobs, on the other hand, is seen by Berman as reclaiming theCreole inheritance rejected by Stowe when she envisions 'an alternative Ameri can nation modelled on the family consisting of her fatherlessmulatto children and herself' (pp. 24-25). In thisperspective, theCreole linkage between female education and social reproduction is later transmuted into (and contained within) the issue of redefining family,race, and nation in theperiod of emancipation. The book concludes with an examination ofCreole politics in JeanRhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (I966). In Creole Crossings Berman has addressed not one but several extraordinarily com plex issues...

"Who We Are": Lawrence Levine as William Jamesian Pragmatist and as Gustave de Beaumont

First of all, I wish to thank Roy Rosenzweig, Lawrence Glickman, James W. Cook, Olivia Ryan, and Mike O'Malley, organizers of this conference to honor a historian of enormous import, a brilliant scholar of intellectual generosity and personal warmth. Although I was neither student nor colleague of Larry Levine's, as a historian I grew up under the sign of his early work. As a member of the professoriate, I have shared his views on the need to open the American mind and his commitment to diversity in American student bodies and faculties. For some thirty years I have loved his writing, laughed at his jokes, appreciated his wife, and, in China in the mid-1980s, accompanied him on his travels. His illness saddens me deeply, even as I hope for his recovery. I know that as serious as is his cancer, healing remains possible. I take great pleasure in the opportunity to think aloud about one part of Larry Levine's provocative oeuvre. At least since the 1980s and surely since long before then, Levine has focused on, in his words, “who we are”: what it means to be an American, as manifested in conceptions of the shape and meaning of the past.1 I want to relate his long-term preoccupation with American identity to the work of four of his predecessors: two aristocratic French friends and fellow travelers, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859) and Gustave de Beaumont (1802–1866), the American philosopher William James (1842–1910), and, of course, the contemporary who inspired Levine, Allan Bloom (1930–1992). Like Levine and Bloom, born about a century after the French aristocrats' visit to the United States, Tocqueville and Beaumont explored the nature of American identity. They wrestled with many of Levine's and Bloom's issues, matters now falling under the rubric of multiculturalism. Just as Levine saw himself as James's intellectual descendant, so Bloom harked back to Tocqueville.

Tocqueville's Comparisons:Choices and Lessons

"lt was necessary to glance briefly beyond France in order to make sense of what follmvs; for I dare say that whoever has studicd and seen only France, will never understand anything about the French Revolution." These words, appearing in Tocqueville's last published work, in 1856, were indicative of his perspective about every subject to which he turned his attention. In his working manuscript for the Democrary Tocqueville wrote, "lt is only by comparisons that one can judge things." Still earlier, his attendance at François Guzot's influential course of lectures on the history of civilization in the late 1820's was preceded by a long meditation on the lessons of English history. These rcflections were formulated in Tocqueville's very first surviving letter to Gustave de Beaumont, who \vas to be Tocquevillc's lifelong friencl and traveling companion in America and England.

Brothers and Others

After their voyage through the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont each wrote about the nature of race relations there. The author offers two theses regarding the nature of U.S. racism and its relation to U.S. democracy as revealed in Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s texts. First, these works illustrate how European Americans, in subordinating Indians and blacks, produce not a politically and socially egalitarian democracy situated amid an otherwise racist society and culture but, rather, a social state internally structured by inegalitarian relations with non-Europeans. Second, in Tocqueville’s and Beaumont’s portraits there operate (1) a critical narrative of European Americans’ fraternalized relations with Indians, marked by sibling-rivalry-like democratic envy, and (2) a critical narrative of European Americans’ relations of absolute differentiation with blacks, marked by desire to secure inalienable status. Both strategies are, nonetheless, rooted in European American anxiety over democracy’s flux.

Stairway to Redemption: America’s Encounter with the British Prison Treadmill

Stairway to Redemption: America’s Encounter with the British Prison Treadmill DAVID H. SHAYT The special question on the treadmill is that of labor in general, so grave for several countries of Europe and pre­ senting no difficulty to the United States. In that country the treadmill would be conducive to no good whatever. On the contrary, as production is yet in the United States below the wants of consumption, it is the interest of society to increase production, and to teach the prisoners a useful art. . . In the fall of 1822, where 26th Street met the East River in New York City, sixteen men could be seen balanced atop a barrel-like contraption that was laid on its side with a shaft running through it. The men were rotating the barrel with their feet like some great log in a millpond. A bell rang out each time the barrel made a complete rotation. The men were prisoners at the city penitentiary, and this was their punishment.2 The prisoner-powered treadmill was a highly successful British creation, but the attempt to introduce it to the United States quickly proved futile. Failure, however, does not diminish the significance of such a device to an understanding of the industrial history of both nations. First, as with any rejection of an imported technology, the story sheds light on the complex processes of adaptation. Rejection exposes aspects of a society’s self-image that otherwise can remain obscure. Morever, the different directions taken by British and American industrialization often have been reflected in the systems Mr. Shayt is with the Division of Community Life at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. He expresses thanks to all whose special insight and assistance with critical source material helped make the thoroughness of this study possible. 'Gustave de Beaumont and Alexis de Tocqueville, On the Penitentiary System in America and Its Application in France, trans. Francis Lieber (Philadelphia, 1833; repr., Cham­ paign, Ill., 1964), pp. 202-3, n. 20. ‘‘Commercial Advertiser 25 (October 15, 1822): 2.© 1989 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/89/3004-0007$01.00 908 America’s Encounter with the British Prison Treadmill 909 adopted (and not adopted) to punish common prisoners, a view set forth more precisely by two German social scientists some fifty years ago: “Every system of production tends to discover punishments which correspond to its productive relationships.”3 In their attempts to modernize methods of punishment, prison officials, reformers, and legislators in both Britain and America once pondered ways of combining new penal philosophies with new forms of prison architecture and new technologies to produce right behavior among convicts? But what ultimately appeared suitable in one na­ tional context did not necessarily appear the same way in another. A case in point is the prison treadmill. British Background The death penalty and transportation (forced emigration) stood as two pillars of the preindustrial British response to unlawful behavior. Abandoned buildings and ships (or “hulks”) frequently were used for short-term confinement and for those awaiting sentencing.5 For even minor infractions, the liberal use of capital punishment and banish­ ment to distant colonies reflected both popular and official attitudes toward the prompt removal from society of unwanted or unworthy elements. The alternative concept of imprisonment as a civic duty to lawbreakers, with their eventual rehabilitation as the goal, arrived only with considerable agitation by religious activists and institutional reformers in the late 18th century and early 19th. In either form of imprisonment, the introduction of labor-making technologies was a logical course of action, meshing well with other prevailing attitudes toward the moral and economic values of hard work. Idleness, especially among prison populations, was considered by many as a sin against God and a crime against the common good.6 With the passage of the Penitentiary Act or Hard Labour Bill of 1779, the perception of prisoners as a potent source of manual labor was royally sanctioned by a general call for organized work as a means ’Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York, 1939), p. 5. ’Robin Evans, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison...

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

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

Religion in America

While some interpreters have claimed that Alexis De Tocque ville was less concerned with the intrinsic truth of religious concepts than with their beneficial effects upon society, it has never been denied that, whether Tocqueville's intent was re ligious or utilitarian, a key portion of Democracy in America is devoted to the role of religion in the United States, and a plea for an approximately similar role in any future mass societies. His commentary is important as an interpretation of the lasting values of our culture, and his observations in Democracy (1835; 1840), his and Gustave de Beaumont's On the Penitentiary System in the United States (1835), his diaries, sketches, letters, and Beaumont's Marie; or, Slavery in the United States (1835) also provide an historical critique of the religious condition of America in the 1830s. At that time, Tocqueville was a believing Catholic, but not an ardently practicing Catholic, and from this position he achieved one of the most objective views of American religion. Just as he did not fully reject the old elitist political order nor fully admire the new order of democracy, he could neither reject Catholicism nor fully endorse religious pluralism. He was concerned with religion, but he was not rigidly orthodox and therefore made no absolute prejudgments about religion in America.

"The Dogma of the Sovereignty of the People": Alexis De Tocqueville's Religion in America

While some interpreters have claimed that Alexis De Tocque ville was less concerned with the intrinsic truth of religious concepts than with their beneficial effects upon society, it has never been denied that, whether Tocqueville's intent was re ligious or utilitarian, a key portion of Democracy in America is devoted to the role of religion in the United States, and a plea for an approximately similar role in any future mass societies. His commentary is important as an interpretation of the lasting values of our culture, and his observations in Democracy (1835; 1840), his and Gustave de Beaumont's On the Penitentiary System in the United States (1835), his diaries, sketches, letters, and Beaumont's Marie; or, Slavery in the United States (1835) also provide an historical critique of the religious condition of America in the 1830s. At that time, Tocqueville was a believing Catholic, but not an ardently practicing Catholic, and from this position he achieved one of the most objective views of American religion. Just as he did not fully reject the old elitist political order nor fully admire the new order of democracy, he could neither reject Catholicism nor fully endorse religious pluralism. He was concerned with religion, but he was not rigidly orthodox and therefore made no absolute prejudgments about religion in America. All previous studies have either concentrated on Tocqueville's

The Dynamics of a Divided Regime

‘L'Irlande est une petite contreé sur laquelle se débattent les plus grandes questions de la politique, de la morale, et de l'humanité.’Gustave de Beaumont, 1839IT IS MUCH EASIER TO EXPLAIN THE COURSE OF A FULLY LEGITIMATE, a fully repudiated or a fully coercive regime than to explain what goes on in a regime that is persistently divided. Northern Ireland is an excellent case study of a regime that lacks the stability or quasistability of these three familiar types of political authority. The regime there has always been divided, i.e., the constitution is supported by only a portion of the population, and a substantial fraction of its nominal subjects are inclined to disobey basic political 1aws. It is particularly striking that this should happen in a land where the institutions of government are explicitly modelled after the Parliament of the United Kingdom to which it is bound, and the culture permits the easy assimilation of its emigrants to life in Britain and America. To understand why industrialization and urbanization together have not produced a fully legitimate regime, one must look back into the history of Ireland, and examine the strategy of political leaders who commenced governing in less than ideal circumstances. Then one can begin to understand the multiple and extreme challenges to the regime today.

Marie or Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America

Gustave de Beaumont's 1835 work, Marie, or Slavery in the United States is structured as a fascinating essay on race interwoven with a novel. It is the story of socially forbidden love between an idealistic young Frenchman and an apparently white American woman with African ancestry. The couple's idealism fades as they repeatedly face racial prejudice and violence, and are eventually forced to seek shelter among exiled Cherokee people. Notable as the first abolitionist novel to focus on racial prejudice rather than bondage as a social evil, Beaumont's work was also the first to link prejudice against Native Americans to prejudice against blacks. This translation, with a new introduction by Gerard Fergerson, provides modern readers with interesting insights into the inconsistencies and injustices of democratic Jacksonian society.

Tocqueville and Beaumont in Philadelphia: Their Interest in the Society of Friends

54Bulletin of Friends Historical Association merely a synonym for conscience? Or were they used with some foreshadowing of the very special sense in which Friends have come to employ them? The distinction is, of course, vital. As has been indicated, I have done the first mile of research; now let a better qualified person do the second. Tocqueville and Beaumont in Philadelphia: Their Interest in the Society of Friends By Arthur W. Silver* IN HIS scholarly study of Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America1 George Wilson Pierson raises the question whether the two young men secured any letters of introduction from Lafayette, the Hero of Two Worlds and the cousin of Beaumont. These two men were totally unsympathetic with Lafayette politically after his part in the July Revolution of 1830, but realized the value of letters from him on any visit to America. They had therefore "pocketed their pride" and solicited letters which Lafayette apparently forgot to leave for young Beaumont to pick up.2 But eventually the Hero remembered and gave them at least one letter. It was addressed to Samuel R. Wood, the Warden of Eastern Penitentiary.3 This letter was found in a scrapbook collected by Wood's niece, Mary Richardson.4 It is dated March 28, 1831, only five * Arthur W. Silver is a member of the Department of History, Temple University. 1 Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York, 1938) . 2 See Pierson, p. 36. A frantic letter by someone in Lafayette's household to James Fenimore Cooper, then in Paris, on behalf of letters for the young men is the only intervention cited. 3 Samuel R. Wood (1791-1858), a Friend, was long a member of the Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. He was also a member of the board of commissioners which built Eastern Penitentiary, and was selected by the Prison Society to lobby with the legislature in 1828-29 to secure the final adoption of the "Pennsylvania system." He was Warden from 1829 to 1840. (Data from family papers; Harry Elmer Barnes The Evolution of PenoL·gy in Pennsylvania [Indianapolis, 1927] p. 159; N. K. Teeters, They Were in Prison [Philadelphia, 1937]. My wife, Marion Rhoads Silver, has his portrait with a picture of Eastern Penitentiary in the background. 4 It is in the possession of her great-niece, my wife. Notes and Documents55 days before the two young men were to sail on the Havre. How well acquainted Lafayette and Wood were is unknown. The letter seems, however, to be little more than a mere formal introduction. It was folded, but without the usual outer address, on a single sheet of paper and reads as follows: Paris, March 28, 1831. My dear Sir: Permit me to introduce to you MM. de Tocqueville and Beaumont two french Gentlemen who Have offered to go over to the United States in quest of information relative to the penitentary Reforming System. Their plan Has Been adopted By Government Under whose auspices they undertake the philanthropic Voyage, to whom can I Better Recommend them than to you, my dear Sir, to your patronage, your lessons, your experience, your Benevolent High minded feelings? I am Happy in the opportunity to protest the affectionate [?] regards of Your sincere friend Lafayette. There actually seems to have been some rivalry between two groups of philanthropists of Philadelphia, each trying to monopolize the attention of the two young French investigators . These two factions were the theorists and the practical men, but both groups were equally enthusiastic over the new Eastern Penitentiary. Which group succeeded is not clear. But Samuel R. Wood, one of the practical men, was so eager to make their acquaintance that he went to the French Consul a week before the arrival of the young Frenchmen and asked "to be notified the very instant of our arrival in this city," according to a letter of Tocqueville to his sister.5 In any case, they became well acquainted with him and seem to have not only consulted him about various matters within his professional purview, but also to have found in him an interesting source of information about the Society of Friends...