“De La Democratie En Amerique”
(Democracy in America)
(1835)
Alexis de Tocqueville [Generally] speaking it requires great and constant efforts for men to create lasting ills; but there is one evil which has percolated furtively into the world: at first it was hardly noticed among the usual abuses of power; it began with an individual whose name history does not record; it was cast like an accursed seed somewhere on the ground; it then nurtured itself, grew without effort, and spread with the society that accepted it; that evil was slavery * * * Christianity has destroyed servitude; the Christians of the sixteenth century reestablished it, but they never admitted it as anything more than an exception in their social system, and they were careful to restrict it to one of the races of man. In this way they inflicted a smaller wound on humanity but one much harder to cure. It is important to make a careful distinction between slavery in itself and its consequences. The immediate ills resulting from slavery were almost the same in the ancient as in the modern world, but the consequences of these ills were different. In antiquity, the slave was of the same race as his master and was often his superior in education and enlightenment. Only freedom kept them apart; freedom once granted, they mingled easily. Therefore the ancients had a very simple means of delivering themselves from slavery and its consequences, namely, to free the slaves; and when they made a general use of this, they succeeded. * * * A natural prejudice leads a man to scorn anybody who has been his inferior, long after he has become his equal; the real inequality, due to fortune or the law, is always followed by an imagined inequality rooted in mores; but with the ancients, this secondary effect of slavery had a time limit, for the freedman was so completely like the man born free that it was soon impossible to distinguish between them. In antiquity the most difficult thing was to change the law; in the modern world the hard thing is to alter mores, and our difficulty begins where theirs ended. This is because in the modern world the insubstantial and ephemeral fact of servitude is most fatally combined with the physical and permanent fact of difference in race. Memories of slavery disgrace the race, and race perpetuates memories of slavery. No African came in freedom to the shores of the New World; consequently all those found there now are slaves or freedmen. The Negro transmits to his descendants at birth the external mark of his ignominy. The law can abolish servitude, but only God can obliterate its traces. The modern slave differs from his master not only in lacking freedom but also in his origin. You can make the Negro free, but you cannot prevent him facing the European as a stranger * * * Turning my attention to the United States of our own day, I plainly see that in some parts of the country the legal barrier between the two races is tending to come down, but not that of mores: I see that slavery is in retreat, but the prejudice from which it arose is immovable. In that part of the Union where the Negroes are no longer slaves, have they come closer to the whites? Everyone who has lived in the United States will have noticed just the opposite. Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than in those states where slavery was never known * * * In almost all the states where slavery has been abolished, the Negroes have been given electoral rights, but they would come forward to vote at the risk of their lives. When oppressed, they can bring an action at law, but they will find only white men among their judges. It is true that the laws make them eligible as jurors, but prejudice wards them off. The Negro’s son is excluded from the school to which the European's child goes. In the theaters he cannot for good money buy the right to sit by his former master’s side; in the hospitals he lies apart. He is allowed to worship the same God as the white man but must not pray at the same altars. He has his own clergy and churches. The gates of heaven are not closed against him, but his inequality stops only just short of the boundaries of the other world. When the Negro is no more, his bones are cast aside, and some difference in condition is found even in the equality of death * * * In the South the master has no fear of lifting the slave up to his level, for he knows that when he wants to he can always throw him down into the dust. In the North the white man no longer clearly sees the barrier that separates him from the degraded race, and he keeps the Negro at a distance all the more carefully because he fears lest one day they be confounded together. Thus it is that in the United States the prejudice rejecting the Negroes seems to increase in proportion to their emancipation and inequality cuts deep into mores as it is effaced from the laws. But if the relative position of the two races inhabiting the United States is as I have described it, why is it that the Americans have abolished slavery in the North of the Union, and why have they kept it in the South and aggravated its rigors? The answer is easy. In the United States people abolish slavery for the sake not of the Negroes but of the white men. The first Negroes were imported into Virginia about the year 1621. In America, as everywhere else in the world, slavery originated in the South. Thence it spread from one place to the next; but the numbers of the slaves grew less the farther one went north; there have always been very few Negroes in New England. When a century had passed since the foundation of the colonies, an extraordinary fact began to strike the attention of everybody. The population of those provinces that had practically no slaves increased in numbers, wealth, and well‐being more rapidly than those that had slaves. The inhabitants of the former had to cultivate the ground themselves or hire another's services; in the latter they had laborers whom they did not need to pay. With labor and expense on the one side and leisure and economy on the other, nonetheless the advantage lay with the former * * * As time went on, the Anglo‐Americans left the Atlantic coast and plunged daily farther into the solitudes of the West; there they encountered soils and climates that were new; they had obstacles of various sorts to overcome; their races mingled, southerners going north, and northerners south. But in all these circumstances the same fact stood out time and again: in general, the colony that had no slaves was more populous and prosperous than the one where slavery was in force * * * What is happening in the South of the Union seems to me both the most horrible and the most natural consequence of slavery. When I see the order of nature overthrown and hear the cry of humanity complaining in vain against the laws, I confess that my indignation is not directed against the men of our own day who are the authors of these outrages; all my hatred is concentrated against those who, after a thousand years of equality, introduced slavery into the world again. Whatever efforts the Americans of the South make to maintain slavery, they will not forever succeed. Slavery is limited to one point on the globe and attacked by Christianity as unjust and by political economy as fatal; slavery, amid the democratic liberty and enlightenment of our age, is not an institution that can last. Either the slave or the master will put an end to it. In either case great misfortunes are to be anticipated. If freedom is refused to the Negroes in the South, in the end they will seize it themselves; if it is granted to them, they will not be Slow to abuse it. Excerpt from Tocqueville, Alexis de. “Democracy in America” (Republished by Alfred Knopf, N.Y., 1994) Edited by the instructor