Democracy in America

by Alexis de Tocqueville

Hardly had the colony been created when they introduced slavery;

Slavery, as we shall explain later,*3 dishonors work; it introduces idleness into society, and with it, ignorance and haughtiness, poverty and luxury. It enervates the forces of the intellect and puts human activity to sleep. The influence of slavery, combined with the English character, explains the mores and social state of the South.

In the English colonies of the North, better known under the name of the New England states,5 the two or three principal ideas that today form the bases of the social theory of the United States were combined.

New England’s principles spread at first to the neighboring states; later, they gradually won out in the most distant, and in the end, if I can express myself so, they penetrated the entire confederation.

The emigrants who came to settle on the shores of New England all belonged to the well-to-do classes of the mother country.

But what distinguished them above all from all the others was the very goal of their undertaking.

It was not necessity that forced them to abandon their country;

nor did they come to the New World in order to improve their situation or to...

The emigrants or, as they so well called themselves, the pilgrims, belonged to that sect in England whose austere principles had brought the name Puritan to be given to it.

Persecuted by the government of the mother country, the rigor of their principles offended by the daily workings of the society in which they lived, the Puritans sought a land so barbarous and so abandoned by the world that they might yet be permitted to live there in their manner and pray to God in freedom.

The emigrants numbered nearly one hundred fifty men, women, and children. Their goal was to found a colony on the banks of the Hudson; but, after having wandered on the ocean for a long time, they were finally forced to land on the arid coasts of New England, at the place where the town of Plymouth stands today.

Puritanism,

was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine. As soon as they disembarked on the inhospitable shore

the first care of the emigrants was therefore to organize themselves in a society. They immedi...

This took place in 1620. From that period onward, emigration never ceased.

The population of New England grew rapidly, and while the hierarchy of ranks still classed men despotically in the mother country, the colony more and more offered the new spectacle of a society homogeneous in all its parts.

The English colonies, and this was one of the principal causes of their prosperity, always enjoyed more internal freedom and more political independence than the colonies of other peoples; but nowhere was this principle of freedom more completely applied than in the New England states.

The means employed by the British government to people these new domains were of different natures:

in certain cases, the king subjected a portion of the New World to a governor

this was the colonial system adopted in the rest of Europe.

At other times, he conceded ownership of certain portions of a country to one man or to one company.

Finally, a third system consisted in giving to a certain number of emigrants the right to form themselves into a political society under the patronage of the mother country, and to govern themselves in everything that was not contrary to its laws.

This mode of colonization, so favorable to freedom, was put into practice only in New England.

the colony of Massachusetts.

Nothing is both more singular and more instructive than the legislation of this period;

we particularly distinguish, as one of the most characteristic, the code of laws that the little state of Connecticut passed in 1650.

first with penal laws;

the legislators are above all preoccupied with the care of maintaining moral order and good mores in society; so they constantly penetrate into the domain of conscience, and there is almost no sin that does not fall subject to the censure of the magistrate.

Furthermore, one must not lose sight of the fact that these bizarre or tyrannical laws were not imposed; that they were voted by the free concurrence of all the interested persons themselves; and that mores were still more austere and more puritanical than the laws.

Beside this penal legislation,

a body of political laws which, drafted two hundred years ago, still seems to anticipate from very far the spirit of freedom in our age.

intervention of the people in public affairs, free voting of taxes, responsibility of the agents of power, individual freedom and judgment by jury were established there without discussion and in fact.

These generative principles were applied and developed as no nation of Europe has yet dared to do.

In the laws of Connecticut, as in all those of New England, one sees arise and develop the township independence that in our day still forms the principle and the life of American freedom.

In most European nations, political existence began in the higher regions of society and was communicated little by little and always in an incomplete manner to the various parts of the social body. In America, on the contrary, one can say that the township had been organized before the county, the county before the state, the state before the Union.

monarchy is the law of the state, but a republic is already very much alive in the township.

Affairs that touch the interest of all are treated in the public square and within the general assembly of citizens, as in Athens.

When one studies attentively the laws that were promulgated during this first age of the American republics, one is struck by the intelligence about government and advanced theories of the legislator. It is evident that he has a more elevated and more complete idea of the duties of society toward its members than European legislators at that time, and that he imposes on it obligations that it still avoided elsewhere.

it is by the prescriptions relative to public education that, from the beginning,*8 one sees revealed in the full light of day the original character of American civilization.

provisions that create schools in all townships and oblige the inhabitants, under penalty of heavy fines, to tax themselves to support them.

in America, it is religion that leads to enlightenment; it is the observance of divine laws that guides man to freedom.

everywhere on the continent of Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute royalty was triumphing over the debris of the oligarchic and feudal freedom of the Middle Ages.

In the bosom of that obscure democracy, which still had not sired generals, or philosophers, or great writers, a man could rise in the presence of a free people and give, to the acclamation of all, this beautiful definition of freedom:

“[N]or would I have you to mistake in the point of your own liberty. There is a liberty of corrupt nature, which is affected both by men and beasts, to do what they list; and this liberty is inconsistent with authority, impatient of all restraint; by this liberty, Sumus Omnes Deteriores [we are all inferior]; ’tis the grand enemy of truth and peace, and all the ordinances of God are bent against it. But there is a civil, a moral, a federal liberty, which is the proper end and object of authority; it is a liberty for that only which is just and good; for this liberty you are to stand with the hazard of your very lives.”

to put the character of Anglo-American civilization in its true light. It is the product (and this point of departure ought constantly to be present in one’s thinking) of two perfectly distinct elements that elsewhere have often made war with each other, but which, in America, they have succeeded in incorporating somehow into one another and combining marvelously. I mean to speak of the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom.

While held within the tightest bonds of certain religious beliefs, they were free of all political prejudices.

Thus in the moral world, everything is classified, coordinated, foreseen, decided in advance. In the political world, everything is agitated, contested, uncertain; in the one, there is passive though voluntary obedience; in the other, there are independence, contempt for experience, and jealousy of every authority.

Religion sees in civil freedom a noble exercise of the faculties of man;

Freedom

considers religion as the safeguard of mores; and mores as the guarantee of laws and the pledge of its own duration.

Township independence is the form of politics