American Institutions And Their Influence

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The annals of France furnish nothing analogous to the condition
in which that country might then be thrown. But it may more
aptly be assimilated to the times of old, and to those hideous
eras of Roman oppression, when the manners of the people were
corrupted, their traditions obliterated, their habits destroyed,
their opinions shaken, and freedom, expelled from the laws, could
find no refuge in the land; when nothing protected the citizens,
and the citizens no longer protected themselves; when human
nature was the sport of man, and princes wearied out the clemency
of Heaven before they exhausted the patience of their subjects.
Those who hope to revive the monarchy of Henry IV. or of Louis
XIV., appear to me to be afflicted with mental blindness; and
when I consider the present condition of several European
nations--a condition to which all the others tend--I am led to
believe that they will soon be left with no other alternative
than democratic liberty, or the tyranny of the Cesars.

And, indeed, it is deserving of consideration, whether men are to
be entirely emancipated, or entirely enslaved; whether their
rights are to be made equal, or wholly taken away from them. If
the rulers of society were reduced either gradually to raise the
crowd to their own level, or to sink the citizens below that of
humanity, would not the doubts of many be resolved, the
consciences of many be healed, and the community be prepared to
make great sacrifices with little difficulty? In that case, the
gradual growth of democratic manners and institutions should be
regarded, not as the best, but as the only means of preserving
freedom; and without liking the government of democracy, it might
be adopted as the most applicable and the fairest remedy for the
present ills of society.

It is difficult to associate a people in the work of government;
but it is still more difficult to supply it with experience, and
to inspire it with the feelings which it requires in order to
govern well. I grant that the caprices of democracy are
perpetual; its instruments are rude, its laws imperfect. But if
it were true that soon no just medium would exist between the
empire of democracy and the dominion of a single arm, should we
not rather incline toward the former, than submit voluntarily to
the latter? And if complete equality be our fate, is it not
better to be levelled by free institutions than by despotic
power?

Those who, after having read this book, should imagine that my
intention in writing it has been to propose the laws and manners
of the Anglo-Americans for the imitation of all democratic
peoples, would commit a very great mistake; they must have paid
more attention to the form than to the substance of my ideas. My
aim has been to show, by the example of America, that laws, and
especially manners, may exist, which will allow a democratic
people to remain free. But I am very far from thinking that we
ought to follow the example of the American democracy, and copy
the means which it has employed to attain its ends; for I am well
aware of the influence which the nature of a country and its
political precedents exercise upon a constitution; and I should
regard it as a great misfortune for mankind, if liberty were to
exist, all over the world, under the same forms.

But I am of opinion that if we do not succeed in gradually
introducing democratic institutions into France, and if we
despair of imparting to the citizens those ideas and sentiments
which first prepare them for freedom, and afterward allow them to
enjoy it, there will be no independence at all, either for the
middling classes or the nobility, for the poor or for the rich,
but an equal tyranny over all; and I foresee that if the
peaceable empire of the majority be not founded among us in time,
we shall sooner or later arrive at the unlimited authority of a
single despot.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE PRESENT AND PROBABLE FUTURE CONDITION OF THE
THREE RACES WHICH INHABIT THE TERRITORY OF THE
UNITED STATES.

The principal part of the task which I had imposed upon myself is
now performed: I have shown, as far as I was able, the laws and
manners of the American democracy. Here I might stop; but the
reader would perhaps feel that I had not satisfied his
expectations.

The absolute supremacy of democracy is not all that we meet with
in America; the inhabitants of the New World may be considered
from more than one point of view. In the course of this work, my
subject has often led me to speak of the Indians and the negroes;
but I have never been able to stop in order to show what places
these two races occupy, in the midst of the democratic people
whom I was engaged in describing. I have mentioned in what
spirit, and according to what laws, the Anglo-American Union was
formed; but I could only glance at the dangers which menace that
confederation, while it was equally impossible for me to give a
detailed account of its chances of duration, independently of its
laws and manners. When speaking of the United republican States,
I hazarded no conjectures upon the permanence of republican forms
in the New World; and when making frequent allusion to the
commercial activity which reigns in the Union, I was unable to
inquire into the future condition of the Americans as a
commercial people.

These topics are collaterally connected with my subject, without
forming a part of it; they are American, without being
democratic; and to portray democracy has been my principal aim.
It was therefore necessary to postpone these questions, which I
now take up as the proper termination of my work.

The territory now occupied or claimed by the American Union,
spreads from the shores of the Atlantic to those of the Pacific
ocean. On the east and west its limits are those of the
continent itself. On the south it advances nearly to the tropic,
and it extends upward to the icy regions of the north.[Footnote:

See the map.

]

The human beings who are scattered over this space do not form,
as in Europe, so many branches of the same stock. Three races
naturally distinct, and I might almost say hostile to each other,
are discoverable among them at the first glance. Almost
insurmountable barriers had been raised between them by education
and by law, as well as by their origin and outward
characteristics; but fortune has brought them together on the
same soil, where, although they are mixed, they do not
amalgamate, and each race fulfils its destiny apart.

Among these widely differing families of men, the first which
attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and
in enjoyment, is the white or European, the MAN pre-eminent; and
in subordinate grades, the negro and the Indian. These two
unhappy races have nothing in common; neither birth, nor
features, nor language, nor habits. Their only resemblance lies
in their misfortunes. Both of them occupy an inferior rank in
the country they inhabit; both suffer from tyranny; and if their
wrongs are not the same, they originate at any rate with the same
authors.

If we reasoned from what passes in the world, we should almost
say that the European is to the other races of mankind, what man
is to the lower animals;--he makes them subservient to his use;
and when he cannot subdue, he destroys them. Oppression has at
one stroke deprived the descendants of the Africans of almost all
the privileges of humanity. The negro of the United States has
lost all remembrance of his country; the language which his
forefathers spoke is never heard around him; he abjured their
religion and forgot their customs when he ceased to belong to
Africa, without acquiring any claim to European privileges. But
he remains half-way between the two communities; sold by the one,
repulsed by the other; finding not a spot in the universe to call
by the name of country, except the faint image of a home which
the shelter of his master's roof affords.

The negro has no family; woman is merely the temporary companion
of his pleasures, and his children are upon an equality with
himself from the moment of their birth. Am I to call it a proof
of God's mercy, or a visitation of his wrath, that man in certain
states appears to be insensible to his extreme wretchedness, and
almost affects with a depraved taste the cause of his
misfortunes? The negro, who is plunged in this abyss of evils,
scarcely feels his own calamitous situation. Violence made him a
slave, and the habit of servitude gives him the thoughts and
desires of a slave; he admires his tyrants more than he hates
them, and finds his joy and his pride in the servile imitation of
those who oppress him: his understanding is degraded to the level
of his soul.

The negro enters upon slavery as soon as he is born; nay, he may
have been purchased in the womb, and have begun his slavery
before he began his existence. Equally devoid of wants and of
enjoyment, and useless to himself, he learns, with his first
notions of existence, that he is the property of another who has
an interest in preserving his life, and that the care of it does
not devolve upon himself; even the power of thought appears to
him a useless gift of Providence, and he quietly enjoys the
privileges of his debasement.

If he becomes free, independence is often felt by him to be a
heavier burden than slavery; for having learned, in the course of
his life, to submit to everything except reason, he is too much
unacquainted with her dictates to obey them. A thousand new
desires beset him, and he is destitute of the knowledge and
energy necessary to resist them: these are masters which it is
necessary to contend with, and he has learned only to submit and
obey. In short, he sinks to such a depth of wretchedness, that
while servitude brutalizes, liberty destroys him.

Oppression has been no less fatal to the Indian than to the negro
race, but its effects are different. Before the arrival of the
white men in the New World, the inhabitants of North America
lived quietly in their woods, enduring the vicissitudes, and
practising the virtues and vices common to savage nations. The
Europeans, having dispersed the Indian tribes and driven them
into the deserts, condemned them to a wandering life full of
inexpressible sufferings.

Savage nations are only controlled by opinion and by custom.
When the North American Indians had lost their sentiment of
attachment to their country; when their families were dispersed,
their traditions obscured, and the chain of their recollections
broken; when all their habits were changed, and their wants
increased beyond measure, European tyranny rendered them more
disorderly and less civilized than they were before. The moral
and physical condition of these tribes continually grew worse,
and they became more barbarous as they became more wretched.
Nevertheless the Europeans have not been able to metamorphose the
character of the Indians; and though they have had power to
destroy them, they have never been able to make them submit to
the rules of civilized society.

The lot of the negro is placed on the extreme limit of servitude,
while that of the Indian lies on the utmost verge of liberty; and
slavery does not produce more fatal effects upon the first, than
independence upon the second. The negro has lost all property in
his own person, and he cannot dispose of his existence without
committing a sort of fraud: but the savage is his own master as
soon as he is able to act; parental authority is scarcely known
to him; he has never bent his will to that of any of his kind, or
learned the difference between voluntary obedience and a shameful
subjection; and the very name of law is unknown to him. To be
free, with him, signifies to escape from all the shackles of
society. As he delights in this barbarous independence, and
would rather perish than sacrifice the least part of it,
civilisation has little power over him.

The negro makes a thousand fruitless efforts to insinuate himself
among men who repulse him; he conforms to the taste of his
oppressors, adopts their opinions, and hopes by imitating them to
form a part of their community. Having been told from infancy
that his race is naturally inferior to that of the whites, he
assents to the proposition, and is ashamed of his own nature. In
each of his features he discovers a trace of slavery, and, if it
were in his power, he would willingly rid himself of everything
that makes him what he is.

The Indian, on the contrary, has his imagination inflated with
the pretended nobility of his origin, and lives and dies in the
midst of these dreams of pride. Far from desiring to conform his
habits to ours, he loves his savage life as the distinguishing
mark of his race, and he repels every advance to civilisation,
less perhaps from the hatred which he entertains for it, than
from a dread of resembling the Europeans.[Footnote:

The native of North America retains his opinions and the most
insignificant of his habits with a degree of tenacity which has
no parallel in history. For more than two hundred years the
wandering tribes of North America have had daily intercourse with
the whites, and they have never derived from them either a custom
or an idea. Yet the European have exercised a powerful influence
over the savages: they have made them more licentious, but not
more European. In the summer of 1831, I happened to be beyond
Lake Michigan, at a place called Green Bay, which serves as the
extreme frontier between the United States and the Indians on the
northwestern side. Here I became acquainted with an American
officer, Major H., who, after talking to me at length on the
inflexibility of the Indian character, related the following
fact: "I formerly knew a young Indian," said he, "who had been
educated at a college in New England, where he had greatly
distinguished himself, and had acquired the external appearance
of a member of civilized society. When the war broke out between
ourselves and the English, in 1810, I saw this young man again;
he was serving in our army at the head of the warriors of his
tribe; for the Indians were admitted among the ranks of the
Americans, upon condition that they would abstain from their
horrible custom of scalping their victims. On the evening of the
battle of * * *, C. came and sat himself down by the fire of our
bivouac. I asked him what had been his fortune that day: he
related his exploits; and growing warm and animated by the
recollection of them, he concluded by suddenly opening the breast
of his coat, saying, 'You must not betray me--see here!' And I
actually beheld," said the major, "between his body and his
shirt, the skin and hair of an English head still dripping with
gore."

] While he has nothing to oppose to our perfection in the arts
but the resources of the desert, to our tactics nothing but
undisciplined courage; while our well-digested plans are met by
the spontaneous instincts of savage life, who can wonder if he
fails in this unequal contest?

The negro who earnestly desires to mingle his race with that of
the European, cannot effect it; while the Indian, who might
succeed to a certain extent, disdains to make the attempt. The
servility of the one dooms him to slavery, the pride of the other
to death.

I remember that while I was travelling through the forests which
still cover the state of Alabama, I arrived one day at the log
house of a pioneer. I did not wish to penetrate into the
dwelling of the American, but retired to rest myself for a while
on the margin of a spring, which was not far off, in the woods.
While I was in this place (which was in the neighborhood of the
Creek territory), an Indian woman appeared, followed by a
negress, and holding by the hand a little white girl of five or
six years old, whom I took to be the daughter of the pioneer. A
sort of barbarous luxury set off the costume of the Indian; rings
of metal were hanging from her nostrils and ears; her hair, which
was adorned with glass beads, fell loosely upon her shoulders;
and I saw that she was not married, for she still wore the
necklace of shells which the bride always deposites on the
nuptial couch. The negress was clad in squalid European
garments.

They all three came and seated themselves upon the banks of the
fountain; and the young Indian, taking the child in her arms,
lavished upon her such fond caresses as mothers give; while the
negress endeavored by various little artifices to attract the
attention of the young Creole. The child displayed in her
slightest gestures a consciousness of superiority which formed a
strange contrast with her infantine weakness; as if she received
the attentions of her companions with a sort of condescension.

The negress was seated on the ground before her mistress,
watching her smallest desires, and apparently divided between
strong affection for the child and servile fear; while the savage
displayed, in the midst of her tenderness, an air of freedom and
of pride which was almost ferocious. I had approached the group,
and I contemplated them in silence; but my curiosity was probably
displeasing to the Indian woman, for she suddenly rose, pushed
the child roughly from her, and giving me an angry look, plunged
into the thicket.

I had often chanced to see individuals met together in the same
place, who belonged to the three races of men which people North
America. I had perceived from many different results the
preponderance of the whites. But in the picture which I have
just been describing there was something peculiarly touching; a
bond of affection here united the oppressors with the oppressed,
and the effort of Nature to bring them together rendered still
more striking the immense distance placed between them by
prejudice and by law.

* * * * *

THE PRESENT AND PROBABLE FUTURE CONDITION OF THE INDIAN
TRIBES WHICH INHABIT THE TERRITORY POSSESSED BY
THE UNION.

Gradual disappearance of the native Tribes.--Manner in which it
takes place.--Miseries accompanying the forced Migrations of
the Indians.--The Savages of North America had only two ways of
escaping Destruction; War or Civilisation.--They are no longer
able to make War.--Reasons why they refused to become civilized
when it was in their Power, and why they cannot become so now
that they desire it.--Instance of the Creek and
Cherokees.--Policy of the particular States toward these
Indians.--Policy of the federal Government.

None of the Indian tribes which formerly inhabited the territory
of New England--the Narragansets, the Mohicans, the Pequots--have
any existence but in the recollection of man. The Lenapes, who
received William Penn a hundred and fifty years ago upon the
banks of the Delaware, have disappeared; and I myself met with
the last of the Iroquois, who were begging alms. The nations I
have mentioned formerly covered the country to the seacoast; but
a traveller at the present day must penetrate more than a hundred
leagues into the interior of the continent to find an Indian.
Not only have these wild tribes receded, but they are
destroyed;[Footnote:

In the thirteen original states, there are only 6,273 Indians
remaining. (See Legislative Documents, 20th congress, No. 117,
p. 90.)

] and as they give way or perish, an immense and increasing
people fills their place. There is no instance on record of so
prodigious a growth, or so rapid a destruction; the manner in
which the latter change takes place is not difficult to describe.

When the Indians were the sole inhabitants of the wilds whence
they have been expelled, their wants were few. Their arms were
of their own manufacture, their only drink was the water of the
brook, and their clothes consisted of the skin of animals, whose
flesh furnished them with food.

The Europeans introduced among the savages of North America
firearms, ardent spirits, and iron: they taught them to exchange
for manufactured stuffs the rough garments which had previously
satisfied their untutored simplicity. Having acquired new
tastes, without the arts by which they could be gratified, the
Indians were obliged to have recourse to the workmanship of the
whites; but in return for their productions, the savage had
nothing to offer except the rich furs which still abounded in his
woods. Hence the chase became necessary, not merely to provide
for his subsistence, but in order to procure the only objects of
barter which he could furnish to Europe.[Footnote:

Messrs. Clarke and Cass, in their report to congress, the 4th
February, 1829, p. 23, expressed themselves thus: "The time when
the Indians generally could supply themselves with food and
clothing, without any of the articles of civilized life, has long
since passed away. The more remote tribes, beyond the
Mississippi, who live where immense herds of buffalo are yet to
be found, and who follow those animals in their periodical
migrations, could more easily than any others recur to the habits
of their ancestors, and live without the white man or any of his
manufactures. But the buffalo is constantly receding. The
smaller animals--the bear, the deer, the beaver, the otter, the
muskrat, &c., principally minister to the comfort and support of
the Indians; and these cannot be taken without guns, ammunition,
and traps.

"Among the northwestern Indians particularly, the labor of
supplying a family with food is excessive. Day after day is
spent by the hunter without success, and during this interval his
family must subsist upon bark or roots, or perish. Want and
misery are around them and among them. Many die every winter
from actual starvation."

The Indians will not live as Europeans live; and yet they can
neither subsist without them, nor exactly after the fashion of
their fathers. This is demonstrated by a fact which I likewise
give upon official authority. Some Indians of a tribe on the
banks of Lake Superior had killed a European; the American
government interdicted all traffic with the tribe to which the
guilty parties belonged, until they were delivered up to justice.
This measure had the desired effect.

] While the wants of the natives were thus increasing, their
resources continued to diminish. From the moment when a European
settlement is formed in the neighborhood of the territory
occupied by the Indians, the beasts of chase take the
alarm.[Footnote:

"Five years ago," says Volney in his Tableaux des Etats Unis,
p. 370, "in going from Vincennes to Kaskaskia, a territory which
now forms part of the State of Illinois, but which at the time I
mention was completely wild (1797), you could not cross a prairie
without seeing herds of from four to five hundred buffaloes.
There are now none remaining; they swam across the Mississippi to
escape from the hunters, and more particularly from the bells of
the American cows."

] Thousands of savages, wandering in the forest and destitute of
any fixed dwelling, did not disturb them; but as soon as the
continuous sounds of European labor are heard in the
neighborhood, they begin to flee away, and retire to the west,
where their instinct teaches them that they will find deserts of
immeasurable extent. "The buffalo is constantly receding", say
Messrs. Clarke and Cass in their Report of the year 1829; "a few
years since they approached the base of the Alleghany; and a few
years hence they may even be rare upon the immense plains which
extend to the base of the Rocky mountains." I have been assured
that this effect of the approach of the whites is often felt at
two hundred leagues' distance from the frontier. Their influence
is thus exerted over tribes whose name is unknown to them, and
who suffer the evils of usurpation long before they are
acquainted with the authors of their distress.[Footnote:

The truth of what I here advance may be easily proved by
consulting the tabular statement of Indian tribes inhabiting the
United States, and their territories. (Legislative Documents,
20th congress, No. 117, pp. 90-105.) It is there shown that the
tribes of America are rapidly decreasing, although the Europeans
are at a considerable distance from them.

]

Bold adventurers soon penetrate into the country the Indians have
deserted, and when they have advanced about fifteen or twenty
leagues from the extreme frontiers of the whites, they begin to
build habitations for civilized beings in the midst of the
wilderness. This is done without difficulty, as the territory of
a hunting nation is ill defined; it is the common property of the
tribe, and belongs to no one in particular, so that individual
interests are not concerned in the protection of any part of it.

A few European families, settled in different situations at a
considerable distance from each other, soon drive away the wild
animals which remain between their places of abode. The Indians,
who had previously lived in a sort of abundance, then find it
difficult to subsist, and still more difficult to procure the
articles of barter which they stand in need of.