Author: Sophie Langa

I thought this essay was very good and showed a lot of what we have covered in the class. I only had some short comments on the essay and how to make it better. In the first paragraph I pointed out that she should describe further the pros and cons of Tocqueville comments on both democracy and aristocracy. Then my last comment for this section was to make the thesis stronger and more direct. In the second paragraph I noticed that the sentence, this is due to the idea…., needed to be moved further up in the section to be more directly related to her argument. The last structural comment I had was in the third paragraph. Lily slightly mentioned the push back that Obama had when elected to office, I told her that she need to show an example of this because those who have no prior knowledge would not know what she was talking about. In the last paragraph I found a sentence that completely summed up her whole argument and that of Tocqueville, this sentence was short yet very strong and pushed her paper further in the last moment, “Race serves as an impediment to true equality”. Besides these few structural changes I thought that Lily’s argument was very strong in the paper and from the first paragraph you knew exactly where she was going with the paper and how she would support it. 

“This kind of aristocracy sympathized with the body of the people whose passions and interests it easily embraced; but it was too weak and too short loved to excite either love or hatred. This was the class which headed the insurrection in the south and furnished the best leaders of the American revolution”

This quote from Tocqueville’s third chapter really stuck out to me with the complexity and overall embodiment of America at the time. He is saying that this form of governance was equally influential in the two regions of the country but had vast differences in the way it influenced the people. The inhabitants in the North were loving and fought for equality along with justice and rights for all. Yet in the South it made the move towards slavery and profit. I find it so interesting that people from all walks of life who came to America for a fresh start at a new life had become so separated in their beliefs of the system. Some found it as a way for them to gain profit with slavery and gold while many found it as a way for liberation from their motherland’s strict laws. The government for the people by the people was a great way for those who had been previously prosecuted to find a safe home, but it wasn’t a safe home for those who were brought there against their will. 

In Tocqueville’s second chapter he specifically talks about the creation of America, he says that is it is one of the few countries that we can trace and follow from the origin. He describes the new country as having two main regions, the North and the South. Whereas the North is inhabited by intellectual puritans who, “[did not] cross the Atlantic to improve their situation or to increase their wealth; it was purely intellectual craving that called them”. He also observed that the south was filled with men who had no morals and saw no law, they were there to create a fortune with gold. He witnessed that these men established slavery of the natives quickly after landing in Virginia. It is hard to tell where Tocqueville stands on the origin of America’s democracy. As talked about in class, he lists the advantages and disadvantages of both democracy and aristocracy in his works, yet when he is talking about the settlers who ‘left’ the safety of aristocracy, he shows the new way of democracy/leadership by the people as an unstable mess. I found these readings very interesting because they challenged my previous understandings of Tocqueville’s writing. He seems to be less open minded here then he is in later chapters, even though he is still unbiased towards both systems. 

Tocqueville has gone in depth of the individual suffering of the three races in America in this section of his book. He describes the three races as the white, educated families, the stolen Africans, and the displaced American Indians. He writes that the white Americans have come from Europe for a better life but in the process of freedom they have enslaved two other races. The new Anglo- Americans have taken Africans from their homeland forced them to work. These are men and women who are stuck between not being Africans and not being Americans, where their native tongue and religion is not allowed and a foreign one is forced on them, and if they don’t comply, they will suffer along with the others. Tocqueville puts it perfectly by saying, “he makes them subservient to his use and when he cannot subdue them, he destroys them…. Taking their humanity”. While the new Americans are stripping Africa’s from their humanity, they are born into this slavery, even before they are conceived. There is a cycle of slavery that seems to have no end in the eyes of Tocqueville. He has witnessed these Americans flee from one country to enslave and own another human for the vison of a profit. This system seems very undemocratic to someone who thought the Americas were a safe haven where the people are supposed to be heard, and it is. Tocqueville went to the Americas to observes a new way of governence, democracy, and he found another system that enslaves its people and forces labor. 

Not only did Tocqueville observe and describe the enslavement of the Africans, but he noticed the third race in the middle of extinction. The American Indians that were there before the Europeans got there, were being displaced and run out of their homes. Once living in surplus and fulfillment and not running for their lives, trying to find the resources needed to sustain life. These American Indians were forced out of their homes and driven to the plains of the west were food and resources are scarce. These populations were documented as ‘destroyed and demolished’ by Tocqueville only in the 1830s. He saw such misery of this races that he felt it was too great to put in words, because it was more of a sympathetic and empathetic feeling to be felt then written down where it could not be justified. The missionary missions to teach the American Indians were seen as unsuccessful and without lasting success. This process of another forced religion and civilization on another race by the new Americans, was not democratic to Tocqueville who believed little in the system at first. He saw that the injustice being done could not be right and could not be along the lines of this new democracy, but he saw no end. The new Americans saw that if they ended this “evil it would imperil their own exitance” on the continent.