Half Yankee Travelers: Tocqueville and Beaumont In America

The full story of Alexis de Tocqueville's and Gustave de Beaumont's encounter with America and Americans resides in the meticulously-kept vaults of Yale's Beinecke Library. These treasures launched what is called the American or Yale school in Tocqueville studies and have also been selectively mined over the years by other Tocqueville scholars, who have participated in arcane archival conversations on dating and attribution. Although much of this material has now been published in French in the magisterial Alexis de Tocqueville: OEuvres complètes, it has remained inaccessible to Anglophone readers. The situation has changed dramatically in the last three years, however, largely due to the three books under review. If one adds the publication by Liberty Fund in 2010 of Eduardo Nolla's massive critical edition of Democracy in America, newly translated by James Schleifer, we now have a voluminous English record of what survives of Tocqueville's and Beaumont's writings about the United States: diaries, drafts, documents, letters, and marginal scribbles. As often happens when materials are translated and made available to a much larger audience, the publication of these materials is likely to rejuvenate old debates and spark new ones.¹ In this brief review, I obviously cannot do justice to the riches the reader will find in this newly revealed terrain. I offer only a brief road map and an indication of particular places of interest.

A road map

The letters published in Frederick Brown's Alexis de Tocqueville: Letters from America and in Olivier Zunz's Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels largely cover the same ground, although the Brown edition is a small book suitable for backpacking and the Zunz/Goldhammer edition is one of those rare books that is both an object of scholarship and a bel objet. It reproduces Beaumont's many charming sketches and watercolors, for example, images that help to draw the reader into the living landscape of Jacksonian America. It is also the most comprehensive and wide-ranging of the three books under review: a highly useful volume both for American historians and for those primarily interested in contextualizing Tocqueville's Democracy. Beyond the letters from America, Zunz includes Tocqueville's travel notebooks chronicling his conversations with a wide array of America interlocutors (almost 200 pages), a selection of preparatory texts and parts of the published work on the penitentiary system, large excerpts from Beaumont's Marie; or, Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America, Tocqueville's letters on the writing and publication of Democracy in America, and a selection of Tocqueville's most important letters and speeches on America after 1840. There is also a wonderful translation of Tocqueville's "Two Weeks in the Wilderness" by Arthur Goldhammer. Goldhammer's prize-winning translation of Democracy in America is the only book-in-translation published by the prestigious Library of America. One hopes that a second printing might append this new version of Tocqueville's lyrical account of his foray into the American frontier, a text that deserves to be placed in the company of Cooper, Thoreau and Emerson.

Although Brown and Zunz both include the bulk of Tocqueville's and Beaumont's letters from America, there are subtle differences in editorial judgment between the two. Both approaches have their virtues. On balance, the Zunz volume focuses on illuminating the public figures that Tocqueville and Beaumont will become. For example, included here, and omitted in the Brown volume, are letters that shed light on their political and intellectual ambitions before they leave France, letters to the...