1831 Ever since 1790, when American prisons had pioneered the layout of cells flanking a central corridor, the segregation of prisoners by age, sex and gravity of crime, and the solitary confinement system, Europeans had wondered whether they could learn anything useful about their own ways of locking people up. So in 1831 the French government sent Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont to investigate the American penal system. Eleven years later, Charles Dickens would set off on the same quest.
Dickens would find American jails oppressive. De Tocqueville admired them – as he would many other things about America. In the event, both authors would range well beyond prisons, into the physical, political, economic and social geography of the country: Dickens in his acutely observant (though often biased) American Notes (1842) and his picaresque satire Martin Chuzzlewit (1833–4); de Tocqueville in the magisterial Democracy in America (two volumes, 1835, 1840), still the foundation text for students of the American scene.
Here was democracy at work, thought de Tocqueville. Most governments claim to be acting on behalf of ‘the people’, but in America the sovereignty of the people was a working principle ‘recognized by the customs and proclaimed by the laws’. Here, ‘every man works to earn a living. … Labor is held in honor’. Because land was free or cheap to the immigrant willing to work hard, European-style economic and social elites based on hereditary land-ownership were thin on the ground.
But ‘natural’ elites of the virtuous or intellectually superior also fell victims to the levelling spirit, he thought. And the down-side of the free-land promise was a tendency to restless movement ever westward, without pause to develop what had been settled. ‘In the United States a man builds a house in which to spend his old age’, he writes, ‘and he sells it before the roof is on; he plants a garden and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing.’
He recalls exploring an island in the middle of a lake in upstate New York, ‘one of those delightful solitudes of the New World’, in which – to his surprise – he uncovers the traces of a settler’s log cabin. ‘The logs … had sprouted afresh … and his cabin was transformed into a bower.’ Confronted with this emblem of death in life, of old age in the New World, ‘I exclaimed with sadness: “Are ruins, then, already here?”’