More Mr. Latrobe (put with notes from interview) 'I am very much afraid that the next legislature will make unjust and oppressive laws against the blacks. People want to make living in Maryland unbearable for them. We mustn't deceive ourselves; the white and black populations are in a state of war. Never will they mingle. One of them will have to yield place to the other." (p 516)
In Baltimore, de Tocqueville and Beaumont observe some horse races, which they enjoy for the most part. They recount this occurrence, however; "A Negro having taken the liberty of entering the arena with some whites, one of them gave him a volley of blows with his cane without this deed appearing to surprise either the crowd or the Negro himself" (491).
Tocqueville interviewed Mr. Latrobe, "a very distinguished Baltimore lawyer."
Tocqueville: Does slavery still exist in Maryland?
Mr. Latrobe : Yes, but we are making great efforts to be rid of it. The law allows the export of slaves but not their importation. Cultivating grain, we can very easily do without blacks. It's perhaps even an economy.
Tocqueville: Is it permitted to free one's slaves?
Mr. Latrobe: Yes, but we often notice that freeing them produces great troubles, and that the freed Negro often finds himself more unhappy, and more stripped of resources, than a slave. An odd thing is the fact that west of the Chesapeake the black population is growing faster than the white, and that the exact opposite is happening to the east of the bay. That comes, I think, from the fact that the west has remained divided in great states, which do not attract the free and industrious population. Baltimore, which to-day counts more than 80,000 souls, didn't have thirty houses at the time of the revolution..."
{later in the conversation]
Tocqueville: Do you think it would be possible to do without slaves in Maryland?
Mr. Latrobe: Yes, I am convinced of it. Slavery is, in general, a very costly method of farming...'and Mr. Latrobe went on to explain why. Only in the far south, and only on such staple crops as tobacco and sugar, could Negro slaves be put to profitable use. In Maryland, as slavery disappeared, the culture of tobacco would follow, he thought. "All this I tell you is not just personal opinion, it's the expression of a public conviction. In the past fifteen years a complete revolution has taken place in the popular mind of this matter. Fifteen years ago one wasn't permitted to say that slavery could be abolished in Maryland, to-day no one contests it..." (Pierson 498)
"What made perhaps the strongest impression on Beaumont, however, was
his experience at the play. 'The first time I entered a theatre in the United
States," he was later to recall, 'I was surprised at the care with which the
spectators of white skin were distinguished from the black faces. In the first
gallery were the whites; in the second, the mulattos; in the third, the Negroes.
An American, near whom I was placed, pointed out to me that the dignity of
whites required this classification. However, as my eyes wandering to the
gallery of the mulattos, I noticed there a young woman of striking beauty,
whose complexion, of a perfect whiteness, betrayed the purest European
blood. Entering into all the prejudices of my neighbour, I asked him how a
woman of English origin could be so shameless as to mingle with the African
women."
'That woman is coloured,' he answered.
'What? Coloured? She is whiter than a lily!'
'She is coloured, he repeated coldly. The tradition of the country
established her origin, and every one knows that she numbers a mulatto
among her ancestors."
(Page 513-Pierson)
(what follows is the same episode, except reverse, with the Spanish woman).
T and B visited almshouse outside of Baltimore. They saw the touching site of a fine young black man driven insane by his owner's cruelty. He cried "get away, don't come near me." The pitifulness of the situation touched both T and B, and four days after the incident, B wrote home about his plans to make Marie (Pierson 516).
Tocqueville interviewed Timothy Walker (again?) page 565
Mr. Walker:I see no reason why slavery should cease in Kentucky. The present population, while recognizing the evils it causes, can't learn to get on without it; and there is no emigration.
Tocqueville: You have made in Ohio some very severe laws against the blacks.
Mr. Walker: Yes, we are trying to discourage them in every way possible. Not only have we made laws allowing their expulsion at will, but we annoy them in a thousand ways. A Negro has no political right; he cannot be sworn, he cannot bear witness against a white. This last law leads sometimes to the most revolting injustices. Lately I was consulted by a Negro who had furnished a very great number of foodstuffs to the master of a steamboat. The white denied the debt. As the creditor was black, and his workmen, who were black also and might have been able to depose in his favour, could not appear in court, there wasn't even any way to bring suit."
"'One other very remarkable thing,' and Tocqueville was now drawing the deadly parallel against slavery," One other very remarkable thing in Ohio is this: Ohio is perhaps the State in the Union where it is easiest to see in striking and parallel fashion the effects of slavery and freedom on the social state of a people. The State of Ohio is separated from that of Kentucky by a single river. On the two sides the soil is equally fertile, the position is favourable, yet everything is different....Like Timothy Walker he found it 'impossible to attribute those differences to any other cause than slavery. It brutalizes the black population and debilitates the white." (Pierson 569)
Kentucky
In Louisville while waiting to see if the ice in the lower
Ohio would not break, Tocqueville had managed to interrogate Mr. Mcllvain, "one of the greatest merchants of Louisville."
Tocqueville: I am told that the prosperity of Louisville has shown great progress in the last few years?
Mr. McIlvain: Immense. When I came to settle here seven years ago, Louisville had only 3,000 souls; there are 13,000 to- day. By myself at the moment I am doing more business than the whole commerce of Louisville seven years ago.
Tocqueville: Whence comes this rapid growth?
Mr. McIlvain: Principally from the unbelievable stream of emigration towardthe West. Louisville is become the emporium of almost all the mer- chandise coming up the Mississip[p]i to provision the emigrants. I believe Louisville is called to become a very large city.
Tocqueville: Is it true that there is a great difference between the prosperity of Kentucky and that of Ohio?
Mr. McIlvain: Yes, the difference is striking.
Tocqueville: What is the cause?
'Mr. McIlvain: Slavery. I regard slavery as more prejudicial still to the masters than to the slaves. The slaves of Kentucky are treated very gently, well fed, well clothed, nothing is so rare as to see them flee their master's house. But slavery prevents the emigrants coming to us. They deprive us of the energy and enterprising spirit which characterize the states where there are no slaves.'
[This was exactly what Timothy Walker had said. But Tocqueville
wanted to develop the economic argument a little further.]
Tocqueville: Is it true that slavery prevents a State from becoming manufacturing?
Mr. McIlvain: Many people think that negroes cannot become good workers in factories. I believe the contrary. When the blacks are placed young in a factory, they are as apt as the whites to become good workmen. We have examples of this in Kentucky; several plants run by slaves are prospering. If the South is not as industrial as the North it's not be- cause the slaves are not able to serve in the factories, it's because slavery deprives the masters of the industry necessary to establish and direct them.
Tocqueville: Is it true that public opinion is beginning to be against slavery in Kentucky?
Mr. McIlvain: Yes, in the last few years an unbelievable revolution has occurred in people's minds. I am convinced that if one made a count of opinion by the head in Kentucky the majority would be found to be for the abolition of slavery. But one doesn't know what to do with the slaves. Our fathers did us a horrible injury in bringing them among us.
Tocqueville: But since opinion against slavery is so pronounced, why has Missouri so obstinately refused to abolish it when it would be so easy ?
Mr. McIlvain: At that time the revolution I spoke of a moment ago had not yet occurred. Besides, it is so convenient for new settlers to have slaves to help them cut the trees and clear the lands in a region where it is hardly possible to find free workmen, that it is under- standable that the less immediate benefit of the abolition of slavery has not yet been appreciated at its true value in Missouri. I believe, however, that now they realize the mistake they have made.
Tocqueville: Is the black population increasing rapidly in Kentucky?
Mr. McIlvain: Yes, but it can never become dangerous for the white population. Kentucky is divided into small holdings; on each one of these small properties is a white family owning several slaves. The division of land and the type of cultivation, which requires a small number of slaves, prevents our seeing here, as in the States further south, hundreds of negroes tilling the fields of one white man. With us, slavery is a great evil, not a danger.
Tocqueville: What do they raise in Kentucky?
Mr. McIlvain: Corn, wheat, hemp; tobacco.
Tocqueville: Do you think that for these various kinds of crops it would be more economical to use slaves than white workmen?
Mr. McIlvain: I believe the contrary. Slaves work less well than free white men, and furthermore they have to be taken care of at all times; you have to raise them and support them in old age.
If there was a contradiction in a point of view which regarded negroes as competent for manufacturing but uneconomic for agriculture, Tocqueville had seemed not to notice it. Their stage started for Nashville, and he had begun his observations of the countryside and its people.
De Tocqueville's description of the Tennesse landscape succinctly recreates the environment in which modest or poor landowner held and worked their few, but overburdened, slaves. He noted that the Kentucky-Tennessee plateau is "filled with hills and rather shallow valleys through which flow a multitude of small streams. It's an attractive but uniform region.The soil in the two States seemed still almost entirely covered by forests. Once every so often a line of rails,some burnt trees, a field of corn, a few cattle, a cabin of tree trunks placed one on the other and roughly squared, announced the isolated dwelling of a settler.You see hardly any villages. The habitations of the farmers are scattered in the woods. Nothing is more rare than to encounter a house of brick in Kentucky; we didn't see ten in Tennesse[e], Nashville excepted.The cabin of the Kentucky and Tennessee country is generally divided into two parts, as seen in the margin. All about are a number of huts serving as stables. The interior of these dwellings attests the indolence of the master even more than his poverty. You find a clean enough bed, some chairs,a good gun, often books, and almost always a newspaper, but the walls are so full of chinks that the outside air enters from all sides...Here was inserted a rough diagram.
'You are hardly better sheltered than in a cabin of leaves. Nothing would be easier than to protect oneself from bad weather and stop the chinks, but the master of the place is incapable of taking such care. In the North you see reigning an air of cleanliness and intelligence in the humblest dwellings. Here everything seems sketchy, everything a matter of chance; one would say that the inhabitant lives from day to day in the most perfect carelessness of the future....'
What was the reason for this singular state of affairs in the pros- perous West ? 'Almost all the farmers that we have seen, even the poor- est, have slaves. These are covered with rags, but generally seem strong and healthy...."
And Tocqueville took a moment to paint for his father an ideal picture of a Tennessee cabin.
It was in one of the many forested valleys of the region, he wrote, 'that we discovered one evening a cabin, made of wood, whose poorly- joined walls allowed one to see a great fire flaming in the interior. We knock: two great roguish dogs, big as donkeys, come first to the door. Their master follows close, grips us hard by the hand, and invites us to enter.t A fireplace as wide as half the room, and with an entire tree burning in it, a bed; a few chairs, a carbine six feet long, against the walls of the apartment, a few hunter's accoutrements which the wind was blowing about as it chose, and the picture is complete. Near the fire was seated the mistress of the lodge, with the tranquil and modest air that distinguishes American women, while four or five husky children rolled on the floor, as lightly clad as in the month of July. Under the mantel of the chimney two or three squatting negroes still seemed to find that it was less warm there than in Africa. In the midst of this collection of misery, my gentleman did not do the honours of his house with the less ease and courtesy. It's not that he forced himself to move in any way; but the poor blacks, soon perceiving that a stranger had entered the house, one of them by orders of the master presented us with a glass of whisky, another, a corn cake or plate of venison; a third was sent to get wood. The first time I saw this order given I supposed that it was a question of going to the cellar or wood- house; but the axe strokes that I heard ringing in the wood told me soon that they were cutting down the tree that we needed. It's thus they do everything. While the slaves were thus occupied, the master, seated tranquilly before a fire that would have roasted an ox to the marrow of his bones, enveloped himself majestically in a cloud of smoke, and between each puff related to his guests, to make their time seem less long, all the great exploits that his hunter's memory could furnish him.'
Apparently Tocqueville had chosen for his model of the typical Tennessee homestead the very wayside cabin where Beaumont had lodged him during his chill and illness. Even a fever was not enough to drug the observer's instinct in him. Not for long, at any rate. For on the fourteenth Beaumont had cooked him a rabbit, and on the fifteenth and sixteenth the same watchful companion had discovered signs of rapid recovery in a returning appetite and a great impatience to be off. One other sign there had been, also. Still lying on his bed, Tocque- ville had now begun to interrogate their host, the story-telling Mr. Harris.
Mr. Harris: I came from South Carolina to settle in this country several years ago.
Tocqueville: Tell me why all the habitations that we encounter in the midst of the woods offer so poor a shelter against bad weather. The walls show such chinks that rain and wind can come in without trouble. Such a dwelling must be disagreeable and unhealthy for the proprietor as for the stranger. Would it be so very difficult to make them tight?'
Mr. Harris: Nothing would be easier, but the inhabitant of this region is generally indolent; he looks on work as disagreeable. Provided he has enough food, and a house capable of giving him a half shelter, he is content and thinks only of smoking and hunting.
Tocqueville: What, in your opinion, is the main reason for this indolence?
Mr. Harris: Slavery. We are habituated to doing nothing for ourselves. There are no farmers in Tennessee so poor that they do not have one or two blacks. When he has no more than that he is often obliged to work with them in the fields. But the moment he has a dozen, which is very frequently, he has a white to oversee them and himself does absolutely nothing but ride and hunt. Not a farmer but passes a part of his time hunting and has in his possession a good rifle.
Tocqueville: Do you think that farming by slaves is economical?
Mr. Harris: No. I believe it more costly than the employment of free whites.'
Mr. Harris's testament persuaded Tocqueville to write in his diary, "It is proved, then,that one could get on without slavery. Publicopinion in these two States seems altogether favourable to this doctrine. But slavery is an evil whose roots are so deep that it is almost as impossible to shake it off after perceiving its harm as before."
De Tocqueville continued the letter to his father: "I must tell you one other small anecdote, that will enable you to judge what value is attached here to the life of a man, when he has the misfortune to have a black skin. About a week ago we had to cross the Tennessee river. To reach the other side we had only a paddlewheel boat operated by a horse and two slaves. We ourselves got across all right, but as the river was full of drift ice the master of the boat was afraid to try to take the carriage across. "Don't worry," one of our travelling companions said to him, "we'll make up if necessary the value of the horse and the slaves." This argument removed all objection: the carriage was taken on and got across.'
Beaumont wrote his mother about the inn he is staying at: Page 573 "My hosts are good people, very proud though inn-keepers, and very lazy though poor. They are proud because they are in a region of slaves. Not a small landowner, however wretched, but possesses two or three slaves. the latter are, in the house of the whites, an obligatory furnishing, as is a chair or a table. It results from this that all those who are not black, and who are consequently free men, consider themselves privileged beings; and likewise that colour is a veritable nobility in this country. The convenience of being served by slaves maked the whites indolent and lazy; and the fertility of this country, which produces much without labor, reinforces this disposition."
'ON finally arriving in Memphis,' Tocqueville took up the thread of his letter to his father, deliberately interrupted at Nashville, 'on finally arriving in Memphis we found that, several miles above, the Mis- sissip[p]i itself was frozen over; several steamboats were caught in the ice; you could see them but they were as motionless as rocks.'
'Within the memory of man,' Beaumont assured his family,1 'noth- ing like it has ever been seen: for the inhabitants of the South it's a subject of stupefaction. However, the weather has moderated to-day and we are hoping for the thaw, which would soon start navigation again. We are resolved to await it a week. If it doesn't come in that interval, we shall leave for Washington by retracing our steps....'
It would, as Beaumont remarked, be an 'odious' and 'revolting' necessity. But even with luck as bad as that, after all his hardships and sufferings, Tocqueville was not sure he would regret their adventure.
'If it were not for the vexation we feel in seeing our plans just about foiled (without its yet being in the least our fault),' Tocqueville wrote, 'we should not regret the expedition just made through the forests of Kentucky and Tennessee.' The reason, to one who knew Tocque- ville as well as did his father, must have leaped to the understanding. Obviously the young man must have had his curiosity aroused; must have seen and heard things on his journey that would repay, in in- tellectual coin, any amount of physical discomfort and disappointment.
Yes, Tocqueville acknowledged it; he had a new enthusiasm.
'We made the acquaintance there of a kind of man and a way of life that we had no conception of,' he announced. 'This part of the United Sitates is peopled by a single type of man only, the Virginians. They have retained the physical and moral character that belongs to them; they form a people apart, with national prejudices and a dis- tinctive character.'
There had also been a second discovery: 'For the first time we have had the chance to examine there the effect that slavery produces on society. On the right bank of the Ohio everything is activity, industry; labour is honoured; there are no slaves. Pass to the left bank and the scene changes so suddenly that you think yourself on the other side of the world; the enterprising spirit is gone. There, work is not only painful: it's shameful, and you degrade yourself in submitting your- self to it. To ride, to hunt, to smoke like a Turk in the sunshine: there is the destiny of the white. To do any other kind of manual labour is to act like a slave. The whites, to the South of the Ohio, form a veritable aristocracy which, like the others, combines many prejudices with high sentiments and instincts. They say, and I am very much inclined to believe, that in the matter of honour these men practice delicacies and refinements unknown in the North. They are frank, hospitable, and put many things before money. They will end, never- theless, by being dominated by the North. Every day the latter grows more wealthy and densely populated while the South is stationary or growing poor.'
Some of these ideas, of course, had first come to Tocqueville in Ohio. But now he had the proof, the ocular demonstration. And a whole fresh set of notions had been suggested by their stage-coach experiences, or brought to his attention by some of the acquaintances that they had made en route.
It was in Memphis, looking at their odyssey in retrospect, that Tocqueville penned most of these notes on slavery and the dwellings of the forest pioneers. Naturally, the strange, feudal aristocracy of the region did not escape a similar analysis.
They had not seen many individuals, and these perhaps not of the best. But everywhere the Southerners had seemed to conform to a distinct type.
'In the sections of Kentucky and Tennesse[e] that we traversed the men are tall and strong,' Tocqueville wrote in his diary.5 'They have a national physiognomy and a rough and energetic appearance. They are not, like the inhabitants of Ohio, a confused mixture of all the American races; on the contrary, they are all sprung from the same stem and belong to the great Virginia family. They possess, then, to a much greater degree than all the Americans we have seen up to now, that intuitive love of country, a love mingled with exaggeration and prejudices, entirely different from the reasoned sentiment and re- fined egoism that bear the name patriotism in almost all the States of the Union.'
'. . . Nothing in Kentucky or Tennesse[e],' however, seemed to Tocqueville to convey 'the idea of so developed a society. On this point these two States differ essentially from those newly settled by the Americans from the North, where is to be found in germ the high civilization of New England. In Kentucky or Tennesse[e1 you see few churches, no schools; society, like the individual, seems to provide for nothing.
'And yet, it's not quite a rustic society. There is none of that sim- plicity full of ignorance, prejudices and . . .# that distinguish agricul- tural peoples in inaccessible countries. These men still belong to one of the most civilized and reasoning races in the world. Their customs have none of the naivete of the fields; the philosophical and argu- mentative spirit of the English crops up there as in all parts of America; and there is an astonishing circulation of letters and newspapers in the midst of these wild forests. We were travelling with the mail. From time to time we stopped before what they called the post. It was almost always an isolated house in the depth of the woods. There we dropped a large packet, from which doubtless each inhabitant of the neighbourhood came to take his share. I don't believe that in the most enlightened rural district in France there is carried on an intel- lectual exchange as rapid or as large as in these wildernesses....'
Of course, 'it would be ridiculous to try to judge an entire people after having lived with it eight or ten days,' Tocqueville admitted. But already he was beginning to believe that the 'whole history' of Ken- tucky and Tennessee peculiarities could be summed up in a single phrase: 'They are southerners, masters of slaves, made half wild by the solitude, and hardened by the hardships of life.' the easy communication I was speaking of.
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