Tocqueville on race relations: Why was there slavery in the American South?

I’m currently reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic,Democracy in America.  Tocqueville was a Frenchman; he wanted to write a book that would help French leaders incorporate democratic principles in France’s new constitutional monarchy.  To do this, he came to America and studied our young democratic government.  He toured the United States reading, interviewing, and generally learning everything he could about American history, government, and culture.  He published his book in 1835 (an English translation was published in the US in 1838).  It is a fantastic read:  I’m very impressed with the wisdom I’ve found in this book.

Alexis de Tocqueville
Photogavure from the 1899 edition of Democracy in America
Source:  Wikimedia Commons

 In the middle of a very long chapter entitled The Three Races in the United States is a very long section about race relations generally between the “Anglo-Americans” and the “Negroes” and about slavery specifically in the South.  I found this section to be very moving, though not perhaps for the reasons someone would expect.  Tocqueville made no pleas to emotion.  He analyzed slavery from the perspective of the whites.  From the beginning he assumed that slavery was both immoral and not economically beneficial, and asked the question, why are there still slaves in the American South?

This caught my attention, as I’ve often wondered this very thing.  From the perspective of me living in 2014, slavery is so abhorrent, so obviously wrong, that it seems completely irrational that someone living 200 years ago would consider owning another person.  Yes, the culture was different, but white southerners were still living in a Christian society, believing in the Bible.  Abolitionists preaching the immorality of slavery were all over the place.  Slavery had already been abolished in much of the world long before America got around to it.  How, then, did slaveholders justify to themselves what they were doing?  How did they rationalize their behavior?

 

1817 map of the southern United States
Published by John Thompson

Tocqueville’s explanation was very interesting.  According to him, slaveholders didn’t rationalize their behavior, exactly.  They were Christian, and they weren’t stupid.  They knew slavery was wrong.  They knew it wasn’t economically efficient.  Trouble was, they didn’t know what to do about it.  Slavery was so deeply ingrained into the economic structure, legal system, and culture of the American South that they couldn’t root it out.  Here’s an example of the difficulty:

“I happened to meet with an old man, in the South of the Union, who had lived in illicit intercourse with one of his Negresses, and had had several children by her, who were born the slaves of their father.  He had indeed, frequently thought of bequeathing to them at least their liberty; but years had elapsed before he could surmount the legal obstacles to their emancipation, and in the mean while his old age was come, and he was about to die.  He pictured to himself his sons dragged from market to market, and passing from the authority of a parent to the rod of the stranger, until these horrid anticipations worked his expiring imagination into frenzy.  When I saw him, he was a prey to all the anguish of despair; and I then understood how awful is the retribution of Nature upon those who have broken her laws.”  (Page 318).

That was honestly one of the saddest things I have ever read.  I think human nature leads us to expect that people who want to do good things will be able to accomplish them if they work hard.  Instead, this was the story of a man who tried very hard to do the right thing and couldn’t.  Tocqueville predicted that the only way to break and end slavery in the United States would be through war.  Tocqueville was right. ¹

After reading this section of Tocqueville, I find myself in the odd position of feeling compassion for a group of people who I’ve always lumped into the “bad guys” category.  Slavery is absolutely, unequivocally wrong.  It shouldn’t have happened.  But . . .

I know what it’s like to feel trapped by the consequences from bad choices—my own or other people’s.  I’ve been in situations where I knew, or thought I knew, what the right choice was, but as I struggled to do right realized that I didn’t have the strength or ability required to do it.  I emerge from these difficulties with an increased gratitude for the Atonement.  Christ’s grace can break the bonds that keep us from accomplishing the good things we try unsuccessfully to do.  He can increase individuals' courage and strength and he can send a nation a Lincoln.

^{Tocqueville, though, thought the war would come via a slave uprising, similar to what happened in Demarara in 1823. return}