On the Road with Tocqueville: 2,900 Miles Through the American Experiment

The road through the White Mountains was almost entirely ours that morning. We were on Route 302, coming west out of Maine toward Vermont through Crawford Notch, and the leaves had only begun to turn. A few had run ahead of the rest, holding their color alone against hillsides still green, while creeks passed beneath the road and thin streams worked their way down the rock faces. For nearly twenty minutes we didn't see another car. My six-year-old daughter was singing along to a Madeline playlist in the back seat, the same songs we had heard in Pennsylvania and would hear again in Ohio. Kate sat beside me with the windows cracked, and somewhere in the middle of that road a thought arrived:

I have it made.

It was my first time in New England, and the landscape exceeded the version I had in my head. But there was something else in the air that morning, something harder to name. The closest word I had for it was freedom, and I spent a good deal of the trip coming back to it.

A week before we left, I finished a biography of Alexis de Tocqueville, who came to America in 1831, a French aristocrat of twenty-five, who went home with what became the most enduring book ever written about this country by a man who was only passing through. For the next two weeks he rode somewhere at the back of my mind, surfacing whenever his journey and ours happened to cross.

It helps to remember how young he was. Tocqueville was not yet the marble figure of political theory but a curious, ambitious young man crossing an unfamiliar country with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, asking questions at dinner tables, collecting introductions, and writing up his notes late into the evening. Officially, they had come to study American prisons, and they did study them, seriously. But he was after something larger.

France had spent forty years moving between monarchy, revolution, empire, restoration, and revolution again; the old aristocratic order was on the way out, but what would replace it was not yet clear. Could ordinary people govern themselves without a king, an aristocracy, or an established church? Could equality coexist with liberty? Could democracy produce self-government rather than another form of submission?

The two Frenchmen spent nine months crossing seventeen of the country's twenty-four states by steamboat, stagecoach, horseback, and canoe, and much of the journey was miserable. Beaumont described the roads west of Albany as "fearful and detestable," while Tocqueville summed up one New York stagecoach in three words: "carriage without springs." On the Ohio, their steamboat, improbably named the Fourth of July, struck a reef shortly after leaving Pittsburgh and sank. Farther downriver, ice forced them ashore on the Kentucky bank near Louisville, where they continued on foot through snow up to their knees. Between Nashville and Memphis, the traces broke, then a wheel, then the axle-tree and at a place called Sandy Bridge, Tocqueville fell ill and spent hours unable to get warm.

We, by contrast, covered 2,900 miles through twelve states in thirteen days and called it a vacation.

We traveled in a car that takes fuel from a wire and, for long stretches of interstate, steers itself. We averaged better than two hundred miles a day without once being cold. Tocqueville carried letters of introduction; we carried phones that could summon a map, a hotel room, a charging station, or the name of a creamery in Vermont churning ice cream from raw milk. He filled a notebook every night. I took photos.

Tocqueville had already described us. The American, he wrote, is so restless in the midst of his prosperity that "if at the end of a year of unremitting labour he finds he has a few days' vacation, his eager curiosity whirls him over the vast extent of the United States, and he will travel fifteen hundred miles in a few days to shake off his happiness." The sentence is funnier after you have done it. We covered nearly twice that distance, and the clearest thought I had in thirteen days, on an empty mountain road, was that I was content.

Strip away the equipment and the journeys were not so different. Two men interested in liberty went out on the road to see what had become of it. Tocqueville wanted to know whether ordinary people could govern themselves and remain free. I found myself wondering about the other end of the experiment: whether a people who had inherited liberty still remembered how to practice it.

Gettysburg

We left Lexington at six, before the sun was up. By afternoon we were in Pennsylvania, climbing Little Round Top with the energy of schoolchildren on a field trip.

The slope is steeper than it looks in photographs, and from the top the southern fields open in a way no map can convey. With the advantage of the height and of a hundred and sixty years I found myself reading the ground as a general might have, the lines and the distances and the fields of fire, before I tried to put the men back into it. Rows of them in wool under a July sun, coming up through the smoke and the noise toward these same rocks, close enough to see the faces of the men trying to kill them. I could summon a few at a time: a young face under a battered cap, another half hidden in a scruffy beard, a heavy mustache, sweat cutting pale tracks through the dirt of a cheek like eye black on a football player. But when I tried to multiply them across the whole of the field the image dissipated, and the field went back to being grass.

Natalie asked why the men were fighting.

I struggled to answer because men in a war rarely fight for the same thing. Some wanted slavery destroyed. Others fought to preserve the Union and would have preserved it with slavery intact if that had been the price. Some followed their state because, to them, Virginia or Pennsylvania was more like a country than the country. And some were boys who went because their brothers went, because their friends went, and because their idea of honor made staying home harder than leaving.

History has a way of becoming cleaner after the people inside it are dead.

Tocqueville had seen the reckoning coming thirty years earlier. He watched a nation speak the language of natural equality while millions of human beings remained in bondage, and understood that the contradiction could not stay suspended indefinitely. "The danger of a conflict between the white and the black inhabitants," he wrote, "perpetually haunts the imagination of the Americans, like a painful dream." He was perceptive enough to see what was coming. Law could abolish slavery faster than habit and prejudice could be abolished. Freedom in law and freedom in life were never quite the same thing.

I climbed that hill carrying an argument and standing on it I could not make the argument level.

Slavery was the total denial of individual liberty. It placed one man so completely beneath another that even his own body was no longer his, and no appeal to states' rights, local custom, democratic majority, or inherited institution makes that arrangement compatible with freedom. A government close to home has no greater right to own a man than a government a thousand miles away.

What I could not walk around was how the claim was made good. Not by argument, in the end, and not by the persuasion of neighbors. It took an army, raised and paid and directed from a capital most of those men would never see, marched into states that had spent eighty years insisting the question was theirs to settle; and when the fighting was over it took an amendment to the Constitution to finish what the fighting had begun. Whatever else emancipation was, it was an exercise of national power on a scale that would have appalled a good many of the men who wrote that Constitution.

Federal power did not create the enslaved man's claim to freedom. That claim was his before Washington acted, before Lincoln issued a proclamation, before any soldier climbed this hill. The state can recognize liberty, defend it, or violate it. It does not create it.

Lincoln came here four months after the battle and called for a new birth of freedom. A birth is not an administrative reform. It is the arrival of something living, which somebody then has to keep alive, daily, and no document relieves anyone of that. A country can keep the language of freedom long after the people have forgotten what freedom asks of them.

We drove out in the late sun past the monuments, hundreds of them, each standing where some regiment had stood. I had brought a question up from Kentucky that morning, whether American liberty still worked, and somewhere on the road out of town it turned into a different question, and in some ways a worse one: whether we still know how to work it.

Philadelphia

Philadelphia gave us two cities in one stop.

We met the first in the morning when we walked the old city: Carpenter's Hall, where delegates from twelve colonies gathered for the First Continental Congress; Elfreth's Alley, its narrow brick houses still lived in centuries later; streets of stone and brick worn uneven by generations of feet. So much of the country's history had begun within a few blocks that it was difficult to see the place before history had settled over it.

Outside Carpenter's Hall, I tried. There was no United States waiting at the end of the story. France had not yet come in, Washington had not yet become Washington, and the colonies were wary of one another, protective of their own interests, and uncertain how far they were willing to go together. The men who entered that room had come over bad roads carrying grievances, loyalties, ambitions, and fears, with no way of knowing whether their arguments would end in reconciliation, rebellion, or failure. We know what came next. They knew only that something had to be decided.

That may be the harder part of self-government. Liberty gives you room to choose, but it does not relieve you of what follows from the choice. You may decide badly. You may discover too late that the other fellow was right. But the consequences still belong to you. Freedom is attractive in the abstract; responsibility is where it becomes costly.

By nightfall, Philadelphia made the question much less abstract.

Walking four or five blocks to dinner, we found the other city. The street smelled of garbage. Men leaned against walls; one lay in a doorway a few feet from us. Two of them were shouting, at each other or past each other, in sentences I could not understand. Natalie asked why the street smelled bad, and I gave her some answer I no longer remember.

What I remember is moving her to the road side of the sidewalk.

I did it without thinking. The man was near the buildings, and I moved Natalie to my other side so that I was between them. Only afterward did I notice what I had done.

It is easy to have a theory of human failure from a distance. From four feet away, with your daughter beside you and your own body placed between her and him, the theory has to share the sidewalk with him. I did not know what he needed. I did not know what had been chosen and what had been taken from him, what illness or addiction or run of bad luck had narrowed the available world down to that doorway. I knew only that he was there, and that I was walking past him to dinner.

Adam Smith understood what distance does to sympathy. A humane man in Europe, he wrote, hearing that an earthquake had swallowed the whole empire of China, would express his sorrow and return to his business; but if he expected to lose his little finger the next day, he would not sleep that night. I had always read the passage as a remark about remoteness. That evening the man was not in China. He was four feet away.

Smith also warned against the “man of system,” who imagines that people can be moved about as easily as pieces on a chessboard, forgetting that each one “has a principle of motion of its own.” The phrase stayed with me. The man in the doorway was not merely the object of someone else’s policy or charity or neglect. He had a will of his own, however constrained by circumstances I could not see.

I knew I owed him the same freedom I claimed for myself, the freedom to live his own life. Whether I owed him anything beyond that was harder. By the time I had begun to turn the question over, we were already past him, Natalie’s hand in mine and the restaurant a block or two ahead.

In the morning I had stood outside a room where men accepted the burden of making decisions without knowing how the story would end. That evening I had walked past a man whose presence demanded a judgment no constitution, political theory, or principle could make on my behalf.

The morning city and the evening city were the same city. Carpenter’s Hall and that sidewalk belong to the same republic, and any account of American freedom with room for only one of them is a brochure.

The Berkshires

We camped two nights in the hills near Hillsdale, at the top of a meadow gone yellow with late blooms. It rained hard the first night, the kind of rain that turns a tent into an instrument, and I lay awake listening to it hammer the fly. Before dark I had taken extra time with the stakes, tightening everything more carefully than seemed necessary while the weather was pleasant, and sometime after midnight, still dry beneath it, I felt the small and slightly ridiculous satisfaction of having done the job properly.

I do not want to make too much of a rain fly. Very little depended on it. But there is a particular pleasure in making some small arrangement yourself, with care, and then having the world come and test your work.

Tocqueville passed through the Berkshires in September of 1831, the same month we did, traveling the stage road from Albany to Boston. He stopped in Stockbridge to call on Theodore Sedgwick, a lawyer from a Massachusetts family already generations deep in arguments about liberty. What began as a courtesy became a correspondence; Sedgwick later helped Tocqueville as he worked on the first volume of Democracy in America.

I love the modesty of the scene. A twenty-five-year-old Frenchman, sore from a carriage without springs, knocks on a lawyer’s door in western Massachusetts. They talk, letters begin crossing the Atlantic, and somewhere in that exchange a book people are still reading nearly two centuries later begins to take shape.

A few miles south, in Great Barrington, we visited the American Institute for Economic Research, whose campus sits on a hill above the surrounding country. Natalie spent most of the visit riding a golf cart and showed considerably more enthusiasm when someone handed her an ice cream bar than she did for the institutional history.

The place brought me back to Tocqueville’s fascination with the American habit of association. Americans seemed forever to be forming things. They joined together for commerce and religion, reform and amusement, for purposes “serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive.” What interested him most was the instinct beneath the variety: when something needed doing, Americans tended to find one another and begin.

He thought the habit important enough to call the science of association “the mother of science.” The phrase sounds grander than the thing usually is. More often it begins with a few people in a room, or around a table, or writing to one another because they believe something ought to exist that does not yet exist: a church, a school, a business, a society, an institute on a hill.

Between the solitary individual and the state lies an enormous middle country, and much of the nation’s life has always been built there. Carpenter’s Hall itself belonged not to a government but to a company of carpenters who had built it for their own meetings and lent it to the delegates when they came. Before any of those delegates arrived, somebody had raised the money, argued over the plans, sat through meetings that ran too long, and kept the minutes, none of which ends up on a monument. Yet that work teaches something. People learn how to persuade one another, divide responsibility, tolerate disagreement, and remain answerable for what they have decided together.

The rain fly required stakes, rope, and one person’s hands. Most of what I had been thinking about on the trip was harder. Families, institutions, towns, and republics eventually ask the same thing on a larger scale: that people find one another, decide what is worth doing, and begin.

Boston and Concord

Boston was where Tocqueville lingered. Through the autumn of 1831 he moved among the dinners and interviews and conversations of the New England political class, filling notebooks with questions about how these people governed themselves and why it seemed to work. Nearly two centuries later, we walked a good deal of the same city.

We followed part of the Freedom Trail, and I had coffee with a friend I met through my writing, which struck me later as its own small Tocquevillian fact.

The most beautiful building I saw on the trip was the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Its courtyard rises four stories around stone, water, and plants, with daylight falling from the glass roof high above. The rooms surrounding it feel less curated than inhabited, filled according to the eye of one extraordinary woman who arranged the paintings, furniture, tapestries, and fragments of old Europe as she wanted them. By the terms of her will, they have remained substantially where she left them, so that walking through the museum feels less like visiting a collection than entering a mind that survived its owner.

Natalie had a small stuffed mouse, acquired at a country toy store in Great Barrington, and somewhere inside the museum she dropped it. This became, for a time, the most important event in Boston. Another mother found the mouse and, seeing Natalie's face, worked out immediately whose it must be. The museum went back to being a museum and the mouse went back to being a mouse. Boston survived.

There is something wonderfully stubborn about the Gardner. No committee could have produced anything like it, because its peculiarities are the whole point: one person had the taste, the money, and the stubbornness to build something beautiful according to her own idea of beauty. A century later, strangers are still walking through it, occasionally rescuing one another's stuffed animals.

Freedom leaves fingerprints.

The next day we drove to Concord. Natalie was worn out and stayed in the car with Kate while I walked alone to the North Bridge.

There were only a few other people around. The river moves slowly enough there that you have to watch a leaf to be sure it is moving at all. Thoreau, who grew up on it, called the Concord "remarkable for the gentleness of its current, which is scarcely perceptible."

The bridge is not the same bridge. The one the farmers held was taken down in 1793, and the one I walked across was built in 1956, the latest in a line of replicas. On the far side stands Daniel Chester French's Minute Man, one hand still on his plow, with Emerson's lines cut into the base. On the near side, behind a low stone wall, is a marker for two British soldiers buried where they fell. Lowell wrote of them:

They came three thousand miles, and died,

To keep the Past upon its throne:

Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,

Their English mother made her moan.

Tocqueville was born into the Past those soldiers died to keep on its throne. He crossed the same ocean, the other way round, to see what might replace it. I continued over the bridge and down along the bank to see it from the side. From there it was a narrow wooden bridge over a brown river, and nothing in the scenery said otherwise.

The men who came to the bridge belonged to towns accustomed to governing themselves. They chose officers, raised local taxes, kept up roads, organized militias, and settled public questions with people they would pass on the street the next morning. Politics was not something happening somewhere else; it was woven into the ordinary business of living together. Tocqueville understood the consequence. “Town-meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science,” he wrote. “They bring it within the people’s reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it.”

A freedom taken by force leaves an event behind: a law, a raid, a date, something people can point to and remember. A freedom surrendered for convenience leaves much less. One burden is lifted, then a decision, then some responsibility that had become tiresome, and life goes on, often more comfortably than before. Tocqueville feared precisely this kind of surrender. He imagined an “immense and tutelary power,” mild and provident, that would relieve people of more and more of the trouble of directing their own affairs until the exercise of their will became steadily less useful and less frequent. The danger was not simply that freedom might be taken, but that the habit of using it might disappear.

The men at Concord practiced self-government before they had to defend it. The town came before the revolution, and the habit came before the theory.

I walked back to the car to rejoin my family.

The Coast

Tocqueville first touched America at Newport in May of 1831, after thirty-seven days at sea. His ship had run short of provisions and put in for more, leaving him only a few hours ashore before he continued to New York. He used them well. The town, he wrote, was "a collection of small houses, the size of chicken coops, but distinguished by a cleanness that is a pleasure to see." Beaumont, with an eye already trained on the habits of the new country, counted the bank buildings and concluded that Americans had managed to turn nearly everything toward commerce.

Nearly two centuries later, the harbor confirmed him. We ate lobster rolls and chowder by the water and paid with a phone, a transaction Beaumont might have accepted as further evidence. What is harder to find is Tocqueville's Newport. The chicken coops are gone. In the decades after he passed through, fortunes rose high enough to construct palaces along the cliffs, summer "cottages," the Vanderbilts' Breakers foremost among them. Several are museums or campus buildings now. The families have scattered, and in most cases the fortunes have gone with them, leaving the houses behind like monuments to the mobility Tocqueville had come to study.

At the New Hampshire line we left the interstate and turned onto Route 1A, a slower road that stays close to the water along the state's short coast. The interstate ran a few miles inland, straighter and faster, and the car could have done much of the work itself. We chose the road that took longer, and I drove.

Tocqueville opened Democracy in America with what he called the "general equality of condition." He did not mean that fortunes were equal, only that they were unstable: families rose, others fell, and wealth seemed forever in motion. There is an old saying in my trade, shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, which I had always heard as a warning. Somewhere along 1A, I began to hear the saying differently: not as a warning about the fortunes that disappear, but as evidence of a country in which new ones are forever being made.

In Portsmouth we stayed in a small independent hotel with stars worked into the carpet and American flags scattered through the rooms, an aesthetic that could easily have been ridiculous yet somehow was not, because somebody had decided exactly what sort of hotel it would be and meant it. At the bar I ordered a Negroni. They had no Campari, so I settled for a gin and tonic, which arrived in a pint glass with enough gin in it to make proportion beside the point. A corporate hotel would have had the Campari. It would also have measured the gin.

Home

After a brief stop in Portland we turned west on Route 302 and went back through the mountains where this essay began, across Vermont and into New York, finishing in the Finger Lakes near Watkins Glen before the long drive home. Some fifty miles to the northeast lay Auburn, where Tocqueville and Beaumont had studied one of the prison systems that officially brought them to America.

They eventually produced the report they had been sent to write. It survives mostly in the margins of Tocqueville’s reputation; the other book is still being read, argued with, and returned to nearly two centuries later. The prisons gave him an assignment, but the country kept interrupting it with town meetings and churches, newspapers and associations, dinner-table arguments, commercial towns, frontier settlements, and people forever forming something, fixing something, or beginning something together. What lasted was what he discovered after the country gave him a better question.

Somewhere in Ohio Natalie fell asleep, and late in the day the road dropped toward the river and carried us home to Kentucky. Tocqueville had come down that same water in the winter of 1831 and found, on opposite banks, the contradiction at the center of the country made visible in the landscape. On the Ohio side he saw the energy of free labor and settlement; across the water, in Kentucky, men were owned, and even the condition of the land seemed to him to bear the mark of it. The river divided two states, but to Tocqueville it divided something larger. “The traveller who floats down the current of the Ohio,” he wrote, “may be said to sail between liberty and servitude.”

We crossed it in less than a minute. The radio was low, and in the mirror Natalie was asleep with the little mouse under her arm, the one we had nearly left in Boston. Somewhere between one bank and the other, I stopped thinking about what Tocqueville had seen and began thinking about what she would inherit.

I want the bridge at Concord to be there for her, and the old houses in Philadelphia, and the field at Gettysburg kept open, and the light still falling through the glass above the Gardner courtyard. These are the things we know how to preserve. Stone can be repaired, paper kept beneath glass, battlefields protected from development, institutions carried forward under names that outlive the people who founded them.

Freedom is the harder inheritance because it exists only while somebody is using it. It survives when people choose and accept what follows, when they form things with one another, argue and lose, build and fail, begin again, and carry responsibilities that would often be easier to surrender. Institutions can be inherited; self-government has to be learned.

Tocqueville understood that the forms of liberty might remain standing after the habits beneath them had weakened. A people need not lose freedom all at once, or even against its will. Judgment is tiring, responsibility keeps a man awake, uncertainty is an unpleasant place to live, and there will always be some arrangement on offer that promises to carry a little more of the burden for us.

Someday Natalie may take her own children through New England, and Little Round Top will still rise over the fields, and the bridge at Concord, or some copy of it, will still cross that slow river, and perhaps she will walk into the Gardner and stand under the same light. But whether those places mean to her what they came to mean to me will depend on things no preservation society can keep for her: whether she has learned to trust her own judgment, to live with disagreement, to join with other people when something needs doing, and to recognize that a life which belongs to her also asks something of her.

That part I cannot leave her.

Tocqueville crossed America asking whether ordinary people could govern themselves. I came home thinking that no generation answers the question for good: we may inherit the monuments, the documents, the institutions, even the old language of liberty, but the answer has to be made again in the lives of the people who inherit them.

Someday it will be Natalie’s question. For the moment, it is ours.