Tocqueville's Discovery of America Book

Alexis de Tocqueville is more quoted than read; commentators across the political spectrum invoke him as an oracle who defined America and its democracy for all times. But in fact his masterpiece, Democracy in America, was the product of a young man’s open-minded experience of America at a time of rapid change. In Tocqueville’s Discovery of America, the prizewinning biographer Leo Damrosch retraces Tocqueville’s nine-month journey through the young nation in 1831–1832, illuminating how his enduring ideas were born of imaginative interchange with America and Americans, and painting a vivid picture of Jacksonian America.Damrosch shows that Tocqueville found much to admire in the dynamism of American society and in its egalitarian ideals. But he was offended by the ethos of grasping materialism and was convinced that the institution of slavery was bound to give rise to a tragic civil war.Drawing on documents and letters that have never before appeared in English, as well as on a wide range of scholarship, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America brings the man, his ideas, and his world to startling life.

The Barnes & Noble Review

It is seventy years since anyone has written at length about Tocqueville's journey. Biographies naturally have to proportion the space they give those nine months in the fifty-four years of Tocqueville's life, and in any case their interest tends to focus on the period, several years later, encompassing the publication of Tocqueville's book and its reception. Damrosch has a different target. Making use of much material not available in English, which he presents here for the first time in his own translation, he is able to retrace Tocqueville's geographical and intellectual footsteps in detail, and by so doing casts much fresh light on the formation of Tocqueville's ideas.

And it is not only Tocqueville's ideas that come illuminatingly into view, but the young and uncertain United States of 1831 itself, for Damrosch takes us with Tocqueville and Beaumont to New York, the great lakes, the frontier woods and newly-cleared farms, Boston, Philadelphia, the steamboats of the Mississippi, New Orleans, and Washington, and on the way we meet every kind of American from the Bostonian Brahmin to the backwoodsman, the ambitious merchant, the welcoming log-cabin hermit, the cheerful steamboat captain, the slave, the leisured slave-owner, the dispossessed native American, and even President Jackson himself -- in a White House that stood with a few other grand buildings dotted about in the otherwise scarcely-tenanted wilderness of Washington as it then was.