What Hath God Wrought (45 page)

Economically Oneida flourished, at first by manufacturing animal traps. The Perfectionists shared their labors and rotated the most unpleasant tasks. The women took to cutting their hair neck-length (short by the standards of the age) and wearing “bloomer garments” (loose trousers under skirts, invented by Amelia Bloomer to allow more freedom of movement than the current fashions). As one of the Perfectionist women expressed it, “We believed we were living under a system which the whole world would sooner or later adopt.”
⁴³
But in 1879, responding to both outside pressure and internal dissension, John Humphrey Noyes recommended an end to “complex marriage.” A year later the experiment in economic socialism ended too with the formation of Oneida Community, Ltd., a joint-stock company whose shares were parceled out among the former Bible communists. Oneida silverware remains a highly esteemed product.

Most antebellum utopian communities were not fleeing the industrial revolution. Some (like Owenites and Associationists) explicitly endorsed it, while others (like Shakers and Perfectionists) seized the chance to make whatever use of it they could. The only communities that really did reject industrialization were two German Mennonite sects: the Amish, who had settled in Pennsylvania during colonial times, and the Dakota Hutterites, who came in the 1870s.
⁴⁴
In the eyes of many Americans the mill town of Lowell constituted an industrial utopian community of sorts: a planned and supervised experiment, aspiring to a model role. Still, the most common and popular utopia of all was simply a family farm. There the average white American could enjoy the dignity of a freehold, exchange help with neighbors during stressful seasons, entertain the expectation of a good harvest, and hope to build a competence that would see a couple through old age with something to pass on to their children. By comparison with what was available in Europe, such a place indeed seemed God’s promised land. The openness of the American prospect allowed many groups to try their hand at building utopias. But the availability of land for individual cultivators, whether in fact or in popular imagination, undercut the appeal of the more collectivist social planners.

IV

Contemporaries viewed not only utopian communities but all America as an experimental society, an example to the world of popular rule. The United States had the widest suffrage of any nation at that time, and the American expectation of social equality among white men made its example still more emphatically democratic. Even people who would never have accepted the idea that America was God’s favorite nation or destined to play a role in Christ’s Second Coming thought their country performed a special mission as exemplar of freedom. American “exceptionalism,” the term often applied to this role, constituted a secularized version of America’s millennial destiny. Both the religious and the secular versions of American exceptionalism seemed to imply that America was exempt from the kind of history that other nations experienced and had, like ancient Israel, a destiny all its own. “Exceptionalism” is an unfortunate term, however, since if America were thoroughly exceptional, its experience would be irrelevant to other countries. In fact, even during the nineteenth century, when the United States might seem most isolated from the rest of the world, she was part of a global community of peoples who observed each other closely. America showed them how popular sovereignty worked, as Britain showed how the industrial revolution worked.

Americans put on display their self-image as an example to the world when they hosted the sixty-seven-year-old Marquis de Lafayette on his triumphal visit to the United States in 1824-25. At the invitation of President Monroe, the Frenchman who had served as a major general in the Continental Army toured the country, feted everywhere amid mass expressions of national gratitude. A consistently courageous advocate of constitutionalism and human rights against tyrannies of both left and right, Lafayette had sent Washington the key to the Bastille to display at Mount Vernon. All contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic saw him as an emissary of liberal values between New and Old Worlds; Americans regarded him as an agent of their international mission. The president had invited Lafayette in order to affirm his Monroe Doctrine’s defiance of the Holy Alliance and to celebrate his Era of Good Feelings. The event succeeded beyond his dreams.

Eighty thousand people turned out to welcome Lafayette when his ship landed in New York City on August 16, 1824. Congress voted him $200,000 and twenty-three thousand acres of public land where now stands Tallahassee, Florida; Samuel F. B. Morse painted his portrait. When the visitor laid the cornerstone of Bunker Hill Monument in Boston before forty thousand onlookers, Daniel Webster gave one of his great orations. For thirteen months Lafayette traveled about the United States by stagecoach and steamboat, resolutely hewing to his schedule despite swollen rivers and typically poor roads; solicitous, however, of sabbatarian scruples among his hosts, the Frenchman did not travel on Sundays. His boat ran aground in the Ohio River and sank, carrying all his effects and six hundred unanswered letters to the muddy bottom.
⁴⁵

The occasion of Lafayette’s Second Coming evoked rhetoric usually reserved for that of Christ. It had been forty years since the Frenchman last set foot on American soil; now he seemed “like one arisen from the dead.” “Benefactor of the world” and “Redeemer of posterities,” he was termed; “he shed his blood for all mankind!” Speakers repeatedly declared that the real significance of Lafayette’s visit lay in what it showed Americans about themselves and in the opportunity it presented to demonstrate their national virtues to a European audience. “Might the Potentates of Europe but behold this Republican spectacle in America!” called out one welcomer.
⁴⁶
On the occasion of his address to a joint session of Congress, Lafayette offered this toast to the Union: “One day it will save the world.”
⁴⁷
Inspired by his example, a few Americans went off to join the Greeks in their revolution against the Ottoman Empire.

Americans were by no means alone in thinking of their country as an example from which others could learn. Foreign observers also often viewed the United States as an indicator of future developments in their own countries. The German philosopher Hegel called America “the land of the future” and predicted that “in the time to come, the center of world-historical importance will be revealed there.”
⁴⁸
Such an attitude characterized the most famous of all European commentators on America, Lafayette’s fellow countryman and fellow nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville. Tocqueville came to the United States in 1831 at the age of twenty-five with his young friend Gustave de Beaumont. The liberal French monarchy of Louis Philippe, interested in reform, had authorized the two to study American prisons and report back on innovations in penology. Tocqueville secured useful letters of introduction from Lafayette, although the two men were not close and their temperaments differed significantly. Where Lafayette endorsed the American example with the enthusiasm of a partisan, Tocqueville regarded it with the detachment of a born social theorist. He spent less than ten months traveling about the United States and Canada with Beaumont before their government recalled them, yet he returned with a multitude of lessons for the French audience of his generation as well as impressions that have intrigued analysts of American society ever since. “In America I saw more than America,” Tocqueville explained; “I sought there the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we [in France] have to fear or to hope from its progress.”
⁴⁹
After he and Beaumont had written up their required report on American prison experiments, Tocqueville turned his attention to an examination of the general subject of democracy as America revealed it. The volumes entitled
De la démocratie en Amérique
appeared in Paris in 1835 and 1840, with translations published in the United States almost immediately.

What Tocqueville meant by “democracy” was not simply political (“one man, one vote”) but broadly social: “equality of condition.” He considered increasing equality—of dignity, influence, wealth, and political power—an irrepressible tendency in the modern world. In Tocqueville’s own moral system, the highest value was neither democracy nor equality but liberty. Just as aristocratic regimes had sometimes interfered with liberty, he worried that democracies might do so too, in their own ways. He called attention to the danger of “the tyranny of the majority,” by which he meant not only overt repression but also conformity of opinion. Accordingly, he took special interest in how liberty of thought and action could be preserved within a democratic order. He hoped American institutions of local government might provide one means of achieving this. A lawyer and magistrate who regarded respect for the law as a bulwark of liberty, he rejoiced in the unique power of the judiciary in the United States and called the legal profession “the American aristocracy.” The prevalence and freedom of the printed media impressed him; “there is scarcely a hamlet that has not its newspaper,” he marveled. He praised the post roads, which he saw kept the citizenry informed and helped consolidate the Union.
⁵⁰

Above all, Tocqueville recognized the crucial importance of America’s numerous and diverse voluntary associations. They mediated between the individual and mass society; they provided opportunities for self-improvement and civic involvement; they could influence public opinion and public policy. The most prominent voluntary associations, of course, were the churches. This struck Tocqueville forcibly, as it usually did foreign visitors, for it contrasted with the European tradition of church establishment. As a consequence European religions generally allied with conservatism and social privilege. By contrast, American churches manifested American freedom. “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds,” he noted, “that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other.”
⁵¹
As a Catholic liberal, Tocqueville welcomed the American religious situation and used it to argue that European liberals should not assume religion their adversary.

Tocqueville was very quick to generalize from his experiences, and for all his insight, his interpretations have their limitations. In praising America’s strong traditions of local self-government, he seemed not to notice how often local democracy tyrannized individuals. An aristocrat himself, he saw more of elite and middle-class life than of the working classes. His impression that wealth exerted minimal influence in American politics probably derived from uncritical acceptance of the complaints of wealthy informants. Though he never freed himself from his European perspective, Tocqueville shared the belief of most Americans that the growth of the Great Democracy was “a providential event,” in which he detected “the hand of God.”
⁵²
Unlike those of many other foreign commentators, his writings were well received in the United States—particularly by the critics of President Jackson, who could read with grim satisfaction Tocqueville’s characterization of him as “a man of violent temper and very moderate talents.”
⁵³

Tocqueville’s traveling companion Beaumont also wrote a book upon returning to France: a novel called
Marie
, a searing indictment of American racism, focused not on the South but on the North. Though it sold well in France, sadly the book had no impact in the United States, probably because it dealt with the sensitive subject of interracial marriage; it was not even translated into English until 1958.
⁵⁴

Several of the most interesting and widely read foreign observers of the United States were women, a circumstance all the more remarkable in view of the fact that single women travelers were so unusual that few inns were set up to accommodate them. Harriet Martineau, an earnest, inquiring Englishwoman mocked for her intellectuality and the ear trumpet that mitigated her deafness, has been called “the first woman sociologist.” She spent almost two years in the United States in 1834–36, longer than Tocqueville, and saw more of the country and a greater variety of its people. Her social background in the provincial bourgeoisie was less alien to America than Tocqueville’s noble birth. “Miss Martineau,” as she was always called, had an eye for picturesque detail. Her three-volume work
Society in America
(1837), supplemented with the anecdotal
Retrospect of Western Travel
(1838), contains more empirical data than Tocqueville provided, along with no less interest in generalizations. She paid more attention than he did to such important topics as transportation and education, as well as to the groups she called “sufferers,” such as the insane, the handicapped, and the poor.
⁵⁵
Like Tocqueville, however, she wrote primarily for an audience in her home country and used America as an example instructive to them. A “radical” as that term was then used in England and one of the early feminists, Martineau strongly sympathized with America’s avowed principles of liberty and equality. Where democracy to Tocqueville was a practical inevitability, to her it was a moral imperative. She criticized the United States for not living up to its ideals, in particular in its oppression of black people and in the “political nonexistence” of women.
⁵⁶
She therefore rendered a mixed verdict in the end: Americans “have realized many things for which the rest of the world is still struggling,” yet “the civilization and the morals of the Americans fall far below their own principles.”
⁵⁷

Harriet Martineau typified a class of reformist foreign visitors who tried to help America improve, not only for its own sake but also because it could then provide a better model for their home countries. A more extreme example of the type was the Scotswoman Frances Wright. Tall, striking, and self-confident, Wright first visited the United States in 1818 at the age of twenty-three. Out of her travels came a book entitled
Views of Society and Manners in America
(1820), an idealized portrayal of the country as a radical’s utopia. The work brought her to the attention of Lafayette, and in 1821 she journeyed to France to meet him. Young enough to be his granddaughter, Fanny quickly formed an emotionally intense relationship with the widowed elder statesman; rumor had her his mistress.
⁵⁸
When Lafayette left for America in 1824, Wright followed him. But when the marquis returned to France, she stayed in the United States with the intention of making it an even better model society. Wright had become involved in antislavery and in Robert Owen’s communal experimentation in Indiana. She hit upon a plan to start an Owenite commune in the South, staffing it with slaves. The profits it earned would pay off the masters, the freedpeople would be learning skills, and eventually they could go off to establish other Owenite communities. Lafayette broached the subject to Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson. Madison and Jackson warned that it all depended on southern “collaboration”; Jefferson declined to participate.
⁵⁹